Anti-Imperialist Cell Discussion Paper - May 22, 1992

"Resistance Means Attack !"

A Critique Of The RAF

"Everyone has to die. The question is only how, and how you lived your life, and the matter is quite clear : Fighting against the pigs for the liberation of humanity ! Revolutionary, in struggle - with a love of life, and contempt for death. For me, that’s how you serve the people - RAF." (from the last letter written by Holger Meins, 31.10.74)

On 22.4.92, we said : "The struggle goes forward together."

Now (22.5.92) we’d like to examine that more closely, to take a look at the necessity/meaning of militant resistance in Germany. We see this as an answer to what the comrades from the guerrilla wrote on 10.4.92. We accept this decision which the comrades decided upon as a decision which applies to themselves. But at the same time we sharply criticize a whole series of passages in their statement which are given a political expression. The taz [a liberal daily newspaper - trans.] was wrong when they when they wrote in the 25.4.92 edition of their paper that we are a "RAF splinter-group". We understand ourselves to be part of the resistance movement in Germany. We have our own form of militant politics and we intend to further develop this. We will leave all further speculation to those people whose job it is to track down people who carry out resistance in Germany.

Whereas the ruling powers are signalling the "end of the RAF" as the end of militant resistance in Germany with propaganda spread through the media, our approach is diametrically opposed to this : We want to learn from the theoretical/practical experiences of the guerrilla (and that means also to learn from the mistakes) and to contribute to the further development of militant politics in this country. This is at a time when the entire system allows practically no genuine free space whatsoever for people to search for alternatives. During the 22 years that the Red Army Fraction carried out its armed struggle, it was proven that it is possible to carry out attacks in the heart of the state, even here in Germany, in one of the most highly developed imperialist centres. In the last few years, these attacks were no longer the part of an overall strategy, without which it’s impossible to make revolutionary politics. The guerrilla are not the ones responsible for this, but rather this is the fault of everyone for whom the slogan "struggle together" has any meaning. We don’t criticize these attacks in and of themselves, but rather the fact that, since they were not imbedded in comprehensive politics, they attacks could no longer achieve their potential political effect. Nevertheless : The successful attacks on Herrhausen and Rohwedder made a lot more people silently happy than the comrades themselves seem to admit. Greetings to the Ulrich Wessel Commando !

For us, the most important thing is the content of revolutionary politics. Naturally, a part of this is the world-wide struggle for freedom for all comrades presently detained in imperialist prisons. As for those comrades imprisoned here in Germany, we demand : Freedom for all prisoners from the RAF and resistance within a reasonable period of time ! In particular, the immediate release of Isabel, Ali, and Bernd, who are ill. Immediate regroupment of all prisoners from the RAF and resistance ! No new trials against comrades already in prison ! As for all foreign comrades : Immediate release and the possibility to travel to any country they choose !

In their statement, the guerrilla describe the "fractionalization" of the state security apparatus in a manner which we feel to be mistaken. The ultimate aim of the people like von Stahl [attorney general - trans.], Werthebach, and Kinkel, who has since been promoted to the post of foreign minister, is domestic peace in Germany. In other words, the ruling elite have made the following demand on the politicians : There can be no visible resistance which is in a position to bring into question the state’s totality. But the state security apparatus is confronted with the fact that the means of destructive prison conditions has only been partially successful towards that end. The Kinkel-Initiative was an attempt to weaken the resistance in Germany over a long period of time, in the hope of eventually eliminating it.

For Kinkel, the prisoners are simply a means to an end. The inhumanity of his politics is made very clear by some of his statements, in which he hardly denies that the prisoners serve the function of hostages. The leading people involved in the KGT [Anti-Terrorism Coordinating Group - trans.] feel that those people which the state has available in its prisons can be played off against those people who oppose the system. That’s the core of Kinkel’s calming statement on ZDF television when he called our first communique a "disruption manoeuvre" against his policies. What careerists like him fail to understand is that it is from this very system which the resistance originally came. As long as this system continues to oppress people, both here and abroad, there will be resistance.

