Varieties of terrorist experience

Uwe Backes' Bleierne Jahre: Baader-Meinhof und danach [The Leaden Years: Baader-Meinhof and After] was published in 1991, near the end of the 23-year active career of the Baader-Meinhof Gang of the title (Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF) and at a time when far-right terrorism was beginning to emerge as a more signficant problem for unifed Germany.

In light of recent polemics over domestic terrorism in the United States, it's useful to see the subject discussed in a different context, from a different time and at a point where both far-right and far-left terrorism were active problems of comparable significance. In a table displaying incidents of left- and rightwing terrorism in the German Federal Republic (BRD; West Germany) from 1968-1989, the left version exceeded the right version for each year in the comparison, with far-right terrorism becoming noticeably more active from 1980 on. Leftwing incidents also increased during that period.

But numerical comparisons can only tell us so much. The year during that period in which terrorism had the most significant political effect in the BRD was 1977, the year in which the RAF kidnapped and eventually "executed" Hanns Martin Schleyer, the head of the BRD's employers' association, which eventually involved the kidnapping of a Lufthansa flight by Palestinian terrorists acting in solidarity with the RAF, and the prison suicides of the RAF's two main leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ennslin. That year was the high-point of the terror that the RAF's actions were designed to inspire and the period in which the German government was under the greatest pressure to step outside its own legal bounds in the fight against the RAF.

So not all acts of terrorism are equal in their political impact. And not all terrorists are equal in terms of their motivations. Backes devotes his longest chapter to biographies of terrorists, including Baader and Ennslin, the other two main RAF founders Horst Mahler and Ulrike Meinhof, Bommi Baumann of a leftwing terrorist group Bewegung 2.Juni, Hans-Joachim Klein of the RAF, and neo-Nazi Odfried Hepp. He then summarizes his research on these and other "terrorist careers".

In the BRD during the period under study, the active terrorists had been most between roughly 20 and 40, with leftwing groups composed more of people near the same age and rightwing ones having a wider spread. Left groups had more female terrorists, right ones were almost exclusively male. Most were from prosperous families. Some kind of serious disruptions in their families' lives was a common factor, e.g., a missing father, divorce.

Among the three leading leftwing terrorist groups in the BRD - RAF, Bewegung 2.Juni and the Revolutionäre Zelle (RZ) - a disproportionate number came from Protestant families. Gudrun Ennslin's father was a Protestant minister. Backes speculates that a Protestant emphasis on the notion that correct belief will make everything right may have played a particular role.

Students composed a large portion of the left terrorists, and liberal arts studies like sociology, education and psychology were especially well represented. Members of far-right terrorist groups tended to have less than the average education compared to other Germans their age. For both groups, a period between completing their education and becoming established in a working career was the most likely period of recruitment.

Backes also describes the evolution of organizational forms of extremist groups involved in violence during the 1980s toward more "autonomous" forms, small groups working together in general but loose coordination with like-minded militants. As violent fringe groups in the US and other countries were discovering around the same time, a decentralized, loosely-knit form of organization is a different kind of challenge to the authorities than a centralized organization. Even in the RAF, the group evolved from a centrally-directed form under the original founding members to a more decentralized mode of operation over time. The "third generation" of the RAF active in the 1980s and 1990s were more successful in evading capture. And even now, their identities are less well known that those of the "first" and "second generations". And developing communications technology allows for even more diffuse methods of operation.

He uses a pyramid diagram of the type that management writers are so fond of employing to illustrate the political environment of the RAF, which could also be applied to other groups, as well. A circle diagram would probably be even more appropriate, particularly for the later, more decentralized forms of organization. There was at any given time a hard core of active, violent militants who were involved in actions against persons (kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies). There was a larger group around the core who were also involved in violence but concetrated on violence against things, objects like buildings, in actions that were designed to have symbolic value rather than hurt people. These could be seen as two parts of the hard core group. In the first and second RAF "generations", the hard core was particularly isolated because they had given up their identities and had to concentrate most of their energy on securing money, weapons and identities papers of various kinds. The hard core of the "third generation" apparently mostly kept their own identities so they didn't have to rely on high-risk activities like robbery and kidnapping to finance their terrorism.

There was a militant group outside the illegals that would engage in smaller violent actions, like throwing rocks during demonstrations or more minor vandalism. This group weren't necessarily all living in the "underground". Then there was a larger group of active sympathizers who were engaged in agitation and propaganda.

