#lang en
#title The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement
#subtitle A study of the origins and development of the revolutionary anarchist movement in Europe 1945–73 with particular reference to the First of May Group
#author Edited by Albert Meltzer
#notes Published by Cienfuegos Press 1976
reprinted by Elephant Editions 2013
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer (editor)
#LISTtitle International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement
#date 1976
#teaser Once again in history Anarchism is singled out by every reactionary
force as its main enemy. World Governments, moving closer together
against the common threat of the common people, fear a socialism
unfettered by government ties, a class struggle without the
limitations imposed by the parliamentary game, a working class without
a leadership that aims at imposing authority either by a new
dictatorship or by bourgeois parliamentarianism.
#cover i-m-irsm-cover.png
** 1900–1939
Once again in history Anarchism is singled out by every reactionary
force as its main enemy. World Governments, moving closer together
against the common threat of the common people, fear a socialism
unfettered by government ties, a class struggle without the
limitations imposed by the parliamentary game, a working class without
a leadership that aims at imposing authority either by a new
dictatorship or by bourgeois parliamentarianism.
Before the First World War the main impetus to social revolution came
from the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movements. However,
following the defeat of the Russian Revolution with the triumph of
authoritarian communism, world capitalism tended to concentrate its
energies on destroying this apparent danger to its continued
existence, thus giving the impression that the libertarian movement
and its ideas were superfluous, or, at best, a side issue to the main
struggle, so far as the organised working class was concerned. Only in
a minority of countries did anarchism take the lead, elsewhere the
very idea of freedom went into decline.
Capitalism, using the dictatorial methods of state communism wherever
necessary, forced a situation where the apparent alternatives seemed
to be (state) communism or fascism.
This did not prevent the anarchist movement from maintaining the
intensity of the class struggle throughout the 1920s. It was the
anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain (the CNT) which carried the
whole weight of labour organisation throughout the dictatorship of
Primo de Rivera (when the socialist leaders took office in order to
try to boost the socialist UGT union at its expense) and during the
equally perfidious republic which followed. In Italy, individual and
collective libertarian attacks against Mussolini and his regime formed
the main anti-fascist resistance. In France, anarchists fought a
losing battle to keep the unions to their original syndicalist basis,
while in the USA the IWW as the legatee to all that was libertarian
and syndicalist in both the European and American traditions, fought a
valiant battle against reaction. In the Argentine and Uruguay there
were murderous assaults against the anarchist movement which fought on
to maintain working class solidarity against the selfishness of the
ruling class. In China, where the communist party sold out the
proletarian revolution to follow the successful bourgeois
revolutionists under Chiang Kai Shek, anarchists continued the
struggle for workers’ councils on the same lines as those of the first
German revolution in 1918 and the factory occupations in Italy. In
Russia, the struggle was passing from the battlefields and the
factories into the prison camps. In Britain, anarchists were prominent
in the shop stewards’ movement and especially the unemployed workers’
movement.
All this maintained a movement that had reached a high point of
international struggle before the first world war; but it was
nevertheless true that the whole trend of the post-world war I era
appeared to be ‘communism v. fascism’. As fascism triumphed in the
‘have not’ imperialist countries most threatened by state communism,
it steadily began to menace the ‘have’ imperialist countries stable
enough to resist that pressure, and so the situation of ‘democracy v.
fascism’ developed. The ruling-class throughout the world had
threatened to take away democratic liberties and substitute fascism if
their domination was threatened, but gradually fascism became
associated with the aggressive ‘have not’ imperialism against the
defensive empires. It began to seem to many that there was some
identity of interests between capitalist and worker; and with the
defence of the Soviet Union in mind, the Communist Party began to
reiterate this theme incessantly.
This period ended with the Spanish Civil War. There it was the
anarcho-syndicalist movement which responded initially to the military
coup d’etat which aimed at ‘restoring law and order’ by opposing to it
the organised force, and the spontaneous action, of the working
people.
Against the rebel Army of their own country they responded with the
greatest weapon in their armoury, social revolution. The combined
force of feudalism and fascism hit back with the greatest force at
their disposal—genocide. Because of the treachery of the Republic,
which declined to defend itself and would not arm the working people
who alone could prevent its overthrow, the rising of the Army, though
checked, became a war. Faced with the reactionary elements within the
Spanish Government (aided by the Communist Party and its foreign
backers) the libertarian movement felt inclined to compromise in its
social revolution by waging the civil war instead; soon it was too
late to alter course, for the enemy was too vicious and to falter
meant to die. But without doubt the libertarian movement was also
betrayed by a leadership which manoeuvred its way to positions of
authority and power under cover of the war.
In the absence of party discipline, anathema to the anarchist
movement, it was possible for the ‘well known’ to rise to a leadership
which sought participation in the Government on the grounds that only
in this way could the civil war be fought. Thus the libertarian
movement came to adopt at second hand the slogans and to some extent
the mentality of the Popular Front in regard to ‘democracy v.
fascism’. At the outset it fought against fascism under
social-revolutionary colours; it went down to its defeat under false
democratic-capitalist ones.
Meanwhile, every single anarchist endeavour throughout Europe was
concentrated on the Spanish struggle to the sacrifice of everything
else. The Spanish Anarchists rejected the idea of an International
Brigade (other than for refugees with nowhere else to go). They did
not want to ‘depopulate’ the anarchist movement abroad. Every struggle
that went on was to help the struggle in Spain and this altered the
entire character of the militant anarchist movement throughout Europe.
** 1939–1945
During the Second World War, liberals and social-democrats (together
with the Communists, once the Nazi-Soviet Pact was broken by Hitler)
pushed the idea of a ‘holy war’ against fascism, since the enemy
happened to be fascist, and tried to bestow a democratic aura on the
Allies. After a time, Allied propagandists themselves began to use
some of the anti-fascist cliches, though with diplomatic caution until
the powers concerned were actually in the war. Soon there grew up the
popular myth that the only reason we went to war with Germany was
because it was ‘Nazi’.
Two major developments took place in the anarchist movement in Europe.
The Spanish Anarchists, exiled in France and treated as second-class
citizens or as prisoners of war by the French Republic, were the first
to take up arms after the French defeat, as a resistance movement
against fascism. This movement of revolutionary defeatism spread over
the Pyrenees into Spain, as an urban guerrilla movement linking up
with people like Capdevila and Massana who had been operating in the
mountains as rural guerrillas without a break since the victory of
Franco in 1939.
The other development was in Britain, where the anarchists took
advantage of the remaining freedom of expression in a country where
the working class was able to resist internal suppression, to attack
imperialism in every way possible, a struggle which spread even inside
the armed forces.
Both these movements reached their zenith and disappeared.
The failure of the soldiers’ councils to link up with workers’
councils in post-war Britain, and the resultant euphoria of a Labour
Government with full power, meant the loss of any revolutionary
impetus. Those attracted to the idea of anarchism, particularly within
the armed forces, as a prospective force in the supposedly forthcoming
post-war revolution, drifted away. But the anti-war attitude of the
British anarchist movement had also meant that many of purely pacifist
persuasion had been attracted to the libertarian camp, and this had
the effect of diluting the class struggle, or rather the libertarian
participation in it, and opened the way to the liberalism of the New
Left.
In Spain, more particularly among the Spanish exiles, the libertarian
movement was stuck with the position of the thirties. The exiled
bureaucrats were entrenched in Toulouse, and found it easier to sit
back and complain that the Allies had not sent their armies into Spain
to achieve the revolution for them, than to associate with the
guerrilla forces that had never laid down their arms. Unwilling to
involve themselves in any action that would compromise their settled
existence in France, or the legality of their Organisation, they
created a wedge between what passed off as the CNT in exile, and the
newly emerged post-war Resistance against Franco which much more truly
represented the CNT. No longer could the ‘exile’ leaders judge this as
part of the revolutionary struggle; they could only view matter from a
social democratic standpoint and echo stale war-time propaganda.
Thus the anarchist movement emerged from World War II lumbered on the
one hand with the dead wood of social- democratic
pseudo-libertarianism still parading the theory of the ‘just’ war (as
exemplified by the National Committee of the CNT in Toulouse) and this
was well matched internationally by some other entrenched movements
too lazy to move over to social democracy, which retained of anarchism
only the label, but monopolised international connections in Europe;
and on the other hand with the liberal-pacifist cult and the
idealisation of non-violence as action in itself which later came,
through America, to influence a whole range of new cults throughout
the world in which the criterion was neither freedom nor resistance
nor class struggle but solely the degree of absence of violence.
This substituted the idea of ‘personal liberation’ under the State for
that of a free society, a purely liberal idea, and there were not so
many differences between these two ‘darker sides’ of anarchism than
appeared at first sight.
In many countries in Europe, therefore, Anarchism became once more a
matter of small groups, some fighting on desperately as they did in
Spain, some still retaining labour connections, as in Sweden, as well
as of isolated individuals everywhere who carried on, against
overwhelming odds, identified by small papers or bulletins or regular
meetings, and trying to re-integrate into a new struggle.
** 1945–1960
With the rise of the new Left and the collapse of Stalinism from its
near-monopoly position among working class militants, there was a
proliferation of Marxist groups. Some of these managed to ensure that
there was carried over into a new generation, though purged of the
Stalinist taint, the same mistakes of the Communist Party and the same
subordination to political leadership, but even more than previously
they substituted the cult of Nationalism for that of any form of
socialism and thus managed to avoid the most important issue, class
struggle. This nationalist cult, expressed in Marxist phraseology, has
characterised the new left ever since.
But despite the many struggles for national liberation which have
over-clouded the issue since the 1950s, the real conflict has no
longer been between state communism and fascism nor between democracy
and fascism nor, as the propagandists now put it, between democracy
and communism (or New Democracy and capitalism). It was between the
rulers of the world with increasingly common interests and the people
themselves. Because of this Anarchism has come to the fore once more,
even though (ironically) just as in the thirties anarchist action was
interpreted in the light of the clash between communism and fascism,
now communist and nationalist (if not exactly fascist) action began to
be interpreted by the media in the light of essentially anarchist
struggle against world imperialism and centralised government.
This rise in anarchist activism spread far beyond the influence of the
small corps of anarchist activists who had to struggle from the grip
of pacifist non-resistance on the one hand, and the non-resistance of
the ‘dominant figures’ of the Spanish libertarians in exile on the
other, who tried to divert the struggle by appeals to the United
Nations and invocations of old war-time slogans as well as cold war
ones, in an attempt to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ that would enable
them to regain their lost ministerial portfolios. For these people and
others like them the ‘justice’ of the armed struggle against Franco
ended, in effect, when it ceased to be legal, and from 1945 onwards
the Resistance fought without their help, and often, against their
wishes.
But as the Spanish activists found common cause with the new
generation inside Spain, so did all the small anarchist groups
throughout Europe find that they were no longer isolated and ageing
groups of militants; on the contrary, while the anti-nuclear movement,
based on pacifist techniques, brought in temporarily hundreds who
appeared to be anarchists (but were basically liberals who found
liberalism meaningless, yet who saw anarchism as merely a personal
revolution, which is to say liberalism) yet of those some came right
through to a revolutionary position and those who did became a
majority in the movement, which overnight became completely
rejuvenated and the more effective.
But as the revolutionary anarchist groups became effective, and came
to integrate internationally, the Marxist movements became effective
by disintegration. The Trotskyist movement broke into a dozen clearly
defined sects; the pretext of ‘Maoism’ meant a large number of
opposing doctrines, from the true ‘Maoist’ Stalinist anti-revisionism
to the most ultrarevolutionary stands. Blanquism, though
unacknowledged flourished more than it had ever done; Spartacism, and
the ideas of council communism, were once more effective. The
challenge to Moscow hegemony meant the proliferation of groups and
theories, all part and parcel of the New Left.
Some of the new militants, encountering not the effective anarchist
groups and thinking of them as the exception to the rule when they
were in fact the rule itself, saw with distaste the ‘retired
militancy’ of the bureaucratic relics or the non-resistance of the
‘new’ movement, and went their own way. Either they formed new
anarchist groups not in touch with the other revolutionary anarchist
groups—and therefore intended sometimes to borrow slogans or
package-deal attitudes from the rest of the new Left for want of
having concretised their own philosophy—or they disclaimed the name
altogether and preferred the more neutral ‘libertarian’ ‘libertarian
left’ or even, in some countries, ‘Maoist’, though the Maoists
explicitly disowned them, or ‘Anarcho-Marxist’. Many of these groups,
especially in Germany where the tradition of council-communism was
strong, moved to a strongly libertarian position. Labelled ‘anarchist’
by the Press, they contained both Anarchists, sometimes using Marxist
labels (later discarded) and New Left Marxists. This was the origin of
such movements as the ‘Red Army Fraction’ whose development (later
labelled ‘Baader-Meinhoff Gang’) terrified the German bourgeoisie but
made apparent the class nature of German society and shattered the
idyllic post-war German capitalist ‘dream’.
In Spain, the urban guerrilla groups (Sabate and Facerias were already
well known) sparked off a new wave of resistance in 1951 when a
General Strike in Barcelona initiated a mass resistance movement
following the passenger boycott of the tramway company in the city.
Apart from building up sufficient capital to finance sabotage
operations and ‘attentats’ against well known persons of the Franco
regime, the aim of the libertarian action groups was to maintain a
spirit of resistance to the government and in this they were
successful for a time. But in spite of the intensity and heroism of
their struggle, the Brigada Politico-social (Special Branch) was able
to carry out a policy of extermination against the libertarian
movement in Spain. It cooperated with the ‘democratic’ police forces
beyond the Pyrenees and the fact that the Spanish libertarian movement
had worked closely with Allied Intelligence during the war left it in
a position to be betrayed afterwards in the interests of ‘stable’
government. What was worse, perhaps, was the apathy and lack of
solidarity from anti-Franco forces in general. The level of conflict
came to a standstill for a time, activity being confined to more
sporadic and individual attacks in industrial Catalonia.
During the repression, militants of the CNT and activists of the
Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) were murdered in the streets, or in
their own homes, by the Spanish police. Hundreds of others received
long prison sentences and a number are in prison to this very day. The
libertarian movement had to reconsider its strategy in the light of
the new repressive wave in Spain. Not only was it faced with the
almost total disarticulation of the action groups of the interior,
but, more discouraging still, the Franco Government was gaining by
leaps and bounds in the fields of international diplomacy. In the
years between 1951 and 1960 the Anarchist movement in Spain became
more introverted and lethargic. It expended its energies, in exile, in
a less physically dangerous but far more destructive way—engaging in
polemics and mutual accusation of incompetence thrown across the
Congress Halls and meeting places of the numerous committees of exile.
