Part One: Preliminary Remarks on the Red Army Faction

It has oft been said that there is an unbridgeable chasm within the Left between reform and revolution, one that forms the line demarcation between the Left and the far-Left, but what the debate boils down to is not a question of assimilation or refusal.  Rather, it is a dispute over the utilization of political violence. 

The mid-1960s were an era of extraordinary political optimism.  The success of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the emergent counterculture that blossomed in its aftermath created the general sense that love was in the air and revolution on the horizon.  From the hippie movement to the student protests in May of 1968 in France, every protest seemed a celebration and every organization the harbingers of new forms of life.  Everything was changing and, in the collective euphoria of youthful revolt, all of it seemed to be for the better.  It is, of course, well known, though, perhaps, seldom discussed, that Students for a Democratic Society, who were deeply involved with the Civil Rights Movement and at the forefront of the protests against the Vietnam War, later fell to the Weather Underground, whose series of, apparently, nonviolent bombings would come to characterize the turn towards more militant forms of direct action.  The protests in France, of course, were not born out of pacifism, though the various of forms of anti-authoritarianism of which its participants commonly ascribed did find itself lacking in some of the more common justifications for various forms of coercion.  Being said, to compare the political trajectory of left-wing groups in the United States and Europe, it is, perhaps, due to the lack of a legacy of nonviolence that the European far-Left would become more inclined towards what we understand as political terrorism.  In both cases, anyways, the peace movement fell apart after the Days of Rage and, in an often overlooked political history, the hope that began with the student protests in France would soon be dashed by the formation of the Red Army Faction in Germany.[1] 

On Saturday, December 6^th of 1969, the Rolling Stones held a free concert at Altamont Speedway that later became notorious for the stabbing of Meredith Hunter by the Hells Angels, who had been traded alcohol in exchange for providing security at the concert.[2]  The event symbolized the decline of the hippie movement and the loss of innocence at the turn of the decade.  To cite any year or event in an overarching meta-narrative about the turn towards political violence in the far-Left, events that would culminate in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, an increase of attacks within the Basque Conflict in Spain, the Years of Lead in Italy, and what has come to be called Autumn in Germany, I would suggest that the turning point was on the 11^th of April in 1968, when Josef Bachmann attempted to assassinate Rudi Dutschke outside of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund office on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.[3]

To understand the German student movement, of course, you, first, need to understand the socio-political context of post-war West Germany.  In June of 1946, an organization headed by Richard Gehlen, former Wehrmacht Major General and head of Nazi military intelligence in the Eastern Front, was formed.  The Gehlen Organization worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency during the early days of the Cold War.[4]  In 1951, John J. McCloy, high commissioner in American-occupied Germany, granted Alfried Krupp amnesty after he had been convicted at Nuremberg for the exploitation of slave labor during the Third Reich and the sending of Robert Rothschild to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was put to death.[5]  Krupp restored his family’s company to its former ascendency, making it once again one of the wealthiest companies in all of Germany.  In March of 1957, Franz Josef Strauss, former lieutenant officer in the Wehrmacht, Defense Minister, and favored target of Ulrike Meinhof, sent a letter to the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS, the HIAG, a lobby group supporting former the now criminal Schutzstaffel, stating, “”I think you know how I personally think about the front line units of the Waffen-SS. They are included in my admiration for the German soldiers of the last world war.”[6]  Needless to say, there was a strong sense in the Federal Republic that ex-Nazis had not, by in large, been brought to justice for their crimes and had, in point of fact, been let to retain some of their power, having found their way to many established positions within West German society.

In “The Present Status of Denazification”, McCloy wrote:

 “Once former Nazis had been removed from public life and to a certain extent from private enterprises, a paradoxical situation arose.  In a sense the party had been reconstituted by creating a large group of ‘ex-Nazis’, which in the U.S. Zone alone would have numbered over 3,500,000 persons.  They would have been tagged and labelled and largely excluded from civic life and professional activity.  This large group, together with their families, relatives and friends, would have become a body of ‘second-class citizens’ within the state and a constant source of discontent and unrest.”[7] 

The sheer number of people who would have been excluded from the public sphere presented a serious problem for the Allies, who were in need of a stable workforce to rebuild the Federal Republic.  The fear over the creation of “a body of ‘second-class citizens’” was also somewhat well-founded, as the Nazi Party, itself, was, in some sense, born out of a feeling of resentment common within the German military following the Treaty of Versailles.  The likes of Erich Ludendorff, of course, had less empathetic reasons to put forth the stab-in-the-back myth, but your ordinary member of the Freikorps, in all likelihood, felt as if soldiers had been maligned by German society.[8]  The notion that soldiers had become outcasts bears a particular relevance when you consider that the early Nazis were commonly called the “armed Bohemians”.[9]  Even if you were able to see the years of the Third Reich from the hypothetical Archimedean Point and be able to pick out each and every individual Nazi and, even if the responsibility for the crimes committed during that period of time were to extend to all of them, a state predicated upon the establishment of an underclass of three and a half-million people is just asking for another criminal association that very well may go ahead and try to wage a coup d’état.  In effect, regardless as to what is fair, the banning of ex-Nazis from public life would have sewed the seeds for another set of so-called “armed Bohemians” to come to the fore in the future. 

Later in “The Present Status of Denazification”, McCloy wrote:

 “Critics of the denazification program also point to the presence of former Nazis in important positions and in the public service generally…With very few exceptions the former Nazis who now occupy posts of any significance have been ‘denazified’… Sections of the democratic German press have spoken out unequivocally against certain appointments to public office. However, once such persons have been duly appointed, and in the absence of legal grounds for their removal, there is generally nothing that can or should be done except to rely upon the democratic system which has been constructed in Germany to deal with the problem.”[10]

While, yes, the Federal Republic did have to respect its own rule of law, as it was one that was largely directed by the Allies, the notion of “former Nazis in important positions” upholding the “democratic system” seems to have been more of a cover for why it was that denazification was effectively abandoned than it was a defense of West Germany’s democratic institutions.  The facts of the matter were that most of West Germany’s specialists, that is, its effective technocracy, had, in some way, shape, or form, participated within the Third Reich.  That a technocracy should facilitate the functioning of a totalitarian regime is just simply tantamount to its operational capacity.  In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, this technocracy was referred to as the “nomenklatura”.[11]  However you should like to characterize the Nazi nomenklatura, in the wake of the Second World War, when faced with the decision to either train an entire sector of the populace to be capable of reconstructing West Germany or merely reestablishing the old technocratic guard, though the Allies certainly preferred specialists who did not participate within the Third Reich, they did often rely upon the latter. 

All of which may lead one to suspect that West Germany was either a fascist state in the drab disguise of liberal democracy or in a clear and present danger of becoming one.  This is certainly the conclusion that the Red Army Faction drew.  It was also consistent with the rhetoric deployed by both the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union.  During the Cold War, the USSR committed itself to so-called “anti-imperialism”, often an oxymoronic cover for Soviet imperialism, as well as a means to foster anti-American sentiment.[12]  Though the United States certainly greatly extended its network of influence during the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency did engage in actions characteristic of an imperial power, for instance, in the case of the coup d’état which they led against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 or the litany of actions that were carried out in Central and South America for which they are now notorious for, and the policy of containment was debatably within a direct violation of a nation’s right to self-determination, something that would become particularly relevant during the Vietnam War, it is not as if the US consisted of a global monolith responsible for nearly each and every abuse of power and authoritarian regime the world over.[13]  The rhetoric of the far-Left in West Germany bears an interesting resemblance to that of the GDR in regards to the Berlin Wall, officially called, “the anti-fascist protective rampart”.[14]  Just as the United States attempted to transform opposition to totalitarianism under the Third Reich into opposition to totalitarianism under the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union tried to transform anti-fascism as per the so-called “united front” against the Axis powers into anti-imperialism against the United States.[15]  Effectively, they both tried to draw an equivalence between their respective adversaries and the now defeated Third Reich. 

While West German society did include any number of ex-Nazis and, while the crimes of the Nazi period went, for a long time, unaddressed, the Federal Republic of Germany was certainly not a fascist state. 

McCloy closed “The Present Status of Denazification” with:

“The success or failure of this effort rests, in the final analysis, on the Germans themselves. The regeneration of a people must come from within. There are in Germany today men and women of real stature, ability and courage who are devoting their energies to this task. There are such people in and outside the Government, in all walks of life. There is a free and democratic press. There are broadening contacts with the free world outside. There exists a deepening conviction among Germans everywhere that the interests of Germany will be best served not by the resurgence of a narrow and chauvinistic nationalism but by the close association of Germany with a free and integrated European community.”[16] 

He was willing to take a leap of faith in the German citizens.  As Germany, today, is a bastion of the European Union and ranked twelfth, seventeen full places above the United States, in the Democracy Index, we do now know that he was right to have placed such faith within the German people.[17]  Hindsight is, of course, twenty-twenty and, to give the RAF some credit, I think it entirely possible that the crisis which they created did, albeit in, perhaps, an indirect manner, help to generate a culture of critical reflection within the Federal Republic such that West Germans finally began to come to terms with the historical legacy of the Nazi past. 

Due to their connection with the Palestine Liberation Organization, who would arm, train, or fund a number of Western terrorist cells while the RAF was active, the RAF, themselves, were also accused of antisemitism.[18]  Though I am not one to disclaim certain human rights lawyers apparently “fixated” upon Israel, there is what you might call a “structural antisemitism” to any number of Palestinian rights activists.  The assumption is that Israel is a synecdoche for the West, a center for the neocolonial superstructure to inculcate the masses, or, much like the Soviet depiction of the United States, a global monolith that functions as the centrifuge for capitalist domination.  The actual Israel is, of course, a small country who, though relatively wealthy, has limited influence within global affairs, but just so happens to be located in the so-called “Holy Land”.  While it is true that the RAF were guilty of structural antisemitism, I am not so inclined to think that, as the Anti-Defamation League does, structural antisemitism is a mere facet of what is called “new antisemitism”, itself a continuation of the old antisemitism that, as we all know, culminated in the Holocaust.  Though, yes, structural antisemitism is still indicative of that a person harbors feelings of resentment towards Jews, there is just simply a difference in kind between the antisemitism of certain left-wing radicals and that of the far-Right.  In the former case, you have a worldview that is only ultimately antisemitic, which is to say that, were a person to think it all of the way through, they would, then, realize that it is antisemitic.  In the latter, you have a worldview that is primarily antisemitic.  Without any reasoning whatsoever, it is already immediately hostile towards Jews.  As the RAF were certainly critical of the Nazi era, the hostility which they expressed towards the Israelis, at least, if we are to understand this in terms of their stated ideology, was only structurally antisemitic.  It is, however, notable that Hans-Joachim Klein left the Revolutionary Cells, an affiliate of the RAF, after passengers on a plane that had been hijacked were separated according to their being Jews, in his words, “like at Auschwitz”.[19]

In consideration of German guilt, I think that it would be apt to say that, at this point in time, both civil society in the Federal Republic and the RAF chose radically divergent but equally inadequate means to cope.  Civil society would have just as soon forgotten about the war years and were in a kind of collective denial of the severity of the Nazi crimes.  While they did not, of course, explicitly deny what had happened, they tacitly agreed to leave in the past what was there and to remain silent about it.  The RAF, by contrast, wanted to expose what was ultimately an all too common form of false consciousness for the apparent fascism that they believed for it to be.  Rather than engage in much needed dialogue about the Nazi past, they chose to tread the spectacular path of violent direct action, or what is more commonly called “political terrorism”. 

The preference for action over words in politics is a common historical cult phenomenon.  It is common to radicals of all kinds, both on the far-Left and on the far-Right.  Political action, of course, is highly spectacular.  It signifies an event and operates within the symbolic register.  Almost all political acts are inherently symbolic.  The assassination of one man, no matter how great of influence, can only, in and of itself, bring down a regime in so far that it is viewed in the eyes of all that the assassination was justified and that what the assassinated represents is a form of tyranny.  When they are not mere pawns in the geopolitical game, political assassins represent a particular kind of social outcast.  They transgress the highest form of established order by committing treason.  It is the closest event to regicide in the aftermath of the aristocracy.  They are, as it were, criminals of the most capital of crimes and criminals, in virtue of operating outside of society, always retain a certain aura. 

In the Left, it is quite common to disassociate a given political philosophy from the practice of violent direct action with the charge of “adventurist terrorism”.  Though, as with the use of any political pejorative, those who level such accusations are not entirely lacking in sophistry, there is just something salient about this accusation.  In certain circles in West Germany, the RAF did take on a mythic dimension akin to certain outlaws and were more or less lionized for the simple fact that people thought that it would be cool to have your portrait up on a wanted poster in more or less every subway station.  Because outlaws operate outside of existing society, it is common for people, particularly those who feel alienated, to ascribe an authenticity to their way of life.  Life on the lam, of course, requires various forms of double lives, and, so, most outlaws probably actually live about as authentic of lives as most spies, but, as I do not expect for the RAF to have come to the same set of conclusions that I have, they, too, believed that the only way they could lead an authentic way of life was from the outside.

Authenticity, in this sense, also represents a kind of freedom.  The quest for this kind of freedom began with the counterculture of the late 1960s. 

Though I should not like to come down upon the very counterculture from which I have drawn my own so-called “hippie” sentiments, if we are to take adventurist terrorism seriously, then its origins can only lie within alternative lifestyles.  Among anarchists, it common to allege for people who call themselves anarchists because anarchism is thought to be cool, hip, or fashionable are “lifestyle anarchists”.  If we are to follow the train of thought that begins with terror chic and ends with German Autumn, you might say that the RAF were “lifestyle extremists”.  Absurd as a motivation for political terrorism as it might be, when you consider Andraes Baader’s style and choice of stolen cars, earning BMWs the nickname, “Baader-Meinhof Wagens”, there is, at the very least, a certain point to be made in this regard.[20]

The counterculture in West Germany was similar to that of the United States with one notable exception, namely that the preceding generation was looked at as the “Auschwitz Generation”.[21]  Unlike the United States, where it only makes sense to call someone who listened to William F. Buckley Jr. a “fascist” in the sense that a “fascist” is just simply a person whom someone on the Left happens to disagree with, for young adults in Germany, a number of conservatives, let alone people of the preceding generation from all walks of life across the political spectrum, were once fascists in that they were actual ex-Nazis.  Though the Federal Republic was a genuine liberal democracy, for the youth, there was a strong feeling of mistrust towards the proceeding generation, which in many cases, directly translated towards one’s biological parents.  Young Germans sought to rescind their historical patrimony.  They wanted a break from the past and to establish new ways of life.

In some ways, they were, of course, quite successful.  The counterculture of the late 1960s not just in Germany, but, also, across the world, has inspired significant social reforms and a more general laxity in regards to how one chooses to live their own way of life.  In Germany in particular, the Greens have also challenged the formality of the political order, having chosen to dress in regular clothes and the bicycle as their preferred means of transport.[22]  As much as Kommune 1 helped to create a culture that was more open-minded and less conventional, they also directly contributed to the turn towards violence through Fritz Teufel, who would later join the 2 June Movement, and indirectly did so through their incendiary text on the burning of Berlin department stores, itself the inspiration for the political act that would immediately precede the formation of the RAF.[23][24] 

What makes a way of life “fanatical” is that a person is willing to impose it upon others.  It is, perhaps, an assumption of the superiority of a given way of life that grants a person the perceived right to disdain others.  If the world outside of someone’s small circle of friends can be characterized in the blanket negative, then imposition, though for the far-Left, good anti-authoritarians that they are, this is never the chosen term, can seem to be justified.  It is, in effect, a countercultural arrogance that sets one down the path of violent direct action.  As I have given much preliminary analysis already, let us turn towards one of those particular paths, that of the Red Army Faction.

Part Two: A Brief History of the RAF

In 1967, Ulrike Meinhof, then a columnist for konkret, published an open letter to Farah Diba, wife of the shah of Iran.  In it, she wrote:

“How do you do Mrs. Pahlavi,
The idea that we might write you a letter came to us as we read the Neue Revue of May 7 and 14 where you describe your life as Empress.  We got the impression that you are not fully informed about Persia.  Which is why you also provide incorrect information to German magazines.

You say for example that “Summer in Iran is very hot, and like most Persians I traveled to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea with my family.”

“Like most Persians” – isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?  In Baluchestan and Mehran, for instance, “most Persians” – 80 percent of them – suffer from hereditary syphilis.  And most Persians are peasants with an annual income of less than one hundred dollars. And most Persian women see every second child die – fifty of every one hundred children – from starvation, poverty, and disease.  And do the children who spend fourteen-hour days knotting carpets, do they also, most of them, travel to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea in the summer?”[25]

On the 2^nd of June that same year, student protestors organized a demonstration against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s, the Shah of Iran, visit to the Federal Republic.  Secret police guarding the Shah stormed the protestors and began beating them.  The Federal police, at first, did nothing, but later came to the aid of the Iranian guards when the left-wing activists began fighting back.  People began to flee and, in the chaos and confusion, Benno Ohnesorg, who was unarmed, was shot in the back of the head by a Federal Police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras.[26][27]

The murder set into course to motion the course of events that would lead to what the student movement called “counter-violence”, that is, to fight back against the police, or what is legally defined as rioting.[28] 

Before the Bild-Zeitung riots, however, a young dropout and occasional car thief, the daughter of a Protestant pastor, a writer, and an activist would set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt.  They were Andraes Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Thorwald Proll, the brother of Astrid, and Horst Söhnlein.  Their reasons for doing so, as were placed on the record during their trial, were in protest of the Vietnam War.[29] 

As the Federal Republic was of high strategic importance for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, there were, and still are, a number of American military bases in West Germany.  The American presence was seen by the student movement as an extension of its influence in the overarching Cold War.  In many ways, it, of course, was.  Soldiers based in West Germany, however, could not really have been held responsible for the policy of containment which led to the Vietnam War, a distinction that the RAF would, later, fail to draw. 

It is an interesting question as to what degree the adherents of the philosophy of containment believed in so-called “domino theory”, effectively the notion that one communist revolution would spur another, and to what degree it was a rationalization for the violation of a given nation’s right to self-determination so as to protect American interests.  In regards to the latter, there is some truth to the anti-imperialist rhetoric, as such interference is precisely how imperialism operates.  While I think it would have been hysterical, they, of course, may have really believed that there was a global communist threat.  My guess would be that some combination of both would have been the case. 

A nation’s right to self-determination presents an interesting paradox when the nation in question has either been or is being established through revolution.  Who is to say what the will of the people is when a populace is engaged in civil war?  To me, it seems likely that the turn was towards communism in what is now just Vietnam, which is how the American invasion constituted an act of aggression, all of which is to say that the war was not just, but it is not as if the North Vietnamese did not use any means of coercion in the establishment of their Democratic Republic. 

Regardless as to how anyone feels about the historical legacy of the Vietnam War, to insist upon the point that the Vietnamese had a right to self-determination presented an opportunity for the far-Left to expand through the greater protest movement.  To be against the war became to support the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.  Support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam became support for Marxism-Leninism, albeit that of a generally less authoritarian strain than that of the orthodoxy established under Josef Stalin.  The turn, ironically, was towards Chairman Mao.  It is, of course, possible to have been motivated by anti-authoritarianism in one’s support for the communist dictator who is responsible for the most excess deaths in all of human history and who denounced destalinization and peaceful coexistence with the Western bloc as “revisionist” because, in politics, rhetoric reigns and everything, even a contradiction, is possible.[30]  What is rational is another story, but one only need to look so far to discover just what is “possible”.

No matter how naïve many student activists were in their turn towards militancy, due to a rising disillusion with peaceful protest, something that can only ultimate within reform, they headed towards revolution.

