Rev Left Radio - The Red Army Faction: Marxist Guerrilla Warfare in West Germany

Episode Date: September 28, 2019

J. Smith joins Breht to discuss the history and theory of the Marxist urban guerrilla organization in West Germany, The Red Army Faction.  Learn more here: http://germanguerilla.com/ Outro Music by Bambu - “Pull it Back” Support his music here:  https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com/ ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Jay Smith to talk about the Red Army faction. This is a really interesting topic, one that I don't know a lot about. I'll be learning along with my listeners a lot of this time. There's a lot of fascinating history as well. Jay Smith, would you like to introduce yourself and say a bit about your background for those who don't know you? Yeah, sure.

I'm one of two people who co-edited two books which collect documents by the Red Army faction, by the wrath, spanning from their beginnings up until roughly halfway through their existence. We have been working for a long time now on the third volume, which will bring the story all the way up to its conclusion. And I'm also an active member of the radical left in the city where I live. Wonderful. Yeah, that's really interesting. Just out of curiosity, do you have a story? specific tendency on the left that you identify with? That is a very interesting question. I'm a non-sectarian radical leftist.

I'm culturally anarchist, you might say, but I'm definitely not politically anarchist. Well, that's awesome. I mean, here at Rev. Left, we are a pan-leftist show. We cover all different tendencies. So regardless of what you are, you're welcome here. But yeah, I think the best way to start this ever, episode would be for you to just explain who the Red Army faction was for those who are not familiar with RAF. Sure. I mean, listeners, are most of your listeners in the United States?

Yeah, I think the majority are probably in North America for sure. Okay, so your listeners may have heard about groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the United Freedom Front, or here in Canada direct action. These were various armed organizations that operated in what, you know, what has been termed the long 60s, this kind of like period of revolt that starts in the 1960s, but then, you know, extends throughout the 70s and beyond. At the same time that that was happening here in a very, in ways that were very specific to the North American context, in Western Europe, there were also armed organizations, which bore some similarities to the ones here, but which were also in many

ways different. And the Red Army faction was one of these. So it was not only one of these, it was one of the first of these organizations to come out of the 1960s New Left. So it was an armed organization. It was a clandestine organization, meaning that members of the Red Army faction lived underground. They didn't have a legal existence and then just do things on the side. And it was a communist organization, a Marxist-Leninist organization. Yeah, that's interesting. And we'll definitely be getting to the ideology in a bit. But I do want to start off now with the immediate historical context. You're talking about the 60s and 70s. Is that correct? Yeah, well, they start in the, their first document signed

Red Army faction comes out in the very early 70s, but really their roots are in the late 60s. and their roots are very specific to the place that they emerge from, which is West Berlin. So just to give, because this is at this point a little bit far in the past, so just to explain to your listeners, at the time the country that today is Germany was, in fact, two countries. One half of it, the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany, was completely integrated within the Western imperialist bloc, so it was a part of NATO. It had essentially been created as an anti-communist country by the United States following the World War II. The eastern half, what was known as the German Democratic Republic or East Germany, was integrated within the Warsaw Pact.

And depending on your political, you know, on your politics, you can then describe that different ways. But something that was peculiar to this setup was right inside, deep inside East Germany. Germany, it took a few hours to drive there, was the city of Berlin. And Berlin was a city cut in half with a wall down the middle, and the west half of Berlin, West Berlin, even though it was in the middle of East Germany, was for all intents and purposes, really a part of West Germany. It was kind of like a NATO outpost in the middle of this Warsaw Pact country. And that created a very intense kind of cultural but also political ambiance. For many people, I guess, they felt. and they literally were living under siege, in a sense. But for many other people, it was just a place where politics was always a couple of years ahead. And at a time when politics changes very quickly, that can mean that the politics in your place can seem like a different planet than elsewhere. So the Red Army faction really starts in West Berlin.

And I think it's fair to say the West German New Left really starts in West Berlin as well. So that's the context. geographically, and politically the context is, as I said, West Germany had been created as an anti-communist country. It had been ruled since World War II by a right-wing political party, the Christian Democrats. It had not been denazified. There were Nazis here, there, and everywhere. So kids growing up in this era would have, you know, school teachers who'd be Nazis. They'd have respected members of the community who'd be Nazis, and obviously many of them would have parents or you know extended family who'd be Nazis as well and it was a very conservative and

heavy place to grow up in and when the new left starts uh so when you start having demonstrations and things like that and when these people who grew up in this setting start you know rebelling against it some of them most obviously didn't rebel against it that is um i think that there's something different than, let's say, what white North Americans would often expect at that stage in life. There was a real sense of clear contradictions and of very high stakes that the New Left and other, like, privileged societies might not have had as readily available to it. In 1967, in one of the earlier demonstrations of the New Left in West Berlin against the Shah of Iran. A young kid, a student at his first demonstration, is shot through the head by an

undercover cop. This, you know, this again confirms the sense that people had growing up in this situation that, you know, the stakes were high. A year later, a student leader, Rudy Deutsche, who was also a leader of the new left, survived and attempted assassination by a, from a member of the far right. And at the same time, the mainstream, the press, the media and all of this was like staunchly anti-communist and, you know, whipping up hatred against the new left. So there was really a sense of being besieged at the same time that there was a sense of things moving forward really quickly. So that was the political context, if you will, out of which the RAF emerged, specifically. And more broadly, obviously, the political context out of which they emerged was one in

which you had a world divided between two very heavily armed superpowers, the USSR and the USA, and in which throughout much of the world at that point in time, you had successful national liberation movements. So you had a clear example of armed struggle movements throughout the world, guerrilla movements, which were successfully defeating either proxy forces, or as would be the case eventually in Vietnam, actual, you know, American forces on the ground. So you had all of this stuff going on, and you had, obviously, the new left globally going on with all of the various liberation movements that came out of it. Hmm, I see. Okay. So that's the broader historical context out of which the Red Army

faction emerged. Lots of Nazis, lots of reactionaries, lots of conservatism. And as you said, the Red Army faction was sort of an underground clandestine movement. So you mentioned earlier that they were Marxist-Leninist. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit more about their ideology and whether or not they were connected with Moscow at the time. Okay, essentially when they formed

one of the people who was close to them and who ended up being a part of them very quickly, like she was definitely a part of them before they were known as the Red Army faction was quite a bit older than the other. people in the group. And she was actually probably the best known or one of the best known left-wing female intellectuals in West Germany at the time. Her name was Ulrika Meinhoff.

Meinhof was a communist, and you asked about ties with Moscow. She had previously in life being a member of the Communist Party. It's important for your listeners to understand. When I said West Germany was an anti-communist country, the Communist Party was illegal in West Germany. It had been declared illegal in the 1950s. You could go to jail if it was found out that you were a member. So Meinhoff was a secret member of the Communist Party and she had been involved in a magazine which was very influential over this generation of young people who came of age in the 1960s, Concrete magazine, and Concrete was secretly funded by the East Block, by the Soviet. I don't remember offhand if it was by the Soviet Union itself or

East Germany, but yeah. So she had that in her history. However, the new left in West Germany, and, you know, Meinhoff, even though she was older than them, this is true for her too, was not pro-Soviet. And Meinhof and Concrete magazine broke with their East Block supporters, specifically at the time of the Sino-Soviet split, because they were publishing things and staking out positions that were far more sympathetic towards China. So that's kind of like the background. And one of the things that I find is the most refreshing about the wrath. It's important to understand that this was not a group that was content to pick up an ideology and then just adopt it. These were people who were active in organizations before they went underground. Several of them were like leading members of the new left or leading members in their scene before they went underground and who were really trying just to think about the kind of

the kind of world they were in, the kind of society they were in, and what it would take to make social change. So, whereas they describe themselves repeatedly as Marxist-Leninists, they also make a point of saying, you know, they were aware. They were always described in the mainstream press as anarchists. And they make a point of saying, we're described as anarchists because anarchists are the ones who are actually, you know, who in a sense haven't abandoned the revolutionary impulse. Most people calling themselves Marxist-Leninists don't actually have what they saw as a proper Marxist-Leninist practice. And so they said, you know, they were very open in that sense. They were open to working with anarchists, and there were people, I'm sure, who identified as anarchists who would join the wrath. Their ideological reference points, if you will, you know, if you read their documents, they quote the Tupamarros from South America.

