Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader

“From the summer until November 1969, Baader and Ensslin threw themselves into their project with enthusiasm and were soon put in charge by the naïve and often intimidated authorities. Under Baader and Ensslin’s guidance, around forty girls and boys (nicknamed ‘picos’) fled Staffelberg, and runaways from various other juvenile centers soon joined them. They found sanctuary in various and sundry apartments in the Frankfurt area, arranged by local activists. Baader and Ensslin staged ‘go-ins’ in the offices of the nervous bureaucrats who ran the homes and succeeded in convincing the experts to make changes to the living conditions before the young residents would promise to return. Baader and Ensslin were given power to manage the five DM cash allotment for each youth, which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a bad mistake…”

Continue reading →

Now Available! Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals

Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s is now available for purchase in our online store. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process. Also available in ebook format at Amazon.com (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (NOOK).

Free Radicals
Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s
Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s

by Elliot Neaman
With a Foreword by Timothy W. Luke

Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals presents a comprehensive panorama of the West German youth revolt in the 1960s, as well as its subsequent fragmentation and descent into terrorism in the 1970s. Neaman argues that the activists of the 1960s fundamentally misconstrued the nature of the young German republic, conflating it with earlier problematic German polities, and offered hazy world-shattering utopias to replace it based on artificial historical comparisons. The student radicals at first were swept along by liberalizing forces, but then made a decisive turn against reform in favor of an aggressive rejection of the existing order.

Continue reading →

Now Available for Pre-order: Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals

Coming on October 1st: Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals: Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas and Germany’s Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Pre-order your copy in our online store, and we will ship it once it is available. Save 20% on the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during the checkout process.

Free Radicals
Agitators, Hippies, Urban Guerrillas, and Germany’s
Youth Revolt of the 1960s and 1970s

by Elliot Neaman
With a Foreword by Timothy W. Luke

Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals presents a comprehensive panorama of the West German youth revolt in the 1960s, as well as its subsequent fragmentation and descent into terrorism in the 1970s. Neaman argues that the activists of the 1960s fundamentally misconstrued the nature of the young German republic, conflating it with earlier problematic German polities, and offered hazy world-shattering utopias to replace it based on artificial historical comparisons. The student radicals at first were swept along by liberalizing forces, but then made a decisive turn against reform in favor of an aggressive rejection of the existing order.

Continue reading →

Sklar: Left and Right

This is the fifth—and last—in a series of posts that introduce the thought of historian Martin J. Sklar, as a prelude to a print symposium on his life and work in a future issue of Telos. For a fuller introduction, refer to the head note to the first TELOSscope post. On the basis of his understanding of political economy (see the third post) and international relations (see the fourth post), and building on his longstanding critique of sectarianism and vanguardism in left-wing politics, in his last decade Sklar argued that U.S. politics were undergoing what he termed a “transvestiture of left and right,” whereby each side of the political spectrum was (however unwittingly) adopting positions that are historically more in tune with the other end of the spectrum. Sklar’s argument will be more fully articulated in the posthumously forthcoming book American Century and World Revolution. For now, the following selections provide a window onto his evolving thinking.

Continue reading →

Antisemitism as Anti-Zionism in the UK

An important report by Alex Chalmers on antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) has just appeared at Fathom. An excerpt:

In a way, the antisemitic incidents I witnessed in OULC are less troubling than the culture which allowed such behaviour to become normalised. It is common to encounter antisemitic individuals in all walks of life, but the mass turning of a blind eye that has come to characterise vast parts of the Left is chilling. As antisemites can double up as vocal critics of Israel, there is a marked tendency on the Left to view them as fellow travellers whose hearts are in the right place – so their rhetoric passes the test of social acceptability.

Continue reading →

Johann Herder, Early Nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the Common Roots of Multiculturalism and Right-wing Populism

In today’s public life, marked by large-scale migration, welfare states under pressure, and a soaring right-wing scene, “multiculturalism” and “right-wing populism” remain at the center of political debate. It is assumed, moreover, that they stand in sharp opposition to one another. On the one hand, multiculturalism is widely acclaimed for being progressive, radical, and safely leftist. It is seen as a vital precondition for a modern society: tolerant, humble, and anti-racist. Anyone who opposes multiculturalism, then, will be deemed at best a conservative or reactionary—if not outright racist, xenophobe, nationalist, or fascist. On the other hand, we have right-wing populism. Due to its allegiance with racism, virulent nationalism, and fascism, right-wing populism has a dubious reputation. Multiculturalism, as it seems, is anything that right-wing populism is not.

Continue reading →