Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Dogs and the RAF

No, not that RAF, I mean the Red Army Faction, previously known as the Baader-Meinhof gang and they were responsible for a large number of bombings in Germany from the 70s through the late 90s. In large part this was in reaction to the failure of the German leadership to eliminate ex-Nazis from the government after World War II.

They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves!

- Gudrun Ensslin

That aspect is fairly obvious as there's a problem so you get a gun and shoot it.  Being fairly brutal about it, that's Texas thinking.  Kill 'em all and let God sort it out.


If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence. If one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.

- Ulrike Meinhof

More than 'off the pigs,' this statement goes to the root of what is terrorism in the first place.  They viewed their action as graduate-level Marxism, essentially writing the books Marx didn't live long enough to write for himself.

Other than the disgrace they felt had been shoved on them by those who failed to eliminate Nazism and their rejection of what they considered to be a fascist state, there's the standard model rejection of the bourgeois status quo.  The latter aspect was prevalent in the sixties in the U.S. and the Weathermen took up that fight but really didn't get all that far with it, nowhere near as far as the RAF.  However, that which was bourgeois in the sixties became a religion in the eighties and has been ever since.

What this has to do with the dogs is that they're in a story of revolution and it's very deliberately that it is being conducted without weapons.  How much of the American government today is dominated by fascism is for you to determine but at least there are no Nazis in it.  Nevertheless, in my view all the ingredients are there for violent protest and the dogs are my view of one possible consequence of that.  Whether it could ever play the way I have projected is for you to judge but hopefully there is some value in it in any case.  Four more days to go with it.  That will get me back through Texas and hopefully even playing again by that time at which time the blog will switch back to my usual crap-ass music!

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