They quote Mal quite a bit. they quote various Frankfurt school intellectuals. They quote Marx and they quote Lenin. I mean, these are their reference points. Although, like I say, they do make a point of stressing that practice is primary, as in they're not closed to learning from or working with other people. You know, you don't have to sign on to some specific version of Marxist-Leninist ideology in order to be a comrade.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Okay, so you said they were Marxist-Leninist, but they still had a lot of critiques of the USSR at that time, and that they were turning more towards China at that time. And the reason I want to emphasize that is because that's broadly considered today as a sort of anti-revisionist ML strain. You know, you saw that in the Black Panther Party, you saw that in Harry Haywood and others. It's even borderline proto-Maoist in some ways. So would it be fair to say, in your opinion, that this was a sort of anti-revisionist and almost proto- Maoist movement? They were definitely anti-revisionist. The whole proto-Malist thing, I think, refers to a particular historical schema of when Maoism comes about, what's Mao-Saintong thought, all of this kind of thing, which, you know, I can't really comment on, but I wouldn't necessarily take it up simply because I think it would be anachronistic in the sense. Like, people in West Germany in the early 1970s would have referred to themselves as Maoists.

They wouldn't have referred to themselves as proto-Malists. And they definitely refer to people as Maoists at times, I believe. There were a number of the equivalent of what's called the New Communist Movement now here. There were a number of little Marxist-Lendist or, you know, what they would call at the time, Maoist organizations in West Germany. Is it fair to say that that's what they were? I think they were definitely very close to that. but their reference points were not closed in the sense that their key reference point was the national liberation movements happening in the global south and the history of resistance to what they saw both fascism before and after the fall of the Third Reich in Germany. So it's complicated.

They have a pragmatic approach to the East block. They're definitely not supported by the East Block, but they're certainly not going out of their way to criticize the East Block, you know, as a major part of their politics. And part of this is practical. I mean, these are people who, from fairly early on, they're traveling to the Middle East fairly frequently. And they're traveling through various East Block airports and cities. and they're being pulled in by security agents from various East Block intelligence services who know who they are and who want to know what's going on. So this is not a reference point for them.

They're not pro-Sovia in any way. They're also, you know, in a situation that they can't really shit where they eat, if you know what I mean. They don't want to go out of their way to alienate anyone who might support them or who might turn a blind eye to them or, you know, leave them alone. Yeah, that's very interesting, very interesting. I appreciate you sort of unpacking that for us. I know sometimes, especially in modern times, you really fetishize these tendencies,

and so it's important to note that they don't always quite fit in to our preconceived notions of these hard and fast categories. So this next question is going to be sort of wide open, and you can take this in any direction that you want? It's sort of a big question. But can you talk a little bit more about the activities that they engaged in, who they would target, and which groups are governments, posed them most of vociferously? Sure. I mean, they were based in West Germany, and almost all of their activities were in

West Germany, you know, for the duration of their existence. What they did and who they targeted evolves over time. Their first action, before they're even known as the Red Army faction, was to break a guy, Andreas Bader, out of prison. And he was in prison for doing a symbolic series of firebombings with some of his comrades to protest the Vietnam War, and they break him out successfully. And that's when Ulricha Meinhoff also goes underground. As I mentioned, she's this well-known journalist. The way they break him out is she contacts the prison where he's being held, and she explains, you know, everyone knows who she is. She's this journalist. She explains she is doing a report on kids in reform school, which was true. And she'd

like to have a meeting with him because he'd been politically active around supporting kids in reform school and their struggle for their rights, which was also true. So they arranged to bring him to a library. She went to the library to meet him, and then he was sprung by a bunch of other people, and she went underground with them there. So that's just as an aside, one reason why this group is often known as the Bader-Mindhoff group or the Bauder-Mindhoff gang. It's not a name they ever took themselves. It's just that from the beginning on, the newspaper is seized on the fact that these were the two figures who were known to be a part of it. Their first few years after doing that were pretty much robbing banks to get money, stealing cars, learning skills,

and primarily, and this is something that would be, I think, their primary activity throughout their entire existence, primarily meeting with people and talking with people in the radical left. this was a constant. The RAF's relationship to the radical left was one of the most important things to it and one of the things that was always a preoccupation. So for the first few years, there's really a period of formation of trying to see what the movement is up for and also trying to convince people that the time is right to attempt to develop an armed struggle tradition in Western. They never thought that they'd overthrow the state in West Germany. They never thought that everyone would become a guerrilla or that they'd become a mass force, but they felt that it would make a real difference potentially to how things would happen over the coming decades, whether or not there was an armed component to radical left politics in West Germany. And they saw it as their task to develop that component.

And, you know, so they published things. you know, this is another of the big things that they do. They publish things. They publish documents. And they come out with, it's their first document which uses the name Red Army faction is Das Concept Stat Guerrilla, or the Urban Gorilla concept. It's released in early 1971. And it's essentially an argument put forward to the radical left, both explaining what they're doing and also explaining this thing that I just talked about, the need to develop a tradition of armed resistance within West Germany. They don't, however, stay there in 1972. And this is also in a situation, like I said, that they're, you know, robbing banks, stealing cars, whatnot. You know, police are looking for them. Some people are getting arrested, and there are some firefighters. Some cops are being killed and some members of the RAF are being killed. And also, it's worth mentioning other people are being killed, too, as always happens in these kinds of situations.

You know, the cops sometimes kill people who aren't a member of the group they're looking for, just as a matter of them. being scared or mistaken identity or whatnot. So there's all of this stuff going on and then in 1972 they go into action I guess you could say in that they go on the offensive. It's no longer small actions

to maintain their group to get money to get necessities. It's no longer simply conversations with people about what's necessary. They go on the offensive and they carry out a number of bombings. They plant a bomb in a judge's car

The judge was in charge of trials of wrath members who'd been arrested. The judge himself, tragically, wasn't the one who sat in his car and turned the ignition and got blown up. It was his wife. She was seriously injured, but she didn't die. They bombed the offices of the Springer Press, which was kind of like the print media equivalent of Fox News. It was a right-wing, very large newspaper chain, which, was seen as being responsible for a lot of the hate propaganda against the radical left and as such even for being responsible for things like cop killings or this far right guy who I'd mentioned earlier who'd attempted to assassinate the student leader Springer was seen as being to blame for that and I mean a popular slogan was Springer shot too so they bombed the officers of of Springer they bombed two police stations and protest against killer cops and these bombings that I've just mentioned no one was killed but the other two bombings that they carry out people are killed and that was

foreseeable and probably intended and that as they bombed two u.s army bases there were tons of u.s army bases in west germany it was an outpost the united states it was a relay point for troops going to vietnam and they bombed these two u.s bases and people die and uh like i said that was probably intended These were actions carried out in solidarity with the, you know, with the war being fought in Vietnam, in solidarity with the Vietnamese. This is known as the May offensive. It's not known as the summer offensive or the spring offensive because even though they had other plans to continue, there is a police crackdown. And while they're not all captured, most of them, including the key members, are all captured in the weeks that follow. So almost all of them at that point in time are in prison.

and those who aren't in prison, you know, they're suddenly very isolated and they're essentially in hiding. Okay. Now, before we get into the prison struggles, which really is a really big part of this entire historical period, I do want to talk a little bit about their motivations. It is fairly reminiscent of the sort of stuff that the Weatherman Underground seemed to want to do, right? That's what they wanted to aspire to be, bombing police stations, U.S. Imperial outposts, etc. So were these actions done in a sort of propaganda of the deed intention, you know, to inspire others to do similar things? Or were these things done sort of, you know, for their own sake and, you know, on face value? I think a bit of both.

