Compounding to that Additional Irony Nuance

Erik’s post of this morning reminds us that vigilance comes, and vigilance goes. What matters is the moral position from which your partis begins. From John O Koehler’s excellent overview, Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police, we find an odd relationship between the continuation of the German left’s strange relationship with violence from both a position of heroically imaged vainglorious rebellion, and violence of a vainglorious state:

Although some guerrillas were schooled in Cuba, the most important training was handled by the Stasi.
Leftist urban guerrilla groups began a reign of terror in Chile in 1983 with bombings and assassinations, exactly the kind of actions for which the Stasi had provided training. Bombs were exploding in Santiago, Vina del Mar, Quilpue, Concepcion, and Talca, damaging supermarkets, buses, government offices and four stores in Santiago's largest shopping center. Between 1983 and 1986 there were more than a thousand bombings attributed to the clandestine Communist Front and the Revolutionary Movement, which also was blamed for killing twenty-one military officers and policemen.25 Between 1984 and 1988 the East Germans contributed $6,795,015 to the Chilean Communist Party for the financing of terrorism.

As the Stasi, the Nazis, and the thousand turdblossoms that the Comintern let bloom, populations cower before violence and enable another in a history of many ideological minorities brutalize the public again. They've been trained in to this Groundhog Day pattern, and they can't really see a freedom from it - not at least among the trees in the forest where they stand.

Until the fall of the East German communist regime, few suspected that more than two hundred of the most dangerous terrorists had been trained by specialists of the Stasi in East Germany. The last class graduated in August 1989, when the DDR was already heading toward disintegration. It appears that not all graduates of the last East German terrorism course for Chilean radicals returned to their homeland. A West European antiterrorist investigator told me, on condition of anonymity, that there were strong indications that some of them had joined the Basque separatist movement ETA, which had been terrorizing Spain for years.

It’s the story of Europe. It’s how small, violent cells later find themselves in power, and there’s always a rogue state involved – whether it’s a Syrian faction, well connected Saudis, the former Stasi or the former KGB.