Authored by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough via The Daily Sceptic,
In the spring of 1975, the Red Army Faction, more popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm and murdered two of its staff before setting the building ablaze. In its aftermath, a British tabloid printed a headline whose bluntness masked its profundity: ‘So, Who’s Sick?‘
It was less a headline than a rhetorical diagnosis, reflecting the bewilderment at these seemingly senseless acts of terror. Was it the bourgeois world condemned as corrupt by these self-styled revolutionaries, or was it the revolutionaries themselves, who in their righteous fervour appeared possessed by demons?
The question was never one that admitted an easy answer in that moment, and it remains just as piercing in ours. For when, half a century later, Charlie Kirk was struck down in the midst of civic debate, and when voices on the ‘progressive’ Left respond not with horror but with unholy glee, we are forced once again to confront the same ambiguity.
Who is diseased? Who is truly sick? The question still hangs in the air, accusing its audience as much as its subjects.
The Eclipse of Compassion
The murder of Charlie Kirk was barbarous enough, but what followed was more chilling still. Social media, that great theatre of contemporary sentiment, resounded with elation rather than grief. Where the natural response should have been mourning and sober reflection, there was instead celebration, applause, even exultation. The old pieties of compassion and human dignity were trampled beneath a chorus of malevolence.
If we return to 1975, we can discern that the spectacle is hardly without precedent. The chronicler of the Red Army Faction’s rise and fall, Stefan Aust, described the psychosis that fuelled its violence as the Baader-Meinhof Complex: a toxic brew of revolutionary ideology, middle-class angst and personality cultism, in which politics fused with pathology. Terror and bloodshed were the logical expression of this worldview.
Jillian Becker, in her study of the same phenomenon published in 1977, placed the emergence of the Baader-Meinhof gang within an extended historical frame, tracing how West Germany’s post-war radicals were the children of those who had lived through the Third Reich — parents whose relationship with Nazism was often ambivalent, sometimes unrepentant. Their children judged them guilty of complicity or cowardice. In turn, they felt they had no tradition to receive let alone uphold, no cultural authority to embrace as their own. Becker memorably described them as Hitler’s Children, who expressed their alienation in violence against the very society that had given them life and often prosperity.
The parallels with today are clear. The obnoxious, jeering, bratty mobs on social media and their elevation of spite into virtue: these too are not simply political stances but symptoms of generational breakdown. Becker’s ‘lost children’ of post-war Germany were orphaned by the silence and ambiguities of their parents’ Nazi past. Today’s youth, though shaped by different conditions, are estranged in an analogous way — heirs to a liberal order that preached emancipation but delivered only deracination.
Children of the Void
Becker’s account of Germany’s post-war radicals was of a generation forsaken by history — children who, faced with no inheritance they could accept without shame, turned their fury against the civilisation that had produced them. That revolt finds its echo 50 years later.
The YouTube channel Richard The Fourth, one of the few voices to offer measured and calm reflections on our troubled times, spoke in similar terms of those TikTokkers, X users and BlueSkyers who rejoiced in Charlie Kirk’s murder. “Who are these lost souls? Where did they come from?” he asked. They were, he suggested, “the lost children of the boomer generation”, alienated by the failures of a secular progressivism that promised transcendence through empathy and emancipation from tradition, but in the end gifted them only spiritual vacuity.
These people are not monsters by nature; they are the offspring of a culture that extolled compassion while detaching it from justice, that proclaimed liberation even as it erased the sources of meaning. The progeny of flower power have become the children of a void, and in that void, savagery takes root.
The historical parallels, then as now, are evident: youth cut adrift from their cultural moorings find themselves drawn less to renewal than to destruction. Then as now, dislocation breeds violence and scorn rather than reflection. Becker’s Hitler’s Children and Richard’s “lost souls” are separated by time and circumstance yet bound together by the same pattern: a society that cannot pass down its traditions to its successors is liable to be repudiated by them.
If Aust diagnosed the Baader-Meinhof Complex and Becker revealed the deeper dereliction that sustained it, Richard The Fourth’s reflections illuminate the pathology of our own time. The cheering at murder and the inversion of empathy into its opposite are the symptoms of a Liberal Nihilism Complex: a syndrome in which the promises of modernity collapse into petulance and hostility, leaving only a cohort of ‘feral goblins’, mocking and howling into the abyss.