During this period, the ‘nuclear disarmament’ movement was attracting
large numbers to the New left and beyond it, to an anarchist position.
The new activists had already shown their willingness to participate
in the struggle. The ball was at the feet of the anarchist movement,
but the revolutionary anarchist movement was too scattered and
isolated to be able to kick it, and did not always appreciate what
potentialities lay before it.
** 1960–1966
On January fifth, 1960, Francisco Sabate (el Quico, sometimes wrongly
described as Sabater) one of the most tenacious and best known of the
libertarian activists, was killed in the village of San Celoni (near
Barcelona) following a gun battle with over 100 Guardia Civil the
previous day, when four comrades from his group had been ambushed and
killed in a Pyrenean farmhouse. Sabate, though badly wounded, managed
to escape and make his way to San Celoni by hi-jacking a train, but he
was recognised and brought down by the crossfire of a police patrol.
The death of this man, who symbolised for many the whole of the
Spanish Resistance, helped to inspire the formation of the new
resistance groups, and also helped to re-unite the scattered forms of
revolutionary anarchist activism, who now realised that they must
break decisively from the non-resistance wings and align themselves
internationally with other revolutionary activists. The Spanish
resistants in the interior realised that they could not rely on the
Toulouse faction whose sole purpose was to divide them from their real
allies, the international anarchist movement. Sabate’s death thus
marked the end of an era of introspection and apathy, and the
beginning of a new internationally coordinated revolutionary activist
struggle against imperialism in all its manifestations.
The reluctance of revolutionary anarchism to cut itself off from
totally ossified groupings or those who, using the label ‘anarchist’
had no longer any libertarian or revolutionary interests, may seem
curious to the outsider; but was born a long tradition within the
anarchist movement to accept anyone as an anarchist who happened to
call himself one (something long since impossible for socialists, or
Marxists), and in the absence of a party organisation, this acceptance
alone defined an anarchist movement. But it was always a dangerous
tradition (it meant that someone well known for being an anarchist,
though having no longer any connection with the movement, could
‘speak’ for something of which he was not a spokesman, one disastrous
example being Peter Kropotkin, a member of no anarchist organisation
at the time, apologising for World War II and causing as much harm to
the revolutionary movement as if he had indeed been its delegate).
The death of Sabate, however, which was heralded in the Spanish press
as the end of Spanish Anarchism, and which provoked the usual
hypocritical disclaimers from Toulouse, meant that the Spanish
movement of the interior decisively broke from Toulouse. Though still
using the name ‘CNT’ to denote the type of union organisation which
they wished to build up, it was clearly understood that they were not
referring to the Organisation in Exile (MLE) but did not wish to
confuse the workers as a whole. (And they also clung to the wish not
to appear to be ‘schismatic’.) However, within one month of Sabate’s
death the Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation (DRIL)
announced its existence, and immediately obtained support from this
anarchist movement of the Spanish interior as well as of other
groupings. It made a number of daring attacks on the dictatorships of
both Spain and Portugal, such as the hi-jacking by a commando of
Spanish and Portuguese and South-American fighters on the liner Santa
Maria on the high seas on January 21st 1961. The possibilities of a
two-fold struggle opened up once more — the vanguard of workers’
councils, now being established by the anarchist movement of the
interior—(FOI — Federacion Obrera Iberica, Workers Iberian
Federation—the ‘internal’ name of the groupings ‘pro CNT’) and this
rearguard of armed fighters who used such action where they could
strike best.
Faced with this ‘problem’ the CNT in exile tried to reunify in 1961,
giving up the attempts to reconcile revolutionary resistance with
futile moves to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ to something which
international capitalism and world diplomacy had solved to its own
satisfaction. But it was now too late, and finally the organisation
was doomed to sink into sterility, with counter-excommunications of
the old guard of the bureaucracy.
Elsewhere in the world were the still somewhat isolated ‘sectarian’
groups of anarchist revolutionaries; the expanding movement that was
coming via the nuclear disarmament movement, and the ‘anarcho-Marxist’
movements growing up quite independently, moving from Marxism but
bringing many Marxist attitudes, especially those of ‘third world’
nationalism, with them.
Yet the coming together of the first of these sections with the
Spanish activists soon surprised the world, since it apparently seemed
that international anarchist activity had emerged from the blue like
the kraken wakening after years of sleep. Moreover, although the
international activists had no connections with, and usually a strong
dislike for, the ‘hippy’ and ‘new left’, nevertheless the latter did
afford them a pool in which to swim. Their ideas were able to be heard
for the first time by a larger audience.
Sympathy for their actions had never been lacking by a very much wider
section of the public than the press ever imagined, and press
distortions and hysteria notwithstanding, there was a deep underlying
support for anarchist ideas in working class circles and among people
of all generations. All this led to the setting up of a secret
organisation the DI (Internal Defence) which brought together comrades
with years of activity in every part of the world to co-ordinate their
clandestine activities against tyranny—in the early spring of 1962 and
within a few months surprised the world by the apparently sudden
re-emergence of international revolutionary anarchist activity after
years of ignorance of its existence.
But only when the ‘near miss’, on Franco’s life at San Sebastian
(August 1962) took place did the international collaboration come to
general notice, partly because this had also the effect of making an
inroad by the libertarian movement on the Basque country. For long
Basque nationalism had been reactionary, nationalist and clerical. Now
it was as discredited as most of the inactive movements of the
Republic in exile. The ETA was the new, dynamic Basque movement, and
while it was to some extent nationalistic, it also contained many who
were not, and could embrace nationalists, marxists, catholics and
libertarians in a common struggle against Franco. As a result of the
terror against the Basques, Franco had succeeded in uniting almost the
whole Basque country against him, irrespective of whether it had
nationalist aspirations or not. It also signalled a new wave of
repression which swept Spain directed particularly against the miners
of the Asturian coalfields and the libertarian activists. Feeling
itself endangered by the rise in revolutionary consciousness and
activity the Franco Government returned to the use of terror perfected
in the years immediately following the Civil War.
Now, however, international action, concerted for the first time, was
able to answer the repression within Spain. The Councils of War sent
thirty libertarians to prison with savage sentences, and for one of
them the State Prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Support for
Jorge Cunill Vals, the young anarchist sentenced to death, grew
throughout the world, and in Milan the Spanish Vice-consul was
kidnapped by Italian anarchists (on September 29,1962). Cardinal
Montini (now Pope) intervened on behalf of the condemned Catalan
Anarchist, and the rebuff he received has caused the tension which
exists between the Vatican and the Prado to this day (and is why the
Church is now backing more than one side in the fight for the
succession). On this occasion, however, Franco had to stay his hand
and remit the sentence.
The following year Julian Grimau and the anarchists Delgado and
Granados were sentenced to death but protests against the executions
were so widespread that Franco’s hopes of admission into the common
Market were totally frustrated. Governments of the Western World were
unable to flagrantly go against what were widespread sentiments by
admitting Franco (the Governments of Eastern Europe had, of course, no
such inhibitions, and could do trade deals whenever they wished
without regard for public opinion which did not exist in their
countries). However, without admitting it to the general public, and
sometimes illegally, the police of Western Europe were working in
close association with Franco though it was not until ten years
afterwards that this was generally admitted. This police activity was
excused in France by the fact that, as Franco had clamped down on the
French OAS operating against De Gaulle from Madrid, they should clamp
down on the Spanish Anarchists in France operating against General
Franco (though it was often politically inexpedient for police who had
collaborated with the Nazis to clamp down openly on libertarians who
had been to the fore-front of the Resistance). In England no excuse
existed, and in fact the issue of Gibraltar meant that Special Branch
was in fact acting against British imperial interests by its
assistance to Franco whose staged demonstrations for Gibraltar were
solely destined to deflect public attention from the Resistance
criticisms of his regime. Nevertheless, Scotland Yard was able to
supply ‘secret information to a foreign power’ feeling that in time
(as it did) government opinion would see that police interests against
revolution were higher than such narrow nationalistic interests.
It was therefore possible for concerted police action to be taken
against French, Italian and British anarchists working in conjunction
with the revolutionary youth movement in Spain, demonstrating the
international nature both of Anarchism and the Police. This led to the
arrest of Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie in Spain, where he was
taking part in an attempt to assassinate the dictator. World opinion
was directed to Spanish prisons and in particular the material support
which he began to receive was diverted by him to libertarian prisoners
in general. For a long time the Communist Party had, under a variety
of anti-fascist and democractic sounding names, been collecting aid
for Spanish prisoners from all; but giving only to their ‘own’ — thus
other prisoners came to be forgotten, with a corresponding dampener
upon the resistance movement. The anarchists not only had been
receiving the longest sentences and been the subject of the bitterest
persecution, but the communists, who engaged only in propaganda
activities extolling the glories of Russia, and advocating an alliance
with the Christian-Democrats against American bases in Spain, were the
only ones to receive aid in jail. Now at last that situation was
reversed, irrevocably, a direct consequence of Christie’s arrest. His
arrest, and that of other ‘foreigners’, also helped to cement the
international alliance that finally broke down the barrier that had
been erected by the ossified and non-resistant wings of the movement.
In 1965 the Libertarian Youth Movement broke completely and finally
with the main anarchist and confederal organisations in exile. The
reason for this was the refusal by the National Committee of the CNT
to implement the decisions agreed on in 1961 to renew the clandestine
armed struggle against the Franco regime. This unwillingness to act
may have been due to tiredness, fear or perhaps not wishing to
compromise the steady comfortable existence they were leading in
exile. However, with the break finalised the revolutionary anarchist
activist movement was now able to break free from the fetters which
had bound it for so long its association with the movement in exile.
** Grupo 1 de Mayo
At the end of April 1966 Mgr. Marcos Ussia, the ecclesiastical adviser
to the Spanish Embassy in the Vatican, disappeared mysteriously while
returning from the Embassy to his home in the suburbs of Rome. A few
days later the First of May group announced its existence in Rome,
while CNT militant Luis Andres Edo, in Madrid, announced
simultaneously to the world press that Ussia had been kidnapped to
draw attention to the plight of Franco’s prisoners. The results of
this action by the revolutionary anarchist movement became an issue of
international importance and a central point of discussion in the
Italian, French, Swiss, Spanish and Swedish press (the British press
avoided it, perhaps for fear of imitative action). When the priest was
released unharmed after fifteen days of intensive and fruitless
searches by Italian, Swiss, and French police, it proved the
efficiency of international anarchist solidarity, and disproved the
‘terrorist’ label put on them by Interpol.
Later, Edo was arrested in Madrid with four other comrades (men and
women) accused of preparing to kidnap a high-ranking military officer
in the American Army who was based there. Once again the anarchists
had brought together in an international struggle the old fight
against Franco and the struggle against American imperialism. Now they
were re-gouped under the old banners of the ‘First of May’, embodying
the traditions of libertarian activism during eighty years of class
struggle against capitalism. The struggle for workers’
councils and direct workers’ control, in opposition to slogans of
nationalism, nationalisation and reform, had always been associated
with the First of May Movement. Now that struggle was backed up by
sharp, decisive actions against particular forms of class repression.
Though the ‘counter-culture’ and ‘alternative society’ coming from the
youth revolution in America had really nothing to do with
revolutionary anarchism, yet it contained within itself strongly
revolutionary elements and the anarchist movement became transformed,
as gradually new and old revolutionaries united together finding their
own level. This was impelled further by the Vietnam War and its
world-wide consequences of protest movements, and the rise of such
groups as the Weathermen in the United States which greatly influenced
the ‘alternative society’ movement in Europe, and especially in Greece
and Turkey, where for the first time in fifty years a libertarian
movement arose among the youth, divided between Anarchists and
Marxist-Leninists, but struggling against the despotic regimes of
those countries up to a point where the regime in Turkey was obliged
to maintain a sort of permanent civil war against young workers and
students, and that in Greece to use all the methods of Nazi rule
learned by the police during the war.
In many countries, the growth of the vaguely ‘libertarian left’
inclined towards Blanquism or perhaps anarchism, with Marxist
phraseology, continued—though as orthodox Maoist movements rose, the
movement was impelled away from its ‘Maoist’ inclinations. This
movement took a strong part in the fight for civil rights and for
workers control, and against the tyranny of the state. To the press,
inevitably far more uninformed than the public if presumed to serve,
all this was the ‘anarchist movement’ and the revolutionary activist
wing at that; a supposition encouraged by Tory propaganda which sought
to present the anarchists as ‘bogeymen’ just as the Left, for that
matter, tried to use the fascists for the same purpose.
In 1967 and 1968 revolutionary activism showed its hand again. Attacks
were made on the offices of American civil and military centres
throughout Europe and on the embassies of the Spanish, Portuguese,
Greek, Bolivian and Uruguayan Governments (among others). Following
these simultaneous actions in Britain, France, Germany, Holland,
Switzerland and Italy, the First of May Group and the International
Solidarity Movement issued a manifesto calling on all revolutionaries
to practice an effective solidarity with all victims of the class
struggle. The struggle began again in Turkey, with the formation of
cells composed of both Anarchists and Marxists in a struggle against
the military dictatorship. I’Express (Parisian weekly) foresaw that
‘Anarchists will prepare a hot summer’ and reported in March 1968 on
the activities of what they described as ‘extreme left wing
organisations in Europe’, prepared by their German and Dutch
correspondents. The situationist movement, and the provo movement in
Holland, were linked together with the libertarian left and the
Anarchist revolutionary activists. And indeed, two months later,
anarchism reappeared once more as the dynamic force it is.
The events of Paris—with the participation in it by Anarchists,
Maoists, Trotskyists, Situationists and others—are well known. And the
First of May Group began attacks on Iberia Airlines in defence of
Spanish political prisoners. Concerted attacks affirmed international
solidarity with them. While the International Solidarity Movement both
directly and indirectly helped the appearance of more active groups in
France, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey and Greece.
Groups which more or less independently continued the activist
struggle in their own country against the steady progression of the
State towards dictatorship, while stepping into other countries to
help that struggle attain greater intensity. There were numerous acts
in all these countries, those in Britain including a bomb attack on
the Home Secretary’s house on the day of national protest against the
Industrial Relations Bill; an attack on a Minister who had defended
the idea of bourgeois attacks upon strikers during the electricity
dispute, attacks on Ford’s and on the mechanised dossiers of Scotland
Yard at Tintagel House, on the Italian, Spanish and American
embassies, on recruiting offices and military barracks, on Spanish
banks, and on Government buildings, some of which incidents were
labelled as (and all labelled by the police as) coming from the Angry
Brigade, though this was not a specific organisation, but a
manifestation of revolutionary activism through a wide circle of the
libertarian movement generally.