I think it's difficult to say at what point ideas became crystallized within the group and even when they were coming out in their documents to what extent that, you know, that represented everyone's position or whatnot. But I definitely get the sense that the RAF saw the national liberation movements, including the Vietnamese, as a key reference point. But their solution, like many of us see anti-colonialism and national liberation struggles as a key reference point. But the question then becomes, what do you do in an imperialist country? And they answered that question in time by coming to, you know, their position ended up being that there was a subjective break that could happen amongst some people in the imperialist countries. just because life is really shitty here and when you lay out the fact that this

culturally or psychologically shitty life is based on genocide in the global South, some people are going to be interested in opposing that. So they definitely felt that these actions could rally people to them. Not necessarily

random people who'd never heard of these issues before, but they, you know, there was still are quite a large and militant radical left. And there were other armed actions being carried out on a much lower level by other people within this radical left. So rallying people to them wasn't unrealistic and was certainly one of their goals. However, in bombing the two US army bases, I think there was also clearly the feeling that these actions could stand on their own. Even if nobody rallied to them as a result, this was a politically and ethically correct thing to do in the

context of genocide in Vietnam. And I mean, decades later, you can read interviews with people who were involved in these bombings, and they're proud to tell people about the fact that they had been told that posters went up on walls in Vietnam, basically celebrating the fact that in West Germany, U.S. military bases had been attacked in solidarity. And this is something that even decades later, people who had been involved in those bombings felt good about. Yeah, that's just incredibly, incredibly interesting. So I do want to ask this next question, and we were talking about it before, and you said you might even want to push back on the framing of this question, so by all means, you know, push back. But I'm curious because I've been studying guerrilla warfare

a lot, actually, both historically and theoretically. And we've also talked about terrorist activity throughout leftist history. I know in Russia, before the Bolshevik revolution, there was a period in the late 1800s where sort of anarchist terrorism was the dominant mode of of resisting power, etc. So how do you think about that line between terrorism and guerrilla warfare and where does the Red Army faction fit in that? I think we just have to define terms.

If we take terrorism to mean an act that's meant to achieve political aims by terrorizing people, by scaring people, in that case, terrorism is obviously, you know, it's something that can be used. It's something that can be used by people anywhere on the political spectrum. Arguably, it's used every minute of every

day by the state because fear is what keeps things from happening differently. That said, although, you know, if we define it with that narrow definition, even if it could sometimes be legitimate, I can't actually think of a single RAF action that would fall within, you know, within that definition. Their actions were never meant to elicit political change by scaring large numbers of people. Some of their actions, I mean, their actions were obviously going to be scary if you were the target and some of their actions clearly were aimed at creating pressure on the state and you know or pressure on their opponents but that's different i feel from acts that are just meant to make your opponents scared that said you know by the end of their

history by the 1990s one could argue that the cumulative effect of decades of successful armed activities created fear on the other side and that this was a factor that could be taken advantage of. But that was never the goal of any one action, you know, using that narrow definition. But I'm not sure if that narrow definition is what you meant or not. Right. No, I think you're correct to, you know, sort of insist that we define terms here. Because the way terms like terrorism get used, especially by states, is often very opportunistically and very much sort of just to delineate what is and isn't appropriate use of violence for state's interests. So I know that term is pretty fraught with a lot of baggage. Would you then describe what Red Army Faction was doing as

guerrilla warfare as opposed to terrorism? Yeah, I mean, they were urban guerrillas, which in English we say urban, but in other languages, the term used for urban is also the term used for metropolitan, which can refer also to the relationship between like metropole and periphery or between first world and third world. So when we say they were urban guerrillas, what I mean by that is that they were a guerrilla force operating in an imperialist country. It's not necessarily that all of their activities took place in cities. Right, right.

Yeah, thank you very much for answering that. I really appreciate that. And I think it does clarify things for sure. Now, I do want to move on to the prison struggles, as we talked about earlier. So could you talk a little bit about rafts? and their prison experiences. Yeah, definitely. I mean, from the time of the May offense of Alm,

the prisoner struggles are always a key part and sometimes the most important part of what's going on for the wrath. I'd mentioned earlier that the raft's reference point overall is the National Liberation Movement's in the Global South, and I'd mentioned that there was the idea that things weren't hopeless for creating a tradition of armed struggle

in the imperialist countries, even though you shouldn't ever hope for, like, a mass movement or taking state power or anything, but you could nevertheless create a tradition of resistance around subjective reasons. After the May offensive, the prison struggle becomes kind of like a bridge between these things, and also it has its own specificities, because the state, having captured most members of the raft, including the most well-known members, including Andreas Bader, including Ulricha Meinhauf, The state isn't satisfied with this military victory, if you will, this capture. I think that's because the state realizes something that the wrath also realizes

that basically anyone who thinks about this realizes, which is a military defeat or a military success, is really secondary to a political success or a political defeat. The military in this kind of warfare is always being mediated by political considerations. And so having captured these people was really just the big, beginning as far as the state was concerned. The state ideally wanted them to flip and to renounce armed struggle. If that didn't work, the state wanted them to appear like crazy lunatics. And one way to achieve that is to try and turn them into crazy lunatics, to try and break their will to try and drive them

nuts. And it's something that a lot of the elements of the story are very specific to their time. So Well, I'm about to say we'll probably strike many people as no big deal, but at the time, solitary confinement was not used in the way that's used today, especially in the United States today. Like in the United States, on any given day, there are tens of thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement, and some of them have been there for months or years, in some cases, even decades. It's a horrific situation. What people may not realize is that's a relatively new situation historically, and that's some. Some of the roots of that situation can actually be traced back to what happened with the RAF in West Germany, which NATO and the United States were involved in both as observers and occasionally as advisors. And that is to say that the state took these RAF prisoners after the May offensive and put them in solitary confinement.

And in some cases, start experimenting with sensory deprivation. So solitary confinement means you're alone in a cell. and in some cases they'd also empty out the cells around you and when I say sensory deprivation in some cases they would empty out well in two cases they emptied out an entire prison ring so first Astrid Pro who'd been arrested prior to the May offensive and then Ulrika Meinhoff who'd been arrested

just after the May offensive were placed alone in a cell and that entire wing of the prison was emptied the cell was painted white The lights were left on 24-7, which again, if you follow prison-like conditions in the United States, having lights left on 24-7 is a fairly common thing that happens in prisons just to, like, torture prisoners and all of this. But it wasn't always common. It was common because somebody tried it to try and break a prisoner, and they saw, yeah, it can be effective.

And that happened in this case in West Germany with the wrath. So the prisoners realized they're being subjected to unusual forms. of detention. They realize because their lawyers are seeing them and saying it's not just you, as the others as well have these weird conditions and all of this. And so they go on hunger strike for better conditions. They go on two hunger strikes, in fact, in the years following their arrest. And this is before they've gone on trial, I should mention. They don't go on trial for three years because, yeah, because it's considered too difficult and things have to be prepared and all of this kind of thing.

