Violence and Brutality - Jean Genet
translated from French by Aiden Farrell
Jean Genet (1910 – 1986) was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist.
The Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group) was a far-left militant group that was active in West Germany between 1970 and 1988. The RAF engaged in armed resistance against the state of Germany, by way of bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and assassinations. Their activity peaked in 1977 in what is known as the “German Autumn” which started in July when the head of Dresdner Bank was shot in front of his house. Genet wrote Violence and Brutality in September of 1977 as a meditation and ode to the group’s tactics. Four days after the essay was published the RAF kidnapped former SS officer Hans Martin Schleyer, then president of the German Employer’s Association. The kidnapping was organized to bargain for the release of 11 members of the RAF detained in prisons across Germany.
Violence and Brutality
Le Monde, September 2, 1977
Le Monde, September 2, 1977
Journalists toss around volatile words for the sake of attention more than out of concern for the slow seed they plant in people’s consciences. Violence—and its indispensable counterpart, nonviolence—exemplify this. If we reflect on either of these necessary phenomenons, even if according to their narrowest meaning— biology—we understand that violence and life are almost synonymous. The germinating grain of wheat that breaks through the frozen earth, the chicklet’s beak cracking its shell, a woman’s impregnation, the birth of a child all attract accusations of violence. And no one calls its cause the child, the woman, the chicklet, the bud, the grain of wheat. The case being made against the “RAF” (Red Army Faction), the case against the group’s violence, is very real, but the German State and with it all of Europe and America are fooling themselves.
Everyone knows these two words with more or less specificity: trial and violence which hide a third—brutality. The brutality of the system. And the case made against violence is that very brutality. The greater the brutality, the more malicious the trial, the more imperious and necessary the violence becomes. The more blunt the brutality, the more the violence that is life will be demanding, to the point of heroism. Here’s a quote from Andreas: “Violence is an economic
potential.”
When violence is defined or described as such, we must state what brutality is. Such a statement does not consist of replacing one word with another, in turn leaving the sentence to its function of accusing the men who use violence. It consists more of rectifying a quotidian judgment and disallowing the powers that be to impose their vocabulary as they please, for their comfort, as they have, as they continue to, while here in France, they replace “brutality” with “error” or “minor incidents.”
Seeing as existing examples of necessary violence are incalculable, such are also the facts of brutality as brutality always arrives in opposition to violence—to reiterate—in opposition to an uninterrupted dynamic that is life. It follows that brutality assumes unexpected forms, never immediately discernible as brutality: the architecture of public housing projects, bureaucracy, the replacement of the word—proper or common–with the digit, the prioritization of quicker foot traffic over slower in circulation, the authority of the machine over the one serving it, the codification of laws that rule over cultural traditions, the numerical augmentation of prison sentences, the keeping of secrets to obscure awareness of general interests, the senselessness of beatings in police stations, the condescension of the police toward those with brown skin, the obsequious groveling for tips and the irony, or lack of tact, if no tip is left, walking in the footseps of geese, the bombardment of Haiphong, the forty-million dollar Rolls Royce...to be sure, no list could exhaust the facts through which brutality imposes itself as if it were multiple avatars. And all of life’s spontaneous violence, continued by the violence of revolutionaries, would just about suffice to thwart organized brutality.
We owe Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins, Gudrun Ennslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, the RAF in general for showing us, with actions as well as words, inside and outside the prisons, that only violence can end the brutality of men. A note on this: the brutality of a volcanic eruption, of a storm, or that more commonly of an animal, prompts no reaction. The violence of an exploding blossom—against all odds—always moves us.
Evidently, there’s the possibility that brutality, via its own excess, destroys itself, or rather, not that it has an end—it doesn’t, by definition—but will come to erase itself, to annull itself long term, in the face of violence. The colonization of the Third World was nothing but a series of brutalities, numerous and extended, with no other atrophied purpose than to serve the interests of the colonizers and the enrichment of investment companies in the colonies.
It therefore created misery, a despair that could only nourish liberatory violence.
But the members of the RAF have never, as far as we know, allowed their violence to become pure brutality, as they know they would immediately transform into the enemy they’re fighting.
In their statements, their depositions, one preoccupation is particularly notable: regardless of anecdotes on the Kremlin, on De Gaulle’s vaticinations over Stalin’s dinners or other details reported by Kremlinologists, which are of as much significance as the sentimental asides of the Queen of England, the RAF strives to demonstrate that, from Lenin to the present day, soviet policy has never wavered from supporting the peoples of the Third World. We can explain it as we’d like, this policy is never the default.
