Voudou in Haiti
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Friday, March 27, 2020
Can fear cure cancer?
In 1962, East German researchers conducted a bizarre medical experiment in an attempt to find out if fear could cure cancer
Book Review
Book Review
Phantom Terror:
Political Paranoia and the Creation Of the Modern State 1789 - 1848
by Adam Zamoyski
Many consider
the French Revolution to be the birth of modern politics in the
Western world. It was a traumatic birth, though, and resulted in the
Napoleonic Wars and the reactionary, reestablishment of monarchical
rule in Europe. Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom Terror addresses
the repercussions of those events on the general populace and the
governments of that era.
One
social level
that gets written about extensively by
Zamoyski is the European aristocracy and how they devised plans to
maintain power. The middle and lower classes were seen as a threat.
Ideologies of nationalism and
liberal democratic government made them worry that their status as
monarchs and government officials was under attack. The main actor in
Zamoyski’s drama is Metternich, the Austrian diplomat for the
Habsburg Empire. His authoritarian tendencies led him to hold the
Congress of Vienna, as well
as conferences in Toplitz and Karlsbad,
where all the leaders of Europe met to divide up territory and scheme
up ways to keep the common people down. Another important figure in
this book is Tsar Alexander of Russia, the paranoid Christian mystic
who at first felt sympathetic to liberalism but switched to
conservative totalitarian politics towards the later years of his
life. Russian troops at the time were spread all over Europe in an
effort to prevent any uprisings and to spread the Russian empire
farther west. Also involved were King Frederick William of Prussia,
King Ferdinand of Spain, the French Bourbon monarchy, Castlereagh of
Great Britain, and a whole host of other minor political
functionaries. Italy and
Germany were little more than a handful of small kingdoms with no
concept of nationality.
On
the other side were the lower and middle classes of Europe.
Demonstrations, riots, terrorist attacks, assaults, assassinations,
and minor uprisings were common in those times. Most of them were of
small consequence, often happening because of low wages or high food
prices. Some of them were the result of students asserting a national
identity as a form of resistance to the rule of the Habsburg Empire.
A small number of
disturbances were the result of activists wanting a republic
characterized by democratic rule. Zamoyski drives home the point that
the turbulence and violence of that era could have been minimized if
the citizens had had more political representation. The dictatorial
policies of the conservative
aristocracy and
their bureaucracies
caused more problems than they
solved.
Metternich
and Alexander saw things differently. They
were convinced that a secret committee of conspirators were planning
and directing all the controversies in order to persecute and
eventually overthrow the monarchies of Europe. Those rulers became
obsessed with conspiracy theories and saw the machinations of
Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Templars, Luddites,
Jacobins, Jews, and
Jesuits behind every event that happened no matter how small or
trivial. They set up an extensive police force and network of spies
to search for this secret committee and wasted a lot of time and
money because no such organization ever existed. Some secret
societies, like the Italian Carbonari, really did exist but their
lack of organization, insularity, and small numbers never led to any
substantial action. The governments involved themselves in the
extensive reading of people’s mail, entrapment through the use of
agents provocateurs, and
paying informants
for information that usually proved to be false or misleading
. They
instituted
a massive surveillance state and wound up with troves of worthless
documents describing nothing of any importance. They also engaged in
extensive censorship of books, art, theater, and schools. Their
efforts nearly bankrupted the Habsburg bureaucracy without producing
any worthwhile
results. By the middle of the 19th
century, nationalist movements were causing the Habsburg and Russian
Empires to weaken and decline anyhow.
Zamoyski
makes a
good case for the
idea that political mismanagement and lack of freedom eventually
resulted in the problematical governments of fascism and communism in
the 20th
century. He makes his point a little too bluntly though. Most
chapters are pretty much the same. Political disturbances occur while
the paranoid government officials send out their spies to locate the
secret society
that instigates all the chaos. No book club, discussion group,
student fraternity, cafe conversation, barroom brawl, or fist fight
is too trivial for Zamoyski to ignore. Descriptions
of upper-class conspiracy theories, mail reading committees, or plots
to infiltrate
suspect organizations are redundant to an extreme. The same basic
ideas and events get repeated over and over again from the first
chapter to the last and
it goes on for 500 pages.
