The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Read online

  25. Again, there is a wealth of literature documenting the outcome and analyzing its causes. For a somewhat superficial but nonetheless useful summary, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).

  26. On Germany, Italy, and Western Europe more generally, see Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Nicolaus Mills, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (New York: John Wiley, 2008). On Japan, see, e.g., John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), especially pages 526–547.

  27. For the seminal work in this area, see Kwame Nkrumah, NeoColonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International, 1966). For more current assessments, see Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Richard A. Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1999); Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).

  28. Even if such a strategy was viable, the moral and ethical implications attending the beneficiary population’s displacement of the suffering entailed in such struggles onto the colonized speak for themselves. With very few exceptions, such a posture has nonetheless been perpetually evident among anti-imperialists in the United States. For a good overview, see Richard Seymour, American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

  29. See Alan J. Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).

  30. Notwithstanding triumphalist Anglo-American prattle about the decisiveness of the Normandy invasion, and so on, the truth is that the Red Army not only bore the great brunt of the fighting against German ground forces but inflicted vastly more casualties upon the Germans—roughly 80 percent of the total—than did the Western Allies; William J. Duiker, Contemporary World History (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2009), 128. For further background, see Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 2007).

  31. See Richard Boyle, Flower of the Dragon: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972); Cincinnatus (Col. Cecil B. Currey), Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army during the Vietnam Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).

  32. On the IRA campaign, see, e.g., Peter Hart, The IRA at War, 1916-1923 (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). By the late 1960s, Uruguay’s Tupamaros had emerged as a useful template for adaptation to North American and European contexts; see María Esther Gilio, The Tupamaro Guerrillas: The Structure and Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla Movement (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973). Among the more influential tracts during the period was Brazilian practitioner Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (Berkeley, CA: Long Time Comin’ Press, 1969; reprint, St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black, 2008).

  33. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1968; reprint, Oakland, CA: AK Press), 277. In actuality, the term “creeping Eichmannism” predates Chomsky’s usage by nearly a decade, having first appeared in E.Z. Friedenberg’s The Vanishing Adolescent (Beacon Press, 1959). See Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacourt Press, 1970), 9.

  34. For further development of this argument, see “The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Justice, and Roosting Chickens,” in my On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 5-38.

  35. That such undertakings commenced on three continents more or less simultaneously was hardly a matter of happenstance. There was a high degree of interaction between the movements in Western Europe—especially Germany—and the United States, while SDS, and perhaps other organizations in the U.S., was in direct contact with Zengakuren, the radical student movement in Japan, during the late 1960s. See Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990), 90.

  36. On the WUO, see Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005); Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques from the Weather Underground, 1970-1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). On the George Jackson Brigade, see Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Daniel Burton-Rose, ed., Creating a Movement with Teeth: A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010). No comparable material is currently available on the United Freedom Front.

  37. Although the first source is inadequate and the second reactionary, see Alessandro Silj, Never Again Without a Rifle: The Origins of Italian Terrorism (New: Katz, 1979); Robert C. Meade, Jr., The Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). From an activist perspective, see also, Chris Aronson Beck, Reggie Emiliana, Lee Morris, and Ollie Patterson, Strike One to Educate One Hundred: The Rise of the Red Brigades in Italy in the 1960’s-1970’s (Seeds Beneath the Snow, 1986), portions of which are available at http://www.urbanguerilla.org/brigaterosse/index.php.

  38. There is no English-language material available on the GARI, per se, but on its successor, see Michael Y. Darnell, Action Directe: Ultra-Left Terrorism in France, 1979-1987 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). Readers should be advised that this is a decidedly right-wing source.

  39. See Robert P. Clark, Negotiating with ETA: Obstacles to Peace in the Basque Country, 1975-1988 (Reno University of Nevada Press, 1990); Paddy Woodworth, Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

  40. The best English-language material available on the FLQ—which isn’t saying a great deal—appears to be Louis Fournier’s F.L.Q.: The Anatomy of an Underground Movement (Toronto: NC Press, 1984).

  41. Material on the BLA is scanty, but see Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” and Russell Shoats, “Black Fighting Formations: Their Strengths, Weaknesses, and Potentialities,” both in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3-19, 128-138. See also Dhoruba bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu Jamal, Still Black, Still Strong (Brooklyn: Semiotext(e), 1993); Jalil Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army (Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press/Arm the Spirit, 2002).

