The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  Spiegel: First you said that force-feeding was a fascist tactic, then after Holger Meins died of starvation, you described his death as a “murder by installment.” Isn’t that a contradiction?

  RAF: We’re not the ones who said that, but force-feeding is a tactic used to diminish the effect of the hunger strike—how it appears—on the outside world; in short, to camouflage the murder. This is why intensive care units were set up in the prisons, so that it could be said that “they did everything they could,” although they didn’t do the simplest thing they could have done: abolish isolation and special treatment.

  Holger Meins was intentionally executed by systematic undernourishment. From the beginning, force-feeding in Wittlich prison was a method of assassination. At first, it was carried out by brutal and direct violence to break his will. After that, it was only done for show. With 400 calories a day, it is only a matter of time, certainly only days, before one dies. Buback and the Security Group arranged for Holger Meins to remain in Wittlich prison until he died. On October 21, the Stuttgart Supreme Court ordered that Holger Meins be transferred to Stuttgart by November 2 at the latest. On October 24, Buback informed the Stuttgart court that the state security services would not be able to respect this timetable—a fact that was only made public after Holger’s death. Finally, Hutter, the prison doctor, completely cut off the forcefeeding and went on vacation.

  It must also be pointed out that throughout the hunger strike the BKA received “reports” from the prison administration as to the prisoners’ condition. It must be emphasized that in an effort to protect himself, because he could see that Holger was dying, before Hutter left he asked Degenhardt to guarantee that he would not face charges, in the same way that all of the charges against Degenhardt had been dropped. Degenhardt was the doctor who, in the summer of 1973, during the second hunger strike, deprived prisoners at Schwamstadt of water for nine days “for medical reasons,” until a coma was induced. He is the doctor who Buback described, in comparison to Frey, who was dealing with the prisoners in Zweibrücken, as having what it takes.

  Holger was assassinated according to a plan by which the scheduling of his transfer was manipulated to create an opening that the BAW and the Security Group could use to target the prisoner directly. The fact that so far no journalist has looked into this and nobody has written about it doesn’t change the facts, but does say everything that needs to be said about the collaboration, complicity, and personal ties between the media conglomerates and state security: the BAW, the BKA, and the intelligence services.

  Spiegel: There is no way we can accept your version of the so-called “murder by installment” of Meins. It seems to us that you have a persecution complex, which would make sense after years spent underground and in prison. We at Spiegel criticized Dr. Hutter’s behavior, and the BAW launched an investigation into his actions.

  RAF: It’s not about Hutter or any other prison doctor—they decide practically nothing. The medical system in prison is organized hierarchically, and at most Hutter is an expendable figure. He’s a pig, but only a little one, who in the long run might be held accountable, although nobody who knows anything about prison or prison medicine would believe it. When you say you “criticized” him, you are referring to the old trick of talking about “mistakes,” so that the actual mistake will not be understood: class society, its justice system, and its prison camps.

  Given the situation in the prisons, the media’s fascist demagogy around the hunger strike, the chorus of professional politicians—the uncontrollable outburst against a nonviolent action carried out by a small group of people, imprisoned and isolated, who have been pushed into a position of extreme defensiveness, as if the hunger strike were a military attack—Strauß spoke of the rules of war—all of this shows to what point the system’s political and economic crises have eroded its facade of legitimacy. That’s where you should look for the sickness, in the state’s real interest in exterminating the RAF prisoners, instead of babbling about persecution complexes.

  Spiegel: The British recently stopped the use of force-feeding, for instance in dealing with the terrorists from the IRA. The hunger strikes stopped right away. How would you react if this was done here?

  RAF: It’s not our problem. The CDU calls for an end to force-feeding, in the same way that it leans openly towards a state of emergency and fascism, while the SPD uses its electoral base and its history towards the same end—fascism. State control of every aspect of life, total militarization of politics, media manipulation, and indoctrination of the people, all to promote the domestic and foreign policies of West German imperialism. And public policy amounts to disguising “social shortcomings” and selling them as reforms. So the CDU openly advocates murder, while the SPD passes off the murders as suicides, being unable to openly embrace the state security hard line, which in the final analysis determines our prison conditions.

  Spiegel: Isn’t this another case of your tilting at windmills? Is it not true that everything we have heard from the RAF so far is based on a patently false analysis of the state, society, the SPD, the CDU, and the justice system?

  RAF: What you’re serving up here is a bit foolish. That which you describe as “patently false” is not some kind of scam or simply a position held by us alone: proletarian counterpower in response to your imperialist power—analytical and practical antagonism.

  It is analytically empty to take a journalistic approach, to talk about the weaknesses, the effects and the basis of revolutionary politics— which it is your job to dispute—as journalism has long been recognized as playing a supportive role for the state, which is to say, it negates proletarian politics. For us, the question—as a question coming from Spiegel—is pointless. Theory and practice are only united in struggle—that’s their dialectic. We are developing our analysis as a weapon—so it is concrete, and has only been properly presented in cases in which we have control of its publication.

