Yet another daily excerpt from Cold World…

The conviction of Meinhof and her comrades that the situation was ripe for revolutionary intervention was not a response to ubiquitous, catastrophic disorder, but neither did it arise spontaneously in the midst of an otherwise tranquil society. One particular flashpoint was the murder of the student protestor Benno Ohnesorg, savagely beaten and then shot in the head by police during demonstrations against a visit by the Shah of Iran. Gudrun Ensslin’s angry declaration, after this outrage, is pivotal: “They’ll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we’re up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can’t argue with the people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven’t. We must arm ourselves!”

This is not exactly an overreaction. It is however less a rational estimation of the magnitude of the hostile forces presented by “the system” than a symbolic putting-to-death of society in general. “Auschwitz” here signifies not only the real threat of state violence, but the foreclosure of negotiation. “You can’t argue with the people who made Auschwitz”, not only because they are better-armed than you but also because they are beyond the reach of persuasion or polemic, wholly identified with what they do: generators of Auschwitz, “the Auschwitz generation”. Once the state is identified, via such representative authority figures as the police and the “older generation” of one’s parents and teachers, as the possibility of recurrence of Auschwitz (and all of its acts, from the suppression of student demonstrations to the saturation-bombing of Vietnam, as smaller or greater Auschwitzes), the ground is prepared for a revolutionary ethics of secession.