The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (59 page)

The rupture in the metropole remains irreversible. Kissinger also speaks about this shift in relationships, which occurred in less than a decade, characterizing the SPD as still pursuing the “idea of domestic peace” in ‘76, but noting that by ‘84, “On both sides of the Atlantic we are threatened by domestic politics overshadowing the worldwide strategy.” That is his automatic response to the fact that imperialism, with its global project to perpetuate the capitalist system, is not only limited by the liberation struggles in the South, but is also held back by the front within.

Christian Klar
Stammheim, December 4, 1984

_____________

¹
On June 10, 1944, the Waffen-SS destroyed the French village of Oradour-sur Glane, killing all 642 of its inhabitants.

²
Herbert Wehner was a prominent SPD politician.

³
Frühschoppen
(Brunch) is a German TV news show.

⁴
Walter Becher, a former Nazi, worked his way through a number of extreme right-wing parties in the postwar period before settling into the CSU.

⁵
Heinz Kühn (SPD) was, in 1977, the president of North Rhine-Westphalia.

⁶
Panorama
is a German TV news program.

⁷
Golo Mann was a German historian and philosopher.

⁸
The
Maßnahmestaat
(literally: state of measures) is a term usually applied to the Nazi state. It has no adequate translation into English and is commonly used in its German form. See William Treharne Jones, “Germany: Prospects for a Nationalist Revival,” in
International Affairs,
Royal Institute of International Affairs 46, no. 2 (April 1970): 316-322.

In the Front Paper we state that the revolutionary strategy is the strategy against their strategy. With this we have proceeded forcefully, basing ourselves on our own situation, and on that which has characterized it since ‘77: the military offensive from which imperialism hopes to emerge as a world system.

It is a definition of fundamental importance, because war—the concept upon which our reality is based—is a concept that every revolutionary movement requires in order to be able to struggle. “War is the key,” Andreas once said in this regard—the key to arriving at a practical perspective, as is the case now—yes, historically, we really are at the highest stage of imperialism—the key to finding a path to social revolution. As such, it is the way we can struggle against the conditions we face.

We say that proletarian internationalism—the subjective connection between existing combatants and the strategy for those who collectively and consciously take up the goal of worldwide liberation and who oppose the imperialist project to establish global fascism—is the way those who desire a final fundamental revolution and prefigure this and make it concrete through attacks, advance to destroy and wear down the system in every sector, together in a front. That is the strategic goal and the political objective that determines our practice; internationally and authentically, on the basis of the specific experience and function of the metropolitan guerilla.

The RAF's struggle was always based on both the global balance of power and the conflict in the metropole. The war is not just about escalating things in the most developed sectors; rather it is the reality of the entire imperialist system, and will be until victory. For us it is a question of revolutionary warfare and how we can bring it to a level that is powerful enough to actually bring this system to its breaking point: as international class war in the form of a protracted struggle.

The goal determines the brutality with which imperialism conducts its war on every level and all fronts. They see it as the decisive battle, because, following the breach opened by Vietnam, they felt that the only way to secure their power would be to completely eliminate all sources of antagonism—the guerilla, the liberation movements, the states that have achieved national liberation, and eventually the socialist states in the East. We are now midway through that phase. They are launching attacks everywhere: stationing missiles and waging war against the guerilla in Western Europe, attempting to stamp out the Palestinian revolution, Grenada, El Salvador, the bloody wars against Nicaragua,
Mozambique, Angola, and Cambodia.

They have not yet completed their unification into a homogenous counterrevolutionary bloc—as they must if they are to politically survive the military offensive—nor is there any guarantee that they will. However, it is also true that the revolutionary struggles, facing different conditions and having achieved different levels of development, have already felt the effects of the offensive meant to prevent them from achieving their goals. The
New Jersey
¹
carried out the heaviest bombing since the Vietnam War in an effort to secure an American victory. Following this attack, an American official said the objective was to make Lebanon look like a lunar landscape. To do this, they withdrew from El Salvador, where they had recently set up base with the objective of crushing the civilian population and isolating the guerilla. The entire machine, which is constantly attempting to perfect this extermination policy, reaches its limit at the boundary established by simultaneous struggles and a balance of power that, as a result, is constantly shifting. The smooth unfolding of their power project is shattered by this dialectical reality.

