(6) Sixth document

Gudrun Ensslin, as a member of the West German Red Army Faction, produced a statement on January 19, 1976, about the Soviet Union, during her trial. She gives the position of the RAF: the Soviet Union is a passive ally and the only enemy would be the USA. Therefore, the organizations defending the Maoist line are wrong because they would help the USA in denouncing the Soviet Union.

“We have clarified the historical and current dialectic between the liberation front on the periphery and the development of class struggle in the metropole – the dividing line between labor and capital – which has developed into a front (…).

Using the Maoist sects in the Federal Republic for the political line:  the USSR as the main enemy, which strengthens NATO, is objectively reactionary.

Their ludicrous anticommunism extends to neutralizing the developing anti-Americanism and hampering awareness of the relationship of forces developing between revolution and imperialism, the transcontinental process in and from which the guerilla in the metropole fights.

As long as their obscure line is based on defending the fatherland, they represent a chauvinist variation of the masses’ revanchism. Strengthening NATO here and agitating for illegal struggle in the GDR, their instrumentalization by the CPC repeats the tragedy of the parties of the Third International in the crisis of 1929-1933 as a farce.

They long ago abandoned the terrain on which the real potential for an anti-fascist Federal Republic lies – that of resistance:  the form of defensive that they want to organize doesn’t simply anticipate defeat – it accepts defeat before the struggle has begun.”