The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  Throughout the RAF’s existence, there has been an increasing process of discussion and polarization on the legal left regarding the question of armed struggle. A new antifascism is taking shape, one which is not based on any apolitical pity for the victims and the persecuted, but on an identification with the anti-imperialist struggle, directed against the police, the state security services, the multinational corporations, and U.S. imperialism.

  Helmut Schmidt wouldn’t have listed the RAF in his New Year’s speech under the five things/developments of 1974 that are most threatening to imperialism—worldwide inflation, the oil crisis, Guillaume,1 unemployment, and the RAF—if we were fish out of water, if revolutionary politics here had as limited a base as you and the psychological warfare campaign claim.

  Spiegel: It is said that one of your main sources of support is the dozen or so lawyers who are in charge of coordinating things for you inside and outside of the prisons. What role do your lawyers play?

  RAF: Committed lawyers, those who are involved in our cases, are inevitably politicized, because quite literally at every turn, right from their very first visit with a RAF prisoner, they experience the fact that nothing they took for granted about the legal system holds true. The body searches, the mail censorship, the cell raids, the hysteria, the paranoia, the Disciplinary Committee rulings, the criminalization, the psychological warfare, the legislation custom-made to exclude them, on top of what they see of the special conditions we are subjected to, and their utter powerlessness to change anything in the normal way, that is to say, by using legal arguments in court, and the fact that every step of the way they see that it is not the judges who are making the decisions regarding us, but the Bonn Security Group and the BAW. The discrepancy between the letter of the law and the reality of the law, between the pretense of the rule of law and the reality of a police state, turns them into defenders of the constitutional state, into antifascists.

  It is part of the counterstrategy of the BAW and the BKA to claim that these lawyers are our “auxiliary forces,” which they are not. To a large degree, the justice system has been taken over by state security, in order to serve the goals of the counterinsurgency campaign and to aid in the BAW’s extermination strategy. In this context, defense attorneys who insist on the separation of powers are considered obstacles to the drift towards fascism and must inevitably be targeted.

  Spiegel: Do you have political disagreements with other underground anarchist groups?

  RAF: Not about Spiegel.

  Spiegel: What about the 2nd of June Movement, which murdered the West Berlin Supreme Court Judge Drenkmann?

  RAF: You should ask the 2nd of June about that.

  Spiegel: What do you think: did Drenkmann’s murder accomplish anything?

  RAF: Drenkmann didn’t become the top judge in a city of almost three million without ruining the lives of thousands of people, depriving them of their right to life, choking them with laws, locking them away in prison cells, destroying their futures.

  What’s more, just look at the fact that despite calls from the highest West German authorities, the President of the Republic and the President of the Constitutional Court, only 15,000 Berliners came out to the funeral, and this in a city where 500,000 to 600,000 people used to come out for anticommunist demonstrations. You yourselves know that all the indignation about this attack on the Berlin judge is nothing but propaganda and hypocrisy, nobody mourns a character mask. This whole exercise was just a way for the bourgeoisie and the imperialists to send a message. The indignation was just a reflex action in one particular political climate, nothing more.

  Those who, without themselves being from the ruling elite, automatically identify with such a character mask of the justice system simply make it clear that wherever exploitation reigns, they can only imagine themselves on the side of the exploiter. In terms of class analysis, leftists and liberals who protested the Drenkmann action simply exposed themselves.

  Spiegel: We know something quite different. We know that Drenkmann was shot, and we consider the RAF’s justification of this murder to be outrageous, nothing but lynch mob justice for a so-called “crime” that was committed collectively by what you refer to as a “fascist” justice system. Even if one accepts the maxim that the ends justify the means, as you obviously do, one can see by the public’s reaction that Drenkmann’s murder constituted a setback for the RAF.

  RAF: The logic behind the means lies with the ends. We are not justifying anything. Revolutionary counterviolence is not only legitimate, it is our only option, and we expect that as it develops it will give the class that you write for many more opportunities to offer up ignorant opinions, and not just about the attempted kidnapping of a judge. The action was powerful—as an expression of our love and our mourning and rage about the murder of an imprisoned combatant. If there are to be funerals—then they will be on both sides.

  Your indignation has to be seen in the light of your silence regarding the attack in Bremen, where a bomb went off in a vending machine shortly after a football game had been cancelled.1 Unlike the action against Drenkmann, this bomb was not aimed at a member of the ruling class, but at the people; it was a CIA-style fascist action, and it met with a much less heated reaction. How do you explain that in this case the Bremen Railway Police were already on alert the morning of December 8—the day that the bomb went off at 4:15 PM—because they had been warned by the Hessian Criminal Bureau to expect an attack in the station or on a train. How do you explain the fact that at 3:30 PM the Civil Protection Service in Bremen-North had already received the order to send five ambulances to the central station because a bomb was going to explode, while the police, who were there immediately after the explosion, claimed that they had only received word of the bomb threat at 3:56 PM, and that they had thought it was going to go off in a downtown department store? The Bremen authorities not only knew the exact time and place of this attack, but immediately afterwards they had this statement prepared to conceal, manipulate and deflect any investigation away from what they had actually been doing. So where is your indignation now?

