German politicians blamed Critical Theory for RAF terrorism in 1977.

Evidence

In 1977 the murders occurred of the Chief Federal Prosecutor, Siegfried Buback, and his driver; of Jürgen Ponto, the chairman of the board of the Dresdner Bank; and of the bodyguards of the kidnapped president of the federations representing German industry, Hans-Martin Schleyer, who was himself killed on 16 October. In the same month, the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger, and the chairman of the CDU in the state of Hesse, Alfred Dreggerthe former in a speech given at the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the University of Tübingen, and the latter in a Bavarian television programme that was broadcast throughout Germany by the television station ARDboth declared the Frankfurt School to be one of the causes of the terrorism. Terrorism, and the demand for an intellectual and political analysis of its roots, became an excuse for the defamation of its so-called sympathizers and of those who criticized society and talked about socialism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 691

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal is dense: the theory that diagnosed fascist personality structures and state violence gets recoded as the cause of terrorism, making critique itself the crime — the very ‘manipulative character’ dynamic in inverted form.