Phantom
Terror addresses
a fascinating subject. The reading gets bogged down by too much
detail, a lot of it repetitious
and unnecessary. Zamoyski
could have made his point in half as many pages without succumbing to
the temptation to over-document so much of what happened in those
times. Still, the issue he raises is worth considering; at the start
of the 21st
century our governments appear to be making some of the same mistakes
that were made back then in Europe. Some results appear to be the
same too while the
internet and surveillance cameras are just making espionage and
paranoia all that much easier.
Zamoyski, Adam. Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation Of the Modern State 1789 - 1848. Basic Books, New York: 2015.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
There's an Unfinished 'City of The Future' Tucked Away in The Arizona Desert
There's a giant contradiction in the middle of the Arizona desert: an experimental city designed for thousands that now contains only a few dozen inhabitants.
For nearly five decades, a group called the Cosanti Foundation has been working to build a city that would inspire a new future of urban design. Today, the project is only 5 percent complete.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Rise and fall of the Italian Carbonari
The Carbonari, or “charcoal burners,” were an Italian nationalist group that formed during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. An offshoot of the Freemasons, the Carbonari as a whole were created to oppose tyranny of all kinds, although this chief aim was kept hidden from all but those few who progressed to the prestigious rank of Grand Master Grand Elect.
Book Review
Book Review
The Altered Ego by Jerry Sohl
The setting is
Los Angeles in 2045 and scientists have discovered how to store a
person’s memories and transfer them to another body after death.
Jerry Sohl, author of The Altered Ego, was
a prolific scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone, Star Trek,
and other tv shows of that era.
So here we get a lean, plot driven novelette that can be entertaining
when looked at through the proper lens.
Bradley
Kempton is the genius leader of a corporation that produces optical
systems for spaceships. Kempton gets murdered and brought back to
life but his son Carl quickly realizes that his father is not the old
self he used to be. Carl and his hot girlfriend Marilla start to
investigate why and learn that a subordinate employee named John
Hardesty had died a month earlier; the corporate scientists who
record and preserve people’s
memories had implanted Hardesty’s mind into Kempton’s body before
resuscitating it.
At
first, The Altered Ego reads
like a detective novel in a science-fiction setting. Carl seeks out
hard data on John Hardesty while Marilla shadows the
newly restored man. Both
learn that Hardesty indulges in the seamy side of Los Angeles. Like
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, the
story opens with a mystery that is solved almost immediately but the
early solution leads to the uncovering of a conspiracy. Sohl’s
conspiracy, however, is one
of international and intergalactic proportions. It is the pursuit of
the how and why of the plot
that draws the protagonists along
a path of quick and sharp plot twists.
As
Carl learns more about the conspiracy, he crosses the paths of the
men responsible for it. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital, only
to discover his father, the real Brandon Kempton, is imprisoned there
too. However, his father’s memories had been implanted into the
brain and body of a psychopathic killer. The
big revelation is why Brandon Kepmton’s mind was preserved for the
sake of the criminal cabal.
That
is where the best parts of the book end. The chase scene and the
climactic confrontation are formulaic and cliched. The story ends the
way you might expect a movie of the 1950s to end which should be no
surprise considering who Jerry Sohl was in real life. The final
chapter is especially bad; a detective explains everything that
happened in a typical mystery story
fashion. But all he really
does is run through the events of the previous chapter; assuming you
actually read that chapter before going on to the last chapter, you
have to wonder why the author thought this was necessary. Maybe Sohl
thought it was too fast paced for you to comprehend or you are horribly deficient in memory.
Maybe he thought there was a need for closure. Maybe he was
contracted to write a certain number of pages and used the final
monologue as filler. Or maybe he just ended it that was because Sohl
insisted on slavishly following the murder mystery formula,
paint-by-numbers style. Even worse, the final lines of the story are
especially cheesy. You might
be left with a better impression in the end if you skip the last
chapter entirely.
The Altered
Ego can be criticized for a
number of other shortcomings. It is a plot driven book so character
development is only taken to the point where the personality traits
make each person fit the role they are meant to play in the story. It
is thematically shallow. The switch between John Hardesty and Brandon
Kempton could be an effective, if
unoriginal, exploration of the doppelganger motif. Marilla could
represent the strive for women’s equality in the world of fiction.
