#armedstruggle — Public Fediverse posts

A woman's place is in the resistance.

#IntersectionalWomensDay #Intersectionality #ArmedStruggle #Palestine #InternationalWomensDay

A woman's place is in the resistance.

#IntersectionalWomensDay #Intersectionality #ArmedStruggle #Palestine #InternationalWomensDay

Press Release: National Democratic Front of the Philippines-Cagayan Valley

Surface missing NDFP-CV staff Scarlet Lyne Gayo and uphold her rights!

We therefore urgently call on the entire international community to stand with the struggling Filipino masses, call for the immediate surfacing of Scarlet Lyne Gayo and the full respect of her rights as an individual, as well as the respect of international law and existing signed agreements. We furthermore advocate for her prompt and unconditional release. Stand with the Filipino people for a just and lasting peace in the Philippines!

Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS) / Friends of the National Democratic Front (FNDF) is a global organization that supports the Filipino people’s struggle for genuine national liberation as outlined in the 12 point program of the NDF. For more information, visit https://ffps.info.

Press Release: National Democratic Front of the Philippines-Cagayan Valley

Surface missing NDFP-CV staff Scarlet Lyne Gayo and uphold her rights!

We therefore urgently call on the entire international community to stand with the struggling Filipino masses, call for the immediate surfacing of Scarlet Lyne Gayo and the full respect of her rights as an individual, as well as the respect of international law and existing signed agreements. We furthermore advocate for her prompt and unconditional release. Stand with the Filipino people for a just and lasting peace in the Philippines!

Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS) / Friends of the National Democratic Front (FNDF) is a global organization that supports the Filipino people’s struggle for genuine national liberation as outlined in the 12 point program of the NDF. For more information, visit https://ffps.info.

Subversive Comrade Marcela Rodriguez Dies in Italy

On the night of October 3rd, subversive comrade Marcela Rodriguez died in Italy after two weeks of hospitalization due to pneumonia. Marcela was part of the Lautaro Popular Rebel Forces, where she played a key role in actions against the dictatorship and the subsequent “democracy” of the Concertación.

“We didn’t believe that the Concertación would solve the problems of poverty, so we continued the armed struggle.” Marcela Rodriguez

In an interview we conducted with the collaboration of @buscandolakalle, we asked Marcela about the nickname “Machine Gun Woman,” which initially emerged from the fascist media with a derogatory purpose, but which ultimately left her forever in the collective imagination: “A stupid thing… But in the end, if what they wanted was to provoke rejection among the people toward us, toward women, it backfired, and they always put us on the front pages.” When we arrived in the towns, they applauded us and shouted “Long live women!” she told La Zarzamora.

Marcela was born on March 3, 1953, in Santiago. She spent her childhood in a working-class neighborhood in the southern part of Santiago called Villa Sur. She completed her primary education at the Alfonso Matte School in the Dávila neighborhood and her secondary education at the Technical Girls’ School No. 3 in the commune of San Miguel, where she says she received “the necessary tools to understand the world.” This, combined with the lessons at home, completed her education. “At family gatherings, my father would talk to us about the history of Chile and the world, especially the history of the labor movement, since he had been a union leader in his youth,” she told us.

In 1982, when the MAPU split, the Mapu Lautaro was formed, and she actively participated. After being part of the Lautaro militia, Marcela began participating in the FRPL (Lautaro Popular Rebel Forces), where she took action against the dictatorship and later against the coalition that maintained the regime’s continuity through political imprisonment, the murder of combatants, and the impunity of military personnel and civilians involved in the dictatorship.

On November 14, 1990, she participated in the rescue of political prisoner Marco Ariel Antonioletti from the Sótero del Río Hospital in Santiago, where she was seriously injured. Regarding this incident, Marcela told us: “I faced it with great courage. The truth is, I never thought they would kill me, that I would be imprisoned, or that I would die. I always thought what I was doing was the right thing, and the moment the bullet hit me, I said to myself, ‘I’m screwed, but they won’t see me cry,’ and that’s what happened.

Supposedly, everything that happened shouldn’t have happened; our actions were always clean. Unfortunately, when I was wounded, everything changed.” I believe the rescued comrade was taken to a house where he shouldn’t have been, and then the owner of the house, named Juan Carvajal, who would later become the Director of Communications for the Bachelet administration, betrayed him, and there he was murdered by police, rats, and special forces. The comrade was unarmed.”

The active memory of this brave comrade, with her irreducible attitude and absolute conviction in combating the enemy, is essential.

Marcela Rodriguez is undoubtedly a comrade of tremendous importance in our recent history of struggle, an example of the strength and conviction with all the intersections that inhabit the life of a woman, a woman who decided to stand up against tyranny and who dared to take up arms against the murderers who gave rise to the new order of capital in Latin America.

We embrace her comrade Julio from afar.

Comrade Marcela, today we raise your memory.

Marcela Rodriguez Present!!!

La Zarzamora

Read the full interview at: https://lazarzamora.cl/memoria-y-accion-entrevista-a-marcela-rodriguez-ex-combatiente-de-las-fuerzas-rebeldes-populares-lautaro-a-50-anos-del-golpe/

Source: https://lazarzamora.cl/fallece-en-italia-la-companera-subversiva-marcela-rodriguez/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21843

#armedStruggle #chile #europe #italy #MarcelaRodriguez #rip #southAmerica

Subversive Comrade Marcela Rodriguez Dies in Italy

On the night of October 3rd, subversive comrade Marcela Rodriguez died in Italy after two weeks of hospitalization due to pneumonia. Marcela was part of the Lautaro Popular Rebel Forces, where she played a key role in actions against the dictatorship and the subsequent “democracy” of the Concertación.

“We didn’t believe that the Concertación would solve the problems of poverty, so we continued the armed struggle.” Marcela Rodriguez

In an interview we conducted with the collaboration of @buscandolakalle, we asked Marcela about the nickname “Machine Gun Woman,” which initially emerged from the fascist media with a derogatory purpose, but which ultimately left her forever in the collective imagination: “A stupid thing… But in the end, if what they wanted was to provoke rejection among the people toward us, toward women, it backfired, and they always put us on the front pages.” When we arrived in the towns, they applauded us and shouted “Long live women!” she told La Zarzamora.

Marcela was born on March 3, 1953, in Santiago. She spent her childhood in a working-class neighborhood in the southern part of Santiago called Villa Sur. She completed her primary education at the Alfonso Matte School in the Dávila neighborhood and her secondary education at the Technical Girls’ School No. 3 in the commune of San Miguel, where she says she received “the necessary tools to understand the world.” This, combined with the lessons at home, completed her education. “At family gatherings, my father would talk to us about the history of Chile and the world, especially the history of the labor movement, since he had been a union leader in his youth,” she told us.

In 1982, when the MAPU split, the Mapu Lautaro was formed, and she actively participated. After being part of the Lautaro militia, Marcela began participating in the FRPL (Lautaro Popular Rebel Forces), where she took action against the dictatorship and later against the coalition that maintained the regime’s continuity through political imprisonment, the murder of combatants, and the impunity of military personnel and civilians involved in the dictatorship.

On November 14, 1990, she participated in the rescue of political prisoner Marco Ariel Antonioletti from the Sótero del Río Hospital in Santiago, where she was seriously injured. Regarding this incident, Marcela told us: “I faced it with great courage. The truth is, I never thought they would kill me, that I would be imprisoned, or that I would die. I always thought what I was doing was the right thing, and the moment the bullet hit me, I said to myself, ‘I’m screwed, but they won’t see me cry,’ and that’s what happened.

Supposedly, everything that happened shouldn’t have happened; our actions were always clean. Unfortunately, when I was wounded, everything changed.” I believe the rescued comrade was taken to a house where he shouldn’t have been, and then the owner of the house, named Juan Carvajal, who would later become the Director of Communications for the Bachelet administration, betrayed him, and there he was murdered by police, rats, and special forces. The comrade was unarmed.”

The active memory of this brave comrade, with her irreducible attitude and absolute conviction in combating the enemy, is essential.

Marcela Rodriguez is undoubtedly a comrade of tremendous importance in our recent history of struggle, an example of the strength and conviction with all the intersections that inhabit the life of a woman, a woman who decided to stand up against tyranny and who dared to take up arms against the murderers who gave rise to the new order of capital in Latin America.

We embrace her comrade Julio from afar.

Comrade Marcela, today we raise your memory.

Marcela Rodriguez Present!!!

La Zarzamora

Read the full interview at: https://lazarzamora.cl/memoria-y-accion-entrevista-a-marcela-rodriguez-ex-combatiente-de-las-fuerzas-rebeldes-populares-lautaro-a-50-anos-del-golpe/

Source: https://lazarzamora.cl/fallece-en-italia-la-companera-subversiva-marcela-rodriguez/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21843

#armedStruggle #chile #europe #italy #MarcelaRodriguez #rip #southAmerica

Announcing the 4th Issue of International Anarcho-Nihilist/Insurrectionary Paper “Blessed Is The Flame”

**Download link (PDF):** http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ENG-Blessed-Is-The-Flame-Issue-4.pdf

In early September, the 4th issue of the international anarcho-nihilist/insurrectionary newspaper “Blessed Is The Flame” has been published. As always, along whith the counter-information of July and August, we have also collected texts on counter-surveillance, counter-repression and direct action.

The newspaper is available in both digital and printed form. If anyone is interested on printing it themselves, the best way is either to print it as simple A4 with a stapler, or as A3 in booklet format.

Note: for printing, we suggest you download the file directly from our website (https://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/4o-teychos-tis-exegersiakis-anarchikis-efimeridas-eylogimeni-i-floga/) in case any minor corrections may be made and therefore the download link is renewed.

**CONTENTS**

⚫ Counter-information for July & August 2025
⚫ Challenges of police investigations into anarchist direct actions
⚫ A search for anarchist practices against torture
⚫ Useful information for anarchists of action from the investigation files of Operation Diana
⚫ Responsibility claim with guide for action [arson attack on machinery of Holcim, Switzerland]
⚫ Chile: Black August and solidarity actions for comrades Aldo and Lucas
⚫ Monica Caballero Sepulveda: “Political violence”
⚫ Uprising in Indonesia and calls of solidarity and support
⚫ The authoritaria trap of identity logic
⚫ Greece: Summer news about the “Synergy of Vengeance” case
⚫ Squat evacuations
⚫ About persecuted comrades from USA
⚫ Update and call for solidarity assembly for Alfredo Cospito
⚫ Message to the climate movement
⚫ Why are we being led to our slaughter? We don’t

*Note: Some of the news and responsibility claims for July and August were published after the completion of this issue.

