The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1
Page 41
As Marighella said:
The basic principle of revolutionary strategy in conditions of permanent political crisis is to develop, in the city as well as in the countryside, such a breadth of revolutionary activity that the enemy finds himself obliged to transform the political situation in the country into a military situation. In this way dissatisfaction spreads to all layers of the population, with the military alone responsible for all of the hatred.
And as a Persian comrade, A.P. Puyan,1 said:
By extending the violence against the resistance fighters, creating an unanticipated reaction, the repression inevitably hits all other oppressed milieus and classes in an even more massive way. As a result, the ruling class augments the contradictions between the oppressed classes and itself and creates a climate which leads of necessity to a great leap forward in the consciousness of the masses.
And Marx said:
Revolutionary progress is proceeding in the right direction when it provokes a powerful, unified counterrevolution, which backfires by developing an adversary that cannot lead the party of the insurrection against the counterrevolution except by becoming a truly revolutionary party.2
In 1972, the cops mobilized 150,000 men to hunt the RAF, using television to involve the people in the manhunt, having the Federal Chancellor intervene, and centralizing all police forces in the hands of the BKA. This makes it clear that, already at that point, a numerically insignificant group of revolutionaries was all it took to set in motion all of the material and human resources of the state. It was already clear that the state’s monopoly of violence had material limits, that their forces could be exhausted, that if, on the tactical level, imperialism is a beast that devours humans, on the strategic level it is a paper tiger. It was clear that it is up to us whether the oppression continues, and it is also up to us to smash it.
Now, after everything they have carried out against us with their psychological warfare campaign, the pigs are preparing to assassinate Andreas. As of today, we political prisoners, members of the RAF and other anti-imperialist groups, are beginning a hunger strike.1 We must add the fact that for some years now—in keeping with the police objective of liquidating the RAF, and consistent with their tactic of psychological warfare—most of us have found ourselves detained in isolation. Which is to say, we have found ourselves in the process of being exterminated. But we have decided not to stop thinking and struggling: we have decided to dump the rocks the state has thrown at us at its own feet.
The police are preparing to assassinate Andreas, as they attempted previously during the summer 1973 hunger strike when they deprived him of water. At that time, they attempted to have the lawyers and the public believe that he was allowed to drink again after a few days: in reality he received nothing, and the pig of a doctor at the Schwalmstadt prison, after nine days, when he had already gone blind, said, “If you don’t drink some milk, you’ll be dead in ten hours.” The Hessen Minister of Justice came from time to time to have a look in his cell, and the Hessen prison doctors’ group was at that time meeting with the Wiesbaden Minister of Justice. There exists a decree in Hessen that anticipates breaking hunger strikes by withholding all liquids. The complaints filed against the pig of a doctor for attempted murder were rejected, and the procedure undertaken to maintain the complaint was suspended.
We declare today that if the cops attempt to follow through with their plans to deprive Andreas of water, all RAF prisoners participating in the hunger strike will immediately react in turn by refusing all liquids. We will react in the same way if faced with any attempted assassination through the withholding of water, no matter where it occurs or against which prisoner it is used.
Ulrike Meinhof
September 13, 1974
The Bombing of the Bremen Train Station
RAF actions are never directed against the people. Given the choice of target, the bomb that exploded in the Bremen Central Station on Saturday bears the mark of the ongoing security police operation. To intimidate and control the people, they are no longer restricting themselves to the fascist tactic of threats:
• of bombings, as in Stuttgart in June 1972;
• of rocket attacks against the millions of spectators at the Soccer World Cup in March 1974;
• of poisoning the people’s drinking water in Baden-Württemberg in August 1974.2
The state security police have now escalated to provocative actions, with the risk of unleashing a bloodbath upon the people.
The RAF prisoners
December 9, 1974
The Nature of the Stammheim Trial: The Prisoners Testify
All there is to say regarding our identity is that which remains of the moral person in this trial: nothing. In this trial, the moral person— this concept created by the authorities—has been liquidated in every possible way—both through the guilty sentence Schmidt has already pronounced and through the Federal Supreme Court decision relative to §231a1 of the Penal Code in the recent hearing before the Federal Administrative Court, which, by ratifying the Federal Supreme Court decision, has done away with the legal fictions of the Basic Law.
Given that the prisoners do not have any recognized rights, our identity is objectively reduced to the trial itself. And the trial is—this much one should perhaps say about the indictment—about an offense committed by an organization. The charges of murder and attempted murder are based on the concept of collective responsibility, a concept which has no basis in law. The entire indictment is demagogy—and this has become clear, just as it has become clear (ever since his outburst during the evidentiary hearing) why Prinzing must exclude us. As a result, it must be demagogically propped up with perjury and restrictions on our depositions. And we see how Prinzing sees things in a way that allows for a verdict even though there is no evidence; and so it becomes clear why he previously, and now for a second time, felt obliged to decimate the defense with a volley of legislation and illegal attacks.