John Hardesty’s attempt at seducing Marilla, his faux-son’s
girlfriend, looks like a reversal of the Oedipal Complex. The
conspiracy could be a useful metaphor for Cold War politics and the
science of the sanitarium could be a reference
to the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program. But these themes are
only hinted at and never explored. Sohl’s
novelette appears formulaic and cartoonish. But if you like cartoons,
that is perfectly alright.
The Altered
Ego has its faults. Really, it
is intended to be read for entertainment more than anything. If you
read it that way
it fulfills that purpose and is, honestly, fun to read if you do not
take it too seriously.
Sohl, Jerry. The Altered Ego. Pennant Books, New York: 1954.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Uganda's Kanungu cult massacre that killed 700 followers
Judith Ariho does not shed any tears as she recalls the church massacre in which her mother, two siblings and four other relatives were among at least 700 people who died.
Friday, March 20, 2020
How to keep astronauts sane: The psychology of long-duration space missions
When it comes to space missions, we normally think about the challenges in terms of technological developments. But if we ever hope to send a manned mission to Mars, then we’re going to have to confront not only our technological but also our psychological limitations.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Why Did Humans Evolve Big Penises But Small Testicles?
Humans have a much longer and wider penis than the other great apes. Even the largest of gorillas, more than twice as heavy as a human, will have a penis just two and half inches long when erect.
However our testicles are rather small. A chimpanzee’s testes weigh more than a third of its brain while ours weigh in at less than 3%. The relative size of our penis and testes is all down to our mating strategies, and can provide some surprising insights into early human culture.
The Books We Can Use to Rebuild Civilization, Selected by Neal Stephenson, Brian Eno, Tim O’Reilly & More
With so many of us across the world stuck at home, humanity's thoughts have turned to what we'll do when we can resume our normal lives. This time of quarantine, lockdown, and other forms of isolation urges us to reflect, but also to read — and in many cases to read the important books we'd neglected in our pre-coronavirus lives. Quite a few such volumes appear in the Long Now Foundation's "Manual for Civilization," which longtime Open Culture readers will remember us featuring not long after it launched in 2014. Its name refers to a library, one that according to the Foundation's executive director Alexander Rose "will include the roughly 3500 books most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization."
William Burroughs on…Led Zeppelin!
When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
The Fall of Evo Morales
A controversial socialist leader fled his country. Was he deposed - or did he escape justice?
Remembering the Time Throbbing Gristle Played A Private School
On March 16th, 1980, the "wreckers of civilisation" played one of England's top boarding schools. Here's the story, as told by some of those who were there.
Monday, March 16, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
Daddy Was an Undertaker
by McDill McCown Gassman
Those of you
fortunate enough to be possessed by a sense of morbid curiosity, take
note. Daddy Was an Undertaker by
McDill McCown Gassman may be a book for you. This short and easy book
has some dark themes which come across as even darker
when keeping in mind that it was written for young adults or
children.
The
story is autobiographical. Dill is a little girl whose father owns
and operates a funeral parlor; the family lives in the apartment on
the second floor. The secondary theme of this book is her love and
admiration for her father, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who brought his
family to Huntsville, Alabama where he set up his trade. Through a
series of anecdotes, we learn how the family, and especially Dill,
are outsiders in the community. Her father is well-respected but kept
at an arm’s length by most people while Dill gets teased and
bullied at school. The presence of death is felt in most of the
stories. Many chapters have interesting themes; along the way, Dill
gets to see a dead body leaking brains and blood after a car crash,
the family goes on vacation in a horse-drawn hearse,
a man commits suicide at his brother’s funeral, and Dill almost
gets trampled to death by a bull. The simple writing style somehow
illuminates these grim mini-narratives with the sunshiny joy and
playfulness of childhood. The gloom of her neurosis
gets balanced by her curiosity and wonder at the good-natured aspects
of her life.
To
make it even more interesting, the narrator is a chronic vomiter.
Ever time she gets excited about something, her stomach churns and
she loses her lunch for all to see. Dill pukes at school, ralphs over
the side of a horse-cart, and barfs while watching the fireworks
explode during the the 4th
of July. I kept expecting her to upchuck at church or hurl during a
funeral ceremony but those events never came to pass.