All of this will be posted in the next few days on our website.*

**OTHER LANGUAGES:**
The newspaper is currently being published in seven languages.
The links for the file of the issue in the other available languages are the following:

English: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ENG-Blessed-Is-The-Flame-Issue-4.pdf
Español: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ES-Bendita-Sea-La-Llama-Numero-4.pdf
Français: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/FR-Benie-Soit-La-Flamme-Numero-4.pdf
Deutsch: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/DE-Gesegnet-Sei-Die-Flamme-Heft-4.pdf
Italiano: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/IT-Benedetta-Sia-La-Fiamma-Numero-4.pdf
Bahasa Indonesia: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ID-Berbahagialah-Nyala-Api-Edisi-4.pdf
Ελληνικά: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/EL-%CE%95%CF%85%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AD%CE%BD%CE%B7-%CE%97-%CE%A6%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%B1-%CE%A4%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%87%CE%BF%CF%82-4.pdf
Feedback for the quality of the translations is very welcome.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21412

#armedStruggle #blessedIsTheFlame #guerrilla #insurrectionaryAnarchism #nihilism

Announcing the 4th Issue of International Anarcho-Nihilist/Insurrectionary Paper “Blessed Is The Flame”

**Download link (PDF):** http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ENG-Blessed-Is-The-Flame-Issue-4.pdf

In early September, the 4th issue of the international anarcho-nihilist/insurrectionary newspaper “Blessed Is The Flame” has been published. As always, along whith the counter-information of July and August, we have also collected texts on counter-surveillance, counter-repression and direct action.

The newspaper is available in both digital and printed form. If anyone is interested on printing it themselves, the best way is either to print it as simple A4 with a stapler, or as A3 in booklet format.

Note: for printing, we suggest you download the file directly from our website (https://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/4o-teychos-tis-exegersiakis-anarchikis-efimeridas-eylogimeni-i-floga/) in case any minor corrections may be made and therefore the download link is renewed.

**CONTENTS**

⚫ Counter-information for July & August 2025
⚫ Challenges of police investigations into anarchist direct actions
⚫ A search for anarchist practices against torture
⚫ Useful information for anarchists of action from the investigation files of Operation Diana
⚫ Responsibility claim with guide for action [arson attack on machinery of Holcim, Switzerland]
⚫ Chile: Black August and solidarity actions for comrades Aldo and Lucas
⚫ Monica Caballero Sepulveda: “Political violence”
⚫ Uprising in Indonesia and calls of solidarity and support
⚫ The authoritaria trap of identity logic
⚫ Greece: Summer news about the “Synergy of Vengeance” case
⚫ Squat evacuations
⚫ About persecuted comrades from USA
⚫ Update and call for solidarity assembly for Alfredo Cospito
⚫ Message to the climate movement
⚫ Why are we being led to our slaughter? We don’t

*Note: Some of the news and responsibility claims for July and August were published after the completion of this issue.

All of this will be posted in the next few days on our website.*

**OTHER LANGUAGES:**
The newspaper is currently being published in seven languages.
The links for the file of the issue in the other available languages are the following:

English: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ENG-Blessed-Is-The-Flame-Issue-4.pdf
Español: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ES-Bendita-Sea-La-Llama-Numero-4.pdf
Français: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/FR-Benie-Soit-La-Flamme-Numero-4.pdf
Deutsch: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/DE-Gesegnet-Sei-Die-Flamme-Heft-4.pdf
Italiano: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/IT-Benedetta-Sia-La-Fiamma-Numero-4.pdf
Bahasa Indonesia: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/ID-Berbahagialah-Nyala-Api-Edisi-4.pdf
Ελληνικά: http://blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net/files/2025/09/EL-%CE%95%CF%85%CE%BB%CE%BF%CE%B3%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%AD%CE%BD%CE%B7-%CE%97-%CE%A6%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%B1-%CE%A4%CE%B5%CF%8D%CF%87%CE%BF%CF%82-4.pdf
Feedback for the quality of the translations is very welcome.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21412

#armedStruggle #blessedIsTheFlame #guerrilla #insurrectionaryAnarchism #nihilism

I hate in-fighting between comrades over methods of liberation. It is a big hindrance. Intellectuals need a vanguard. And vice versa. Every successful revolution has a Fidel Castro & a Che Guevara, A mouthpiece, & a Guerilla.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #revolutionary #liberation #antifa #anarchist

I hate in-fighting between comrades over methods of liberation. It is a big hindrance. Intellectuals need a vanguard. And vice versa. Every successful revolution has a Fidel Castro & a Che Guevara, A mouthpiece, & a Guerilla.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #revolutionary #liberation #antifa #anarchist

I hate in-fighting between comrades over methods of liberation. It is a big hindrance. Intellectuals need a vanguard. And vice versa. Every successful revolution has a Fidel Castro & a Che Guevara, A mouthpiece, & a Guerilla.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #revolutionary #liberation #antifa #anarchist

I hate in-fighting between comrades over methods of liberation. It is a big hindrance. Intellectuals need a vanguard. And vice versa. Every successful revolution has a Fidel Castro & a Che Guevara, A mouthpiece, & a Guerilla.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #revolutionary #liberation #antifa #anarchist

I hate in-fighting between comrades over methods of liberation. It is a big hindrance. Intellectuals need a vanguard. And vice versa. Every successful revolution has a Fidel Castro & a Che Guevara, A mouthpiece, & a Guerilla.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #revolutionary #liberation #antifa #anarchist

Non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscious. & Facist have no conscious. They only care about there profits, & there life. Therefore,.. we will take both from them.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #killthetyrant

Non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience. & Facist have no conscious. They only care about there profits, & there life. Therefore,.. we will take both from them.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #killthetyrant

Non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscious. & Facist have no conscious. They only care about there profits, & there life. Therefore,.. we will take both from them.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #killthetyrant

Non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience. & Facist have no conscious. They only care about there profits, & there life. Therefore,.. we will take both from them.

#armedstruggle #armedrevolution #expropriation #propagandaofthedeed #redfactionarmy #bonnotgang #insurectionist #Antifa #AntiFascistAction #NoPasaran #SmashFascism #FightFascism #Antifascist #ACAB #FTP #RevolutionNow #BlackBloc #DirectAction #Resist #SolidarityForever #AntiRacistAction #DefendTheStreets #CommunityDefense #OpposeFascism #RevolutionaryLove #RadicalResistance #MutualAid #AntifaInternational #AntifaZone #AntiCapitalist #FascismIsNotWelcomeHere #PropagandaOfTheDeed #anticapitalism #deathtocapitalism #killthetyrant

Αλληλεγγύη στην Daniela Klette, αλληλεγγύη στην μαχόμενη Παλαιστίνη
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1637059/
#solidarity #internationalistsolidarity #prisons #greece #Anarchism #antiimperialism #ArmedStruggle

Αλληλεγγύη στην Daniela Klette, αλληλεγγύη στην μαχόμενη Παλαιστίνη
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1637059/
#solidarity #internationalistsolidarity #prisons #greece #Anarchism #antiimperialism #ArmedStruggle

Αλληλεγγύη στην Daniela Klette, αλληλεγγύη στην μαχόμενη Παλαιστίνη
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1637059/
#solidarity #internationalistsolidarity #prisons #greece #Anarchism #antiimperialism #ArmedStruggle

Αλληλεγγύη στην Daniela Klette, αλληλεγγύη στην μαχόμενη Παλαιστίνη
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1637059/
#solidarity #internationalistsolidarity #prisons #greece #Anarchism #antiimperialism #ArmedStruggle

Αλληλεγγύη στην Daniela Klette, αλληλεγγύη στην μαχόμενη Παλαιστίνη
https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1637059/
#solidarity #internationalistsolidarity #prisons #greece #Anarchism #antiimperialism #ArmedStruggle

(Important notice : not interested by any means in your opinion towards Fidel, his brother, Communism, Cuba or Marxism.
Violators will be unmercifully and immediately erased...yeah, that's right, like all Commies do with freedom of speech)

#Revolution #ArmedStruggle #Oppression #Memes

(Important notice : not interested by any means in your opinion towards Fidel, his brother, Communism, Cuba or Marxism.
Violators will be unmercifully and immediately erased...yeah, that's right, like all Commies do with freedom of speech)

#Revolution #ArmedStruggle #Oppression #Memes

(Important notice : not interested by any means in your opinion towards Fidel, his brother, Communism, Cuba or Marxism.
Violators will be unmercifully and immediately erased...yeah, that's right, like all Commies do with freedom of speech)

#Revolution #ArmedStruggle #Oppression #Memes

(Important notice : not interested by any means in your opinion towards Fidel, his brother, Communism, Cuba or Marxism.
Violators will be unmercifully and immediately erased...yeah, that's right, like all Commies do with freedom of speech)

#Revolution #ArmedStruggle #Oppression #Memes

Año’s Recycled Lies Meant to Obscure Real Roots of Armed Conflict

Kabataang Makabayan (KM) strongly condemns the recent statements made by National Security Adviser Eduardo Año and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac), which once again weaponize so-called “former rebels” to prop up the discredited narrative of a so-called “spent revolutionary force.” What Año parades as “raw, unfiltered testimonies” are, in truth, manufactured scripts extracted through coercion, bribery, and threats, designed to mislead the public and justify the militarist crackdown on democratic dissent in the Philippines.

The formation of organizations composed of alleged “former rebels,” organized under the close direction of the military and intelligence agencies, is a state-sponsored ploy aimed at legitimizing repressive policies, red-tagging, and the silencing of legitimate criticism against the Marcos Jr. regime’s corruption, foreign subservience, and anti-people programs.

Año’s recycled lies and fear-mongering narratives do more than insult the intelligence of the Filipino people—they actively obscure the real, deeply rooted causes of the armed conflict in the Philippines. Landlessness, joblessness, widespread poverty, fascist state violence, and a foreign-dominated economic system that denies the Filipino people sovereignty and justice are still the norm today.

Año’s attempt to weaponize “former rebels” in the information war is a desperate move in the face of growing international exposure and condemnation of human rights violations under their “counterinsurgency” programs as well as the mounting call to abolish the NTF-Elcac. It also exposes the regime’s failure to crush the revolutionary movement, which continues to persevere and grow.

It is not the revolutionary movement but the ruling classes and their security apparatuses who exploit the urban poor, workers, farmers, and indigenous peoples—through demolition, union-busting, land grabbing, environmental plunder, and killings of rights defenders. Far from being deceived, the Filipino masses experience firsthand the crushing poverty, joblessness and lack of access to basic services that further foment their resolve to join the armed struggle in the countryside. The people’s democratic revolution is a rational, collective response to a system that offers no meaningful future to the youth, urban poor, workers, and peasants.

Kabataang Makabayan reiterates its commitment to a just and lasting peace—one that addresses the fundamental issues of land reform, national industrialization, and democratic rights. We call on all Filipino youth, students, migrants, and professionals, to reject the fascist propaganda of the AFP and NTF-Elcac, and instead join the struggle for genuine change and national and social liberation.

Source: https://ndfp.info/anos-recycled-lies-meant-to-obscure-real-roots-of-armed-conflict/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18965

#armedStruggle #asia #communist #KabataangMakabayan #philippines

Año’s Recycled Lies Meant to Obscure Real Roots of Armed Conflict

Kabataang Makabayan (KM) strongly condemns the recent statements made by National Security Adviser Eduardo Año and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac), which once again weaponize so-called “former rebels” to prop up the discredited narrative of a so-called “spent revolutionary force.” What Año parades as “raw, unfiltered testimonies” are, in truth, manufactured scripts extracted through coercion, bribery, and threats, designed to mislead the public and justify the militarist crackdown on democratic dissent in the Philippines.

The formation of organizations composed of alleged “former rebels,” organized under the close direction of the military and intelligence agencies, is a state-sponsored ploy aimed at legitimizing repressive policies, red-tagging, and the silencing of legitimate criticism against the Marcos Jr. regime’s corruption, foreign subservience, and anti-people programs.