The Frankfurt arsons would result in that Baader, Ensslin, Proll and Söhnlein would be arrested on the 4^th of April in 1968.[31]  They would, later, be sentenced to three years in prison and paroled under amnesty laws for political prisoners.  Söhnlein would serve his sentence and Proll would, later, turn himself in on the 21^st of November in 1970.[32]  Baader and Ensslin would run a program for disaffected youth as a part of their parole, of which Peter-Jürgen Boock was a member.  Boock would later go on to join the second generation of the RAF.[33]  Baader and Ensslin were defended in court by Horst Mahler, who would become one of the RAF’s founding members.  After they were sentenced, Baader and Ensslin fled the Federal Republic, though Baader was, again, caught on the 4^th of April in 1970.[34] 

Before all of that had happened, however, another event that would be critical to the formation of the RAF would occur. 

On the 11^th of April in 1968, Josef Bachmann shot Rudi Dutschke outside of the SDS office in Kurfürstendamm.  He had procured weapons from a group of neo-Nazis in Peine in 1961 and was carrying a newspaper article published by Deutsche National-Zeitung with the headline, “Stop Dutschke Now!”  Bachmann swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills to avoid capture by the police.[35] 

The student movement blamed Axel Springer, the media mogul behind Bild-Zeitung, notorious for their sensational coverage of protests, for the attempted assassination.  They marched on the Springer house in Berlin chanting, “Bild schoss mit!”, or “Bild shot too!”  They overturned and set fire to a number of their delivery vehicles, threw stones and Molotov cocktails, and were eventually dispersed with water cannons and arrests.[36] 

Following the riot, in May of 1968, Ulrike Meinhof published “From Protest to Resistance” in konkret.  It opens with:

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this.  Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.  Protest is when I say that I refuse to go along with this anymore.  Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.”[37]

In many ways, I think that this statement drew the line in the sand between the far-Left and the Left in general, between reform and revolution, or between nonviolence and violent direct action.  It is, of course, very convincing.  Anyone who has ever been to a protest can tell you that there is an element of pageantry to such an event.  While, yes, people there do want to change the world for the better, it is not as if they yet to fully absolve themselves of any given political vanity.  The assumption, by the far-Left, that many who engage in protest are more interested in playacting than progress is not wholly unfounded.  There is a difference between merely voicing an opinion and actually substantiating significant change.  Meinhof closes her text with the reiteration, “The fun is over.  Protest is when I say I don’t like this.  Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.”[38] 

The problem with the dichotomy that Meinhof draws is that what “resistance” implies is the utilization of political violence. 

Illegal protest can be characterized along a spectrum from nonviolence to political terrorism.  Civil disobedience, sit-ins, certain strikes, protest marches, conscientious objection, and so on and so forth, is still in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence.  Such acts are, in and of themselves, a form of refusal, which is to say that they are still, in some sense, radical.  Direct action refers to illegal acts of protest ranging from tree-sitting through sabotage to bombings and assassinations.  Most nonviolent acts of direct action can still be categorized as civil disobedience.  Someone who stakes their life in defending a forest surely should not be considered as a so-called “eco-terrorist”.  What makes an act of direct action a form of political terrorism is that it is violent.  There are various forms of property damage, such as graffiti or, in certain cases, the destruction of equipment that are still nonviolent.  While smashing a bank window may or may not constitute an act of “violence”, throwing a Molotov cocktail certainly does, and, so, you could say that violent direct action ranges from rioting through bank robberies, the bombing of evacuated buildings, kidnappings, political assassinations, the bombing of functionaries of the state apparatus, and the bombing of civilian targets.  While rioting, in and of itself, should not be considered as constitutive of “terrorism”, in so far that the rest of the acts mentioned are political, they can be.  Certain riots, such as the riots against the Serbian population in Sarajevo following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were certainly terroristic, but, to qualify the actions of the somewhat mythical black bloc as “terrorism” seems, to me, to be dangerously nebulous.  Regardless as to how anyone should like to define “terrorism”, it is quite clear, through both her words and deeds, that Meinhof is, here, advocating violent direct action. 

Violent direct action is almost invariably born out of some form of desperation or another.  To participate within political terrorism, a person more or less has to come to two basic conclusions: the situation is dire and in need of radical change and it is only through violence that that change can be meaningfully brought about.  The progression from a political activist to a political terrorist begins with disillusionment.  A person, first, becomes convinced that almost all reform is more or less going nowhere.  They, then, become panged by despair.  The system seems so monstrous, so inhuman, so totalizing, and so cruel that something, anything, has to be done to help to bring it down.  Alongside this dystopian worldview, the utopian reverie begins to germinate.  If only people lived within communist society, if only we could abolish every form of hierarchy, if there was a world that truly cared for the poor and downtrodden, then everything, all social ills, all inequalities would disappear.  Out of the apocalyptic depiction of the present is born the messianic vision for the future and, so long that the ends are achieved, whatever means are necessary can be deployed.

Meinhof is a bit of an enigma, as she was not, like many of those who turn towards violence are, subject to an acute social alienation.  Much to the contrary, she was well-liked and well-established among the German Left.  It is, perhaps, the contrast between her personal life, one that was of a relative leisure, and her political ideals that accounts for her turn towards violence.  She must have felt that it was not right for her to live as she did when the world is full of such suffering.  Her critique of Farah Diba may have become internalized as per her own social standing within the left-wing intelligentsia.  For Baader, it is easy to say that his life as a social outcast, later, developed into his life as a political outlaw, but, for Meinhof, there is no so-called “society” to blame.  She took it upon herself to join the RAF and, while we do not have to respect that decision, we should, at least, try to understand it. 

After Baader’s second capture, Mahler, Ensslin, and Meinhof arranged to spring him from prison.  They convinced the federal government to let Baader meet with Meinhof, ostensibly to work on the publication of an article.  They precured arms, strangely enough, from a far-Right bar known as the Wolf’s Lair and shot Georg Linke during Baader’s flight out the Institute for Social Issues’s window.  Meinhof, who was supposed to feign surprise, would soon follow.[39] 

It was from this point in time that they would go underground and the beginning of what we have come to understand as the Red Army Faction. 

The RAF, then, travelled to a PLO training camp in Jordan.[40]  As anyone might have anticipated, they and the Palestinians did not quite see eye to eye.  The RAF threatened to wage a strike in order for men and women in their organization to be let to cohabitate, which they were granted, and, later, went on strike after they were refused to be given any more ammunition for their training due to their wild and excessive waste on the firing range.  During their strike, they decided to sunbathe naked on the roofs of their quarters.  The PLO took for this to be the last straw and, so as to avoid any further culture shock of their own militants, agreed to arrange for their passage back to the Federal Republic.[41] 

Upon arriving in Berlin in August of 1970, they began to prepare for what they called the “triple coup”, an act of “expropriation”, or, as it is more commonly known, a series of bank robberies.  On the 29^th of September in 1970, in a span of just ten minutes, and in collaboration with the 2 of June Movement, they successfully robbed three banks simultaneously.[42]  Emboldened by their actions, they decided to expand their underground network and brought Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Irmgard Möller into their fold.[43][44]  

In April of 1971, they published “The Urban Guerilla Concept”.  It opens with three quotes by Mao Zedong and is then followed by a polemical rebuttal to their depiction in both in the press and by the German Left.  It continues with commentary on the situation in West Germany, an acknowledgement of their roots in the student movement, an averment of the “primacy of practice”, a theory of the urban guerilla, and closes with a defense of their illegal practice.  The crux of their argument is featured just before the section on the urban guerilla:

“The Red Army Faction asserts the primacy of practice.  Whether it is right to organize armed resistance now depends on whether it is possible, and whether it is possible can only be determined in practice.”[45]

When anyone wages a revolution, they can never be certain that it will succeed.  In the case of the RAF, we, of course, know that it did not, but to wage revolution is inevitably a perilous gamble.  When a person shoots heroin, there is always a chance that they might die of an overdose.  Every time a person shoots up is, in some sense, a near attempted suicide.  Though I, of course, do not really know, having never, myself, been in one, I would imagine for life within a terrorist cell to be quite similar. Inevitably, for a crisis generated by political terrorism to be successful, a civil war has to break out.  Political terrorism can, in the sense, be considered as a low-intensity civil war.  Like soldiers in any conflict, there is always a chance that one might be captured or killed.  Particular to guerilla warfare, however, is that the conflict is largely asymmetrical.  The Left, along with many other political philosophers, all agree that the state has a monopoly on violence.  Revolutionary violence is necessarily somewhat suicidal.  When you play a game of Russian Roulette, at least, according to its rules, the only way to discover as to whether or not a bullet is in the chamber is to pull the trigger.  When the RAF had wanted to contend with their “primacy of practice” is that they were willing, as it were, to pull the trigger.

For all of its wild excess in polemics, “The Urban Guerilla Concept” does make sense.  While the RAF might have been deluding themselves in that a revolution in West Germany was warranted, let alone stood any real chance of success, assuming, as they often did, that it was warranted and could succeed, what is presented in “The Urban Guerilla Concept” are precisely the kind of the theories that they should adopt, the kind of attitudes that they should display, and the kind of style with which to get their message across.  While it may not be the only one, the praxis presented within “The Urban Guerilla Concept” is not quite the cult phenomenon that it is sometimes believed to be; it is also a logical consequence of Marxist revolution in the West.  While I do not, here, mean is that your average Marxist academic is somehow a political terrorist, what I would like to suggest is that, if someone really thought things all of the way through and if they really wanted to incite a Marxist revolution, they would probably come to any number of the same conclusions. 

In May of 1972, the RAF launched their “May Offensive”.  On the 11^th of May, they bombed a US Army headquarters in Frankfurt.  Paul A. Bloomquist was killed and thirteen others were wounded.[46]  On the 12^th of May, they bombed a police station in Augsburg.  Five were wounded.[47]  On the 15^th of May, they attempted to assassinate judge Wolfgang Buddenberg with a car bomb.  His wife, who was driving the car, was wounded.[48]  On the 19^th of May, they called the offices of Axel Springer Verlag and demanded that the building be evacuated.  Their demands were ignored and seventeen people were wounded in the bombing.[49]  On the 24^th of May, they set a bomb off outside of the Officers’ Club at Campbell Barracks.  Three died and five were wounded.[50] 

Following was became the largest police operation in the Federal Republic, after a number of shootouts with the police, by the 7^th of July in 1972, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Mahler, Meins, Rapse, and Möller had all been arrested.[51]  Astrid Proll, the getaway driver for Baader’s escape, had been arrested on the 6^th of May in 1971 and was transferred to a sanatorium.  She managed to escape from there to England, where she was discovered by a Special Branch of London Police on the 15^th of September in 1978.  Graffiti demanding her release can be seen in the 1979 film, Radio On.[52][53] 

Meinhof was kept in the same cell in the notorious “dead section” of Ossendorf jail that resulted in Proll’s being transferred to the sanatorium.  She was both physically and acoustically isolated from any contact with the outside world.  She recorded her experience in stream of conscious writing:

“The feeling that your head is exploding.

The feeling that the top of your skull must be going to split and come off.

The feeling of your spinal chord being pressed into your brain…

…That’s the worst thing.  A clear awareness that your chance of survival is nil.  Utter failure to communicate that.  Visits leave no trace behind them.  Half an hour later, you can tell if the visit was today or last week only by a melancholy reconstructing it.

On the other hand, a bath once a week means a moment’s thawing out, recovery – and that feeling persists for a few hours.

The feeling that time and space interlock…”[54]

The prisoners’ time in solitary confinement resulted in a series of hunger strikes against “isolation torture”, which won them a widespread sympathy among the general populace.[55]  Mahler would break from the RAF during this period of time, effectively deriding the strikes as childish.  He would serve his sentence, later go on to join the far-Right and, again, be imprisoned for Volksverhetzung, a crime somewhat unique to Germany meaning, “the incitement of the popular hatred”.[56] 

On the 9^th of November in 1974, Holger Meins died on hunger strike.  His funeral was attended by many student activists, one of whom was Rudi Dutschke, who raised his fist in the air and declared, “Holger, the fight goes on!”[57] 

The prisoners were eventually transferred to a special wing of Stammheim Prison where their conditions were bizarrely lax.  They could meet with one another in the adjoining commons area, were let to outside for brief periods of time, and met extensively with their lawyers whom they passed messages through with their “info-system”.  They were also able to obtain radios, televisions, and books of all kinds, many of which were technical military manuals that they had clearly intended to utilize in their guerilla war campaign.  They were even able to develop an intercom system to speak to one another which the prison guards apparently had no knowledge of.[58] 

As the Federal Office in Bonn had suspected for the RAF to be coordinating actions on the outside, what my guess would be is that they were not unaware of the prisoners’ communications in prison, but had, rather, been spying on them in the hopes of garnishing information. 

Throughout the entire course of their highly publicized trial, they blanketly refused to participate within the proceedings.  When they were finally sentenced, none of the defendants were present, as they had all been barred for repeated disruptions.[59] 

Leading up through the death of Holger Meins and to their inevitable conviction, the second generation of the RAF had become more and more active. 

On the 5^th of September in 1972, the Black September organization took a group of Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic games.  They demanded the release of a number of a Palestinian prisoners, as well as a few members of the RAF.  Their demands were not met and the event, tragically, resulted in a massacre.  Eleven Israeli athletes were killed along with one German policeman and five of the Palestinian terrorists died.[60] 

On the 10^th of November in 1974, Günter von Drenkmann was killed in a failed kidnapping by the second generation of the RAF.[61]  They waged a number of actions designed to free the prisoners, which would ultimately culminate within German Autumn.  The most notable of these is, perhaps, the storming of the German Embassy in Stockholm on the 25^th of April in 1975, which resulted in the chilling execution of a hostage, Baron Andreas von Mirbach, a set of explosions, four total deaths and fourteen injuries.[62] 

The second and subsequent third generation of the RAF are sometimes criticized for perpetuating a cycle of violence for the near unilateral objective of freeing prisoners who, themselves, had engaged in terrorist acts designed to free prisoners.  The illegalism of the original RAF put forth in “The Concept of the Urban Guerilla” breaks down in this manner, as, for all that can be said of prisoners of conscience, for the common spectator, it would seem relatively obvious that, should a person have qualms with there being political prisoners, they just should not advocate for people to engage within political terrorism in the first place.  A similar logic, perhaps, applies to various Palestinian resistance movements, though they have, at least, had some success in the past in convincing the Israeli government to engage in prisoner exchanges. 

While in Stammheim, as attempts to set them free repeatedly failed, the relationships between the RAF prisoners began to deteriorate.  Though an interesting double-entendre, the “Baader-Meinhof Complex”, the official name for the RAF within the security services of the Federal Republic, was a bit of a misnomer.  Though Meinhof did author many of their communiques, the de facto leadership of the RAF were none other than Andraes Baader and his longtime lover, Gudrun Ensslin.  Baader was, of course, the man of action, whereas Ensslin provided the revolutionary catechism within the group, whose “criticism and self-criticism” often amounted to Baader berating the other members and Ensslin smoothing things over with her instructions of just what was the correct revolutionary path. 

As they were often together, the relationship between Ensslin and Meinhof became particularly disintegrative, which has led many to suggest that Meinhof’s suicide was due to her alienation from the RAF.[63]

On the 9^th of May in 1976, Meinhof was found dead in her cell by hanging.  Though some would claim that she was, in point of fact, murdered, most of the West German populace accepted the official claim that she did commit suicide.  The notion of her “murder” was to moreso suggest that the state was responsible for her death, as it was quite clear that her mental state began to deteriorate during her time in solitary confinement.[64]  Though I do have certain suspicions regarding the death of Andraes Baader and the near death of Irmgard Möller, as it had become increasingly clear that the RAF were not going to be released from prison, Meinhof had become increasingly isolated from the rest of the group, and her time in solitary did seem to fracture her psyche, I do accept the official ruling as a suicide. 

Meinhof became sort of a tragic icon for both the far-Left and the feminist movement after death.  She, along with other RAF members, were immortalized in the photorealistic paintings of Gerhard Richter, Marianne Faithful’s “Broken English” was dedicated to her, and the character of Ophelia in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine was based off of her.[65][66]  It closes with:

“Here speaks Electra. In the Heart of Darkness. Under the Sun of Torture. To the Metropolises of the World…Down with the joy of oppression. Long live hate, loathing, rebellion, death. When she walks through your bedroom with butcher’s knives, you’ll know the truth.”[67]

Following Meinhof’s death, two desperate attempts to free the remaining prisoners by the second generation of the RAF would come to culminate in what is known as German Autumn. 

On the 5^th of September in 1977, Hanns Martin Schleyer, former SS member and German industrialist, was kidnapped by the RAF.  Heinz Marcisz, his chauffeur, Roland Pieler, Reinhold Brändle, and Helmut Ulmer, all police officers, were killed during the abduction.  Schleyer was hidden in an apartment building in Erftstadt.  The RAF engaged in a series of communications with the West Germany security forces in the hopes of exchanging Schyler for the imprisoned members of the original RAF.  The Federal Republic never intended to free prisoners and spent most of their efforts on buying time.[68] 

On the 13^th of October, Lufthansa Flight 181 was hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PLFP.  They, too, demanded the release of the RAF prisoners.  In a series of communications between various law enforcement agencies, national governments, and the hijackers, the plane flew from Frankfurt to Rome to Larnaca to Bahrain to Dubai to Aden to the Somali capital of Mogadishu. 

Though, naturally, they hoped for the hijacking to free them, the imprisoned members of the RAF quietly denounced the action to both each other and their intermediaries from German intelligence.

On the 17^th of October, a coordinated operation between West German special forces, the United Kingdom’s Special Air Force, and the Somali Army successfully freed all of the hostages and took out the four PLFP commandos.  Only the pilot, who had been executed earlier, died and four of the hostages suffered minor injuries from explosive blasts. 

That same night, Andraes Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Rapse, and Irmgard Möller arguably agreed to commit suicide.  Baader, Ensslin, and Rapse were found dead in their cells the next morning, and Möller, who, to this day, maintains that they were murdered, survived multiple stab wounds to the chest.  Ensslin hung herself and Rapse shot himself in the head.  Baader is alleged to have shot himself in the back of the neck either at point blank range or from thirty centimeters away.[69] 

I think that it would be safe to assume that they were aware of that the hijacking had failed.  They also had, on numerous occasions, threatened to commit suicide in protest.  They were also capable of communicating with one another through their intercom.  It is also known that they did smuggle the weapons into prison through their info-system.  I would suggest that there are two plausible scenarios concerning their debatable suicides.  In both, they do make a suicide pact and, in both, Ensslin and Rapse follow through with it.  In one, however, all of the members follow through with the pact, as is what is officially stated.  In the other, Baader and Möller, for some reason or another, decide not to follow all of the way through with it and someone in some position of power somewhere decides, at that point, to just go ahead and get rid of them.  If Baader was shot from thirty centimeters away from the back of his neck, it would seem highly implausible that this was a position from which he could have taken his own life.  Möller is alleged to have stabbed herself through the chest four consecutive times, which, though certainly possible in desperation, would have taken an extraordinary amount of willpower.  As I can not possibly gain the requisite information to give a conclusive answer, I can only speculate.  With only speculation, however, the official story does stand, and, so, we should, in some sense, set aside our skepticism and, without the light of further evidence, accept that they did, in point of fact, commit suicide.   

Regardless as to what really happened that night in Stammheim, I find it rather poignant that, due to the undo duress caused by the many crises of the RAF, for many it just did not even matter by then.  People were relieved that the prisoners were now, as it were, gone and felt that their troubles should soon be over. 

