Urban Guerilla Warfare in Germany




Occasionally I learn about something that I didn't even know existed. This morning Meg and I watched a 2002 BBC documentary about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, aka the Red Army Faction (Roten Armee Fraktion), a radical leftist/anarchist paramilitary terrorist organization in West Germany.

Basically the story boils down to a group of middle class students, tired with the post war structure of capitalist Germany, taking their Vietnam protest movement to a place that no other late 60's radical student was willing to go. The killed people, a lot of people actually... more than 30.

While I don't believe that "all cops are pigs" or that "the capitalist state is itself a prison", and I certainly don't think that premeditated murder is ever justified, I'm fascinated by them. There are a lot of things I feel pretty strongly about, (as you well know), but I would never kill for them. The basis of the RAF's ideology is really the same as mine, but taken to terrifying extremes.

*I know we live in a police state (don't laugh, the Patriot Act?).

*I know the media (in it's capacity as the propaganda arm of it's parent companies) preaches a dogma of total product worship and mindless consumerism.

*I know that the federal government is directly controlled by special interests at the cost of it's citizens lives, and the the health of the planet.

*I know our nation is engaged in an illegal, un-winnable war in a politically unstable region, at the cost of non-combatant citizens of that country and our men and women in the military.

Those are basically the same grievances Andreas Baader and his murderous gang of student thugs had thirty five years ago in Berlin. The difference is that I know better than to try and overthrow my nation with a gang of philosophy majors.

The lesson to be learned from them is that fighting back is a waste of your time. Instead of bringing down the "capitalist pigs", the RAF's reign of terror in the early 70's actually served to modernize the German Federal Police (like the FBI), and strengthen the German government's systematic program of spying on it's citizens.

They should have wised up, started slacking off and not worried about it. That's what I've chosen to do. I make the changes I can make in my life, and preach the word of slack as much as I can, but I'm not going to blow up an embassy.
- posted by Mason @ 8:24 PM