Europe, I Cannot Love You Like This

The 1970s and 1980s were no gentle age in Europe. The Red Army Faction, or RAF, carried out attacks against military, political and economic targets in West Germany, killing public officials, business leaders and police officers.

On Jan. 4, 1977, the organization attacked a U.S. artillery base in Giessen, killing several terrorists, according to the article. On April 7, RAF members assassinated Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, whom they blamed for the 1974 death of Holger Meins.

The group then shifted its focus toward key figures in the state apparatus and the economy. It killed Dresdner Bank chief Jürgen Ponto in Frankfurt on July 30 and bombed the federal prosecutor's office on Sept. 3, seeking an end to the isolation of imprisoned RAF members. Two days later, it abducted Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the employers' association, and shot dead the police officers accompanying him.

The violence continued into the following decade. The RAF attempted to kill NATO commander Alexander Haig in 1979, bombed the U.S. air base at Ramstein in 1981 and targeted U.S. General Frederick Kroesen in Heidelberg. Later attacks killed arms manufacturer Ernst Zimmermann, Siemens chairman Karl Heinz Beckurts, Foreign Ministry official Gerold von Braunmühl, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen and Treuhandanstalt chief Detlev Karsten Rohwedder. In 1991, the group attacked Russian Jews emigrating to Israel on a road to Budapest's Ferihegy airport, wounding two Hungarian police officers and several passengers.

The author concludes that, although those decades were far from peaceful, much of what is happening in the West today would once have been considered impossible. The article also briefly points to the violence associated with Italy's Red Brigades.