They, of course, were wrong.  Soon after their deaths, Schlyer was found dead en route to Mulhouse in France.  The third generation of the RAF would continue its operations all of the way up until the 20^th of April in 1998.  Though they were occasionally critical of the so-called “collateral damage” which they caused, they, by-in-large, showed little to no remorse for their actions.[70]

Throughout the entire history of the RAF, the German security apparatus expanded immensely.  The fight between the police of the Federal Republic and the RAF, in many ways, marks the origins of modern counterterrorism.  Even if you could suggest that the actions of the RAF did represent a symbolic victory, they most certainly resulted within a strategic failure. 

Concluding Remarks on the RAF

For all that the RAF failed to achieve in the beaten way of revolution, they do still certainly live on within the popular imagination.  For some, they are martyrs, to others, they are tragic heroes, common criminals, drug addicts with weapons, reckless miscreants, concerted intellectuals, or the left-wing equivalent of a children’s crusade.  While certainly a cult phenomenon in retrospect, I should hope that I have shown that they were not born ex nihilo.  They formed the avant-garde of their historical zeitgeist.  While many were only willing to talk of revolution, they were willing to wage it.  It was a wager that bore tragic consequences. 

The RAF’s motivations for engaging within political terrorism probably vary between each and every individual member.  What Baader saw in Clyde Barrow found its ethical imperative in Ali La Pointe.  Revolution was as much of an adventure for him as it was a manifestation of the freedom he saw in life on the outside.  Gudrun Ensslin’s love of Baader transformed into a romantic political crusade that celebrated her life on the run.  It also provided her with a forum for her particular brand of revolutionary catechism.  Ulrike Meinhof felt an obligation towards society’s outcasts, which, in contrast to her professional life, led to that she, herself, would live as one. 

To give a general account of their motivations, I would suggest that the RAF, motivated, wittingly or not by their failure to come to terms with the Nazi past, believed for the Federal Republic to be a form of well disguised fascism.  Their dystopian outlook set them on a desperate course for an alternative way of life, which they, of course, found in communism.  As “six against sixty million”, they became evermore convinced that their hour was at hand and that their tactics were justified.[71]  Like any idealistic political crusade, however, as the death toll mounted, the utopian vision began to wane and their strategy became one of their own ideological survival.  What began in protest of the Vietnam War ended as a series of attempts to liberate comrades imprisoned for attempting to liberate comrades who had long since died in prison.  Ideology, too, began to dissipate and they eventually became a kind of criminal organization with communist characteristics. 

In 1968, the six chambers of the revolver were spun.  To both their credit and their chagrin, time and time again, the RAF would prove that they were willing to pull the trigger.  There are two lessons to be learned from the RAF.  The first is that you should have the courage not to play the game, engage in dialogue, and unload the gun.  The second is that you should neither produce a situation where revolution seems warranted nor advance revolution where it is not, which is to say that you should never spin the chambers.     

---

[1] Jeremy Varon. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. (University of California Press, 2004).

[2] David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charolette Zwerin. Gimme Shelter. (The Criterion Collection, 1970).

[3] Sven Felix Kellerhoff. “The obscure act of the Dutschke shooter”. (Die Welt, 6 December 2009).

[4] “CIA to Release Records on Cold War Spymaster German General Reinhard Gehlen”. (The National Archives and Records Administration, 20 September 2000).

[5] The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 March 2024).

[6] “Armed SS: A Pure Joy”. (Der Spiegel, 24 March 1964).

[7] John J. McCloy. “The Present Status of Denazification”. Quarterly Report on Germany. (The Office of the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany, 31 December 1950). 

[8] “Hindenburg Spreads “Stab-in-the-Back” Myth”. Holocaust Encyclopedia. (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

[9] Hans Ernest Fried. “Review of Der Fueher”. (The American Political Science Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 June 1944). p. 567.

[10] John J. McCloy. “The Present Status of Denazification”. ibid. 

[11] “Party-State Nomenclature”. The Great Russian Encyclopedia. (The Russian Federation, 2004-2017).

[12] Ronald Grigor Suny. “The Empire that Dared Not Speak Its Name: Making Nations in the Soviet State”. (Current History, Vol. 116, No. 792: Russia and Eurasia, October 2017).

[13] Jon Gambrell. “CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic as it revisits ‘Argo’ rescue”. (Associated Press, 12 October 2023).

[14] Geraint Hughes. “Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall: A Retrospective”. (King’s College, 8 November 2019).

[15] Alan Johnson. “The Cultural Cold War: Faust Not the Pied Piper”. (New Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2001).

[16] John J. McCloy. “The Present Status of Denazification”. ibid.

[17] The Economist Intelligence Unit. Democracy Index 2023. (The Economist, 2024). p. 9.

[18] Michael W. Kometer. “Chapter 4: “Old” Terrorism”. The New Terrorism: The Nature of the War on Terrorism. (Air University Press, 1 July 2004). p. 27-47.

[19] Jessica Yu. Protagonist. (IFC Films, 30 November 2007).

[20] Richard Huffman. “Terminology: Baader-Meinhof Wagen”. (baader-meinhof.com, 11 October 2011).

[21] Robert Gerald Livingston. “’Violence is the Only Way’”. (The New York Times, 3 January 1988).
“Violence is the only answer to violence, this is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them!” is a quote by Gudrun Ensslin.

[22] D. P. Conradt. “Green Party of Germany”. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 December 2023).

[23] William Grimes. “Fritz Truel, a German Protestor in the ‘60s, Dies at 67”. (The New York Times, 7 August 2010).

[24] Stefan Aust. “Napalm and Pudding”. Baader-Meinhof. (Oxford University Press, 2008). p. 22.

[25] Ulrike Meinhof. “Open Letter to Farah Diba”. Everybody Talks About the Weather…We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof. (Seven Stories Press, 2008). p. 171.

[26] “Death of the demonstrator (commemorative plaque for Benno Ohnesorg)”. (District Office of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, December 1990).

[27] Karl-Heinz Kurras was later discovered to be working in collaboration with the East German Stasi, though the context of the killing is still uncertain.   

[28] Ulrike Meinhof. “Counter-Violence”. ibid. p. 234-238.

[29] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “The Arson Trial”. ibid. p. 37.

[30] David L. Shambaugh. Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice. (Claredon Press, 1995). p. 249.

[31] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Arson, or There’s No Turning Back”. ibid. p. 32. 

[32] Tom Vague. Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story 1963-1993. (AK Press, 2001). p. 16. 

[33] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Peter-Jürgen Boock”. ibid. pp. 47-50.

[34] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Arms in the Cemetery”. ibid. p. 58.

[35] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “An Attempted Assassination”. ibid. pp. 33-35.

[36] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “An Attempted Assassination”. ibid. pp. 34-35.

[37] Ulrike Meinhof. “From Protest to Resistance”. Some People Talk About the Weather…We Don’t. ibid. p. 239.
According to Meinhof, this is a paraphrase of something that someone from the Black Power Movement said at a conference on the Vietnam War.

[38] Ulrike Meinhof. “From Protest to Resistance”. Some People Talk About the Weather…We Don’t. ibid. p. 242. 

[39] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Preparing a Rescue”. ibid. pp. 59-61.

[40] The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Red Army Faction are also connected through the East German spymaster, Markus Wolf, alias, “Mischa”.  Though I do not know if this occurred under his direction, konkret was also, in part, funded by the GDR. 

[41] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. ibid.  pp. 65-75.

[42] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “The Triple Coup”. Ibid. pp. 78-80.

[43] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Jan-Carl Rapse” and “’A Certain Psychological Disposition’”. ibid. pp. 86, 89. 

[44] André Moncourt and J. Smith. The Red Army Faction Volume 2: Dancing with Imperialism. (PM Press, 2013). p. 356.

[45] The Red Army Faction. “The Urban Guerilla Concept”. (The Red Army Faction, April 1971).

[46] “Attack by the Red Army Faction on the Frankfurt headquarters of the US Army, May 11, 1972”. (State Historical Information System Hesse).

[47] “RAF Chronology”. (Deutsche Welle, 5 September 2007).

[48] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Bomb Attacks”. ibid. p. 161.

[49] Lars-Broder Keil. “When bombs exploded in the Axel Springer building”. (Axel Springer SE, 19 May 2022).

[50] “Blasts at U.S. Base in Germany Kill 3”. (The New York Times, 25 May 1972).

[51] Stefan Aust covers their captures throughout Part Two of Baader-Meinhof.

[52] Alexander Symons Sutcliffe. “Dispossed: Portraiture and Property in the Case of Astrid Proll”. (Archive of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions, 11 October, 2023).

[53] Christopher Petit. Radio On. (British Film Institute, 1979).

[54] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “’A Clear Awareness That Your Chance of Survival Is Nil’”. ibid. pp. 179-180.  

[55] This is a theme discussed throughout Part Three of Baader-Meinhof.

[56] “Former Left-Wing Extremist, Horst Mahler, Switches to Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party”. (The Southern Poverty and Law Center, 29 August 2001).

[57] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “’Holger, the Fight Goes On!’”. ibid. p. 211.  

[58] This is also discussed throughout the latter parts of Baader-Meinhof, beginning in Part Three.

[59] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “The End of a Ghost Trial”. ibid. p. 288. 

[60] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Black September”. ibid. pp. 1818-183. 

[61] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “The Murder of a Judge”. ibid. p. 210. 

[62] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Storming the German Embassy”. ibid. pp. 223-228.

[63] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “’…Because You Want to Crack Up’”. ibid.  pp. 252-255.

[64] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “The Death of Ulrike Meinhof” and “’And Finally She Herself’”. ibid. pp. 258, 262-263.  

[65] Gerhard Richter. October 18, 1977. (November 1988).

[66] Marianne Faithfull, Barry Reynolds, Joe Mavety, Steve York, and Terry Stannard. “Broken English”. Broken English. (Island, 2 November 1979).

[67] Heiner Müller. Hamletmachine. (1979). 

[68] These events occur throughout Part Five of Baader-Meinhof

[69] These events do as well. 

[70] Stefan Aust. Baader-Meinhof. “Aftermath”. ibid. pp. 432-438.

[71] That the RAF constituted an army of “six against sixty million” is from a quote in a newspaper article by Heinrich Böll, author of the 1974 novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, which was made into a film of the same name by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta in 1975. 

            There is a certain irony to the French Revolution in that one of, primarily, two historical events that came to serve as the basis for the beaux ideals of Liberalism was, perhaps, the genesis of modern dictatorship and that it became notorious for its ritualistic and ostensibly self-purifying use of the guillotine.  In the opening chapter to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote, “If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre.  But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one.”  The protagonist then asks how we can condemn something that is ephemeral and declares, “In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”[1]  It was, perhaps, telling that the guillotine had originally been created as a more humane means to carry out public executions out of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s opposition to capital punishment.  The Committee of Public Safety was capable of absolving itself of its ritual public murders, all the while legitimating that such a device was in need of such constant use that there was ever even a reason for its invention.  Though certainly more quick and painless than other instruments of public execution at the time, the public spectacle of serial beheadings must have had an extraordinary effect upon the French populace.  It would have been as if, by experiencing the acute trauma of serving as a witness to political decapitations, a French citizen was expected to substitute the theoretical catharsis of divine violence with the terror of the Revolution.  By carrying out the Reign of Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, who during the Thermidorian Reaction was, himself, beheaded, must have believed that he was purifying the French body-politic.  The device became emblematic of the Revolution, the violence associated with it, and, to some, the dictatorial control that The Committee of Public Safety had secured over the National Convention.  For the many on the right, it has become a symbol for the Left’s vengeful disregard for the “sanctity of life” and, within certain circles on the left, one of liberation.  Though I am not so inclined so as to pathologically fear the poor and downtrodden, in part, because I have little reason to, I see little to celebrate of a reign of terror.  On the 6^th of April in 1871, communards of the Paris Commune dismantled and burned a guillotine that had been built for the government of Adolphe Thiers.[2]  They did not believe, contrary to many of their own avowed sympathies with Louis Auguste Blanqui, that the world that they had wanted to create could be established by an exclusive conspiratorial sect or, contrary to what many, at the time, thought about revolutionaries, through the excessive use of revolutionary terror.  The Bolshevik faction of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, would not prove to have been so wise.

            A notable blight upon Lenin’s legacy is that he was, perhaps, how the charge of being among the intelligentsia came to be brought at the level of a slur.  While it may come as no surprise to anyone overly concerned with Communist sympathizers outside of the former Soviet Union that the alleged inventor of the term, “useful idiot”, came to be associated with the pretense of intellectual superiority, as there is no known record of his usage of it, I should like to consider how this came to be without verifying any, dare I say, “reactionary” predispositions.  Within the Soviet Union, as well as number of other Communist countries in what is often referred to as “Eastern Europe”, it became quite common to associate the “intelligentsia” with the “apparat”, or the administrative system of an official Communist party.  Official Communist parties, within the Soviet Union, as well as almost all of the “Eastern Bloc”, were, despite almost every formality, the effective ruling orders.  Though I would claim that Lenin would have been far from advocating what became of his attempt to counter “factionalism” by granting the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party the right to expel members “in cases of violation of discipline or of a revival or toleration of factionalism” during the 10^th Congress of the Communist Party on the 6^th of March in 1921, the “democratic centralism” invoked by a number of party officials to justify their de facto rule did have definite origins within both his theories and practices.[3]

            In his lengthy 1902 polemical onslaught against the “primitivism”, “amateurism”, and “trade unionism” of Rabocheye Delo, What Is to Be Done?, Lenin repudiated the concept of revolutionary spontaneity, defended the visionary telos of the abolition of tsardom and the radical development of the Communist project, called for the training of a clandestine set of disciplined revolutionary cadres, and emphasized the importance of a national Russian Social Democratic Labour Party newspaper that would cover all aspects of political life.[4]  Despite that Rabocheye Delo was a mere organ of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, only began publishing in 1899, and ceased doing so in February of the year that Lenin had published his now famous polemic, he characterized their political disposition as being that of the entire “third period” of the social-democratic movement in Russia and called for the replacement of such “opportunists” by a “genuine vanguard”.[5]  As anyone might imagine, Lenin’s near total lack of willingness to take the accusation of being “anti-democratic” into any form of consideration whatsoever and explicit desire to take over the organization did become a cause for concern within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.  During the 2^nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held between the 30^th of July and 23^rd of August in 1903, Julius Martov, then a friend and mentor to Leon Trotsky, debated Lenin in regards to the party’s approach to membership.  Lenin’s program qualified membership “by personal participation in one of the party organizations” whereas Martov’s proposed revision only required “regular personal association”.[6]  The dispute, however, was not limited to the administrative task of qualifying members or the procedural delineation of an official program.  It was moreso engendered by divergent standpoints concerning the organizational structure and direction of the party.  Those who supported Martov, by and large, believed that the party should be an inclusive organization that respected the autonomy of the working class by letting it cultivate a resistance to tsardom and an understanding of Socialism largely on it its own.  They also tended to favor focusing upon issues that would be relevant to workers in their daily lives, rather than on the grand emancipatory project of a Socialist revolution, and parliamentary reform, as opposed to revolutionary violence.  Those who supported Lenin, believing themselves to have been vindicated by the requisite confidentiality of being in an organization that was outlawed, by and large, believed that the party should be an exclusive organization that sought to lead the working class in a violent revolution.  Martov originally won a majority vote at the congress, but, as seven of his supporters would later walk out, the program was ratified as Lenin had dictated it.  Having gained a majority at the congress, Lenin, perhaps seeking to present his faction as the only veritable vox populi, named his faction of the party, the “Bolsheviks”, which loosely translates to “those who are of the majority”.  Martov, in turn, named the faction to have supported him, the “Mensheviks”, or “those who are of the minority”.  The dispute devolved after the conference, with many Mensheviks accusing Lenin of being a despot, and resulted in his resignation from the editorial board of Iskra, which he had run since 1900. Though Lenin would lament the loss of his “amazing comrade” in 1921, their differences were never reconciled and the Mensheviks were banned by the Russian Communist Party following the Kronsdat rebellion during the Russian Civil War.[7]

            On the 22^nd of January in 1905, a mass of strikers marched upon the Winter Palace.  They were led by the Reverend Gregory Gapon, head of the Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg, an organization that sought to improve working conditions without facing violent opposition from the police and tied to the Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, the “Okhrana”, the secret police of the Russian Empire.  The march resulted in a massacre and later became known as “Bloody Sunday”.  After Gapon revealed his dual loyalties Pinchas Rutenberg, who, in turn, revealed them to the members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Yevno Azef and Boris Savinkov, he was hung outside of a rented cottage in St. Petersburg on the 10^th of April in 1906.[8]  Yevno Azef was already a double agent for the Okhrana and Boris Savinkov was involved in a number of political assassinations between the years of 1904 and 1905.  He was, later, thought to have been killed by the State Political Directorate, the intelligence service of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, after a failed rendezvous with whom he believed to have been co-conspirators of the Secret Intelligence Service agent, Sidney Riley, the “Ace of Spies”.[9]  The Okhrana was notorious for their usage of agent provocateurs, which I suspect to have had an effect upon Lenin, as his “professional revolutionaries” were to have been organized like an intelligence operation.  Following the massacre, strikes broke out throughout the entire country in what was to become the Russian Revolution of 1905.  Lenin, as anyone might expect, supported the revolution.  Contrary to what he had published for Iskra and written in What Is to Be Done?, he also advocated for many of the tactics and goals put forth by the Socialist Revolutionary Party, such as the expropriation of land and the utilization of political terrorism, which further factionalized the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.  In July of 1905, he finished writing Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which advocated insurrection.  It was, perhaps, then that he broke completely from the social democratic project in creating a revolutionary theory that would later both come to be understood and misrepresented as “Leninism”.  Though the revolution would not successfully overthrow the tsardom, it did result in the radical concessionary reform, the establishment of the State Duma, the Lower House of the Russian Empire.

Because many revolutionaries believed for Tsar Nicholas II’s Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order, the October Manifesto, to have provided them with insignificant liberties, they boycotted the 1906 Russian legislative elections.  The First Duma was comprised of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, the “Kadets”, the social-democratic Trudoviks, and the liberal, reformist, and constitutional monarchist Union of October 17, the “Octoberist” Party.[10]  It lasted for less than three months before it was dissolved by Tsar Nicholas II the day before Pyotr Stolypin was made Prime Minister.  On the 22^nd of July, the Vyborg Manifesto was issued in response.  It was signed primarily by Kadets and Trudoviks, but, without the support of the general populace, merely led to many of their arrests.   Aleksei Feodorovich Aladin, leader of the Trudoviks, was banished from Russia in spite of that he considered for the writing of the manifesto to have been ill-advised.  He would later join the White Army during the Russian Civil War.[11]  Despite the renewed restrictions upon political freedoms, by the time that the Second Duma convened, the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries all had abandoned their strategy of boycotting elections and won a number of seats in the 1907 legislative election held in January.[12]  Their success, however, was short-lived.  On the 2^nd of June in 1907, the imperial government, under the direction of Stolypin, who, in his life, would survive ten assassination attempts before being shot at the Kiev Opera House on the 14^th of September in 1911, demanded that the Duma hand over fifty-five deputies who were alleged to have been involved with either political terrorism or revolutionary agitation within the military.[13]  Because they had been granted parliamentary immunity by the October Manifesto, the elect to the State Duma were not technically obliged to do so and refused to upon having been issued the decree.  Stolypin, in turn, dissolved the Second Duma the next day.  The Third Duma, which lasted from the 7^th of November in 1907 to the 9^th of June in 1912, would have little influence upon matters of state and, by many, was considered to be largely symbolic.  The Fourth Duma was, perhaps, notable for the role that it had to play in response to the July Crisis, as well as that both Alexander Kerensky and Roman Malinovsky were elected to it.[14][15]  Kerensky would later become the Chairman of the Russian Provisional Government and the president of the following transitional government, the “Directorate”, before it was dissolved during the October Revolution.  Malinovsky was a member of the Central Committee for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and a double agent for the Okhrana.[16]  He was executed by firing squad in 1918.  The Fourth Duma didn’t differ too much from the Third Duma otherwise.  It is against this legislative backdrop that we can come to understand how it was that Lenin came to create his own political party.