  Spiegel: We will look into your allegations. While underground, you yourselves emphasized violence. When the bombs went off in Munich, Heidelberg, and Hamburg, the RAF saw these as political acts and claimed them as such. Since then have you recognized that violence against property and people is ineffective—that it doesn’t attract solidarity, but rather repels it—or do you intend to continue along this path?

  RAF: The question is, who does it repel? Our photos were hung in the streets of Hanoi, because the RAF attack in Heidelberg destroyed the computer that was used to program and guide U.S. bombers deployed in North Vietnam. The American officers and soldiers and politicians found this repellent, because, in Frankfurt and in Heidelberg, they were suddenly confronted by Vietnam, and could no longer feel safe.

  Today revolutionary politics must be both political and military. This is a given because of the structure of imperialism, which must guarantee its sphere of control both internally and externally, in the metropole and in the Third World, primarily by military means, through military pacts, military interventions, and counterguerilla programs, and through “internal security,” i.e. building up the internal machinery for maintaining power. Given imperialism’s capacity for violence, there can be no revolutionary politics without resolving the question of violence at each organizational stage as the revolution develops.

  Spiegel: How do you see yourselves? Do you consider yourselves to be anarchists or Marxists?

  RAF: Marxists. But the state security image of anarchists is nothing more than an anticommunist hate campaign aimed at portraying anarchists as only being interested in blowing stuff up. In this way, the necessary terminology is established for the government’s counterinsurgency campaign, meant to manipulate those anxieties which are always lurking just below the surface. Anxieties about unemployment, crisis, and war, which feed the insecurity about living conditions that people expe
rience in a capitalist society, and which are used to sell the people “internal security” measures as peace and security measures in the form of the state’s military machine—the police, the intelligence services, and the army. It aims at a reactionary, fascist mass mobilization of the people, thereby manipulating them into identifying with the state’s machinery of violence.

  It is also an attempt to turn the old quarrel between Marxism and revolutionary anarchism to the advantage of the imperialist state, to use the bland opportunism of contemporary Marxism against us: “Marxists don’t attack the state, they attack capital,” and “It is not the streets, but the factories that are key to class struggle,” and so on. Given this incorrect understanding of Marxism, Lenin must have been an anarchist, and his work, The State and Revolution, must have been an anarchist work. Whereas it is, in fact, the strategic guide of revolutionary Marxism. The experience of all the guerilla movements is simple: the tool of Marxism-Leninism—what Lenin, Mao, Giáp, Fanon, and Che took from Marxist theory and developed—was for them a useful weapon in the anti-imperialist struggle.

  Spiegel: So far as the people are concerned, it would seem that the “people’s war” as conceived of by the RAF has become a war against the people. Böll once spoke of six against sixty million.

  RAF: That’s just the wishful thinking of imperialists. In the same way that in 1972 the newspaper Bild turned the idea of people’s war into “a war against the people.” If you think that Bild is the voice of the people… We don’t share Böll’s contempt for the masses, because NATO, the multinational corporations, state security, the 127 U.S. military bases in the Federal Republic, Dow Chemical, IBM, General Motors, the justice system, the police, and the BGS are not the people. Furthermore, hammering into the people’s consciousness the idea that the policies of the oil companies, the CIA, the BND the Verfassungsschutz, and the BKA are in the interests of the people and that the imperialist state represents the common good is the function of Bild, Spiegel, and the psychological war waged by state security against the people and against us.

  Spiegel: Vox populi, vox RAF? Haven’t you noticed that nobody takes to the streets for you anymore? When there is a RAF trial, hardly anyone shows up in court. Haven’t you noticed that from the moment you began throwing bombs nobody has been willing to shelter you? All of which goes some way to explaining the successes in the hunt for the RAF since 1972. It is you and not Böll who have contempt for the people.

  RAF: It’s nice of you to repeat Hacker’s clichés, but the situation is this: a tactically weak and divided legal left, facing heavy repression in the national context, cannot transform the reactionary mobilization into one that is revolutionary. This is not on their agenda. It is precisely because of this contradiction that proletarian politics must be armed politics.

  The understanding of strategy and class analysis contained in your silly polemic can be repudiated by examining these facts.

  The RAF, its politics, its line, and its actions are proletarian, and are the first stages of proletarian counterviolence. The struggle has just begun. You talk about the fact that some of us are prisoners—this is only a setback. You don’t talk about the political price the imperialist state has paid hunting this little unit, the RAF. Because one of the goals of revolutionary action—its tactic at this point in its development—is to force the state to show itself, to force a reaction from the repressive structure, so that the tools of repression become obvious and can be transformed into the basis for struggle in a revolutionary initiative. Marx said: “Revolution progresses by giving rise to a powerful, united counterrevolution, by the creation of an opponent through which the party of revolt will ripen into a real revolutionary one.”1

  The surprising thing is not that we suffered a defeat, but that five years later the RAF is still here. The facts to which the government alludes have changed. In answer to a poll in 1972, 20% of adults said that they would hide one of us at their home for a night, even if it meant risking criminal charges. In 1973, a poll of high schools found that 15% of high school students identified with the RAF’s actions. Of course the value of revolutionary politics cannot be measured through opinion polls, as one cannot quantify the processes of becoming conscious, of gaining knowledge, and of becoming politicized. But this does show how the concept of armed insurrection develops into protracted people’s war—this shows that through the struggle against the imperialist power structure, the people will eventually recognize their role and will break free from media brainwashing—because our battle is a realistic one, it is a battle against the real enemies of the people, whereas the counterrevolution is obliged to stand facts on their head.