Essentially, they pass a bunch of laws just for their trials to, you know, make their trials happen a certain way. They build a special prison courtroom for them and all of this kind of stuff. But in the meantime, they're subjected to these conditions. And the hope is clearly that before they get to trial, maybe some of them will have recanted because of these prison conditions. Or maybe if not recanted, maybe they'll just, you know, they'll show up and they'll just be messed up people.

and this is what the media will show that these are the messed up people who carried out these bombings and, you know, they won't be able to mount even a political defense. So they do these two hunger strikes and the hunger strikes provide them with a way also

to reach out to the radical left and they get people supporting them on humanitarian grounds and obviously they also have some people supporting them on political grounds. And they act in the way that I think many radical left groups of that time and perhaps today also act in that

they, you know, they shit on a lot of their supporters. They're like, if you're only supporting us on humanitarian grounds and you're saying at the same time that you disapprove of our acts, well, then you're a liberal, you're bourgeois, we don't want your support. We want people who are actual revolutionaries to support us. So they're, at the same time as they're doing these hunger strikes and they're creating links with the outside, they're also making it clear that, you know, that they're providing political direction, if not always in the most polite of ways to people on the outside.

And this culminates in their third hunger strike. Their third hunger strike takes place in late 1974. In this hunger strike, one of their prisoners, Holger Mines, dies. He is being force-fed. He's been forced-fed for weeks. But nonetheless, he hasn't been forced-fed enough. They refuse to transfer him to a hospital, and he dies. And they've spent the past two and a half years, like I said, developing a prisoner support scene and providing political direction to this prisoner support scene with the message, you know, arm struggle is correct.

You need to create a tradition of armed struggle. You can't be bound by legality. And at the same time, you know, other people have been doing armed actions within their own frameworks which are different from the raft. So Holger Minds dies. and the next day, another guerrilla group called the Second of June movement attempt to kidnap a judge when the judge resists, they kill him. And this is a very popular action. Just to explain to you where consciousness on the radical left is, killing a judge in this context isn't seen as beyond the pale. There's thousands of people at Holger Minds's funeral.

There's numbers of low-level attacks that are taking place in solidarity with the hunger strike. and the hunger strike continues in this really heightened atmosphere and at the same time as this is happening what can perhaps only be recognized in retrospect is some key political prisoner

supporters on the outside who'd been doing prisoner support for years start dropping out of sight and what we now know is they had made the choice to follow this direction that they'd been being given this political direction

and to renew the rest of Red Army faction, though with the goal now of freeing the prisoners, this would now be the priority. And they carried out their action in early 1975 in April, and they traveled to Sweden. They entered the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, and they took hostages. And they demanded that all of the raft prisoners be flown to whichever country would take them. South Yemen was an obvious possibility because South Yemen had earlier taken other political prisoners, which had been freed by other armed groups following a hostage taking. So they took these hostages, they killed the military attache, they killed the economics affairs at attache, at which point special police

units flown in from West Germany are on the scene and the embassy blows up. And it's unclear whether the embassy blew up because the RAF commandal, which had taken the hostages, had, you know, accidentally triggered something, or if it was that the police had triggered something by trying to enter the building. Only one person dies in the explosion, a RAF member, Ulrich Wessel,

but they're all captured, and another raft member, Siegfried Hausner, dies just a few days later. They're all captured on the spot, flown to Stamheim prison in West Germany, which is like the Supermax. prototype of a supermax. Again, there are supermaxes in the United States. There are control units in the United States. They come from somewhere. And one of the big places they come from is West Germany and this experience. And Hausner dies a few days later in prison. When I first heard about the Stockholm action, you know, I thought it was horrible because I thought, I mean, on top of the fact that taking hostages isn't a nice thing to do, you know, you're doing this to free prisoners and no

prisoners were freed, and now there's a bunch more people in prison as well as people who are dead. But at the time, that's not how people on the radical left in the middle years close to the RAF support scene and the political prisoner support scene took this. And the RAF prisoners certainly didn't take it this way. The RAF prisoners were actually overjoyed by the fact that after years in prison, they had managed to inspire other people to renew the organization, integrate themselves in the organization and risk, in some cases, give their lives to try and win their freedom. And for many other people who were in the radical left, they looked at this and they were like, you know, how long have these people been planning this for?

You know, probably since Holger Minds died six months ago, and there weren't that many of them, less than a dozen people planning stuff for less than six months, and this is what they could do. Maybe if we took a little more time and we had a little more people, we could do something better. So this is actually, at the same time, obviously, that there's mass revulsion in, you know, Western imperialist countries about this horrible act kind of thing that happened in Stockholm. For some people, this is very inspirational, and it inspires them to, in fact, also go underground over the next few years and prepare their own actions. Well, that is fascinating, specifically the whole idea that the sort of worst excesses and depravities of the U.S. prison system is in some significant way rooted in the West German oppression of the Red Army faction and their prison experiences. And that is something I had no idea about, but it's really

not at all surprising that the hyper-reactionary white supremacist U.S. prison system has some of its roots in the hyper-reactionary West German situation at that time. Did you want to, so when I was doing research for this, I kept coming across this concept of three generations. of the RAF. And I'm not sure if that's relative to these prison struggles or not, or if that's even a helpful lens through which to understand the situation. So do you know about the three generations things? And how do you think about that as a lens to understand the evolving of this movement? It's an understandable lens for people to adopt. Like, as we'll speak more, you'll see. You can definitely break the RAF's history down into sections. And one way

of doing it is to break it into three sections. But in another sense, I mean, when we're doing our books, we're putting out three books. But in another sense, it doesn't work. It's not scientific. It's where do you draw the line. It's, you know, one of the lines is I guess clear, 1977. I'm sure we'll come back to that. Where do you, you know, the other line would be 1972. And then what about 1985? What about 1992? It's, uh, and in each of these generations, so to speak, you had people from previous generations, so to speak, who were involved. You know, and you have the RAF prisoners who, up until the 1990s, will include people who'd been active in the early 1970s playing a key role in a dynamic. They obviously weren't active members of the wrath when they were in prison, despite the fact that the state would accuse them of being active members of the RAF even while they were in prison.

But the point of the matter is, it's very understandable to break it down that way. And it makes a very, it's useful as a narrative device, but it's not. not, it's more misleading than it is useful. And it should also be stressed it's not a, it's not a version of their own history that has ever been put forward by the wrath, even though they've also broken their own history down into periods at times. Yeah, that's extremely helpful. So, it's ultimately arbitrary, but it makes sense in a narrative way to make these sorts of distinctions. But what you're saying is that we have to keep in mind that the reality is much more complex and fluid than that.

Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Okay, so you've talked about their prison struggles and you've talked about their activity in the 70s. Would you just want to go on and continue to fill in that history through the 70s and the 80s? Before we leave the 70s, I should talk about 1976 and 1977. I'd mentioned earlier that the RAF prisoners didn't go on trial

for several years after being arrested in 1972. The trial takes place in Stamheim Prison. They built a special courtroom just outside the prison for the trial. And the prisoners carry out a trial much as political prisoners normally carry out trials, which is to say the courtroom is a terrain to put forward your politics. The struggle doesn't end once you're arrested. The next stage is you put forward your politics in prison statements and court statements, all of this kind of things.

