Interpreting the past

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

I have a question to the US P-listers here: in the context of the past of our 
foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who was in the seventies a militant street 
fighter during the so called Frankfurt "house riots" (Westend) - he hit a 
policeman and so on -, there is a new debate in Germany not about the Nazi 
past but about the student movement, about RAF terrorism etc. The 
conservatives use this campaign about Fischers so called "unclear relation to 
violence" to begin a kind of "Historikerdebatte" about the sixties and the 
seventies. I know people in Frankfurt who know Fischer from that times and 
they laugh about him and don't take him for serious. But I think this isn't 
the point. The new debate concerns the hegemony of interpretation of the past 
25 or 30 years ago. My question is now: is there any similar discussion in 
the US about the "militant" past of several people, is there, for example, a 
debate about the "Weathermen", the "American RAF"?
Best
Kurt-Werner Poertner