With the dissolution of the Second Duma came a wave of political repression and Lenin went into exile.  He would not return to Russia until after the February Revolution in 1917.  The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party also became further factionalized.  The Mensheviks split into the “Pro-Party Mensheviks”, led by Georgi Plekhanov, who sought to continue both legal and illegal activities and the “Liquidators”, who sought only to pursue social-democratic reform through the established legal channels.  Plekhanov was a Marxist theorist who was considered to be the founder of the social-democratic movement in Russia and who had become one of Lenin and Trotsky’s principal antagonists during the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Delegates, the “St. Petersburg Soviet”, in 1905.[17]  The Bolsheviks split unto the “Ultimasts”, led by Grigory Aleksinsky, who sought to issue ultimatums to party deputies demanding that they follow its line or resign immediately, “Recallists”, led by Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who called for the recall of all party members from the Duma and for a boycott of all legal work, and a group centered around the newspaper that Lenin had edited from the 3^rd of September in 1906 to the 11^th of December in 1909, Proletary, also led by Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, both of whom would later testify during the “Trial of the Sixteen”, the first of the Moscow Show Trials held from the 19^th to the 24^th of August in 1936, who were decidedly opposed to nearly every other faction of the party.[18][19]  From the 5^th to the 7^th of January in 1912, the 6^th All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in Prague.  The conference was supposed to have been kept secret, even within the party, but the Okhrana was aware of what happened during it.  At the conference, Lenin and his associates expelled their rival factions from the party and elected seven members to the Central Committee.[20]  One of the newly elected Central Committee members was Malinovsky and another was Josef Stalin.[21][22]  The conference effectively created another political party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks).  It was this political party that would become the Russian Communist Party, which Lenin led during the Russian Civil War, thereupon, the All-Union Communist Party, the de facto ruling order under Josef Stalin, and, later, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, more or less the only political party within the Soviet Union until it was dissolved on the 29^th of August in 1991. 

It was at the 6^th Congress that the Bolsheviks decided to employ Pravda, a reference to the Russkaya Pravda, the legal code of the Kievan Rus’,in their service.[23]  On the 5^th of May in 1912, the newspaper began, under the direction of Vladimir Lenin, to publish legally.  The paper had been around since 1903, began publishing during the Russian Revolution of 1905, and became popularized under the editorship of Leon Trotsky.[24][25]  The paper would not enjoy its legal status for long, however, as itwas shut down by the tsardom in July of 1914.  It would not begin publishing again until after the February Revolution, when it was edited by Vyacheslav Molotov, who would later staunchly defend Stalin after he was officially denounced by Nikita Khrushchev on the 25^th of February in 1956, and Alexander Shliapnikov, who would later become the leader of the Worker’s Opposition movement within the Russian Communist Party and was executed on the 2^nd of September in 1937.[26][27]  It was, then, taken over by Kamenev, Stalin, and Matvei Muranov, who supported Stalin and would survive the Great Terror, on the 12^th of March in 1917.[28]   They edited the paper until its offices were moved to Moscow on the 3^rd of March in 1918, when it became an official organ of the Russian Communist Party.  Nikolai Bukharin edited the paper from then until February of 1929 when both he and Mikhail Tomsky, who would later commit suicide in order to avoid arrest in 1936, were removed from their posts.  Bukharian testified during the “Trial of the Twenty-One”, the last of the Moscow Show Trials.[29]  He was accused of espionage, attempting to wage a “fascist” palace coup, assassinate Lenin and Stalin, and partition the Soviet Union to be divided amongst Germany, Great Britain, and Japan.[30]  He was shot on the 15^th of March in 1938.  Today, Pravda is owned by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, quite arguably the successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the second-largest political party in the Russian Federation.

The closing of Pravda coincided with the outbreak of the First World War.  Contrary to the Social Democratic Party of Germany, of whom he was affiliated, Lenin opposed the war.  He spent a great deal of his time in exile advocating for the transformation of the war into a continental “civil war” between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and the proletariat.  In September of 1917, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was published.  In it, Lenin claimed that capitalism culminates in the creation of monopolies, emphasized the “universal character” of financial capital, attempted to delineate an economic basis for imperialism, rejected Karl Kautsky’s, who would leave the Social Democratic Party of Germany in opposition to the war in 1917, “official optimism” in what was the telling crux of his argument, and characterized his political opponents as “opportunists”.[31]  It does stand to common reason, by that Lenin had attempted to exploit the war in order to incite a revolution and that, in what anyone would assume to be a sober analysis of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, he primarily occupied himself with chiding his newly found political opponents, he did not take Pacifism seriously.  What, then, can be said for his attitude towards imperialism?  In the text, Lenin does claim that imperialism is an inevitable result of capitalism and that it is utilized as a means to divide and conquer the working class.  Given that he was an avowed Marxist, it would be safe to assume that he was a bona fide anti-imperialist.  The text, however, perhaps, because of Friedrich Engel’s insistence upon the “scientific” nature of Socialism, makes little mention of the horrors of either imperialism or colonialism.[32]  I would doubt that Lenin was particularly moved by righteous indignation in his opposition and suggest that he merely thought that imperialism was a culminate set of crises engendered by capitalism.  Such analysis is, perhaps, germane, but would certainly seem to fall short of what a number of Marxist-Leninists had offered revolutionary groups around the world with their invocation of it.  Though Lenin would have probably renounced the “social imperialism” carried out by the Soviet Union, his methodical and self-interested opposition would, later, become nothing but reflective of official Soviet policy. 

He would author another text that would become integral to Soviet orthodoxy during this period of time.  In August of 1917, Lenin finished writing The State and Revolution.  He had planned to write an additional chapter for the book, but never did so because he became preoccupied with the October Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War.  In the text, he characteristically castigates his political rivals, rails against “opportunist prejudices” and “philistine illusions” concerning the “peaceful development of democracy”, develops a “Marxist” revolutionary teleology that calls for the eventual abolition of the necessity of democracy and delineates a two phase theory of the development of communist society, repudiates democracy in general, paradoxically cites the Paris Commune in his defense of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, claims that a “special apparatus” for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat will simply “wither away” as communist society develops, and, in a section of the text that was either originally written or, later, directly quoted by Bukharin, calls for “seas of blood” to flow in the wake of a revolution led by a vanguard party.[33]  To the chagrin of any self-respecting Leninist, unless they are willing to claim that the “withering away of the state” began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we now know this “special apparatus” never went through an extempore disintegration.  While, perhaps, originally written as a both pragmatic and visionary preliminary delineation of revolutionary praxis, there are many who would later interpret it as a defense of authoritarianism.  The “Leninism” of the official ideology of the Soviet Union, Marxism-Leninism, seems, to me, to have been “democratic centralism”, a euphemism for one-party rule, as it was both inspired by and expropriated from The State and Revolution.

While Lenin was writing The State and Revolution, the February Revolution broke out in Russia.  During a celebration of International Women’s Day on the 8^th of March, the 23^rd of February in Old Style, in 1917, protestors, in solidarity with workers on strike from the Pulitov Factory, joined demonstrations against the imperial government’s rationing of food and bread riots broke out across the city of Petrograd.  People flooded the streets and soon began to demand an end to the First World War and the tsardom.  By the next day, nearly two-hundred thousand demonstrators had joined the uprising, and, by 10^th of March, nearly all industrial enterprises in the city were shut down.  The Imperial Russian Army was ordered to fire upon the revolting citizenry, but, by the 12^th of March, many of its soldiers had joined the revolution.[34]  On the 15^th of March in 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne on behalf of himself and his son, Alexei Nikolaevich, and nominated his brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, to succeed him.  Michael refused, and, on the 16^th of March in 1917, the three-hundred and four year-long rule of the House of Romanov in Russia came to an end.[35] 

What is remarkable of the February Revolution is that it was a spontaneous revolution.  It lacked any definite leadership or formal planning.  Contrary to what Lenin had posited in What Is to Be Done?, the Russian populace was capable of abolishing the tsardom without the arbitration of what he called “professional revolutionaries” or under the banner of a vanguard party.  As to whether or not they would have been capable of serving as the catalyst for the eventual creation of what Karl Marx called “communist society”, that is a matter of historical speculation. 

With the abolition of the tsardom came the establishment of the Provisional Government.  The role of the Provisional Government was to facilitate the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly that would take place on the 25^th of November in 1917.  The Constituent Assembly was to have become the next governing body in Russia.  On the evening of the 12^th of March in 1917, the first meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the “Petrograd Soviet”, was held after soldiers had freed the leadership of the Central Workers’ Group from Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been imprisoned since the 2^nd of February of that same year.[36]  The soviets were supposed to have been workers’ and soldiers’ councils that were to mediate the transition to the rule by the Constituent Assembly and to combat a projected counter-revolution, but, from the almost immediate outset, they came to rival the Provisional Government.  On the 14^th of March in 1917, the Petrograd Soviet issued Order Number One, which instructed soldiers and sailors to obey orders from their commanding officers or the Provisional Government only if they did not contradict the decrees issued by the Soviet.[37]  The order effectively resulted in what Lenin would, later, theorize as “dual power”, or a parallel rule by the Provisional Government and the soviets.[38]  As the Provisional Government was established by the Fourth Duma, Order Number One would ensure that free, fair, and public elections were held in November.  The order, also, however, began the levying of power in favor of the soviets that Lenin would, later, exploit leading up to the revolution in October. 

On the 1^st of May in 1917, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadets who, at the time, had a majority in the Provisional Government, sent a note to Allied Powers promising to a continued commitment to the First World War.[39]  Massive demonstrations demanding an end to the war and Milyukov’s resignation broke out during the next few days.  Milyukov, along with Octoberist Minister of War and Navy, Alexander Guchkov, both resigned.  Milyukov would, later, go underground and join the White Army when his party was banned by the Bolsheviks and Guchkov would provide them with financial support during the Russian Civil War.[40]  Lenin had returned to Russia from Switzerland two days before the April Crisis began and would issue The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution, his, now, famous “April Theses” the day after his equivocal arrival.  The first of his directives stressed that the First World War was a war of “conquest” and that it could not be defended from a revolutionary perspective without a “complete break” from all “capitalist interests” and called for a widespread campaign to be organized within the Russian military.  The second posited that the February Revolution was the first “stage” of a revolution in Russia.  The third directive demanded a total withdraw of all support for the Provisional Government.  The rest of his theses delineated a revolutionary program, called for the creation of a new International, what would later become the Third International, or the “Comintern”, and, perhaps, most significantly, requisitioned that all power be transferred to the soviets.[41]  The “dual power” that Lenin had theorized was, in point of fact, a strategically divisive campaign to establish an entirely new form of governance.  As anyone might imagine, Lenin’s explicit call for the co-option of the February Revolution by a coalition of revolutionaries was not met without opposition. 

On the 16^th of July in 1917, demonstrations by armed soldiers began on the streets of Petrograd.  They were against the Provisional Government’s refusal to withdraw from the First World War.  Because the Bolsheviks were the sole political faction to have unanimously opposed the war, many of the protestors sympathized with them and they could often be heard chanting their slogans.  In the following “July Days”, the martial administration of the Provisional Government deployed troops to crush the rebellion.  Despite that support for the protests was a matter of debate within their party, the Bolsheviks were largely blamed for inciting them and both Pravda and the headquarters for the Bolshevik Central Committee were shut down.  A number of arrests were made, several hundred people were killed, and many Bolsheviks, including Lenin, were forced underground.[42][43]  It is, perhaps, notable that the Provisional Government was already undergoing an internal crisis before the protests broke out. 

Because of the political polarization in Russia, the Provisional Government often found itself to be incapable of coming to critical administrative decisions.  In July of 1917, a number of Kadet ministers resigned, leaving mostly moderate Socialists at its helm.[44]  Kadet Prime Minister, Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov of the Rurik Dynasty, announced that he planned to resign on the 7^th of July and did so in favor of Kerensky, a Trudovik and Socialist Revolutionary, on the 20^th of July in 1917.[45]  Gregory would flee to territories occupied by the Czechslovak Legion, be advised by Pyotr Vologodsky, then, the Chairman of the Provisional Siberian Government, to travel to the United States of America so that he could persuade President Woodrow Wilson to support the White Army, and, after failing to rally American support, would help Bolshevik detractors emigrate from Russia to other parts of the world during the Russian Civil War.[46]  Kerensky, who authorized the offensive that led to the demonstrations in July in June, found himself at the head of new coalition cabinet, established on the 24^th of July in 1917.[47]  The Second Provisional Government would last for a mere two months before it had to face another crisis.

From the 10^th to the 13^th of September in 1917, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, General Lavr Kornilov, launched a coup d’état against both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet.  Kornilov was thought to have blamed the failures of the Russian Army in the First World War on the Provisional Government and to have sought to eliminate any potential for a Bolshevik revolution in Russia.[48]  A number of conspiracy theories surround the coup, with some alleging for it to have been a ploy by Kerensky, and Kerensky, himself, to have alleged that, then, Minister of Munitions for the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, played a central role in what he characterized as a right-wing conspiracy.[49]  Regardless as to just what happened and why, without popular support within the military, as well as among the Russian populace, the attempt at a regime change and to dissolve the Petrograd Soviet, who would be given weapons to defend themselves under Kerensky’s orders, was foiled without the either Provisional Government or the Petrograd Soviet having to resort to the use of force.  Kornilov was arrested and imprisoned in Bykhov.  He would, later, escape from prison on the 19^th of November in 1917 and become the commander of the Volunteer Army during the Russian Civil War.  He was somewhat infamous for his fervid anti-Bolshevik rhetoric, having stated that, in order to win the war, he was willing to “to set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-quarters of all Russians.”[50]  He was killed by a shell just outside of Ekaterinodar on the 13^th of April in 1918. 

On the 14^th of September in 1917, in partial response to the growing unrest in the wake of the “Kornilov Affair”, another transitional government, the “Directorate”, was established.  Against that the Constituent Assembly was supposed to have decided upon what kind of government would be established in Russia, Kerensky proclaimed for the country to be a republic the next day.[51]  Though some historians cite Kerensky’s mantra of “no enemies to the left” as having alienated a significant base of support among both liberal and monarchist conservatives, and, therefore, leaving him without allies when challenged by the Bolsheviks, I would never claim that the Provisional Government’s repeal of the death penalty, grant of amnesty to political prisoners, or institution of the freedom of the press was what led to its downfall.  Perhaps, having allowed revolutionary agitators to the front lines during the, then, ongoing war was a strategic mistake.  Perhaps, the Provisional Government had too directly challenged the Petrograd Soviet with the use of force and insignificantly done so in matters of diplomacy.  It was, however, a lack of radicalism and not the placation of it, that, in my opinion, led to the Bolshevik victory in October.  In the beaten way of historical speculation, I would suggest that, had the Provisional Government withdrawn from the First World War, they could have circumvented the events that would occur less than a month after the Directorate was established.  The Russian Army war campaign was largely disastrous and it could be suggested that just as much territory, if not less, would have been surrendered had the Provisional Government negotiated for peace treaty with the German Empire in February of 1917 instead of on the 3^rd of March in 1918, the day that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed.[52]  Such alternative history, however, is an exercise in conjectural reverie, and another revolution would occur in Russia in October.

On the 23^rd of October in 1917, the Petrograd Soviet, led by Trotsky, voted in favor of an armed uprising against the newly established third coalition of the Provisional Government.[53]  Two weeks later, soldiers loyal the government, ransacked the printing house of the Bolshevik newspaper, Rabochiy put, and ordered both its and another left-wing newspaper’s, Soldat, closure.  They also ordered the closure of the right-wing newspapers, Zhivoe slovo and Novaia Rus.  Their editors and contributors were to have been prosecuted for advocating insurrection.  The Military Revolutionary Committee, the Bolshevik military organ within the soviets, denounced the government’s actions, and, by ten o’clock that morning, had retaken the Rabochiy put printing house.  Kerensky, in turn, ordered for all but one bridge in Petrograd to be raised.  Clashes, then, broke out between the Red Guards, militias to have been created within the soviets who were loyal to the Bolsheviks, and soldiers loyal to the Provisional Government.  By five o’clock that evening, the Military Revolutionary Committee had taken over the Central Telegraph of Petrograd, giving the Bolsheviks control over communications in the in the city.  On the next day, the 7^th of November, the 25^th of October in Old Style, in 1917, the Bolsheviks led an uprising that would culminate in the storming of the Winter Palace.[54][55]  Though met with little resistance at the time, the event would, later, be mythologized by the Russian Symbolist’s, Nikolai Evreinov, “mass action”, the extraordinary political spectacle to have been inspired by the concept of “ritual theatre”, The Storming of the Winter Palace, held on the 7^th of November in 1920.[56]  Though I, personally, think that Evreinov’s work of art was a profound experiment in the role that a simulation of an event has to play within historical epistemology, as well that of a work of art in the creation of society, the, perhaps, captivating revelation that truth can almost be created as political spectacle would, later, become nothing but absolutely terrifying.   The Storming of the Winter Palace can either be regarded as a groundbreaking work of experimental theatre or one of the most effective examples of propaganda in all of recorded history.  Regardless as to what forms of official ceremony can still be classified as “art”, Kerensky, who would condemn both the Red and White Army during the Russian Civil War, fled Petrograd and power was transferred to the Council of People’s Commissars, originally set forth as a transitional government of centralized soviets.  Of this council, it is notable that only two presiding members, aside from Stalin, who lived to see the Great Terror would survive it.  None of them would do so without losing an immediate or former relative.[57]    

Because of that the Bolsheviks were, still, then, a political faction who arguably did not have the support of the general populace and, therefore, had arrogated power, their ascendency was not met without immediate opposition and many Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks left the Second Congress of Soviets before the resolution that formally transferred power to it was passed.  The Party of Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, however, supported the Bolsheviks, and joined the new coalition government.  Lenin would author the Decree on Peace, which called for an immediate withdraw from the First World War, and the Decree on Land, which formally abolished private property and redistributed landed estates amongst the peasantry, both of which were ratified by the Second Congress of Soviets on the 8^th of November in 1917.[58][59]  Despite that the Bolsheviks had finally consolidated power, as their rule was originally presented as having been pro tem, they agreed to hold elections to the Constituent Assembly on the 25^th of November in 1917.  Much to their dismay, the Socialist Revolutionaries won around twice as many seats in the Constituent Assembly as the Bolsheviks.[60]  On the 18^th of January in 1918, the Constituent Assembly rejected a mandate to recognize the authority of the soviets and was dissolved the next day.[61]  Though the Bolsheviks and the Left-Socialist Revolutionaries disputed its legitimacy, I am of the opinion that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was nothing but further evidence to that they had fully intended to follow through with what they believed for the “Russian Revolution” to have been with or without the support of the general populace. 

  While the Constituent Assembly was still operative, The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, the “Cheka”, was officially established on the 20^th of December in 1917.[62]  The Cheka was an intelligence organization created to combat what both was and was declared to be the “counter-revolution”.  The organization operated almost entirely without any form of legal oversight and was the first of many organizations within the Soviet Union to later be described as the “secret police”.  It became infamous for what even Pravda and Izvestia described as “medieval” methods, such as the murder of children, the rape of women, the destruction of entire villages, and archaic forms of torture.  It was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a former Polish aristocrat who joined the Marxist political party, Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the “Union of Workers”, of which Rosa Luxembourg was also a member, in 1895.  Dzerzhinsky was active within the Military Revolutionary Committee during the October Revolution.[63]  Though Soviet historians would, later, depict Dzerzhinsky as one of Lenin’s oldest and most trusted comrades, he and Lenin actually disagreed on matters of official policy quite often.  Such a difference of opinion would not have been tolerated of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs by Josef Stalin during the Great Terror.  The Cheka was instrumental in the carrying out of what the Bolsheviks, themselves, called the “Red Terror”.      