They're doing this in their trial. And O'Reika Meinhoff was central to this. As I'd mentioned, she'd been a very well-known intellectual. She was also older than a lot of them. And as such, she also knew a lot of people who were a part of the establishment, who are a part of the left of the establishment. She'd been friends with them. She'd been active in various political campaigns over the years with them

before she joined the wrath, before she'd been politically active way before the new left even existed in West Germany. So she's a very important person. and she's a person also who has argued, you know, was key to their defense and it's argued, you know, in retrospect, that it was at this point just when their defense or their offense, if you will, just when their courtroom delivery was about to, you know, get into its most critical phase, the government holds a press conference and announces that Lerika Meinhoff won't be showing up in court anymore because she committed suicide. At the time, it was almost unanimously disbelieved the idea that she'd committed suicide. It was almost everyone believed that she had been murdered. There were discrepancies around the state's story. If she did commit suicide, the state acted suspicious.

It did things like, you know, making sure her cell had been repainted before her family's lawyer was allowed to observe it. doing its own autopsy, and then, you know, getting rid of various samples and things like that before an independent autopsy could be carried out. The state argued that she hanged herself. You know, it was argued that she couldn't have hanged herself. Various things were argued, and various international figures in the left, wasn't nonpart of them. These were leftists, did set up an investigatory commission, and several years later they announced their findings.

and their findings were that they felt she had probably been killed. Now, that was the feeling at the time. Today, the feeling, including on the left, is, you know, is probably seen as more reputable to say that, you know, George Bush and Dick Cheney personally blew up the Twin Towers than to say that Lurika Meinhoff was killed by a commando of the West German state. It's just as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. But that's not because any new information has come to light.

It's just because we live in different times. and what people, I think, instinctively think the state is capable of and also think people are capable of is different in different times. And when you don't have a large radical left or just when decades later no proof comes out one way or another, I think it's very difficult to maintain a position against the official position. But just to say, at the time everyone, including people who are not, including large numbers of people who are not on the radical left, felt that the most important female intellectual and post-war West Germany and also arguably

the most important intellectual figure within the wrath had been murdered by the state. And this really radicalized things. Those people who I spoke about before who after Stockholm were like, imagine what could be done. There was now a real sense of moral urgency. And there was a sense of, you know, they're all going to end up dying if we don't do something. So you have plans that start to be made very concretely to get the, the prisoners out of prison. So people go underground, and the form this takes is today known as the German autumn, although it started way before the autumn in 1977. It set off once again

by a prisoner's hunger strike. The prisoners go on hunger strike demanding not only improvements in their conditions, not only demanding that they not be held in solitary, but also demanding that there be an international inquiry into the deaths not only of Ulrika Meinhof, but also of Siegfried Hausner and Holger Mainz, who remember had also died in prison. This is not only prisoners from the raft, but also prisoners from this other armed group. I mentioned the second of June movement who engaged in this hunger strike. Shortly after, the hunger strike has declared, Sigfried Bubak, who was the Attorney General of West Germany and who was personally held responsible for prison conditions

and who was like, you know, the symbol of prison conditions, he is killed. motorbike drives up beside his car, and he and his bodyguard and his driver are submachine gunned, and this was carried out by the wrath. Immediately, wrath prisoners are placed under stricter conditions and everything. The state, in a sense, at this point, I don't know, I don't want to say it blinks because of what happens next, but basically the state says, okay, we'll look into things, conditions will be relaxed a bit. And even though this doesn't meet by any all of the demands, nonetheless the prisoners and their hunger strike. Over the summer of 1977, the prisoners in Stamheim are allowed to like see each other and hang out with each other

during the day in a common room, but the guards provoke a fight and that's used to separate them and also to send some prisoners out of the prison. The prisoners start another hunger strike and the wrath on the outside go into action again. They attempt an attack on the new attorney general's offices. It fails. But then in September, they carry out a kidnapping. They

kidnap a man named Hans Martin Schleyer. Schleyer is a former member of the SS, who like a high level member of the SS, who like many Nazis after the war, you know, was basically welcomed back into the establishment with open

arms. And by 1977, he was president of the Employers Association, President of the Industrialist Association. He was in the news all the time representing, you know, the boss's point of view. And he was a part of the state, essentially, even though he'd never been elected and he was a former SS guy. He was a part of the state more powerful than many politicians. And the wrath essentially ambush him and his police convoy, and he is kidnapped and everyone else is killed. They have him. And they say, This is mid-September, and they basically say, you know, the prisoners have to be released to some country that'll take them, otherwise we're going to kill Schleyer.

West Germany is suddenly there are police with submachine guns at every corner. There's barbed wire going up around government buildings. There are armored vehicles in the streets. It's definitely not as bad as what happened just after 9-11 in the States in terms of, like, militarized, like, ostentatiousness. but it's, you know, it feels like martial law is about to be declared. And the radical left, you know, everyone on the radical left is being followed. People aren't being rounded up. And the reason people aren't being rounded up wholesale is because they're hoping that

they'll follow someone who will lead them to the wrath. At the same time, the wrath is being hunted for. The wrath, you know, had taken Schleyer. They'd taken him out of the country. They were hiding him in various places. And they're releasing communiques every few days, basically saying, stop looking for us, release the prisoners or we got to kill them. And the state isn't releasing the prisoners. The state institutes something called the contact ban, which is

something they'd done very briefly just after Bubak had been assassinated earlier that year. And the contact ban basically means they are in complete isolation not only from each other, but also from lawyers, also from the media. They don't have televisions or radios most of them. They're supposed to be cut off from the outside world, with the exception of politicians who will sometimes come and visit and speak to them about how to defuse this crisis. But the crisis doesn't get diffused. In fact, it escalates. Given that there's a stalemate between the guerrilla and the government, roughly a month later, on October 13th, a Palestinian commando hijack an airplane, and they do this demanding freedom for two Palestinian prisoners.

being held in Turkey and also for the RAF prisoners. They do this in solidarity with the RAF as they explain it. They fly the airplane to South Yemen, where they probably hoped they could park it because that had been done in the past by other guerrilla groups. South Yemen had a very radical left-wing government, but probably due to pressure from outside forces, South Yemen basically blocked the airstrip with tanks

and wouldn't let them stay. So at that point, they're in a jam, and they fly on to Mogadishu in Somalia, which is not a friendly government in the same way that South Yemen was. And, you know, for the radical left, this is completely, in West Germany, this is completely beyond the scope

of what they're able to deal with. People, you know, this is no longer, the radical left is no longer a player at this point in 1977. This is between the guerrilla, the prisoners, There's Palestinian Commando and the West German state. And it's the West German state who know how to act. And they send this special operations unit GSG9 to Mogadishu. It raids the airplane.

It kills most of the guerrillas. None of the hostages are killed in the raid. And to this day, the Mogadishu raid is, you know, talked about as a model counterinsurgency operation, a model rescue operation because none of the hostages were killed. the next day, you know, the next morning, because this happens in the middle of the night, the government holds a press conference at which they, you know, they say, you know, the forces of good have vanquished the forces of evil, blah, blah, blah, the hostages are saved. You know, it was several days of this plane flying around with these hostages kind of thing,

that everyone around the world had been mesmerized by this. The government also at this press conference announces, you know, these aren't their words, obviously, but this is the gist of it, those prisoners who, all of this fuss was about while the ringleaders all decided to commit suicide last night. So this is two years after Ulrika Meinhof's so-called suicide

apparently Andreas Bader Jan Karl Rasp, Gudren Enselin and Ermgard-Moyler, who were all held at Stamheim, commit suicide the same night that or try to commit suicide the same night that this raid goes bad. Again, nobody

believes this. It's not to say that just because nobody believes that that's not true today, similar to Weinhoff again, everybody or almost everybody, believes they committed suicide. But there's no facts available today that weren't available then. And the fact that were available then were that Andreas Badr and Jan Karl Rasp were shot through the head. They're in a control unit. They're in a super high security prison. They're subject to a contact ban. They haven't had even access to lawyers for weeks. How did they get the guns? Gudron Encelain apparently, herself. Well, okay, that's less far-fetched, but the question there also remains, well,

she's under a contact ban. How did they make this plan between themselves for this group suicide? How did she find out that the raid hadn't worked in Mogadishu on a different continent when she herself isn't supposed to have had access to, like, radio or television? And things become even more, like, difficult to believe when the state, you know, announces, you know, our security cameras on that floor malfunctioned that night. It's kind of like the Jeffrey Epstein thing recently in the state. It's like, you know, how far-fetched does this have to get? And in this case, the cherry on the cake was the fourth prisoner, Irmgard-Moyler,

was supposed to have tried to stab herself. She's supposed to have had a knife that she stole from her meal tray. So in a high-security prison, this isn't got to be like, you know, the sharpest knife in the world. And she's supposed to have stabbed herself repeatedly in the chest to the point of driving the knife down almost all the way to her heart. And the hiccup in this is that Irmgard-Moyler survives. And she's, you know, rushed to hospital and she survives.

