IN MY SHOES: A Changed Man
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen recently saw the movie "The Baader Meinhof Complex,” watching it through the eyes of his older and wiser self:
[The movie] lingers because, to me, it is only incidentally about the 1970s-style radicalism of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and more about how wrong I was when I was young.
The movie portrays the sudden bloody rise and just as sudden bloody fall of the Red Army Faction, or the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang, in what was then West Germany. Neither Baader nor Meinhof thought they were leading a gang, although they did rob banks and kidnap rich people and set buildings afire with abandon. Instead, they believed they were leading a revolution, one that would start in their own country and spread elsewhere. …
In the movie, as in real life, the Red Army Faction spouted mindless revolutionary claptrap. They were also responsible for about 30 deaths. Yet, for a while, they had the support of some prominent intellectuals and about 25 percent of Germans under the age of 40. They aligned themselves with the Palestine Liberation Organization, underwent mayhem training in the Middle East and never paused to consider that the Palestinian cause was a product of what their parents had done to the Jews of Europe. They had an odd way of atoning for that. …
As it happened, I had cheered for the German left (although not the crazies) and had cheered, too, for the Iranian revolutionaries - and all that came of it was the murder of innocent Germans and an Iran that went from bad to bad - or maybe worse.
Young people are typically myopic. Living in the present and ignoring the past, they cannot predict the logical outcomes of their actions and beliefs. It’s only until middle-aged presbyopia sets in that many people see clearly for the first time in their lives.
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