The
family’s relationship with the African-American community is
interesting too.
In one passage, Dill and her sister are preparing their ghost
costumes for Halloween.
They hear a car pull up outside and run out to see who it is. There
are two African-American men outside who are immediately frightened
and quickly drive away. Obviously, but without saying it directly,
this is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. You may think this scene is
cruel at first but as the book goes on, it becomes obvious that the
author had a great amount of respect for the African-American people.
Her father defends them when people put them down, she writes with
admiration about a 90 year old ex-slave who tells her stories and
sings for her, and her father even helps a young Black man escape
from a lynch mob. Some of this is patronizing to African-American
people by today’s standards but this book mostly takes place in
Alabama during the 1920s; this literature would have been both
progressive and controversial in that decade so a little historical
perspective can go a long way.
Another
interesting thing about this book is the artwork. Each chapter has an
illustration with a caption taken from the narrative and written
along the bottom. Some of the
better one, especially when
taken out of context, look similar to the art of Raymond Pettibon.
One shows Dill hugging her father’s knees while he holds a pair of
handcuffs and a pistol. The
caption reads, “I flung myself at Daddy’s knees...’Don’t go,’
I implored, ‘Oh, Daddy – don’t go!’”
Not
all of the writing is great and the few passages that
make no
reference to death or anxiety are not especially interesting but
Daddy Was an Undertaker is
still worth being hunted down and read. It could even be interpreted
as a young adult version of the Southern Gothic style even though
that probably was not the author’s intention. McCown Gassman has
written the kind of book that could inspire Tom Waits to write a
song. It could inspire John Waters to make a movie. It is a weird
book and that is why it should be read.
McCown Gassman, McDill. Daddy Was an Undertaker. Vantage Press Inc., New York: 1952.
US museum Dead Sea Scroll collection found to be fakes
A collection of supposedly valuable Dead Sea Scroll fragments on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC has been found to be fake.
Collecting Side Show/Carny Books
It may seem an odd subject to want to amass titles, but for some, the quirkiness and oddities that circus sideshows and carnivals provide are fascinating subjects. I began to indulge in collecting any mystery that had a smidgen of sideshow or carny theme, and have progressed to purchasing non crime fiction too. Sideshows are considered politically incorrect in this day and age. People think that displaying individuals with physical deformities is demeaning and exploitive. Perhaps it is, for some. But for many of the performers of yesteryear who graced the tents and circus midways, the money and notoriety was a welcome thing, the alternative to being shut away in some institution or hidden in the attic of a family home.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
The actor who was really stabbed on stage
When he was cast as Hamlet at age 24, Conor Madden thought his stage career was about to take off - but then an accident during a sword-fighting scene left him with serious injuries. No-one knew whether he would ever act again.
R.I.P. Genesis P-Orridge
R.I.P. Genesis P-Orridge
(1950 - 2020)
member of Throbbing Gristle & Psychic TV
founder of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
Book Review
Book Review
Paris In the Terror: June 1793 - July 1794
by Stanley Loomis
Reading about
the French Revolution can be a bewildering task. A lot of books
examine the abstract ideologies at the expense of the people who
participated in it. Those ideologies can seem like a haze of minute
details and inconsistent theories. A lot of those books also
prostitute the subject matter, be it Marxists, conservatives,
anarchists, American libertarians or Thomas Carlyle; the revolution
gets used as a means of pushing a political agenda adding extra
elements of confusion into an already murky historical subject. This
is where Stanley Loomis’ Paris In the Terror:June 1793 – July
1794 comes in since it focuses
on the people more than the ideas of the French Revolution.
Loomis’
approach is to describe the human side of those times. The major
figures are portrayed as detailed individuals and their
psychological motivations are brought out into
the open for the world to
see. This book is written
almost like a novel with vivid descriptions and plot elements so that
the reader feels like they are present as the events unfold. This
makes the history easier to relate to and more comprehensible.
Another thing that Loomis gets right is
that he does not try to tell the story of the whole revolt in one
book. By narrowing the scope of the narrative, the events and their
significance are easier to grasp. It probably does not matter that it
solely examines the Reign of Terror that happened at the climax
of the French Revolution. A basic knowledge of what came before and
after that notorious time is
enough to make this book comprehensible. The well-defined characters
and sharp focus on one segment gives
Paris In the Terror more
structure, clarity, and gravity than other accounts therefore
justifying it as a significant text for serious readers.
