Monday, December 6, 2010

Baader Meinhoff Reaction

I'm not sure why, but I actually found it pretty interesting.  Reading the subtitles and keeping track of the action is always a chore with foreign films, but  it always feels more authentic if the supposed German people are actually speaking German...It was kind of weird to see how these (at the beginning) somewhat normal people with strong ideals made a drastic transformation into violent political radicals.  These normal people who were taking things way too seriously (in my opinion, but I don't even vote.....) just became fixated on these ideals (mostly concerned with the idea of a greater good) until they kind of lost sight of what they were doing and let it consume them.  What they did was absolutely terrorism.  Their need to speak out against institutional policy eventually became an impulse to actually "do something about it."  But as time goes on, their cause becomes twisted to fit the ideals of new and more violent "activists" giving way to more and more extreme ways to kill the innocent citizens standing between themselves and the Institutions that they initially aim to target.  This is almost exactly what is happening now with the War on Terror.  An influential few use their power to forge a motive for a mass movement against an institution (in this case, the USA) and eventually the original purpose is lost among the escalating violence that has now taken center-stage.  The Reason evolves into pure, irrational, irreconcilable hatred.  Most conflicts boil down to an ignorance that spurs a cultural conflict (that is my standard criteria for why war exists).

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