Useful idiots have always apologised for terrorists

It was an explosive challenge to all existing assumptions, and a break with history. It took place in a period of unprecedented material prosperity and cultural tolerance against the background of an unpopular war. It was a disproportionately middle-class revolt, generated by alienation from the society's dominant values, and not widely shared by the poor. The violence outraged the mass of citizens, permitting the authorities to respond with tough laws and repressive tactics. And it was, in the end, a failure.

Thus, in paraphrase, the judgment of the historian David Caute, writing about the revolts of 1968. I turned, a few weeks ago, to Caute's valuable account of the year of the barricades because I was thinking about the exhausted collapse of Gerhard Schroeder's red-green coalition government, an event that in so many ways performs the last rites over the political careers of Germany's 1968 generation. But now, in the light of the 7/7 bombings in London, Caute's comments take on wider resonance.

Over the past week it has been claimed with increasing regularity that recourse to terror tactics without explicit or coherent political aims is something new in western society. Western nations are unprepared, it is claimed, to cope with destructive terrorism as opposed to the supposedly focused tactical purpose of, say, IRA bombings. But this is simply not true. Though much about Islamist terror is new and particular, much is historically familiar. Islamists are not the first radicals to have been in love with violence.

The delusions of the politics of the deed are in no way new. A decade and a half ago, Simon Schama pointed out that violence was not just an aspect of the French revolution, but its motor. The cult of the just massacre and the heroic death, which may seem to have erupted into our midst in the 21st century, were essential parts of the French revolutionary mentality - and the IRA's.

It would be reckless and wrong to say that violence in 1968 was endemic. Yet violence was widespread, not just in the form of American bombing of Vietnam, but in the tactics adopted, and widely celebrated, by significant parts of the counterculture. In the May events, Paris explicitly re-embraced its own tradition of violence. In this country, the prosperous duo of Mick Jagger and Tariq Ali each celebrated not peaceful protest but street fighting. In America, the rhetoric, and even the action, was hotter. "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig," the student leader Mark Rudd told the Weathermen conference in 1969. "It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building."

In Germany, similar dehumanisation grew out of the revolts of 1968. Much of the worst violence in German cities was perpetrated on, not by, the protesters. Nevertheless some protesters drew the lesson that they must fight fire with fire. "We must arm ourselves," the soon-to-be terrorist Gudrun Ensslin announced after police had killed a demonstrator in riots against the Shah of Iran in West Berlin in 1967.

The Baader-Meinhof group, of which Ensslin became a key member, laid internal siege to West German life for nearly a decade. Led by a professor's son and a pastor's daughter, they and their imitators killed 28 people, wounded 93, took 162 people hostage and robbed 35 banks of an estimated 5.4m marks. By the time the ringleaders committed suicide in Stammheim prison in October 1977 after the failed Mogadishu hijacking, West Germany was almost on its knees.

Two of the most striking aspects of the group were the educated, middle-class, and in some cases extremely wealthy, background of many of its activists and the indulgent attitude of so many young West Germans to its activities. "There is no capitalist who does not have a terrorist in his own intimate circle of friends and relations," reflected the interior minister when one of his friends had been murdered after allowing his god-daughter's sister into the house.

The terrorists also enjoyed very high levels of quiet support. One in four West Germans under the age of 30 said in a 1971 survey that they felt "a certain sympathy" for the Baader-Meinhof group. In northern Germany, one in 10 said they would be ready to offer their homes to terrorists on the run. A similar proportion said they could imagine taking part in acts of political violence.

These were remarkable figures. Yet they give a picture of a society that is in some ways not unlike our own, reeling as it is from the impact of the London bomb murders. Like West Germany in the early 1970s, ours is a society confronted with a disruptive challenge at a time of prosperity and against a backcloth of an unpopular American war.

We too face a revolt whose activists are often relatively prosperous young people with a romantic attachment to violence, apologised for by a surprisingly large number of the comfortably disaffected - the people Lenin once called useful idiots. As in 1970s Germany, most working-class people are impatient both with the violence and the disaffection. The result is to encourage extremely sweeping repressive laws - such as West Germany's employment bans then and Britain's identity-card plans today.

And yet, if the experience of late 20th-century Germany is any kind of a guide, there may be some light at the end of the long and bloody tunnel into which we plunged two weeks ago. For the Baader-Meinhof campaign was, in the end, a total failure. After Stammheim, the movement faded and support evaporated. Instead of continuing to kill and wound, the generation of 1968 made a sustained effort to reject violence and embrace mainstream politics, a transition embodied both by Gerhard Schroeder and, in particular, by Joschka Fischer.

In retrospect, as Steve Crawshaw makes clear in his excellent recent history of modern Germany, the period of terror was "part of a difficult German journey, not a final destination". In this country, we have begun our own difficult journey too. Those who say we are doomed to remain indefinitely in a state of siege are as wrong as those who think that merely to withdraw from Iraq, desirable though that would be, would bring the terrorist siege to a quick, clean end.

If Germany's experience has lessons for us, it is that the outcome of our journey depends most of all upon security measures to catch the terrorists and a rejection of violence by those who are tempted to excuse or even condone it. With the dead yet unburied and the wounds still fresh, the challenge may seem unutterably daunting, but there are good grounds for believing that, if the enduring allure of violence can again be confronted, Britain can come through the threat from Islamist terror without becoming its permanent hostage.

m.kettle@guardian.co.uk