On the 17^th of August in 1918, Moisei Uritsky, who had resigned from his post in opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litvost and joined the Left Communists, but returned in order to combat the Czechoslovak Legion, Chief of the Cheka of the Petrograd Soviet, was assassinated by a young  poet and military cadet of the former Imperial Russian Army, Leonid Kannegisser.[64]  On the 30^th of August in 1918, a woman generally thought to have been a Socialist Revolutionary who later told the Cheka that her name was “Fanya Kaplan” fired three shots at Lenin on his way to his car after speaking before an arms factory in south Moscow and hit him twice.[65]  On the 3^rd of September in 1918, Izvestia published their “Appeal to the Working Class” which called for workers to “crush the hydra of the counter-revolution with massive terror!”[66]  Though political repression was already well underway, as a number of rival political parties had already been banned, Lenin had officially restricted the freedom of the press, and a number of uprisings and opposition movements had been crushed, it was, perhaps, after the assassination attempt on Lenin that a campaign of revolutionary terror became integral to official policy.  Like other Soviet atrocities, the number of lives for the Red Terror to have claimed is still a matter of historical debate.  In Red Victory, William Bruce Lincoln claims that the most reliable estimates for the death toll of the Red Terror are around one-hundred thousand, though, in Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History, Norman Lowe claimed for it to be around two-hundred thousand.[67][68]  The figure given by Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt in Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions is much higher, at around one million and three-hundred thousand.[69]  Estimates for the death toll of the White Terror during the Russian Civil War also vary.  They are from twenty-thousand to a hundred thousand, with outliers of upwards of three-hundred thousand.[70][71]  I would suggest that the Red Terror, in comparison to the White Terror, was of equal virulence, but of greater scope.  It is likely that the “Reds” killed around two to five times as many people as the “Whites”.  Though, perhaps, more explicable than later Soviet atrocities, the precedent which it set would have catastrophic consequences in the Soviet Union.

The creation of the Cheka and the carrying out of the Red Terror occurred within the context of the, then, ongoing Russian Civil War.  As the Bolsheviks had taken power, a loose confederation of opposition forces began to amass.  The White Movement is often characterized as having been conservative, reactionary, martial, nationalist, monarchist, and often anti-Semitic.  It, occasionally, is even characterized as having been proto-Fascist.  All of this is true to a certain extent.  There were also, however, a number of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Trudoviks, Kadets, and other republicans and liberals to both have sympathized and to have been accused of sympathizing with the Whites.[72]  The Mensheviks would, also, independently become instrumental in the establishment of a short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia, and many Socialist Revolutionaries would later support the so-called “Third Russian Revolution”.[73][74]   It is difficult to parcel out just who had sided with who during the Russian Civil War, as, at some point or another, the Bolsheviks would find themselves in conflict with nearly every other political faction within both what is now the Russian Federation and the other territories where the war took place.  Both aside from and along with the Whites, the Bolsheviks both fought against and with Polish, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian separatists.  The separatists tended to side against the Bolsheviks, but, as the Bolsheviks had offered them autonomy, they occasionally sided in their favor.  The creation of the White Army, of course, could not have been possible without the Czechslovak Legion.[75]  The Whites were also backed by the United Kingdom, the Empire of Japan, the United States of America, and the Bogd Khanate of Mongolia.  Though allied support for the Whites was somewhat critical for their initial success, it was ultimately half-hearted.  Though fully willing to engage in unrepentant anti-Communist hysteria domestically, the United Kingdom and, perhaps, most specifically, the United States were rather unwilling to engage in yet another conflict at the tail end of the catastrophic First World War.  The Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the so-called “Green” armies, and the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, the “Black Army”, originally tended to fight alongside the Bolsheviks, but turned against them during the war.  The Party of Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was born out of a factional split within the Socialist Revolutionary Party and could be characterized as having become agrarian left-wing Communists or libertarian socialists.[76]  The Green armies were peasant militias thought to have been born out of opposition to military conscription.[77]  The Black Army was a loosely affiliated set of Anarchist militias who established the Free Territory in Ukraine, a federation of “free communes” led by Nester Makhno.[78]  All of them would end up fighting a war on all fronts against both the Reds and the Whites, though there probably were rare cases of collaboration with both sides during the general chaos of the latter half of the war.  All of which, of course, is to make no mention of the Kronsdat rebellion led by Stepan Petrichenko, the swan song of left-wing opposition to the Bolsheviks during the civil war.[79] 

  As a point of departure, I should like to address an objection to an earlier claim that I had made, as anyone familiar with Soviet history could tell you that opposition to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had a decisive influence upon both the former Imperial Russian Army officers who led the White Army and the left-wing Communists who fought against the Bolsheviks during the civil war.  To this, I will say that opposition to the war had, in part, inspired the February Revolution.  It is also the case that the continuation of the war would’ve just simply been disastrous.  Lenin’s steadfast opposition to the war was, perhaps, the only Bolshevik tenant that any person, with any degree of political conviction, could any longer stand by. 

Regardless as to how anyone feels about Pacifism, the Russian Civil War was neither, as the Reds had portrayed it, the genesis of an international revolution that was to liberate all of humanity, or, as the Whites had, the restoration of the Russian Empire.  It was a complex civil war incited by that the Bolsheviks had taken power.  The total number of war casualties is estimated to have been between nine and ten million, with most of the casualties having been civilians.[80]  Despite that the White Army nearly doubled that of the Red Army, they, as we know, lost the civil war and the Soviet Union, officially, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was established on the 30^th of December in 1922.

Lenin would live for less than two years after its establishment.  He died on the 21^st of January in 1924.  Against his personal wishes to have been buried next to his mother in Volkovskoye Cemetery in what is now Saint Petersburg, his body was preserved and is, to this very day, on display in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow.  His wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote for Pravda, “Do not build for him monuments, castles in his name, hold opulent receptions in his memories, etc.  To all of this he assigned such little significance in life and it saddened him so.”[81]  Trotsky was notably absent at Lenin’s funeral, having claimed that Stalin had given him the wrong date in what was, perhaps, the beginning of his “betrayal” of the revolution.  Before Lenin died, he authored a “testament” which criticized party leadership and warned of an impending split within the party, most notably warning of the “unlimited authority” that Stalin had secured as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and recommending, with caution, that Trotsky should become his successor.[82]  Lenin’s Testament would be suppressed, even among the upper echelons of the party, though the Left Opposition did force it to surface before the United Opposition, a merger between Trotsky’s Left Opposition, the Group of Democratic Centralism, or, the “Group of Fifteen”, an opposition group formed against the increasingly authoritarian nature of the party led by Vladimir Smirnov and Timofei Sapronov, both of whom would die because of the Great Terror, and the New Opposition led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, partisans were expelled from the All-Union Communist Party.[83][84]  The existence of the testament was officially denied within the Soviet Union up until Stalin died on the 5^th of March in 1953, though it was published by The New York Times on the 18^th of October in 1926.  Though Lenin, himself, personally disliked his own hero-worship and had effectively recommended that Stalin be removed from his position near the end of his life, he became venerated as an idol within both the Soviet Union and other countries that sought to adopt its model after his death and Stalin, though, as the legitimacy of his reign drastically deteriorated, he, more and more, was made out to be a living god, throughout his entire career, depicted himself as Lenin’s sole ideological heir.  To take the political legacy of one, Vladimir Lenin, into full consideration, means both to acknowledge that he, himself, was somewhat autocratic, and that it was largely fabricated in order validate Marxist-Leninist dogma. 

You may have, by now, noticed that there are two narratives that have been presented in this essay that would seem to be mutually inconsistent.  The first of which is the explicit argument that I making, which is that the abuse of power within the Soviet Union, its “satellites”, and other countries to have desecrated the Communist project, became possible because of Lenin’s political praxis, which, if you were to learn history in chronological order, would seem self-evident, but, as there are many who would still like to revel in ostensive glory of the October Revolution, can, quite often, be a greater point of contention than what anyone would reasonably expect.  The second of which is the rather harrowing chronicle of just what happened to a number of “Old Bolsheviks” leading up to and during the Great Terror.  The continuation of the systemic elimination of dissent, proceeding from the Red Terror carried out during the Russian Civil War, within the Soviet Union culminated in such extraordinary excess that no person, even those who were willing to claim that Lenin was, in point of fact, the biblical anti-Christ, could reasonably suggest that Stalin’s reign was a natural consequence of the October Revolution.  The betrayal of the Old Bolsheviks leading up to and during the Great Terror also marks a radical departure from the rule established during the Russian Civil War.  There are some who claim that to describe the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin as having been “totalitarian” is imprecise, as it assumes that a state is actually capable of securing total control over its populace.  I would, however, posit that states become totalitarian because their ruling orders understand that, within the full breadth of their reason, their subjects are likely to attempt to remove them from power by more or less any possible means.  No regime, anywhere in the world, can convince a single person to willfully become subjugated by it.  Totalitarianism is predicated upon the constant suppression of its constant revolt.  Lenin was autocratic.  That a person becomes preoccupied with a quest for political power is indicative of that they are afflicted by a hamartia, which, should they succeed, can often result in catastrophe.  This, I believe, is an allegorical implication of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet that may come as a revelation to some, but, ought to be elicited through even a cursory analysis of the play.  The October Revolution can be interpreted as a parable about the ethics of revolution and Lenin can be characterized as having been a “minor despot”.  Stalin was desperate to secure power and all the more desperate to retain it.  That a regime makes a frantic attempt to remain in power is not indicative of that totalitarianism does not exist; it is just precisely what totalitarianism is.  Stalin was a dictator par excellence, or, in short, a tyrant.  Nevertheless, Stalin’s regime was not born ex nihilo and must have originated somehow.  As Lenin led the Bolsheviks from their split within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party until after the Russian Civil War and, throughout his entire life, represented his political faction as the sole political faction to be capable of reifying the Communist project, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to discover just what those origins were.

What is striking, to me, of Lenin is the sheer arrogance in his having believed that he was chosen by history to lead a disciplined set of nonpareil revolutionaries in a quasi-eschatological conflict that would generate a new way of life thought to have been so much better than all of what had been wrought by Western civilization that it would eventually result in the common liberation of all of humanity.  A person to have made such a messianic claim outside of the general idiocy which comprises the political context of late modernity would’ve probably been diagnosed with either schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder or dismissed as megalomaniacal.  Aside from the apparent sanctimony of which he was emphatically guilty, there is also that it is nothing but extraordinarily condescending to have believed that common people are incapable of coming to an awareness of their political situation on their own and that they need to be guided by near apostolistic “professionals”, lest they stray from the officially sanctioned revolutionary course of action.  Though, in What is to be Done?, Lenin emphasized that the vanguard was to come from all sets of Russian society, what it effectively creates is an intellectual elite comprised of often domineering revolutionaries who can afford to spend years of their lives becoming well versed in the theories of Marx and Engels, or, in short, a new revolutionary class.  Lenin’s original principal antagonist was the Okhrana.  The Cheka, which he established, would greatly exceed their abuse of power.  The myriad of somewhat divergent, but inextricably interrelated organizations and both legal and extrajudicial machinations that came to comprise Soviet intelligence both under Josef Stalin and during the, later, rule of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would make even the most fanatical Russian nihilists long for the days of the aristocracy and, in some cases, actually did.  Though, living in the United States, as I do, this point is probably better made than taken, if there is anything to learn from the so-called “Russian Revolution”, it is that civil society should not be organized like an intelligence operation.  Though, by no stretch of the imagination do I intend to suggest that the life of the mind should not be both cultivated and celebrated, what I do, as an explicit affront, intend to suggest is that the combination of presumed intellectual superiority and vindication of nominal “discipline” did have more than dire consequences within the Soviet Union.  What Lenin must have thought of himself was that he was a natural born “leader of men”.  For a man of cloth to be self-righteous is a slight to a true believer.  For a man in power to is a grave offense.  Though the role of his “avant-garde” would be quickly effaced from the surface of Soviet society, what has proceeded from it continues to effect not only Russian society, but, also, society in many former Marxist-Leninist states to this very day.  Were anyone to accept Soviet society as it appeared on the surface, they would be bewildered by that it had not ushered in a new era for all of humanity.  It was what happened in the background that is its true history.  A government that has to resort to conspiracy in order to remain in power is a danger to every form of civil society. 

   The role that the intelligentsia had to play within Soviet society, however, is fairly complex.  Like in what has been designated as the “West”, intellectuals tended to either have been born into privileged classes of the old order or to have come up through the, then, emergent technocratic meritocracy.  That is, aside from the “nomenklatura”, the emergent bureaucratic class that would come to dominate Soviet society.  In the Soviet Union, of course, to be from a privileged class was considerably more precarious than it was in the West and the meritocratic aspects of the regime were, by and large, facades.  The education system within the Soviet Union, however, though delimited by Marxist-Leninist doctrine, was an astounding achievement for the regime.  The Russian Federation, as well as the rest of former the Eastern Bloc, even today, have some of the highest literacy rates in the world.[85]  To become well educated in the Soviet Union, however, though, obviously encouraged, quite often became rather perilous and a number of intellectuals were either imprisoned or killed during the Great Terror. 

With such considerations aside, what, of Lenin, was, to me, most troubling was his willingness to impose his will upon the world.  He did not have the support of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, his faction of it, his associates abroad, their left-wing detractors, the people to have carried out the February Revolution, or, most importantly, the Russian populace leading up to the October Revolution.  In every single case, he picked out a somewhat virtuous, but, ultimately, meek, if not ideologically fainéant, popular Socialist politician, ascribed a slew of slanderously reactionary attributes to their person, and vigorously defended his “position”, that of him leading a revolution, as if it were the way, the truth, and the light.  Within the Left, a political category that I take absolutely no pride in being designated under, what we call nationalists who engage in such conduct are “chauvinists”.  According to Christian “cannon”, if you will, pride is not only considered to be a cardinal sin, but the cardinal sin from which all others originate.  Though I, myself, am an atheist, I do, as a philosopher, think that there is something to such an article of faith.  Socrates, of whose reported theories of democracy you will find no sympathy with, here, committed suicide in protest of the reaction to his philosophy of wisdom.  He believed that people should evince a humility of thought.  Lenin seems to have felt it his natural right to create society as he saw fit.  Though open to criticism, he assumed that his praxis was without fault.  He was a dynamic strategist, adept rhetorician, visionary theorist, and entirely resolute in his revolutionary convictions, or, what some might call a “good” politician.  He also, however, flat out refused to take consistent concerns over his attitude towards democracy, or even liberty in general, into consideration throughout his entire life.  What I would call a civil war incited by such a leader is not a “revolution”, but a “personal crusade”.  When a person is willing to lay such claim over history, the world that they envision can be created by any requisite means.  The Red Terror, as we now know, did not justify the creation of a global utopia; it became the basis for an abject dictatorship.

We, however, live in a different era, more than a full century after the October Revolution.  Though Lenin’s legacy has been evidently challenged by the destruction of Soviet monuments, within the Russian Federation, today, it is still held, by some, to be sacrosanct.  Despite that most of its citizens would prefer to see Lenin buried, President Vladimir Putin has refused to so, having claimed that it would mean for Russian citizens to have to reassess the October Revolution.  I should hope that I have argued well enough by now to convince you that they, the Left, and whoever else there is that should be so inclined to should do precisely that.  Lenin’s corpse has haunted the world for nearly a century.  It is time to lay it, and the terror of its wake along with it, to rest.        

Bibliography

“Aladin Papers”. The University of Manchester Library. www.web.archive.org/web/20161126065008/http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/search-resources/guide-to-special-collections/atoz/aladin-papers.
Accessed 2 November 2020.

“Cheka”. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CC%5CH%5CCheka.htm.
Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Congresses of the R.S.D.S.P.”. “R.S.D.L.P., Sixth Congress: July 26 – August 3, 1917”. Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/glossary/events/r/rsdlp.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Glossary of People: Nikolai Bukharin”. Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/u.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Glossary of People: Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov”. Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/glossary/people/m/o.htm#molotov. Accessed 3 November 2020. 

 “Glossary of People: Alexander Shliapnikov”. Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/h.htm#shliapnikov-alexander. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Indicator 4.6.2: Youth/ adult literacy rate”. United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2020. tcg.uis.unesco.org/4-6-2-youth-adult-literacy-rate. Accessed 4 November 2020.

“Interrogation of accused Bukharin”. The Supreme Court of the United Socialist Soviet Republics, 5 March 1938. First published as “The Case of the Anti-Soviet Block of Rights and Trotskyites” by The People’s Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R. in 1938.  On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/index.htm. www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/2.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Minister of the Provisional Government”. The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. www.prlib.ru/en/node/427419. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Mosei Uritsky”. The British Museum. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG80459.
Accessed 3 November 2020.

Mysteries of Political Murders: the Gapon and Rasputin cases. The Museum of Political History of Russia. 20 April through 5 December of 2016. www.polithistory.ru/en/visit_us/view.php?id=1736. Accessed 2 November 2020.

“The New Duma”. The New York Times, 6 March 1907.

Petrograd 1917: From the Russian Empire to the Soviet Republic. “The October Revolution”. Coordinated by Oleg Minin. Designed by the Experimental Humanities Media Corps Team.
www.projects.eh.bard.edu/1917/oct-maps.html. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“October Revolution”. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia, Volume I”. The Office of the Historian of the United States of America. www.history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1918Russiav01/ch4subch1. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“People’s Comissariats”. Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia. www.encspb.ru/object/2855700942?lc=en. Accessed 3 November 2020.

“Russian Social Democratic Labour Party”. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social_Democratic_Labour_Party#cite_note-Woods-12. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Second Congress. Twenty-Second Session.  Marxists Internet Archive, July – August 1903. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/index.htm. Accessed 2 November 2020.

“White Terror”. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Russia)#cite_note-5.

 Baron, Samuel H.. “Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 26 May 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Georgy-Valentinovich-Plekhanov. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Bittleman, Alexander. “The Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial”. The Communist, Vol. 15, No. 9, September 1936. Edited by Tim Davenport. Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/1936/09/0900-bittel-zinovievtrial.pdf. Accessed 3 November 2020. 

Blanc, Eric. “A Guide to the February Revolution”. Jacobin Magazine, 8 March 2017. www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/guide-february-revolution-russia-tsar-soviets-bolsheviks.
Accessed 3 November 2020.

Bruce, Lincoln W.. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War. Simon & Schuster, 1989. p. 384.

Cinella, Ettore. “The tragedy of the Russian Revolution : Promise and default of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918”. Cahiers du Monde Russe, Volume 38, No. 1 and 2, 1997.

Cliff, Tony. “Chapter 12: Lenin and Workers’ Control”. “The Rise of Factory Committees”. Lenin 2: All Power to the Soviets. Pluto Press Limited, 1976. Transcribed by Einde O’Callaghan. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1976/lenin2/ch12.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Cliff, Tony. Trotsky 3: Fighting the rising Stalinist bureaucracy. “Chapter Seven: The United Opposition”. Marxists Internet Archive, 1991. www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1991/trotsky3/07-unopp.html.
Accessed 4 November 2020.

Corney, Fredrick. “Trotskii and the Vienna Pravda”. Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 27, No. 3, September 1985. p.256.

Daniels, Robert V.. The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia. Yale University Press, 2007. p.110.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Aleksandr Kerensky”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 7 June 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Kerensky. Accessed 2 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Constituent Assembly”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 6 July 2015. www.britannica.com/topic/Constituent-Assembly-Russian-government. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 7 September 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Feliks-Edmundovich-Dzerzhinsky. Accessed 3 November 2020.          