The fact that we are struggling in a country which has never witnessed a successful revolution, a country where a particularly evil variant of fascist "national socialism" once ruled, a country in which there are only a few traditions of resistance, all of this makes it even more important for there to be a continuity of resistance. It follows from this : Those things which the comrades correctly/decisively recognized years ago in their analysis need to be applied to the present social/political situation. On May 6, 1975, two days before her death, Ulrike Meinhof was visited by the Italian R.A. Capelli. In her May 7 report of the conversation, she said, among other things, that : "The function of the reactionary integration of Western Europe for counter-revolution in the Third World and the development of North-South antagonism, the general connection between the struggle in the metropoles and the development of the front in the Third World - the conversation astounded him (Capelli, that is)."

Militant resistance in Germany has as its strategic goal the establishment of a link between the struggles of the Three Continents and that which is at hand or which can (potentially) be developed here in the form of resistance. We would like to say more about that.

Firstly : Considering the level of exploitation/destruction of human existence in the Three Continents, it is the fucking moral duty of everyone in Germany who defines him- or herself as left-radical to continually make new attacks here. That’s why we can fully understand the anger of the foreign comrades we have spoken with when we discussed the recent statement from the guerrilla : They can’t understand how comrades who surely realize that the imperialist elite’s war against the people of the Three Continents advances more and more every day can be responsible for calling an end to armed struggle in Germany.

Struggle together in a front with those people waging resistance in the Three Continents !

Secondly : We have to bear in mind the actual social reality in Germany. The relative stability of the system in the metropoles is based on the consistent ability of the ruling powers to make the actual/supposed identity of the people that of the "middle class". The system is (still) able to adapt mechanisms of integration to the actual present situation whenever necessary. That is (perhaps the decisive) part of German reality.

We have to bear in mind the social conflicts/moods of the "lower classes" in this society. Here, the situation is, for example, as follows :

In an asylum-seekers’ hostel in Hunxe, 8-year-old Zeinap is so badly burned by a group of skinheads that she will be disfigured for life. In Magdeburg, 23-year-old Thorsten is beaten to death by a skinhead at a birthday party. A 28-year-old Iranian prevents his deportation to Turkey by slashing his wrists in the back of the police car taking him to the airport in Frankfurt. An 18-year-old is found dead, hung in his cell, at 6:00pm by guards, after having been brought to prison at 3:30pm. According to "statistics", 4 youths commit suicide every day in Germany. A 44- year-old unemployed man in Zepernick hangs himself in his garden just hours before he is to be forcibly evicted from his property. Of the 14,000 suicides registered in 1990, 4,000 were elderly people. In Oschersleben, 50 unemployed persons take over the state employment office and begin a hungerstrike. After 18 years, workers in the "public sector" go on strike against the will of both the employers and the unions. In the states of Baden- Wurtenburg and Schleswig-Holstein, 30% of people don’t even bother to "vote" while two fascist parties book election "successes".

We have to deal with today’s reality and all of its contradictions. We have to deal with a system which functionalizes peoples’ fear of poverty (with 3 million unemployed and 352,000 homeless) to its own ends. In those places where the mechanisms of integration fail, the ruling politics is exposed to be the same thing here as it is with respect to the Three Continents : inhumane. These politics are based on having people redirect their hate, anger, disillusionment, and resignation against another person or against weaker persons, not against the ruling powers.

In so far as militant politics can break through this strategy, they have a political effect. Every day when the destruction of human value is experienced in the metropoles, a way out can be found in an attack on the elite, the corporations, the organs of repression, etc. That means that this has to be carried out to its logical conclusion, otherwise there can be no freedom.

Freedom is only possible in the struggle for liberation !

All people in the metropoles who struggle for liberation eventually recognize that our enemy here is the same one against whom the peoples of the Three Continents are struggling in order to have a humane life.