Año’s recycled lies and fear-mongering narratives do more than insult the intelligence of the Filipino people—they actively obscure the real, deeply rooted causes of the armed conflict in the Philippines. Landlessness, joblessness, widespread poverty, fascist state violence, and a foreign-dominated economic system that denies the Filipino people sovereignty and justice are still the norm today.

Año’s attempt to weaponize “former rebels” in the information war is a desperate move in the face of growing international exposure and condemnation of human rights violations under their “counterinsurgency” programs as well as the mounting call to abolish the NTF-Elcac. It also exposes the regime’s failure to crush the revolutionary movement, which continues to persevere and grow.

It is not the revolutionary movement but the ruling classes and their security apparatuses who exploit the urban poor, workers, farmers, and indigenous peoples—through demolition, union-busting, land grabbing, environmental plunder, and killings of rights defenders. Far from being deceived, the Filipino masses experience firsthand the crushing poverty, joblessness and lack of access to basic services that further foment their resolve to join the armed struggle in the countryside. The people’s democratic revolution is a rational, collective response to a system that offers no meaningful future to the youth, urban poor, workers, and peasants.

Kabataang Makabayan reiterates its commitment to a just and lasting peace—one that addresses the fundamental issues of land reform, national industrialization, and democratic rights. We call on all Filipino youth, students, migrants, and professionals, to reject the fascist propaganda of the AFP and NTF-Elcac, and instead join the struggle for genuine change and national and social liberation.

Source: https://ndfp.info/anos-recycled-lies-meant-to-obscure-real-roots-of-armed-conflict/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18965

#armedStruggle #asia #communist #KabataangMakabayan #philippines

A Brief Greeting from Dimitris Koufontinas

A brief greeting from Dimitris Koufontinas from the special prison of Domokos, for the presentation of his book “The Revolutionary Organization November 17. 13 Answers from Prison” in Milan [Occupied Bakery, 17/04/2025]

I am very happy that today I find myself with my mind together with you in Milan, for the presentation of the book “13 answers”, translated by comrade Leonidas.

This year coincides with the 50th anniversary of the first armed action of the November 17 Revolutionary Organization, in December 1975 against the head of the CIA in Greece. This is a further reason for a broader discussion, with the distance of time, for the armed counter-violence movement in our countries and around the world.

In this little book there is no simple account of the facts of the Greek version of this movement. If we want to get closer to the truth, we cannot isolate it from its historical roots, we cannot exclude it from the totality of the historical process, from the path of social evolution, from the international conjuncture and from the geostrategy of the movement throughout the world.

17N always considered itself as part of the current of resistance that runs through the history of our earth, and as part of the broader current of the resistance of peoples. The answers it gave as well as its evolutionary path are similar to the answers that have been given in other lands and to the evolutionary path of other movements in other countries.

In my opinion, in addition to the warning that the weak can make the powerful tremble, the most important contribution of the 17N was its adherence to ideological warfare, in the attempt to interpret reality by the socially active, in the face of the dominant lie and its organized reproduction. In an attempt not to rewrite history.

The edition of this book, as well as today’s debate, are part of this ongoing ideological struggle, as an attempt to be useful to those who seek their own paths to social liberation.

Source: https://panetteriaoccupata.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/18/un-breve-saluto-di-dimitris-koufontinas/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18486

#17N #armedStruggle #DimitrisKoufontinas #europe #greece #italy #milan #PoliticalPrisoners

A Brief Greeting from Dimitris Koufontinas

A brief greeting from Dimitris Koufontinas from the special prison of Domokos, for the presentation of his book “The Revolutionary Organization November 17. 13 Answers from Prison” in Milan [Occupied Bakery, 17/04/2025]

I am very happy that today I find myself with my mind together with you in Milan, for the presentation of the book “13 answers”, translated by comrade Leonidas.

This year coincides with the 50th anniversary of the first armed action of the November 17 Revolutionary Organization, in December 1975 against the head of the CIA in Greece. This is a further reason for a broader discussion, with the distance of time, for the armed counter-violence movement in our countries and around the world.

In this little book there is no simple account of the facts of the Greek version of this movement. If we want to get closer to the truth, we cannot isolate it from its historical roots, we cannot exclude it from the totality of the historical process, from the path of social evolution, from the international conjuncture and from the geostrategy of the movement throughout the world.

17N always considered itself as part of the current of resistance that runs through the history of our earth, and as part of the broader current of the resistance of peoples. The answers it gave as well as its evolutionary path are similar to the answers that have been given in other lands and to the evolutionary path of other movements in other countries.

In my opinion, in addition to the warning that the weak can make the powerful tremble, the most important contribution of the 17N was its adherence to ideological warfare, in the attempt to interpret reality by the socially active, in the face of the dominant lie and its organized reproduction. In an attempt not to rewrite history.

The edition of this book, as well as today’s debate, are part of this ongoing ideological struggle, as an attempt to be useful to those who seek their own paths to social liberation.

Source: https://panetteriaoccupata.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/18/un-breve-saluto-di-dimitris-koufontinas/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18486

#17N #armedStruggle #DimitrisKoufontinas #europe #greece #italy #milan #PoliticalPrisoners

Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism: Martin Sostre, 1975

“The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism?”

One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre ’s essay, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross , Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of “repressive fascist measures” were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to “ infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.”

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be “multi-dimensional,” “complex,” and able to meet people where they are.

Born in East Harlem on March 20, 1923, Martin Ramirez Sostre , was an Afro-Puerto Rican revolutionary anarchist. After a short stint in the army and a longer period of hustling, Sostre opened the legendary Afro Asian Book Shop at 1412 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, NY. The bookstore became a political and pedagogical refuge for many during the urban strife and whitesupremacist warfare that rocked the city in the late 1960s. In 1967, Sostre and co-worker Geraldine Robinson were arrested on COINTELPRO fabricated drug charges. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty to forty years in prison. Sostre spent the next decade in prison, often in solitary confinement, regularly humiliated and tortured by guards.

While incarcerated , Sostre became a successful “jailhouse lawyer” using legal appeals for his own rights. He also advocated for the religious and political rights of all prisoners and for the end of draconian policies of censorship, solitary confinement, and invasive bodily exams. As the editors of the North Carolina Central Law Review note in their introduction to Sostre’s 1973 essay “The New Prisoner” Sostre was also “the moving force behind the formation of a prisoners’ union in New York State and an advocate of minimum wages for inmate workers.” Sostre also introduced figures like Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchist theory and practice. Sostre was released from prison in 1976 through a combination of his own efforts and of the Free Martin Sostre campaign. He died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92.

A visionary with a highly attuned sense of both justice and praxis, Martin Sostre had the mind of a political strategist. These qualities are demonstrated in his essay “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism.” We reprint it below.

Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism

Martin Sostre

Sisters and Brothers:

The escalating repression by this predatory, racist and sexist capitalist system makes glaringly clear to all but the most politically backward that the dire predictions that U.S. capitalism would evolve into fascism have come to pass. Restoration of the death penalty, life sentences for drugs, recent supreme Court rulings upholding the denial of the right to live in communes, the right to privacy and human dignity (by granting police the right to arbitrarily invade peoples’ persons and homes and use as evidence in court anything seized during the illegal search), police electronic eavesdropping, infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide are some of the repressive fascist measures now being implemented.

The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism? Shall we continue spouting revolutionary rhetoric without commensurate deeds and passively stand by like sheep while our comrades are framed by the gestapo police kidnapped off the streets and murdered one by one? Must we passively wait our turn to be led to the oppressors’ cages, brutalised or murdered? Or shall we oppose the choking fascist oppression which if allowed to continue encroaching on what is left of our personal freedoms will eventually convert us into de-humanised mindless robots? The answer is obvious. Indeed, to defend ourselves by all means necessary against the destruction of our human rights and personhood not only is the natural right to self-defence but a human duty.

By what means then shall we resist the fascist oppressors? The answer to this is determined by the means employed to press us. Our oppression is multi-dimensional. We are oppressed economically, legally, psychologically, culturally, physically and by all other means deemed necessary by the criminal ruling class to maintain themselves in power. Since oppression is multi-dimensional, does not common sense dictate that resistance to it be multi-dimensional with each level of oppression challenged by a commensurate level of revolutionary resistance?

For example, the fascist lies propagated by the controlled media press must be challenged with revolutionary truth disseminated by the movement press, tapes, films, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, etc. Not too many revolutionaries and militants will disagree with this. Only when the same common-sense is applied to opposing fascist violence with revolutionary armed resistance do many of them become horrified. Witness the reaction of most of the movement people to SLA’s [Symbionese Liberation Army] revolutionary response to fascist repression.

The current revolutionary action of the SLA is the correct and inevitable response to the countless kidnappings, frame-ups, brutalisations and murders perpetrated by the ruling class members upon resistors of oppression. At long last the individual members of this exploitative-racist-sexist system are being subjected to revolutionary justice. As Malcolm X said, “It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” I extend my revolutionary love and solidarity to my SLA comrades and wish them every success.

Why then are so-called militants and revolutionaries so horrified when armed fascist repression is resisted by the armed might of the people? Do they expect the people to revert to the turn-the-other-cheek state of the 1950s and respond to fascist murder, sadistic brutalisation, frame-ups and tortures with passive acquiescence, love for our fascist enemies and cooperation in our own oppression?

Or is it that these horrified so-called militants and revolutionaries see the liberation struggle as one dimensional, to be fought solely on the level of consciousness they happen to be on? Surely they cannot be so politically retarded [sic] as to believe that in a liberation struggle the enemy should be fought on only one level – that approved by the enemy.

It is just as absurd to propose that everyone resist fascist oppression through peaceful means as to propose armed resistance for everyone. Just because I’m a revolutionary anarcho-communist who believes in armed struggle does not dogmatize me to propose that everyone arm and go underground. Nor would I denounce those who refuse to do so.

Paradoxically, though these leftists bitterly denounce all violence by US revolutionaries against the US ruling class, they highly praise as “heroic” the armed violence of the revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, Ireland, the Middle-East and Latin America. The rule seems to be that armed violence is an acceptable form of revolutionary struggle except when employed by US revolutionaries against the fascist ruling class of the US. In effect, it’s as if the role of these left groups is to protect the ruling class from violence and confine the liberation struggle to the boundaries of legal activities approved by the ruling class.

However, the irrefutable truth is that a liberation struggle is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war is a complicated process of mass struggle, armed and unarmed, peace and violent, legal and clandestine, economic and political, where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axle of armed struggle. Anyone who by now has not grasped these basic facts does not know what liberation struggle is – or is trying to palm off reformism for liberation struggle.

A distinction must be made between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists seek merely to reform through legal means, and not overthrow the existing fascist system. That’s why they panic when the people exercise their right to armed self-defence against the genocidal violence of the fascist ruling class. Revolutionaries seek the complete overthrow of the fascist system by all means necessary including armed struggle. Revolutionaries seek, moreover, to subject to peoples’ justice individual members of the ruling class for their many crimes against humanity.

The spreading of the East and West coasts of the philosophy of subjecting members and agents of the ruling class to people’s justice attests to how widespread this revolutionary concept has become. It can never be erased from the consciousness of the people, the revolutionary clock.

At long last the peoples’ armed force has emerged within the United States to oppose the gestapo of the ruling class. The balance of power has radically shifted. Gone forever are the days when fascists could prepare every conceivable crime with impunity. The price of oppression has been raised and shall soon become prohibitive.

