The Bombing of the Hamburg Train Station
In the face of the state propaganda effort to tie the attack at the Hamburg Central Station to the raf, we state clearly: the nature of this explosion speaks the language of reaction. It can only be understood as part of the psychological war that state security is waging against the urban guerilla. The method and objective of this crime against the people bear the mark of a fascist provocation.
The political-military actions of the urban guerilla are never directed against the people. The raf’s attacks target the imperialist apparatus, its military, political, economic, and cultural institutions and its functionaries in the repressive and ideological state structures.
In its offensive against the state, the urban guerilla cannot resort to terrorism as a weapon. The urban guerilla operates in the rift between the state and the masses, working to widen it and to develop political consciousness, revolutionary solidarity, and proletarian power against the state.
In opposition to this, this intelligence service-directed terrorist provocation against the people is meant to increase fear and strengthen the people’s identification with the state. At the Hessen Forum, Wassermann, the President of the Braunschweig Court of Appeals explained the state security countertactic—in his words, one must “increase citizens’ feelings of insecurity” and “act on the basis of this subjective feeling of fear.”
In the meantime, the Frankfurter Rundschau report (September9) confirmed that the state security counter-operations conducted since 72 (bomb threats against Stuttgart, threats to poison drinking water, stolen stocks of mustard gas, sam rocket attacks on football stadiums, the bomb attack on Bremen Central Station and now in Hamburg) were developed from programs created by the cia. The fr is only substantiating what has been known for a long time now, that the use of poison in subway tunnels and the contamination of drinking water in large cities is a special warfare countertactic, a “psychological operation” of intelligence services and counterguerilla units.
At this point, the question to be answered is whether the attack in Hamburg was the act of a lone criminal, of the radical right-wing Bremen group under intelligence service control, of state security itself, or of the special cia counterinsurgency unit established at the American embassy in Bonn after Stockholm.
What is certain is that state security works within the reactionary structures through a network of state security journalists who use the media conglomerates and public institutions to attack the urban guerilla. High profile figures in this network close to the bka’s press office and the baw press conferences are Krumm of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Busche of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Leicht and Kuchnert of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Rieber and Zimmermann, who are published in many national newspapers. Zimmermann’s article about the alleged connection between the attack, the raf, the 2nd of June Movement, and Siegfried Haag was simultaneously published in eight national newspapers.
The incredible fact that state reaction is now resorting to such measures against the weak urban guerilla here simply indicates the strategic importance of this instability for the Federal Republic as part of the U.S. imperialist chain of states. In the North-South and East-West conflicts, the frg is a central base of operations for U.S. imperialism; militarily in nato, economically in the European Community, politically and ideologically through the Social Democrats and their leadership role in the Socialist International.
The state’s attempt to use its intelligence services to provoke a reactionary mass mobilization is not a response to the guerilla, but is rather a reaction to strategic conditions; namely, the economic and political weakness of the U.S. chain of states. They are responding to the future potential and current reality of revolutionary politics. The objective and function of psychological warfare, in the way it is being waged against every democratic initiative, is to cause splits, isolation, withdrawal and eventually extermination.
Marx said, “Revolutionary progress disrupts the course of a closed and powerful counterrevolution by producing rebels who convert the party of resistance into a truly revolutionary party.”[1]
The urban guerilla has shown that the only way to resist state terror is through armed proletarian politics.
[1] Probably quoted from memory, this is a very mangled version of a phrase from Marx’s “Class Struggles in France.” See page 367, fn 2.