  At the same time, there is the problem of metropolitan chauvinism in the people’s consciousness, which is poorly addressed by the concept of labor aristocracy as an economic category. There is the problem that national identity can only be reactionary in the metropole, where it implies an identification with imperialism. This means that right from the beginning, popular revolutionary consciousness is only possible in the form of proletarian internationalism, by identifying with the antiimperialist liberation struggles of the people in the Third World. It cannot develop simply through the class struggle here. It is the role of the metropolitan guerilla to create this connection, to make proletarian internationalism the basis for revolutionary politics here, to connect the class struggle here and the liberation struggles of the people of the Third World.

  Andreas Baader Regarding Torture

  This statement was made after the testimony by Henck (the Stammheim prison psychiatrist), who concluded by declaring that isolation intensifies the impact of torture and, as such, constitutes a “philosophical problem.” Prinzing and the BAW interrupted Andreas seventeen times to prevent him from developing a coherent argument connecting isolation torture to his political perspective, to which it is directly related. This explains the blanks. This is an example of what it was like every day.1

  Events unfolded exactly as follows: the dead wing—and when that didn’t work as they had hoped, when no confession was forthcoming despite the effects of isolation becoming apparent—at the BAW’s request they locked Ulrike in an isolated psychiatric unit for eight weeks, “for observation,” as Götte said. And when that didn’t work either— they tried to arrange for forced drugging and a forced scintigraphy. The Federal Supreme Court’s idea being to open her head to see where human thought comes from; the BAW’s concrete project was stereotactical intervention in her brain. Witter was to be in charge of the drugging and scintigraphy; Loew was proposed for the brain surgery (note: both are connected to the University of Homburg/Sarre).

  After the mobilization prevented this project, the dead wing was used again. The hunger strike and the smear campaign. Following the smear campaign came the law that makes it possible to exclude defense attorneys and to continue the trial in the absence of the accused,2 which signifies the elimination of what remained of public accountability. Because the hearing to establish the prisoner’s inability to appear wasn’t public, the hearing was held in the special section—just like in Stammheim.

  In Zweibrücken last week, in the case of Manfred Grashof, it was demonstrated how these obligatory medical examinations could be used to prevent a prisoner from testifying.

  We certainly can’t agree with the argument regarding torture as it is developed by Schily in his petition. That is to say, we refuse to be the object of his analysis. For the torture victim, arriving at a conception of torture is an ambiguous and impossible endeavor, because we can only appeal—and it’s pointless—to an indignation based on a liberal conception of the state confronted with the deformation of that state, a deformation which is unavoidable for it is conditioned by the contradictions resulting from the movement of capital itself. In reacting to revolutionary politics, the state does not know what to do except torture, and in doing so it exposes itself as an imperialist state. The indignation of degenerate bourgeois antifascism only masks this. The latter
is already so weak, corrupted by social democracy, and locked in revisionism, that it can no longer express itself in a meaningful way.

  An example of this same old miserable situation. So bourgeois antifascism puts itself at the service of the state in the hope of changing it, and is itself changed by the state, becoming an instrument of the state, serving to prevent radicalization, before it is finally liquidated for being an expression of bourgeois ideology, of bourgeois humanism, of traditional bourgeois liberties, that disrupts the broader process of capital’s ideological reproduction.

  It makes no sense to talk about torture without at the same time talking about the perspective and strategy that will abolish it: those of revolutionary politics. The bourgeois antifascist blather on this subject ends up denouncing the torture victims themselves.

  Certainly isolation is torture. No matter how those who suffer it experience it, it is a slow process that leaves one with lots of time to reflect on the destruction of one’s political identity and is more horrifying than any physical pain we have experienced. Political consciousness falls into the trap set by consumer society, the trap of alienated production and alienated consumption, with all its complex cultural and psychological mediations. It is only in opposition to all this that one’s identity can be developed—it is a process that can only be realized in struggle. In the agony of isolation, it is this process that they want to break down by depriving us of its basis: political practice and conscious social interaction. The prisoner is deprived of his political history, his own history to the degree that his conscious history is a political history.

  It is also the end of one’s personality.

  To the degree that history is the process that creates the personality, if history is lost the personality is lost. Not because one forgets it (even if that is one manifestation), but because the ability to reconstruct it, to reflect upon it, to recognize it, is destroyed. One becomes unable to relate to what has been accomplished and what one has oneself accomplished.