The Red Army Faction
Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robison and der Baader-Meinhof Gruppe
I’ve had occasion recently to read up on the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, a small but tightly knit terrorist group active in Germany from the late 1960s and into the ‘80s. They were noted for kidnapping and killing several people in different incidents, including a leading German banker, a federal prosecutor and others. The rationale behind the crimes was a mix of anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-racism and de-Nazification of Germany, as well as anti-Zionism. The group is particularly known for its connection to the October 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger plane by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); the plane carried 91 passengers and crew, all of whom were ultimately held for ransom in Mogadishu, Somalia. The demands were for numbers of Palestinian and Red Army Faction prisoners to be freed, including four Red Army Faction leaders who were being held in the Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart. The plane was stormed by German special forces a short time after it landed in Somalia; the hostage takers were killed; and none of the Red Army Faction prisoners was released (three of the four Stammheim prisoners, including Andreas Baader, allegedly committed suicide soon after they learned of the failed plot).
I was not thinking of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing an insurance executive in New York late last year, or Tyler Robinson, who is accused of murdering Conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk in September, when I looked up information on the Red Army Faction. But the similarities jumped out at me, including the ideology and the nature of the targeted individuals. Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down last December, and Charlie Kirk can both be considered symbols of a system the very far-Left considers corrupt – profits above health care in the former case, and a foot soldier in Donald Trump’s authoritarian designs in the latter case.
The Red Army Faction was not the only radical group operating in Germany from the late-1960s and on, only the most prominent, or at least most publicized. I guess “terrorist spectaculars,” as they used to be called, count as “earned media,” a term every advertising executive and public relations expert worldwide understands. I hear Conservatives and Republicans talk about “Antifa” and I do think they are plotting a crackdown on dissent in America generally. But I don’t think there is a single organization or network called “Antifa” that is directing cells across the country. The terrorist acts we’ve witnessed recently look to be lone wolf operations, at least based on publicly available evidence I’ve seen so far.
But there does not have to be a coordinated or centrally managed resistance today any more than there was in the late 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, either in Germany or America. That was one of the lessons of the Red Army Faction. Like-minded people and/or small groups just have to sprout here and there. Whether one small group can rise to the level of notoriety that the Red Army Faction attained is an open question. We had the Weather Underground and some others (and very loosely affiliated Ku Klux Klan cells on the far-Right), but their level of commitment and expertise, shall we say, was a joke compared to what was seen abroad. I don’t include the Black Panther Party affiliates among these radical groups of old mostly because there was a level of community commitment and organization behind them, though the revolutionary language certainly was there.
Is violent resistance making a comeback, though? The two murders I’ve highlighted above do not make a trend. But there is always something appealing about violence, it seems. Very few people will actually pull the trigger, as it were, but there is the perverse glamour behind a Bonnie and Clyde, a John Dillinger, and an Andreas Baader. Such truly violent people make for good movie anti-heroes, one supposes. I’ve read that Red Army Faction t-shirts sporting the upraised arm holding an automatic weapon against the background of a Red Star were quite popular in Europe through the 1990s and beyond. More seriously, though, the goal of the truly violent revolutionaries on the very far Left often is to provoke reaction, the theory being that the broader public will have to choose sides – support violent repression by the state, or join the resistance. This is related to the concept of “clarification,” which in this case means the people will be able to see for themselves who the real enemy is and thus have to choose which side they’re on. I fear that Trump and his coterie will be happy to accommodate, and then everything becomes more terrifying than anything we’ve seen here in decades.