It
is possible to say the character driven narrative makes Loomis’
writing almost cinematic. You may wonder why so much of the first
section is dedicated to the life of Charlotte Corday who many authors
might consider to be of little value since she is only remembered for
the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. But learning about her
motivations clarifies a lot of the conflicts inherent in the story.
She exemplifies the contrast between Paris and the outlying
provinces, the division between the Girondins
and Montagnards in the Assembly, and the ambiguous intellectualism
and attitudes to the
revolution that were current among the French populace.
A
larger section of Paris In the Terror describes
the life of Danton. Loomis portrays him as the moderate leader of the
Cordelier Club that tried to unite the naively idealistic Girondins
with the action-oriented thugs and ruffians of the Montagnards. All
the while he was embezzling money from the national treasury to
purchase property despite his loyalty and patriotism to the country
of France that he deeply loved. The complexities and contradictions
of his motives get thoroughly examined; Loomis makes him one of the
central figures of the story and his mixture of admiration and
disappointment is easy to see.
The
other major player is Robespierre. The cutthroat lawyer who loved the
guillotine more than the French people gets cast as a horrifying
villain. His character is
cowardly and humorless, unable to love and asexual. His lofty moral
standards were impossible for anyone to live up to except for
himself. His intention was to purge France of anyone who was not
revolutionary enough so he cut through a lot of red tape by
eliminating due process of law and sending
thousands of people to the Place de la Revolution to be butchered by
the executioner Samson. Eventually his followers began to realize
that the longer they lived, the closer they got to the guillotine. It
is difficult to sympathize with the character of Robespierre but it
also becomes more apparent as the book goes on that the
French Revolution was mostly
a populist uprising; the members of the Jacobins who made up most of
the Assembly were politically naive and inexperienced in running a
government. One lesson that might be learned is that having
merchants, farmers, and thugs seize control over government can
easily lead to a bloodbath, especially when they feel their goals are
not being reached quickly or
efficiently enough.
Paris In the
Terror is not without it faults.
Jean-Paul Marat gets portrayed as a ranting,
resentful instigator of violence; this portrayal may be true but
there are many people who consider him a hero and Loomis’ does not
draw him as a three-dimensional character which he does for others
like Charlotte Corday who has her share of detractors as well.
Overall, the accuracy of Loomis’ depictions
can be called into question but then again, so what? It is clear who
the author loves and who he hates but any writer or historian will
bring their own personal prejudices into their writing. Besides, so
far no other author can claim a monopoly on truth when it comes to
portraying the French Revolution. It was a time when too much
happened, there were too many people involved, and they all brought
their own ideas, legitimate or
not, into the events of the
day. It would be natural for even eye-witnesses of the revolution to
give contradictory accounts of what happened.
Paris In the
Terror is a fascinating book.
Its vivid descriptions put the reader right at the sidelines of the
action while exemplifying how human nature and psychology caused the
French Revolution to take all the disastrous turns that it did. The
ideologies of the participants take a back seat to the people who
believed in them. It also does not revel in the gore and inhumane
slaughter that characterized the Reign of Terror. History
is made by people and the people, with all their imperfections, who
made the French Revolution are at the center of this storm. You do
not have to agree with Loomis’ interpretations to get a lot out of
this book; you just have to observe and decide for yourself what to
think.
Loomis, Stanley. Paris In the Terror: June 1793 - July 1794. J.B. Lippincott and Company, Philadelphia and New York: 1964.
Saturday, March 14, 2020
The Long, Complicated History of Auto-Fellatio
People have been fixated on the act of auto-fellatio for thousands of years—and a handful have succeeded.
Friday, March 13, 2020
Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse
As modern civilization’s shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to the decline and fall of civilizations past. Their studies have generated rival explanations of why societies collapse and civilizations die. Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch. Of course, surviving the real thing will become a much different story.
Thursday, March 12, 2020
The Endless Culture War In the Pacific
My Hero Academia is one of the recent breakout hits of Japan’s anime and manga industry. Created by Kōhei Horikoshi and inspired by Western superhero comics, it’s been ongoing since 2014. However, the ghosts of the past risk overshadowing its global acclaim and many accolades
JEAN PAUL MARAT
Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) has become one of the French Revolution’s most identifiable figures, as much for his untimely death as his political contributions he made in life.
