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Mi Y — — - -———-- — — ~v %— - - -- ‘*_‘W?",- -—.- —-Tr -- -- R HIS IGHTLw OCT 29'77 VOLUME 38 N021 15p EVENTS CAN CERTAlNLY‘LEAVE YOU BEHIND. The moment our review section went to the printers the issues of violence exploded. Now almost all the original members of the Red Army Fraction are dead. Eighteen months ago we were asked to believe Ulrike Meinhof had committ- ed suicide when she was found hanging in h-er cell with bruises on her thighs and semen on her underclothes. When the Meinhof family handed her body to _a forensic specialist from Hamburg he found that parts of the body had been cut away to such an extent that it was impossible for him to reconstruct what had happened. Now we are asked to believe that three others of the group have killed themselves, after terrorising their guards, operating a bomb factory, estab- lishing telegraph links.between themselves, smuggling in guns (one in 44 separate parts) and then, in the case of Andreas Baader, deviously and pervidiously attempting to discredit the German State by shooting himself in the backlof the neck. While we should not deny to others the courage and the dignity of suicide, it was the German Federal Justice Minister himself who used the word "unbelievable." FREEDOM's attitude to the Red Army Fraction has been stated before. The RAF are not anarch- ists as they themselves have said, a fact which the world's press seems unable to grasp. Yet ANDREAS BAADER RAF and anarchists are linked, in fact and myth. Even in the context of a military campaign we cannot accept the hijacking of innocent passengers. while Buback and Schleyer are fair targets. I We believe that the RAF are isolated, elitist and authoritarian. Yet these people have died fightingviolence far greater than they have ever aspired to. The following piece examines the implications of these events. ,_ vr..__ EACH NEW STAGE in the tragic history of the among them — and why, after all, the surpise? “I x-. Red Army Fraction has been accompanied by For some time the East Eurbpean states who, Q neat and ironic and sometimes even eloquent on the whole, have escaped the wrath of the comment in support of their thesis — a comment Red Army Fraction, have been urging the West which has nothing to do with the humourless Germans to be harder on their terrorists, and hypocrisy and tired jargon of their own public expressing blank incomprehension at their statements. Sometimes it is incidental, some- failure to destroy them. lf the three Stammheim times a carefully engineered part of their war, prisoners were murdered, and if lrmgard Mbller but it is always effective in its truth to those barely escaped with her life, none would be very few still dispassionate enough to see it. less shocked than the governments of Eastern The most striking instance to me still is the Europe. fact that at the very time Ulrike Meinhof died, Many anarchists would say, as with the case Lieutenant Calley, perpetrator of the My Lai of Ulrike Meinhof, that the "if" is irrelevant. GUDRUN ENSSLIN massacre, got married as a free man. Again, the RAF's thirst and hunger strike in August in Either way — whatever the true story about the demand of an end to social isolation coincided pistols — it was murder. (Indeed, one gathers that Dany Cohn-Bendit was almost lynched the with the German government's manifestation of other day in Frankfurt for daring to suggest support for the Nazi murderer Herbert Kappler the deaths might have been suicides). l have when he escaped from a military hospital in reservations about this attitude; it is facile and Rome. Most recently of course there was the in its logical implications, dangerous. lt does spectacle of mingled ioy and relief at the matter if they were hanged and shot by gag: deaths of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe and nment agents and if what lrmgard Nlbller says Andreas Baader, contrasting with the mourning is true; and that the government knows this for Hanns-Martin Schleyer - a man who, yes, best of all is shown by their hurried invitations was murdered and cruelly (what murder is not to foreign experts to attend the autopsies, and that?), but whose SS youth and only nominally non-fascist. middle age have brought him the by the hurried resignations and sackings homage and the pious tears of modern social going on in Baden-Wurttemberg (the state democracy. with responsibility for Stammheim) under the implausible pretext of inefficiency, so that in The reasons should be clear by now. No-one effect those responsible are no longer answer- is feared or hated more than the opponent of able. the State. The governments of the world com- My argument may be a semantic one, but I do bined against the hijackers of the