Mindfulness Poster

‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’, I watched this movie yesterday. Just to refresh your memory the ‘Baader Meinhof Gruppe’ or ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ or RAF as it was known, was a group of German urban terrorists active –mainly- in the seventies in Germany. I found it a movie that triggered raw and painful feelings, upsetting in many ways. Mentioned this to my friend and colleague Liz this morning. She said: ‘I know the names, weren’t they something in sport in the fifties or forties?’ How time flies and how soon tragedy’s are forgotten. In a couple of years Adolf Hitler will be remembered as a person who won many gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936….
Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Enselin were the prominent figures of the first wave of the RAF. Three very different people from different backgrounds. Baader, the psychopath, who used the anger of the political extreme left in Germany as a medium to channel his ant-social and psychopathic tendencies. Enselin was his follower with a middle class background, infatuated with the violence and the anger. Meinhof was the successful left-wing journalist, whose involvement started out of a sense of guilt. They unleashed up Germany an orgy of violence that brought the democratic republic almost to it’s knees. Only by the wisdom of people like the German Chancellor Will Brandt and some of his colleagues was the path to a repressive reaction halted. They went for a path of understanding or in German ‘verstehen’. Not an understanding of the violence, but an understanding of the underpinning motives of the violence. This resulted in a falling away of the public support for the RAF in Germany (a public poll held in Germany at that time demonstrated that around 25% of people between 15 and 35 were in support of the actions of the RAF). What the history of the RAF also demonstrates (and THIS is the real upsetting thing for me) is how easy it is to get seduced by evil if it pretends to have a good cause….The other real sad think is that evil once unleashed feeds on itself. The RAF committed many acts of urban terrorism that caused the lives of many innocents as a result of that the German state increased it’s police presence. The RAF saw the latter as a sign of their success: this was at last evidence of the police state that was lurking under the surface.
It seems that currently we are in the same boat, whether it is Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq or any troubled spot. The hard core evil doers have discovered the RAF’s maxim: do so much evil that the other side HAS to react violently and than you use this violent reaction as motive for past and future violence. This is an almost impossible situation to escape from, the only way is to (and to quote Willy Brandt): ‘Understand what motivates acts of un-understandable evil and to eradicate these causes’. But and that is a huge but, the evil acts will always continue for a while longer, as we saw in Germany in the 70-ies. And the sad thing is that evil has an endurance that the forces of good do not have. As one can learn from the sad story of the RAF, evil thinks it wins, if it dies a horrible public death (several of the RAF group killed themselves, knowing that the German authorities would be accused of having murdered them, they saw it as giving their lives to inflame the struggle). The other sad thing is that we still do not know how to deal with this type of evil….