Baader-Meinhof Film

D

droid

Guest
Recognising their violence as 'political' does not equate to popular support though.

One positive thing that the RAF did achieve though was to highlight the fact that Nazis, (many of them quite senior) had been reinstalled into positions of political and economic power by the US after WW2
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
zhao said:
easy to proclaim "petty and pathetic" in hindsight. actions of a group of individuals against a global status quo of imperialism and state sanctioned violence -- how effective or how "great" can they be? of COURSE it looks pathetic compared to systematic government backed terrorism.
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But if you're going to take up armed struggle, it should have some clearly defined objective in mind - an Irish (or British) Northern Ireland, a free Chechnya or whatever. But destroying the "global status quo of imperialism and state sanctioned violence" by committing a few kidnappings and bank robberies? Is that really terribly likely - abolishing global violence by adding your own little bit of violence to the mix, like homeopathy? Or is the overwhelmingly more likely outcome the discrediting of the vast majority of left-wing activists who don't operate in this fashion?


zhao said:
wrong or right, whatever the personal motives, at least they were not afraid to stand up and take action against obvious injustice the rest of the world willfully ignores.

it is more than you or i can say, and enough to garner some kind of respect and admiration from me.
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Thing is, this is exactly how (say) al-Qa'eda and the Westboro Baptist Church see themselves - do they garner "respect and admiration" from you? On second thoughts, perhaps you'd better not answer that...
 
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john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
zhao said:
from the flip side, that these people did not suffer great personal injury perhaps means that it was their CONSCIENCE and EMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF OTHERS which drove them to these extreme actions. can be interpreted as testament of the fact that humans are capable of acting not only with the self, but indeed others, in mind.
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They could just as easily have been motivated by self interest along the lines of "woo! look at me blowing shit up and shooting guns! I'm a revolutionary! with sunglasses and a sportscar!" :)
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
zhao said:
maybe less compared to other groups, but popular support was not exactly non-existent:

[...]...students and leftists [...] middle class sympathisers – academics, doctors, even a clergyman. [...] “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” [...]
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Middle class revolutionaries supported by middle class people.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
And let's face it, if they'd been serious about fighting tyranny and state violence they'd have tried to bring down the government of East, not West, Germany.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
zhao said:
whether baader or meinhof were or not is beside the point, but if one is pushed enough, if injury to one's loved ones or people is great enough, you, me, anyone is capable of taking up arms against oppressors. the plight of the Irish, Columbia, Chechnya... I will not sit here and judge these freedom fighters by their methods from a safe distance, just because I was lucky enough not to have been put in those kinds of desperate situations, or endured that kind of suffering.
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The RAF were not 'oppressed'!
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
vimothy said:
The RAF were not 'oppressed'!
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again:
zhao said:
from the flip side, that these people did not suffer great personal injury perhaps means that it was their CONSCIENCE and EMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF OTHERS which drove them to these extreme actions. can be interpreted as testament of the fact that humans are capable of acting not only with the self, but indeed others, in mind.
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C

crackerjack

Well-known member
Originally Posted by zhao
from the flip side, that these people did not suffer great personal injury perhaps means that it was their CONSCIENCE and EMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF OTHERS which drove them to these extreme actions. can be interpreted as testament of the fact that humans are capable of acting not only with the self, but indeed others, in mind.
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That's one way of putting it. Another is that they didn't have a clue what they were on about, just knew they were against stuff, whatever it was.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Another thing that struck me about the Neal Ascherson article was the monsterous vanity of it: "When I first met Ulrike Meinhof, before she took up the gun, I thought her tender and vulnerable." Oh, please! In a way, it's actually great, a prime slice of self-infatuated and aggrandising journalese. The pseudo-portentious and elegaic tone only adds to the effect making the piece, in the end, unintentionally hilarious. At first, it annoyed me. Re-reading it, though, reveals a comic gem.

And then the logic leads down into darkness, into places where arguments are no longer about noble ends but about whether you can harden yourself to use terrible means. Meinhof relied much on words by Bertolt Brecht: 'If you could change the world at last/ What would be beneath you? .../ Sink in the dirt,/ Embrace the slaughterer./ But change the world; the world needs it.'

Really, how profound. Are you joking, man?
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
oliver craner said:
Another thing that struck me about the Neal Ascherson article was the monsterous vanity of it: "When I first met Ulrike Meinhof, before she took up the gun, I thought her tender and vulnerable." Oh, please! In a way, it's actually great, a prime slice of self-infatuated and aggrandising journalese. The pseudo-portentious and elegaic tone only adds to the effect making the piece, in the end, unintentionally hilarious. At first, it annoyed me. Re-reading it, though, reveals a comic gem.

And then the logic leads down into darkness, into places where arguments are no longer about noble ends but about whether you can harden yourself to use terrible means. Meinhof relied much on words by Bertolt Brecht: 'If you could change the world at last/ What would be beneath you? .../ Sink in the dirt,/ Embrace the slaughterer./ But change the world; the world needs it.'

