In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination by a leftist nutcase who expressed opinions aligned with Antifa, President Trump has designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which unlocks more enforcement tactics and resources to deal with a group that has been a major thorn in the side of law enforcement for years. They were responsible for a great deal of the damage in the 2020 "Summer of Love" riots and are present in most major left-wing protests today.
There was another left-wing group in Germany in the post-World War 2 years. The Red Army Faction, founded by communist bomb-throwers Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (leading to them also being known as the "Baader-Meinhof group"), operated in Germany from not long after the war until they were broken up for good in the wake of German reunification. Could this group serve as an inspiration for Antifa? Could Antifa adopt more of the RAF's tactics?
It's possible. There are, though, a few major differences in the two groups. First, let's take a look at the RAF's history.
The group had its origins among the radical elements of the German university protest movement of the 1960s, which decried the United States as an imperialist power and characterized the West German government as a fascist holdover of the Nazi era. From its early years, members supported themselves through bank robberies and engaged in terrorist bombings and arson, especially of West German corporations and businesses and of West German and U.S. military installations in West Germany.
Aside from the bank robberies, at least, so far, many of the operations and philosophies of the Red Army Faction would look and sound a lot like Antifa. Antifa decries the USA as an imperialist power, just as the RAF did. They characterize the Trump administration and any American politician to the right of, well, Baader and Meinhof as fascists and Nazis. The only difference is that Antifa's funding is less overt.
That's key; more on that in a moment.
The Red Army Faction also engaged in considerably more aggressive tactics than Antifa has, so far. But the goals are strangely similar:
They also kidnapped and assassinated prominent political and business figures. The goal of their terrorist campaign was to trigger an aggressive response from the government, which group members believed would spark a broader revolutionary movement. As its tactics became more violent, however, it lost much of the support it had enjoyed among the West German political left. By the mid-1970s the group had expanded its scope outside West Germany and occasionally allied itself with militant Palestinian groups. For example, in 1976 two Baader-Meinhof guerrillas took part in a Palestinian hijacking of an Air France jetliner, which eventually ended after the successful Entebbe raid in Uganda by Israeli commandos.
The finale of the group came when most of the gang was captured and imprisoned. Hans Ulrike was shot in his cell along with three other captured RAF members on October 18, 1977. Ulrike Meinhof had already hanged herself in her cell in 1976. The rest of the group more or less faded away following the reunification of Germany, although when I went to Germany in support of President Clinton's Balkans distraction in 1996, we were warned that there were still a few rather elderly Red Army Faction members running around.
Now, how does that compare to Antifa?
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There are a couple of major differences. The Red Army Faction mostly operated as a more or less cohesive group. Antifa operates as disconnected cells, perhaps having learned a thing or two from Hamas and other Islamic terror groups. This isn't new; in the late '80s through the '90s, enviro-terror groups like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front also followed this model. It greatly complicates the task of law enforcement to roll up the group's members.
And, of course, as we noted, the Red Army Faction financed their operation through bank robberies and other acts of theft and extortion. Antifa is funded through donations, by shady money from left-wing groups and supporters (let's whisper the name "Soros" here.) And that may be their vulnerability; donations like this, in the modern world, leave an electronic trail. It may be a challenge, but those transactions can be identified, tracked, and the donors arrested and charged with supporting a terror group.
That's one of the advantages of Antifa being designated as a domestic terror group.
Antifa may well respond to the president's designation by escalation. They may well go as far as emulating the Red Army Faction in their operations: Bombings, kidnappings, and targeted assassinations. But the money trail may well end up being their primary weakness.
For a more detailed look at the Red Army Faction, I highly recommend my good friend Jillian Becker's book "Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang." It's a great in-depth analysis, a detailed history of a chilling, vicious, violent group. And it yields insights into the thought processes of left-wing terror groups in general.
