Yesterday a very unpopular decision has made it to the news: Brigitte Mohnhaupt will be released from prison on March 27th. Brigitte who?
Some thirty years ago, the "Rote Armee Fraktion" (RAF / Red Army Faction) had waged a guerrilla war on Germany. Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of BDI (League of German Industrialists) and BDA (League of German employers), Siegfried Buback, Federal State Attorney of Germany, and Günter von Drenckmann, President of the Berlin Kammergericht, have been allegedly killed by terrorists. A Lufthansa plane had been hijacked to Somalia by RAF-associated Palestinians in order to blackmail the Federal Republic of Germany to release the convicted terrorists Jan Carl Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader from the Stuttgart Stammheim high-security prison.
These were the days of what historians call the German Fall (Deutscher Herbst) 1977.
The hijacking failed and the imprisoned terrorists were found dead in their cells. Investigations came to the result that they had committed suicide, but some questions have been waiting for answers ever since.
The RAF has always been a nightmare to Germany as were the Brigate Rosse to Italy, who allegedly have killed Aldo Moro, then the head of the Democrazie Cristiana, one of the most influential political groups in Italy. Nobody could infiltrate the RAF, not much was known about its structure and about its lines of command. The founders being either dead or convicted to life terms in high security prisons, the so-called "second generation RAF" was an enigmatic mystery, which has not quite been solved until this very day.
One of the few successes of the German police state was Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who, being sentenced to three life terms in prison plus fifteen additional years, is going to be released on March 27th, having served twenty-four years in prison.
Some people, including the widow of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, still consider her one of the most ferocious enemies the German state ever had.
But, did she and her fellow Guerrillas really fight the state?
The explicit aim of these terrorists was to provoke the state, not to fight it. They wanted the police state to fight. Not to fight the feeble force the RAF represented in her wildest days, but to crack down on the average man. The RAF intended to create a brutish police state in order to force the German public to revolt and follow their lead into a socialist revolution, where the RAF leaders would be able to lead the German people into a socialist terror state the way Lavrentii Beriia and Joseph Stalin would have approved of – with the RAF terrorists as benevolent dictators and leaders.
They were denounced as Anarchists, fighting the state, but in reality, they were serving as excuses to create a police state Heinrich Himmler would have been proud of. With the RAF as an excuse, laws could be passed, which would have caused the press to cry bloody murder and which would have made many – classical – liberals piss blood. Instead, they all fell in line and applauded to laws which would have been blatantly unconstitutional, if the Grundgesetz, which had been in a bad constitution already, had not been altered in time in order to give these laws a "constitutional" foundation.
When, in 1990, the Eastern part of Germany pleaded for annexation, the Grundgesetz was altered again, essential parts, like the old article 145, which had granted the people the right to resist against a state, which had undergone the change from state to tyranny, being omitted or counteracted.
The legislation after 1990 could erase all barriers in the way to a total police state, legalizing things like searches without warrant, telephone surveillance without even a hint of a suspicion, abolition of the last remainders of financial privacy, a new shortcut between secret services and police, like in the good old GeStaPA1 days and many, many more items which were established long ago in order to limit the government's powers.
George Orwell's 1984 was an optimist prophecy of a total police state, but even Orwell could not foresee internet surveillance or "Rasterfahndung" (computerized investigation), which would bring many harmless people in trouble, but not a single terrorist. During the heydays of Rasterfahndung and RAF hype, the apartment of an octogenarian lady had been raided by a Sondereinsatzkommando, the German equivalent to a SWAT unit, merely because her daughter had been paying her telephone bill in cash every month. The old lady had no bank account of her own and could not pay her telephone bill by cashless payment. What a success in the war against terror!
The last of the RAF terrorists who ever happened to run into the dragnet of German investigation was Christian Klar, who surrendered to some surprised policemen when he, halfway starved and deteriorated, had found no way to run or hide any more. He, of course, had been sentenced to several life terms and will most probably be released in 2008.
Most rules of due process have been suspended for the sake of fighting terrorism, thus turning the state into a terrorist group, exactly the way the RAF had intended to.
The rhetorical question is: who served whom, the terrorists the state or vice versa. In point of fact, German Police State has recovered from its 1945 defeat and has resurrected in full glory. The only excuse it needs to flourish again will be a new Reichstagsbrand as a legitimation for a perpetual state of siege. I think, this will not be much of a problem to create. Another Martinus van der Lubbe might be waiting somewhere in the dark to take the blame.
When on March 27th, the gates of Aichach prison will open for Brigitte Mohnhaupt, still some people will think of her as a heroine in the fight against the state. She will most probably live off social welfare and the royalties of the books she is going to have written in her name.
I will think of her as what she really was and why she earned the pension our state will grant her: a true and faithful servant.
- The commonly known acronym "Gestapo" was popular, but wrong. The official term was Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, a. k. a. GeStaPA.
February 15, 2007
