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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…..

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Continue reading this article at Daily Sceptic.

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 LondonImage Credit: Daily Sceptic