These particular environments are vitally important to understanding not only these groups from 20 or 30 years ago but domestic terrorist groups today, as well. Even when the violent actions take the form of seeming "lone wolf" attacks, they are operating in a particular political and psychological environment. Including those who suffering from actual mental illness, which is the "lone nut" script into which the American press tries to squeeze any and all incidents of far-right terrorism. The path to violent action and the selection of targets operate within that larger framework. A leftwing terrorist is not likely to try to assassinate an abortion provider. A neo-Nazi is more likely to shoot up a crowd in a Holocaust museum than to attack a white racist TV commentator.

Recruitment into the hard core of violent militants also typically takes place from the related political circle of activists. That may seem obvious, but it's an important fact. If the broader context of sympathizers is reduced, then the potential for recruiting new violent activists is decreased. But that also means that neither authorities nor those in civil society concerned to reduce the domestic terrorist potential can simply ignore the terrorists' political goals and environment, any more than they can ignore their personal psychology, their choice of weaponry or their criminal modus operandi.

I'll quote Backes' concluding lines here, which focus on the role of fanaticism and the Good vs. Evil Manichean mindset in the phenomenon of terrorism:

Der Terrorismus belegt anschaulich die Macht extremistischer Ideologien. Marxismus, Anarchismus und Nationalismus heißen die intellektuellen Drogen, die das politische Wahrnehmungsvermögen trüben, scheinbar schlüssige Antworten auf alle Probleme bieten und das Verlangen nach „großen" Zielen befriedigen. Aus dem bedingungslosen Einsatz für die einzig „gerechte" Sache sind in der Vergangenheit die größten Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit begangen worden. Wo der Glaube an die absolute Richtigkeit der eigenen Überzeugungen Raum greift, gelten Toleranz und Liberalität als unverzeihliche Schwächen. Für die Erreichung höchster Ziele erscheint letzlich jedes Mittel geeignet. Hier tritt die totalitäre Wurzel des Terrorismus in demokratischen Verfassungsstaaten zutage.

[Terrorism graphically demonstrates the power of extremist ideologies. Marxism, anarchism and nationalism are the names of the intellectual drugs that dull the political perception, offer seemingly definitive answers to all problems and satisfy the longing for "great" objectives. From the unconditional commitment to the only "just" thing, the greatest crimes against humanity have been committed in the past. Where the belief on the absolute rightness of one's own conviction gains ground, tolerance and liberality are seen as unforgiveable weaknesses. For the achievement of the highest goals, any means appears appropriate. Here outcrop the totalitarian roots of terrorism in constitutional democratic states.]

Tags: deutschland, german politics, germany,
postwar germany, raf, rote armee fraktion, terrorism

"Ihr Völker der Welt ..."

Is Barack Obama chanelling the spirit of Ernst Reuter?

Der Spiegel Online headlined their story about Obama's speech in Berlin, Völker der Welt, schaut auf mich, which would literally be, "Peoples of the world, look at me." Which could be read as suggesting Obama was being egocentric. But Berliners are famous for jokes with multiple meanings. (Der Spiegel is headquartered in Hamburg, but still.) And this headline is clearly a reference to one of the most famous speeches in German history, by the Social Democrat Ernst Reuter on September 9, 1948, known as his "Ihr Völker der Welt" speech. Obama's speech quoted Reuter (though oddly not by name) used the phrase "people of the world" more than once in his speech.

In that speech during the Berlin Airlift months, which Reuter,the Mayor of West Berlin, delivered in front of the Reichstag building with a crowd of 350,000 there to hear him, he made a memorable statement of West Berlin's defiance of the Soviet land blockade of the city and called for solidarity from the world. The most famous line of the speech was, "Ihr Völker der Welt ... schaut auf diese Stadt und erkennt, dass ihr diese Stadt und dieses Volk nicht preisgeben dürft, nicht preisgeben könnt" (Peoples of the world, look upon this city and recognize that you should not and cannot surrender this city and this people). My literalist translation doesn't capture the rhetorical appeal of the German. But it's more accurate than whoever did the translation Obama used in quoting that line.

In that connection, the headline implies that Obama represents the forces of democracy and peace trying to change the "rogue state America" policies of the Cheney-Bush administration.