  Spiegel: You won’t end your hunger strike until your demands have been met. Do you think you have any chance of success? Or will you escalate matters and, for instance, begin a thirst strike if the demands are not met? What further actions are you preparing inside and outside of prison?

  RAF: Buback still believes that he can break the hunger strike and use it to destroy us. He hopes to do this by using murder, psychological warfare, and counterpropaganda—and forced psychiatric treatment, which is to be intensified in prison, with us strapped down 24 hours a day and disoriented by psychiatric drugs and sleep deprivation, so as to provoke our complete physical and psychological stagnation.

  Buback received the help he needed from, amongst other places, the Heinemann Initiative, but also from the precisely worded fascism of the Spiegel essay written by Ditfurth,1 for whom murder and forced psychiatric treatment are fair game for his cynical distortions, meant to increase the brutality of the political climate around the hunger strike. When, in mid-November, Carstens2 began to produce propaganda openly calling for our murder it created public shock, antagonism and horror.

  It was Heinemann’s role to eliminate any lingering doubts—among intellectuals, writers and the churches—regarding Buback’s hard line. It has always been the role of this character to dress up the aggressive policies of West German imperialism in a language and form that makes them seem humane. Heinemann’s letters amounted to an appeal for us to submit to brainwashing or murder. In the same way that he, as President, pardoned Ruhland, with his letters he promoted the death sentences the BAW wanted to impose on us, with humanist gestures that soothe the conscience of his supporters. What he wanted was to clear the way for murder—just like in Easter 1968, during his Presidency, when he hoped to integrate the students, the old antifascists, and the New Left into the new fascism.

  We are going to escalate to a thirst strike, but imprisoned and isolated as we are, we are not planning actions either inside or outside of prison.

  Spiegel: Did Holger Meins’ death provide the RAF collective with
an opportunity?

  RAF: That is fascist projection, an idea from someone who can no longer think except in the terms of the market—the system that reduces all human life to money, egotism, power, and one’s career. Like Che, we say, “The guerilla should only risk his life if this is absolutely necessary, but in such a case, without a moment’s hesitation.” Holger’s death most certainly has “the resonance of history,” meaning that what started with the armed anti-imperialist struggle has become a part of the history of the people of the world.

  “An opportunity” in this case could only mean that it broke through the news blackout about the strike. You yourself bear some responsibility for the fact that lots of people only woke up when someone was finally murdered, and only then began to realize what was going on. For eight weeks Spiegel did not say a word about the hunger strike of forty political prisoners, in order to prevent solidarity and leave them vulnerable. Your first report on it appeared on the 53rd day of the strike, five days before Holger’s death.

  Spiegel: Are you prepared to see other people die?

  RAF: Buback is sitting at his desk waiting for that.

  Spiegel: You must know that we think that’s a monstrous suggestion.

  RAF: Oestereicher, the Chairman of Amnesty England, a professional human rights activist, following a conversation with Buback in his efforts at mediation with the state, was “shocked” by the “ice-cold” way that Buback “was gambling with the prisoners’ lives.” That’s a quote.

  Spiegel: How do you analyze the situation in the Federal Republic?

  RAF: An imperialist center. A U.S. colony. A U.S. military base. The leading imperialist power in Western Europe and in the European Community. Second strongest military power in NATO. The representative of U.S. imperialist interests in Western Europe.

  The position of the Federal Republic vis à vis the Third World is characterized by the fusion of West German and American imperialism (politically, economically, militarily, ideologically based on the same interests in exploiting the Third World, as well as on the standardization of their social structures through the concentration of capital and consumer culture): in terms of its participation in the wars which imperialism wages, as well as being a “city” in the worldwide revolutionary process of cities being encircled by the countryside.

  So the guerilla in the metropole is an urban guerilla in both senses: geographically, it emerges, operates, and develops in the big cities, and in the strategic and politico-military senses, because it attacks imperialism’s repressive machinery within the metropole, from the inside, like partisans operating behind enemy lines. That is what we mean by proletarian internationalism today.

  To sum up: the Federal Republic is part of U.S. imperialism’s system of states, not as one of the oppressed, but rather as an oppressor.

  In a state like this, the development of proletarian counterpower and the liberation struggle to disrupt the ruling power structure must be internationalist right from the beginning, which is only possible through a strategic and tactical relationship with the liberation struggles of the oppressed nations.

  Historically, since 1918-1919, the German imperialist bourgeoisie and its state has held the initiative in an offensive against the people, from the complete destruction of the proletariat’s organizations under fascism, through the defeat of the old fascism, not by armed struggle here, but by the Soviet army and the Western Allies, and onward up until today.

