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on specific targets.)
    At the same time, the RAF’s focus on NATO, and its claim that Western Europe was a cornerstone of the world revolutionary process, did not sit well with all of its supporters. Some saw in this new strategy a distressing departure from the anti-imperialist line they had spent years defending. This included individuals who could trace their relationship with the RAF back to the West Berlin commune scene of the APO days. In some cases they had known the founding members personally, and, unlike so many others, they had never stopped supporting the guerilla. While there were no immediate public recriminations, behind the scenes many of these traditional supporters were not at all happy with this new analysis. Indeed, in some cities a generational split would eventually occur around the May Paper, some seeing it as a bold step forward, while others considered it to be a dereliction of the RAF’s internationalist duties.
    These criticisms remained whispered, if not unspoken, for two years. It was a heavy thing to be an anti-imp or a RAF supporter, and leaving the scene or repudiating the guerilla’s choices was not something that was done lightly, at least not while trying to remain true to a pro-guerilla perspective.
    It was 1984 by the time a public version of this critique appeared, in the form of a series of scathing articles in
Antiimperialistischer Kampf,
a sporadic and very small circulation magazine that had emerged from the Marxist-Leninist
Knastgruppe Bochum
(Bochum Prison Group), which had taken its distance from the RAF following the 1981 hunger strike. Without presenting the AIK as more than it was, for the purposes of exposition we will go over their critique in some detail, as it summed up many of the misgivings shared by these older supporters. According to AIK:
    The RAF was ideologically anti-white. It consciously placed the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole under the hegemony of the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples and nations of the Third World. This made them simultaneously the protagonists of the proletarian position in the class struggle within the FRG and the opponents of the modern revisionism of the left in the FRG. While the student movement’s proletarian parties were developing the chauvinistic specter of a revolution in the FRG, simultaneously reducing their politics to the wage-labor/capital contradiction in the imperialist metropole… the RAF continued to develop the student movement’s ideological dividing line: the criterion for dividing friend from foe in the class struggle in the metropole is that any struggle against imperialism that is not an unconditional struggle against the subjugation of three quarters of the world’s population to the interests of finance capital is in the final analysis a direct betrayal of the international revolution.
    Now, however,
    The better part of the May Paper… consists of a new chauvinist ideology… as the basis for “anti-imperialism.” There are two issues. First, the historical revisionism and the destruction of the anti-imperialist position held by the RAF up until ‘77. Second, the assertion of an international relationship of forces that reflects a true chauvinism, and from which, conversely, that chauvinism can draw nourishment, support itself, and meet its needs.
    The critique continues,
    The RAF’s 1982 May Paper… constitutes a complete revision of the line the RAF formulated in the 1970s, which served as a reference point for an entire section of the anti-imperialist movement in the FRG, laying the groundwork for an entire concrete political experience.
    Such a revision obviously doesn’t occur overnight. It developed in the heart of the RAF itself, and within the anti-imperialist movement, following the execution of the leading RAF cadre in Stammheim in autumn 1977. With the 1981 hunger strike, the Kroesen and Ramstein communiqués, and the trial