The Black Panther who hijacked a jet to Algeria and started again in France

It was an unusual hijacking by a group of three men, two women and three young children. They commandeered a Delta airliner, flew across the Atlantic and the adults never set foot in the US again, four of them making France their permanent home.

Read the full article on BBC

 

Fifty Years Ago: Angry Brigade and the Motley Crew of Miss World Judges in 1970

ON 21 November 1970, in his usual smooth and professional manner and while, “the girls are changing into their extremely expensive evening gowns”, Michael Aspel introduced the judges of that year’s Miss World. In the late Sixties and early Seventies Miss World was pretty well the most popular TV show in the world and the show regularly got over 20 million viewers in the UK alone.  Considering the huge global audience, Eric Morley – the man in charge of the contest – chose some very odd judges.

Read the full article on Flashbak here

 

Book Review

Book Review

The Revised Boy Scout Manual:

An Electronic Revolution

by William S. Burroughs

     In the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs was mostly writing articles for underground newspapers and pornographic magazines like Mayfair. The hippie scene was winding down and urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Angry Brigade, and the Red Army Faction were springing up all over the place. Burroughs had just voluntarily left the Church of Scientology because of their authoritarian and potentially fascist overtones and was trying to maintain his status as a writer and counter-cultural icon. He began work on a manifesto to explain his unorthodox world viewto the younger generation. He never completed the project but parts of it were sold as spoken word pieces on cassettes and other fragments were published in scattered places. These pieces were put together as The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution and recently published in paperback. The finished product serves as a good, but incomplete, overview of his ideas.

     The opening sections of this short work lay out strategies for overthrowing the established order and explain a variety of weapons, both conventional and unconventional, that can be used in the pursuit of building a free society. These passages are seasoned with little bits of Burroughs’ acerbic humor and eventually make a transition into fantasy vignettes that read like the fiction Burroughs is famous for. A smooth transition is made from realistic-sounding essay writing to the gallows humor of his dark scenarios. Readers who are less experienced with Burroughs’ writing style may get disoriented and wonder whether they should even take this prose seriously. The answer is both yes and no or at least the intent of his writing is serious while the realized result is fiction. But that is how Burroughs always operated. He melted the boundaries of reality like hot candle wax dripping into a pool of molten lava. He didn’t merely think outside the box; he did everything he could to destroy whatever box it is you are in when you think.

     There are key ideas to this revolution. One is that ten percent of the human race has to be killed but it has to be the ten percent that is responsible for controlling and oppressing everybody else. His idea that ten percent of the population controls ninety percent of society prefigures, by forty years, the contention of the failed Occupy Wall Street movement that one percent of the population controls ninety percent of the wealth. Political activists of our day should take note because they are not as unique or original as they think they are. To add to this idea, Burroughs points out that genocides and mass murders have historically been acts of violence perpetrated by the powerful elite against the masses of common people. Another component of this revolution is M.O.B. which means “mind own business”. When governments and police do not allow people to live freely then they are not doing as such; M.O.B. is to be the cornerstone law of a newly liberated humanity. The result of the revolution will be communal societies, some of which will be located on the beaches of Ecuador or in the dense jungles of the Amazon River basin. It is not surprising that Burroughs’ preoccupation with power, domination, and control made an impression on the mind of a young Michel Foucault who cited him as an influence on his philosophy of biopolitics.

     The rest of the book suggests ideas for experiments using film and audio. By the 1970s, Burroughs wished to expand on his practice of cut-ups to apply it to other, more current forms of media. A lot of the tape splicing he describes are now common practices in editing sound, music, and video. Some people have claimed his hypotheses are silly, ridiculous, and impossible but they may be misunderstanding the concept of experimentation. That particular word means to try something new and see what happens. The outcome may or may not be predictable but you really can not know until it is tried. Most experiments fail. Sometimes the intend outcome is not realized but serendipity occurs and a new method of doing things is accidentally discovered. In the end these tape recorder experiments had a profound influence on music and other arts. Burroughs used tape loops and sampling long before hip hop artists did and his philosophical ideas had a directed impact on industrial and punk music in the 1970s.

     Another aspect of revolution Burroughs explores is the presence of language. He briefly explains how language can be used as a mechanism of control. He also writes about the encoding of meaning in words by the speaker and the decoding of its meaning by the listener; he makes suggestions for experiments with language scramblers to determine if a listener can unscramble distorted messages subconsciously. This is a crude take on semiotics but it explains some passages from his novels that read like disorientating gibberish; some of his texts were scrambled using cut-ups and montage and it is up to you to decide if you can derive some meaning from it. Burroughs also suggest eliminating the words “the”, “either/or”, and “is” from the English language. He describes the way “is” causes distortions in our perceptions of reality. This sounds like an idea lifted from Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics but actually it is inspired by the General Semantics theory developed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski in the 190s. In any case, these ideas anticipate the philosophies of poststructuralism and deconstruction by at least a few years.

     A lot of people have criticized William S. Burroughs for believing in things that are simply not true. They also overlook the fact that he was primarily a writer of fiction and fiction, by definition, is not true. But good fiction makes statements about truth. The Revised Boy Scout Manual should be read as a fictional document, maybe even as comedy or satire, but keep in mind what it actually says about the world we live in. It is some of Burroughs’ most clear and direct writing and does a good job of explaining his theories in a way that can clarify some of the confusing and opaque passages of his difficult prose. 

Burroughs, William S. Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus: 2018. 

 

Gimme Shelter: the Brief And Strange History of CHOP (AKA CHAZ)

The end has come for CHOP—or CHAZ. At first the six-block area just east of downtown Seattle was called CHAZ. The area was occupied by protesters on June 8^th after it was reluctantly ceded to them by Seattle Mayor Jennie Durkan and the police. That was the day that the Seattle Police Department vacated and locked up its East Precinct building on 12^th Avenue. When the police left, the occupiers painted “People” over the “Police” in the sign, “Seattle Police Department, East Precinct.” Then they declared the surrounding area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, soon referred to simply as CHAZ. Whatever exactly it was, it had a name. Then some black community leaders suggested it be called Capitol Hill Organize Protest. Hence, CHOP, although CHAZ was still being used. Whatever you call it, as of the First of July it was no more.

Read the full article on Counterpunch here

The Day Police Bombed a City Street: Can Scars of 1985 Move Atrocity Be Healed?

Eleven people, including five children, died and a Philadelphia neighborhood burned down in the airstrike against a black liberation group. Now an effort at reconciliation is under way

Read the full article on The Guardian here

Puerto Rico, Protest, Prison: Johanna Fernández and Jose Saldaña Talk About The Young Lords

Johanna Fernández, child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and professor at New York’s Baruch College, has just published The Young Lords: A Radical History, a book about the 1960s Puerto Rican activist group. The Young Lords began as a Chicago street gang; then, inspired by the Black Panther Party, morphed into a militant rights organization that caught fire in New York City, where Jose Saldaña, child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born. Raised in impoverished East Harlem, Jose spent 38 years in NY prisons. On his release in 2018, he became the Director of Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPP) and a compelling critic of our criminal justice system. Johanna, for her part, has devoted years to the prison abolition movement, championing the release of imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Read the interview on Counterpunch here

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.