The existence of the Anarchist activist groups encouraged a wide
section of the revolutionary left, not explicitly anarchist but
certainly libertarian, to step up the struggle and shake themselves
free of the non-resistance elements. Though all such revolutionary
attempts have been particularly scrupulous in their respect for human
life during the whole of the decade, and have avoided innocent victims
entirely the campaign of repression against the libertarian movement
has (outside Spain) been unequalled since the days of Nazism. The
activities of Nationalist groups, with which they have nothing in
common, and which by their nature could not be so scrupulous, have
been maliciously ascribed to them.
This has been the case in Italy, Germany, Turkey and Greece and even
in Great Britain where forms of restraint over the police are believed
to exist.
The Anarchist Black Cross, as offering a legitimate means of
expression for the anarchist revolutionary activists, has been
particularly the object of attack. In Milan, Giuseppe Pinelli,
militant anarchist, ex-member of the wartime Resistance and secretary
of the Italian ABC, was arrested following a Fascist bomb in Milan and
thrown from a police station window during interrogation; in Germany,
a policy of extermination carried out by the German police against the
Red Army Fraction, composed of Marxists and ‘Anarcho-Marxists’, was
extended to shoot down in the street members of the Black Cross,
including Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weis-becker. Then Stuart
Christie, secretary and co-founder, was arrested in London charged
with the activities of the Angry Brigade together with a number of
comrades, men and Women, who represented a wide section of the
libertarian left and a wide variety of interests (all being describe
by press and prosecution as Anarchists, though this only applied to
some). This led to the longest and most costly trial in recent
judicial history in England, ending in ten years each for four of the
accused, with four being acquitted (and preceded by 15 years under
another, but notoriously reactionary judge, and an acquittal).
In Scotland, savage sentences were passed on members of the Scottish
Workers Party, a Maoist organisation. These examples are only the more
spectacular testimonies of bourgeois, social democratic and fascist
repression against revolutionary anarchist, libertarian activism and
revolutionary forms of Marxism too, but such persecution has not and
will not achieve its object because the idea of international
solidarity is growing by leaps and bounds. Even in Turkey, where the
most obscene forms of torture are being used against the young
revolutionaries, and in Spain, where torture and death are
commonplace, the idea of workers councils and the affirmation that the
fight for the occupation of the places of work will be backed by
activist groups continues to flourish.
The struggle is not on the other side of the world. It exists in the
countries dominated by State capitalism and State Communism as well as
in the capitalist and fascist countries. It is not only in the ‘third
world’ or the undeveloped part of the world. The call for revolution
has gone through Europe. Never again will it lie down before the
attacks of fascists, vigilantes or secret police. It is not even
confined to one revolutionary ideology. It is not a conspiracy. It is
a movement that may prove to be irresistible.
** Some Documents
*** To All Revolutionary Movements and Organisations in the World
The ‘1st of May Group’ has, for several years now, come to support, in
practice, the necessity of carrying out the struggle against
dictatorship by means of revolutionary violence as the only possible
way of answering the repressive violence of the regime of General
Franco and of reconquering freedom for the Spanish people in
accordance with the strategy drawn up by the Iberian Federation of
Libertarian Youth (FIJL).
Being aware of the backing given to various dictatorships and national
oligarchies, by reactionary imperialist governments which enables them
to maintain their oppression of the people—we address ourselves to
revolutionary movements throughout the world who fight for the freedom
and independence of all people. Fully convinced, also, of the
sterility of the so-called ‘legal and pacifist’ struggles, as a means
of ending the oppression and forcing Imperialism and its lackeys to
end warlike aggression and military interventions, we have come to the
following conclusions:
1. We believe that the present struggles for freedom (eg. the
revolutionary struggles of the guerrillas in Latin America, the blacks
in the United States) have provoked a crisis of conscience, and forced
a reaction against the reformist line, from authentic revolutionaries
of various brands—these have finally understood that the only sure and
dignified way to make Imperialism and its lackeys retreat, and clear
the path to Revolution, is an armed struggle against the forces of
fascist oppression (the main props of capitalist society and
Imperialism).
2. We believe that the serious divergencies and divisions existing
between various revolutionary movements, in each country are the
result of absurd and negative ideological sectarianism (with which,
until now, the different revolutionary ideologies have expressed and
applied themselves) and have contributed to the division of the
international proletariat and facilitated the increasing
depoliticisation of the masses who cannot logically be attracted by a
revolutionary praxis divided by contradictions and confrontations
resulting from anti-revolutionary dogmatism which have been the cause
of all revolutionary schisms and ideological internecine quarrels.
3. Together with the Latin American groupings and their most well
known exponents, we believe that ‘the Revolution’ is not the
inheritance of any single Party, but of all who decide to fight for it
with guns in their hands, that the struggle against oppression, and
for the freedom of the people, theoretically and historically belongs
to, and is assumed by, the people and classes who suffer the
oppression and decide to fight against it. Parties and ideologies are
only transitory tactical instruments—particularly interpretations of
this struggle, whose object is the Revolution—and they must therefore
be subordinated to the true essence of social history.
4. We believe that international revolutionary solidarity will only be
effective between those movements which do not maintain contact, nor
involve themselves in compromises, with Imperialism, and who do not
give support to the politics of ‘peaceful co-existence’ which enable
Imperialism to carry out its massacres and spoliations with impunity
which will continue as long as there is no coherent response to
military interventions whose purpose is to stifle fights for freedom,
and revolutionary outbreaks throughout the world.
5. We believe that the real revolutionary objective is the achievement
of freedom for the masses and for each individual, and that neither
private capitalism nor state capitalism can be conducive to the
freedom of man nor to an authentic free society. Private capitalism
pretends to give freedom while maintaining the exploitation of man by
man—state capitalism pretends to end exploitation by suppressing
freedom; each of them has their roots in economic and political
alienation and therefore cannot even offer the hope of gradual
evolution towards liberation. For the authentic revolutionary the
achievement of freedom and the ending of exploitation are inseparable
and complimentary aspirations.
6. We believe that all revolutionaries who truly wish to see the
Revolution triumph must, and can, admit the unavoidable necessity of
an ideological restatement which will resolve more effectively the
problems of freedom and social justice—in other words: means and ends,
tactics and objectives, revolutionary strategy and the ethic of
revolution—in order to end the damaging differences and doctrinal
antagonisms which have hindered until now the union of all
revolutionaries against the common enemy. The important thing is that
they should now recognise that Imperialism and Capitalism,
of any variety, are the real enemies, and revolutionaries can only
confront them by uniting their forces, or at least to support each
other by effective revolutionary solidarity, national and
international, thus preventing the enemy from taking advantage of
everlasting contradictions and divisions.
7. We believe that the time has come for revolutionaries to put aside
their ideological divergencies, sectarianisms and various ‘objective
conditions’ of constitution and location — all revolutionary movements
should unite and co-ordinate their efforts through a vast Movement of
Revolutionary Solidarity in order to oppose coherently imperialist
aggression and the cronies of dictatorship, and to back with deeds the
revolutionary struggles of the people and so make the way to
revolution secure. We can testify to this Revolutionary Solidarity by—
- acts of propaganda and solidarity in favour of all peoples who are
fighting against fascism and imperialism;
- acts of violence against the diplomatic and military corps,
imperialism and dictatorships, as effective reprisals against
their outrages.
REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE FOR AN EFFECTIVE REVOLUTIONARY
SOLIDARITY TO PREVENT THE EXTERMINATION OF THOSE WHO FIGHT FOR THE
REVOLUTION IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD!
LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY SOLIDARITY!
August 1967
1st of May Group/FIJL (Iberian Federation of
Libertarian Youth)
** Anarchist International
*** Towards the Creation of an Anarchist International
On the basis of our recent experiences, and an analysis derived from
our particular situation as anarchists (organised or not) within the
International politico-social context, we have arrived at the
following conclusions which we consider both useful and necessary to
be put before all militants who believe it still possible to adopt an
efficient revolutionary position.
1. The modern states (totalitarian or democratic), private and state
capitalism, all variations of political and religious ideology,
trade-unionism (whether reformist or state-run), in general, all
social groups which are part of the present productive society, have
established as a fact, a co-existence that tends, at any cost, to
ensure the present status quo for all forms of privilege, exploitation
and authority.
More and more the fundamental contradictions of the System (or the
different systems and societies, as well as those between the
different races and nationalities) tend to intensify (but not resolve)
themselves through negotiations and compromises which do not imperil
the survival of the system (or systems) as such, nor of the groups,
castes or classes that at present enjoy privileged positions. From
this stems the prevailing political confusion and moral degradation,
the repugnant dealing between regimes pretending to
irreconcilable enmity (Russia and the USA, Cuba and Spain, China and
Portugal) the ‘peoples’ democracies and the capitalist democracies,
etc.
The old ruling castes and the new bureaucratic castes, whatever their
colour, race or religion, have lost their former prejudices and hidden
scruples. Today within international organisations and through
official exchanges they hobnob and entertain one another on the backs
of the common people who sustain them, and are subjected to them. And
within this mesh of agreements and interests we must also place the
well-integrated ‘leadership’ and trade-union bureaucratic caste.
2. From this it follows that, today, doctrinal declarations and
re-affirmations of ideological principles have no meaning beyond
demagogy—a habit that clings. One no longer fights for democracy,
socialism, communism, or revolution, but merely for the recognition of
the defeat of power, by this or that group, in a particular place, and
for ‘national independence’ (the certificate of guarantee which covers
and justifies all types of despotism) and in order to forget the debts
owing to international revolutionary solidarity. So, in Vietnam,
Korea, Hungary and Cuba, after the triumph of one or another gang, one
no longer fights for or against ‘communism’ but
simply in order to guarantee ‘national independence’, the Geneva
agreements, the UNO agreements, territorial integrity and the survival
of the government of Saigon or Hanoi, Tel Aviv or Cairo. In the
meantime, Barrientos and the Latin American oligarchies, assisted by
American ‘Green Berets’, smash revolutionary guerrillas and
assassinate Che Guevara, and the USSR and the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’
continue to do business, maintain diplomatic relations and extend
credit to these same governments that the Marxist revolutionaries of
Latin America are fighting against.
Throughout the world one finds the same ugly wheeling and dealing.
Soviet commercial, cultural, and sports missions confer with their
counterparts in Franco’s Spain; and throughout the Vietnamese tragedy
American and Maoist diplomats in Warsaw maintain relations. The
decolonisation of the Asiatic and black peoples proceeds, but only to
allow the indigenous bourgeoisie to take power extensively assisted by
Russia and/or the USA.
In practice ideology is shelved, becoming no more than a function of
patriotism, ‘national independence’, ‘legality’, ‘public order’,
‘peace’, and ‘development’—and as it is in the East, so it is in the
West.
All over the world parties and organisations witness their own
sacrifice of ideology to the simple struggle for power.
3. Unfortunately this phenomenon of the abandonment of ideological
coherence has also invaded international anarchist circles, which did
not know how to resist or fight against the process of revolutionary
demobilisation.
For anarchism, organisational or not, revolutionary demobilisation,
this rupture between ideological conception and its practical outcome
is of great importance, considering that anarchism does not aspire to
the conquest of political or economic power. If it abandons its only
possible vocation: its combativeness in the struggle for revolution,
if it is content to reminisce about the past or to vegetate into
bureaucracy, it will lack a final objective and, as it lacks mystical
roots, it could not survive as a sect—it would be of no practical use
to any social grouping be their needs material or spiritual.
If anarchism is to exist in reality, it is to draw the people and
justify itself as a practical revolutionary ideology without being
demagogic, it must not only re-affirm its antistatism as a determining
condition for the triumph of freedom, but must accompany this
criticism of authoritarianism with the practice of permanent
rebellion; without this it is useless except as a means of ridiculing
and contributing a little more to the extension of the present
confusion, pointing out the dangers, contradictions and damaging
results of authoritarian society. But it is all useless if we content
ourselves with vegetating as others do. It is obvious that the
persecution of dissidents, the fighting of real or imaginary
deviations, will not save us from a collective decadence if we do not
react beforehand against the reigning apathy, stagnation, routine, and
revolutionary demobilisation of the whole, whether as individuals,
groups, or movements.
4. However, as we have said before—the fundamental contradictions of
capitalist and ‘socialist’ society continue to flourish and in many
cases their consequences are even more serious than before; the
integration of workers into capitalist society, and the growth of
‘consumer’ society have lulled the proletariat. However, the class
struggle has not disappeared, nor the inevitable confrontations
through which each class defends its sectional interests. Neither has
‘peaceful co-existence’ stopped armed conflicts, it has only limited
them geographically—Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa .....
Racial discrimination, the exploitation of the working masses, the
abuses of the ruling classes, the absence of essential freedoms (of
thought, expression and assembly), political crimes and resulting
repression and terror are common currency in our civilised world. In
Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the ‘Colonels’, as
in the Soviet Union and the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’, workers and even
liberal academics are condemned when they protest or attempt to
exercise their freedom of assembly. And in the United States the
blacks rebel against racial discrimination, while in China there is a
brutal confounding of the will of the masses with the deification of
Maoism.
So, for anarchists throughout the world there is no lack of motives
for action, nor of practical possibilities to declare their presence
and to show the way.
In Europe, either hypocritically indifferent or accessory to crimes
committed within its borders (Spain, Greece, Portugal), and in other
continents dominated by economic and political imperialism, there
exist many possibilities of demonstrating through these obvious
examples where reason, justice and freedom lie without having to play
at suicide, gratuitous heroism or compulsive activism. But simply and
modestly, aware of the risks that go with such an attitude it is
possible to keep the rebel conscience alive and to mobilise, by means
of concrete action, all revolutionary agitations that manifest
themselves throughout the world, transcending the absurd dogmatisms
and tracing a way of effective rebellion before the collective
submission of the supposedly revolutionary parties and organisations.
5. To summarise: we think that the time has come to define and set in
motion a line of action that will be consistent with the revolutionary
ethic and realisable in practice; such as form of organisation that,
avoiding the ominous consequences of bureaucracy, takes into account
our numbers and real possibilities while being capable of projecting
the anarchist presence effectively, if modestly, in the international
politico-social context. We must take advantage of all the
opportunities of the historic moment, and in particular of the crisis
in Marxism in whose heart has arisen the inescapable problem of direct
action and revolutionary solidarity. We do not believe in miraculous
solutions, nor in the mere educative value of example—we believe in
the effectiveness of action when it responds to certain conditions
which give it meaning, and a consistent ideological and tactical line.