The stolen billions of dollars possessed by members of the criminal ruling class shall soon become a liability. They’ll be forced to convert their mansions into fortresses protected by round the clock armed guards and electronic protective devices. Every venture outside the besieged fortress will require escorts of armed guards. Even this will not guarantee safety. For revolutionary justice shall stalk the fascist criminals at every turn. Already the people’s army has sent shivers of fear through the spine of the criminal ruling class who clearly recognise the signs as meaning: the beginning of the end.

Conversely, the people’s armed self-defence force has created new hope in the hearts of the oppressed – particularly revolutionary comrades held hostage in fascist prisons serving long sentences. Soon the fascist ruling class will be forced to free these prisoners of war in exchange for captured members of their own class.

The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Indeed, some movement papers quoted statements from the controlled press to support their claim that the people rejected the kidnapping. The criminal ruling class rubbed their hands in glee and publicised how divided the left was over the SLA. Each left organisation seemed to be competing with the others for legitimacy by denouncing the SLA. It was utterly disgusting, reactionary and opportunistic.

Nor were the denunciations made in a spirit of constructive criticism by fellow comrades. No attempt was made by the movement press to publicise the SLA’s programme, analyse it and point out where it was erroneous. The criticism was deliberately hostile and designed to isolate the SLA by poisoning people’s minds against them.

Conspicuously absent from the denunciations of the SLA in the movement press is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. The impression given is that armed struggle is not an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, that revolutionary violence is something repulsive which should be shunned. The left movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations, protest and repeat revolutionary slogans. Even after Chile (the lates of a series of tragedies where thousands of defenceless comrades were slaughtered because of the criminal refusal of leftist leaders to arm the people against the armed might of the ruling class) the movement in the United States still follows the same ill-fated line of Allende – as evidenced by the bitter denunciations of the armed action of the SLA.

Most movement organisations are so busy following their dogmatic party lines, repeating revolutionary cliches and downing other movement groups that they’re unable to see the self-evident. Were their natural powers of perception and consciousness not stultified by party-lineism they would know that a revolutionary liberation movement must deal with the enemy concurrently on all levels, including armed violence. Otherwise when the inevitable showdown with the ruling class comes, the revolution will be left defenceless and the lives of our beloved comrades needlessly sacrificed.

The SLA is the armed resistance of the people to the exploitative, racist and sexist fascism which is now upon us. All resistors of oppression, on whatever level of conscience they may be, should rejoice at the SLA’s existence, at their successful deeds  and the fear they put in the hearts of the criminal ruling class. It’s therefore the duty of us all to support by all means necessary, our SLA comrades. We must close ranks with them and give them the support they need. Let’s not fall for the malicious lies spread by agents of the FBI about the SLA which are designed to isolate the SLA from the people to make it easier to capture and murder them.

I have carefully studied the Declaration of the Revolutionary War and the Symbionese Liberation Army and find it generally sound. It incorporates much of our historical revolutionary experience. I believe that the Symbionese Liberation Army has one of the most advanced revolutionary programmes for liberation in operation within the United States of America.

The SLA represents the greatest challenge to fascist power because it objectifies the nucleus of the people’s army which as history shows is necessary to deliver the death-blow to the military arm of the fascist parasitic class.

Your comrade in struggle,

Martin Sostre

Martin Sostre, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross 4 no. 3 (August 1975)

source: Black Agenda Report

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18127

#armedStruggle #blackLiberation #martinSostre #northAmerica #revolution

Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism: Martin Sostre, 1975

“The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism?”

One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre ’s essay, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross , Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of “repressive fascist measures” were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to “ infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.”

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be “multi-dimensional,” “complex,” and able to meet people where they are.

Born in East Harlem on March 20, 1923, Martin Ramirez Sostre , was an Afro-Puerto Rican revolutionary anarchist. After a short stint in the army and a longer period of hustling, Sostre opened the legendary Afro Asian Book Shop at 1412 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, NY. The bookstore became a political and pedagogical refuge for many during the urban strife and whitesupremacist warfare that rocked the city in the late 1960s. In 1967, Sostre and co-worker Geraldine Robinson were arrested on COINTELPRO fabricated drug charges. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty to forty years in prison. Sostre spent the next decade in prison, often in solitary confinement, regularly humiliated and tortured by guards.

While incarcerated , Sostre became a successful “jailhouse lawyer” using legal appeals for his own rights. He also advocated for the religious and political rights of all prisoners and for the end of draconian policies of censorship, solitary confinement, and invasive bodily exams. As the editors of the North Carolina Central Law Review note in their introduction to Sostre’s 1973 essay “The New Prisoner” Sostre was also “the moving force behind the formation of a prisoners’ union in New York State and an advocate of minimum wages for inmate workers.” Sostre also introduced figures like Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchist theory and practice. Sostre was released from prison in 1976 through a combination of his own efforts and of the Free Martin Sostre campaign. He died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92.

A visionary with a highly attuned sense of both justice and praxis, Martin Sostre had the mind of a political strategist. These qualities are demonstrated in his essay “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism.” We reprint it below.

Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism

Martin Sostre

Sisters and Brothers:

The escalating repression by this predatory, racist and sexist capitalist system makes glaringly clear to all but the most politically backward that the dire predictions that U.S. capitalism would evolve into fascism have come to pass. Restoration of the death penalty, life sentences for drugs, recent supreme Court rulings upholding the denial of the right to live in communes, the right to privacy and human dignity (by granting police the right to arbitrarily invade peoples’ persons and homes and use as evidence in court anything seized during the illegal search), police electronic eavesdropping, infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide are some of the repressive fascist measures now being implemented.

The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism? Shall we continue spouting revolutionary rhetoric without commensurate deeds and passively stand by like sheep while our comrades are framed by the gestapo police kidnapped off the streets and murdered one by one? Must we passively wait our turn to be led to the oppressors’ cages, brutalised or murdered? Or shall we oppose the choking fascist oppression which if allowed to continue encroaching on what is left of our personal freedoms will eventually convert us into de-humanised mindless robots? The answer is obvious. Indeed, to defend ourselves by all means necessary against the destruction of our human rights and personhood not only is the natural right to self-defence but a human duty.

By what means then shall we resist the fascist oppressors? The answer to this is determined by the means employed to press us. Our oppression is multi-dimensional. We are oppressed economically, legally, psychologically, culturally, physically and by all other means deemed necessary by the criminal ruling class to maintain themselves in power. Since oppression is multi-dimensional, does not common sense dictate that resistance to it be multi-dimensional with each level of oppression challenged by a commensurate level of revolutionary resistance?

For example, the fascist lies propagated by the controlled media press must be challenged with revolutionary truth disseminated by the movement press, tapes, films, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, etc. Not too many revolutionaries and militants will disagree with this. Only when the same common-sense is applied to opposing fascist violence with revolutionary armed resistance do many of them become horrified. Witness the reaction of most of the movement people to SLA’s [Symbionese Liberation Army] revolutionary response to fascist repression.

The current revolutionary action of the SLA is the correct and inevitable response to the countless kidnappings, frame-ups, brutalisations and murders perpetrated by the ruling class members upon resistors of oppression. At long last the individual members of this exploitative-racist-sexist system are being subjected to revolutionary justice. As Malcolm X said, “It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” I extend my revolutionary love and solidarity to my SLA comrades and wish them every success.

Why then are so-called militants and revolutionaries so horrified when armed fascist repression is resisted by the armed might of the people? Do they expect the people to revert to the turn-the-other-cheek state of the 1950s and respond to fascist murder, sadistic brutalisation, frame-ups and tortures with passive acquiescence, love for our fascist enemies and cooperation in our own oppression?

Or is it that these horrified so-called militants and revolutionaries see the liberation struggle as one dimensional, to be fought solely on the level of consciousness they happen to be on? Surely they cannot be so politically retarded [sic] as to believe that in a liberation struggle the enemy should be fought on only one level – that approved by the enemy.

It is just as absurd to propose that everyone resist fascist oppression through peaceful means as to propose armed resistance for everyone. Just because I’m a revolutionary anarcho-communist who believes in armed struggle does not dogmatize me to propose that everyone arm and go underground. Nor would I denounce those who refuse to do so.

Paradoxically, though these leftists bitterly denounce all violence by US revolutionaries against the US ruling class, they highly praise as “heroic” the armed violence of the revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, Ireland, the Middle-East and Latin America. The rule seems to be that armed violence is an acceptable form of revolutionary struggle except when employed by US revolutionaries against the fascist ruling class of the US. In effect, it’s as if the role of these left groups is to protect the ruling class from violence and confine the liberation struggle to the boundaries of legal activities approved by the ruling class.

However, the irrefutable truth is that a liberation struggle is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war is a complicated process of mass struggle, armed and unarmed, peace and violent, legal and clandestine, economic and political, where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axle of armed struggle. Anyone who by now has not grasped these basic facts does not know what liberation struggle is – or is trying to palm off reformism for liberation struggle.

A distinction must be made between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists seek merely to reform through legal means, and not overthrow the existing fascist system. That’s why they panic when the people exercise their right to armed self-defence against the genocidal violence of the fascist ruling class. Revolutionaries seek the complete overthrow of the fascist system by all means necessary including armed struggle. Revolutionaries seek, moreover, to subject to peoples’ justice individual members of the ruling class for their many crimes against humanity.

The spreading of the East and West coasts of the philosophy of subjecting members and agents of the ruling class to people’s justice attests to how widespread this revolutionary concept has become. It can never be erased from the consciousness of the people, the revolutionary clock.

At long last the peoples’ armed force has emerged within the United States to oppose the gestapo of the ruling class. The balance of power has radically shifted. Gone forever are the days when fascists could prepare every conceivable crime with impunity. The price of oppression has been raised and shall soon become prohibitive.

The stolen billions of dollars possessed by members of the criminal ruling class shall soon become a liability. They’ll be forced to convert their mansions into fortresses protected by round the clock armed guards and electronic protective devices. Every venture outside the besieged fortress will require escorts of armed guards. Even this will not guarantee safety. For revolutionary justice shall stalk the fascist criminals at every turn. Already the people’s army has sent shivers of fear through the spine of the criminal ruling class who clearly recognise the signs as meaning: the beginning of the end.

Conversely, the people’s armed self-defence force has created new hope in the hearts of the oppressed – particularly revolutionary comrades held hostage in fascist prisons serving long sentences. Soon the fascist ruling class will be forced to free these prisoners of war in exchange for captured members of their own class.

The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Indeed, some movement papers quoted statements from the controlled press to support their claim that the people rejected the kidnapping. The criminal ruling class rubbed their hands in glee and publicised how divided the left was over the SLA. Each left organisation seemed to be competing with the others for legitimacy by denouncing the SLA. It was utterly disgusting, reactionary and opportunistic.

Nor were the denunciations made in a spirit of constructive criticism by fellow comrades. No attempt was made by the movement press to publicise the SLA’s programme, analyse it and point out where it was erroneous. The criticism was deliberately hostile and designed to isolate the SLA by poisoning people’s minds against them.