We have been amused by this for some time now.
We consider what is going on here to be a masterpiece of reactionary art. Here, in this “palace of freedom” (as Prinzing calls these state security urinals), state security is pitifully subsumed within a mass of alienated activities. Or in other words, it’s as if the same piece is being played out on three superimposed levels of the same Renaissance stage—the military level, the judicial level, and the political level.
The indictment is based on a pack of lies.
After state security suppressed nine-tenths of the files—and, as Wunder stated, it wasn’t the BAW, but the BKA: the BAW itself, according to Wunder, is only familiar with a fraction of these files—they have been obliged to work with lies.
One of the lies is the claim that one can, using §129, construct an indictment that can allow for a “normal criminal trial”—even though this paragraph, since it inception, that is to say since the communist trials in Cologne in 1849,2 has been openly used to criminalize political activity, assimilating proletarian politics into criminality. So as to not disrupt normal criminal proceedings, they use the concept of “criminal association,” a concept that historically has only come into play when dealing with proletarian organizations.
It is a lie to say that the goal of a revolutionary organization is to commit reprehensible acts.
The revolutionary organization is not a legal entity, and its aims—we say, its goals and objectives—cannot be understood in dead categories like those found in the penal code, which represents the bourgeoisie’s ahistorical view of itself. As if, outside of the state apparatus and the imperialist financial oligarchy, there is anyone who commits crimes that have as their objective oppression, enslavement, murder, and fraud— which are only the watered down expressions of imperialism’s goals.
Given the role and the function that §129 has had in class conflicts since 1848, it is a special law. Ever since the trial of the Cologne Communists, since the Bismarck Socialist Laws, since the “law against participation in asso
ciations that are enemies of the state” during the Weimar Republic, its legacy and essence has been to criminalize the extra-parliamentary opposition by institutionalizing anticommunism within parliament’s legal machinery.
In and of itself, bourgeois democracy—which in Germany has taken form as a constitutional state—has always found its fascist complement to the degree that it legalizes the liquidation of the extra-parliamentary opposition, with its tendency to become antagonistic. In this sense, justice has always been class justice, which is to say, political justice.
In other words, bourgeois democracy is inherently dysfunctional given its role in stifling class struggle when different factions of capital come in conflict with each other within the competitive capitalist system. In the bourgeois constitution, it anticipates the class struggle as class war. Communists have always been outlaws in Germany, and anticommunism a given.
That also means that Prinzing—with his absurd claim that this is a “normal criminal trial” despite the fact that the charges are based on this special law—is operating in an absolute historical vacuum, which explains his hysteria. The BAW operates in a legal vacuum situated somewhere between the bourgeois constitutional state and open fascism. Nothing is normal and everything is the “exception,” with the objective of rendering such a situation the norm. Even the state’s reaction—which of course this judge fails to grasp—places our treatment in the historical tradition of the persecution of extra-parliamentary opposition to the bourgeois state. Prinzing himself, with §129, establishes the historical identity this state shares with the Kaiser’s Reich, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. The latter was simply more thorough in its criminalization and destruction of the extra-parliamentary opposition than the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic.
Finally, this paragraph conveys the conscious nature of this political corruption of justice, as it violates the constitutional idea that “Nobody can be deprived of …,” and because today, just as in the 50s, it lays the basis for trials based on opinions, that is to say, for the criminalization of opinions.
It is a paragraph that is dysfunctional, given that the bourgeois state claims that the bourgeoisie is by its very nature the political class. Within the bourgeois state’s system of self-justification, it reflects the fact that the system—capitalism—is transitory, as their special law against class antagonism undermines the ideology of the bourgeois state.
As a special law, it cannot produce any consensus, and no consensus is expected. It equates the monopoly of violence with parliamentarianism and private ownership of the means of production. Clearly, this law is also an expression of the weakness of the proletariat here since 45. They want to legally safeguard the situation that the U.S. occupation forces established here, by destroying all examples of autonomous and antagonistic organization.
The entire construct, with its lies, simply reveals the degree to which the imperialist superstructure has lost touch with its own base, has lost touch with everything that makes up life and history. It reveals the deep contradiction found at the heart of the break between society and the state. It reveals the degree to which all the factors that mediate between real life and imperialist legality are dispensed with in this, the most advanced stage of imperialism. They are antagonistic. The relationship is one of war, within which maintaining legitimacy is reduced to simply camouflaging nakedly opportunist calculations.
In short, we only intend to refer to the concept of an offense committed by an organization, which forms the entire basis for Buback’s charge, and which—as it is the only way possible—has been developed through propaganda.
But we also do this in the sense of Blanqui: the revolutionary organization will naturally be considered criminal until the old order of bourgeois ownership of the means of production that criminalizes us is replaced by a new order—an order that establishes the social appropriation of social production.
The law, as long as there are classes, as long as human beings dominate other human beings, is a question of power.
