West German conservatives in the 1970s branded critical theorists as intellectual parents of terrorism.

Evidence

Günther Rohrmoser was a social philosopher employed by Filbinger, who, as a judge at a naval court martial during the last days of the Second World War, had pronounced a scandalous death sentence which he defended during the 1970s by saying that what was the law then could not be injustice today. … Since the publication in 1970 of his book The Poverty of Critical Theory, Rohrmoser has promulgated, in constantly varying forms, the view that Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer were the terrorists’ intellectual foster-parents, who were using cultural revolution to destroy the traditions of the Christian West. … Academics such as Ernst Topitsch and Kurt Sontheimer, who saw themselves as educators and liberal democrats, followed in Rohrmoser’s footsteps. … In 1972 Topitsch, a critical rationalist who was Professor of Philosophy in Graz, had stated that behind the slogans of rational discussion' and dialogue free of domination’ there was being established at the universities a distinct terrorism of political convictions such as has never existed before, even under Nazi tyranny'. … Sontheimer, who came to prominence during the 1960s with his study of Anti-Democratic Thought in the Weimar Republic, declared during the 1970s that left-wing revolutionary theories were the breeding-ground for terrorism, and considered the Federal Republic to be threatened by left-wing ideas in precisely the same way that the Weimar Republic had been threatened by anti-democratic right-wing ideas. … In 1978 Henning Günther, a student of Rohrmoser's who was now Professor of Education at Cologne, published with others a crude pamphlet that presented itself as an academic analysis, under the title The Violence of Negation: Critical Theory and its Consequences. … As in the first phase of restoration in the Federal Republic, in this second phase too the measures taken to combat unconstitutional forms of opposition were imperceptibly extended to include measures against the legal opposition as well. … Conservative anti-democrats denigrated every effort at reform as a deviation from the fundamental free democratic order’, and were often supported in this by liberals' who supported a militant democracy’ and a strong state, such as Werner Maihofer, then Minister of the Interior. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2755

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the 1968 movement, the RAF terrorism era, and the Berufsverbot (professional ban) policies in West Germany; also recalls the parallel rhetoric in the first phase of Weimar-era restoration.
• SEED: The claim that ‘what was the law then could not be injustice today’ — Filbinger’s defense of a WWII naval death sentence — is a striking moral-legal position worth an essay on how legal positivists repurposed Nazi-era jurists’ logic to discredit critical theory.