We have arrived at these conclusions after a number of experiences
which have demonstrated to us that, in spite of the fact that we are a
minority practically without means, we can make our presence felt,
gain sympathy, and be taken into consideration by international public
opinion.
So, our objective is not only to present conclusions drawn from our
own experience, but rather to offer our solidarity and collaboration
to all those who believe in the possibility of working effectively
towards rebellion and international solidarity.
Consequently we sum up our position in the following way:
FIRSTLY: :: Complete identification with the anti-authoritarian concept
of anarchism and its classic revolutionary line;
SECONDLY: :: Complete rejection of ideological dogmatism and
sectarianism, as we consider these phenomena incompatible with
anarchist ethics;
THIRDLY: :: Complete respect for opinions and discussions as far as the
activity of each group, individual or movement is concerned;
FOURTHLY: :: To be totally prepared to collaborate with groups,
individuals or movements with whom one has affinity and similarly with
all those who claim to follow a revolutionary ideology and who would
be prepared to fight sectarianism and elitism as well as the
injustices imposed by any species of ideology;
FIFTHLY: :: complete identification with the essentials of the manifesto,
‘TO ALL REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS IN THE WORLD’ (distributed by the 1st
of May Group after the attack on the American Embassy in London) as a
general strategic line as long as the present politico-social
conditions persist throughout the world.
**10th March 1968**
**1st of May Group**
** And now... what?
The ‘end’ of the war in Vietnam corresponds to the end period of
international politics of the great powers which, during these last
thirty years, has governed the destiny of the world. Beyond these
apparent and immediate consequences (‘end’ of the most flagrant
technological genocide and the practical affirmation of the principle
of ‘pacific co-existence between opposing political regimes) it has
its probable consequences for the future which are disturbing; the
consolidation of the domination of the state under all its forms and
in all the four corners of the world; entente cordiale between all
powers to ensure the status quo of Power and Privilege; extension of
technological rationality over all the planet, with the consequent
assertion of submission by alienating work and the ‘advantage’ of the
consumer society; intensive and maximum development of the structures
of authoritarian society, round the two poles of its ideological
dynamic: fascism and Stalinism.
*** Western Society, the Third World & the Others!
In the frenzied race towards industrialisation which was established
as the leitmotif of contemporary history of all peoples and of all
systems, Western society has attained sufficiently high levels to
render possible a radical change in the social politics of the
different governments which composes it. Nevertheless, in the name of
‘international competition’ and ‘national independence’ the order of
priority continues to be ruled by the economic and not by the social.
And only in the case of movements demanding better wages and
conditions, being able to overflow the limits of legality, and to
continue their action beyond that which the system can tolerate, only
then are certain reforms allowed and limited improvements made. But
always with deliberate intention of ensuring the integration into the
system of the exploited masses, of ensuring the continuance of the
established order and of facilitating economic expansion. All to the
detriment of the true humanisation of individual and collective life,
of true democracy and true communism.
In the countries of the Third World, industrialisation is also changed
into a supreme political objective. Despite the revolutionary
assertions of the principal movements of ‘national independence’ and
‘liberation’ which in their time woke great hopes in the heart of the
organised working class in Europe, the Third World (leaning, precisely
on the submission of the masses to demagogic nationalism) turned to
follow the path of Western Capitalist development. And, more and more,
having resolved or not its ethical and religious contradictions, its
integration with the other western nations became an incontestable and
irreversible fact.
The others, were, in their time, Mao’s China, North Viet nam and
Castro’s Cuba. But we have seen what economic reasoning, the strategy
of dissuasion and the international collaboration with Johnson and
Nixon have been able to do in these revolutionary ramparts.
*** Revolutionary Groupuscles
Faced with this harmony of the different authoritarian systems, and
although the leftist groupuscles, the most ‘politicised’ did not
renounce their well known slogans (to change the quality of life,
society and man) nor their pretension to be the revolutionary
vanguard, they retreated towards more modest, less radical, and more
integrated positions. Thus perhaps without wanting it, those who
considered themselves the most legitimate heirs of the whole
international movement of the youth revolt, have helped in the
absorption by the system of a movement which aspired to be
inabsorbable. Just as repression equally lost its virulence, these
groupuscles imposed a self-discipline (not to yield to ‘provocation’)
that made them more and more respectful of legality up to the point of
being happy to be the ‘extreme left’ of the classic left integrated by
the whole range of reformist unions and parties of communist,
socialist, or simply democratic persuasion..... Thus, although they
continue to be called revolutionary, they have equally ceased to be,
practically and potentially, the negation of the authoritarian order.
Only the marginal groupuscules who have not renounced the
revolutionary raison d’etre now remain as the authentic
representatives of the ideal of the negation of authority; a raison
d’etre which consisted, as had been affirmed in an exemplary fashion
in May ’68, of living the revolution at the present moment, and it is
only they who continue to fight the system, in radicalising the
struggles in different sectors of society, which the other
groupuscules, parties and organisations persist in keeping within the
bounds of legality.
*** Objectives
The Leninist conception of revolution has ceased to be a possible
alternative thus giving to anarchist ideas a growing prominence and
significance. In the factories, in the neighbourhoods, in the
universities and in everyday life, revolutionary activism can find a
thousand and one justifications and an equal number of ways of showing
itself. Capitalist exploitation and State oppression are still, and
much more than before the essence and everyday reality of all the
authoritarian systems with their inevitable string of injustices and
endless outrages, of violence and repressive barbarity, of moral
misery and cultural alienation. The objectives are still revolt and
liberation, in order that man can aspire and attain his most complete
realisation. And, immediately, the denunciation and awakening of
public opinion to the most flagrant abuses and outrages against the
‘rights of man’ in no matter what country of the world; in opposing
the repressive solidarity of the States by the
solidarity of the oppressed.
*** Appeal
Faced with the revolutionary demobilisation of all the sectors and
States which once invoked the revolution as the supreme ideal and
objective; faced with the concerted efforts of the powerful to
strengthen the very foundations which renders possible and maintains
their privileges, faced with the assertion of the authoritarian
principles of society, in the East as in the West, to the detriment of
the independence of the people and of civil liberties, we ask the
revolutionary unification and mobilisation of all those who do not
wish to abdicate their human dignity, of all those who refuse to live
in alienation and to serve as a support for the powers that be.
We suggest to all those who have surmounted the poisonous ideological
sectarianisms and who have renounced the chimera of the legal
struggle, to unit their efforts with ours to foment the revolutionary
activism in all its forms, finally in arousing public opinion to the
struggles of peoples, minorities and individuals victimised by the
oppression and repression of the State based on the premises stated in
our documents prior to May 1968.
~~
**May 1st 1973**
**1st of May Group**
**International Revolutionary**
**Solidarity Movement**
** Press Communique
*Text distributed to press agencies and periodicals.*
Incomplete and erroneous accounts given by the press concerning recent
events have obliged us to give a few explanations as to the objectives
and characteristics of the ‘1st of May Group’.
During the night of the 2nd and 3rd March 1968 the 1st of May Group
carried out (in various European capitals) a series of actions
directed against the diplomatic and military corps of the United
States and the fascist governments Greece, Spain and Portugal. Actions
such as the kidnap of Mgr. Ussia in Rome, the machine-gunning of the
American Embassy in London, the attacks on the embassies of Greece and
Bolivia in Bonn, etc. to which the Press gave, at the time, an
essentially psychological character, had two principal objectives:
- to inform the public at large, through the means of the press
agencies, of the claims which motivated these actions;
- to demonstrate through these claims the palpable of the ‘escalation
of terror’ which is at present spreading throughout the world under
the patronage of the USA, oppose it by a ‘counter-escalation’ of
rebellion in all its aspects and on all grounds.
Clearly it is not a matter of opposing to global terrorism an ‘heroic’
terrorism but rather to spread an offensive movement capable of
breaking down the passivity which governments, using increasingly
scientific methods, are attempting to create in us.
The genocide of the Vietnamese people, the subjection of Latin
America, and the conflicts fomented in the Middle East by the
assassins of the White House and the Pentagon are aspects of a
systematic programme to encapsulate the world. In Europe too, once can
observe important aspects of this programme: the fundamental support
given by the USA to the dictatorships of Greece, Spain and Portugal in
exchange for the guarantee of strategic bases in the Mediterranean.
As for the ‘bourgeois democracies’ of the west and the ‘peoples’
democracies’ of the east, they are busy looking for new markets as
they are moving in the direction of the ‘super consumer’ society.
Financial trusts in the west and the bureaucratic party structures in
the east, totally disregarding any humanitarian scruples, strengthen
their ties with dictatorial regimes.
Thus private and state capitalism converge towards the same objective
(while preserving their respective systems), using as justification a
political plan for ‘national independence’, or an economic plan for
‘national expansion’ while the countries of the ‘third world’ are kept
in a perpetual state of repression and misery as the main source of
raw materials and cheap labour.
In the face of this reality we submit that a generalised revolutionary
action against capitalism and all reigning bureaucracies (including
that of China) is the only way left open to an exploited humanity
wishing to regain control of its destiny.
At a time when new generations of the whole world, shattering the
myths of a ‘free’ western world and the ‘construction of socialism’
(directed by an omnipotent party) crystalise their aspirations towards
an anarchist revolution we believe that only the international
co-ordination of these movements could oppose an effective force
against the global collaboration of the forces of oppression.
The struggle against dictatorships—Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, against
racism in the USA and ‘apartheid’ in South Africa, against the
extermination of the Vietnamese people or the enslavement of Latin
America, constitute the global fight against all systems of
exploitation.
~~
**March 1968**
**1st of May Group**
**Movement of Revolutionary Solidarity**
** Operation Durruti
*** Report on the Arrest and Proceedings against Five Anarchists Accused
by the Spanish Police of Planning to Kidnap an American VIP in Spain.
On the 28th October 1966 the Spanish Press and the International Press
Agencies announced the official police statement which confirmed the
arrest of five Spanish anarchists: Luis EDO, 41 years old; Antonio
CANETE,49; Alicia MUR, 33; Jesus RODRIGUEZ, 39; and Alfredo HERRERA,
31.
The official communique published by all the Spanish press gave the
following version:—
‘A group of five armed persons all members of the FIJL (Iberian
Federation of Libertarian Youth, youth branch of the Spanish
Libertarian Movement) which planned to kidnap an important foreign
personality in Madrid, has been arrested by the SIS (Servicios de
Investigacion Social). The five persons and the arms have been placed
at the disposal of the Madrid Public Order Tribunal. The group was
headed by Luis EDO, a former Secretary General of the FIJL in Paris
and member of the group which last April kidnapped in Rome the
ecclesiastical councellor of the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See,
Monseigneur USSIA.
‘The FIJL had been planning for some time a subversive action which
would have focussed international opinion on Spain. This mission had
been entrusted to EDO’s group whose members were mobilised from France
with full instructions.
‘The planned kidnap is a follow-up of the one carried out last April
by the anarchist group ‘First of May’ against Mgr. Ussia in Rome. This
time the anarchists plotted a similar ‘coup’ in Spain with the
intention of launching a sensational campaign against Spain. The
brilliant police operation began on the 25th October with the arrest
of Antonio Canete travelling under a false name on the
Madrid-Barcelona express. Canete, who was arrested at the Saragosse
station, is well known for his record as an activist. He had taken
part in several sabotage actions. In his possessions the police found
a contract for a flat in Madrid—Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza.
This flat was the base of the group and it was there that the foreign
VIP was to have been kept. The remaining members of the group were
arrested soon after this in the flat mentioned.
‘According to Luis EDO’s declarations, the brain behind the operation
was Octavio ALBEROLA who had remained in Paris. EDO came to Spain
after the Rome kidnap with the intentions of holding a press
conference about the anarchist group ‘First of May’ operation in Rome.
‘In the flat which served as headquarters of the group, the police
found a ‘Sten’ machine gun, a Luger automatic, false passports, and
several documents which set out in detailed instructions the follow-up
of ‘operation Ussia’. Other persons connected with these activities
are being actively searched for by the police.’
As soon as this statement was published, reporters began to speculate
as to the possible identity of the VIP concerned. The name of American
ambassador, Biddle Duke, was repeatedly mentioned, in spite of his
denials.
*** Statement of the FIJL and the ‘1st of May’ Group
On November 1st 1966,the Agence France Presse announced in Madrid that
they had received the following statement released by the FIJL:
‘In relation with the recent arrest of five of our comrades (the names
follow) the Peninsular committee of the FIJL declares:
1. Our comrades had the mission of carrying out an action to show up
the false ‘liberalisation’ of the Franco regime along the lines of
our campaign for the release of all the political prisoners in our
country.
2. We ratify the following statement made by the group
‘1st of May’ in a communique to the press denouncing
the declarations made by Franco’s police.
‘The Spanish police is attempting to incriminate the group of
anarchists arrested last week in Madrid in the kidnap of Mgr. Ussia by
the ‘1st of May’ group in Rome.
‘As you will easily be able to see for yourselves by comparing the
hand-writing of this note with the notes made at time by the ‘1st of
May’ group, and as Mgr. Ussia himself will have to admit if he is
confronted with the comrades arrested in Madrid, none of them took
part in the Rome kidnap. It is thus totally false that the Spanish
police have dismantled the ‘1st of May’ group.
‘We are prepared to show that the fascist regime of General Franco is
lying and that the ‘1st of May’ group will not fail prove this
together with its firm decision of continuing its campaign for the
release of all the political prisoners in our country.’
**31st October 1966**
**1st of May Group**
3. The Peninsular Committee of the FIJL urgently appeals to all
anti-fascist organisations, groups and individuals to mobilise
their protest to stop the Franco regime from committing another
new crime.
~~
**Spain, 1st of November 1966**
**The Peninsular Committee of the FIJL**
*** Counsel for the Defence
Soon after the announcement of the arrest of our five comrades, a news
item from Madrid declared that the counsel for the defence would be
assumed by Srs. Jaime CORTEZO and Alfonso SEVILLA, both members of the
Madrid bar.
In an interview to the foreign correspondents of the Press Sr. CORTEZO
later made public that the Tribunal of Public Order had refused to
assume the responsibility of taking charge of the files of our five
comrades and had passed them on to the Military authorities. This
meant that the danger existed of their being tried by a summary Court
Martial which would dispatch them without any real possibilities of
defence.
*** Press Conference in New York by Octavio Alberola
On December 8th, AFP cabled a long communique from New York of a
clandestine press conference held in a Manhattan Hotel by Octavio
ALBEROLA. The text of the press conference was:
‘NEW YORK, 8th December—The anarchist ‘commando’ arrested in Madrid on
the 24th of October by the Spanish police did not intend to kidnap
Ambassador Biddle Duke. The intended VIP was Rear-Admiral Norman G
Gillette, Commandant in Chief of the American forces in Spain, who
would have been kidnapped on the 25th if the police had not discovered
‘Operation Durruti’.
