THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, (rated MA+, with English subtitles).

• Author: James, Bill
• Position: Movie review
• Pages: 70(3)

Forty years ago, on 4 July 1969, I participated in an anti-Vietnam protest.

As we marched south down Melbourne's Swanston Street, activists filtered back through our ranks and told us to sit down on the road at Flinders St. Such an action effectively blocked the city's busiest intersection right at the evening peak hour, just as workers were trying to get home.

As the instigators knew, this left the police with no option but to move us, an outcome which could then be spun as unprovoked violence against passive protesters. It had the additional advantages of providing opportunities for covert anti-police violence in the ensuing chaos, and of getting a few of the genuinely peaceful marchers radicalised as result of their being manhandled by police in the unavoidable clearing operation.

The fact that the incident would exasperate and alienate the otherwise revered "workers" was ignored in the interest of existential revolutionary self-indulgence. Ever since that and similar experiences from that era, I have treated the standard media characterisations of demonstrations as "police riots" with the profoundest scepticism.

The Baader Meinhof Complex begins with a protest against the Shah of Iran's visit in June 1967 to West Germany, and the alleged violence perpetrated against the demonstrators. (There is no exculpating the undoubtedly unpleasant Shah, but why have the usually judgmental and moralistic Left ignored his far more unpleasant Islamo-fascist successors as the dictators of Iran?)

The 1967 shooting of an unarmed student demonstrator was portrayed by the Left as proof of the fascist character of the West German...