Conspicuously absent from the denunciations of the SLA in the movement press is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. The impression given is that armed struggle is not an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, that revolutionary violence is something repulsive which should be shunned. The left movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations, protest and repeat revolutionary slogans. Even after Chile (the lates of a series of tragedies where thousands of defenceless comrades were slaughtered because of the criminal refusal of leftist leaders to arm the people against the armed might of the ruling class) the movement in the United States still follows the same ill-fated line of Allende – as evidenced by the bitter denunciations of the armed action of the SLA.

Most movement organisations are so busy following their dogmatic party lines, repeating revolutionary cliches and downing other movement groups that they’re unable to see the self-evident. Were their natural powers of perception and consciousness not stultified by party-lineism they would know that a revolutionary liberation movement must deal with the enemy concurrently on all levels, including armed violence. Otherwise when the inevitable showdown with the ruling class comes, the revolution will be left defenceless and the lives of our beloved comrades needlessly sacrificed.

The SLA is the armed resistance of the people to the exploitative, racist and sexist fascism which is now upon us. All resistors of oppression, on whatever level of conscience they may be, should rejoice at the SLA’s existence, at their successful deeds  and the fear they put in the hearts of the criminal ruling class. It’s therefore the duty of us all to support by all means necessary, our SLA comrades. We must close ranks with them and give them the support they need. Let’s not fall for the malicious lies spread by agents of the FBI about the SLA which are designed to isolate the SLA from the people to make it easier to capture and murder them.

I have carefully studied the Declaration of the Revolutionary War and the Symbionese Liberation Army and find it generally sound. It incorporates much of our historical revolutionary experience. I believe that the Symbionese Liberation Army has one of the most advanced revolutionary programmes for liberation in operation within the United States of America.

The SLA represents the greatest challenge to fascist power because it objectifies the nucleus of the people’s army which as history shows is necessary to deliver the death-blow to the military arm of the fascist parasitic class.

Your comrade in struggle,

Martin Sostre

Martin Sostre, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross 4 no. 3 (August 1975)

source: Black Agenda Report

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18127

#armedStruggle #blackLiberation #martinSostre #northAmerica #revolution

#MartinSostre #ArmedStruggle #fascism #DiversityOfTactics

"One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre’s essay, 'Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,' is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine 'Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross', Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of 'repressive fascist measures' were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to 'infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.'

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be 'multi-dimensional,' 'complex,' and able to meet people where they are."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-armed-struggle-natural-response-fascism-martin-sostre-1975

#MartinSostre #ArmedStruggle #fascism #DiversityOfTactics

"One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre’s essay, 'Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,' is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine 'Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross', Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of 'repressive fascist measures' were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to 'infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.'

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be 'multi-dimensional,' 'complex,' and able to meet people where they are."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-armed-struggle-natural-response-fascism-martin-sostre-1975

#MartinSostre #ArmedStruggle #fascism #DiversityOfTactics

"One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre’s essay, 'Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,' is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine 'Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross', Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of 'repressive fascist measures' were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to 'infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.'

In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be 'multi-dimensional,' 'complex,' and able to meet people where they are."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-armed-struggle-natural-response-fascism-martin-sostre-1975

“The Possibility of a Historic Moment is Now” – Burkhard Garweg

… from the German newsite “nd” …

Below we document a letter from Burkhard Garweg, which was sent exclusively to »nd«. Garweg is one of the most wanted people by German police authorities because of suspected RAF membership and several robberies in which millions of euros were stolen. His letter is a critical outline of the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and at the same time a response to Caroline Braunmühl, daughter of RAF victim Gerold von Braunmühl, who in January in the »nd« was critical of her brother’s »call for clarification« , but also responded to a previous letter from Burkhard Garweg. Burkhard Garweg now addresses Braunmühl’s statements in his current text. He criticizes the RAF for a phase lasting from 1977 to around 1990 in which the urban guerrillas made military confrontation with the state the focus of their politics and neglected social revolutionary struggles. The author, born in 1968, comes from the autonomous squatter movement and now lives illegally, alternates between two levels in his text: one that analyses and evaluates from today’s perspective and a second, in italics, that speaks very personally from the past and his youth. Burkhard Garweg’s contribution is fully documented below.

“The possibility of a historic moment is now”

On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.

“The possibility of a historic moment is now”

On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.

In her text in »nd.Die Woche« of January 18, 2025, Caroline Braunmühl presents an alternative position to the bourgeois attitude that attempts to depoliticize the history of militant and armed resistance by reducing its content to violence and negating a political conflict.

In my statement of December 2024, it was also important to me to present resistance to capitalism in the context of the relations of violence – exploitation, the rule of man over man, nationalism, militarism and war – and thus to conduct the debate according to historical reality and to counter the historiography of the rulers and their attempts at manipulation.

The aim of bourgeois historiography is to delegitimize and criminalize anti-capitalist resistance and its history. Its elites have a fundamental interest in maintaining the conditions of exploitation and oppression and in being able to continue to make profits. This is what the proclamation from the ranks of its elites in the 1990s, which has gone down in history, stands for: “there is no alternative.”

Caroline Braunmühl associates the RAF and other militant groups, such as the Rote Zora, with radical resistance against the “violence of socially dominant groups and individuals against socially subordinates – such as class justice, patriarchal violence or transnational relationships of exploitation, oppression and war, from which the economic elites in the Federal Republic of Germany have profited and continue to profit today.” She identifies the justification for militant resistance against violent relations and at the same time denies the legitimacy of targeted assassinations by the RAF in its history.

She criticizes my statement from a feminist perspective and for lacking criticism of the RAF.

I agree with her that a reflective picture of the history of the struggles with the ability to see their weaknesses is necessary. The main thing is to be able to draw conclusions for the struggles of the future.

The world of the dominant capitalist system is moving at an increasing pace towards social and global erosion: war, poverty, displacement and the destruction of the planet’s ecological basis for life. The bourgeois state – and this affects the entire capitalist center of Europe and the USA – is increasingly using right-wing and authoritarian means. It uses the construction of a “national community” to differentiate itself from migrants, Muslims, refugees and the poor. It uses racism, nationalism and rapid militarization both internally and externally. This has repercussions – some of which are also intended – on bourgeois society.

This is becoming radicalized by the deeply rooted racist, patriarchal and social forms of differentiation, exclusion and oppression within society. The world is unmistakably moving towards an infernal tipping point of social, ecological and military erosion.

Capitalism offers no solution to this. It would also be a contradiction in terms. The elites’ solutions to the crisis are now authoritarianism, fascism, war and the process of unifying bourgeois and fascist politics. This is nothing other than a journey into the possible abyss with clear parallels to the historical crises that culminated in the world wars of 1914 and 1939 – albeit with an extremely increased global destructive potential in modern times.

Anyone who wants to prevent this should focus less on the hopeless rescue of bourgeois democracy as a facet of capitalism and the associated retention of the fundamental relations of violence, but rather on social revolutionary alternatives that can only be achieved as a result of social revolutionary and emancipatory struggles.

Existential questions arise: In which steps, initiatives and processes can the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary and internationalist left be achieved?

But also: What do we take with us into the future from the struggles and concepts of history, from the attempts to overcome the thoroughly violent capitalism and imperialism? How do we as revolutionary leftists discuss and write history from below and appropriate it for the struggles of today and tomorrow and against the propagandistic, depoliticizing and criminalizing historiography from above?

I see in the history of the RAF courage and determination to dare something, to take risks and the unconditionality and seriousness and the surrender of one’s own privileges that are also needed to achieve the transformation of the misery of domination and oppression – including the overturning of power imbalances within society.

How much I was moved as a young person by their determination and unconditionality and the way they put themselves aside in deep and true solidarity with the poor and colonized people of this world, with the exploited in the countries of the starving Tricontinent and the insurgents there. How much I was moved – still wet behind the ears and without much knowledge and above all out of empathy with those who had nothing or almost nothing – by the militant internationalism they stood for. There were times when I read the texts of Ernesto Cardenal or later the last texts of Ulrike, which I was not yet able to fully understand.

I heard about Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, one of whom was a political prisoner in South Africa for decades, and the other an insurgent against South Africa’s apartheid system who was tortured and murdered by the South African police. I was outraged by this unspeakable, racist violence, including state violence, but also moved by the resistance of so many and that of the ANC. At the same time, however, I also learned that I myself lived in a country whose elite profited from this system of violence known as apartheid, and was deeply connected to the racist regime in South Africa, its military and its police. It was a regime made up of predominantly South African, German or US capital, of the local government, military and police, of the self-proclaimed elite of white colonialists, who treated people like slaves, exploited them, killed them and declared them second or third class citizens because they were black. I perceived it – and it also shaped my life – this oppressive and violent reality of this colonial and state crime, this “normality” of the world of capitalism. The perpetrators and accomplices of this unspeakable racism, also committed by the state, and these crimes of colonialism sat in their headquarters in Pretoria or Johannesburg. They sat in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich or Bonn on the boards of banks and corporations, in the German government or in the barracks of the Western world, especially the German, Israeli or US military.

For me, it was the RAF that showed solidarity in the struggle with the poor and the revolutionaries in Nicaragua, El Salvador and South Africa, those attempts at revolution that had moved me since my early youth. I began to realise that it was a shared resistance – that in the metropolis and that in the Tricontinent. And that was what the RAF meant.

History is also the history of mistakes, defeats and moments of sadness
For me, the history of the RAF is also a history of strategic and tactical errors.

In the history of the RAF, there are also moments that were not shaped by the moral compass of the revolution.

Nobody has to find the whole story correct today. For me, this does not call into question the fundamental legitimacy of the contribution of various attempts at resistance over the centuries – including that of the RAF – to liberation from the violent conditions.

The RAF emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement. The 68 movement reconstructed the anti-capitalist resistance that had been crushed by the Nazis in Germany. It brought the personal continuities of the elite into the consciousness of society. It is the miserable reality of the Federal Republic of Germany that it was built up by the old Nazis. They made careers as converted democrats in all state institutions and on the boards of banks and corporations – under the umbrella of the USA. The Nazi elite became the elite of West German democracy overnight.

It was a rebellion against the reactionary stuffiness of the West German democracy shaped by National Socialism and a questioning of the existing capitalist order, which was socially reactionary and repressive and structurally based on exploitation and militarization.

After the murder of the anti-rearmament demonstrator Philipp Müller by the police and after the ban on the KPD in 1956, police violence, professional bans and emergency laws were the state’s response at the end of the 1960s to the movement of students and apprentices, youth, the sub-proletariat and other sections of the population.

It was the time of the Vietnam War, the merciless brutality of the US military machine, which tried to wipe out the Vietnamese attempt at revolution and went down in history with the massacres of the Vietnamese population and the use of the chemical warfare agent napalm. Huge movements of solidarity against the imperialist war and for the right to liberation by the Vietnamese armed and revolutionary movement arose around the world. “Bring the war home” – a slogan of the US anti-war movement. The 1968 movement and the RAF did exactly that and brought the worldwide resistance against the Vietnam War into German society. With the immense resistance against the Western world’s war of terror, the possibility of liberation had entered the consciousness of humanity worldwide and was on the table at the time. Revolutionary, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles developed worldwide. Capitalism and imperialism were up for debate. Armed struggle of the Gauche Proletarienne in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, armed struggle in Spain, Northern Ireland, England, the Basque Country, Greece, Japan, Palestine, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the USA, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the urban guerrillas in Mexico and Brazil or the anti-fascist uprising of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

It was the time of anti-colonial struggles in the South, in Mozambique, Algeria and many other places of anti-colonial liberation against the crimes of the West there.