Victorian Party People Unrolled Mummies For Fun
IF YOU WERE LOOKING TO have a great night out on January 15, 1834, Thomas Pettigrew’s sold-out event was definitely the place to be. The lucky Londoners who had managed to acquire a ticket for the Royal College of Surgeons that night, were looking forward to a rare sensation: before their eyes, Pettigrew was going to slowly unroll an authentic Egyptian mummy of the 21st dynasty–for science!
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Anti-Musicality: An Interview With Romain Perrot Of VOMIR
Russell Williams speaks to Romain Perrot, one of the main practitioners of harsh noise wall, to discuss how creating his monolithic slabs of caustic static offers a way to exorcise his frustration with the world
Monday, March 9, 2020
Richard Serra’s Epic Steel Sculpture in the Qatari Desert Has Suffered ‘Significant and Deliberate’ Vandalism
The artist’s largest installation will be cleaned by the state-run organization that funded the project.
The Red Army Faction and the Baader - Meinhof Gang
The 1960s were
turbulent times throughout the world. The New Left had begun to
emerge and demonstrations against the Vietnam War and nuclear power
were becoming commonplace in first world nations. West Germany was no
exception but youth activists in that country, which was divided by
communists and capitalists into East and West respectively with the
Wall dividing Berlin in half, had a deeper problem than other
nations. World War II had ended and the Nazis were defeated but many
members of the National Socialist party were later given prominent
positions in the media, the police, and the government of West
Germany. Even worse, the West German government were supplying the
U.S. military with weapons produced in German factories. Many
activists feared another Nazi uprising was imminent in their country.
Some of them were content with ordinary protests while others saw the
situation in more drastic terms. Underground urban guerilla movements
began to coalesce and one of these, the Red Army Faction, were
prepared to commit acts of terrorism and violence in the name of
revolution.
Andreas
Baader’s mother raised him by herself. His father was a member of
the Wehrmacht and he got caught during the invasion of Russia, never
to return. As a teenager, Andreas Baader dropped out of high school
and embraced the bohemian lifestyle of the fledgling hippie movement.
He got involved in political activism up to 1968 when he and his
girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, firebombed a department store in
Frankfurt am Main to protest Germany’s involvement with the
American military in Vietnam. The pair got arrested but after their
sentencing, activists sympathetic to their cause, helped them escape
and smuggled them across the border into Switzerland. They traveled
clandestinely around Europe, staying in communes and squats to
establish contacts with radicals all across the continent. Eventually
they sneaked back into West Germany.
Andreas Baader
had a habit of hot-wiring sports cars. One night when he ran a red
light in a stolen vehicle, the police pulled him over. After checking
his counterfeit driver’s license, they were not convinced he was
who he claimed to be so they hauled him off to jail, discovering his
true identity later. Gudrun Ensslin tracked down a journalist named
Ulrike Meinhof because she had a plan for breaking Baader out of
prison.
Ulrike Meinhof
had been involved with political activism and communism since the
late 1950s. As time went on she became more radical and more
militant. Throughout the 1960s, she had been working as a journalist,
writing stories for Konkret magazine. In 1968, a right-wing
extremist tried to assassinate the Marxist sociologist Rudi Dutschke;
he shot Dutschke in the head but the scholar survived and escaped
with his family to England to live in safety. Meinhof wrote an angry
article about the attempted murder and denounced political protests,
declaring that the time for fighting in the streets had come. Around
that same time, she made contact with Baader and Ensslin in order to
report on their arson attack against the store in Frankfurt.
When Ensslin
contacted Meinhof in 1970, the journalist had quit writing for
Konkret magazine because she felt they were becoming too
mainstream. Nonetheless, Ensslin persuaded her to use her
journalistic credentials to arrange for an interview with Andreas
Baader who was then living in prison. The authorities agreed to allow
the interview to take place in a university library in West Berlin.