This precision was given today in New York to several newspapermen in
an hotel in Manhattan by Octavio ALBEROLA, in charge of liaisons
between the Peninsular Committee of the FIJL and the Exterior
Delegation. Alberola, who had come from Madrid to hold this press
conference—the first of its kind held by the FIJL in the USA—also
revealed how the kidnap would have been carried out. An accident would
have been faked on the roadway between the American airbase of
TORREJON and Madrid. Rear-Admiral Gillette would have been transferred
to another vehicle which would have taken him to the capital. There he
would have been taken to a flat where, in the presence of several
reporters he would have assisted as a ‘living symbol of North American
occupation of Spain’ to the reading of a FIJL document.
Since the document had not been made public in Madrid on account of
the discovery by the police, Octavio ALBEROLA read it to the press in
New York shortly after having sent copies to the Secretary General of
the United Nations, U Thant, and to all the delegations of the UN
member countries.
In this document the FIJL denounced the ‘patriotic demagogy of
Franco’s government over its claims for Gibraltar, and its complicity
with the aggressive plans of the North American military forces who
are using the military bases in Spain as logistic points for its
bellicose plans.’
Octavio ALBEROLA also insisted on the following:
1. That the general amnesty proclaimed by General Franco was a farce
and that there existed several hundreds of political prisoners in
Spanish jails.
2. The Spanish dictatorship is not moving towards more democratic
ways. Nor will the Referendum of December 14 make any fundamental
difference.
3. The FIJL considers that in spite of having been discovered by the
police, ‘Operation Durruti’ has had a positive result on account of
its repercussions and that it will continue actively its struggle
until its immediate aims are reached: the liberation of all Spanish
political prisoners and an end to police persecution with the
possibilities of freedom of speech meeting and association. In this
respect, Octavio ALBEROLA affirmed categorically that the FIJL would
continue to carry out spectacular actions both inside and outside
Spain. ‘If these acts will in some cases be violent ones’, he added,
‘nevertheless, as in the previous operations, there will be no
victims.’
He finally confirmed that the five anarchists arrested in Madrid had
taken no part whatsoever in the kidnap or Mgr. Ussia in Rome.’(AFP)
On the same day that the press conference was given by Octavio
Alberola, all the delegates present at the General Assembly of the UN
received a note from the Exterior Delegation of the FIJL together with
the document found in EDO’s possession by the Spanish police which
would have been the basis of the ‘OPERATION DURRUTI’. This document
has since been sent to all the Provincial Authorities in Spain and has
circulated widely among official circles as well
as among the people.
*** Shuffles in Madrid Between Military and Public Order Tribunal
As mentioned above, the public order Tribunal had refused to take
charge of our comrade’s case and had passed it on to the Military
Authorities. The regime seemed to be using this tactic to gain time
and use it as blackmail against reprisals on the part of the FIJL.
Several weeks after the Public Order Tribunal had passed the files on
to the Military Tribunal, it was announced that the latter had also
refused to take the case and had passed it back to the Public Order
Tribunal which finally drew up the accusations. These were made public
on February 9th and the Prosecutor demanded 15 years imprisonment for
Luis EDO, Alicia MUR and Antonio CANETE; and 6 years for Alfredo
HERRERA and Jesus RODRIGUEZ. The Prosecution accused them: illegal
association (for being members of the FIJL), having intentions of
carrying out a kidnap, and possessing arms (AFP 9th Feb).
*** International Protests
As soon as the arrests took place, there followed a wave of Protests
all over Europe. Hand-bills and posters were distributed in France,
Belgium, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, etc. The more important
acts were the following:
Amsterdam: On Sunday 30th October strong groups of provo and anarchist
demonstrators protested in front of the Spanish Embassy. Windows were
smashed and an antique Pistol was thrown in symbolising the Franco
terror. As a result the Dutch press carried articles about the five
anarchists arrested in Madrid. In the days that followed, over 15,000
handouts and posters were distributed in Amsterdam. More
demonstrations took place on the 3rd and 4th in front of the Spanish
Embassy. During one of these demonstrations, an Italian comrade was
interviewed by the Dutch radio. Two weeks later, during the Provo
Concilium, resolutions were passed to fight the dictatorship of the
Franco regime.
Milan: Thousands of handouts were distributed during the last week of
October all over the city. On the 31st a protest demonstration took
place in the Dome Square. On the following day, a protest march
demonstrated over the city carrying a reproduction of a garrotte as a
reminder to all that fascism is still alive in Europe.
Brussels: Thousands of handouts and posters were distributed at the
beginning of November over the ‘capital’ of Europe. On Saturday 19th,
a Provo Happening ‘in solidarity with the five anarchists arrested in
Madrid’ took place in the Place Brouckere in the main centre of the
town. A handout was distributed which said the Brussels Provos ‘would
piece together, gratis, in public and with participation of the police
a scenic play in one act, the tortures which awaited the five Spanish
anarchists if Franco is allowed to do at will ... The
provotariat declares war against the Franco regime. A regime which
continues to live today under the Middle Ages and the Inquisition;
proof of this was given not so long ago with the garrotting of two
young anarchists in 1963, Delgado and Granados ...’
Paris: Over 10,000 handouts were distributed together with posters. At
a meeting held in the Mutualite by several left-wing movements to
protest against the Franco regime, Daniel MEYER, President of the
League for the Rights of Man, talked about the situation of our five
comrades. After the meeting the anarchists demonstrated in front of
the Spanish Embassy smashing windows until the police dispersed them.
A meeting of solidarity organised by the Spanish Syndical Alliance
took place at the Alhambra Theatre.
*** The Franco Repression and the ‘liberalisation’ Farce
The arrest and forthcoming trial of our five comrades coincides with a
period of agitation among workers and students in Spain, and with a
hardening of the police persecution.
Luis EDO, Antonio CANETE, Alicia MUR, Jesus RODRIGUEZ, and Alfredo
HERRERA were arrested and will be tried for planning to carry out an
action to show that the ‘demonstrations and liberalisation’ of the
Franco regime is mere lip service and to demand the release of all the
political prisoners in the Spanish jails. Yet, at the same time,
hundreds of students and workers have been arrested during the same
period for simply having believed that the ‘liberalisation’ was a real
thing. There is a certain irony in this. Nevertheless events are
showing how wrong are all those who think that a fascist dictatorship
can ‘liberalise’ itself peacefully through
the mere democratic claims for the fundamental rights.
The numerous arrests of students and workers for having taken part in
the peaceful demonstrations or in the so-called ‘free assemblies’,
together with the exclusion of all those University Professors who
have dared protest against police brutalities or who have talked up to
the regime, shows clearly that the Franco Dictatorship continues
faithful to its totalitarian nature and that it is in no way prepared
to give in to the democratic aspirations of the Spanish people.
The much boasted ‘reforms’ approved by the mock Cortes, the political
dispositions of the Penal Code, the new Press Law, and all the other
‘democratic’ blueprints announced by the regime, are mere paper
projects and publicity stunts.
Students, workers, University professors and even priests are daily
persecuted and jailed for holding unauthorised meetings, campaigning
against the Referendum, editing opposition bulletins, etc. etc.
Stuart CHRISTIE, sentenced in September 1964 to 20 years jail on
another false charge of terrorism, continues in Carabanchel. A recent
appeal for clemency was refused and this 20 year old British militant
shares the lot of many other democratic Spaniards.
Now the regime threatens to sentence the five anarchist militants to
new heavy sentences.
**COMITE ESPAGNE REVOLUTIONNAIRE**
**FIJL LIASON COMMITTEE**
**Aubervilliers (France)/Brussels**
** Postscript
The First of May Group has been one of the best known of the anarchist
activist groups of the period under review. It represents a
continuation of the work of Sabate and the post-war Spanish
resistance, and a bridge-head into the next period when revolutionary
activism in many countries (Germany, USA, Italy, and South America)
consisted of many strands some of which were authoritarian
Marxist—usually Maoist, sometimes Council-Communist, occasionally
Trotskyist others were Anarchist. In many cases the Press seized on
the name ‘Anarchist’ and inflated the actual participation of the
Anarchists (since anarchism now is the same bogey for Right Wing
extremists that fascism is for left Wing extremists) so that in
Turkey, for instance, where it is a much smaller
grouping than any other (though decidedly militant) it appears that
all activists are anarchists and all anarchists are activists, which
is by no means the case.
The First of May Group is entirely anarchist, though it too has been
less sharply differentiated from other revolutionary factions than is
normally the case with anarchist movements, feeling that the major
task was the achievement of the revolutionary situation, and
endeavouring to make the revolutionary organisations as libertarian as
possible. This lack of sharp differentiation is reflected in its
communiqués.
The difference between activism of the anarchist variety, and the
terrorism of Nationalist or other groupings, may be seen if one
compares the chronology of ‘May the First’ attacks with—for
instance—the record of events in Northern Ireland, or that of the
Palestine guerrillas, let alone with the facts of governmental
terrorism in almost any country—pick at will. The struggle is not, for
the anarchist, an attack on peoples, whereas by definition the
Nationalist struggle is. Marxism, though denouncing the activism of
Anarchists, excuses the terrorism of Nationalists with appropriate
phraseology.
For Governments, of course, terrorism must be wholesale (and legal)
and not ‘retail’ (and illegal). Wholesale murder is legal war — the
struggle against tyranny is individual rebellion.
It may seem surprising to the casual reader of newspaper propaganda
that the anarchists should have had consistently so ‘bad a press’.
When one considers over the past fifty years the record of anarchist
activism, for instance, individual attempts on Mussolini, the stand in
Bolshevik Russia against tyranny, by individual attempts as well as by
armed resistance in the Ukraine and other risings, the various
anti-fascist struggles in Spain and elsewhere, the fight against
tyranny in South America and so on — none of it would seem in any way
to justify the persistent vilification of anarchism in the press
except as deliberate propaganda. When one considers the mass
psychopathic murders associated indelibly with fascism; the
governmental wholesale slaughter both in war and in internal
oppression perpetrated by powers, capitalist and state communist
alike, and the wholesale brutalities in suppressing opposition,
(especially of a national character) even by nations democratic within
themselves, but oppressive to minorities or subject peoples, one
wonders where the journalists got the idea that they could treat the
Anarchists as if they were automatically the worst of all possible
villains.
But of course the sycophantic nature of journalism makes it see
attacks upon authority, and upon persons in authority, however
tyrannical, as a far greater menace than the genocide of peoples or
the imposition of injustice.
Of late years this has been helped by the nature of totalitarian
Gandhi-ism, which chooses to describe itself as non’ violent’ and goes
on to describe all who do not share its views as ‘violent’. The
‘violentists’, of course, from a pacifist point of view are every
single person except themselves; but the small ‘anarcho-pacifist’ cult
in England and America describing themselves as being ‘non-violent
anarchists’ with the corollary that others are ‘violent anarchists’
have been at least a contributory cause of the confusion of anarchist
activism with any form, or if one wishes to put it that way, any other
form, of terrorism. People like Sabate or Durruti did not ‘believe’ in
violence; had they ‘believed’ in violence they could have joined the
Falange or the Requete and had their fill; they believed in resistance
to those who were imposing their violence upon the people. It was this
resistance which led to their activism taking a violent turn. It was
their belief in the libertarian humanities that made this violent
activism so much nearer and so much an integral part of the people
than the struggles of the ‘Third World’, let alone the wars of the
Great Powers.
**INTERNATIONALIST**
** Chronology
*This chronology should not be considered exhaustive, nor
definitive. It will, however, give the reader a rough outline of the
development of revolutionary anarchist activism in Europe over the
last fourteen years. Little mention has been made in this chronology
of the activities of the Italian groups. As a result of fascist
provocations in Italy it would be virtually impossible to prepare a
reasonable chronology of groups such as The Red Brigade and The
Partisan Action Group — GAP, as we have been able to do with the Angry
Brigade, Red Army Fraction, the 1st of May Group and the Autonomous
Combat Groups of the Iberian Liberation Movement.*
*** 1960
January :: In the early hours of January 3/4th a battle
took place between a 100 strong Civil Guard unit and an anarchist
guerrilla group which had just crossed the Pyrenees heading for
Barcelona. Four members of the group were killed as was one Civil
Guard Lieutenant. The leader of the group, Francisco Sabate Llopart,
Franco’s Public Enemy No. 1, was wounded but managed to escape the
security net thrown around the area. He was killed the following day
in the Catalan village of San Celoni by the cross-fire of fascist
militia men and the Civil Guard.
February :: The Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian
Liberation (DRIL) announces its formation by a series of attacks on
key government buildings throughout Spain and Portugal.
June 27/28/29 :: Another series of concerted bomb attacks
begin in the Iberian Peninsula directed against buildings and
installations of both fascist regimes.
*** 1961
January :: On the night of 21/22nd a DRIL commando
group, led by the Portuguese captain, Henrique Galvao, took control of
the Portuguese liner Santa Maria on the high seas to demonstrate to
the world active resistance to the Dictatorships of Franco and
Salazar. The commando group consisted of Spanish, Portuguese and South
American activists.
July :: Spanish police discovered a sabotage attempt on
the railway line leading into San Sebastian shortly before a train
load of fascist ex-combatants passed. They were headed for the yearly
fascist victory celebrations in
the capital of Guipuzcoa on the 18th. This was the first action in
which the Basque activist movement ETA participated as an
organisation.
August :: A guerrilla action in the Catalan Pyrenees
took place between a libertarian action group and the Civil Guard. One
Guard was killed and another seriously injured.
*** 1962
April 7 :: Miners from the ‘Nicolas de Mieres’ coalmine
in the Asturias call a strike in demand for a minimum daily wage of
140 pesetas (70p), the right to strike and free Trade Unions. (Since
the beginning of the century approximately 50% of all coal extracted
from the Spanish coal fields came from the 11,600 kilometres of the
Asturias. All raw materials indispensable to industrial development
and the growth of Capitalism, Coal, Steel, Manganese, Mercury, etc.
were to be found here in abundance.
In the early 19th Century a large number of displaced farm labourers
moved to the Asturias from Castille and the South. They quickly
assimilated with the native Asturians early accepting their traditions
and customs, and within a short period lost all traces of their
origins.