The “racial segregation” of apartheid in South Africa, the state and social racism in the USA, the murder of a million people during the crushing of the Communist Party in Indonesia by US military forces or the CIA-led military coup against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile are examples of Western self-evident truths and brutalities that humanity should accept.

This violence of Western capitalism and imperialism generated revolutionary counter-violence around the world, such as the resistance of the ANC and the Black Panthers. It showed millions of people around the world that capitalism is built on the foundation of violence.

In Paris, a million people took to the streets, on strike and on the barricades – large parts of the population, students and proletarians together.

Berlin, Turin, Paris, New York: Revolution no longer seemed unthinkable. Things were shaking tremendously in the Western world.

In Germany, the state attempted to crush the insurgent movement with harsh repression, emergency laws, professional bans, the imprisonment of thousands and police violence. The first shot came from the weapon of the German state: the police murdered Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967.

The social democratic version of the crackdown consisted of carrot and stick, of repression and the offer of integration, which was intended to bring about the abandonment of any resistance to capitalism and imperialism in the march through the institutions – and continues to this day.

The situation in the world at that time, this age of uprisings and imperialism, whose state terror is visualized in the image of the Vietnamese girl fleeing from the bombs of the West, the social situation in the post-Nazi Federal Republic of Germany, the harsh and systematic state repression against the awakening, the elite of the Federal Republic of Germany riddled with Nazi perpetrators, the strikes – including wild ones, those marked by migrants – at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, the virulence of ideas of the revolutionary transformation of the status quo in all parts of society and the worldwide uprisings against imperialism, state racism and colonialism as well as the emergence of urban guerrilla groups in many countries, including the metropolises – allow, in my view, only one conclusion: the emergence of the various armed fighting groups in the Federal Republic of Germany, this risk, this revolutionary experiment was completely justified and had to be attempted. Not trying would have been a failure in revolutionary history. A historic moment was possible.

1972
The “Urban Guerrilla Concept” and other RAF texts of this period were also an attempt to halt the decline of the movement, which had been plagued by repression and integration, and to bring it into the perspective of liberation.

The RAF’s actions were directed against the imperialist war, against the means of power through repression and the aggressive and violent manipulation of society by the Springer press and other media. In all attacks, they were a link to the (19)68 movement.

By attacking the US Army headquarters and destroying the computer there, which was essential for the state terrorist bombing, the RAF clearly sided with the oppressed and those trying to free themselves, and thus played a part in defeating the cruel Western imperialism that was raging in Vietnam as part of the worldwide resistance. The destruction of the US military computer in Heidelberg meant that the bombing and the mass killing of people that went with it had to be stopped for several days. In Vietnam, the massacred population appreciated this.

In 1972, the RAF had a social revolutionary and anti-imperialist concept that was in a social context and proclaimed the primacy of practice. How sympathetic and right as a part of the class struggle was the serious and credible reference of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Raspe, Holger Meins and Ulrike Meinhof and all the others to the fringes of society, the sub-proletariat, the children in care homes, those who had become mentally ill in the system or to the proletarian women of the Märkisches Viertel – that proletarian and poor part of Berlin. The militants of the RAF came from all classes and from the history of different political ideas of this time of awakening: anarchism, communism, feminism, social revolutionaries and anti-imperialists. That is what I assume. How open the RAF was.

The RAF had a base in the insurgent movement that was in decline. Its practice was an attempt to take this movement into the revolutionary struggle against the decline. It was in line with social reality and the worldwide, revolutionary and anti-colonial awakening.

The RAF in its inception – just like 2 June and later the Revolutionary Cells and the Rote Zora – was, in its relationship to state violence and to the fundamental power relations in capitalism, legitimate revolutionary counter-violence and a legitimate attempt at liberation. All of the actions in its early days, which ended with the arrests of the militants of the time in 1972 and ’73, are a very clear expression of this and convey exactly that.

In a survey conducted at the time, one in five German citizens said they would be willing to protect a member of the RAF from arrest.

The time was ripe for this revolutionary attempt and it was part of worldwide revolutionary attempts. The emergence of the urban guerrilla groups RAF and 2 June at that time was based on historical conditions.

Given the circumstances, an attempt had to be made to reconstruct the fundamental resistance and the option of liberation that the Nazi state had once destroyed with the extermination of the workers’ movement and whose Nazi elites now opposed it again as converted, flawless democrats.

Looking back on this history of resistance and this contribution to the liberation attempt, how important this early period of the RAF is to me and how it helped to shape my relationship with it. I would not be able to understand the history of the RAF in its entirety – neither in its merits nor in its lows – without being aware of this time and the legitimacy of its creation. That time – I was just born at the beginning of it – seems distant, but the content of their attempt, even if it is history, is close to me.

After the arrests in 1972/73, the RAF only existed as prisoners
“Dare to be more democratic,” as Willy Brandt said in 1972, had no reality in the execution of Tommy Weisbecker, Georg von Rauch, Petra Schelm or of bystanders during the manhunt, such as Ian McLeod – shot through a closed door – or the killing of the unarmed apprentice Richard Epple by the police.

In the prisons, it was the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the government – in other words, the state – that decided on war against the imprisoned RAF and bore responsibility for it: solitary confinement for all political prisoners, daily cell raids, physical abuse by the rolling squads in the prisons, the dead wing in Cologne-Ossendorf, in which Ulrike Meinhof and Astrid Proll were sealed off from all sensory perceptions, or the research into isolation as a method of subjugating people in prison at the University of Hamburg.

The state’s plan to forcibly open Ulrike Meinhof’s skull in order to examine her brain and “prove” that her resistance was due to “brain damage” was only prevented due to public protest. The factual parallels to the research of the Nazi perpetrator Josef Mengele, who carried out forced examinations on living people in the German extermination camps during the Nazi regime and killed or mutilated them in the process, are obvious. These are traces of this period and of the state’s attempt – in its excesses one could also call fascist – to annihilate or subjugate those who had questioned the existing order in a revolutionary way and were at the mercy of the system as prisoners.

The death of Holger Meins in 1974 during a hunger strike against the torture of solitary confinement through force-feeding, the dosage of which was designed to lead to his death, and the denial of medical help, was a state murder. They knew and wanted him to die as a result of their measures. In the war against prisoners and in the attempt to subjugate or destroy them, the elite clearly broke with the basic law of bourgeois democracy that they proclaimed: “Human dignity is inviolable” and openly showed the violence inherent in the bourgeois state.

The former officers of the Wehrmacht of the Nazi state: Schmidt, Buback, Herold and others, were the ones who ordered this extreme form of state violence and were responsible for it.

Even much later in the next decade of the (19)80s, as a young person I was moved by the violent and state-terrorist reality of that time and helped me to understand that the foundation of the bourgeois state in capitalism is based on violence, terror, war and exploitation.

A little later, in the 1980s – I remember being very moved by it myself – I once told my mother about the torture of prisoners in solitary confinement. She was visibly moved. Unbeknownst to her, I had broken the windows of some banks with others to support the prisoners on hunger strike. Many years later, I would hear that my father and mother had themselves moved in solidarity with the prisoners and had begun to support the Kurdish liberation struggle as part of their lives.

Social and societal empathy is something they gave me in life. It was also reflected in their decisions, which led them to become involved in the history of resistance in solidarity and, despite the repression of German or Turkish “security forces”, were prepared to leave the privilege of their own safety behind at times.

1975, Stockholm
After the death of Holger Meins, whose death also demonstrated that the German state was once again prepared to liquidate prisoners 29 years after the end of Nazi fascism, the justified fear of further state murders of prisoners and in an attempt to free the prisoners from the obvious attempt at subjugation and extermination in the prisons led the newly formed Holger Meins Commando of the RAF to the German embassy in Stockholm. It demanded that the German government release 26 political prisoners and threatened to blow up the embassy if it did not do so. The state refused to contact the occupiers and preferred to sacrifice its embassy staff for the sake of German state interests.

During the occupation and in response to the German government’s refusal to enter into negotiations, the commando shot the diplomats Andreas von Mirbach and Heinz Hillegaart.

Siegfried Hausner, a member of Holger Meins’ commando, was seriously injured during the occupation of the embassy. With burns all over his body, he was no longer able to be transported. Contrary to medical instructions, the federal government insisted on transporting him to Stuttgart-Stammheim, which was tantamount to a death sentence. They knew he would die from it, and he died.

The RAF’s reaction to the tough stance of the federal government, which placed military priority over politics, was to be countered with the same logic. By shooting the two hostages, who themselves had no direct responsibility for the violent situation to which the RAF responded by murdering them, the RAF lost the moment of revolutionary morality and legitimacy in this action.

1976
Ulrike Meinhof died after four years in the dungeons of the powerful.

After the failed occupation of the embassy in Stockholm, there was no longer any visible RAF outside until 1977. The state’s war against RAF prisoners, solitary confinement, special laws and special justice remained. With the verdict against the Stammheimers, the prisoners in the power’s isolation cells were to disappear forever. The system of annihilation or subjugation and special justice continued unbroken.

The brutality of the ongoing state terrorist war in the prisons, which could not be stopped by Stockholm or by the prisoners’ hunger strikes, shows today a historical phase in which the attempt at self-defense and, in principle, the attempt to free political prisoners from the torture of solitary confinement was justified and legitimate. The occupation of the Stockholm embassy and the RAF’s ’77 offensive took place under this banner.

This is also demonstrated by the successful liberation of prisoners through the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz in 1975 by the June 2nd Movement.

1977
Siegfried Buback, Federal Prosecutor General and largely responsible for the repression of the time and in particular for his orders for solitary confinement and special justice as well as for the murder of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner and Ulrike Meinhof, was killed by the RAF’s Ulrike Meinhof commando. From the perspective of those who were aware of the violent relationships in capitalism and who perceived or were affected by the extreme state violence of the time, this act was a form of legitimate counter-violence and self-defense. Denying this connection cannot in any way capture the historical reality.

This was the beginning of Offensive ’77, with which the RAF attempted to end the “special detention” of the RAF prisoners by liberating them and to enable a reorientation of the RAF and the prisoners.

She wanted to kidnap the head of the Dresden bank, Jürgen Ponto, but failed and ended with his unintentional killing.

Schleier kidnapping 1977: “Those responsible for the crisis team decided to sacrifice Schleyer for the sake of state.”

During the kidnapping of Hans Martin Schleyer, four police officers, Schleyer’s bodyguards, were shot dead.

The federal government declared a state of emergency. The executive branch assumed decision-making power in the crisis team. The press declared itself to be in line.

Historically, the state of emergency at that time represents the fascist power option that bourgeois democracy can use in capitalism. It also represents the elite’s willingness to use it when necessary.

Those responsible for the crisis team decided to sacrifice Schleyer for reasons of state. They refused to exchange him for the prisoners. This was the state’s decision for a purely military solution. This was accompanied by discussions in the crisis team at the time about shooting RAF prisoners every hour. All of this speaks of the government’s responsibility for the course of history.

The RAF responded, in the hope of persuading the ruling crisis team to adopt a different stance, by authorizing a commando of the Palestinian PFLP to hijack an airplane carrying innocent civilians.