Reuter himself was once the General Secretary of the German Communist Party (KPD). That was in 1921. He had become a Bolshevik during his time as a prisoner of war in Russia. He even worked as a Commissar for a while in the Autonome Sozialistische Sowjetrepublik der Wolgadeutschen (Autonomous Soviet Republic of the Volga Germans)in the Soviet Union. In 1918, he returned to German and was one of the founders of the KPD. But he was kicked out in 1922 for "revisionism" and joined the Social Democratic Party.

He passed away in 1953. He's remembered as one of the greatest heroes of German democracy for his leadership of West Berlin in the early days of the Bundesrepublik (German Federal Republic). His son, Edzard Reuter, served for years as the CEO of Daimler-Benz.

The Mayor of Berlin today is Klaus Wowereit, who's also a Social Democrat and openly gay. He heads what is known as a "red-red coalition", meaning the government is a coalition of the Social Democrats and the Left Party, the latter being the "postcommunist" party that is the direct descendent of the East German Communist Party.

But they're scarcely setting up a Soviet Republic there. As Joschka Fischer writes in Die neuen Regeln Die Zeit 02.03.08:

Zudem hat sich im Bundesland Berlin gezeigt, das seit mehreren Jahren von einem rot−roten Senat regiert wird, dass alle Befürchtungen von einer Rückkehr des Sozialismusschlichter Quatsch sind. Ganz im Gegenteil steht der rot−rote Senat in Berlin für eine Politik der Haushaltssanierung, des Stellenabbaus im öffentlichen Dienst, der Umsetzung der Hartz−IV−Reformen und der Wirtschaftsfreundlichkeit, die man mit einigem Recht zutreffend als rechts von Rot−Grün charakterisieren kann. Von Sozialismus ist da weit und breit keine Spur zu finden.

[It has been shown in the Federal State of Berlin, which has been governed by a red-red senate for several years, that all fears of a return to socialism are sheer nonsense. Very much the opposite; the red-red senate in Berlin stands for a policy of budget streamlining, the reduction of government jobs, the implementation of the Hartz-IV reforms ["pro-business reforms" which reduce some of the powers of unions] and a friendliness to business that one can with full justification characterize as to the right of red-green. Of socialism, there is not a trace to be found.]

Fischer is the former Foreign Minister and former chairman of the Green Party which competes for votes with both the SPD (Social Democrats) and the Left Party, so there's a bit of a partisan perspective dig in that analysis. (For American readers, "socialism" is not universally regarded as a dirty word in European politics.)

In Zurück in die Zeiten des Selbstbetrugs? Die Zeit 18.03.2008, he argues that the pressure for such non-"left" policies even on left-leaning governments comes largely from the demands of globalization.

But I'll try to return to that another time.

According to both Der Spiegel Online and Die Zeit Online, 200 thousand people showed up to see the American Senator on Thursday. It sounds like he was well received in Germany.

Listening to clips of Obama's speech in English to the German public (which surely understood a lot of it) reminded me that I was in Germany two or three weeks after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Vladimir Putin spoke to the German Parliament during the time I was there. In fluent German.

This must have been one of the parts of Obama's speech that suggested a Reuter connection:

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived - at great cost and great sacrifice - to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us -- what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

These are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. These aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. It is because of these aspirations that the airlift began. It is because of these aspirations that all free people - everywhere - became citizens of Berlin. It is in pursuit of these aspirations that a new generation - our generation - must make our mark on the world.

People of Berlin - and people of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.

Tags: barack obama, germany, german politics, joschka fischer, postwar germany

Occupying Germany and occupying Iraq

Typical scene in a German city, 1945

Helena Cobban has a thoughtful post at her Just World News blog that among other things, mentions some of the qualitative differences between the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany and the massive disaster in Iraq: Peace, justice, and war-crimes courts: the view after Iraq 04/20/07.

She emphasizes three points of comparison. Her first point is this:

In 1945, in both Germany and Japan, the national society and the national state had alike been devasted by long years of devastating war (which included extremely fierce and lethal Allied bombardments of most major cities in both countries.) In Japan, a weakened Emperor still survived and was able to submit a surrender and negotiate its terms, though from a very weak position. In Germany, no national command authority survived to surrender; and in addition, nearly all the big military formations crumbled under the final assault. There was little need to "disband" the German army, since it had effectively fallen apart; all that remained in the various parts of Germany to which demoralized small units had fled was to gather them up and put them into POW camps as the Allies swept in for their final advance. In Iraq, by contrast, most of the Iraqi Army's big units had done little or nothing to resist the Allies' advance. They still existed-- and equally importantly, most of their armories still remained intact. When Bremer summarily ordered the disbanding of the entire Iraqi Army he overnight caused the disaffection of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men who had served in the army until then, as well as of all the family members who had been dependent on that man's salary. Moreover, these disaffected men had fairly good military training. They often retained unbroken ties with their former comrades-in-arms. And they had access to huge amounts of weapons and explosives lying in the armories that the occupation forces - mysteriously - did little or nothing to secure. The potential in Iraq for the emergence of well-armed, well-trained forces that would resist the occupation regime made this occupation, from the beginning, very different frm that in Germany or Japan.