Creating the Land of Hatred
Contemporary academics, especially in the social sciences, have little of real value to offer humanity, but the few decent ones — those who write for this outlet, of course — still have the capacity to bring depth and perspective to some of our present predicaments.
We are neither spiritualists nor psychologists and cannot claim to have a greater window into the minds of these lost souls than anyone else. What we can offer, though, is decades of engagement with the study of strategic conduct: the motives and means of those who resort to violence in pursuit of political ends. And it is here that we wish to advance a thesis that goes further than viewing the collapse of empathy as an unfortunate by-product of social confusion.
What we are witnessing is not a mishap. Whatever the spiritual degradation and cultural dispossession of these young minds, they are, nevertheless, instruments of history. The way they have been psychologically programmed is no quirk of fate; it has been done with intent. They have been conditioned for a purpose.
To explain this means walking backward into history. We could begin with the French Revolution, but for simplicity’s sake let us start a decade before 1975; in 1966, when Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in China, mobilising youth against their elders, students against teachers, children against parents. He did not stumble into chaos; he conjured it — because chaos was useful.
In Wild Swans, Jung Chang’s memoir of her family’s turmoil during the Cultural Revolution, she recounts that Mao ruled by getting people to despise one another. He understood the ugliest human instincts — envy and resentment — and knew how to weaponise them. “By nourishing the worst in people, Mao created a moral wasteland, a land of hatred.”
What Jung Chang described was not an incidental consequence of revolutionary excess but the very heart of its method: hatred deliberately sown, division systematically engineered, cruelty unleashed as a political instrument.
The lesson travelled westward. French intellectuals, jaded by the ossified torpor of Soviet communism, visited China and found in Mao’s carnival of destruction a perverse vitality. They imported his ideas, transmuting them into the currency of post-structuralist thought, which in turn shaped the practice of the Baader-Meinhof gang and others like them. From there it was but a short step to their entrenchment on Anglo-American campuses.
In the United States, groups that emerged from 1960s student radicalism, such as the Weather Underground, adopted similar tactics. Their manifesto, Prairie Fire (1974), named after Mao’s dictum that a single spark can ignite a conflagration, urged radicals to exploit racial and class divisions precisely because such divisions could be rendered unbridgeable.
Prairie Fire, which is still an influential text on the American radical Left, is a handbook for permanent confrontation. Its pages bristle with the conviction that America’s prosperity, its institutions, its constitutional liberties are all obstacles to be torn down. It demanded escalation over reconciliation — more division, deeper fractures, sharper antagonisms. For its authors, harmony was stasis, and stasis was defeat. Hatred was no passing symptom; it was the weapon itself.
This was not a politics of justice but of immolation. Harmony was the enemy; hatred the accelerant.
The Long March into the Academy
The campaigns of violence waged by groups such as the Weather Underground and the Baader-Meinhof gang were eventually broken. In the latter’s case, their downfall was signalled by the successful storming of a hijacked Lufthansa jet in Mogadishu in October 1977 by German GSG9 Special Forces, assisted by the SAS, which led to the suicide of the first generation of leaders in Stammheim Prison. After these reversals, many radicals withdrew to safer ground: the universities. There, sheltered by tenure and steeped in jargon, they recast their struggle into something less visible but more enduring.
What could no longer be pursued through bombs and bullets was now carried forward in the idiom of theory. Critical theory, post-colonialism, gender studies — all served the same end. Established systems of knowledge and reasoning were methodically dismantled, and in their stead rose the new orthodoxy of ‘social justice’. In this dispensation, social justice meant rancour without limit. The effort of the intellect was no longer a quest for truth. Instead, it was to be redirected into the calculated manufacture of animosity.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe set out this programme with striking clarity in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Their project was never the reconciliation of differences. It was, rather, in their words, “to extend social conflictuality to a wide range of areas” in order to generate “new antagonisms”, arising out of “highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, anti-racist, ethnic, regional, or that of sexual minorities”. The aim was less to close fissures in the body politic than to ensure they remained open wounds. The scholarly mind was recast: no longer to think and analyse, let alone to seek concord, but to irritate and inflame.
