[lbo-talk] baader meinhof

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 19 06:16:44 PDT 2010


[WS:] I have mixed feelings about RAF. The fact that they were not "chump change" is owed mainly to considerable public support they received in Germany - and that in itself is noteworthy. I think that much of it was owed to key leadership roles women played in RAF - which was not only a clear defiance of German sexist stereotypes, but also cinematographically sexy.

But on the other hand, an attempt by a small group to defeat a state, or an alliance of states (NATO) by armed struggle strikes me as utterly naive. It took extraordinary effort of three most powerful states on Earth (the USSR, the UK, and the US) to defeat the Nazi state - so a bunch of guys & gals with small arms and a bomb amounted to less of a challenge than a fart in the wind.

An then there is the "killing controversy." Killing of state leaders and aristocracy is not necessarily wrong. It is justified when it can produce a social change, ease the suffering of the oppressed or perhaps create a cathartic finale of an oppressive regime (the executions of Louis XVI of France, Nicholas II of Russia, or Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania served that function.) But killing that does not produce any of the above and can be reasonably expected to produce the opposite effect - more repression and delegitimation of the struggle against the oppressors strikes me as utterly wrong.

I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, but a number of what passes for revolutionaries are in fact thugs who use revolution as an excuse for playing out violent urges. Violence of any kind really turns me off as nothing else (except perhaps right wing rhetoric:) ) so to see it as justified - there must be clearly no other way out. I do not think that this obtained for Germany in the 1970s.

Wojtek

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> Baader was crazy, but left marks. Weather was chump change by comparison;
> SLA a TV movie of the week.
>
> Dennis
>
>
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