I left the following comment there in response to that particular point, with a couple of small wording mistakes that I've corrected here:

What I would add to your point 1 on the German and Japanese postwar occupations is that it's somewhat misleading in the German case to say that the "national state" was "devastated". It's true that the Wehrmacht had been defeated and demobilized, and that the Nazi Party had lost its power and credibility.

But the normal governmental institutions had never been completed wiped out to the extent that occurred in Iraq. The police still functioned, the civil administration could continue to function under new direction. I wouldn't want to exagerate the point: there was some chaos in the cities, with young gangs going around robbing and plundering. But Germany was far better off in that regard than Iraq.

In Iraq, the American invasion "smashed the state" in a way that was no doubt gratifying to the conservative-Troskyist neocons whose pet project it was. (Though Lenin's notion of "smashing the state" had to do with changing its political character, not erasing the entire machinery of government and starting from scratch.)

It also reflected American military assumptions about "shock-and-awe" quickly destroying the command-and-control functions of the enemy, minimizing own-side (American) casualities and achieving a rapid conventional military victory. That figurative "decapitation" of the leadership, combined with the massive looting in Baghdad and other cities that virtually destroyed the physical assets and resources of the civilian governmental institutions, created a power vacuum that was far more drastic that what existed after Germany surrendered.

Germany was defeated. But Iraq was quickly thrown into a state of literal anarchy, of no government.

This is one consequence of a stategy based on "shock-and-awe", in which the military consideration of how to most quickly beat the opposing army was in contradiction to the political needs of the occupation that was to follow. I hope we never undertake another war like this one. But the "lessons of the Iraq War" should include a thorough re-examination of how "shock-and-awe" functioned in winning the (conventional) war but losing the (conventional) peace.

Her second point is this:

The US-led force that occupied Iraq in 2003 was extremely small compared with the forces that had occupied Germany and Japan 58 years earlier.

True. Also much smaller relative to population than the NATO forces in Kosovo. This is already one of the military's main alibis for their failures in the Iraq War, that those mean civilians like Rummy made them go in with too small a force.

While that's true as far as it goes, when our infallible generals were faced with the task of going in with the "army you have", in Rummy's famous phrase, they also had decisions to make about how to approach the task. Their "shock-and-awe" approach had the drawback I mentioned for an operation that clearly would involved a postwar occupation. The failure to have sufficient resources of the right kind available to protect key government buildings is also not something that can be laid entirely at the feet of the bad civilians. Our generals did, after all, manage to protect the Oil Ministry in Baghdad quite well from the looting.

Her third comparison point is:

Finally, the US occupation regime in Iraq differed from those of 1945 in that it did not have within its cadre anything like the required amount of expertise on how to run the occupied country. ... In Iraq, by contrast, though the State Department had done quite a lot of earlier planning for running the occupation, those plans were all summarily jettisoned by Rumsfeld and his aides; and beyond that, Rumsfeld and his aides in the Pentagon made a point of trying to staff their entire occupation administration with people who were not Arabic speakers or experts on Iraqi affairs. Instead, in line with many philosphical predilections of the Bushists, they outsourced most of the tasks of planning for an running the occupation - a job that was outsourced largely to the small coterie of Iraqi exiles convened by Ahmad Chalabi...

Here again, this is true. But we shouldn't let our glorious generals get off by blaming it all on Rummy and Wolfie and their boys. The military had good reasons to anticipate, at least since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, that they needed far more people who were fluent Arabic-speakers. Even today, in the fifth year of war with no end in sight, there has been no push to put a substantial number of soldiers through intensive, year-long Arabic courses that could raise them to a decent level of fluency. That's not just Rummy's fault. It's also due to our generals who are more interested in fighting their inter-service rivalries and winning contracts for expensive and high-profile boondoggles like the Star Wars program than they are in taking care of an obvious need like this.

Tags: germany, iraq, iraq war, postwar germany