Each industrial centre, however, developed its own political leanings;
Socialism in Mieres, communism in Sama and anarchism in Felguera and
Gijon. The revolutionary tradition in the Asturias was very strong. It
was the Asturian miners in 1930 who precipitated the downfall of the
Monarchy and prepared the way for the ill-fated Republic. Four years
later the same miners and industrial workers rebelled against the
bourgeois Republic which had failed them and occupied the Provincial
capital, Oviedo, declaring the social revolution. The Asturian
Commune, as it came to be known, lasted from October 5th until the
19th when it was bloodily suppressed by Moorish soldiers and
Legionaries on the orders of the Republic’s most prized general —
Francisco Franco.)
Twenty-six years of fascist oppression had not broken the spirit of
the Asturian working class. The torch of mass revolutionary working
class opposition in Spain had been re-lit!
April 20 :: Virtually every coal mine in the Asturias
was paralysed by strike action and many factories closed down or on
reduced output due to solidarity actions.
April 22 :: Two companies of Civil Guards and three companies
of Armed Police rushed into the coal fields in an attempt to break
the strike.
May 4 :: Martial law declared by Presidential Decree in the Provinces
of Vizcaya, Asturias and Guipuzcoa.
May 6 :: Solidarity strikes take place in Barcelona. Workers and
students distribute thousands of leaflets in support of
the miners’ demands and declaring their solidarity with
the Asturian workers.
May 11 :: Armed police occupy Barcelona University following large
scale disturbances in the Catalan capital.
May 14 :: 1200 strikers held in the four prisons of Oviedo
May 15 :: Silent demonstrations by women outside Security Headquarters
in Madrid in solidarity with the strikers
and demanding a total amnesty for all political prisoners. Police
arrest eighty women.
May 26 :: Province Strikers
{{{
Barcelona 17000
Asturias 15000
Vascongados 10500
Salamanca 750
Leon 5200
Jaen 3000
Madrid 1100
Total 52550
}}}
June :: On the 5th,7th and 12th there were attacks on the Madrid
residence of a Papal dignitary, Monterolas; the Madrid HQ of the
Falange; the Banco Popular de Espana (Opus Dei) and on the
Barcelona HQ of the Falange. Assassination attempt on Franco’s life
in San Sebastian on 18th. On the 30th further explosions took place
in the Opus Dei college in Barcelona and in the Catalan Instituto
de Prevision.
July :: The Casas Consistoriales in Valencia was badly damaged by a
powerful explosion on the 15th. This had been another assassination
attempt on Franco. The bomb was intended to explode during a State
visit earlier in the month, but the mechanism was faulty.
August :: An explosion badly damaged the Basilica de la Santa Cruz del
Valle de los Caidos outside Madrid. (This is a monument erected by
Franco and built by forced prison labour to glorify the eternal
memory of General Francisco Franco as a Christian gentleman). On
the 19th, at a small distance from Franco’s summer residence, the
Palacio de Ayete, a plastic bomb exploded as Franco, his wife and
Ministers passed through the gate into the palace. No one was
injured.
On the same day plastic bombs exploded in the offices of right-wing
papers in Madrid, ‘Ya’ and ‘Pueblo’ and Barcelona daily ‘La
Vanguardia’.
September :: Barcelona Security HQ issued the following
communique on the 18th:
‘As a result of recent investigations into the acts of terrorism
carried out in Spanish territory, officers of the Brigada
Politico-Social have arrested a number of militants of the ‘Young
Libertarians’ (FIJL). These are:
Jorge Cunill Vals, Marcelino Jimenez Cubas and Antonio Mur Peron.
These individuals operated under instruction from foreign elements who
financed their activities aimed at disturbing the social peace and
tranquility of the Spanish people.’ The three libertarians were tried
within a few days of their arrest by summary court martial (Council of
War) and for Vals the prosecutor demanded and was granted the death
sentence. The execution was to be by Garottevil (death by slow strangulation).
Sept 23 :: Shortly before the opening of the Vatican Council two bombs
explode close to the Pope while inspecting the seating arrangements
in the Basilica Saint Peter in the Vatican.
Sept 29 :: The Spanish Monarchist paper ABC published the following
report from its Milan correspondent: ‘The Spanish Vice-Consul in
Milan, Sr. Elias, has been kidnapped by persons unknown according
to a police statement issued tonight. Sources close to the police
assume it to be the exclusive work of the Italian Communist Party.
October :: Sr. Elias, the Spanish Vice-Consul in Milan, was released
by his kidnappers on October 2nd with the following statement:
‘The kidnapping of the Spanish Vice-Consul was organised by a group
affiliated to the INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG LIBERTARIANS with
the sole aim of drawing the attention of the world to the sad fate of
three libertarians recently arrested in Barcelona and to prevent the
execution of Jorge Cunill Vals. We return Sr. Elias to his family as
promised to demonstrate
our methods are vastly different to those employed by the Francoist
regime. Sr. Elias will be able to embrace his family. How different to
the fate of the political prisoners locked in the Caudillo’s
dungeons!’
The following day the Italian police announced they had arrested those
concerned with the kidnapping of Sr. Elias and the culprits were to be
tried within a matter of weeks. (Incidentally, the police were
informed of the identity and whereabouts of the anarchists by an
Italian communist journalist who had interviewed the Vice-Counsul in
the People’s Prison outside Milan where he was being held).
October 6 :: Julio Moreno, 28 year old electrician and militant of
the Libertarian Youth Movement, is sentenced to thirty years
imprisonment by a Military Council of War in Madrid accused of
‘contacting an illegal organization
in exile’ and of ‘having participated in actions against
the security of the State’ (Banditry and Terrorism).
October 7 :: A dynamite charge explodes in the residence of Cardinal
Spellman in New York. These actions against
the Church and Opus Dei formed part of a campaign
to force these institutions to renounce their support of
the Francoist dictatorship. The actions were claimed
by ‘La mano negro’, who sent numerous letters explaining their
actions to the Pope.
October 20 :: Eleven young Spanish workers and students, all members
of the Libertarian youth Movement, sentenced by Military Council of
War to sentences between six years and twelve years imprisonment.
November 17 :: Three militants of the Libertarian Youth Movement sentenced by
Council of War in Madrid for editing and distributing ‘Libertarian
Youth’: J. Ronco Pesina (23), 11 years imprisonment, Antonio Bayo
Poblador (23), 11 years imprisonment, Rafael Ruiz Boroa (23),
3 years imprisonment.
Nov 22 :: The trial of the Italian libertarians accused of kidnapping
Sr. Elias which had opened on the 15th, with all the defendants
walking from the court in
Varese free men. Sentences were nominal as the weight of Italian
public opinion made any other sentences impossible. Jorge Cunill’s
death sentence
in Spain was commuted to life imprisonment.
Nov 29 :: Four militants of the anarcho-syndicalist National
Confederation of Labour (CNT) are sentenced to various terms of
imprisonment ranging between four, nine and eleven years by Madrid
Council of War.
The charges were ‘Reconstituting the CNT’ and ‘illegal propaganda’.
On the same day at another Council of
War (again in Madrid) another three members of the CNT from
Valladolid each received four year prison sentences for inciting
industrial unrest.
In Barcelona another militant of the CNT, Antonio Sanchez Perez (51)
was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment on charges of sabotage.
Dec 2 :: Bomb explodes in the residence of the Military Governor of
San Sebastian. The following day another exploded in the Palace of
Justice in Valencia and another which badly damaged the Treasury
building
in Madrid. On the same day a bomb exploded in the Spanish Consulate
in Amsterdam and in the administration offices of two Lisbon
prisons. All these actions were claimed by the Iberian Liberation
Council (CIL).
*** 1963
March 6 :: Concerted plastic bomb attacks on the offices
of ‘Iberia’ in Rome and the Ministry of Technology in Madrid’
‘The Iberian Liberation Council has mounted ‘Operation
Warning’ in its struggle for the freedom of the Iberian
people. The object of this operation is to demonstrate to
the international tour operators that they run a great
danger in utilising airlines of the fascist regimes of
Franco and Salazar (Iberia and TAP) . Until the last
vestiges of Nazi-fascism have been eliminated in the
Iberian Peninsula there can be no peace in Europe. Down
with Dictatorship! Viva la Libertad!’
(Iberian Liberation Council — Communique March 1963).
April 16 :: Three young French Libertarians, Bernard Ferry, Alain
Pecunia and Guy Batoux are arrested in Spain and charged with
Terrorism and Banditry. The accusations made by the police were
that the three anarchists participated in the anti-tourist campaign
mounted by
the Iberian Liberation Council and were materially responsible for
explosions in the offices of ‘Iberia’ in Valencia, the attempted
sinking of a liner in Barcelona Harbour and an attempt to blow up
the American Embassy in Madrid.
June 13 :: Firebombs explode in the luggage compartments of Spanish
and Portuguese aeroplanes on the tarmac in Frankfurt, Geneva and
London airports. These actions
are claimed by the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL).
July 31 :: Two anarchists, Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados, are
arrested by the Spanish Special Branch and charged with the two
explosions which took place two days earlier on the 29th. One was
in Security HQ at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and the other, also
in Madrid, at the chamber of Falangist Syndicates. Both these men
were militants of the Liberation Youth Movement and had come to
Madrid to carry out organisational activities.
August 7 :: Ramon Vila Capdevila (57) (Caraquemada), the last
of those mountain guerrillas who had operated in the Pyrenees for
over 23 years, was killed by a patrol of Civil Guard in the early
hours of the morning near La Creu de Perello in Catalonia.
August 11 :: According to press reports two explosions took place
in the Spanish Capital on July 29th of this year: one inside the
offices of the General Directorate of Security,
which caused light injuries, and the other in the Chamber of the
Falangist Syndicates, at 17:30 hours and 24:00 hours respectively. Two
days later, following a massive police mobilisation, the Francoist police arrested
Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados. The coincidence and proximity
of these two events have
no relation to each other—the first people to know this are the
Francoist police themselves—but every effort is being made by the
regime to present the two arrested men as the material authors of the
July 29th explosions. This is absolutely false. The Iberian Liberation
Council has always accepted responsibility for its action and we
hereby declare to national and international public opinion the
following:
1. Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados were in no way responsible
for the events in Madrid on July 29th this year.
2. The arms cache attributed to Francisco Granados (as many others which
exist in our country for specific purposes)
had been unused and remained intact until its discovery by the police
(The Brigada Politico-Social discovered two Colt .45s, a machine gun
with two full magazines, a radio transmitter, hand-grenades and other material
in the flat of Granados’s girl friend).
3. Joaquin Delgado is completely innocent of the other charges made
against him by the police.
4. The author or authors of the events of July 29th in Madrid have not
been arrested. If, in Spain, ‘justice’ were carried out with a minimum
of legal normality then the truth of our affirmations could be easily
proved in the interests of the defence of the two men. However, this
is not the case. The Iberian Liberation Council holds the Francoist
regime, imposed by force of arms,
responsible both individually and collectively, for all victims who
have fallen or may yet fall in the struggle for the freedom of the
people of the Iberian Peninsula. We are the first to lament these
victims, wept over with crocodile tears by the forces of reaction to
justify their atrocities. Those who took part in the protest against
the Falangist building and the Directorate of Security inform us that
the former was carried out to expose the official Syndicates as the
servants of the Bosses and the regime. The latter was a protest
against the arbitrary arrest of the Asturian miners and their
deportations. Also, because it was the building in which men and women
are barbarically tortured for supposed political and social crimes
(ie. opposing tyranny). The action group which carried out the two
attacks acted on its own initiative. The Iberian Liberations Council
declares its solidarity with that group and revindicates the acts as a
protest of opposition to the regime.’
(Communique issued by the Iberian Liberation Council, 11th August
1963).
August 13 :: A Council of War of the 1st Military Region (Madrid)
passes sentence of death by strangulation on Joaquin Delgado and
Francisco Granados.
Aug. 18 :: ‘.....In the early hours of this morning, subject to the
formalities of Penal Common Law the two terrorists Francisco
Granados Gata and Joaquin Delgado Martinez were executed in
accordance with the sentence passed by the Council of War of the
1st Military Region......
(Official communique 18/8/63)
‘Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados denied having any knowledge of
the events of July 29th in Madrid. The Iberian Liberation Council
states that the Franco regime was afraid to reveal the real reason for
their trial because it was considered that the accused would win the
sympathy of world opinion if it became known that the mission in which
they participated and the material found in their possession was
intended for the execution of the Assassin of the Spanish Working Class:
General Francisco Franco. This was the real reason behind the farce
mounted in Madrid on August 13th behind closed doors in the Calle de
Reloj.’
(Communique issued by the CIL).
Sept 12 :: ‘ ......A series of police operations directed against
Spanish Anarchist circles took place yesterday in Paris
and the S.E. of France. A number of extremists are being
interrogated and their homes searched. Thirty arrests have been
made in the Paris region and the HQ
of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL)
in the rue Sainte Marthe have been searched. These operations seem
to have been inspired by the discovery of documents in Perpignan
detailing plans
for aggressive actions and ‘attentats’ in Spanish territory.’
(Le Figaro).
September 21/22/23 :: Bombs explode in German Embassy, Moroccan
Embassy and in the Church of Loyola in Madrid.
Sept. 25 :: Bomb explodes outside the home of American Ambassador in
Madrid. A few hours later another explosion outside the home of the
Chief of the Falangist Movement.
Sept. 27 :: Explosion at the home of Aramburu, Civil Governor
and the head of the National Movement in Madrid.
Sept. 29 :: Bomb explodes outside the American Embassy in Madrid. (All
the explosions in Madrid are claimed by ‘Colonel Montenegro’ of the
IV Republican Army).
October 11 :: Francisco Abarca, FIJL militant, is arrested in Belgium
accused of participating in the attack on an Iberian aeroplane in
Geneva.
Oct. 18 :: Alain Pecunia, Bernard Ferry and Guy Batoux, the French
Anarchist arrested on April 16th, are tried and sentenced by Madrid
Council of War: Alain Pecunia (17), 24 years imprisonment. Bernard
Ferry (20), 30 years imprisonment. Guy Batoux (23), 15 years
imprisonment.
Oct. 20 :: ‘The Ministry of the Interior announces that, in accordance
with the Law of April 12th 1939 relating
to foreign organisations, further modified by the Decree of
September 1st, 1939: Art. 1. The legality of
the foreign association known as the Iberian Federation
of Libertarian Youth has been nullified...’
(Extract from the ‘Journal Officiel’, 20th October 1963).
Oct. 25 :: Bomb explodes at a stand in the Spanish Fair, Mexico City.
A young anarchist is arrested after being wounded
by one of the explosions.
*** 1964
May 10 :: Bomb explodes in the Castellano Hilton in
Madrid.
May 11 :: Four more bombs explode in Madrid and one in Gijon.
The American Embassy, the Ministry of Commerce
and the Institute of Immigration; until ‘Colonel Montenegro’ is
arrested on May 23rd, bombs continue
to explode in Madrid at the number of three or four
per day.