And several days later, her lawyer makes a statement saying that, you know, my client did not try and commit suicide and was not aware of any suicide plan. And as far as she's concerned, she was attacked. She doesn't know by who. She doesn't suspect it was the guard. She later says in an interview, she suspects it was some kind of death. squad, which was allowed access to the prison, and there were various ways it came out that one could have access to the prison. And with the goal of basically making it clear that if the struggle to free the prisoners is essentially going to cause this much disruption and crisis in society,

but like I said, this was the largest crisis in post-war West Germany had been brought about by this attempt to free the prisoners. And if this is what your God do to try and free your prisoners will make sure you don't have any prisoners left to free. And, you know, it's not for nothing that this phase of the raft's existence from Stockholm to the German autumn, that's the phase where they try and free their prisoners. The raft don't carry out armed actions to try and free their prisoners after that. Because clearly, you know, even if everyone else today believes that the prisoners committed suicide, it's, you know, it was fairly clear to the guerrillas on the outside that the state had killed the people on the inside and that that kind of activity to

free prisoners was just not going to work. Wow, there is so much there. That is incredible history for sure. So do you want to do like a bird's eye view of the 80s and then sort of transition into how the RAF ultimately ended? I can do that. I should just explain. The 70s, it is a very intense narrative. And it's not for nothing that the movie that came out a few years ago, the Bader Meinhof complex and most of the books about the Red Army faction, only deal with the 1970s. It's because it is an utterly complete and intense and engaging story all unto itself. What I'd like to mention is that it's really a third of the story. The 80s is just as interesting. The 90s is just as interesting. I won't go into as much detail, in part also because

we've established a lot of the things already. One of the things that they contribute to us today is that we can learn things from them that we can't learn from other armed groups. And that's not that other armed groups aren't equally righteous, important, or may have not even been more successful on their own terrain, but the Red Army faction existed for such an extended period of time and managed to deal with challenges again and again and again and figured out how to renew their base again and again and again. That's what makes their story kind of like special.

So on to the 80s, after 1977, the RAF is in crisis. This was a disaster. They had failed. Many more people had been arrested during this period. And the radical left, you know, everyone was terrified on the radical left. The amount of state repression, especially afterwards when it was, you know, because the raft kills Schleyer. So at that point, the state's no longer trying to find him.

They tell him where to find him. And it's just the sense of like crackdown and the sense of state surveillance is like everywhere. So it's a disaster. And as well, the founding members of the wrath, many of them, not all of them, but many of them, the most well-known, are now dead. So it's a disaster. And it takes them years to recover. And I'll just say quickly, we'll go quickly, between 1977 and the early 80s, half of the people, who are members of the Red Army faction

decide to leave the group. They have a change of heart. And this is really difficult for the other half because they're obviously, you know, they have to be supported, they have to be kept underground. It's not a situation that you can just, you know, quit.

And it takes a long time just to figure out how to deal with this problem. And the problem is eventually dealt with a deal is brokered with the East German Secret Service, the Stasi, and several members of the Raff were given new identities and relocated to East Germany. It takes years for them to get over it.

They attempt in 1979 their next action is an attempted assassination of Alexander Haig, who at the time was a high-level NATO official. This was before the Reagan administration and his role within, but that fails. And they're really, you know, they're really in crisis. And just to contextualize the entire radical left that came out of the 1960s, is in crisis at this point. The women's movement is in crisis. The Maoist groups that came out of that period are in crisis, or the Marxist-Leninist groups, if you prefer. The Sponti scene, which is, I guess, close to what you'd call an anarchist scene, although it wasn't made up specifically of anarchists,

is in crisis. So there's a broader crisis on the left, and there are two other main, well, by this point, there are three other main armed organizations, and they're all facing their own crises as well. So it's a time of historical change. This is also the, you know, Thatcher, Reagan, you know, it's the beginning of a new kind of, but today we call neoliberalism taking place. And it's also the time of what's today known as the Second Cold War,

which is this kind of brinksmanship between the Reagan administration and NATO, and the East Block countries. So the Rath end up deciding what to do is to really, reorient the struggle because their previous actions had been about freeing prisoners to reorient the struggle as a struggle against NATO. And this is the context within which their next actions will take place, which will be an attack on a NATO, high-level NATO official and the bombing of an other U.S. military base. And these take place in the context of another prisoner's hunger strike.

Throughout all of this period, there are prisoner struggles going on, led by political prisoners. And throughout all of this period, there is abuse. Following 1977, you know, prisoners are obviously targeted for abuse if they had any connection at all to the gorilla. And, you know, other prisoners die. Sigurd de Boos, a prisoner who wasn't in the raft, but who was close to the raft, die in this early 1980s hunger strike. This is still a period of reorientation. And just as had been the case in the early 70s, the main activity, although they do carry out. these attacks I just mentioned, their main activity is once again talking to people. It's

meeting with people and discussing things. And again, not random people, people in the radical left, but people, you know, trying to figure out what will work. There's a new radical left scene, a scene that perhaps wouldn't have taken the form it did if the wrath had never existed. It's not the 1960s left. It's a generation younger, and it's the people who today are known as the autonomen, the people who the black block comes out of this period in West Germany. It's developed by the scene, the autonomen, and

basically mass riots against nuclear power plants and against military ceremonies. And the wrath basically want to be able to reach out to the scene, even if there is a generational divide. And within this scene, within this large radical left 80s

scene, a small section of people do begin being interested in what the RAF has to say. And this scene becomes known as the anti-imperialist scene. And to outsiders, they all look the same. They're all a part of the same black blocks. They live in squats. They're involved in like violent protest. It's, it must seem like indistinguishable. But within the scene, there's a real difference between if you're an autonomist, an anti-imp, an anti-imperialist. And an anti-imp has in that context the specific meaning that you're into a heavier kind of

politics, probably aligned with the politics of the wrath. And as a result of all of this talking with people and discussing, in 1982, the RAF come out with their first theoretical document from the outside that they produced in almost a decade. And it was called the May paper, because it came out in May, 1982. This complete title is The Guerrilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front. And it really signals political renewal. It's a new political line. It's a political line that still maintains that the key contradiction may be the national liberation struggles. However, that the global instability of imperialism is such that a successful struggle might be carried out anywhere, even in West Germany.

