The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (6 page)

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).

F
ORTY 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.