The Red Army Fraction was an armed gang operating in West Germany in
the 1970s, organised around a charismatic leader (Andreas Baader) and a
skilled publicist (Ulrike Meinhof). Claiming to operate in the name of a
revolutionary opposition to Western imperialism, they lived outside the
law and showed no mercy to their opponents - police officers in
particular. The RAF worked underground and with no connections to any broader
social movement. They made a virtue of necessity by arguing that mass
opposition to imperialism in Germany was impossible: the masses had
already been bought out, and would only rally to the revolutionary cause
when state repression had brought society close to Fascism. Vastly
outnumbered and outgunned, most RAF members were active only briefly
before being captured; the 'first generation' RAF carried out its first
actions in 1970 and was suppressed in June and July 1972, with the
arrest or flight of all its active members. Most of the 'first
generation' members of the RAF committed suicide when in prison -
Meinhof in August 1976, having been held for four years awaiting trial;
Baader and three others in October 1977, after being found guilty of
multiple murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Sympathisers formed
second- and even third-generation versions of the RAF; although these groups carried out many violent actions, they were
dedicated mainly to expressing support for the original RAF. The
afterlife of the RAF ended only in 1998, when the 'third generation' RAF
wound itself up.
Why study a group like this? Their
membership was small; their actions weren't very numerous or very
significant; their political programme was designed around the group
itself (emphasising the need for violence and dismissing the possibility
of mass activity); and, perhaps not surprisingly, they didn't change
society in any way - except in the sense of justifying police
modernisation. All in all it's a thoroughly nasty story, and arguably
not a very important one.
I think it is worth studying, though, for two reasons.
Firstly, in prison the members of the first-generation RAF were treated with
several different forms of brutality (some of them superficially quite
civilised); many died in prison and some may have been murdered. This shouldn't have been necessary:
if the RAF's political programme was crazy and their criticisms of contemporary society were overstated (which they very largely were),
the authorities should have been able to let them speak freely; they shouldn't have had anything to worry about.
This
relates to the second point: the RAF wasn't just a gang of armed
robbers. Exploiting their notoriety, they put forward well-worked out
criticisms of the West German government and its involvement in Western
imperialism, and gained a substantial audience for them. This shouldn't have been possible:
officially, West Germany was a peaceful and prosperous country, which
had put its Nazi past well behind it and had no concerns about its
Communist neighbour to the East. The RAF talked about "heightening
the contradictions" within society to the point of provoking a Fascist
crackdown. This goal was wildly unrealistic (not to mention
irresponsible), but the contradictions were real: they were living in a
free society, but one in which Communism was banned; it was a democratic society, but one in
which ex-members of the SS held positions of responsibility.
In
terms of the typology we looked at last week, the RAF carried out
spontaneist violence which - almost despite the RAF themselves - became reformist violence: they became
figureheads for a section of society which felt itself to be excluded
from the political system. The RAF's real achievement was to bring
that sense of exclusion to light and give those people's voices some
representation, in however distorted a form. It's because of this
achievement that they couldn't be suppressed quickly and easily, and
shouldn't now be forgotten.
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