The living ghosts of violent radicalism

Last month, 67-year-old German woman Danijela Klete was sentenced to 13 years in prison for armed robberies committed between 1999 and 2016. When Klete, one of the last surviving members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), was arrested in 2024, authorities found a pistol, an assault rifle, gold and large sums of cash in her Berlin apartment. There she had been hiding under an assumed name for years.

The RAF was an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist group that once terrorized Germany by assassinating politicians and businessmen, hijacking planes, and robbing banks, hoping to spark a global revolution. Most former RAF members are now dead. Some of the founders, such as Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, died in prison in the 1970s, when Klete was just getting started. The organization was officially disbanded in 1998. Two RAF members remain at large.

The arrest and sentencing of Daniela Kleta, long after her revolutionary cause had failed completely, brought to mind the case of Hiro Onoda. An intelligence officer in the Imperial Japanese Army, he refused to believe that World War II was over and survived for decades on a small island in the Philippines as a kind of guerrilla fighter, until he was finally returned to Japan in 1974.

The Kletes and other violent postwar revolutionaries, especially in Germany, Italy, and Japan, suffered from a similar obsession. They too were caught up in the last war.

Members of the RAF, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army (JRA) saw their countries' complicity in "American imperialism" as an extension of fascism. They did not want to repeat the mistake of their parents, who during World War II either collaborated with fascist and militarist regimes or remained silent in the face of unimaginable atrocities. Instead, they fought violently against what they saw as the fascist-capitalist world order.

Fusako Shigenobu, born in 1945, was one of the most radical leaders of the JRA, an organization that operated largely from Lebanon. Her father was a right-wing extremist in the 1930s and served as a major in the Imperial Japanese Army. After she was arrested during a trip to Japan in 2000, she explained that her armed resistance "was closely linked to historical circumstances."

Similarly, Italian radical far-left activists were equally convinced that they were continuing the struggle of the wartime anti-fascist partisans.

It is not surprising that the most militant student movements emerged precisely in the former Axis powers. The post-war generations did not only have to deal with the complicity or obedience of their parents; many influential people in Italy, Germany, and Japan had blood on their hands.

Nobusuke Kishi, Japanese Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960, was Deputy Minister of Armaments in Imperial Japan during World War II, and before that he oversaw vast forced labor systems in Manchuria.

Konrad Adenauer's first government in West Germany included several prominent former Nazis. The later West German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was also a member of the Nazi Party.

There were many former fascists in the conservative wing of Italian politics and economics.

All of these establishment figures generally had the support, and often financial assistance, of the United States. Kishi, for example, liked to play golf with US President Dwight E. Eisenhower.

While the anger of the postwar revolutionaries is understandable, their radicalism was actually a sign of defeat. More moderate student protests against the Vietnam War, authoritarian professors, rigid sexual norms, and corrupt conservative elites achieved some success. Social norms became more liberal, and hierarchies in education and religion began to collapse.

However, mainstream politics in the US-led "free world" remained relatively conservative, and the capitalist system was never seriously threatened. During the 1970s, the student protest movement dissipated in the rise of the sex, drug, and rock and roll culture.

The armed struggle of the most hardened revolutionaries was rooted in a sense of hopelessness. Klete is today a kind of dinosaur, one of the last survivors of that ideological war that many can no longer even remember.

But that created a new, perhaps even bigger problem.

Postwar politics in Europe, the United States, and Japan may have been conservative, but they were not fascist. Memories of the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese atrocities in Asia made militant right-wing ethnic nationalism, let alone openly racist politics, socially unacceptable; such ideas persisted only on the rotten margins of society.

Young leftist revolutionaries, so obsessed with memories of World War II, often saw Nazis and fascists even where they were not, pursuing these specters with actions that were as brutal as they were ineffective.

But what if the loss of historical memory among future generations allows some of these ghosts to come back to life?

No matter how many teenagers read Anne Frank's diary in school, the violent ideologies of the 20th century - Japanese wartime militarism, Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's Third Reich - now belong to the same distant past as Napoleon or the Boer War. Vivid memories of past atrocities no longer provide a bulwark against the spread of racist demagoguery and extreme chauvinism.

For a growing number of people, far-right politics seem attractive, even "cool." Smooth racists in well-tailored suits, promising to deport foreigners and punish "liberal elites," can be very appealing to a younger generation eager to shake up the establishment. The origins and historical background of such radical xenophobia are largely forgotten.

As far-right activists gain political power, their activities become far more dangerous than the violent fantasies of a handful of privileged revolutionaries with homemade bombs. Unlike the Nazis and fascists of old, their voices are now heard in the White House.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.