While Ulrike Meinhof was waiting inside, Baader arrived with two
armed guards. He sat down with her and they began their interview. As
they talked, two females entered the library with suitcases
accompanied by a man who had been hired because of his professional
experience with firearms. The two women opened their suitcases which
were filled with guns. A firefight broke out between them and the two
armed guards. The gunman opened fire and accidentally shot the
elderly librarian in the liver. Baader and his three companions
escaped through an open window. Ulrike Meinhof went with them.
Originally, she had planned to stay behind and deny any knowledge of
the escape plan but at the last minute she gave in and went along.
Later that day she called a friend and asked her to pick up her
children from school. Ulrike Meinhof never returned home and she
never saw her children again.
About that
time, the police and the press began referring to the escapees as the
Baader-Meinhof Gang. But the urban guerillas saw themselves in a
different light. While living underground with the revolutionaries,
Ulrike Meinhof wrote a manifesto which was soon printed, published,
and distributed around the activist scene. The pamphlet’s cover had
an assault rifle against the background of a red star with the
letters “R.A.F.” The intention was to announce the establishment
of the Red Army Faction; the Baader-Meinhof Gang were to be just one
part of this group which also included the 2 June Movement, the
Socialist Patient’s Collective, Kommune 1, and the Situationists.
Members of these groups did not recognize each other by sight but
knew each other through the use of code names and secret communiques.
Together they would unite to fight a class war against the forces of
capitalism, fascism, and imperialism.
Then the
Baader-Meinhof Gang disappeared. They re-emerged in Jordan where the
Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine were waiting for them.
The PFLO had made arrangements to give the guerillas training in
terrorist and urban warfare techniques. The partnership was short
lived. The Muslim PFLO did not approve of drugs, alcohol, or free
love and insisted they be separated along lines of gender with the
women kept sheltered in a separate housing unit. The RAF members were
not physically fit and objected to the exercises and drills they were
instructed to do in the harsh desert sun. Andreas Baader decided to
leave and the others followed him.
In the winter
of 1972 the Red Army Faction embarked on a campaign of bombings, bank
robberies, and murders back in their home country of West Germany.
The first bomb was set off in the British Yacht Club, killing a
German boat maker. The 2 June Movement claimed responsibility citing
their support for the Irish Republican Army as their cause. In the
spring, the Baader-Minehof Gang set off a bomb in the American
Consulate in Frankfurt am Main, killing one officer and injuring
thirteen others; their stated objective was to support the communists
in North Vietnam. That same month they targeted the right-wing Axel
Springer media group by planting six bombs in their Hamburg office
building; only three bombs went off and nobody died. Soon after that,
several car bombs blew up at an American military base where West
German manufactured weapons were being stored for shipment to the war
in Vietnam; three U.S. soldiers were killed and five others were
injured. They also robbed some banks here and there to obtain funding
for their movement.
After a series
of police raids, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof,
Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were capture and brought to prison.
The five suspects were taken to Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart. Each
was locked in their own solitary confinement cell which was painted
white and equipped with fluorescent lights on the ceilings that never
shut off. Only a small barred window near the top of each cell gave
them any indication as to what time it really was. The only human
contact they were allowed was with their lawyers. Gudrun Ensslin
devised a system where names from Herman Melville’s classic novel
Moby Dick were given to the
attorneys who passed the
messages on to the other inmates. This is how they orchestrated a
hunger strike to protest their living conditions.
When
Holger Meins died of starvation on November 9, 1974, the emaciated
remaining three RAF prisoners were taken out of their cells and
forced to eat.
Inspired
by the death of Meins, the 2 June Movement recruited other associates
of the Red Army Faction for a kidnapping operation, an action that
alerted the West German public to the fact that the Baader-Meinhof
Gang were not the only RAF members. In February of 1975, Peter
Lorenz, a Christian Democrat campaigning in the election for mayor of
Berlin, was taken hostage and held in a secret location. The
second-wave RAF members demanded the release of seven Red Army
Faction affiliated supporters who were imprisoned for non-violent
criminal activities. They were quickly released and they sent Peter
Lorenz away unharmed.
One
month later, six RAF members seized the West German embassy in
Stockholm, Sweden. They took hostages and planted bombs all around
the building. Their demand was that all members of the Baader-Meinhof
gang be released from prison or the whole building would get blown to
pieces with the hostages inside. The police refused their request
so two of the hostages were murdered. But some of the bombs went off
prematurely and two members of the Red Army Faction got killed. The
four remaining terrorists later surrendered and the hostages
were released.