Lufthansa believe linguistic precision is a tool not to be plane, the Soviet Union and East Germany JAN CARL RASPE discarded lightly, and if "murder" comes to k 2 FREEDOM - It will be answered that the RAF's idea is to draw out the basic fascism of the "liberal" Diagram of the State. Presuming from their literature that seventh floor the objective of the RAF is not an anarchic Z jg .. of Stammheim one, this may be the correct thing to do. An Gmfnfijgmymtgtafia prison, Stutt- openly fascist state would in its turn provoke L " S S gart showing a popular front of left-wing resistance. But it the location is unlikely that the abolition of power itself of the RAF would be brought nearer in this way. Smash_ing 4- prisoners‘ cells. fascism does not mean smashing power. And l\ These look on- 5 ‘_.i'.il-iii-r3£ilL\ power can only be smashed for any length of to a central time if the alternative community structures space where are already being laid. they were all- Ev owed to meet - This brings us to perhaps the most serious failing of the RAF since they came into being - — _ ' , s._‘_ for a few hours the inability to combine legal with illegal is J each day when - d not in solitary activities, which was their original intention. The plan was to prepare and set up an efficient confinement. I " 1 military network all over the country and be- yond to service the needs of the "working “\. class" once the Revolution had begun. With mean just anything from imprisonment to exec- Jean Genet, the French writer, to the fury this class the RAF would cement relations on ution, then that tool loses its power and ends and chagrin of German commentators, (and a legal as well as illegal plane, withdrawing by giving carte blanche to the ruling class. through Le Monde no less) recently expressed from the centre of the stage when no longer gratitud;F>_fl'T~_5.tammheim prisoners for expos- needed. But the bombing campaigns and the Whether or not the three prisoners were actually start of the killings forced them into a twilit . killed, what is certain is that their deaths ing the violence of the State and the consumer society (it had not, apparently, occurred to jungle which grew its own obstacles and pre- were directly connected with imprisonment, him before). But as anarchists we should rem- occupations, victories and defeats, far removed imprisonment per se as well as with the extra- ember above all their mistakes, and through from anything of import to the daylight world, ordinary conditions in which they lived. The let alone the factories. Workers who did join penal' system in Federal Germany as it now them, qy; weaknesses. l would list them in a rambling sort of way as follows, while warning were not necessarily trusted to take part in stands, down to the latest horrifying "contact the ideological discussion, were more or less restriction" law, was built block by block, readers that they are points that have been all made before. left with opening and shutting doors if one is clause by clause around the "Baader-Meinhof" to believe not just police reports on crown qroup and had, and has, its own destructor witnesses (which one will not) but comments mechanism. Sick jokes about the quality of from members of the 2nd June Movement, their colour television sets (and materially -vhose composition was less middle class, and these prisoners were privileged, compared to Dur-ing a.recent visit to England l was fort- who seem to have been held in some disdain others) have .|~7.,Tserved as a pretext for ig- by the younger RAF. Some who joined the noring the fairly subtle form of mental destruct- unate enough to obtain some of your publicat- ions, but unfortunately the German frontier RAF, hoping to replace "verbal radicalism" ion which over seven years, first of solitary by Action, began to realise that the RAF s confinement and sensory deprivation, then of control decided that l had no right to read such books. Presumably they are now reading kind of revolutionary struggle would take as striking trial and other legal irregularities, and long, and maybe even longer, than others, above all of social isolation - their exceptional theml Yours sincerely and had its own periods of unutterable boredom isolation in one tiny group for reasons of state and routine, and isolation and pettiness. security - involved. That the effects of such s Correspondent in Germany (There are some indications that Ulrike Mein- isolation were serious enough is shown in the hof herself had felt the need for giving more reports of the court-appointed professor, thought to what they were doing and wished to Wilfried Rasch who examined the Stammheim start a breakaway group, but by that time the L prisoners in I975 and again this year, and jungle was already closing in on them).