Really, how profound. Are you joking, man?
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Olly, you actually seem pretty demented on this. He met one of the key players, someone who's been dead 30 years, and he's supposed to not mention it?


it's actually great, a prime slice of self-infatuated and aggrandising journalese.
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No, it's just journalism.
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
oliver craner said:
Another thing that struck me about the Neal Ascherson article was the monsterous vanity of it: "When I first met Ulrike Meinhof, before she took up the gun, I thought her tender and vulnerable." Oh, please! In a way, it's actually great, a prime slice of self-infatuated and aggrandising journalese. The pseudo-portentious and elegaic tone only adds to the effect making the piece, in the end, unintentionally hilarious. At first, it annoyed me. Re-reading it, though, reveals a comic gem.

And then the logic leads down into darkness, into places where arguments are no longer about noble ends but about whether you can harden yourself to use terrible means. Meinhof relied much on words by Bertolt Brecht: 'If you could change the world at last/ What would be beneath you? .../ Sink in the dirt,/ Embrace the slaughterer./ But change the world; the world needs it.'

Really, how profound. Are you joking, man?
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i feel sorry for people who can not feel anything beyond the impenetrable exoskeleton of cynicism they have barricaded themselves in; who despise and are hostile to passion precisely because they are incapable of it themselves.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Olly, you actually seem pretty demented on this. He met one of the key players, someone who's been dead 30 years, and he's supposed to not mention it?

I suppose I must do, it's true. I'm probably over-egging the badness of it for my own amusement. Only a bit, mind you. Maybe I get slightly wound up by poor and conceited journalism.
 
J

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the wider context of the RAF, I would highly recommend this film:

http://www.kinoeye.org/02/20/goldsmith20.php

The section featuring Fassbinder is particularly interesting. At one point, the great director argues with an older woman, possibly his mother. Fassbinder takes the position that "All these people are to me is criminals." But his mother, though, disturbed by the ostensibly "political" character of the violence, begins calling for political clampdowns, repressions, to Fassbinder's abject horror.

I'm on Fassbinder's side... the RAF had no real connection to political struggle, beyond a rhetorical one. They stated "We are revolutionaries, and as revolutionaries, we will perform these deeds." But this identification was capricious and hollow... it was simply something they said, symbolic politics, nothing to do with anything.

But isn't it interesting how symbolic politics produces real effects? Like in the views of the mother, who starts becoming paranoid, fascistic, despite the fact that RAF were never really a serious political force. And this is of course an effect that contemporary terrorism has had as well...
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
josef k. said:
But isn't it interesting how symbolic politics produces real effects? Like in the views of the mother, who starts becoming paranoid, fascistic, despite the fact that RAF were never really a serious political force..
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Which, irionically, is exactly what the RAF wanted, to provoke the German state into revealing its 'true' nature.
 
D

droid

Guest
crackerjack said:
Which, irionically, is exactly what the RAF wanted, to provoke the German state into revealing its 'true' nature.
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And considering they were extra-judicially executed in their cells you could say that they had some success in that aim.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
From "You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship":

The RAF put it this way,


We don't count on a spontaneous anti-fascist mobilisation as a result of terror and fascism itself .....
And we know that our work produces even more pretexts for repression, because we're communists - and whether communists will organise and struggle, whether terror and repression will produce only fear and resignation, or whether it will produce resistance, class hatred and solidarity . . . depends on the response to repression. Whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate such treatment ... depends on this response.​

What is revealed completely in this quote is the absolute arrogance of these groups - "Sure we're hoping for a radical response to the state repression we bring down on your heads, but if that doesn't occur, well, that will go to prove you are all stupid." They ignore the actual conditions, like all guerrillas, demanding that everyone else miraculously achieve their "advanced" consciousness, when, as has already been shown, their ideas are superficial and without value and merely a rallying cry for a massacre.

The reason for the occurrence of this ugly strategy derives from the limitations of urban guerrilla warfare. Since they depend on armed action for their existence, all guerrillas can only develop their struggle by escalating their engagements. If they do not they will be forgotten. Dynamism is everything. But rural guerrillas can do this by establishing and expanding their territory of action - liberated zones. They can choose to take on army formations according to their situation. But urban guerrillas can hold no territory, for to attempt to hold a neighbourhood or building is to take on the entire armed might of the city. In any engagement the size of army forces cannot be ascertained since they can arrive in minutes.

Urban guerrilla warfare must become terrorism in order to develop. There is no other avenue for escalating the struggle. Furthermore the warfare cannot stretch out indefinitely without withering away. This is the appeal of the polarisation and militarisation of society strategy. It is the ultimate in manipulation - an intentional attempt to create suffering among the people for the ends of the guerrillas who assume that they know best and that the people will be better off in the long run. Of course the strategy usually results only in repression.
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D

droid

Guest
Yeah. When you considerer groups like the French resistance and Tito's partisans, the cruelty and ugliness of their strategy is always the first thing that springs to mind...
 
Agent

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
oliver craner said:
I have the feeling that "Agent Nucleus" is making fun of me.
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no i wasn't making fun of anyone dude. sadly i actually wrote a screenplay about baader-meinhof and zombie porn, and then pitched it to asia argento via email. i regret it and all traces of the monster have been destroyed.

but i think, generally speaking, it's a fascinating subject. most of the dialogue in the script was lifted from "the urban guerilla concept." the working title was 'panic regime' and it went to incredible lengths to eroticize terrorism and violence, and yeah it really was shit :)
 
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