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Rightly, I think, Julia Hell argues that the RAF has become topical again because of 9/11—but why would Hell want to become part of this particular media construction of an affinity? Why should 9/11 call the left out onto the mat for its presumed past transgressions? What does 9/11 have to do with RAF? Are there any high profile leftists who, like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit with respect to the RAF during its period of activity, feel that they are at one with al-Qaeda? Isn’t it left writers like the late Eqbal Ahmad who long ago insisted that Osama bin Laden began as a White House hero fighting the Soviets with the Afghan Mujahideen?
If terrorism refers to a violent political tactic, then the left, like the right, has doubtless made use of it—”terror” was already Edmund Burke’s term for describing the French Revolutionary left in 1790. In 1969, a year before the RAF was founded, Karl Heinz Bohrer’s book Threatened Fantasy or Surrealism and Terror berated the left for reasons akin to Burke’s: its lack of style, its ideological muddling of a “beautiful terror” that is properly left unburdened by any political load. Sure, Burke and Bohrer are ready to concede, terrible violence happens under the auspices of more or less sublime sovereign powers, but political terror itself is, well, disgustingly low brow. A civilized response insists on distance; insists that a populist political vocabulary be shed. Like Bohrer just before the RAF, Hell after 9/11 has the same problem with the unwashed left: it takes terrorism too seriously as referring to the real world.