The Offensive ’77 completely isolated the RAF. It created a situation in which the entire left turned away from it and the RAF closed itself off to the left. Revolutionary goals that attempted to achieve a social impact were no longer a visible and direct element of its actions. It acted primarily for itself and therefore subjectivistically. It escalated the question of power against the state on a purely military level and thus opened a duel against the state that it could only lose.

The military dynamics ran counter to political analysis. The isolated and subjectivist struggle was the precondition for an unjustifiable hijacking that ran counter to revolutionary principles and the idea of ​​revolution as class struggle.

The killing of the four police officers as a prerequisite for negotiations is difficult to understand today and corresponds to a purely military logic. The killing of Ponto was not intentional and in itself ran counter to a realistic negotiating position for the release of the prisoners. Therefore, this action is part of the actions of the offensive at the time, which had lost its revolutionary legitimacy.

October 18, 1977
The German government had rejected any political solution and risked the lives of the hostages by storming the plane in Mogadishu for the sake of German state interests.

Gudrun Enslin, Jan Raspe and Andreas Baader did not survive the night of October 18th in Stammheim. Irmgard Möller survived with serious injuries and declared: It was murder.

With Schleyer died a man who went down in history as the right-hand man of the SS leader Heydrich, head of the Protectorate of Czech Bohemia/Moravia, which was occupied by the Nazi state. Schleyer was a careerist in the SS and responsible for the deportation of more than 40,000 Jews to the German extermination camps. As a person, he was partly responsible for the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah.

He died as the personified continuity of Nazi perpetrators who made careers in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945 and whose elite he represented. He died as the boss of bosses, as the person responsible for the exploitative conditions of the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany state.

He also died as a prisoner of the RAF.

The death of the Nazi perpetrator and the representative of the continuity of Nazi fascism in West German capitalism is certainly not a moment of mourning.

Killing a prisoner or hostage is per se a moment of weakness and even a moment of defeat.

The defeat of ’77 marked the beginning of long phases in which the military dominated the visible path of the RAF before the political moment. The military confrontation between the guerrillas and the state was the focus of politics, unlike during the May ’72 offensive.

’77 shows that armed struggle can only work if it is part of political movements and is politically committed to them. Armed struggle is always only one possibility for revolutionary movements and not something that can work on its own. The isolated guerrilla always runs the risk of entering into a militaristic and subjectivist dynamic. In the conflict based on military logic, it can only lose in the metropolis.

The RAF was completely isolated after ’77. It had no base and had decided against social revolutionary politics in ’77.

The militaristic moment of Offensive ’77 marked the beginning of a policy focused on assassinations for the next 14 years.

The dissolving base of the guerrilla by the mid-1970s had led the Stammheim prisoners in their statements of 1976 to begin to emphasize that the RAF in anti-imperialism was beginning to distance itself from the social revolutionary and class struggle aspects of its concept of revolutionary struggle.

1979
With the attacks from 1979 to ’81 against the US military and two of its generals as high decision-makers and co-responsible for the most aggressive and powerful part of Western imperialism, the RAF ushered in the policy of urban guerrilla warfare focused on anti-imperialism. From then on, it sought its purpose in the international coordinates between liberation and the counter-strategy of imperialism. It saw itself – and was – part of the anti-imperialist liberation movements of the world. However, it was separated from the social conditions of its battle terrain. It shifted its analysis to the coordinates between liberation and imperialism. It only knew the world proletariat, which mutated into an abstraction without orientation to the social conditions.

May 1982
The strategy statement of the “May Paper”, which formulated the RAF’s policy and contained its purpose, conceptualized the mistakes of ’77 and laid the groundwork for the 1980s. The idea of ​​politics in the ’82 concept was an anti-imperialism whose focus was no longer on the consciousness of the society in which it fought. The bombs against the state and US imperialism had been planted. What was not intended were bombs in the consciousness of society.

It was a departure from the strategic principles of the “urban guerrilla concept” of 1972. The RAF’s anti-imperialism was now detached from any social revolutionary strategy.

The offer to others was militant attack or militancy in general at various levels in the context of the guerrilla’s anti-imperialist strategy and under its leadership.

In doing so, it appropriated a concept of avant-garde, with which it declared itself to be the avant-garde. However, whether something is avant-garde is ultimately decided by the course of history and the potential to bring others into the revolutionary struggle.

Due to the RAF’s lack of class analysis and its reduction to anti-imperialism in international coordinates, politics remained abstract and did not lead the guerrillas out of their isolation throughout the 1980s. Isolation here means isolation in a social relationship. The RAF was deeply connected and organized with comrades in the resistance and other small urban guerrilla groups, especially Action Directe from France, on the anti-imperialist and Western European fronts. But that was not enough for the revolutionary process, which fundamentally develops in a social context.

Without the social reference and without the primacy of the political, politics remained subjectivist and did not lead it out of the duel between state and guerrilla.

This was not changed by the “Fighting Units” strategically linked to the RAF or by militant groups calling themselves otherwise, who carried out a large number of arson and bomb attacks throughout the 1980s – for example, in 1982: militant actions against Siemens, AEG, US military barracks; 1984/85 Turkish consulate, NATO pipelines, NATO/US/German armed forces facilities, US secret service, Interior Ministry in Hanover, AEG data center; 1988 Renault branch, Deutsche Bank training center; 1989 Frankfurt Stock Exchange; 1990 Deutsche Bank data center and many more – all militant, non-armed actions in which the killing of human life was excluded and never happened.

In reality, the Western European front was weak and could not replace the missing strategy in social relations, which as a fundamental opposition could only have been social revolutionary and anti-imperialist.

The policy, reduced to anti-imperialism and free of class struggle, was an immense strategic mistake and was rightly criticized, for example, by the Belgian CCC, the Belgian communist urban guerrilla group of the 1980s, and completely ignored by the RAF throughout the 1980s.

The factual and historical prerequisites for a redefinition of politics since 1979 would have been both the completely isolated RAF and its reasons as well as the class situation in neoliberalism: the pacified proletarian layers, the integration of the proletariat with the promise of mass consumption in the metropolises; as well as isolation as a neoliberal principle of life, which was a result of the restructuring of industry in globalized neoliberalism. This was also a consequence of capitalism in response to the uprisings in the factories at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, as had occurred in Italy and France. The rulers feared the “mass worker” and preferred the isolation of the population in production and society.

The development of the worldwide liberation movements, the strategies of NATO in the coordinates between liberation and imperialism and the existence of various large, naturally reformist but partly also militant sub-sector movements would also have been the prerequisite for the necessary strategic repositioning of the urban guerrilla.

An urban guerrilla that was also socially revolutionary and not just anti-imperialist might have had the chance to bring together the movements that emerged independently of the RAF in the late 1970s and 1980s, some of which were also militant: the house-to-house fighting movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-NATO movement, the feminist movement and the solidarity movements with the liberation movements of the Tricontinent, into a socially revolutionary and anti-imperialist fundamental opposition. Then it would undoubtedly not have been possible to focus on the RAF/state conflict within the international coordinates and to set a militaristic dynamic in motion.

But the RAF was only committed to itself and did not manage to break out of it in the 1980s.

Politics from 1977 and throughout the 1980s involved only a few people. The radical left largely became spectators in the conflict between the anti-imperialist RAF and the state.

1984
The militaristic actions of the second half of the 1980s, which were rightly criticized as incomprehensible, had little political connection to society and remained abstract and subjectivist, were based on the strategic errors that had occurred in 1977 and were declared a concept in 1982.

With the lack of revision of the strategic errors since ’77 and their conceptualization in May ’82, a militaristic logic took on a life of its own in the course of the 1980s, which, from a revolutionary perspective, brought moments of loss of the moral compass of the revolution and moments of loss of legitimacy into the struggle.

The shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl in 1986 is an expression of this. The lack of response by RAF militants to legitimate questions posed by the von Braunmühl brothers at the time is a further expression of political weakness and the destructive development after ’77.

From the failure to come to terms with the ’77 offensive as a phase of militaristic logic and the resulting lack of revision, to the militaristic strategy of May ’82, in which the social question mutated into an abstraction detached from society and in which class struggle only played an abstract role, and the equally class-struggle-free and militaristic independence with the unjustified killing of the US soldier Pimental, it was precisely a coherent path.

The reduction to anti-imperialism and “politics of assassination” after ’77 tells more about subjectivism and the independence of the military from the political than about class struggle and social revolutionary processes. The primacy of the practice of an anti-imperialist and social revolutionary urban guerrilla of the awakening from 1970 to ’72 ended up in a militaristic dynamic with the dividing line between oneself and the enemy as a now subjectivist consciousness.

The lack of pause since the defeat of ’77 – meant as a collective conclusion, summary, reflection, new justification and change of strategy – characterized the policy of the primacy of the RAF’s practice from ’79 through the 1980s. 1979 would quite obviously have been the time for social analysis or class analysis and a re-positioning of the fundamental opposition in the form of the RAF. The re-formation of the RAF in 1984 would also have provided reason to pause, as would the epochal break in 1989.

After 1977, the state used a manhunt against the guerrillas: no prisoners were taken. Willy Peter Stoll and Elisabeth von Dyck were deliberately shot by the police without resistance. Rolf Heißler survived a shot to the head when he entered an apartment, but was seriously injured.

The harsh repression and massive criminalization reached large parts of the left and forced various legal activists to go underground in the course of the 1980s in order to avoid arbitrary arrests. Some ended up in exile for many years. The climate of repression, not only against the RAF, was extraordinary and, if seriously examined, its structure and form since the 1970s can only be seen as state terrorism.

1989
There came a turning point and the hunger strike of the political prisoners.

The permanent state of emergency, designed to destroy or subjugate the political prisoners, continued into its 19th year as a form of terror.

19 years of a state of emergency in prisons meant 19 years of isolation, sometimes in the form of small group isolation. 19 years of isolation as white torture and internationally condemned. 19 years of various hunger strikes as the remaining possibility of fighting for survival and dignity and of defending oneself against torture and extermination.

Günter Sonnenberg, who was seriously wounded by a gunshot wound to the head, was denied appropriate life-sustaining treatment by the state for many years, which would have been a prerequisite for his release. Sigurd Debus died during a hunger strike against solitary confinement torture.

The misery of prisons and solitary confinement torture was endless.

The turning point and the hunger strike of the prisoners occurred in the same year, 1989. It was the end of real socialism and a decisive change in the global coordinates between real socialism, liberation movements and capitalism.

With the hunger strike in 1989, the prisoners tried one last time to collectively bring about a change in their situation. They also declared that they wanted to initiate a discussion with other social groups.

The end of the international order of the 1980s, which was the prerequisite for the RAF’s determination in May 1982: The dissolution of the real socialist bloc and the decline of the remaining liberation movements dissolved the RAF’s determination framework.

After the hunger strike, the political changes at various levels, including international ones, and the invalidity of the guerrilla strategy of May 1982, the state executive was sure that the RAF would not return to this practice.

The state reacted to the prisoners’ political openness and their attempt to put an end to extermination imprisonment, and despite the broad solidarity for their demands from many people across all sectors of society, as it had done for 18 years: it maintained the extermination regime in the form of isolation torture.

In retrospect, the epochal turning point in 1989 would have been a historically imperative moment – ​​as it was after 1977 – to review the continued existence of the RAF, to conduct an appropriate investigation and class analysis and to decide whether the project should be transformed or terminated.