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince Lvov”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 29 October 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Georgy-Yevgenyevich-Prince-Lvov. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “July Days”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 July 2020. www.britannica.com/event/July-Days. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 26 August 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Lavr-Georgiyevich-Kornilov. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Russian Provisional Government”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 10 Septemeber 2019. www.britannica.com/topic/Russian-Provisional-Government. Accessed 3 November 2020.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Treaties of Brest-Litovsk”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 February 2020. www.britannica.com/event/treaties-of-Brest-Litovsk. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Elwood, Ralph Carter. “Lenin and Pravda”. Slavic Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, June 1972. pp.357, 380.

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Progress Publishers, 1970. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Gaido, Daniel. “The July Days”. Jacobin Magazine, 27 July 2017.
jacobinmag.com/2017/07/russian-revolution-bolshevik-party-july-days. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Gleason, William. “Alexander Guchkov and the End of the Russian Empire”. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1983. p. 76.

Keep. John L. H.. “Nicholas II”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 13 July 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Nicholas-II-tsar-of-Russia. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Keep, John H. L., “Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov”. Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 February 2020. www.britannica.com/biography/Pavel-Milyukov. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Kenez, Peter. “The Ideology of the White Movement”. Soviet Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 1980. pp. 59, 62, 68, 70-71.

Kiselev, Evgeny and Henrikh Borovik. “Alexander Kerensky”. Echo Magazine, 23 December 2007.

Kleberg, Lars. Theatre as Action: Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics. Macmillan International Higher Education, July 1993. pp.52-55.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. p.4.

Landis, Erik C.. “Who Were the “Greens? Rumor and Collective Identity in the Russian Civil War”. The Russian Review, Vol. 69, No. 1, January 2010. pp.33-34.

Lenin, Vladimir. “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. Progress Publishers, 1965. Written on 16 December 1917. Translated by George Hanna. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “The Dual Power”. Pravda, 28 April 1917. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.  

Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marxists Internet Archive, 2005. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “Last Testament”. ”Letters to Congress”. Marxists Internet Archive, 1997 and 1999. Transcribed by Brian Baggins. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm. Accessed 1 December 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “Meeting of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.” 10 October 1917. Edited by George Hanna.  Translated by Yuri Sdobnikov and George Hanna. Transcribed by Charles Farrell and David Walters. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/10a.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “On Party Unity”. Marxists Internet Archive, 16 March 1921. www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/10th/16.htm. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “Report on Land”. The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 26 October 1917. On Marxists Internet Archive.
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “Report on Peace”. The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 26 October 1917. On Marxists Internet Archive.
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. The Sixth All-Russia Conference of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. “Draft Resolution on Liquidationism and the Group of Liquidators”. Published in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Vol. 40. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/6thconf/4.htm#v17pp74-460. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. The State and Revolution. Originally published by Vladimir Lenin in 1918. Transcribed by Zodiac and Brian Baggins in 1993 and 1999. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”. Pravda, 7 April 1917. Translated by Issacs Bernard. Transcribed by Zodiac. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Lenin, Vladimir. What Is To Be Done?. Marxists Internet Archive, 10 March 1902. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Lowe, Norman. Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History. Palgrave, 2002. p.151.

Lyandres, Semion. “The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence”. Slavic Review, Vol. 48, No. 3, p.433.

Makhno, Nestor. The Russian Revolution in the Ukraine: Part Two. “Chapter Twelve: The agrarian communes—Their internal organisation—Their enemies.”. On The Anarchist Library. www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nestor-makhno-the-russian-revolution-in-the-ukraine#toc31.
Accessed 4 November 2020.

Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. Marxists Internet Archive, 18 March 1891. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/intro.htm. Accessed 2 November 2020. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. Pegasus Books, 24 February 2009. p.287.

Mayer, Arno J. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution. Princeton University Press, 15 January 2002. p. 255.

Meyerson, Harold. “My Man Martov”. The American Prospect, 7 November 2017.
www.prospect.org/world/man-martov. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Onu, Alexander. “Prince George Lvov”. The Slavonic Review, Vol. 4, No. 10, June 1925. p.171.

Padokh, Yaroslav. “Ruskia Pravda”. Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4, 1993. On The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\R\U\RuskaiaPravdaIT.htmAccessed 3 November 2020.

The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. “Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to the Petrograd District Garrison”. 1 March 1917. From Illustrated History of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Transcribed by Brian Baggins. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1917/03/01.htm. Accessed 3 November 2020.

Radek, Karl. “The Kronstadt Uprising”. Bulletin communiste, 1 April 1921. Translated by Ed Maltby. On Marxists Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1921/04/kronstadt.htm. Accessed 4 November 2020.

Spence, B. Richard. “The Terrorist and the Master Spy: The Political ‘Partnership’ of Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilley, 1918-1925”. Revolutionary Russia, 4:1, pp. 113, 121-122,124, 125.

Rinke, Stefan and Michael Wildt. Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and Its Aftermath from a Global Perspective. Campus Verlag, September 2017. pp. 57, 58.

Sabandze, Natalie. Globalization and Nationalism: The Cases of Georgia and the Basque Country. Central European University Press, 2010. p.77.

Sharkov, Damien. “Putin vs Lenin: Why the Russian President Won’t Remove the Soviet Union’s Founder”. Newsweek, 5 November 2017

Spiridovitch, General Alexander. “Les Dernieres Annees de la Cour de Tzarskoe Selo“, Translated by Rob Moshein. The Alexander Palace Time Machine, 1926 and 2004. www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/stolypin-murder-1911-kiev.html. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Trotsky, Leon. The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Volume One. “The Czechoslovak Mutiny” and “Revolt of the Left SRs”. Marxists Internet Archive, 1923 and 1996. Translated by Brian Pearce. Transcribed by David Walters. Originally published by the United Soviet Socialist Republics. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch34.htm

Walsh, Warren B.. “Political Parties in the Russian Dumas”. The Journal of Modern History, Vol.22, No.2, June 1950. Published by The University of Chicago Press. p.145

Werth, Nicholas, Jean-Louis Panné, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Andrzej Paczkowski. The Black Book of Communism. Harvard University Press, 15 October 1999. Edited by Mark Kramer. Translated by Johnathan Murphy.

White, James D.. “The First Pravda and the Russian Marxist Tradition”. Soviet Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 1974. pp.182, 200.

Wolfe, Bertram D.. “Lenin and the Agent Provocateur Malinovsky”. The Russian Review, Vol. 5, No. 1. pp.49-69.

---

[1] Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (HarperCollins Publishers, 1999), 4.

[2] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Marxists Internet Archive, 18 March 1891).

[3] Vladimir Lenin, “On Party Unity” (Marxists Internet Archive, 16 March 1921).

[4] Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (Marxists Internet Archive, 10 March 1902).

[5] Vladimir Lenin, “Conclusion”, What Is To Be Done?.

[6] The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Second Congress, Twenty-Second Session, (Marxists Internet Archive, July through August of 1903).

[7] Harold Meyerson, “My Man Martov” (The American Prospect, 7 November 2017).

[8] Mysteries of Political Murders: the Gapon and Rasputin cases, (The Museum of Political History of Russia. 20 April through 5 December of 2016).

[9] Richard B. Spence, “The Terrorist and the Master Spy: The Political ‘Partnership’ of Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilley, 1918-1925”, (Revolutionary Russia, 4:1, 1991), 113, 121-122,124, 125.

          This article posits that Savinkov went to Russia because he became disillusioned with anti-Bolshevism,
          though what is generally suspected seems to be that he had done so because of that he had been lured there by
          the State Political Directorate.  

[10] Warren B. Walsh, “Political Parties in the Russian Dumas”, (The Journal of Modern History, Vol.22, No.2, June 1950), 145.

[11] “Aladin Papers”, (The University of Manchester Library).

[12] “The New Duma”, (The New York Times, 6 March 1907).

[13] General Alexander Spiridovitch, “Les Dernieres Annees de la Cour de Tzarskoe Selo“, Translated by Rob Moshein, (The Alexander Palace Time Machine, 1926 and 2004). 

[14] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Aleksandr Kerensky”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 7 June 2020).

[15] Bertram D. Wolfe, “Lenin and the Agent Provocateur Malinovsky”, (The Russian Review, Vol. 5, No. 1), 54.

[16] Bertram D. Wolfe, “Lenin and the Agent Provocateur Malinovsky”, 49-69. 

[17] Samuel H. Baron, “Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 26 May 2020).

[18] “Russian Social Democratic Labour Party”, (Wikipedia).
          I have cited this article because I have paraphrased it.  The author of this section of the article has cited pages
          321 through 355 of Alan Woods’s Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, I believe from “The Bolsheviks Split”
          to “The Prague Conference” of the third and fourth part of the book, which is available online.

[19] Alexander Bittleman, “The Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial”, (The Communist, Vol. 15, No. 9, September 1936).

[20] Vladimir Lenin, The Sixth All-Russia Conference of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, “Draft Resolution on Liquidationism and the Group of Liquidators”, (Published in Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Vol. 40, 1 January 1973).

[21] Ralph Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda”, (Slavic Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, June 1972), 357.

[22] “Congresses of the R.S.D.S.P.”, “R.S.D.L.P., Sixth Congress: July 26 – August 3, 1917”, (Marxists Internet Archive).

[23] Yaroslav Padokh, “Ruskia Pravda”, (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4, 1993).

[24] James D. White, “The First Pravda and the Russian Marxist Tradition”, (Soviet Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 1974), 182, 200.

[25] Fredrick Corney, “Trotskii and the Vienna Pravda”, (Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 27, No. 3, September 1985), 256.  

[26] “Glossary of People: Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich”, (Marxists Internet Archive).

[27] “Glossary of People: Alexander Shliapnikov”, (Marxists Internet Archive).

[28] Ralph Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda”, 380.

[29] “Glossary of People: Nilokai Bukharin”, (Marxists Internet Archive).

[30] Interrogation of accused Bukharin”, (The Supreme Court of the United Socialist Soviet Republics, 5 March 1938).

[31] Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (Marxists Internet Archive, 2005).

[32] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (Progress Publishers, 1970).

[33] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, (Vladimir Lenin, 1918).

[34] Eric Blanc, “A Guide to the February Revolution”, (Jacobin Magazine, 8 March 2017).

          New Style did not come into use in Russia until 1918. 

[35] John L. H. Keep, “Nicholas II”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 13 July 2020).

[36] Tony Cliff, “Chapter 12: Lenin and Workers’ Control”, “The Rise of Factory Committees”, Lenin 2: All Power to the Soviets, (Pluto Press Limited, 1976).

[37] The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, “Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to the Petrograd District Garrison”, (The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 1 March 1917).

[38] Vladimir Lenin, “The Dual Power”, (Pravda, 28 April 1917).

[39] John H. L. Keep, “Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 28 February 2020).

[40] William Gleason, “Alexander Guchkov and the End of the Russian Empire”, (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1983), 76. 

[41] Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”, (Pravda, 7 April 1917).

[42] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “July Days”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 July 2020).

[43] Daniel Gaido, “The July Days”, (Jacobin Magazine, 27 July 2017).

[44] “Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia, Volume I”, (The Office of the Historian of the United States of America).

[45] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Georgy Yevgenyevich, Prince Lvov”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 29 October 2020).

[46] Alexander Onu, “Prince George Lvov”, (The Slavonic Review, Vol. 4, No. 10, June 1925), 171. 

[47] “Minister of the Provisional Government”. (The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library).

[48] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 26 August 2020).

[49] Evgeny Kiselev and Henrikh Borovik, “Alexander Kerensky”, (Echo Magazine, 23 December 2007).
          Echo Magazine rebroadcasted this interview in 2007, but I am unsure as to whether or not Borovik had
          originally conducted it for a different publication. 

[50] Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution, (Princeton University Press, 15 January 2002), 255. 

[51] The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Russian Provisional Government”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 10 Septemeber 2019).

[52] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Treaties of Brest-Litovsk”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 February 2020).

[53] Vladimir Lenin, “Meeting of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.”, (The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 10 October 1917).

[54] “October Revolution”, (Wikipedia).
          I have paraphrased this article to provide “ground truth” to the events in October and verified the information
          in it by the following footnote. 

[55] Petrograd 1917: From the Russian Empire to the Soviet Republic”, “The October Revolution”, (The Experimental Humanities Media Corps Team).

[56] Lars Kleberg, Theatre as Action: Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics, (Macmillan International Higher Education, July 1993), 52-55.

[57] “People’s Comissariats”, (Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia).

          Of the two to survive, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich lost a son-in-law to the Great Terror and Alexandra
          Kollontai lost both her former husband and her former lover to it.

[58] Vladimir Lenin, “Report on Peace”, (The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 26 October 1917).

[59] Vladimir Lenin, “Report on Land”, (The Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 26 October 1917).

[60] Vladimir Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, (Progress Publishers, 1965).

[61] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Constituent Assembly”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 6 July 2015).

[62] “Cheka”, (The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine).

[63] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky”, (Encyclopædia Britannica, 7 September 2020).

[64] “Mosei Uritsky”, (The British Museum).
          The British Museum cites Kannegisser as having been a Socialist Revolutionary, which I don’t think is true. 
          He merely seems to have been an associate of Boris Savinkov.

[65] Semion Lyandres, “The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence”, (Slavic Review, Vol. 48, No. 3), 433.
          Lyandres claims that Kaplan was not a Socialist Revolutionary, but an Anarchist, which, to me, seems entirely
          plausible.  He also proceeds from Vera Figner’s report of Kaplan having been the moniker of Feiga Haimovna
          Roytblat, which also seems plausible.  I have not given a name because there is no conclusive evidence as to
          who she was, and reported her as “thought to have been a Socialist Revolutionary” because that is what is
          commonly suspected of her.

[66] Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Andrzej Paczkowski, The Black Book of Communism, (Harvard University Press, 15 October 1999).

          I have lost the page for this citation, but believe for it to be within the chapter titled “The Red Terror”.  

[67] Lincoln W. Bruce, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, (Simon & Schuster, 1989), 384. 

[68] Norman Lowe, Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History, (Palgrave, 2002), 151. 

[69] Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt, Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and Its Aftermath from a Global Perspective, (Campus Verlag, September 2017), 57.

[70] Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt, Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions, 58. 

[71] “White Terror”, (Wikipedia).
          The upper estimate seems to have come from Vadim Erlikhman’s Population Losses in the 20^th Century,
          though I have not verified this.

[72] Peter Kenez, “The Ideology of the White Movement”, (Soviet Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 1980), 59, 62, 68, 70-71.
          This article actually posits that the White Army’s intransigent nationalism and monarchism alienated them
          from popular support and that their anti-Semitism led them to become delusionally fanatical, though does
          make mention of that other sets of Russian political society were among their ranks. 

[73] Natalie Sabandze, Globalization and Nationalism: The Cases of Georgia and the Basque Country, (Central European University Press, 2010), 77.

[74] Leon Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Volume One, “Revolt of the Left SRs”, (Marxists Internet Archive, 1923 and 1996).

[75] Leon Trotsky, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Volume One, “The Czechoslovak Mutiny”.   

[76] Ettore Cinella, “The tragedy of the Russian Revolution : Promise and default of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918”, (Cahiers du Monde Russe, Volume 38, No. 1 and 2, 1997).

[77] Erik C. Landis, “Who Were the “Greens”? Rumor and Collective Identity in the Russian Civil War”, (The Russian Review, Vol. 69, No. 1, January 2010), 33-34. 

[78] Nestor Makhno, The Russian Revolution in the Ukraine: Part Two, “Chapter Twelve: The agrarian communes—Their internal organisation—Their enemies.”, (The Anarchist Library).

[79] Karl Radek, “The Kronstadt Uprising”, (Bulletin communiste, 1 April 1921).

[80] Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, (Pegasus Books, 24 February 2009), 287.

[81] Damien Sharkov, “Putin vs Lenin: Why the Russian President Won’t Remove the Soviet Union’s Founder”, (Newsweek, 5 November 2017).

[82] Vladimir Lenin, “Last Testament”, ”Letters to Congress”, (Marxists Internet Archive, 1997 and 1999).

[83] Tony Cliff, Trotsky 3: Fighting the rising Stalinist bureaucracy, “Chapter Seven: The United Opposition”, (Marxists Internet Archive, 1991).

[84] Robert V. Daniels, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia, (Yale University Press, 2007), 110.

[85] “Indicator 4.6.2: Youth/ adult literacy rate”, (United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2020).

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War begins with a fictionalized ethnographic account.  We see the Polish peasantry perform folk music in threadbare clothing, the soulful glimmer in their eyes and occasional glance into the camera, an awareness in naïve anticipation of their status as a subject beneath the microscope, the odd smile and heartfelt auditions, the film shot in stark, high contrast black and white.  The aesthetic is that of a vintage photograph taken for The New York Times, a vignette by Dorothea Lange, or, as we will later witness Paweł Pawlikowski’s idiosyncratic gift for an excess of headroom, that of a peculiar family album.  The cinematic movement that instantly comes to mind is cinéma verité.  Though, in many ways, true-to-life, Cold War does not proceed from social realism.  What we are about to experience is a strange story.  It is a fantastical story, though a tragic one.  It is a love story, and, like all love stories, we will be swept, as it were, on a whirlwind adventure, if only through the mercurial bouts between its protagonists. 

            At the beginning of the film, Wiktor Warski, played charmingly and sullen by Tomasz Kot, is a disaffected Polish artist bringing together a folk ensemble in 1951.   Zuzanna “Zula” Lichoń, played with an ever-changing range of emotions by Joanna Kulig, is “a bit of a con”, as we come to find out, on probation for pulling a knife on her father to defend herself from his attempt at sexual assault, eager to impress, and desirous of the life on stage that a place in the ensemble could afford her.  She teams up with a young woman who plans to sing a mountain tune for her audition before making it all of the way through the chorus of a song from a Russian musical after her partner is dismissed and she is interrupted by Wiktor’s partner and potential lover, Irena Bielecka, played by Agata Kulesza.  Zula’s choice of “Kak mnogo devushek khoroshikh”, or “Hearts”, for her audition is certainly ironic, as, at least, originally, the folk ensemble that she is auditioning for is meant to celebrate authentic folk culture within Poland, and, later, other Soviet satellites and not the grand popular spectacle of a notably Russian musical, but love is full of ironies, some dramatic, some bitter, and some comical, and, if you are paying close attention, you will notice that she sings this song again, this time as her best Ophelia, floating with her head barely above the water after she jumps into the river, having gotten into an argument with Wiktor after confessing to him that she has been “ratting” on him.  The music throughout the film, many songs of which recur with notable variations, can, perhaps, be compared to the dichotomy between the two characters.  Of Zula, we have the borderline sentimentality and popular kitsch of the song as spectacle, the grand parade of the show, and the many perils and joys of a newfound stardom.  Of Wiktor, we have the so-called “high art” of Chopin and Bach, the smoke-lit Parisian cafés where he plays jazz, and his research on folk music in Poland, each with own malaise, their own virtuosity, and their own approach, in excess or want of authenticity.  In interviews, Pawlikowski has described the music as the “glue” which holds the film together and, to Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has said that the script “took on a life of its own” after adding the element of music to the narrative.[1]  The film’s dynamic duo will be brought together and reunited by music a number of times within the film.  They will also be torn apart. 

