The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (4 page)

Stasi:
The colloquial and somewhat derogatory term for the
Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
(Ministry for State Security, or MfS), East Germany's secret police force that tracked both internal dissent and foreign threats. It was similar in some ways to the FBI or the BKA, but played a more central role in policy decision-making.

Verfassungsschutz:
literally “Protection of the Constitution”; the German internal intelligence service, primary police force for intelligence actions against the guerilla and the left.

Zielfahndung:
“target search”; the name of a BKA unit whose agents are assigned to track specific individual targets.

by Ward Churchill

Never again without a rifle.
Italian leftist slogan
(circa 1970)

Looking back from the vantage point of more than forty years, it's clear that those of us in the so-called developed world purporting to be serious about abolishing the prevailing order had by 1970 come to know a few things now forgotten or, perhaps more accurately, consigned to the murky depths of active denial. Among the foremost of these is that absent a global system of imperialism the grossly inequitable societies in which we find ourselves could not exist in their present form,
¹
that colonialism/neocolonialism constitutes the veritable bedrock upon which imperialism is both foundationed and sustained,
²
and that the impact of colonialism upon the colonized is inherently genocidal.
³

No less clear was the understanding that there can be no valid basis for equivocation. Faced with the systemic perpetration of what has been aptly described as “the incomparable crime,”
⁴
we are obliged—morally and legally, individually and collectively—to intervene through any and all available means. In this, there are no bystanders. As Karl Jaspers observed of so-called Good Germans during the nazi era, those who pretend blindness with regard to genocidal processes or, worse, seek to avoid the weight of oppositional responsibility by arguing that such processes weren't or aren't “really” what they were and are, may be properly viewed as accomplices to the crime itself.
⁵

Concrete action is plainly required. In this sense, merely “bearing witness” to genocide serves little purpose (other than allowing the witnesses to claim a feeble moral superiority over proverbial Good Germans, perhaps).
⁶
Relatedly, the notion that “speaking truth to power” about what is witnessed—as if those holding power were somehow oblivious to the effects of the manner in which they wield it—can in itself remedy the situation is at best a mythic proposition.
⁷
And, of course, the pursuit of substantive change through electoral politics has
long since revealed itself as adding up to little more than a species of alchemy or, perhaps more accurately, masturbation.

The same holds true with regard to the forms of dissent formally permitted or even approved by those in power—marches, rallies, and other state-sanctioned modes of protest—irrespective of the scale on which they might be pursued.
⁸
Indeed, the ability of advanced states to assume a posture of “repressive tolerance”
⁹
has largely nullified the prospect that business as usual can be significantly impaired even by mass engagement in the rituals of nonviolent civil disobedience.
¹⁰
It's of course possible that the hallowed anarchosyndicalist prescription of a general strike might in some ways accomplish the desired result, as it very nearly did in France during the spring of 1968,
¹¹
but, alas, history offers no example of where it has been possible to organize such action either on an explicitly anti-imperialist basis or, more narrowly, in opposition to a particular genocide.
¹²

This is not to say that the range of approaches mentioned are altogether devoid of value or utility. On the contrary, each has a place in a continuum of tactics and techniques required to effect the galvanization of popular consciousness and consequent political mobilization essential to transforming the status quo. Even where all elements have been present and functioning more or less in concert, however, the historical outcome has been a consistent failure to achieve the desired result. In other words, something more has been and remains necessary. In this connection, it is instructive that the only instances to date in which genocidal processes undertaken by technologically advanced states have been brought to a halt have involved significant—often massive—applications of military force.

The most conspicuous examples are undoubtedly those of Germany, Japan, and Italy, each of whose imperial ambitions and frankly exterminatory policies vis-à-vis various subject peoples were unconditionally terminated by force of arms during World War II.
¹³
Other noteworthy instances include the Cuban guerillas' eviction of a U.S. client regime in 1959,
¹⁴
Algeria's sustained prosecution of a guerilla campaign resulting in the eviction of French colonialism in 1962,
¹⁵
the protracted Vietnamese people's war that defeated first the French (in 1954) and then the United States (in 1975),
¹⁶
the guerilla campaigns that freed Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola from Portuguese rule in 1973, ‘74, and ‘75, respectively,
¹⁷
the elimination of another U.S. client regime by Nicaraguan guerillas in 1979,
¹⁸
and the success of Namibia's war of national liberation against apartheid South Africa in 1988.
¹⁹

While it is taken as an article of faith in many quarters that Britain's postwar relinquishment of dominion over India—manifested with truly
genocidal callousness between 1940 and 1944
²⁰
—was brought about through a Gandhian program of nonviolent civil disobedience, the reality was actually quite different.
²¹
Not only was there a significant armed dimension to India's struggle for independence,
²²
but without the Second World War itself Gandhi's effort would most certainly have failed. Simply put, the demands of waging total war against the earlier-mentioned tripartite alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan so exhausted British military and financial resources that the Empire simply lacked the capacity to maintain its grip on the subcontinent.
²³
The more so, since Britain was simultaneously confronted with armed liberation struggles in others of its colonies, notably Malaya (now Malaysia), Kenya, and, a bit later, Aden (Yemen).
²⁴

