The Attack on the BAW

All the theories about the apparatus which we used to prevent the federal prosecutors from sitting comfortably in their offices musing about how to arrange the next murder of a political prisoner, or planning a manhunt or a show trial or raids against citizens and lawyers who sympathize with us, or fabricating all of the lies and the hatred of the “information offensive”—are false.

It wasn’t used to create a bloodbath—in this nest of reactionary violence, which already during the communist trials of the fifties sided with the ongoing fascism—or as part a “new strategy” or the “arms race between rival guerilla groups” that we read about.

Nor was it used to attack Rebmann, although he appears to be even more unscrupulous, more brutal, and a more loathsome demagogue than Buback.

It was simply meant as a warning, in a situation where over forty political prisoners were on hunger strike, because when he was Undersecretary for the Ministry of Justice in Baden-Wurttemburg, Rebmann promised to allow the prisoners’ association in groups of 15. As Attorney General, he has reversed himself and broken this promise.

The group that previously existed in Stammheim is now smaller instead of larger, and the prisoners are now—after five years of isolation—once again totally segregated from one another, despite the fact that doctors, Amnesty International, the World Council of Churches, the League for Human Rights, and the Association of Democratic Jurists have all demanded that they be granted association, because isolation causes illness and, with time, death—that is to say, as a form of imprisonment, isolation constitutes torture and is a violation of human rights.

We proceeded from the view that following Buback’s removal from office because of the murders of Holger, Ulrike, and Siegfried, and given the complete isolation the hunger strike provoked, Rebmann felt a need to distinguish himself by using the situation to execute Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan.

We agree with the prisoners’ decision to break off their hunger and thirst strike, and we ask them to not resume it for the time being, not until we know whether the sanctimonious gang of murderers—the Ministers of Justice, judges, prosecutors, and cops—will choose to remain as arrogant in the face of our weapons, which we can use, as they do in the face of the weapons the prisoners have at their disposal.

The moral appeal of a hunger strike is useless, because this state’s political violence is not in danger of becoming “fascistoid” or of showing “fascist tendencies,” but is transforming itself into a new fascism, one that differs from National Socialism only inasmuch as it represents American and German monopolies, and can therefore proceed more aggressively, more powerfully, and more subtly than German capital during its barbaric nationalist period.

Whether they are part of the justice system, the executive, the political parties, the corporations, or the media, the greasy elite understand only one language: violence.

The misery and humiliation in the state security wings and the barbarism of force-feeding is for them no more than their own sick in-joke for the lunchroom.

Should it be taken up again, they intend to use the strike to kill you, just like now, because we need you, and they want to take every trace of morality and solidarity that the sacrifice of your struggle has produced and bury them under a mountain of shit, a mountain of cynical rumor-mongering and propaganda.

They’d like to have a good long laugh at our expense. Those who understand the struggle in the isolation holes (the dungeons, the torture of force-feeding)—those who understand the prisoners’ determination, know that it is possible to be free. We will not make any further demands, and the ongoing activity and solidarity of the raf will not be limited to communiqués.

We repeat: should a prisoner be murdered—and death in an isolation cell is nothing other than murder—we will respond immediately, both inside and outside of Germany.

Should Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan be killed, the apologists for the hard line will find that they are not the only ones with weapons at their disposal. They will find that we are many, and that we have enough love—as well as enough hate and imagination—to use both our weapons and their weapons against them, and that their pain will equal ours.

“The solidarity of the people
is grounded in revolt.”