Clover for the Horseshoe
Clover for the Horseshoe
Daniela Klette, former member of the “3rd Generation” of the Red Army Faction, is in custody.
After over 30 years underground, the state managed to apprehend Klette in an apartment in Kreuzberg.
The last purely political action attributed to Klette was the explosive attack on the Wetzlar Prison, which caused purely property damage of 95 million euros.
Her politically militant career consisted solely of attacks on property of political value, including shooting at the American Embassy in Bonn in 1991.
Since then, especially after the official dissolution of the RAF in 1998, Klette participated in several robberies not driven by political motives but for survival in the underground.
Among them was the raid on a cash transport in Duisburg in 1999, which yielded about 500,000 D-Mark, as well as multiple robberies of supermarkets.
Fatal to her conviction was likely the robbery of a cash transport in Groß Mackenstedt in 2015, where there is suspicion of attempted murder, as Klette is said to have shot at the side of the vehicle; the bullet lodged in the metal door.
The political dimension of the Klette situation is hard to overlook.
Bourgeois media, from Spiegel to Springer, are reporting intensely on the “RAF pensioner” (Spiegel) and are shocked by the solidarity and “diminution of the killer gang” (Tagesspiegel).
The three wanted individuals were members of the “left-wing extremist terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF), which carried out numerous attacks until 1991 and killed 34 people.” writes Bild, although the information is not even accurate.
The incarceration of Klette makes the RAF, 51 years after its founding and 26 years after its dissolution, a political object again.
Faeser and colleagues seize the opportunity to reframe “left-wing extremism” alongside Islamism and fascism:
The crumbling horseshoe, shaped by incidents like Hanau, Halle, hundreds of arson attacks and deaths, Reich Citizens, and the normalization of bourgeois fascism, is being reconstructed with the full force of the bourgeois press; because the RAF once existed.
The system, responsible for underground activities over the past 30 years that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, waged numerous wars, and justified genocides, projects all its shame onto the “RAF pensioner.”
Klette has stolen; cash transports are different from Iraqi gold, Palestinian oil, or corrupt tax money, because Klette is tangible and opposed to the system.
The imprisonment of Klette has a dual character: on one hand, she can be used as a tool to rebuild the discredited left-right horseshoe thinking, and on the other hand, it serves anti-communism.
The RAF’s tactics are clearly critique-worthy and should be rejected as reckless adventurism, but many of their analyses are not — and that is the problem for the bourgeois state.
Currently, around 700 Nazis are wanted in Germany by arrest warrants; many of them militant, violent, and already convicted.
Where is the effort to reshape entire neighborhoods? Where are the reports in every Bild newspaper? Where are the wanted posters?
Many analyses and critiques of the RAF, including those related to Palestine, find fertile ground in the current state of the ruling system.
We know how high the solidarity with Palestine is in Germany, and the rejection of the system and its methods is probably higher than ever before.
Klette can thus be cleverly used to discredit individual alternatives, like socialism, because left-wing extremism is also dangerous, see Daniela Klette.