  42. Although the FALN engaged in “more than 120 bombings of military and government buildings, financial institutions, and corporate headquarters in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.” between 1974 and 1983, there is a near-total absence of material about the organization available in English. See generally, Ronald Fernandez, Prisoners of Colonialism: The Struggle for Justice in Puerto Rico (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994).

  43. There is a substantial literature (of wildly varying quality) on the Provos. One of the more useful overviews is provided by Richard English in his Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also see Gary McGladdery, The Provisional IRA in England: The Bombing Campaign, 1973-1997 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006).

  44. The JRA should not be confused with either the short-lived Japanese Red Army Faction or its immediate successor, the United Red Army, which self-destructed in Japan in 1971; see Farrell, Blood and Rage, 1-29. On the Revolutionary Cells, per se, there is virtually nothing currently available in
English.

  45. While the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine has been quite complex, both militarily and politically, the PFLP (EO) in particular adopted a strategy of working with and sponsoring non-Arab organizations for purposes of conducting operations inside the imperial centers from which the Israeli settler state drew support. For background, see generally, Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (London: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  1

  Previously on Red Army Faction

  FORTY YEARS AGO, THE WORLD was a very different place.

  The division between “Communism” and “The Free West”—détente notwithstanding—marked each and every political conflict, as did the anticolonial revolutions, which had by no means run their course.

  Millions of people around the world felt that it was reasonable and worthwhile to risk their lives fighting for liberation from capitalism and imperialism, joining movements with these stated goals. This global upheaval found its epicenter in the Third World, and yet its effects left no nation unchanged. While in the wealthy imperialist countries these revolutionary movements were most evident in the 1960s, there remained pockets of resistance, subcultural remnants, people who persisted in putting their lives on the line, carrying the struggle forward through the 1970s and beyond.

  This is the story of one such group, the Red Army Faction (RAF).

  West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), was an anticommunist state set up after World War II to threaten the Soviet bloc, around which imperialism hoped to and succeeded in rebuilding Western Europe’s economy. As part of this process, immediately after the war the capitalist Allies decided to make peace with former Nazis and their supporters, so long as they were willing to play ball with the new “democratic” masters. Throughout the late 1940s, the ‘50s, and the ‘60s, many of the key positions of power in the FRG were occupied by men who had played similarly important roles in Hitler’s Third Reich.

  As a substitute for any real denazification, religious and civil leaders simply repeated the mantra that the best way to make sure the crimes of the Nazi period were never repeated was for all Germans to concentrate on living “decent, law-abiding” lives. A message that would often be repeated by parents—not a few of whom had sieg-heiling skeletons in their closets—to their children.

  A stifling, authoritarian, and conformist ideology was being imposed from above, a perfect match for the cultural wasteland that had been sterilized in the postwar period, just as it had been “Aryanized” by fascism.

  The global wave of revolt that became known as the “New Left” hit the FRG in the 1960s, just as it was reaching the other imperialist countries. Students in West Berlin began questioning not only the economic system, but the very nature of society itself. The structure of the family, the factory, and the school system were all challenged as these young rebels mixed the style of the hippie counterculture with ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism.

  In 1966 and ‘67, a recession that had hit the entire capitalist world pushed unemployment in the FRG to over a million for the first time in the postwar era. In a move to preempt dissent, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was brought into a so-called “Grand Coalition” government alongside the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its more rabid Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU). With the putative “left” working hand-in-hand with the right to manage the crisis, it appeared that any real change could only come about outside of government channels. Disenchantment struck West Germany’s youth in the factories and on the street, as younger workers were increasingly marginalized by the new corporatist compact—but most especially in the universities, which had been bastions of right-wing power for over a hundred years.1 The Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO), or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, was born.

  Communes and housing collectives began to spring up. Women challenged the male leadership and orientation within the student movement and the APO, setting up daycares, women’s caucuses, women’s centers, and women’s communes. The broader counterculture, rockers, artists, and members of the drug scene all rallied to the emerging political insurgency. Political protests encompassed traditional demonstrations, as well as sit-ins, teach-ins, and “happenings.”