The conditions of struggle in each sector have a direct impact on all of the other sectors, because the conflict has fundamentally changed. Vietnam won. The guerilla has politically implanted itself in Western Europe. Developments in the Middle East have taken on new and more powerful dimensions as part of the broader Arab revolution. In Latin America—where for ten years they installed military dictators everywhere, because the guerilla had a mass base—they are now confronted with new struggles and with people who will no longer accept easy solutions, who show no fear in the face of fascism, because the experience of fascism has shaped their resistance. And the Nicaraguan revolution broke the grip of reaction throughout the continent. Nothing is dead and gone. Fifteen years ago the Tupamaros explained how they had drawn on Che's experience to develop the urban guerilla concept, and now two years ago Salvador Carpio
²
made it clear that the FMLN had learned from the Tupamaros' struggle and built upon what they had learned. There is no single international strategy, but there is a learning process based on the different experiences and political developments, and it is clear that in their perspectives and relationships the combatants see every attack as a practical building block in a strategy to open up new possibilities.

The military strategy is now the unifying factor and the basis for imperialist restructuring. They are pushing Western Europe and Japan to the forefront, because they need a unified system for their global offensive. That was a lesson they learned from Vietnam, and they are now making the connection: wars of aggression and intervention have ramifications for their own society—they serve to mobilize people. There is no place left where they have any hope of legitimacy or support. The formation of the unified system depends on their keeping the “political costs” under control, creating legitimacy based solely on the military strength of the bloc as a whole, and confronting their own society with this power. That is why the invasion of Grenada followed a request from the Caribbean states, why the NATO intervention in Lebanon took place under the rubric of “multinational peacekeeping,” and why right to the end Weinberger
³
tried to involve ten different states in order to avoid a troop withdrawal. What they hope to achieve is a flexible structure of military commandos in the core imperialist states—the United States, the FRG, Great Britain, France, and Japan—that can tailor its response to the style and requirements of the regional states concerned. The German Association for Foreign Policy,
⁴
which produces studies in association with the Office of the Federal Chancellor,
⁵
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Defense, demanded this at the beginning of ‘81. Board members range from Stoltenberg, Weizsäcker, and Schmidt
⁶
to Zahn, Beitz, and Vetter,
⁷
all of whom—industry, political parties, and trade unions—are concerned with making the necessary internal preparations. With the stationing of missiles, the formation of the French and British RDF
⁸
units, and the integration of Japan into NATO's military strategy, the military core has come together.

For them, the offensive has thus become a decisive battle, and the reformist version—social democracy and covert warfare—is unfolding on all levels. The SPD's ambitious project to institutionally bury all antagonism has not succeeded in any way; not internally between the state
and society, and not internationally. Having promised to guarantee the internal stability of Model Germany by nationalizing the conflict between capital and labor (concerted action, intergroup mediation, the trade unions as equal members of economic associations), they found themselves confronted not only with an economic crisis, but also with the politics of class struggle—a result of the effects the national liberation struggles had on the metropole. In June ‘68, Schiller
⁹
congratulated the government and business for the collaboration between the state, industry, and the trade unions that had prevented “any social conflict from spreading to the workforce in the FRG, as occurred in France.” They thought that with Brandt and the amnesty they had succeeded in depoliticizing the working class and reintegrating the students who had been criminalized, bringing them back into the orbit of the state.
¹⁰
But the politicization achieved by the front's struggle was stronger than that.