            When Wiktor and Zula are reunited for the first time in Paris after Wiktor crosses the border in Berlin, Wiktor asks why she chose to remain in Poland.  She replies, “I felt it wouldn’t work…that I wasn’t good enough, not good like you.”  In many ways, that the film follows Wiktor leads its audience to sympathize primarily with him.  We experience all the of desperation, joy, heartbreak, and despair of a love that can not be and yet must through the film’s focus on his late life story.  We fall in and out of love again and again with Zula as she brings us into their many bouts.  Why Wiktor leaves, we understand.  Zula’s long stare into the dressing room mirror and somber, half-hearted dance with the East German patron in the bar room on the night of their planned escape captivates us in want for understanding.  We know that she has longed for a better life.  We can surmise that she enjoys the stage and being one of the stars of the ensemble.  In the “elliptic” scenes which deliver the film’s narrative, we are given just enough information to understand her alienation in Paris.  Wiktor has invented a life story for her, one that he idiotically, as it is to Zula, compares to the charm of Edith Piaf’s having worked in a brothel, and, while they are creating an album together, insists that she sings in French with lyrics translated by his former lover.  We see her wild and alluring dance at the night club where Wiktor plays piano.  Why she never leaves Poland the first time and why she returns, however, we never understand and are left only to rationalize or speculate upon.  For me, Zula seems to be afflicted by a deep-seated and inexplicable angst, as if touched by an acute despair that colors life with a melancholic beauty, one that is always tempered and, rather in spite of her openness and whimsical spirit, never fully expressed.  Perhaps, because of her defense against her father, she feels like she will be the death of him, which, in the beaten way of self-fulling prophecy, culminates in their double suicide?  Perhaps she finds his age and intellectualism to be somehow intimidating?  Perhaps she genuinely loves being in the folk ensemble?  Unlike Wiktor, whose mental breakdown we witness on the piano, Zula comes in and out of our life, as it were, throughout the film and lets us feel rest assured only of her love for its protagonist.  Her perspective is always slightly, but tragically obfuscated. 

            Zula is a fascinating character because she dreams of a life of popular kitsch and, yet, is entirely sincere.  For all of Wiktor’s cultivated interests and talents, he just isn’t quite as genuine as Zula either is or wants for him to be.  The boorish intellectual decadence of post-war Paris and banal necessity of affording his flat have left him willing to sacrifice an authentic artistry for the over-simplified score and trending lines of verse.  The sentiment is that of malaise.  Don’t get me wrong, Wiktor is certainly a relatable and likable character, at times, moreso than Zula.  He is intelligent, charming, concerted, mitigating, and kind.  He becomes fascinated by Zula after hearing her audition and dotes upon her in the ensemble.  He will, later, brave all in an effort to reunite with her, crossing the border illegally again, this time, into Poland, and lose many years of his life in a labor camp, where, assumedly under interrogation, he also loses the ability to play the piano, having had his hand broken.  This is but one of many scenes which reveal the historical backdrop of the film, a structural component that delimits but does not deliver its narrative. 

            In interviews, Pawlikowski has stated that, in spite of both Ida and Cold War having been set in Poland, he hasn’t been terribly influenced by Polish cinema, giving props, instead, to Czech New Wave, as well as European art house classics, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie.[2]  On some level, it surprises me that Czech, and not French New Wave, has been his primary influence, as Cold War is highly reminiscent of the early black and white Godard films, as well as François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.  Though history is omnipresent within Cold War, it is much more of a free-spirited and maudit human-interest story than it is a work of historical fiction.  It is not a didactic film.  We will not learn about the many perils of daily life in former Soviet satellites by watching Cold War.  We do, however, see a narrative whose lines of demarcation are drawn by its historical backdrop. 

            History interjects throughout Cold War.  After their successful debut in Warsaw, Mazurek, the folk ensemble that they are a part of, is selected to tour all of the Eastern Bloc, only under the auspice of celebrating communist culture, most notably, to sing patriotic songs and play before an image of Josef Stalin, all to great humor and horror.  Wiktor, as we all know, crosses the border before the Berlin Wall, what, in the Soviet Union, was officially known as the “anti-fascist protective rampart”, is constructed.  In one of the films most poignant scenes, Wiktor travels to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a neutral country, to see Zula perform.  He is forced to leave during the intermission, with the secret police deciding to send him back to France instead of returning him to Poland to avoid a scandal.  Zula, who notices him in the audience, is left to face his empty chair during the latter half of the performance.  Each of the character’s lives are situated by history.  Their very nature is often either determined by it or expressed in spite of it.  History is both the spectre which haunts the world of Cold War and gravity which makes its characters’ lives all the more meaningful.  It is like a god, one that is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but, rather, plays games with fates to its own advantage, a grand device to draw out the most of the human experience. 

            The semblance of fate within the film is, of course, completed when Wiktor and Zula take their own lives in the ruined chapel Kaczmarek discovers in its introduction, the shot sequence echoed before we see Wiktor and Zula kneeling before the altar, a lone candle burning and line to pills to consummate their unofficial marriage.  The less predictable scenes in the film present us with a truth that is stranger than fiction, a flight of love from the perils of pragmatism and circumstance.  The juxtaposition of the historical backdrop, verité technique, and mercurial love story lets the audience feel as if they are witnessing something that could really happen, or has already happened, but astonishes us at every turn.  The choice of elliptical editing allows for us experience some of the more extraordinary moments in the characters’ lives, if only for the way that they feel at that given point in time.  It is a human story about love, and love is a truth that is stranger than fiction.

              Cold War is, of course, not like most love stories.  To be sure, that it ends in a double suicide is bittersweet, as their moments together are ones of bliss and tranquility, but that it ends in a double suicide is much more in the way of classical tragedy than a happily ever-after.  The mood throughout the film is of a kind of whimsical despair.  Wiktor and Zula both experience an acute sorrow, both together and apart, and will push and pull against one another, as if panged by the impossibility of their love, before we make back to the ruined chapel in the film’s final scene.  The sentiment reminds me of a quote by Walter Benjamin, “the only of knowing a person is to love them without hope.”[3]  Zula relates to Wiktor something else in the chapel, “now I’m yours.”

            The film’s themes, settings, narrative, backdrop, and style deliver a melancholic ode for lovers and lovers of history alike.  Something that is, perhaps, notable about the delivery of its narrative, itself a near epic saga, is that it is told elliptically, wherein much of the information is left out.  Cold War begins in 1951 and ends in 1963, though spans a runtime of a mere hour and twenty-eight minutes.  We see brief vignettes of Wiktor and Zula’s lives.  Much of the time left out is filled in by a few passing lines of dialogue or shown in brief moments.  Pawlikowski has stated that the script was constantly being revised, much to the dismay of his actors.  It surprises me that a full script was not carefully planned in advance.  It also surprises me that Cold War was edited while shooting.  I would have expected for a film with so much happening within its narrative and of such a short length to have required extensive preproduction planning and postproduction fine-tuning and editing.   Pawlikowski, who is certainly an auteur, must be something of a virtuoso as well.  The refined, but uninhibited process of filming reflects within the overall film. 

            One, as I have said before, feels as if they have been swept up on a whirlwind adventure and, yet, there is a sense of what Nietzsche described as “amor fati”, or love of one’s fate, as if everything that we see happen must happen.[4]  The film, of course, is very realistic.  No providence nor kismet shall bring our lovers together.  It is more of a sense of love of drawing one into the weight of the human experience that makes our protagonists truly “star-crossed”.  It is a very mature love story, though in no excess of gravitas, a well-refined narrative that reveals to its audience only what it needs to know.  Though, given that its protagonists will take their lives at the end, there may be a certain irony to this choice of term, you might describe Cold War as an “existential” love story.  As much as it has in common with Romeo and Juliet, it is a tale unlike any other. 

            I think that it should go without saying by now that I rather like the film.  It harkens to another era in cinema, that of Italian neorealism and French New Wave, though doesn’t feel like a rehash of past techniques and experimentations.  One gets a strong sense of nostalgia from the film, to be sure, but it plays as very modern, perhaps, owing to the ecstasy of influence of European cinema from the 1960s, but also the film’s considerable credit.  It is a landmark classic and feels very modern.  In ways, I think that Pawlikowski has reinvented the wheel, as his filmmaking process doesn’t necessarily differ too much from Truffaut or Godard.  A film such as this raises interesting questions about history and what is considered as contemporary.  It is, of course, a historical drama, but one that differs than most in that it is not about history.  You do feel transported to another time, and, yet, there is something timeless about Cold War, a story about a pair of lovers who meet a tragic end, that, I think, will resonate with audiences for generations to come. 

            Cold War takes place on the other side of love, a world torn apart by temperament and circumstance.  When they reunite at the end of the film, there is no hope for them to be together.  It is only in the final scene that they become at peace with one another, and, in that moment, come to understand each other truly.  While I shouldn’t hope for any pair of lovers to meet a similar end, it is this love without hope that renders tragic love all the more meaningful.    

Benjamin, Watler. One-Way Street. Verlag Herder, 1928

Godard, Jean-Luc. Vivre sa vie. Les Films de la Pléiade, 28 August 1962

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882

Pawlikowski, Paweł. Cold War. The Criterion Collection, 2018
All of my citations in relation to Cold War are featured on this disc.

Truffaut, François. Jules et Jim. Les Films du Carrosse, 23 January 1962 

---

[1] Pawlikowski, Paweł. Interviewed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. For The Criterion Collection, 2018

[2] Pawlikowski, Paweł. Cannes Film Festival Press Conference, 2018

[3] Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street. Verlag Herder, 1928

[4] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1882

For such a monumental historical film, little explanation is given for the escalation of violence within The Battle of Algiers. We see only the oblique terror of an archaic execution, the black robes of the men beside the guillotine before the stark prison walls, the beginnings of a haphazard revolt, a series of assassinations that might as well have been carried out by common criminals, the division of Algerian society unto the European and Muslim quarters, the sandbags and barbed wire at the checkpoints that can’t help but disclose the brutal reality of the occupation, men who take things into their own hands, a police bombing of an apartment complex and subsequent clandestine reprisals. As the film begins, it begs your sympathy for National Liberation Front. It asks you to be willing to understand why a man walking to his death would chant, “Long live Algeria!” In the escalating violence that comprises of its first hour, it refuses to let you accept that we should be willing to live in a world where the rules of engagement are so flagrantly disregarded. We see the women in veils wailing before the bodies piled on the rubble and hear the same somber refrain as the pied noirs are carried into ambulances after a series of bombings in an airport and two cafés. As much as the film is a celebration of the Algerian War of Independence, it is also a lament for the devastating impact that terror, be it either sanctioned by a nation-state or in the form of revolutionary violence, has upon civilian life.

As one of the films that sparked my interest in cinema, I should like to share a personal anecdote about my reasons for watching it for the first time. I was rather young and reckless and, though I have always vaguely ascribed to some form of pacifism, somewhat paradoxically fanatically devoted to the cause of communization. I checked out the film from a local video rental store in the back of a coffee shop because of that I knew it was a favorite film of Andraes Baader, the former leader of the Red Army Faction. It is, perhaps, ironic that it has been established within the counterterrorist curriculum for more or less the same reason. The all the more dramatic irony, however, is that, like Baader, who officially is said to have taken his own life in Stammheim Prison by shooting himself in the back of the head, I was somewhat taken by the mythic aura that its protagonist retains. I even, to this day, own more than one field jacket with a hood because of that I originally thought that it called to mind the image of Ali la Pointe within the film. Upon watching it for what is now the third time, I have found that I didn’t understand it very well. I had let the call to some vague and indeterminate revolt get me to ignore its rather bleak depiction of a clandestine conflict that blurs the distinction between military and civilian life.
I have not brought this up to merely bore you with my personal history. I have done so to point out that it makes a certain degree of sense for members the United States Military and the Central Intelligence Agency to watch the film as a character study in the psychology of political terrorism. There is, however, another bitter irony in that they watched the film in preparation for what was once called the “War on Terror”. If the recent Taliban victory in Afghanistan is indicative of anything, it is that they, too, failed to understand it. Within a martial context, its central thesis is that it is impossible to retain morale when faced with the brute reality of an occupation is actually like. In his presidential address during the disastrous withdraw from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden stated that the Afghan military just simply had “no will to fight”. Though I agreed with his claim that the Taliban would have swept over Afghanistan whether we had left ten years earlier or ten years later, I felt for it to be a fundamental failure on the part of the entire administration that sets out United States’ foreign policy for him to have shifted the blame for the loss of the war onto the military of a nation that we were never sincerely trying to build. If the United States government is serious about diffusing the situation in the region that they, themselves, incited, then they should watch The Battle of Algiers, not as a character study of their favored antagonists, but as a film born in the wake of neorealism, meditating upon, as Frantz Fannon would have put it, the tragic and terrifying necessity of violence amongst anti-colonial movements, and in response to the usage of torture by any of the many political factions to be engaged within either violent revolution or its counter. In short, I think that they, as I have come to, should consider it on its own terms and within its own context.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat, perhaps best known for, “photography is truth and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second”, features the line, “torture is monstrous and sad. It’s not easy to talk about.” It occurs before an excruciatingly long depiction of torture, interspersed with the melancholic drone of a piece of Classical music that plays over the radio and the film’s protagonist’s interior monologue. Le petit soldat was directed in 1960, but wasn’t released in France until 1963 because of that it was banned. In 1958, Henri Alleg published La Question, itself a graphic depiction of torture set during the Algerian War, which inspired resistance to its use within both France and around the world. It is, perhaps, ironic that Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu, the French paratroop commander and antagonist of The Battle of Algiers, has a snide remark to make of Jean-Paul Sartre, who denounced the usage of torture during the war, as it is by that he engages in the act that leaves him in “bad faith”. Torture expresses a limit to individuated human cruelty. It degrades both the perpetrator and victim. A person who carries out an act of torture can no longer lay claim to be within any form of right, as witnessing their victim scream and cry in unfathomable pain leaves them without any plausible deniability for that they have violated another unjustly. A victim of torture has not only been brought unto a violent experiment indicative of bare life, they are also stripped of any form of human pride. Torture is the bleak impasse of war, a dead end for humanity, and could not more emphatically be described as “inhumane”. No information, anywhere in the world, can justify it.
The Battle of Algiers begins with a prisoner who has undergone torture. Though, in accordance with its fidelity to historical truth, it acknowledges that the act was carried out on both sides and plays to no favorites in its condemnation of either, it was also banned in France, on paper, due to its tacit support for the FLN. It is nothing but clear to me that the film was banned for its stark depiction of what, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, is a crime against humanity. Though released elsewhere in the world in 1966, it was not shown in France until 1971, nearly ten years after the Algerian War of Independence had been won. Though I have brought this up out of concerted political and ethical conviction, it is also because there is no way to understand the political environment in which the film was made without making it clear that, in France, opposition with the war began with its near complete and total disregard for the rules of engagement, something that the United States, too, has failed to learn from.

With what ethics of war we can set aside, I should like to return the aforementioned thesis of the film.

It is nearly a full hour into the film before we are introduced to its primary antagonist. Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu is shown marching before a cheering crowd of French Algerians in stylistic aviators after the military has been deployed to crush the revolt. The voiceover notably states that he served in Italy and Normandy as part of the resistance to Fascism. We are then brought into a meeting that he holds with his compatriots detailing their modus operandi. As I imagine for the men who orchestrate counterterror operations to have been in such meetings before, even recognizing the cell structure of most contemporary terrorist cells, as well as that I assume for them to find a certain humor in many of his statements, though I, myself, feel as if they take them only at face value, as if the script for the film was written in single entendre without any form of social critique or satire, I suspect for them to identify with him. Having, myself, done something quite antithetical, but similar, I also suspect for the social critique of his character to be somewhat lost on them. Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu is afflicted by anomie. Throughout the entire film, he depicts himself as a stalwart French patriot, yet, nearly every remark that he makes, particularly when speaking to the press, is tinged by cynicism. Textually, his characterization is representative of the French colonial mindset. He wants to believe in the France that he fought for during the Second World War, the liberal bastion of “liberté, égalité, and fraternité”, but can not help but experience the war as if it were characterized by nihilism. Unlike the antihero of Albert Camus’s, L’Étranger, however, his colonial venture does not result in an existential crisis. He, rather, becomes all the more committed to the occupation and eventually wins the Battle of Algiers. The military lesson of the film is that it was a strategic victory and an ethical failure.

On some level, it is quite tragic that the original attacks by the FLN were a form of collective suicide. On some level, they were undertaken so that the French would respond with overwhelming military force. It is nothing but clear that the assassination of a police officer will not incite a revolution. The purpose of such acts is to provoke the occupying force to lay bare the brute oppression of the colonial project. Though a film ultimately in the favor of Algerian independence, The Battle of Algiers has no illusions as to what the FLN were actually like. They are not portrayed like a revolutionary organization that you would see in a communist propaganda film; they are shown as they were, militant, strict, distrustful, with both traitors and martyrs, somewhat deceitful, demanding of sacrifice, and willing to undertake acts that would cost Algerian citizens their lives. It is only because of that the French were willing to continue to escalate the violence of the occupation that there became the conditions for a fifth column of Algerians during the final days of the war of independence. That the excessive force of an occupying army will never sway a populace to its side is something that the United States has also failed to learn.
Ali la Pointe’s characterization, too, is not lacking in social critique. He is young, reckless, uneducated, a bit of a derelict, unwavering in his faith in his cause, and more or less unrepentant for his life as a terrorist. It is only when he has an encounter with Ben M’hidi on the rooftop of their hideout that he comes to understand what he is fighting for. Ben M’hidi asks why Ali was opposed to the strike in favor of Algerian independence. Ali tells him that it was because they were prohibited from using arms. Ben M’hidi, then, turns to him, and says, “you know, Ali, it’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But, it’s only afterwards, after we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.” A revolution is not just waged as a spiteful adventure against an unknown enemy; it is done so to create a better way of life. Gillo Pontecorvo’s film is not just a historical reconstruction of what, due to its title, has become known as the “Battle of Algiers”; it is also a coming-of-age story. Ali goes from a blind revolt to a genuine attempt to create a better world for the people in Algeria. Though plainly spoken, there is much wisdom and political maturity that Ben M’hidi has to impart. Actual political change doesn’t just require faith in one’s cause; it also demands resolve.

On watching the film again, after all of these years, I found that I should have understood it better. I should have seen the attacks as they were, as tragic. I should have understood for it to be all the more so that they should ever seem necessary. There’s a lot that I could have gained from the Battle of Algiers had I seen it better. I think that there could be a lot of people, perhaps even the FLN today, who would feel the same way. I guess that they, like me, will just have to watch it again.
 
Bibliography

Alleg, Henri. La Question. Originally published by Éditions de Minuit, 1958.
Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. Originally published by Gallimard, 1942.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Le petit soldat. Currently distributed by The Criterion Collection, 1963.
Pontecorvo, Gilberto “Gillo”. The Battle of Algiers. The Criterion Collection, 31 August 1966.
Another fascinating aspect of this film is that Saadi Yacef, who plays El-hadi Jafar, was a leader of the FLN.

Yukio Mishima’s graphic depiction of ritual suicide, Patriotism: The Rite of Love and Death, serves as a testament to the banality of violence and the cessation of Fascist ideology in Nihilism.  The act of seppuku plays out as if it were in an Italian horror film.  Mishima’s own suicide four years later only adds to the fascination.  Patriotism is fascinating, but, it is just that.  The film does not inspire its audience to engage in the romantic anomie of the Fascist project.  Rather, it leaves the audience with the brute null of “That’s that.” and is almost functionally subversive.  By simulating his own suicide on film four years prior, Mishima paradoxically strips the act of its aura by portraying it too well.  The act of ritual suicide comes off as exactly what it was, which was idiotic.  The Imperial Japan that Mishima held as paragon could probably care less for such theatrical gestures.  If anything, they would have considered such actions to have been useful.  The film, however, is good.  What it does well is to portray its ideal so precisely that the absurdities of Mishima’s ideology can do nothing but become all too readily apparent.   