It is of course true that in no instance has national liberation yielded the results hoped for by those who sacrificed to attain it, and in even the most successful cases abatement of the genocidal effects of imperialism has been transient at best. Not the least reason for this dismal outcome is that, aside from the crushing of the tripartite powers by other industrially/technologically advanced states in 1945, the imperial order has been forcibly repealed only in the so-called Third World of colonized rather than colonizing countries.
²⁵
With the exceptions of Germany, Italy, and Japan—each of which was quickly reorganized, rebuilt, and restored to its “rightful” place in the international hierarchy—the imperial centers have remained largely unscathed.
²⁶

This has allowed imperialism to absorb and in many respects even welcome dismantlement of its classic system of overseas colonialism in favor of a more refined, profitable, and genocidally immiserating mode of neocolonial domination now depicted by its proponents, rather contradictorily, as being both a “global free market” and a “fully integrated global economy.”
²⁷
It follows that the eradication of imperialism cannot be viewed as an objective attainable solely through the success of armed struggles in the colonial hinterlands, a proposition once—and still—embraced by far too many professed anti-imperialists in the metropoles.
²⁸
Rather, it must be brought about in the metropoles themselves. The only real question is how this might be accomplished.

Ideally, something akin to the British Royal and U.S. Eighth Air Forces which together bombed the Third Reich into oblivion during World War II would be available to visit the same fate upon
all
the imperial centers,
²⁹
thereby precluding reconstitution of the system in some still more virulent variation. That scenario, unfortunately—along with those of the materialization of a figurative counterpart to the Soviet Red Army that both gutted the German army and overran Berlin
³⁰
or to the People's Army of Vietnam that fought a half-million-strong U.S.
military force not merely to a standstill, but to the point of the latter's disintegration in the field
³¹
—belongs to the realm of pure fantasy.

As was understood well before 1970, however, guerilla warfare—of the sort initially practiced by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the early twentieth century and subsequently evolved specifically for urban settings—offers considerable potential.
³²
At the very least, it serves to put teeth in the expression of anti-imperialist opposition. Crucially, in regard to those functionaries in the metropoles imbued with what Noam Chomsky had by 1968 already described as a “creeping Eichmannism,”
³³
it removes a sense of their own immunity to consequence. In a context of armed struggle carried out “on the home front,” the little Eichmanns complicit in ongoing crimes against humanity can entertain few doubts that their actions might at any moment result in the imposition of tangible penalties, both material and, at least potentially, personal as well.
³⁴

Between 1969 and 1973, serious anti-imperialists in the metropoles therefore set about the task of implementing urban guerilla operations in locales extending from the United States to Western Europe and Japan.
³⁵
While a welter of sometimes mutually opposing strategies were evident and the results were decidedly mixed, a number of important organizations and initiatives emerged from the effort. These may be loosely grouped into three distinct but overlapping and often interactive categories:

• formations like the Weather Underground (WUO), the George Jackson Brigade, and the United Freedom Front (Sam Melville/ Jonathan Jackson Brigade) in the U.S.,
  ³⁶
  Italy's
  Brigate Rosse
  (Red Brigades),
  ³⁷
  the
  Groupes d'action révolutionnaire internationale
  (GARI) and
  Action Directe
  in France,
  ³⁸
  and the
  Rote Armee Fraktion
  (the Red Army Faction or RAF) in Germany, arising in a manner organic to and targeting the state/corporate apparatus of their own countries;
  
• formations arising in colonies internalized by an imperial power and conducting operations within the borders of the “mother country” itself for purposes of furthering the struggle for decolonization of their respective peoples. Examples include the Basque separatist
  Euskadi Ta Askatasuna
  (ETA) in Spain
  ³⁹
  and the
  Front de libération du Québec
  in Canada,
  ⁴⁰
  as well as the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and
  Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña
  (FALN) in the U.S.
  ⁴¹
  To a significant extent, the Provisional IRA's guerilla campaign to free Ulster (Northern Ireland) from British rule also falls into this category;
  ⁴²
  
• formations like the Japanese Red Army (JRA) and a section of the German Revolutionary Cells which, although arising in particular metropoles, adopted an “internationalist” stance leading to their operating largely—in the case of the JRA, all but exclusively—outside their own countries, targeting the state/corporate apparatus of imperialism on a global basis.
  ⁴³
  Often, groups of this type worked directly with and often took their lead from Third World guerilla organizations (notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations)).
  ⁴⁴
  

While each of the organizations named above is deserving of in-depth study and analysis, only a scant handful have thus far received it. The matter is by no means of mere academic interest. Only through excavation of their histories in substantial detail can lessons of their much-varied experiences be extracted, their errors corrected, and a better praxis of armed struggle in the metropoles achieved.

Here, the ongoing effort of J. Smith and André Moncourt to provide a definitive archeology of the Red Army Faction is to be especially commended. This is so not only because of the exemplary quality of the work produced by Smith and Moncourt but because of the unique importance of the RAF as a signifier of the potential lodged in the populace of the mother country itself.