  This was all the more striking given the conservative cultural and political situation in West Germany at the time. In retrospect, it may not be difficult to see that the student revolt was one part of a complex and often contradictory process of social transformation, through which capitalism was not only being challenged, but also renewed, new classes rising as old classes updated their worldview. At the time, however, the gulf that separated the student protesters from the surrounding society could seem well-nigh unbridgeable.

  The APO was opposed by a rabidly right-wing gutter press and gratuitous violence, which would be exemplified for many by the killing of Benno Ohnesorg, a young student shot dead by police while attending his first demonstration in West Berlin, on June 2, 1967.2 In this context, the APO was forced to develop a capacity for street militancy, as ongoing attacks on the movement combined with the specter of Germany’s recent past to imbue it with a sense of “do or die” urgency—an attitude that was sadly vindicated, as Socialist German Students Federation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS) leader Rudi Dutschke, the target of a hate campaign in the popular Springer Press, barely survived being shot three times by a would-be assassin in 1968. (He would in fact die as a consequence of his injuries eleven years later.)

  In radical circles it was a commonplace that the Federal Republic was simply the Third Reich in new clothing, and this view—made all the more credible by the violence directed at the New Left—had consequences as to the place that repression, violence, and resistance would all play in activist strategies. As Irmgard Möller would recall, over thirty years later:

  Repression had not brought people together, but it had sharpened the perspective of those affected. Who is it that one confronts? How can one protect oneself? Above all, it became clear that people could only defend themselves if they acted together! Then, the overview of the entire justice system, the repressive system—what would they go after? What grinder would they put us through? I’m not saying that persecution automatically gives rise to something good. But at the time, it was important that anyone who had ever set foot on the street—against the state of emergency legislation, protesting the Vietnam War, the junta in Greece, there was an endless stream of demonstrations and demonstrations—felt threatened. All of this was criminalized.3

  It was within this context, and inspired by the liberation struggles occurring in the Third World, that militants began experimenting with a new form of political intervention: the urban guerilla.4

  Initially, this armed development manifested itself in two broad tendencies. A constellation of groups based in the communes and the counterculture, often described as anarchist, carried out a number of firebombings, robberies, and attacks on police. They operated under names such as the Tupamaros Munich and West Berlin, the Raging Panther Aunties, the Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels, the West Berlin Yippees, and the Blues—by 1972, elements from all these had coalesced into the 2nd of June Movement (2JM), the group taking its name from the date of Ohnesorg’s murder in 1967. This first tendency was marked by a more populist approach and paid particular attention to the question of class within the FRG.

  Demonstrations following the murder of Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 (top) and attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke in 1968 (bottom).

  The second guerilla tendency to emerge was more clearly a product of the student movement, for whom capitalism had been discredited, not so much by internal class oppression but by its past and present complicity in military aggression and genocide around the world.5 This second tendency overlapped significantly with the first, with several individuals crossing back and forth, but it would ultimately develop along a separate pat
h.

  Those who followed this path constitute the subject of our study, the guerilla organization they established being the Red Army Faction.

  A STRATEGY AGAINST IMPERIALISM

  The Red Army Faction first announced itself in 1970, when a small group broke a young man out of jail.

  Andreas Baader was serving a three-year sentence for having set fire to two department stores to protest the war in Vietnam. One of his rescuers, Gudrun Ensslin, had also participated in this political arson, and, as such, was living underground at the time. Another rescuer, Ulrike Meinhof, was a well-known left-wing social critic, a journalist who had been putting the finishing touches on a docudrama about girls in reform school. Significantly older than the other guerillas, within the FRG she was in fact the best-known left-wing female intellectual of her generation; due to her role in Baader’s escape she had no choice but to go underground.

  The RAF made international headlines with this jailbreak, during which an elderly librarian was shot and seriously injured, and the operation was hotly debated on the left. All the more so when one year later at the annual May Day demonstration in West Berlin, supporters handed out copies of the group’s foundational manifesto, The Urban Guerilla Concept, a document that not only made the case for armed struggle in the metropole, but also established the RAF’s reputation as a group that took political theory seriously.

  In this and subsequent texts, the RAF would develop a distinctive analysis of capitalism and the possibilities of resistance “in the belly of the beast,” addressing the difficult fact (as formulated by former RAF member Knut Folkerts), that “All revolutionary initiatives in [Germany] suffer—if they do not wish to resolve the question opportunistically—from the contradiction between the reality presented by this population and the need to find a base here.”6