The RAF Prisoners
August 19, 1975
THE BOMB ATTACK IN MUNICH CENTRAL STATION
In order to create greater publicity for this statement from the guerilla regarding the right-wing attacks, on September 14, 1975, we announced that a bomb would explode in Munich Central Station at 6:50 PM. At 6:55 PM, we telephoned to direct the search to locker 2005, in which, rather than a bomb, the following statement was found:
No Bomb in Munich Central Station
Disappointed that once again there is no “bloodbath” to blame on “violent anarchists,” as was the case in Birmingham,1 in Milan,2 and most recently here at home, in Bremen in December 74, and yesterday in Hamburg?
This is to make something perfectly clear to you cops and those of you on the editorial staffs of the newspapers and the radio stations:
The guerilla’s statements and practice show that their attacks are directed against the ruling class and their resistance is against the system’s oppression.
• In June 72, the police tried to create panic in Stuttgart with bomb threats. They used the World Cup to threaten thousands with claims that the guerilla planned rocket attacks against football stadiums. As part of their intimidation, they spoke of a plan to poison the drinking water in Baden-Würrtemberg. In Bremen, in December 74, and yesterday in Hamburg, provocateurs acted for real: explosives were set off in the midst of large groups of people. Without any consideration for the health and wellbeing of the people, they turned their threats into deeds, doing everything they can to increase the agitation against the radical left and the guerilla.
• The guerilla in Germany has attacked the U.S. Army, which was engaged in a war against the Vietnamese people. The guerilla has bombed the Federal Constitutional Court, the capitalist associations, and the enemies of the Chilean and Palestinian people. They kidnapped the CDU leader Lorenz to gain the freedom of political prisoners. They struggle against rising prices and the increased pressure brought to bear on the people, e.g., the Berlin transit price actions.3
We demand that the press, the radios, and TV broadcast this statement!
We are the urban guerilla groups
Red Army Faction
2nd of June Movement
Revolutionary Cells
And above all struggle against those who are responsible for planning and carrying out the attacks in Bremen and Hamburg. The choice of targets shows who the culprits are. […]4
Red Army Faction
2nd of June Movement
Revolutionary Cells
September 14, 1975
The Bombing of the Hamburg Train Station
In the face of the state propaganda effort to tie the attack at the Hamburg Central Station to the RAF, we state clearly: the nature of this explosion speaks the language of reaction. It can only be understood as part of the psychological war that state security is waging against the urban guerilla. The method and objective of this crime against the people bear the mark of a fascist provocation.
The political-military actions of the urban guerilla are never directed against the people. The RAF’s attacks target the imperialist apparatus, its military, political, economic, and cultural institutions and its functionaries in the repressive and ideological state structures.
In its offensive against the state, the urban guerilla cannot resort to terrorism as a weapon. The urban guerilla operates in the rift between the state and the masses, working to widen it and to develop political consciousness, revolutionary solidarity, and proletarian power against the state.
In opposition to this, this intelligence service-directed terrorist provocation against the people is meant to increase fear and strengthen the people’s identification with the state. At the Hessen Forum, Wassermann, the President of the Braunschweig Court of Appeals explained the state security countertactic—in his words, one must “increase citizens’ feelings of insecurity” and “act on the basis of this subjective feeling of fear.”<
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In the meantime, the Frankfurter Rundschau report (September 9) confirmed that the state security counter-operations conducted since 72 (bomb threats against Stuttgart, threats to poison drinking water, stolen stocks of mustard gas, SAM rocket attacks on football stadiums, the bomb attack on Bremen Central Station and now in Hamburg) were developed from programs created by the CIA. The FR is only substantiating what has been known for a long time now, that the use of poison in subway tunnels and the contamination of drinking water in large cities is a special warfare countertactic, a “psychological operation” of intelligence services and counterguerilla units.
At this point, the question to be answered is whether the attack in Hamburg was the act of a lone criminal, of the radical right-wing Bremen group under intelligence service control, of state security itself, or of the special CIA counterinsurgency unit established at the American embassy in Bonn after Stockholm.
What is certain is that state security works within the reactionary structures through a network of state security journalists who use the media conglomerates and public institutions to attack the urban guerilla. High profile figures in this network close to the BKA’s press office and the BAW press conferences are Krumm of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Busche of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Leicht and Kuchnert of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Rieber and Zimmermann, who are published in many national newspapers. Zimmermann’s article about the alleged connection between the attack, the RAF, the 2nd of June Movement, and Siegfried Haag was simultaneously published in eight national newspapers.
The incredible fact that state reaction is now resorting to such measures against the weak urban guerilla here simply indicates the strategic importance of this instability for the Federal Republic as part of the U.S. imperialist chain of states. In the North-South and East-West conflicts, the FRG is a central base of operations for U.S. imperialism; militarily in NATO, economically in the European Community, politically and ideologically through the Social Democrats and their leadership role in the Socialist International.