Afternoon Comrades and welcome back to the your first patreon-only dispatch of this week. As always, thank you for your interest and support of this work. Today’s dispatch is going to be a long one, now that I am finished, the longest one to date -primarily, because the story deserves it and it is not an easy topic to write about.
When I finished my PhD last year I told myself, no, rather promised myself that for the foreseeable future I would be done with academia, one, because of exhaustion and additionally due to my frustration with the reality of working in academia. Nevertheless, my curiosity has and seemingly always will get the better of me as for the last few months I have been asking myself several questions about our radical past, here in Europe but increasingly so here in Germany. Whilst the majority, if not all Germans I know would never think of it in such terms, this new country after WW2 has been so thoroughly “westernized” by the US and to a certain degree the UK, especially in regards to their history; that large parts of the radical left wing History here has been erased from popular memory, by design of course. Similar to the US and the UK, the 1800s and 1900s saw several, large and small scale, worker based rebellions and movements that you’d never hear about in popular context, schooling or public memory. I have and am still debating to submit a few queries about potential post/doc studies on the subject, especially in regards to Germany but that’s a topic for another day. Today, we are going to speaking about the Red Army Faction.
I am certain some, if not most of you are at the very least aware of its name and imagery, potentially due to the movie that came out in 2008 ( The Baader Meinhof Komplex, it’s on Netflix ) but I wanted to offer a more detailed introduction about the RAF as well as some more complex opinions on the matter.
To be clear, what the RAF, especially the first generation, did and how they operated cannot be repeated today. The tools available to the state today are in part, specifically designed to counter any and all, anti-capitalist guerrila warfare in the West, partly, if not mostly, due to the actions by the RAF. In my humble opinion, the tactics employed by the RAF then would in no shape or form be effective today, whilst their ideology and strategy are most definitely relevant, if not more relevant today than 50 years ago. Additionally, this isn’t a piece about hero worship either, there is ample evidence of misogyny and sexism by Baader, one of the RAF’s principle founders, whilst typical of the times in Germany, that need to be addressed and acknowledged. The point of this dispatch is as always, educational, as I firmly believe that their work does play a relevant part in our struggle today. Also, in a larger context I do find it important to bring our collective “radical” history back into the conversation- all so often we are inundated with non-violent “liberal” historical figures that at the very best, challenged the capitalist powers structures only to the point where it did not hurt our enemy.
With that, strap in, following is a more detailed history of the RAF, its ideology, its founders, their impact on German and International society, their connections to various other political groups such as the KGB, PLO and SDS, media and more.
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