And also, that imperialism is so fragile, this, you know, document puts forward, that if you do make a breakthrough anywhere, that could have like qualitative effects everywhere. So, you know, so suddenly the struggle in West Germany is potentially much more important. And if it works, they're not saying it will work. They're just saying it's possible. But if it works, if you could have a revolutionary breakthrough in West Germany, by which I don't think they mean taking state power, they probably just more mean in the sense of a very large revolutionary movement constantly attacking. and constantly keeping the state and NATO, you know, in a situation of disarray,

that that could be a breakthrough that could have worldwide implications. The other part of this document, the front part is they lay out the line that it's not all up to the guerrilla, that supporters, the front, and groups in other West European countries, too, as clear as a part of this, too, though it's not as explicitly spelled out here, have a key part to play. So the front paper is widely debated in the radical left, And again, it really inspires many people in this anti-empt scene. What happens next would normally end our story, but it's not going to, which is that in 1984, so a year after this paper comes out, again, I really got to stress what the gorilla is about

in this situation is political, not military. You have years in which an attack doesn't take place other than like robberies or whatever just to survive, but in which important things are happening on the level either. of prisoner struggles or on the level of discussions taking place, of which we have no real trace except to know that they were taking place. In 1984, a safe house, there's a safe house where RAF members are staying. One member is cleaning a gun in the bathroom, and they take out the clip, but they forget the bullet in the chamber and the gun fires, and it fires a hole through the floor. And like I said, it's in an apartment building, the safe house. So,

The question is what to do, because they've just shot through someone else's apartment. So a woman goes downstairs, a gorilla, and knocks on the apartment door, which she figures out was the apartment that had received said bullet. And the guy answers the door, and she says, look, you don't know me. I'm staying upstairs. I'm cat sitting for some friends. And, you know, I just knocked over, like, a pot of water. And I'm afraid it might be leaking into your apartment. I'm just checking.

Is everything okay in your apartment? And the guy says, yeah, everything's fine, no problem. and she says oh cool sorry to bother you see you later and she leaves uh the guy closes the door and as it will later come out he says to himself wait a second i've been watching football on tv i wouldn't know if there was water leaking i'd better look around and when he goes to the bathroom he sees a hole in the ceiling and he sees a bullet in the bathtub and he phones the cops and every single wrath member on the outside had been in that safe house and they are all captured The entire wrath is captured.

That's it. You know, like I said, military defeat successes, mediated politically, but normally you don't get over everyone being captured if you're a guerrilla group. The raft were in a unique situation. They had spent the past several years talking to people. They had come out with a document over a year earlier saying other people, you know, who aren't in the guerrilla, you have a really important role to play. You know, you're really important. You'd better start thinking seriously. And, you know, this created a situation in which very quickly, various anti-imps, learning about the situation, chose to go underground and chose to carry out, you know, essentially, I have no idea if this is what the wrath had been planning or not, but they carry out what in my mind is the most oppressive offensive to date, which starts at the end of 1984, raft prisoners go on hunger strike.

and a commando plants a bomb at a NATO officer's training school, so a school for like high-level military officers in NATO. And the car bomb doesn't go off, but it's almost as if the car bomb worked as a signal. Suddenly, in cities across West Germany, bombs are going off. Suddenly, there's like more than an attack every single day being carried out against some targets somehow related to the military industrial complex,

be it as an arm manufacturer, a company involved in, you know, involved in, you know, horrible things in the global south or a government target. And it becomes very clear, very soon that these attacks are being carried out by the communiques,

are calling them fighting units. It's not the RAF, but it's anti-IMPs who have been organized within the framework of the RAF's May paper and who are basically responding to the fact that the RAF have initiated and offensive.

A few, you know, not long afterwards, maybe a month into this offensive of constant bombings and attacks, in France, a general René O'Dron, who's, you know, a mass murdering piece of shit, whose job was to sell arms to various third world governments. France at the time was the third largest arms exporter in the world after the United States and the Soviet Union. he gets out of his car and he's killed and a group in France called Action Direct

claim responsibility and then their communique which they name after a fallen member of the RAF, Elizabeth von Dick, in their communique they say we are carrying out this attack as part of the RAF's front strategy.

So suddenly the RAF's strategy that was developed before everyone was arrested has been taken up by new people who integrated themselves within the RAF, is being taken up by large numbers of

anti-y-ymps carrying out constant bombings and is being taken up by other armed organizations outside of West Germany, all within this line of attack NATO. Shortly afterwards, this arms manufacturer is killed by the wrath in West Germany, at which point, wrath prisoners who'd been on hunger strike call off their hunger strike, and, you know, the offensive is basically viewed as a success. And, yeah, as a high point, it's the amazing. amount of support and the amount of feeling that this is like a breakthrough within the radical left, you know, the pro-arm struggle radical left, obviously, in West Germany was at an all-time

high. And Western Europe was mentioned as like a potential crisis zone and counterinsurgency like studies being carried out in the United States at the time because of this level of resistance. At the same time, it all goes to shit very quickly, which is to say that in the same way that military defeats, you can turn them around if your politics are well placed. If you make a political misstep, it doesn't matter how good you are militarily. The wrath had said, you know, basically established this kind of framework in which supporters and people who weren't in the guerrilla were very important. Their next action took place in August, 1985. They bombed another military base in which people were killed. But it came out shortly afterwards that in order to get

access to the base, they had kidnapped and killed a young American GI. And they killed him in circumstances where they didn't have to. Like they'd kidnapped him, they'd stolen his ID, they could have just left him there. And they felt, obviously, as they would say afterwards, they didn't see what the big deal was. They said they were at war against NATO. They've been bombing U.S. bases, killing people for years now. They didn't see this as a step too far. But their support scene and the radical left felt this was completely different. Their politics had always been framed in terms of prisoners' rights, the Geneva Convention. Some people claimed, well, now the RAF had a prisoner, and they just killed him.

There were all kinds of layers. Obviously, many people were people who disagreed with the RAF to begin with, and would just opportunistically take advantage of the situation to criticize them, but there were also many people who actually, you know, were horrified. including it would later come out some of the RAF prisoners, you know, just felt, you know, why did you do this? And in the aftermath of this bombing, the acrimony and all of this, just in a sense, they lose all of the momentum that they had coming out of that 85, early 86 offensive. And although they do, the fighting units do carry out another offensive later on is kind of like a last gasp of that kind of broad-based armed resistance, so which may point to the fact that wasn't sustainable

over the long-term or may simply, you know, point to the contingency that it was a really difficult to deal with action that the raft carried out next and, you know, it was too much for the support scene to deal with. But that has been, although the raft would last and carry out actions for many years after that, that has been, you know, retroactively pointed to as the beginning of the end by many people. Okay, okay, I see. I see. So this and entire time that they're carrying out attacks, it's never indiscriminate killing. It's always sort of tied to some ethical restraint on their part. It's really like targeted attacks on members of the ruling class specifically, right? Oh, it's definitely not indiscriminate

levels of violence. I'd mentioned earlier a skyjacking. What I hadn't mentioned, which I perhaps should, is that that was controversial amongst RAF members and amongst RAF prisoners. people were horrified that an airplane had been hijacked. And supporters also, there was always, it was always explicit, and it was always a key element of the RAF struggle, and of all of the guerrilla group struggle, the attempt to have an ethical practice. Again, whether or not killing a soldier in these circumstances is unethical or not is something that can be debated, but it's just very clear that most people, including most people in

their support scene, we're fine with killing soldiers under certain circumstances, but not under other circumstances. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. And, you know, I think it does speak to this sense of morality, of ethics, of, like, keeping the broader goal in mind. It, it's sort of, these discussions are happening because these people do not want to, to hurt any innocent people, you know, they only want to go after specific targets. And I, honestly, I think that's, you know, incredibly admirable in a lot of ways.

