When Horst Mahler, lawyer, terrorist and anti-Semite, died last month at the age of 89, that nemesis of Germany had become little more than a deranged demagogue who had lost a leg to diabetes and was fatigued by years in prison.
Such is the derangement of the times, however, that Mahler – a member of the notorious hard-Left Baader-Meinhof gang who later converted to neo-Nazism – is more relevant in death than he ever was in life.
With sensible politics around the world challenged by anti-Western fervour, this is increasingly Mahler’s moment. Across the political extremes, his hallmarks are familiar today: conspiratorial thinking; a pathological hatred for the United States, the West and all our old certainties; a cleaving to utopian radicalism; and a loathing for both Israel and the Jews.
Since October 7, this omnidogma has accelerated its advance, reaching for influence in our schools, universities, throughout the arts and media, in our formerly great northern towns and cities, on the streets, in the digital universe and through the benighted corridors of Lanyardistan.
It reached a bloody nadir in Washington DC last May, when two young Israeli diplomats were gunned down in the name of “Palestine”, and in the firebombing of elderly Jews in Colorado by an Egyptian national a few weeks later. In Britain, it has prompted death chants at Glastonbury and the sabotage of RAF aircraft by the bourgeois radicals of Palestine Action, not to mention relentless street unrest. But its spirit has also inspired the far-Right, with figures like the American firebrand Tucker Carlson and European insurgent parties Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National indulging an animosity towards Israel, fondness for the erstwhile Assad regime and adoration for Vladimir Putin.
Anything, in other words, that hurts us.
Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, is a prominent denizen of this swamp. She clashed with the president over the American attack on Iran. Closer to home, former BNP leader Nick Griffin has appeared on a podcast produced by 5Pillars, the Islamist website.
This convergence of radicalisms, which takes hatred of the Jews and packs it with contempt for liberal Western values, could now perhaps best be described as the “Horst Mahler complex”. More than anybody else, Mahler’s life story demonstrated that the gap between far-Left and far-Right is bridged not by shuffling round the horseshoe but by a simple sidestep.
Mahler was born in 1936 to a Nazi dentist – why were so many Nazis dentists? – in Haynau in Lower Silesia, a town now called Chojnow in southwestern Poland. Devastated by the fall of the Third Reich, in 1949 his father took his own life and probably attempted to poison his three sons (Mahler’s older brother, Klaus, prevented them from taking the suspicious tablets).
As an adult, Mahler became a lawyer and a leading exponent of the trend to cast Western capitalism as the continuation of Nazism. For him, bloodshed was a means of purging the crimes of the older generation in the fires of revolutionary fervour.
He became a key figure in the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was responsible for 34 murders and some of the most spectacular terrorist atrocities in post-war history. Inevitably, theirs was a virulent Israelophobia. Mahler underwent terrorist training in Jordan with the Palestinian faction Fatah, which now rules in Ramallah. He also represented an activist shot by German police while protesting a visit from Iran’s Shah in 1967. Progressives sided with the exiled Ayatollah.
In 1970, Mahler was arrested carrying a loaded pistol while wearing a wig and false beard. In prison, he renounced violence, but in the coming years embraced neo-Nazism, envisioning fascism as a means to fulfil the aims of the hard Left: the defeat of American Jewish capitalism.
The Holocaust, he now said, was “the actions of God, not those of humans”. He performed a Sieg Heil in front of a Jewish journalist and claimed that Hitler was “the saviour of the German people”. Mahler also praised the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, he accepted an invitation by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to an international conference promoting Holocaust denial.
Mahler’s pathetic demise may have gone largely unmourned, but it did not represent the death of his spirit. In this age of radicalism, the Horst Mahler complex is more of a threat to the West than ever before.
When Horst Mahler, lawyer, terrorist and anti-Semite, died last month at the age of 89, that nemesis of Germany had become little more than a deranged demagogue who had lost a leg to diabetes and was fatigued by years in prison.
Such is the derangement of the times, however, that Mahler – a member of the notorious hard-Left Baader-Meinhof gang who later converted to neo-Nazism – is more relevant in death than he ever was in life.
With sensible politics around the world challenged by anti-Western fervour, this is increasingly Mahler’s moment. Across the political extremes, his hallmarks are familiar today: conspiratorial thinking; a pathological hatred for the United States, the West and all our old certainties; a cleaving to utopian radicalism; and a loathing for both Israel and the Jews.
Since October 7, this omnidogma has accelerated its advance, reaching for influence in our schools, universities, throughout the arts and media, in our formerly great northern towns and cities, on the streets, in the digital universe and through the benighted corridors of Lanyardistan.
It reached a bloody nadir in Washington DC last May, when two young Israeli diplomats were gunned down in the name of “Palestine”, and in the firebombing of elderly Jews in Colorado by an Egyptian national a few weeks later. In Britain, it has prompted death chants at Glastonbury and the sabotage of RAF aircraft by the bourgeois radicals of Palestine Action, not to mention relentless street unrest. But its spirit has also inspired the far-Right, with figures like the American firebrand Tucker Carlson and European insurgent parties Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National indulging an animosity towards Israel, fondness for the erstwhile Assad regime and adoration for Vladimir Putin.
Anything, in other words, that hurts us.
Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, is a prominent denizen of this swamp. She clashed with the president over the American attack on Iran. Closer to home, former BNP leader Nick Griffin has appeared on a podcast produced by 5Pillars, the Islamist website.
This convergence of radicalisms, which takes hatred of the Jews and packs it with contempt for liberal Western values, could now perhaps best be described as the “Horst Mahler complex”. More than anybody else, Mahler’s life story demonstrated that the gap between far-Left and far-Right is bridged not by shuffling round the horseshoe but by a simple sidestep.
Mahler was born in 1936 to a Nazi dentist – why were so many Nazis dentists? – in Haynau in Lower Silesia, a town now called Chojnow in southwestern Poland. Devastated by the fall of the Third Reich, in 1949 his father took his own life and probably attempted to poison his three sons (Mahler’s older brother, Klaus, prevented them from taking the suspicious tablets).
As an adult, Mahler became a lawyer and a leading exponent of the trend to cast Western capitalism as the continuation of Nazism. For him, bloodshed was a means of purging the crimes of the older generation in the fires of revolutionary fervour.
He became a key figure in the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was responsible for 34 murders and some of the most spectacular terrorist atrocities in post-war history. Inevitably, theirs was a virulent Israelophobia. Mahler underwent terrorist training in Jordan with the Palestinian faction Fatah, which now rules in Ramallah. He also represented an activist shot by German police while protesting a visit from Iran’s Shah in 1967. Progressives sided with the exiled Ayatollah.
In 1970, Mahler was arrested carrying a loaded pistol while wearing a wig and false beard. In prison, he renounced violence, but in the coming years embraced neo-Nazism, envisioning fascism as a means to fulfil the aims of the hard Left: the defeat of American Jewish capitalism.
The Holocaust, he now said, was “the actions of God, not those of humans”. He performed a Sieg Heil in front of a Jewish journalist and claimed that Hitler was “the saviour of the German people”. Mahler also praised the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, he accepted an invitation by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to an international conference promoting Holocaust denial.
Mahler’s pathetic demise may have gone largely unmourned, but it did not represent the death of his spirit. In this age of radicalism, the Horst Mahler complex is more of a threat to the West than ever before.