While
Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe spent Spring in their cells, work
began on a maximum security courthouse located on the prison grounds
to be used solely for the Baader-Meinhof trial, the first indication
that this was to be no ordinary criminal court case. Before
the trial began, lawmakers agreed to a special law specifically
written for the RAF: defense attorneys were to be illegal and any
attempt made by their attorneys to assist the Baader-Meinhof
defendants were to be liable to criminal penalties. Unfortunately,
the law was retroactive and police proceeded to raid the homes and
offices of any lawyers associated with the Red Army Faction. Several
of them were arrested for being accomplices to terrorist activities.
The police also raided the homes of suspected sympathizers and
associates of the RAF as well as some left-wing bookstores. The team
of judges overseeing the trial were all former Nazi Party members and
known to be right-wing extremists.
The
four surviving Red Army Faction prisoners were made to defend
themselves. Their line of defense was that the American invasion of
Vietnam was an illegal act of war, therefore
attacking their military base in Germany was punishment for an
international crime. During their testimony, their microphones were
sometimes shut off, making the defendants impossible to hear. They
were removed from the court several times due to outbursts of anger.
At one point, a prison psychiatrist tried to have the trial delayed
because he said the conditions of living in solitary confinement were
a form of torture and the defendants were no longer physically or
psychologically fit to stand trial.
Shortly
after the court case
began, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell. She committed
suicide by hanging herself with a
rope she had made by tying prison towels together.
To
no one’s surprise, the three remaining Baader-Meinhof Gang members
were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary
confinement.
In
retaliation for the convictions, something had to be done. Hanns
Martin Schleyer, a former SS officer and later a prominent
industrialist and businessman was being
driven in his Mercedes with a
police escort. They passed by a woman pushing a baby carriage on the
sidewalk and pulled up behind a car at a red light. When the light
turned green,
the car ahead went into reverse, colliding with Schleyer’s
Mercedes. Five masked gunmen got out and the woman on the sidewalk
reached into her baby carriage and drew a loaded rifle. Bullets
sprayed everywhere and three policemen and Schleyer’s chauffeur
died. The masked men pushed
Schleyer into the trunk of their car and drove off. They
held Schleyer hostage for more than a month. They mailed a
typewritten letter to the police demanding that all imprisoned
members of the Red Army Faction be released in exchange for the Nazi
businessman. The police decided to delay negotiations while they
searched for the kidnapper’s location.
Meanwhile
members of the PFLO who had tried to train the Baader-Meinhof Gang in
Jordan hijacked an airplane flying out of Bonn. They forced the pilot
to fly to Dubai then Aden in Yemen and finally on to Mogadishu,
Somalia where a German sniper succeeded in shooting the terrorists,
setting the airplane’s hostages free.
When
Schleyer’s kidnappers heard this news, they put him into an Audi,
drove him over the border into France, shot him, and put his dead
body in the trunk, leaving the car on the side of the road. Later
they called the police and gave them the location of the vehicle.
The
next day, the inmates at Stammheim heard all this news. The next
morning
they were all found dead. Andreas Baader died of gunshot wounds in
his neck. Gudrun Ensslin was found hanging. Jan-Carl Raspe was killed
by a gunshot wound in the back of his head. Imgard Moller, another
RAF affiliate who had been transferred to Stammheim after being found
guilty of car-bombing the American military base, was found bleeding
with several stab wounds in her heart. Moller survived but the others
were declared dead from suicide.
Throughout
the 1980s, members of the Red Army Faction continued to carry out
bombings and assassinations but their
objectives were becoming less and less clear. By the 1990s, the
Soviet Union had collapsed and East and West Germany were reunited to
be one country again. RAF activities dwindled until 1998 when a
typewritten letter was sent to the media bearing their logo with the
red star and rifle. The dispatch declared that all Red Army Faction
urban guerilla campaigns would cease and the organization would exist
no more.
As
a united Berlin became the capital city of Germany again, secret
Stasi documents were found revealing that communist East Germany had
been supplying money, materials, and support to the RAF all along.
Reference
Aust,
Stefan. Baader – Meinhof: The Inside Story Of the R.A.F.
Oxford University Press, New
York: 2009.
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