Oh, yeah, it was never we're going to attack for attack. sake because, I mean, partly the state from the beginning said they're attacking for attacking a state. The state from the beginning was saying these people want to like, you know, poison lakes with nuclear waste. They want to kidnap children. They want to bomb malls and supermarkets and all of this stuff, which wasn't true. So from the beginning, you know, they defined themselves in contrast to that. And you can read that in document over document them basically saying, state is projecting onto us its own reality, like the state does these things, but the state is claiming that the guerrilla does. I mean, these were communists, and they took, you know, the

idea of communist ethics very seriously. Yeah, and that stands in stark contrast to right-wing forms of terrorism, which we've seen over and over again target, you know, mothers, children, the innocent, the indefensible, the powerless, etc. So that stark difference is really important to pay attention to. Yeah. When one looks at the situation today, it's interesting because I last did these talks before the current situation. And, you know, this is actually the first in-depth conversation I've had about this for several years. So, you know, some things have definitely changed. But, yeah, the contrast is stark. All of the groups in West Germany did things that they were self-critical of. And they made self-criticisms. They made public self-criticisms. The RAF in this case of Edward Pimentel, the soldier who is kidnapped and killed. Initially, they react very defensively saying, we didn't make a mistake, or if we made a mistake, we underestimated the number of assholes on the left. These were their actual words, but they backed down very quickly, and they're self-critical. And in fact, from this point on,

it's almost like a theme in their documents to, like, be bending over backwards, being self-critical. But before then, too, they were self-critical. But at their worst, none of these groups carried out anything like what the far right carries out. They're just two different mindsets of what they're trying to accomplish by our means. But the far right is engaging in terrorism. And it's not terrorism aimed at powerful people, is terrorism aimed at racialized people, at people from oppressed nations,

at people who already are suffering a lot of structural oppression. And that's the opposite of what the communist guerrilla is about. Exactly right, exactly right. What would you say were the biggest successes and the biggest failures by RAF? And what is the ultimate legacy, in your opinion, of the Red Army faction? Well, I think their biggest successes that they managed to recreate a base again and again and again, by which I mean they looked at a situation in which they felt nobody has politics like we do.

We're going to act, and it's through our actions that will create a political reference point for other people. And they did that, and it worked. And for me, it's one of the lessons, though sadly it's a lesson that's not specific to the far left. I think the far right is actually implementing the same kind of lesson very successfully at the moment, which is that if you do something, even if everybody says what you're doing is horrible and wrongheaded, if you stick with it long enough, you will develop supporters and you will also shift the parameters of what people are willing to entertain or think about. They did it in a very positive way, I feel, the rafted. What we see today is we see these neo-Nazi mass murderers are, I think, also going to have a greater effect than many people realize because people are saying, you know, people at the moment are saying, well, you know, so many people are outraged by this. But the historical record is that a revolutionary current can survive and grow even if so many people are outraged by it. and what would you say would be the biggest failures or set of failures in your opinion

well it's difficult to say it's difficult to say it's i mean clearly the the misstep with pimental uh kidnapping and killing the soldier the people who did that felt it was a really big error most people as they age decades later they look back on things they did and they're critical of them so it's perhaps not surprising that many wrath members today are critical of things that they even while they remain sympathetic to revolutionary politics. It's difficult to say what the biggest error was. Clearly, in their document that they put out in 1998, where they disband the organization officially,

even though they haven't carried out in action in years, they say their biggest error was not having created a political organization, an either above-ground or semi-clandestine organization that people could join without joining the guerrilla as having been their largest strategic mistake, But that was an observation made by a very small number of people who had joined the RAF in its last stages kind of thing, who hadn't been involved in all of the stuff that I've spoken to you about today. So I'm not sure if that's the case. And in one of their earlier documents, the RAF explained why they're not doing that. They say if we do that, the large organization will just, everyone will just be arrested.

So I'm not sure if I agree with them, but it's worth saying that's what they said was one of their largest errors. Yeah, right. And that tension between above-ground and underground formations has a long history on the left. You can look at the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army or the IRA and Sinn Féin, for example. But yeah, in the context of West Germany at that time, perhaps an above-ground organization simply just wasn't possible. Yeah, well, that was their feeling at least. And it's important to note there were other armed groups and none of the other armed groups set up large, like, above-ground organizations either. And then the final question is, what is the legacy of the Red Army faction, and what can radicals and revolutionaries on the left today learn from them, in your opinion? I mean, it's very difficult to say what the legacy of the RAF is. The wrath obviously, like, knocked West Germany, like, on its axis kind of thing for a while. It changed the entire society. It's difficult to say, had the RAF not existed, maybe that would have happened anyway.

Like, we know that all of these, like, you know, first world societies underwent really rapid cultural shifts about that point in time. But it's noteworthy, I think, that one of the most militant mass movements have occurred in Western Europe in the late 1970s or 1980s was in West Germany, like the Autonomian who were involved in squats and anti-nuclear and also anti-nuclear missile protests, you know, on the long. level completely different from anything we have here in North America, well, that happened in West Germany. And I wouldn't, I'm, you know, who knows, we don't have like an alternate universe we can check out, but I think that the RAF played a big part in that. Clearly, the other guerrilla groups that were active in West Germany at the time, members said we would have never done what we did if the RAF hadn't, in a sense, blazed the trail. And also, there was a lot more support for other forms of militant action and other forms of armed action in West Germany

because people could be like, well, it's not that serious. They're not doing stuff like what the raft does. Whereas if you remove that like more heavy pole, which the raft constituted, suddenly firebombing a police station can seem much more serious kind of thing. But in the context of like blowing up military bases, it doesn't seem so much so. That said, when the Berlin Wall came down, And a year later, or a little less than a year later, the German Democratic Republic was absorbed within what had been the West Germany, and they just become this country, Germany. It's like a tidal wave knocking over everyone's sandcastle. So it's a brand new world. So it's really difficult for me to say, is there any legacy beyond that point of anything that came before?

which also, I think, is a historical lesson about quality of change and quantitative change and about the way in which so-called black swans are things you really don't see coming can take place, which basically make what you've been doing for the past 20 years irrelevant. The wrath never found their footing after that, and they weren't alone in that. Arguably, you know, hardly anyone found their footing after that. And the radical left that has emerged and that exists today in West Germany, the roots don't go back beyond that point without involving all kinds of

really serpentine flip-flops kind of thing and that's yeah that's a thing I mean I think it's worth studying the history of a group like this because it lasted so long and because it's useful to think of historical change over a period of decades in that way absolutely well thank you so much Jay for coming on

going through all of this with me and educating myself and my listeners. This has been absolutely fascinating. I'm definitely going to continue my personal research into the Red Army Faction and learn more because there's so much here. Before I let you go, though, can you please let our listeners know where they could find your work online and what your work is? Sure. Well, there's two books. They're both the Red Army Faction documentary histories. The first volume is called Projectiles for the People.

And the second is called Dancing with Imperialism. and we will have a third, which should be out hopefully next year. And the best way is if you go to the website, German gorilla.com. In that case, you can see various documents from the RAF. You can see interviews that have been done with members of the RAF, including recent interviews. And you should also be able to find links to purchase both of the books, which were co-published by PM Press and Krasplebib. and that's German Gorilla, sorry, Gorilla with 2Ls, so GermanGarilla.com.

Or you can just look up the books online, they're on Amazon, and I believe they've probably also probably been scanned in on all kinds of pirate sites. Okay, yeah, we'll definitely link to the Germanurilla.com website in the show notes of this episode. And thank you so much again for coming on. This has really been a fascinating and important lesson on history, and I really appreciate all the work you put into come on the show and teach me and my audience. about it. Okay, thanks. Sorry it was so long. No worries. No worries.

It was awesome. Yeah, but thank you so much. Have a good one. Thanks. Bye. You're looking at Brownskine, South East Asian kids with a problem. Two hundred, three hundred. Shoot, that's a lot of them. Ready for the metal pellets killed off Magellan's descendant. Talk to police.

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