The basis for Patriotism is a short story by Mishima of the same title.  The story was published in 1961 and details the last night that a young lieutenant and his wife spend together before committing seppuku.  Seppuku, or, hara-kiri, was an honorable method of taking one’s own life in feudal Japan.  The practice was primarily enacted by samurai.  In Patriotism, Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama decides to commit seppuku after discovering that his colleagues were collaborating with mutineers in order to prevent an internal conflict amongst Imperial forces.  The film adds to the plot.  Tokyo is placed under martial law following an attempted coup d’état which the young lieutenant did not take part in because he had recently married.  Shinji is a member of the secret society who attempted to wage the coup.  He is also a palace guard.  He ostensibly decides to commit seppuku so that he can die honorably.  The short story is, perhaps, a more bitter lamentation upon suicide than the film which glorifies the act.  Shinji’s co-conspirators betray one another in the short story, and, the text reads as more of a character study.  A young idealistic man is driven to a desperate act in a corrupt world that bears no resemblance to his ideals.  The character experiences anomie.  The film, however, exposes the absurdity of suicide.  The sensational retelling of the story leaves its audience without an answer as to why the act was committed.  The form of society that Mishima envisioned is represented by a small miniature that is superimposed over Reiko’s mind during the first scene of the film.  Perhaps, by committing suicide, Mishima believed that he was becoming more perfect?  Mishima’s disciplined, borderline Fascist, right-wing authoritarian politics ought to have produced work that reified the reactionary militarist ideology of the Tatenokai which he founded, but, I would argue that Patriotism plays as a transgressive film, with or without Mishima’s intent.  It could be suggested that, when watching Patriotism, an audience member is quite literally witnessing the death of the author.  The film calls into question the motivations for suicide.  Is Shinji really committed to the secret society who attempted to wage the coup or the emperor?  Can the act be accepted at face value?  In both the film and text, Lieutenant Takeyama leaves a suicide note that states, “Long live the Imperial forces!”  Mishima would, perhaps, have liked for the note to read as a single-entendre.  The lieutenant was merely devoted to the cause of his co-conspirators.  I would suggest that, in both the film and text, the note also reads as a rumination.  Who does the act honor?  By situating the story between two young lovers, Mishima suggests that the act was made in desperation.  Perhaps the romance which Mishima substituted for nationalism had just simply gotten to them?  In the film, the act could just as easily have been carried out in devotion as it could have been in desperation.  Both conclusions are too complex to reduce to a paragraph that could be fit in an obituary.  Would any person be driven to such measures over ideas such as honor or glory?  Could someone really have been that spiteful?  A suicide only asks questions.  It does not give any answers.

The formal staging of the film takes place on the Noh stage.  Noh theatre is a traditional Japanese theatrical form that is said to have originated in the fourteenth century.  There tends to be little action in Noh drama.  Noh theatre is one of the oldest extant theatrical forms in the world.  The modern choices of dressing Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama in a military uniform and showing the facial expressions of the actors is striking.  Mishima, perhaps, sought to thrust the tradition of the past into a projected future where a revolutionary reactionary Modernism would take the place of traditional Japanese society.  He may also have made such choices as a meditation upon traditionalism, revolution, and, anomie.  Mishima, perhaps, would have given different answers to different parties.  The incredibly graphic climax of the film is certainly a departure from the tradition of Japanese theatre.  Regardless as to what Mishima’s intentions may have been, the juxtaposition of the setting, staging, and, act can be interpreted as a revolt against the rigidity of Japanese society.  The simulated double suicide in Patriotism is somewhat ironic.  The act impugns the very social order that it sought to actualize.  Mishima’s suicide four years later, perhaps, did the same.       

Hamlet is a proto-Existential play.  The play’s lengthy deliberation upon suicide and murder calls into question the nature of madness and disinters what death does to thought.  Hamlet is confronted by the absurdity of the human condition which he capriciously avoids by taking solace in cynical philosophical pessimism.  His confrontation with the Absurd leads to his numerous ruminations upon suicide and human agency.  That Hamlet ultimately fails to adequately cope with the conditions of the human experience is tragic, but it is just that.  Hamlet is a character who can be empathized with but not venerated.  Hamlet is about the all too common human failure to cope with Absurd.  The tragedy had implications that go far beyond the purview of Elizabethan Theatre.      

The circumstances of Hamlet’s life are grave.  His father has died and his kingdom has been stripped from him.  Exigent situations often result in tragedy.  The tragic takes on the character of The Absurd (Camus, pp. 1-66).  That any form of human suffering exists feels absurd.  Because there are no grand designs to find fault in, the revelation of the absurdity of the human condition results in angst.  Hamlet stands upon the limit-edge of mortality.  He is, for most of the play, incapable of coming to terms with death.  That people die feels like an absurd ukase issued by an arcane tyrant who can not at all be benevolent.  Yet, there is an odd kind of justice in death.  The mind abates and the body decomposes.  All people return to the same base materials after death.  Death is The Great Equalizer.  In spite of the Christian beliefs that he presents at the beginning of the play, Shakespeare substitutes Death for God in Hamlet.  Such an intellectual machination contextualizes fatalism so that it can be rendered meaningful without invoking the mythic or the divine.  Hamlet may not have been fated to kill Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, or Claudius, but he was fated to die.  No person escapes death.  That people die is the basic condition of the human experience.  The “fell sergeant, Death” is “strict in his arrest.”  No palaver can contend with mortality.  There is no parley to be had with it.  It is a fact that people die.  There are no other terms or conditions to be offered.  Coming to terms with death is a necessary existential endeavor.  Hamlet’s cynical wit mocks every sincere attempt to do so.  He can not cope with mortality, and, yet, believes that he wants to die.

Hamlet is exceptionally cruel.  He attempts to cope with angst by obsessing over suicide and mercurially castigating others around him through the ample deployment of vicious repartee.  Hamlet does not jest; he is hysterical.  There are plenty of jokes within the play, but, almost none of them are funny.  Hamlet utilizes his cruel wit in order to interrogate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  His humor also takes on the form of a rebellion against what he has come to understand about the human condition.  Hamlet is self-depreciating.  I am incredibly skeptical of the cheap Psychoanalytic interpretations of the play that see Hamlet as either being a self-loathing narcissist or having an Oedipal complex.  Such base reductions miss the point entirely.  Hamlet lacks the resolve to break the upshot of his philosophical predilection to the world.  He can not speak well enough to soften of the blow of what he has come to understand about the human experience in spite of that he is very well spoken.  He copes with his alienated position by attempting to make light the very grave.  His jests reveal to the audience the depths of his pathology and often take on the character of anti-jokes.  I don’t, like T.S. Eliot, believe that this is indicative of that the play is just simply flawed (Eliot, para. 8).  Shakespeare’s usage of wit in Hamlet is ingenious.  The plights incurred during the human experience play as anti-jokes.  Life is plagued by misfortune.  One can only laugh to oneself.  In so far that philosophical pessimism adequately assesses the human condition, what we come to understand about the world is often like a joke that nobody gets because it isn’t funny.  Hamlet is a play that is about a failed attempt at overcoming philosophical pessimism.  Hamlet believes too directly in the madcap charm that being suicidal allows for.  There are but brief reprieves from his mania and melancholy.  Shakespeare offers no relief in Hamlet.  You are only given a suicidal lament to empathize with and the gravediggers to laugh at.

For nearly all of the first half of the play, Hamlet’s behavior is extraordinarily melancholic.  The audience is led to believe that he is mourning the death of his father, but I would argue that Hamlet’s extolment of his father is self-deceiving.  Hamlet is beset by the existential plight that the death of his father reveals to him.  He is not mourning his father’s death; he is mourning the death of the symbolic itself.  There is no divine order.  A person’s will will not be commanded by cause or providence.  We must cope with radical freedom.  Hamlet is confronted by two choices in the play: whether or not he should kill Claudius and whether or not he should kill himself.  The fixation upon his ruse is motivated by that he is avoiding thinking about suicide.  He does not want to die, and, yet, can not choose to live.  He refuses to abandon the postulation that the human experience is ultimately negative, and, is, therefore, incapable of coming to terms with mortality.  Death produces desire.  People want to live because they know that they will die.  All of life is lived in spite of death.  Hamlet’s whimsical derision delays death, but does not free him from it.  His reliance upon his intellect offers him only a brief moment of clarity before his final hour.  At the beginning of the play, he is crestfallen.  By the middle of it, he has fallen in love with the idea of committing suicide.  In the play’s famed soliloquy, Hamlet associates human action with suicide.  He laments:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. (Shakespeare, p. 47)

To act means to attempt to put an end to the suffering spawned by desire.  All human action braves the unknown.  Self-destructive suicidal impulses allow for an odd kind of freedom.  A person seemingly becomes liberated from the fear of death.  This liberation, however, is felt as a mere sensation.  A person does not actually quell the anxiety caused by mortality.  Liberating suicidal caprice is often expressed as jouissance (Johnston, Section 2.4.2).  To act on a whim becomes an addictive compulsion.  Hamlet is coping with the revelation that he is radically free.  Human agency allows for the potentiality of suicide.  That a person can take their own life should result in an appraisal of the concept of freedom.  We are not just free to do good or to live well.  We are also free to injure and inflict self-harm.  The radical negation of another’s existential attestation, to kill, transgresses the inviolable.  Because suicide only involves one person, no ethic ensues.  The negation of the Self produces the semblance of ekstasis.  That the Self can seemingly be negated allows for reflexive abstract thought (Sartre, pp. 122-123).  Hamlet learns about himself and the world through being suicidal.  He mistakenly identifies the ecstasy of realization with psychological plight which engendered it.  He experiences catharsis, but does not become more lucid after the fact.  His behavior, following the soliloquy, is fiendish and rash.  It is the last time, aside from a few ephemeral moments, that the audience can truly empathize with the character.  His “antic disposition”, here, becomes true madness.  What we are witnessing when we watch Hamlet deliver the “To be or not to be” soliloquy are the last moments of his lasting sanity.

Hamlet can be diagnosed with a litany of mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  I would diagnose Hamlet as suffering from Major Depression and Psychosis.  The DSM-5 treats Psychosis as a symptom of other disorders and not a disorder itself.  As Hamlet is a character in a play, and not a person with whom I can communicate directly, I do not know whether or not I would diagnose Hamlet as suffering from Schizophrenia or other disorders that are claimed to have psychotic symptoms.  We only know that he is “psychotic”.  A clinical analysis of the character would be contingent upon the actor who plays him.   The situation that Shakespeare casts Hamlet in calls into question the nature of madness itself.  Every person who he encounters is to some degree lying to him.  His father is dead and his mother has married a man who offers the pretense of being a drunkard.  His sovereignty has been taken from him.  Hamlet’s antics are an attempt to lay bare the falsehoods promulgated by his uncle.  We know that there is an actual ghost by that Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo are also witnesses to it.  We know that Claudius did kill King Hamlet by that he confesses to it in the third act.  We discover, near the end of the play, that Claudius had attempted to have Hamlet executed upon landing in England.  We also know that Claudius tempers the cup that Gertrude drinks from with poison and that he had brought Laertes under his wing so that he could devise a means to kill Hamlet.  Hamlet is not just mad.  His “antic disposition” is an extraordinarily clever means to cope with his extreme alienation at Elsinore.  He exploits his madness in an attempt to dethrone his uncle.  This works all too well.  The play within the play forces Claudius to confront his guilt.  Shakespeare uses the play within the play to demonstrate what madness is like.  Because of the stigma associated with mental illness, a person who allegedly suffers from it will experience social encounters as a masquerade.  Everyone pretends to offer the mentally ill the same cordiality that they extend to others.  When the society that has designated a person as being “insane” is negative, the insane have no choice but to revolt.  A mad revolt often takes on the character of a play within a play.  We all attempt to act our way out of the roles that we are assigned in a world that classifies genuine free expression as madness.  What is madness?  Does madness describe a genuine psychological plight or is it merely determined by that a person is out keeping with whatever social order that they find themselves to be subject to?  By that he is contemplating treason, Hamlet is certainly criminally insane.  By that he gives way to his own mania, he could be considered to be mad.  We know that he is mad by that Gertrude does not see the ghost who he speaks to in the fourth scene of the third act.  What does Hamlet’s madness reveal about the human condition?

The human condition results in angst.  There is no way to adequately cope with death.  Parlous anxiety produces mania.  A person can only develop the exalted resolve of those who are willing to stake their lives in conflict.  Hamlet validly identifies a catholicon to angst, but fails not to succumb to the pitfalls of soldier mentality.  That he is carried to the stage and given a military funeral at the end of the play is somewhat ironic.  Such vainglorious fanfare was, in part, precisely what destroyed his mind.  Hamlet is right to suggest that one should expose what is mortal and unsure to all that Fortune, Death, and Danger dare “even for an eggshell”, but falls prey to the call of the epochal when he suggests that to be great is to “find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake.”  Hamlet can be interpreted as a subversive play in so far that it deconstructs a great man.  Because he becomes consumed by vengeance, Hamlet becomes subject to history and loses his agency over it.  His serene resolve in the second scene of the fifth act is as close to him developing a resolution with which to cope with the circumstances of his life as we come in the play.  In regards to the wager that Hamlet has just agreed to, Horatio states, “If your mind dislike anything, obey it.  I will forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.”  Hamlet replies:

Not a whit, we defy augury.  There’s a special providence in the
fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the
readiness is all. (Shakespeare, p. 70)

This is about as much there is to draw from for inspiration in all of Western civilization.  The “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” unceasingly levy their assault, and all that we have are the brief moments of serenity in men who can be considered to be nothing but mad.  That Hamlet is suicidal is a natural response to the circumstances of his life.  It is incredibly tragic that the world should ruled by suicidal men.  What is all the more tragic is that the only reprieve from the disintegrative order established by such an aporia comes from those who are willing to stake their lives in an attempt to reintegrate a life-affirming philosophy that would undo the psychological plights incurred through the diffusion of the thanatopolitical.  The answer is “to be”.  To state such an answer still means to risk death.  The very crux of sanity can be considered as a form of self-sacrificing suicide in what has been wrought by Western civilization.  There are no sane men.  There is only that there is a means to cope with the Absurd.  Hamlet attempts to do so and tragically fails.  He is human.  What his tragic failure reveals is the very human failure to adequately cope with the human condition.  It takes courage to attempt to come to terms with existence.  The questions that Existentialism poses are not for the feint of heart.  Hamlet may not have died as a hero, but he did die with valor.  Such men need not be venerated, but their stories have enough within them to be offered the condescension of empathy.  Hamlet may not be understood well by all, but can be.  We are all, to some degree, suicidal.  By acting, we negate some facet of the Self which had potentiality.  There is knowledge to be gained from the ekstasis that is produced while contemplating suicide.  Overcoming suicide is a necessary existential endeavor.  We can glean certain means to cope with the Absurd from Hamlet.  Black humor has its place in spiting the very bleak human condition with laughter.  That there is no inherent meaning in the world can be somewhat liberating.  We can, like Hamlet, whimsically denounce the inveterate establishment of the symbolic by utilizing the affected mien we have developed in response to the conditions of the Absurd.  It is also quite brave to confront suicide and mortality.  One should attempt to develop a resolve with which to live in spite of the tragic human experience.  That Hamlet had made such an attempt is what makes the character tragic.

Hamlet is, of course, no role model.  Unlike Camus’ Sisyphus who heroically chooses to live in spite of the Absurd, Hamlet lets his despairing outlook become a reality (Camus, pp. 119-123).  The assumption that the human experience is ultimately negative is pathological.  It becomes true in so far that it is believed to be so.  A person who believes that existence primarily entails suffering will suffer.  Shakespeare chooses not to create a heroic myth about confronting the Absurd.  He, rather, tells a tragic tale about a man who becomes incapable of escaping his own self-fulfilling prophecy.  The play is about a man who breaks down completely.  Hamlet is tragic, but he is not a tragic hero.  He offers only a brief respite before death.  That Hamlet ultimately fails to come to terms with the Absurd, calls his very character into question.  Should his cruelty be excused by his charm?  Is Hamlet at all someone who an audience member can empathize with?  His cruel disregard for Ophelia drives her to commit suicide.  The experience of watching Hamlet can be likened to Ophelia’s relationship to the character.  She represents the relationship that people have to men who can not cope with the gravitas of power.  We are left hysterically beset by the uninvited cruelty of the play.  One can only lament, “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”  Hamlet can be interpreted as much as a mediation upon revolutionary suicide as it can an investigation into the suicidal pathology of Fascism.  Should an audience member even attempt to identify with the character in so far that he is a Fascist?  The proper response would seem to be the cold logic of clinical analysis.  In so far that Hamlet’s cruelty is unwarranted, the character can only be analyzed.  In that sense, Hamlet is a character study in Psychosis.  The play, however, is far more subversive.  Hamlet transgresses what Christianity falsely identifies as inviolable knowledge.  He braves the unknown in attempting to actually cope with mortality and is, therefore, thrust into the actual conditions of the human experience which are beset by the perils of human agency.  Hamlet’s cruelty is an acceptable revolt against the Absurd.  He simply misplaces his fury by taking his distress out on Ophelia.  His anger is righteous, but he falls prey to mania.  What the audience is left with after Hamlet delivers his exalted soliloquy is a character who no longer has any control over his own mind.  The human encounter with the Absurd does not usually end in sublime victory.  It, more often than not, results in catastrophic tragedy.   Hamlet’s defeat brings ruin to his entire kingdom.  We are left only with Horatio to deliver his epitaph.  The play is about the all too human encounter with the Absurd.  One should, like Hamlet, have the courage to attempt to cope with the actual conditions of the human experience.  One should not, however, repeat his mistakes.  Hamlet is a character who is deserving of empathy but not veneration.  The death of the symbolic is completed by Hamlet’s death at the end of the play.  He, at the very least, leaves us with one last lament: “The rest is silence.” (Shakespeare, p. 71)  

Hamlet can be seen the beginning of the abandonment of the belief in the aristocracy.  Their beautiful world could never be looked at the same way again.  The play marks the outset of Modernity.  It can be seen as the rudimentary Existential text which called every Renaissance assumption about the world and humanity into question.  Shakespeare leaves us with a “world that has grown honest.”  It is up to us to learn to cope with the tragic modality of the Absurd.  He offers the brief respite of resolution as a means to cope with the human condition.  I would argue that this does not go far enough.  We should take a leaf from Camus and revolt against our state of affairs.  In doing so we will discover how to do so joyously.  One must choose “to be”.  That one does is the most difficult task of all.

References

Camus, A. (1983). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York, NY: Vintage International, 1-66, 119-123.

Eliot, T. S. (1921). “Hamlet and His Problems”. In The Sacred Wood. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, para. 8. Retrieved from https://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html    
In “Hamlet and His Problems”, T. S. Eliot notoriously called Hamlet an “artistic failure”.  He does concede that the play is more problematic than the character, but ultimately suggests that Shakespeare had “tackled a problem which proved too much for him” in writing Hamlet.

Sartre, J. (1984). Being and Nothingness. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 122-123.

Shakespeare, W. (1952). “Hamlet”. In W. Clarke and W. Wright’s The Plays and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, Vol. II. Chicago, IL: William Benton, 47, 70, 71.

Johnston, A. (2018). “Jacques Lacan”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Section 2.4.2. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/#LibEco
Jacques Lacan is the founder of Lacanian psychoanalysis.  While I disagree with Lacan’s insistence upon maintaining Freudian interpretations of the human psyche that rely upon either the Oedipal complex or a fixation upon the phallus, I think that his concept of jouissance is valuable to both Psychology and Philosophy.

Author’s Note:

While I do understand the perceived need for it, I don’t necessarily believe in intellectual property, and, so, you may do with this text what you will. My full name is Zadimus Morgenstern if you, for any reason, would like to cite this article.