Algeria, Vietnam, South Yemen, Che, and the Tupamaros reestablished something that had been declared long dead in the metropole: a new internationalist consciousness and with it a perspective for struggle here—a struggle in a front with them. Later Sartre would call it the decisive political discovery in the West, and that was true. And so the armed struggle began in Germany, and under different conditions in Italy. Since that time, the social revolution has been taken up as part of the objective pursued by the movements for national autonomy, such as ETA and the IRA.

More than anything, the first RAF action threatened the SPD's institutional strategy for domestic peace, and with it the political preconditions for the smooth integration of the West European states. For this reason, as well as the fact that reformist politics in this state have only a very narrow field of maneuver, to get back on track the antagonism had to be liquidated—that is why the reaction against us sought to exterminate us. This contradiction eventually broke the SPD's back. They couldn't resolve it. The only way they could have had victory over the guerilla would have been if we had given up the struggle. The confrontation with revolutionary politics made the reintegration and depoliticization of the ‘68 left irrelevant. It exposed the SPD's
institutional strategy for what it was: war tailored to the metropole. It was not Model Germany as the most advanced form of imperialist rule that was exported, but rather the brutality of the national security state. In Italy this is known as “Germanization,” and it is what the SPD state has been known for around the world since ‘77—revolutionaries know Germany as imperialism's most advanced tactical position, while reactionaries know it as the state with the most modern and pervasive repressive machinery. It is no longer the Israelis who are training anti-guerilla units everywhere, but instructors from the GSG—from Fort Bragg to Thailand. Their plan to impose peace along the North-South front line—using money and counterinsurgency—had just as little success in masking the contradictions. The hunger and hardship are too great and the gap between rich and poor is too wide and too deep. Last year, when Kreisky
¹¹
proposed a new Marshall Plan like the one after ‘45, Shultz
¹²
responded that he was naïve, because the conditions that had existed in devastated Europe were in no way comparable to the poverty in the poor countries.

The U.S. magazine
Foreign Policy
¹³
wrote that the imperialist solution to the crisis—i.e., neverending debt and dependency on the political dictates of the core states—has set the development of entire continents back forty or fifty years. Brandt's North-South Commission no longer talks about a global partnership or a new world economic order to harmonize conflicting interests, but about the need to rescue the banking system. There is nothing left to harmonize between the different parties, because it is clear there can be no new world economic order without a worldwide revolution. There is only one solution to the economic crisis, a political solution: the destruction of the system of hunger and despair, repression and exploitation. In the long run social democratic intervention has been unable to establish a foothold anywhere, no matter what form it has taken—Bahr's
¹⁴
attempt in ‘76 to use cash payments to shift the liberation movements away from military struggle, or the attempt to use the
Friedrich-Ebert-Stifung
¹⁵
to build up figures who could emerge as the “democratic opposition” following
a successful revolution, or else the pressure brought to bear on the new national states, i.e. financial aid in exchange for an anticommunist foreign policy. Their ideology was shattered by the reality of war. The conflict has spread too far.

They also failed on the East-West front line. The United States experienced national revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa in the sixties, and a quick victory against the USSR ceased to be possible because they too had the atom bomb, forcing another shift in U.S. foreign policy. At first the objective was to defeat the liberation wars in order to get a free hand with which to force the USSR into a conventional war that would remain below the atomic threshold, so as not to provoke a counterattack. This gave rise to the policy of détente, and here the SPD was important. It was the SPD's job to implement the new line and to accept the borders established in ‘45, a line that the CDU at that time could neither enforce within their own party nor—after twenty years of revanchism—credibly present to the socialist states. It was intended to force the USSR between a rock and a hard place: a policy of coexistence and a lull in the arms race in exchange for an end to their support for the liberation movements, combined with the hope that the market, consumption, and propaganda would wear down the socialist states from the inside, gradually destabilizing them politically. That didn't work either. Most importantly, they didn't develop anything capable of destroying the Vietnamese revolution. Vietnam became the example of revolutionary war, protracted war, and the continuity of attacks through setbacks and victories.