August 11 :: Stuart Christie and Fernando Carballo arrested and
charged with Banditry and Terrorism. The mission was
to have been an attempt on the life of Franco during a football
match in Madrid.
October 21 :: Bomb attack on Spanish Embassy in Copenhagen.
Nov 27 :: Two fire bombs gut Opus Dei seminary in Rome.
Bomb explodes inside the Vatican, and another in the Spanish
Pontifical College, Rome.
*** 1965
January 2 :: Plastic bomb explodes inside the offices of
the Spanish Consulate in Naples.
Feb 19 :: Plastic bomb explodes in the Copenhagen office of the
Spanish National Tourist Office.
April 25 :: Bomb wrecks Iberia office in Milan.
August 1 :: The Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL)
initiates its International campaign in support of the political
prisoners of Spain and Portugal.
*** 1966
April 31 :: Mgr. Ussia, the Ecclesiastical Counsellor to
the Spanish Embassy in the Vatican is kidnapped. The operation is
announced simultaneously by Luis Edo
in Madrid and the First of May Group in Rome.
May 12 :: Ussia is released but the 1st of May Group announce
they will continue their actions in support of all political
prisoners.
October 26 :: Five anarchists arrested in Madrid, amongst them Luis
Andres Edo. They are accused of preparing a kidnap Attempt against
the Commander in Chief of the American forces in Spain.
December :: In New York Octavio Alberola gives a secret press
conference in which he explains the intention of the kidnapping
and distributes copies of the document which Edo was to publicise
once the operation had been carried out successfully.
*** 1967
April :: 1st May Group kidnap and hold hostage for a few
hours the First Secretary and the Juridical Counsellor of the Spanish
Embassy in London to demand the immediate trial of Luis Andres Edo and
his comrades arrested the previous October in Madrid. At the same time
this is a warning as to the possible outcome of the trial. The trial
was held two months later with surprising sentences for all the
accused — the maximum sentence, for Edo, was nine years — a prison
sentence previously unheard of for an anarchist in Spain.
August :: The private cars of two Spanish diplomats in London
are riddled with machine gun fire. Shortly afterwards
the American Embassy in the same city is raked with machine gun
fire as a protest against American imperialism (First of May
Group).
November :: Simultaneous bomb attacks against the Greek, Bolivian
and Spanish Embassies in Bonn and the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome.
(First of May Group — in solidarity with the Latin American
guerrillas and against the fascist regimes in Europe). The same day
a bomb destroyed the entrance to the Spanish Tourist Office
in Milan and the Spanish, Greek and American Embassies in theHague,
Holland.
Dec 26 :: David Urbano Bermudez arrested in Spain accused of supposed
relations with the 1st May Group and the FIJL.
*** 1968
January 3 :: Explosive rocket discovered facing Greek in
London.
February 8 :: Octavio Alberola arrested in Brussels during
negotiations between Spain and Belgium for the former’s admission
into the Common Market. Alberola
was preparing a press conference to denounce this manoeuvre and
raise the plight of Spanish political prisoners to the attention of
the world.
February 27 :: The Hornsey home of Stuart Christie raided
by police
led by Det. Sgt. Roy Cremer with explosives
warrant relating to Greek Embassy and information received that other
attacks were about to take place in London.
March 3 :: Six bombs damage the buildings of diplomatic missions in
London, the Hague and Turin. The Spanish Embassy and the American
Officers Club in London;
the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese Embassies in the Hague, and at
the US Consulate in Turin. These actions were claimed by the 1st
May Group.
March 6 :: Incendiary bomb with timing mechanism explodes in
the Moabit Criminal Court, West Berlin.
March 18 :: Three major American offices in Paris are damaged
by plastic bomb attacks: Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America
and Transworld airlines.
March 25 :: American Embassy in Madrid bombed.
August :: International Anarchist Conference, Carrara, Italy.
September :: Seven young anarchists arrested in Spain accused of
conspiring with 1st May Group and of having participated in a
number of actions in the Valencia region, such as that of
“preparing” bank robbery. Information leading to their arrest came
from the Special Branch of New Scotland Yard, London.
October 15 :: Imperial War Museum, London gutted by incendiary device.
Towards the end of 1968 numerous attacks are made against large
capitalist enterprises in France. These are attributed to “Gauchistes”
and anarchists. A woman wounded in one of these attacks is arrested
and another, Eliseo Gueorguieff, is named by the police as
being suspected of participating and organising the attacks.
On April 2nd and 3rd a warehouse in Frankfurt is burned down,
causing more than £140,000 damage, as a protest against the war in
Vietnam. Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, Hans Sohnlein
are arrested and charged. They are sentenced to three years
imprisonment, but paroled under an amnesty for all political prisoners
in 1969 on condition that they return to prison in 1970. While on
parole Baader and Ensslin work together on the apprentice and borstal
campaign in Frankfurt.
Nov 4 :: Dept. of Internal Affairs in West Berlin is attacked with
molotov cocktails.
Dec 19 :: Rectorate of the Free University in West Berlin is
firebombed.
*** 1969
February 3 :: Unexploded dynamite charges discovered on
the premises of the Bank of Bilbao and the Bank of Spain in London.
FOMG.
Feb. 9 :: Bank of Spain in Liverpool bombed First of May Group.
March 9 :: J.~~F. Kennedy Library in West Berlin firebombed – more
than £12,000 damage.
March 15 :: Two anarchists arrested immediately following a powerful
explosion at the Bank of Bilbao in London.
In their possession was a letter justifying the action
on behalf of the First of May Group.
May 2 :: Six anarchists arrested in Italy accused of
conspiring with Spanish anarchists and also being responsible for
fifteen attacks on Francoist buildings in Italy. They were then
charged with the attack which took place in the Milan Fair, an action
which was subsequently
proved to have been the work of fascists.
May 25 :: Bomb explodes in the Spanish Embassy in Bonn.
It is claimed on behalf of the FAI in solidarity with the Spanish
workers expelled from Germany on the insistance of the Spanish
Embassy.
July 15 :: Local government office in Bamberg severely
damaged. Blank identity cards stolen.
Nov-Dec. :: Six bomb attacks in West Berlin.
December :: On the afternoon of December 12 1969, almost
at the
12 :: same moment, there were three explosions: one in
the Bank of Agriculture, in Milan, with sixteen people dead and many
wounded, and two in Rome, at the Labour Bank and at a national
monument called ‘Homeland Altar’ with several wounded. A fourth bomb
was found later, unexploded in another Milan bank: but the police blew
it up, eliminating the most important evidence in the whole case. The
police started to investigate immediately among the left militants:
Calabresi, our CIA trained inspector, stated openly that “we have to
look in that direction.” He had the support of the CIA — president
Saragat, who made violent anti-left speeches, and of all the media
controlled by the bosses. The whole revolutionary left was attacked,
in a McCarthyist way: seizures, ‘questionings’, arrests, searches,
raids, open threats, police terror. The main targets were the
anarchists, indicated by everyone as directly responsible for the
bombings: entire groups
of them were arrested, interrogated, and beaten in the police
stations.
Dec. 15 :: The anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe
Pinelli “fell” from the 4th floor of the Milan central police station.
Giuseppe Pinelli was 41 years old. He worked as a railway worker
in the Porta Garibardi station in Milan.
He married in 1955, Licia Rognini, a communist militant he met in
an Esperanto school. They had two daughters: Silvia, 10, and Claudia,
8. Pino started to work very young, as a shopboy and as a
warehouse-man — then he was hired by the railway company.
When he was 15, he participated in the armed struggle against the
Nazis (1943–45), as a messenger for a people’s brigade formed mainly
by anarchists.
His political commitment increased, after that first activity,
soon becoming his basic concern. In 1965, he started, with others, an
anarchist group ‘Sacco and and Vanzetti’ — in 1968, he participated in
the students’ struggle as a member of ‘Bandiera Nera (Black Flag),
which founded the club ‘Ponte della Ghisolfa’ – in 1969, he finally
became responsible for the Milan area of the ‘Black Cross’, the
anarchist organisation which helps mainly financially, anarchists in
prison, and maintains contact with the Greek anarchists struggling
against fascism and the “colonels”.
He lived with his family, in a small apartment, in the
suburbs; the £8 monthly rent was low, compared to the current Milan
prices. His house was a real shelter for everybody: when some comrade
was passing through Milan, he was sure to find hospitality and
friendship in Pino’s house. As an anarchist, Pino was first of all a
very humanitarian person.
Towards the end of 1969 Swiss police discover an arms cache in Geneva
and arrest three Swiss anarchists.
*** 1970
Jan 28 :: Bomb attack on offices of Spanish Cultural
attache in Paris.
February :: Baader, Ensslin, Proll decide not to return
to prison and go underground.
Feb 28 :: Bomb attack on Bank of Bilbao and Spanish
State Railways in Paris.
March 3 :: ATTEMPTED KIDNAPPING OF THE SPANISH DELEGATE
TO U.N.E.S.C.O.
**The Kidnappers Arrested.**
“Spain’s permanent delegate to UNESCO, 57 year old Sr. Emilio
Garriguez has been the object of an attempted kidnapping. The
kidnappers have been arrested. Sr. Garriguez had been under police
protection for some time, so that when 3 men, armed with ether pads
surrounded him as he left the UNESCO building in the Avenue de
Suffren, they were immediately over-powered and arrested. The men
responsible for the attempt have been remanded in custody in the HQ of
the Police Judiciaire, Quai des Orfevres. They are due to appear in
court on Thursday. They are three Spaniards: Messrs: Juan Garcia
Macarena, aged 24; Jose Cabal Riera, 21; and Jose Canizares Varella,
35, and have refused to name the political organisation to which they
belong.
“Our action had a solely political motive,” they said in statements,
“we wanted to bring pressure to bear
on the Spanish government in order to obtain the release of our
comrades imprisoned in Spain.”
All three are of libertarian leaning and resident in France since last
summer. They had no specific occupation. Various documents were seized
at their residences and in the car they had hired, police found three
guns, a flask of ether and glasses covered with sticky paper to darken
them.”
(Le Monde, March 6th, 1970).
March :: Germany: Mahler is convicted following a
demonstration against the Springer Publishing concern. He receives six
months suspended sentence.
April 4 :: Andreas Baader is arrested in West Berlin
when stopped by police and found to be driving without a licence. He
is imprisoned in West Berlin.
April 22 :: Belgium: Ivo della Savia arrested in
Brussels under
an extradition warrant to Italy asked for by Italian government.
He is accused of being a member of Italian 22nd March Group
(Valpreda’s Group) and 1st of May Group.
May 10 :: Incendiary device discovered aboard Iberian
Airliner shortly before take-off. At the same time in other European
Capitals more devices of a similar nature
are discovered on other aeroplanes belonging to Iberia. The action
is a reminder that while Franco remains in power there can be no peace
in Europe.
May 14 :: Baader is liberated from the library of the
Institute for Social Research where he has obtained permission to work
with Ulrike Meinhof on a book about the borstal situation in West
Germany, following the intervention of his lawyer Horst Mahler. An
armed group breaks
into the library and frees Baader, who is under armed guard.
Ulrike Meinhof flees with the group. Linke, an employee of the
Institute, is wounded when he tries to intervene.
May 22 :: High explosive device discovered at a new
police station in Paddington. This was later claimed by the
prosecution in the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight to be the first
action undertaken by the ‘Angry Brigade.’
July 3 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks in Paris and London
against Spanish State Tourist offices, and the Spanish & Greek
Embassies.
August :: Germany: Formation of the Red Army Fraction.
August 18 :: London offices of Iberia Airlines, Spanish
State airline badly damaged by a bomb. (First of May Group).
August 30 :: The London home of the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron is damaged by a bomb blast. The
bombing is not reported in the national press.
Sept 8 :: The London home of the Attorney General, Peter
Rawlinson, in Chelsea, is bombed and once again the incident goes
unreported.
Sept 26 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks against Iberia in
Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris and London Airports.
Sept 29 :: RAF attacks three banks in West Berlin within
a few minutes of each other. They get away with 217, 469.50 marks.
(£26,500).
October 8 :: The police get a tip-off about a meeting of
RAF members in West Berlin. They raid Knesebekstrasse 8. Horst Mahler,
Irene Georgens, Ingrid Schubert, Monika Berberich, Brigifte Asdonk are
arrested.
October 9 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks in Paris, London,
Manchester and Birmingham against Italian State buildings. The letters
sent following the attacks were claimed on behalf of Giuseppe Pinelli
the Italian Anarchist murdered by the police in 1969.
Nov 16 :: Germany: Town Hall at Nuestadt is broken into.
Thirty- one official stamps, fifteen passports, and one identity card
stolen.
Nov 20 :: A BBC outside broadcast van covering the Miss
World Competition in London is badly damaged by an explosion.
Nov 21 :: Germany: Town Hall at Lang-Gons (Giessen) is
broken into. 166 identity cards, official stamps, 430 marks and a
bottle of cognac removed.
Dec 3 :: Spanish Embassy in London machine-gunned,
following international protests against the
trial of the Burgos Six in Spain.
Dec 8 :: Day of large demonstrations against the
Industrial Relations Bill. In the early hours of 9th December the
Ministry of Employment and Productivity in London is rocked by a
powerful explosion following an unsuccessful police search of the
building. (“Angry Brigade”).
*** 1971
January 12 :: Day of national demonstration against
Industrial Relations Bill with strikes and protest marches against
this blatant piece of class legislation. That night the home of the
Minister responsible for the Bill, Mr. Robert Carr, is almost wrecked
by two powerful explosions. The action is claimed by the ‘Angry
Brigade’.
January 19 :: Jake Prescott arrested on a cheques charge
in Notting Hill and questioned by Det. Chief Supt. Habershon — the
officer who was to take charge of the so-called ‘Angry Brigade’
investigation.
February 3 :: Prescott released on bail, but re-arrested
8 days later and charged with causing the explosions at the home of
Robert Carr and the Miss World Contest. It was admitted in court by
Chief. Supt. Habershon that he
had refused the arrested man access to a lawyer
for three days. During the ensuing months of the investigation the
actions and activities of the police come in for a great deal of
criticism from many different quarters, and numerous charges
are brought against Scotland Yard for assault and harassment. These
are waived aside by Supt. Habershon with the comment: “I am not
concerned with legal niceties”. It becomes increasingly clear that
capitalism in Britain has moved into the defensive by permitting
itself to be panicked into allowing the police a “free hand” in its
methods of investigation. This is reflected in the political sphere
with the Industrial Relations Bill laying the foundations of a
corporate state.
