Choose Your Illusion

The German Left has had to adjust to some new "realities." First, the pompous "anti-fascist" Gunter Grass confessed he had actually once been a Nazi. Now, the shooting of a student protester that was the German equivalent of Kent State (and, which supposedly led to the agitations that resulted in today's progressive German state) was the not the result of the fascist West German regime, but was instead caused by a Stasi infiltrator and agent provacatuer.  German history and the Stasi: The gunshot that hoaxed a generation


The death of Benno Ohnesorg stirred a whole movement of left-wing protest and violence. On June 2nd 1967 the newly wed student of literature joined a protest in West Berlin against the visiting shah of Iran. As he watched a commotion in the courtyard of a house into which police had chased some demonstrators, he was shot in the back of the head by a policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, who claimed he had been threatened by knife-wielding protesters.

This was a turning-point. In the eyes of many young Germans the state had unmasked itself as evil. Many joined what would become the 1968 student movement; some took up arms. “This fascist state wants to kill us all,” said Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to become a leader of the Red Army Faction terrorist group and died in prison in 1977.

Had she lived, she would be stunned to learn that Mr Kurras, now 81, had been a long-time agent of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. 

Spare me. Student protesters in the Sixties were like mobs everywhere: easily panicked, easily lead, and easily exploited. This shooting didn't make Germany into some kind of progressive paradise. As Hayek noted in "The Road to Serfdom," the project to create the German welfare state and unite the corporate and political worlds was begun in Bismark's time. But, Germans and Leftists love to believe their historical lies. 

The motivation of the Stasi agent is intriguing, however. Was he simply trigger-happy? Or, did he deliberate kill the student to spark a destabilizing student protest movement? Most likely, he acted to accomplish what is always the Leftists goal: to demoralize ordinary people, so they lose trust in the present regime and hopefully prove receptive to the cool blandishments of progressivism. By shooting the boy, he did not overthrow the German government. But he did create the dramatic and bloody image of a dead boy, blood flowing from his scalp, with a beautiful blond hovering over him. The important result was that image coupled with the ordinary German's thought: "Christ, now the cops are shooting our kids." With visuals like these, does the truth even matter?

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