International solidarity is what the ruling powers fear the most.

We would like to discuss three more individual points from the statement by the guerrilla which must not be allowed to remain uncontradicted :

The first point concerns the collapse of those states which were known as "socialist". The guerrilla foresees a "catastrophic development for millions of people across the world". This statement should be made more precise : a catastrophic development for the people of Cuba or Vietnam (for example, in 1991 there were 1.1 million people infected with malaria in Vietnam and 4,500 died ; previously the Soviet Union had provided free medical supplies). The material situation of several liberation movements has also been worsened. But, when the guerrilla write that "everyone around the world struggling for freedom is now thrust back on their own resources", that is simply not true.

Even before 1989 it was clear that every country develops an anti-imperialist resistance based on its own unique conditions. Those people who are struggling just as hard in 1992 as they did in 1985 or 1989 are proof that the notion that they are just dependent on the "socialist" states, and that they are just serving their ends, was just imperialist propaganda. The clarity of the confrontation (on the one side, imperialism, and on the other side, the people struggling for liberation) makes it possible for revolutionaries here and in the Three Continents to reach a new self-consciousness !

The second point has to do with the notion of "social prisoners" which the comrades used, without even defining just what "social" means. The prison system in Germany is a specific expression of the entire system which we are struggling against. We send our greetings to all prisoners in German prisons !

The third point is as follows : The guerrilla write that "the question" is "whether or not German soldiers will once again march against other people". The fact is, during the 33rd Commanders Conference in Leipzig, people like Ruehe [defence minister -trans.] and Naumann [military chief of staff - trans.] left no doubt that, in the long-term, they intend to send the German army on armed, Out-of-Area missions. The decisive factor in this is Germany’s role in NATO : New stationing agreements imply that Germany will remain a important station and base for global US imperialist interventions for the unforeseeable future. Even apart from this, Germany’s role is quite clear : At 6.5 billion dollars, Germany was one of the four biggest financiers of the Gulf War.

The differences between US and German imperialism were spelled out rather clearly in 1971 in "The Concept Of The Urban Guerrilla" : "While no less aggressive than American imperialism, it (German imperialism) is less easy to attack."

At a conference of American publishers in New York, Kohl said : "We accept President Bush’s invitation to be ’partners in leadership’." The enemy has therefore given us a sufficient self-characterization.

Everywhere in the world, people are standing up and waging militant anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal struggles against the system. From Los Angeles to Lima, from Durban to Qalqilia, from Cizre to Cagayan.

In Germany, militant actions are not only morally necessary, they are also politically useful ! Resistance means attack !

"But that’s who we are, that’s where we’re from : The blood of the processes of destruction and degradation in metropolitan society, the war of everyone against everyone, the competition of everyone against everyone, the system, the law of fear, the pressure to succeed, all of this is what rules over us, for the one at the cost of the many, the division of people into men and women, young and old, healthy and unhealthy, foreigners and Germans, the struggles for prestige. And that’s where we’re from : The isolation of the row houses, the concrete jungles in the suburbs, the prison cells, the asylums and the clinics. From the brainwashing by the media, consumption, punishment through beatings, the ideology of non-violence ; from depression, sickness, and the declassifying, insulting, and degrading of people, all exploited peoples under imperialism. Until we have satisfied the needs of each of us and the necessity of liberation from imperialism, there is nothing to lose in this system of destruction, and there is everything to gain in the armed struggle : collective liberation, life, humanity, identity. That the concerns of the people, the masses, the assembly line workers, the lumpen, the prisoners, the students, the lowest class of people here and the liberation movements of the Third World are our concerns, too. Our concern : armed, anti-imperialist struggle is the concern of the masses, and vice versa - even when it’s a long, slow process at first, the guerrilla’s military-political offensive can become a real people’s war. It can become real." (from the speech by Ulrike Meinhof about the liberation of Andreas Baader from Moabit Prison, 13.9.74)