To those who warned about his frantic pace of life, Rainer Fassbinder replied that he would rest when he was dead. And so it was: the German filmmaker died at age 36, with dozens of movies behind him. One of them, titled Germany in autumn and signed with other New Wave directors, deals with the offensive that the RAF terrorist band had launched against the German state in the summer of 1977. Mixing fiction and essay, this unequal work has value as a historical document on the transition from ideological radicalism to political violence. No one sums it up better than Horst Mahler , a Marxist-Leninist theorist who says before the camera that the revolutionary has judged the individuals who participate in the capitalist system and found them guilty. That is: "It is necessary for our liberation, and consequently it is justified, to destroy evil even in its human form." Sincerity is appreciated .

Fortunately, times have changed. Political violence has lost that romantic aura that revolutionary ideas lent to it and that are summed up in an infallible formula: fighting against unjust power in favor of just emancipation. Hence, Catalan independence has tried from the beginning to portray itself as a peaceful, democratic, smiling movement. And from there, too, that he took so much propaganda performance to the legitimate use of force by the security forces in the 1-O referendum : the violent ones were the others.

However, the detention of members of the CDR accused of holding explosives casts shadows on the relationship between independence and violence. A certain moral lassitude was already necessary to consider a movement that combined institutional power and street mobilization to impose a process of secession organized around an ethnocentric vision of the political community on the majority of Catalans. And it begins by saying that "the streets will always be ours" and end up keeping explosives in the closet. Or harassing journalists, a very serious fact that the usual thunderstorms have flown over a distance. But the emotional itinerary is in sight: an impossible one based on lies is promised and the resulting frustration becomes latent aggressiveness . And if nothing happens in the end, it won't be because everything can't happen.

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