At the 31st International Rosa Luxemburg Conference on January 11, excerpts from a greeting by Burkhard Garweg, a former RAF militant living underground, were read aloud:
Dear comrades,
I send you warm greetings from underground.
We, who are persecuted as militants of the past, as well as the wanted antifascist comrades, are forced to live underground today by the repression of an increasingly authoritarian state. In Germany today, living underground is a necessary defensive position.
For 30 years, despite many adversities, we lived a life characterized by solidarity – beyond the isolation and exploitation inherent in capitalism. Now, this is held against us.
Nevertheless, we could imagine something other than battling our way through the sometimes thorny thicket of illegality and, inevitably, prison. That’s how it was, and that’s how it is.
It was and is the apparatus of repression that forces us into illegality and bears sole responsibility for it. Or should we surrender ourselves to a state whose police and prosecutors openly threaten us with execution by special forces upon arrest? A state whose police and prosecutors lie through their teeth so that even the last person believes the state’s version of our brutality. The aim is to denounce the history of resistance. They are trying to divide us from the rest of the world, they are striving to cement us in their prisons forever. All I can say is: Don’t believe a word they say. Given the reality of repression and state terrorism, we naturally have a right to live illegally.
For three decades, we have responsibly managed the necessity of organizing our lives and our survival. This is also proven by the results, which expose the police and prosecutorial narrative of our dangerousness for what it is: a fabricated lie. One wouldn’t have to take it seriously if they weren’t using it to threaten our imprisoned comrade Daniela Klette with a long prison sentence. The talk about our dangerousness as a fabrication in the upcoming two legal trials against Daniela is nothing but denunciation.
We, who are persecuted and harassed as “terrorists” both in prison and while living illegally, have nothing to do with terror or terrorism. It is not we who, through the means of the police, the judiciary, the military, intelligence services, and politics, are willing to enforce a system that, in the current erosion of capitalism, will only produce more misery and violence. It is grotesque to call ourselves “terrorists.” The real terror lies in the normality of the capitalist system. And terrorists, therefore, would surely be those who bring this terror to its culmination.
This is the era of the replacement of the “welfare state” system of a bygone epoch, in which the pacification of the metropolises at the expense of the colonized and exploited of the world enabled Western dominance. In its place, we are witnessing the establishment of the militarized, war-oriented, repressive, and authoritarian state of order and control of our time. It is the return of the proletariat as cannon fodder for the power of billionaires and shareholders, of intensified exploitation in the relations of production, of the decline of the welfare state, of the exacerbation of patriarchal power structures, and of state and societal racism that oppresses and threatens large segments of the population.
A comrade in hiding aptly wrote for a rally from the perspective of antifascist resistance: “As the situation escalates, fascism is once again becoming a viable option for domination. Antifascist practice means not only taking militant action against the Nazis, but doing so in close cooperation with revolutionary grassroots work in order to offer an alternative.” We must understand that a good life for all will never be found in capitalist sham democracy…
The alternative is our global task, and it is a socialism that could be rich in historical experience and also in overcoming the major and minor mistakes of history—the large and small attempts at revolution, the urban guerrillas, the anarchists, the communists, the social revolutionaries, and the anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial struggles and movements. Achieving this will ultimately determine whether life on this planet will continue to be possible and under what conditions. We are at a critical juncture globally. The question for all of us worldwide about the alternative to capitalism and the systemic processes leading to it, as well as our own, is existential and cannot be postponed.
The system of repression will foreseeably intensify further in the wake of the crisis of capitalism. We see this in the repression against our friend and comrade Daniela Klette. A fabricated and false accusation of intent to kill, invented by the police and public prosecutor’s office, and an absurd portrayal of our dangerousness are intended to justify a long imprisonment and a corresponding sentence against Daniela.
Despite protestations to the contrary by the judicial authorities, this state will stems from the fact that, for this state and its executive branch, the enemy is fundamentally wherever capitalism and the state’s monopoly on the use of force are challenged. It is this same judiciary, led by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, that will open another trial against Daniela in a few months, threatening her once again with life imprisonment for militant actions that took place more than 30 years ago.
It is a true mockery that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office is seeking to secure a long prison sentence for Daniela for actions she is accused of decades ago. No one was harmed during the resistance actions against war, prisons, and capitalism. The injustices against which these actions were directed, however, killed millions through war, brought hunger to millions, or created yet another monstrous prison system.
The state is determined to prosecute resistance even decades later. This leads it into an aggressive and repressive pattern of police and judicial behavior, whose primary target today is Daniela. The state’s attempt to imprison Daniela for many years affects us all as leftists from various movements. Her imprisonment and the threatened verdicts are unjust. The first trial is nearing its end: Support Daniela! Scrutinize the justice system, monitor the trials in whatever way you can. Show solidarity. Create visible public awareness. Stand up to this collectively and find forms of resistance. The apparent intention to condemn resistance history in the trials against Daniela, and the attempt to use repression as a deterrent in times of crisis, in light of escalating violence, demand solidarity and the protection that can only be achieved through attention and public awareness. Nothing less than freedom for Daniela Klette is justified. All imprisoned comrades, wherever they may be in the world, deserve nothing less than freedom, while the entire prison system deserves to go to hell.
A moment of great sorrow for the revolutionary movements is the death of Rolf Becker, whose profound and deep solidarity we recognized and valued even in the underground. He will be missed by this left, by us. I am also thinking of Devran, Brigitte Asdonk, and Assata Shakur, who recently passed away. They, too, will be missed. All of you who have died as part of our long, worldwide history of resistance remain immortal in the liberation struggles of the present and the future.
Resistance against genocide, apartheid, Germany’s complicity, against the “war-readiness” of the ruling class, against exploitation, social cutbacks, and against patriarchal structures of violence is necessary and justified! Together for a world without capitalism, war, and patriarchy!
Fuck off, German raison d’état and every kind of fatherland! Freedom for all our imprisoned comrades worldwide, and the end of the entire prison system for all! Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal! Freedom for Daniela Klette!