It is often embraced by the complexities of feudal and tribal relations that are still alive and well, to which the old colonial and American powers now add their interests, their contradictory maneuvers. Since 1917, however, despite what western commentators tell us, despite what its domestic policy would be, the Soviet Union, whether by agreements between governments or by voting at the UN and international organizations, has always taken the side of the most feeble, the most impoverished. Many are aware of this, it’s certain.
In Europe—and by “Europe” one should also hear the European world of the Americas—and certainly in Western Germany, in such an anti-Soviet world as this, the RAF reestablishes political transparency otherwise concealed in Europe. Is this the reason why the Red Army Faction is so—despite the impact of its political arguments, stifled by violent actions here named “terrorism” (parenthetical: a word still, that of “terrorism” which should be applied even more to the brutalities of a bourgeois society)—is so, shall we say, unaccepted by certain leftisms?
There could also be other reasons: that the Red Army Faction appears to be the opposite of what May 1968 was, and its extension. Mainly its extension.
From the beginning, the student revolt—but not the factory strikes—have had a rebellious allure about them that translates into skirmishes in which the adversaries, the police and protestors, seek, with more or less elegance, to avoid the irreperable. The nocturnal street games manifest in forms beyond just combat. The demonstrations are verbal, open even to the police and right-wing provocateurs.
As for the extentions of that month of May, we perceive them to be a kind of angelic lace, spiritual, humanist.
The RAF is organized with the stiffness of a tightly screwed cork, the seals of watertight structures, with violent action that continues both in and outside of prison, and, with precision, takes each of its members to the brink of death, to the borders of a death suffered from opposing judiciary and correctional brutalities just as violently, and even to their death as well.
Heroism is not within the reach of just any activist. One can see that casual leftists, whose leftism Ulrike identifies as “only verbal radicalism,” are fearful in the face of such a consequential determination. In this long correspondence and its declarations, no one will find the word Gulag. What the USSR has done in the negative—without hiding it—cedes to what it has in the positive. Each member of the RAF accepts, claims responsibility for, and demands, unequivocally, through torture until death, one of the islands of this archipelago of the western Gulag.
What “Ulrike’s call for the liberation of Andreas at the Berlin-Moabit trial” says very well, and very explicitly, is that it’s the brutality of German society that has created the necessity for the RAF’s violence. We can take this from a reading of his statement, and from one passage in particular beginning with “The guerilla, and not only here, as it has been no different in Brazil...we are a group of comrades who have decided to act, to leave our state of lethargy, of only verbal radicalism, of increasingly vain discussions of strategy, we have decided to fight...”.
Germany has become what the United States government expected of it: their extreme buffer zone in the East, and the most aggressive. To this brutality, self-perpetuating according to its own absurd logic, forbidding or crushing a virtually outlawed communist party, the RAF could only respond with heroic violence.
Let’s admit for a moment that the correspondence between Andreas, Ulrike, and their comrades is built and fortified with more and more unattainable, more and more “inhumane” demands, we then have to ask what is the cause: this inhumane Germany that America desires.
And let’s ask ourselves if aggravation is not brought on by prison, isolation, audio surveillance (reading them is as if the prisoners are inside an enourmous ear), camera surveillance, the silence, the light; and if aggravation was not the intention—that of Buback and the system—so that the prisoners appear monstrous, so that their writings distance us from them, so that their death, slow or brutal, leaves us indifferent; so that we are no longer aware that these are men under torture but a monster that has been captured.
If that was Buback and the systems’s goal, they have failed: Holger has given us the terrifying portrait of one who opposes the capitalist brute. Ulrike, Andreas, Gudrun, and Jan-Carl, throughout their correspondence and their debates, have succeeded in convincing and troubling us.
A quote from Ulrike: “The cops try, using the tactics of psychological warfare, to overturn the facts on which guerilla action stands upright. Namely, that it is not the people that depend on the State, but the State that depends on the people; that it is not the people who need joint-stock companies of multinational corporations and their factories, but it is these capitalist rats who need the people; that the goal of the police is not to protect people from criminals, but to protect the rule of the people’s imperialist exploiters; that the people are not in need of justice, but justice of the people; that we here do not need the presence of troops or American establishments, but the imperialist US that needs us. Through appropriation and psychologization, they project themselves onto us: the clichés of the anthropology of capitalism, the reality of its masks, its judges, its prosecutors, its C.O.s, its fascists; a rat basking in its own alienation, who lives only by torturing, oppressing, and exploiting others, for which the basis of existence is career, advancement, elbowing its way up the ladder, profiting off others; that rejoices in the midst of exploitation, hunger, misery, and in the deprivation of several billion human beings in the third world and here as well.”