What they offered was more than theory; it was revolutionary strategy re-clothed in academic garb. Laclau and Mouffe made plain that the task of progressive politics was to create new fronts of enmity, new identities defined not by their substance but by their opposition — a creed of victims and oppressors, endlessly proliferating, endlessly unreconciled. In their schema, the intention was never to knit society together into an equilibrium, only to drive it into perpetual dissonance.
Nor was this movement hidden, or without its early critics. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) saw where it was all leading. He warned that the university was ceasing to be the guardian of truth and culture. Instead, relativism was being allowed to erode tradition, while grievance displaced learning. He foresaw the battlelines forming long before the wider culture wars broke out.
In the decades that followed, the academy was unmade: from bastions of learning into factories of disaffection. The lecture hall, once devoted to dispassionate inquiry, became a place where conflict and division were intentionally stirred.
Engineering Discord
The end of the Cold War gave the enterprise added impetus. With the supposed ‘end of history’, liberal triumphalism licensed universities and institutions to reinvent themselves as moral tribunals. Politics was recast as ethics, and ethics as indictment.
‘Diversity’, ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ became less articles of faith than a set of tactics — no longer instruments of compromise but of humiliation, tools by which resentment was stoked and sustained. Generations of students have since been trained to denounce rather than to reason, to persecute rather than to persuade. This is Mao’s Red Guards reconstituted for a digital age: armies of accusation, armed less with AK-47s than with hashtags and HR manuals.
Those who dismiss the ‘culture wars’ as a distraction misunderstand the nature of conflict in our time. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the phrase three decades ago, cautioned that when disputes cease to be arguments within a shared reality and instead become clashes over what reality itself is, rapprochement is no longer possible. At that point, the logic of civic debate and constitutional politics gives way to the logic of force.
To see all this as a tragic misfortune is deeply mistaken. What has emerged is not spontaneous disorder but a carefully tended culture of antipathy — fertilised by theory, irrigated by resentful passions and sustained by bureaucracies whose survival depends on perpetual conflict.
The Fruits of Permanent War
The harvest is plain to see — in the mayhem and murder on a Utah campus, in the digital mobs that revel and rage across social media, and in a public discourse poisoned by denunciation, where opponents are cast as existential threats — Nazis, fascists, and every other heresy of the age — solely for the crime of disagreement. In such a climate, the very possibility of civil discourse dissolves, leaving only the grammar of hatred.
It is the very condition Jung Chang described: a polity increasingly characterised by malice, nurturing the worst in its citizens, sustained by leaders who profit from fracture.
To reiterate, this is not collateral damage. It is the design. A fractured society is a pliable society. The more its members despise one another, the easier it is for elites to consolidate power under the guise of adjudicating conflicting rights-claims. A peaceful society cannot be radicalised. A society at war with itself can be subverted from within.
Here we confront the image of our times: young people clapping bloodshed, institutions that tremble before mobs, elites that fan flames for advantage. This is no vision of reform. No accommodation of political differences. It is the shadow of perpetual strife — the deliberate cultivation of a land of hatred.
The Terminal Condition
Thus, the question of 1975 — “Who’s sick?” — has found its answer. It is no longer only the young who jeer at murder, though they remain responsible for their choices. Yet their conduct reflects more than personal failing. It is the outcome of a society that abandoned its traditions, hollowed out its own authority and left its youth open to manipulation by those who profit from discord. Individuals may bear the guilt, but the culture that fashioned them must also stand condemned.
The signs of decay are no longer hidden. It is the parable of the Emperor’s New Clothes: the pretense sustained only so long as no one dares to speak what all can see. What we are living through is an epidemic of noticing — a slow, reluctant recognition that the social fabric is threadbare and that the fractures are premeditated, not incidental.
David Horowitz, who as editor of the radical 1960s periodical Ramparts once marched in the ranks of the radical Left before renouncing it, understood these dynamics better than most. He argued that the upheavals of the era were not motivated by the “longing for justice”. It was “not a quest for peace but a call to arms. It is war that feeds the true radical passions, which are not altruism or love, but nihilism and hate.” The reality of their political programme, he lamented, “entails only permanent war, that observes no truth and respects no law, and whose aim is to destroy the only world we know”.
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David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World, King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is a former Head of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