Feb 10 :: Germany: Exchange of fire between Manfred
Grashof, Astrid Proll and the police in Frankfurt.
March 16 :: Ian Purdie arrested in London and charged,
together with Jake Prescott, for the two ‘Angry Brigade’ bombings.
Further reports in the liberal press of police excesses and Nazi-type
tactics, in their investigations.
March 18 :: During a major strike of Ford workers in
England the main offices of the Ford Motor Company at Gants Hill,
Ilford, on the outskirts of London, is wrecked by a powerful
explosion. A thousand word communique from the ‘Angry Brigade’ is
delivered shortly after.
April 28 :: Bomb delivered to the Times newspaper with a
message from ‘The Vengence Squad, the Angry Brigade, the People’s
Army.’
May 1 :: Bomb wrecks the trendy Biba boutique, in
Kensington. It is followed by a communique attacking consumer
capitalism and the conditions of the sales girls and seamstresses.
May 5 :: Spain: Bomb attacks in Barcelona on the Palace
of Justice, the Falangist HQ and a Capuchin Monastery. Claimed by the
Catalan Anarchist Group ‘Libertad.’
May 6 :: Germany: Astrid Proll, one of the group which
liberated Baader, is arrested.
May 18 :: Germany: Horst Mahler found not guilty of
participating in the liberation of Baader. Ingrid Schubert receives 6
years, and Irene Georgens 4 years for participating in the liberation.
Horst Mahler is held in prison under paragraph 129 — for being a
member of an illegal organisation, the RAF.
May 22 :: Bomb attack on Scotland Yard Computer Room at
Tintagel House, London. This is accompanied by simultaneous attacks by
the ‘Angry Brigade’, the International Revolutionary Solidarity
Movement and the ‘Marius Jacob’ group against British Rail, Rolls
Royce and Rover offices in Paris.
May 28 :: Spain: The arrest is announced of 9 people
accused of belonging to the Catalan Liberation Front. Charges include
sabotage attempts on T.V. stations, State Prosecutor’s offices and the
right-wing newspaper ‘La Vanguardia’.
June 22 :: During a dispute between Ford management and
the militant shop steward, John Dillon, in the Ford Liverpool plant,
the ‘Angry Brigade’ blow up the home of Ford’s Managing Director,
William Batty, in Essex. The same night a bomb damages a transformer
at the Dagenham plant of the Ford Motor Company.
July 8 :: Germany: Thomas Weissbecker and Georg Von
Rauch, both members of the Anarchist Black Cross, are tried for
assaulting a journalist on the Springer magazine Quick. Georg is
convicted and Tommy acquitted, but both police and press have confused
them from the beginning of the case and, after the verdicts, they
change places. Georg goes underground and Tommy has to be released.
July 15 :: Germany: Petra Schelm is shot dead by police
following a check at a road-block in Hamburg. Werner Hoppe is arrested
and accused of the attempted murder of a policeman.
July 20 :: Germany: Dieter Kunzelmann arrested for
allegedly planting a bomb at a lawyers’ ball. Charged with attempted
murder.
July 24 :: Germany: The Socialist Patient Collective in
Heidelberg (SPK) is attacked by the police on the pretext of a
connection with the RAF. (The SPK, the first self-organised group of
mental patients, located the cause of mental illness as capitalist
society itself.) 300 police armed with machine guns forced their way
into the SPK rooms and the residences of 20
patients. 11 members of the SPK are put into 10 different prisons. 6
are still detained on remand.
July 31 :: Despite close police protection the home of
the Secretary for Trade and Industry John Davies, in London, is badly
damaged by a powerful explosion. This action followed close on
Davies’s announcement of his intention to close ‘Upper Clyde
Shipbuilders’, throwing thousands of men out of work. This is
accompanied by the 11th communique from the ‘Angry Brigade.’
August 15 :: Following the announcement by the British Government that it intended
to introduce internment in Northern Ireland there was a powerful
explosion
at the Army Recruiting Office in Holloway Road, London. This was
claimed by a communique signed ‘The Angry Brigade: Moonlighters Cell.’
Aug. 20 :: House in Amhurst Road, London, raided by
Special Branch and CID arresting Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson, John
Barker and Hilary Creek. The four are taken to the HQ of the ‘Bomb
Squad’ in Albany Street, London, where the two men are subjected to a
brutal beating-up to extract a confession from them.
August 21 :: Stuart Christie arrested at Amhurst Road
while visiting the house. One hour later Chris Bott is arrested at the
same place. Both taken to join others at Albany St. Police Station.
Incriminating evidence
in the form of two detonators planted by police officers in Christie’s
car. — Both men are also ‘verballed’.
Aug. 23 :: All are charged at Albany Street police
Station with:
1. Conspiring to cause explosions between January 1st 1968 and August 21st. 1971.
2. Possessing explosive substances for an unlawful purpose.
3. Possessing a pistol without a firearms certificate.
4. Possessing eight rounds of ammunition without a firearm
certificate.
5. Possessing two machine guns without the authority of the Secretary
of State.
6. Possessing 36 rounds of ammunition without a firearm certificate.
7. Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in May, 1970.
8. Anna & Jim: attempting to cause explosion in Manchester, October
1970.
9. Stuart: possessing one round of ammunition without a firearm
certificate. (this dated back 2 years when a bullet was taken from his
flat. No charges were preferred against him at the time).
10. John, Jim & Stuart: Possessing explosive substances.
11. Jim, John & Hilary: receiving stolen vehicle.
12. Stuart: possessing explosive substances (the two detonators
planted by police).
All are refused bail and remanded in custody to await trial.
Sept 24 :: Despite the fact that the police claim to
have arrested all the Angry Brigade, the Albany Street Army barracks
(near the Bomb Squad HQ) is bombed by the Angry Brigade in protest
against the actions of the British Army in Northern Ireland.
Oct 20 :: Bomb blasts home of Birmingham businessman
(building construction) Chris Bryant, while his workers are on strike.
Communique issued by the Angry Brigade.
Oct 21 :: Following a confrontation between members of
the RAF and the police, the policeman Norbert Schmid is killed. Margit
Schiller is arrested and charged with the shooting.
Oct 30 :: Post Office Tower in London is bombed.
Nov. 1 :: Army Tank HQ in Everton Street, London bombed
by Angry Brigade.
Nov. 6 :: Attacks against Lloyds Bank in Amsterdam; in
Basle against the Italian consulate; in Rome against the British
Embassy; and in Barcelona against the British Embassy, in support of
the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ and the Italian anarchists imprisoned on
trumped-up charges of ‘conspiracy’ and subversion.
Dec. 1 :: Trial of Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott ends.
Ian Purdie found not guilty on all charges and Jake Prescott guilty on
charge of conspiracy — 15 years.
Dec. 4 :: Georg Von Rauch, a member of the Anarchist
Black Cross, is shot dead by the police in West Berlin. He is unarmed,
and is shot in the head when he’d already
put his hands above his head. Between 5000 and 7000 people turn
out the following day for a solidarity demonstration called by the
Berlin Red Help.
Dec 18 :: Kate Mclean arrested and charged with Angela
Weir, Chris Allen and Pauline Conroy, who had been arrested during the
course of November of having conspired with the six people already
arrested on conspiracy charges. Shortly before the opening of
Committal proceedings against the ten militants, the Attorney General,
Sir Peter Rawlinson, the victim of one of the Angry Brigade attacks
decided he could not allow a case to be made against Pauline Conroy
and Chris Allen due to insufficient evidence and they were released
from custody.
Dec. 22 :: A bank is robbed in Kaiserslautern. £16,750
is stolen. A policeman, Herbert Schoner, is killed. There is nothing
to directly connect this robbery with the RAF, but the Springer
concern starts a big propaganda campaign on the assumption that this
was the action of the “Baader-Meinhof Group”. Heinrich Boll, world-
famous novelist, publicly attacks the Springer press
for the hysteria it is constantly trying to whip up. Two weeks
later Chancellor Brandt is forced to appeal to the West German public
to remain calm. At the same time, Peter Bruckner, a radical
psychologist, suspected of harbouring members of the RAF, is suspended
from teaching at Hannover University. Following his suspension there
is a massive demonstration of solidarity from his students.
Dec 25 :: Switzerland: Attack on the Central Police HQ
in Zurich. Police name an anarchist whom they are unable to locate.
*** 1972
February :: Bomb attack on Italian Embassy in Brussels
in solidarity with Pietro Valpreda now on trial in Italy.
March 2 :: Thomas Weissbecker, another member of the
Anarchist Black Cross, is shot dead in the middle of a street in
Ausburg, when asked to produce his identity card. Although armed he
didn’t draw his gun. The police
had been watching the flat where he was staying,
but as became clear later had no idea who it was they had shot until
after the killing. Carmen Roll, who was with Tommy is arrested.
Solidarity demonstrations take place in five cities the next day.
March 3 :: In Hamburg, the police raid a flat and open
fire almost immediately on Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann.
There follows a gun battle in which Grashof is seriously wounded, and a
police inspector receives wounds from which he later dies. Despite his
serious injury, Buddenberg, the judge in charge of all people arrested
in connection with the RAF, orders Grashof’s removal from the prison
hospital to a cell where he has to administer medical treatment
himself. Grundmann is put in the same prison.
March 24 :: Bomb alert in British Embassy in Brussels.
April :: The not guilty verdict on Horst Mahler is
quashed after the prosecution appeals. He is now to be re-tried on
all charges.
May 11 :: A bomb destroys the officer’s club of the
headquarters of the American Army in Frankfurt. An American colonel is
killed and 13 other officers wounded. A Communique issued by the RAF
said the attack was a response to the escalated American aggression in
Vietnam.
May 12 :: The police headquarters in Ausburg, where
Tommy Weissbecker was shot dead, and the headquarters of the Bavarian
police in Munich are bombed, causing thousands of pounds worth of
damage. Claimed by RAF.
May 15 :: A bomb explodes under the car of Wolfgang
Buddenberg, the judge mentioned above. His wife normally drives him to
work, but on this occasion she is alone, and is seriously injured.
Claimed by the RAF.
May 19 :: In the publishing house of Springer’s concern
in Hamburg, two high-explosive bombs are detonated. Three telephone
warnings are given — two to the Springer House itself, one to the
police. All are ignored. 17 people are injured. 5 other bombs fail to
explode. Altogether the bombs contain 80 kilos of TNT. Claimed by the
RAF.
May 20 :: Police open fire on Madrid students seriously
wounding one of them. Students reply with Molotov Cocktails.
May 24 :: At the HQ of the American Army in Europe at
Heidelberg, two bombs explode in the car park. A captain and two
sergeants are killed, five others are wounded- Claimed by
the RAF.
May 26 :: Bomb attacks on American Consulate and
American Legion in Paris. At the same time the Spanish Consulate in
Stuttgart is also wrecked by an explosion.
May 30 :: Trial of ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ opens at No.
1 Court at the Old Bailey, in London. This was to be the longest trial
in the history of the British Legal System.
June 1 :: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, Jan Carl Raspe
are arrested when 250 police with machine pistols, tear
gas, and a tank, raid a flat in the suburbs of Frankfurt. A fourth
person arrested with them is later released by the police. They say he
was a doctor at a local hospital, but after his release he
mysteriously disappeared. In a gun battle with the police before the
capture, Baader is wounded.
June 7 :: Gudrun Ensslin is arrested in a boutique in
Hamburg, after a shop assistant spots her gun.
June 9 :: Bernhard Braun and Brigitte Monhaupt are
arrested
in West Berlin. They are two of the 19 people whose photos have
been posted up all over Germany as members of the RAF.
June 12 :: Bomb explodes in Spanish Consulate in Munich.
June 15 :: Ulrike Meinhoff and Gerhard Moller are
arrested in a flat near Hannover. The police have received a tip-off
from a ‘left-wing’ trade-unionist in the ‘progressive’ wing of the
SPD, living in the same block.
July 1 :: Spain: 800,000 pesetas robbed from a wages
office in the Calle Majorca near the centre of Barcelona. This is the
first known action of the Iberian Liberation Movement. (MIL).
July 18 :: Bomb wrecks Spanish Tourist Office,
Stockholm, on 34th anniversary of the Francoist victory.
August 14 :: France: Material worth over one million
pesetas taken from a print-shop in the rue l’Esquille in Toulouse.
(MIL)
September 9 :: Acting on ‘information received’ the
French police
raid an isolated farmhouse in Bessieres, near Toulouse, and discover
an arms dump, printshop and a large amount of anarchist propaganda. In
an official communique issued after the raid they say the place
has obviously been used as an international meeting place for
anarchist activists.
Sept. 13 :: Wage snatch fails at the Savings Bank of
Igualada in Salou (Tarragona), 50kms. from Barcelona. (MIL)
Sept. 15 :: Armed robbery at the Savings Bank of Bellver
de Cardana in Lerida netting the group over one million pesetas. (MIL)
Sept.17/18 :: French police halt a Renault 16 at a road
block near Pau and identify two of the occupants as being responsible for the
hiring of the farmhouse near Bessiere. A police raid in Toulouse later
that night effects the arrest of two militants, a third managed to
escape. Oriol Sole, one of the accused, is kept in custody, but his
companion, Jean Claude Torres, is released for lack of evidence. (MIL)
Oct. 21 :: Layetana Savings Bank in the industrial city
of Mataro robbed of over one million pesetas. (MIL)
Nov. 18 :: Savings Bank in Barcelona robbed of 200,000
pesetas; for the first time it is reported that the group is armed
with Sten sub-machine guns. (MIL)
Nov. 20 :: Seven men, armed with sub-machine guns, rob
the Central Bank of Barcelona of one million pesetas. A communique is
left signed by ‘Autonomous Combat Groups, Iberian Liberation Front’.
(MIL)
Dec. 6 :: The trial of the Stoke Newington Eight ends
with four sentences of guilty of conspiracy against Jim Greenfield,
Anna Mendelson, Hilary Creek and John Barker. Each was sentenced to 10
years imprisonment, after a plea for clemency by the working class
jury.
The four subsequently appealed against sentence but had it thrown out.
The other four were found not guilty on all counts demonstrating that
the jury accepted the defence allegation that most of the police case
was a fabrication of ‘verbals’, misplaced and planted evidence — as in
the case of two detonators being planted in Stuart Christie’s car — to
secure conviction.
Dec 13/14 :: The printshop stolen by the police from the
farmhouse at Bessieres is removed from police custody and put to
social use again. (MIL)
Dec. 29 :: Layetana Savings Bank in Badalona robbed of
800,000 pesetas and a communique signed by the MIL is left
commemorating the death of Francisco Sabate Llopart.