  In the 1920s, there was the treachery of the Third International,1 with the communist parties all totally aligned with the Soviet Union, which prevented the KPD from advancing the revolution and conquering power through a policy oriented around armed struggle, through which it could have developed a class identity and revolutionary energy. After 1945, U.S. imperialism tried to brainwash the people with anticommunism, consumer culture, and the political, ideological, and even military restoration of fascism in the form of the Cold War. Nor did the GDR develop communist politics through a liberation war. Unlike France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain, and even Holland, there was no mass, armed antifascist resistance here. What conditions there were for that were then destroyed by the Western Allies after 1945.

  What this means for us and for the legal left here is that we have nothing to hold on to, nothing to base ourselves on historically, nothing that we can take for granted in terms of proletarian organization or consciousness, not even democratic republican traditions. In terms of domestic policies, this is one of the factors which makes the drift towards fascism possible, with the exaggerated runaway growth of the police apparatus, the state security machine as a state within the state, the de facto concentration of power, and the proliferation of fascistic special legislation in the framework of “internal security”—from the Emergency Laws to the current special laws that allow show trials to be held in the absence of the accused and their lawyers, permit the exclusion of “radicals” from the public service, and extend the jurisdiction of the BKA. A democracy that is not won by the people, but is imposed on them, has no mass base, cannot be defended, and won’t be.

  All this sums up the specific conditions within the borders of the Federal Republic.

  Spiegel: So far, all of your bombs and slogans have only attracted very small groups of intellectuals and anarchist fellow travelers. Do you think you’ll be able to change this?

  RAF: The Third World peoples’ liberation wars have economic, political, military, and ideological repercussions within metropolitan society, which Lin Biao1 referred to as “cutting the feet out from under imperialism.” They accentuate the contradictions within the metropole. The techniques the system depends on to cover up these contradictions cease to work. Reform turns into repression. In areas where people lack social necessities, the military and police budgets are enormously bloated. Inevitably, the system’s crisis unfolds: impoverishment of the people, militarization of politics, and increased repression. The historic, politically defensive intervention into this process of disintegration forms the basis for revolutionary politics here.

  Spiegel: You are often criticized for having absolutely no influence on the masses or connections to the people. Do you think this might be because the RAF collective is out of touch with reality? Have you sharpened your perspective? Many now feel that the only people paying attention to you are those who feel sorry for you, and that even the far left does not approve of you. Where do you think your supporters are?

  RAF: The politics of the RAF have had an impact. Not supporters, not fellow travelers, not successor organizations, but the RAF and its political effect is apparent in the fact that—as a result of the measures the government has taken against us—many people are seeing this state for what it is: the repressive tool of the imperialist bourgeoisie against the people. To the degree that they identify with our struggle, they will become conscious—the system’s power will eventually show itself to be relative, not absolute. They will discover that one can do something, that the feeling of powerlessness does not reflect objective reality on the level of proletarian internationalism. They will become conscious of the connection between the liberation struggles in the Third World and here, conscious of the need to cooperate and work together legally and illegally. On the level of practice, it’s not enough to talk. It is both possible and necessary to act.

  Spiegel: Do you intend to remain a cadre organization and bring down the system all by yourselves or do you still think you will be able to mobilize the proletarian masses?

  RAF: No revolutionary wants to ”bring down the system on his own,” that’s ridiculous. There is no revolution without the people. People said things like this about Blanqui, Lenin, Che, and now they say it about us, but they only ever say this to denounce revolutionary initiative, appealing to the masses in order to justify and sell reformist politics.

  It is not a matter of struggling alone, but of creating a politico-military vanguard, through everyday struggles, mobilizations, and organizing on the part of the legal left,
of creating a political-military core that can establish an illegal infrastructure, which is necessary in order to be able to act. In conditions of persecution, an illegal practice must be developed and can provide continuity, orientation, strength, and direction to the legal struggles in the factories, the neigborhoods, the streets, and the universities. In this way it indicates what is necessary at this point in the imperialist system’s economic and political crisis: seizing political power.

  Our political objective, what we are struggling to develop, is a strong guerilla movement in the metropole. This is a necessary step, in this phase of U.S. imperialism’s definite defeat and decline, if the legal movements and the movements that develop in response to the system’s contradictions are not to be destroyed by repression as soon as they appear. In this age of multinational capital, of transnational imperialist repression at home and abroad, the guerilla organizes proletarian counterpower, and in so doing represents the same thing as the Bolshevik cadre party did in Lenin’s day. It will develop through this process— nationally and internationally—into a revolutionary party.

  It is stupid to say that we are acting alone, given the actual state of anti-imperialist struggle in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, in Vietnam, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Palestine. The RAF is not alone in Western Europe: there is also the IRA, the ETA, and the armed struggle groups in Italy, Portugal, and England. There have been urban guerilla groups in North America since 1968.

  Spiegel: It seems that right now your base consists of forty RAF comrades in prison and about three hundred anarchists living underground in the FRG. What about your sympathizer scene?

  RAF: Those are the constantly-changing numbers issued by the BKA. They are incorrect. It is not so simple to quantify the process by which people become conscious. At the moment solidarity is spreading internationally. At the same time, international public opinion is becoming increasingly aware of West German imperialism and of the repression that goes on here.