Jeremy Varon Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the RAF differed also in their ways of negotiating a tension between excess and limits. The Weathermen, on the verge of attacking human targets, instituted a prohibition on lethal actions. The Germans repeatedly crossed the threshold of lethal violence. Far more than a tactical difference, Weatherman’s and the RAF’s approaches to political murder constitute profound differences—perhaps the most important differences—between the two groups. Their comparison elicits a basic question of political morality: when and under what conditions may one Introduction
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    assume dominion over life and death and kill another human being on behalf of a political ideal or goal?
    The Weathermen claimed to represent the promise of a society that would be more just and humane than the one they sought to destroy. At times, however, their rhetoric and actions belied this claim. In their early days, the Weathermen spun grisly fantasies of limitless destruction and planned attacks that would almost certainly harm “civilians.” Behind Weatherman’s recklessness lay a fascination with transgression and a desire to shock. Within a logic of excess, political murder could be seen as the ultimate transgressive act. But by contemplating or engaging in acts of brutality, the Weathermen reproduced qualities they attributed to their enemy and that they ostensibly opposed. The group’s challenge, then, was to develop an internally constrained practice. The Weathermen responded to the 1970 townhouse explosion by imposing limits on their violence. In short, they made the conscious decision not to be killers.
    The RAF’s brutality, most pronounced in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, has been the object of intensive, if often highly speculative, analyses. Explanations range from the psychopathologies of the individual members, to the internal dynamics of the group, to the specter of Hitler returned in the RAF as his depraved children.17 The most promising interpretive framework highlights the influence of the fascist past on the political conflict of the West German 1960s and 1970s.
    The RAF sought to punish Germany both for the sins of that past and for what it saw as their repetition in the present through such things as police repression and German support for American “genocide” in Vietnam. Here the RAF practiced a logic of vilification, in which it equated the political and judicial custodians of the Federal Republic with Nazi perpetrators. It thus felt an imperative to use any means available, including the murder of state agents, to bury finally the archenemy of political modernity. The RAF also employed, however unselfconsciously, a logic of vindication, in which armed rebellion now would compensate for the virtual absence of violent resistance in Germany to the Nazi regime. In this capacity, lethal violence promised to liberate RAF members from the psychological and political burdens of the past and break the chain of German guilt.
    By practicing terror themselves, RAF members compounded their political failure with moral failure, while deepening their connection to the damage of the past from which they sought an escape. The RAF’s extreme violence also crystallizes the differences between the American and West German armed struggles. Weatherman’s violence was equally inef-14

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    fective in bringing about the kind of social change it imagined. But by observing limits, Weatherman contained the cost of its choices. In one of the few statements of comparison between the two movements, Hans-Joachim Klein of Germany’s Red Cells lamented in 1978 that “the members of the guerrilla [movement] are no longer capable of acting like the Weathermen in the States. Of saying now we stop.”18
    The American and West German armed struggles differed, finally, in the reactions they elicited from their governments and societies. In the 1960s and early 1970s, U.S. security agencies employed invasive, illegal, and violent means in