I highlight this quote as it reveals that the Third World’s misery—physical misery, moral, intellectual—is constantly present with them, that the R.A.F lives this misery in body and mind.
When they denounce the brutalities of the United States and its privileged agent, federal Germany, they address a subserviant Germany, but in the same moment, with the same gesture, they address the misery of the entire world. And when they wrote the above, the R.A.F.’s members demonstrated not only the generosity and tenderness flown by all revolutionaries, they again conveyed a delicate sensitivity with regard to those, here in Europe, that we continue to reject. If Marx’s analysis is right: “Revolutionary progress carves its path as it provokes a powerful counterrevolution, which closes in on itself, engendering an adversary that can only cause the insurrectionary party and its fight against it to evolve into a true revolutionary party...,” then we should recognize that the R.A.F., this time at the expense of superhuman sacrifices, is deciding to clear the way, with all it implies for solitude, incomprehension, internal violence.
They are in this dangerous situation, attentive to a refusal of pride in it, knowing that their thought must be removed of all dregs of idiocy to become sharper through an ever finer analysis, and attentive to the methods of attack of the system they oppose.
At the trial on August 26th, 1975, Andreas dryly declared: “The State is fighting with every means at its disposal—this is what [chancellor] Schmidt has sufficiently repeated, that it was a question of employing every means—and they are the organized means of suppression, falsehood, manipulation, technology— it’s a matter of the image of imperial omnipotence he’s giving himself against the consciously articulated historical trend of our policy, in the insurrection, where it appears antagonistic to society and becomes illegitimate.”
On reading certain statements at the tribunal, one will understand what they need in regard to frankness and finesse in order to leave the structures of the organization in the gray, to say, by way of the tape recorder set up in the tribunal, to say clearly and intentionally what they wanted to achieve, to state the situation in Germany (that of [chancellors] Brandt and Schmidt), a Germany imposed by America and its bourgeoisie, which takes pride in the exploits of the German Mark, and takes itself to be absolved of Nazism because of its anti-Communism.
It is evident from the rest that federal Germany’s opposition to all openly communist parties is largely responsible for the existence of the R.A.F., which proves, resoundingly, that social democracy is democratic in its speeches, inquisitorial when it likes to be. And inquisitorial—with “clean”, “refined” torture thanks to modern techniques—without remorse, without distress.
Germany, which has abolished capital punishment, driven to death by hunger and thirst strikes, isolation by the “depreciation” of the smallest noise save for the heartbeat of the incarcerated who, vacuum-sealed, is brought to discover the noise of blood plusing through its body, its lungs, its organic noise to know that its thoughts are produced by a body.
To say that the situation imposed on the imprisoned members of the R.A.F. is criminal is to say nothing at all. Moral judgment ceases in the consciences of the magistrates and in those of the population whom the press, and therefore the pressure, has driven into an empassioned state of absolute respite. It is to be feared that Germany may feel purified when “everyone will be dead, and dead by their own willingness to die,” therefore “dead because they know themselves to be guilty,” because, for Germany, this is the soothing sign of hunger and thirst strikes that end in death.
On reading Andreas and Ulrike’s book, and Gudrun and Jan-Carl’s, let’s keep in mind that some German journalists rise against nourishiment via feeding tube and declare that the doctor’s responsibility is to leave food at the doors of the detainees: up to them to live or die. Like the way the magistrates save face by declaring that it’s the lawyers who, incapable of persuading their clients, are guilty of the offense (or crime?) of the failure to assist a person in danger.
But what does it mean to accuse the German government, the German administration, the German populace? If the U.S.A. was not physically present in Germany, had their ambitions not inflated as they have, if Europe hadn’t, directly or otherwise, assigned Western Germany the role of policing the East, the needle of the R.A.F. in the fat flesh of Germany would maybe be less sharp and Germany less inhumane.
If you will, I believe I see a double phenomenon of contempt. Germany seeks— and in some ways successfully—to paint a terrifying, monstrous image of the R.A.F. On the other hand, in the same motion, the rest of Europe and America, by encouraging the intransigeance of Germany’s torturous activities against the R.A.F., seeks—and in some ways successfully—to paint a terrifying, monstrous image of an “eternal” Germany.