Terrorism and the German State's Absorption of Conflicts

Abstract

The trouble with the current state of affairs in the Federal Republic does not stem from the difficulty in determining the sociological and socio-psychological causes of terrorism. It appears much more threatening to me that terrorism, and everything that can be associated with it, has assumed a nightmare quality in this society which breeds fear of contact and self-censorship. Most debates about terrorism are marked by the repression of real social contradictions and show such a high degree of unreality that one is led to believe the entire matter concerns only illusory problems. Even when it is a question of determinable techniques and brutal facts, everything bears the stamp of a ghostlike, inverted reality which often appears to be totally inexplicable when viewed from the sober perspective of a foreign observer. Each and every analysis of terrorism and its legitimatory function that discards the moralistic rhetoric and ritualized answers prevalent in the public sphere must proceed from a simple ascertainment of the facts. In Italy there is substantially more terrorism and violence carried on in public than in Germany but no one thinks of calling in the public executioner, suggesting incisive changes in the legal system, or even endowing the state with greater powers. John F. Kennedy, the former president of the United States, his brother Robert as presidential candidate, and Martin Luther King, the leader of the black liberation movement, were all murdered within a relatively short period of time but there was no return to McCarthyism and political persecution in the US, although mourning seized the entire nation. England has been suffused for years with assassinations and assassination attempts, but scarcely anyone believes that the main problem of English society is to be found here. Terrorism as strategy increasing tensions through horror, taking murderous revenge on single persons in leadership roles, forcing the public to pay attention to unresolved social and political problems, or blackmailing for the purpose of freeing prisoners such terrorism exists in other countries as well, but the motives and goals vary. What these countries have in common, however, is the manner and way in which they deal with terror and other acts of violence. They are obviously able to isolate terrorism as a special problem and in that way to preserve a measure of practical reason which in turn prevents individual social groups or parties from profiting and legitimating their power from the fear