At that moment, the RAF did not have the political strength to fully grasp the dimension of this historical moment in relation to its own situation. However, it was determined not to give up in the face of the gloom of the times, which loomed large with the prospect of German capital now gaining what it had not achieved under National Socialist rule: becoming one of the world powers behind the USA, the hegemonic power in Europe and an active actor in imperialist wars.

In retrospect, it is unrealistic that the RAF would have simply carried on in the face of the epochal turning point of 1989 if, at the same time, an end to the hostage-taking of the prisoners, which was designed to destroy them, could have been enforced and thus the discussion about updating the transformative strategies of the left and the old fundamental opposition inside and outside would have been possible.

In this respect, the state bears its share of responsibility for the killing of the head of Deutsche Bank and the head of the Treuhand by the RAF. The action against Herrhausen was also clearly a response to the persistence of the state’s desire to destroy the prisoners. The RAF was objectively at a historical point at which it could only have disbanded or come back as a new project with a new strategy – if at all, given the real state of society and that of the remaining left.

1989
The RAF’s action against Herrhausen was a contradiction in terms: the RAF was clearly reacting in the context of the state terrorist violence of immense proportions that had existed since 1970. At the same time, it was no longer acting within an inadequate strategy, but without a strategy. There is, of course, a visible contradiction here: an action of this magnitude without an explainable strategy, but as the initiation of a process of search and redefinition, has a legitimacy deficit from the outset.

At the same time, however, an action against Deutsche Bank at that time represented a return to a policy that was objectively determined by a social relationship. Herrhausen was the man who set the course for German capital’s reunification, for Germany’s rise to become one of the world’s leading economic powers, and represented the emerging new German imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union like no other on the side of German capitalism. In political terms, addressing and/or attacking the Deutsche Bank group at that time – regardless of its form – was objectively the possibility of a social revolutionary and anti-imperialist perspective and marked a departure from subjectivism – that is, acting outside of the social relationship.

1990
The RAF’s practice in the 1990s was clearly an unconditional adherence to fundamental opposition in the form of the RAF in the face of Germany’s rise to the “Fourth Reich”, as many on the left feared at the time, and the rise of German capitalism. Their will to change something that had long since become wrong was unmistakable. Their courage to define themselves as seekers and not as responders was clear.

However, it was also marked by its obvious theoretical weakness. In this respect, it was clearly a child of the 1980s. The early RAF group and the comrades of the 1970s still drew on the wealth of profound and diverse, worldwide discussions of the 1968 era and the effort to collectively acquire theoretical knowledge. In the 1980s, the RAF militants then drew on the wealth of May 1982 and remained stuck in it. The 1980s were years of practice rather than theory, even in the legal sub-movements.

In the 1980s, at the historical moment of epochal change, I myself was part of the squatter movement and a resident of Hamburg’s Hafenstrasse – what a unique, special and formative time in my life, I thought of it for a long time with nostalgia and affection – and was more driven by a youthful, emotional and immature radicalism and determination than by profound conceptual debates or the theoretical acquisition of knowledge.

I was not yet aware of the importance of the wealth of knowledge of my fellow residents on Hafenstrasse at the time, some of whom had already brought experience from the 1970s, and some of whom were anarchists, social revolutionaries or former prisoners of June 2nd and the Red Army Faction, nor of the possibility of drawing on it and taking it with me into life.

1990
The action against the then Secretary of State for the Interior, Neusel, showed how the RAF, despite the recognition in their statement that something had to change, still acted outside of social relations, i.e. subjectivistically, despite the fact that it was still influenced by the 1980s. A non-fatal assassination attempt in the context of the hunger strike of Spanish revolutionary prisoners during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the takeover of the GDR by the FRG, i.e. the triumph of capitalism with its serious social upheavals in Germany and Eastern Europe, is absurd in retrospect. Not that solidarity with the Spanish prisoners would not have been a good thing – but an assassination attempt in this context during the fundamental changes in the world and the social and political effects of this in Germany was completely politically disorientating. A true irony of history.

1991
The action against the US embassy in the war against the people of Iraq, the first violent expression of the new world order in which only the capitalist centres would have power, a war that would lead to millions of deaths as a result of military force and sanctions, was a first departure from the “assassination policy” of the 1980s. It was the first political/military non-lethal action, the declared aim of which was not to endanger others, since the action against the Springer group in 1972, which only resulted in accidental injuries on the part of the RAF. This action in 1972 was an attempt to reach out to a dying movement of the 1968 generation, which was denounced by the constant lies of the Springer press.

The action against the US embassy in 1991 was also declared to be the first clear approach to left-wing movements since the early 1970s and an attempt to connect with them – even without the expectation that they should join the guerrillas with militancy. In fact, the false concept of avant-garde was off the table and obsolete in the proclaimed process of searching.

1991
With the action against Rohwedder, the RAF returned, in contradiction, to the “politics of assassination.” In political terms, in contrast to the 1980s, it acted in a clear relationship to society. The action explained itself in terms of social conditions: the “incorporation” of the GDR by capitalism and the social upheavals that this brought about. It was essentially class-fighting and socially revolutionary. It had an obvious and declared addressee: the workers and masses affected by the upheavals and the realignment of capitalism, who were exposed to the new conditions of capitalism. The decision to attack the Treuhandanstalt as a front institution of West German capital in this process was self-explanatory and politically coherent as an attack on the institution, regardless of the form.

At the same time, the RAF was in the process of searching for a new conception and a path to an updated strategy and therefore did not yet know a possible future of a “political-military” conception.

Furthermore, the RAF’s “assassination policy” had been thoroughly discredited since 1977, which should have inevitably led to a break with it as a political decision and marked a moment of political weakness and lack of foresight on the part of the RAF at that time.

Both delegitimized the attack on the Treuhand boss. So what had to happen happened: it left society and the remaining left as spectators on the sidelines. The attack’s severity ran counter to the growing together of the urban guerrillas and the remaining left. The same applies to the obvious attempt to reach out to others who were battered, degraded or downgraded by great uncertainty and social upheaval in the new Germany. Many people noticed this attempt by the RAF, and not just leftists, but also on a broader social level – especially that of the downgraded and insecure, proletarian sections of the population of the defunct GDR. But nothing came of it. Despite its unmistakably social revolutionary orientation and purpose, an assassination attempt could not contribute to a new beginning.

Individual assassinations in the long history of revolutions and uprisings over the centuries can only be assessed in a differentiated and historical context. In fact, history can only be discussed in a differentiated and political manner. On the other hand, an “assassination policy” – there is no way around calling it that in the form of practice that has been elevated to dogma (and the RAF never called it that, but the term sums up the practice from 1977 to 1990) – and this term already tells of its political weakness – could not achieve what revolutionary politics and practice in the metropolis are all about. “Assassination policy” in its structural application is an expression of militaristic independence and subjectivist consciousness. “Assassination policy” negates the structural interchangeability of individual decision-makers in bourgeois democracy, which inevitably leads to a legitimacy deficit. “Assassination policy” simply has too little effect on society’s consciousness in the construction of revolutionary counter-power in the metropolis.

“Assassination politics” reaches only a few people and leaves those it wants to reach as spectators on the sidelines.

A primary goal of revolutionary strategy should surely be to reach the consciousness of the addressees in the social context – those who are to be reached.

The RAF has been losing this since 1977 and could not be eliminated with the necessary consequence even at the beginning of the 1990s. Here the form of the assassination was at odds with the goal and countered the proclaimed political realignment in the early 1990s.

Historically, there are of course assassinations as a form of revolutionary self-defense and counter-violence that are clear and whose legitimacy cannot be denied from a revolutionary perspective: for example, the assassination attempt against the former boss of Schleyer and SS mass murderer Heydrich, the attempt by Georg Elser to kill Hitler, or the assassination attempt in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain on Carrero Blanco – the successor and deputy of the Spanish fascist and dictator Franco.

At this point it should be said that the violence of the Federal Republic of Germany in the fight against insurgency, which from a realistic point of view can only be seen as state terrorism with partly fascistoid forms, led to moments of legitimate self-defense in the history of the RAF.

There were undoubtedly moments of weakness in the RAF’s struggle and political decisions that were wrong. There were also moments when the moral compass of the revolution did not determine the historical moment. Every moment of this is one too many and remains as a burden on history.

Moments of collective memory of the revolutionary left are also linked to the numerous militants of the RAF and the resistance who did not survive the fight for a world free from the rule of man over man and state terrorism, either in prison or outside.

1993
The year in which Wolfgang Grams was executed by the police while lying incapacitated on the tracks in Bad Kleinen. For Birgit Hogefeld, long years of life in prison began.

Before that, the RAF blew up the Weiterstadt prison. This was the end of the RAF’s armed politics and the beginning of another possible perspective of militant politics.

The destruction of the prison had opened up a social relationship in which prison as a means of domination affects all those who are affected by the repression and misery of prison out of need and necessity or because of their awareness of it. They are the poor; they are those who do not have the money for tickets; they are those who sink into drugs so that they no longer have to feel the misery of the violent conditions; they are the recalcitrant; they are those in deportation detention, they are those who defend themselves and those who rebel against domination and violent conditions – and who end up in prison for it.

The bombing of the Weiterstadt prison will go down in history as a political direct hit. It touched the hearts of many. And that is how it should be.

The RAF of the 1990s – with all its weaknesses, its sometimes lack of foresight and the weakness of its theoretical foundations, and despite the fact that in moments of its search it was more “clumsy” than sharp-witted and analytical, but what distinguished it was courageous enough to move forward in a questioning and searching manner, and despite the fact that it did not bury “assassination politics” until 1992: Under the changed conditions of that decade, it had tried to find its way back to the social revolutionary, class-fighting and internationalist principles that the RAF had known in its early days.

With the actions against the US embassy and the blowing up of the Weiterstadt prison, the guerrillas found their way to propaganda of action, that idea of ​​revolutionary practice from the history of the anarchist movement. In this way, their return to acting within the social context was appropriately populist in the best sense. A moment that also guided the Red Brigades in Italy in their early days up to 1974 – despite completely different circumstances and incomparable strength.

Ultimately, the left, the RAF and the social conditions in the 1990s were not ready for an armed struggle for a social revolutionary transformation.

The West German left and what was left of it was preoccupied with the emerging nationalism and racism and its fascist and widespread violence.

They, the radical left, had neither the strength nor the foresight to find a social revolutionary response to the surprising incorporation of the GDR. The up to 50,000 people who took part in individual demonstrations in the defunct GDR at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall against the integration into capitalism and in the dwindling hope of a “third – socialist and emancipatory – way”, beyond the great mistakes of repressive and rigid real socialism and beyond capitalism, remained more or less alone. In the years that followed, no relevant, social revolutionary left was formed, and none that could have posed a political threat to the new German imperialism that had begun to kill during the war in Yugoslavia.

The RAF had already become history and any idea of ​​a repeat is absurd.

The time in the 1990s was not ripe for new forms of militant struggle as an arm and option of large emancipatory movements that no longer existed and do not yet exist.

After the upheavals and divisions among the RAF prisoners at the time and the RAF itself – and after the RAF declared its end in 1998 – I felt an inner distance from this story.

Today I see in the history of the RAF the moment of justified resistance and its moments in history.

In these 28 years of history, I see those who gave everything for the goal of a better and fairer world. I see those who had to bear the decades of misery of prison on their shoulders or those who died in this fight for liberation from the violent conditions of the capitalist system.

I also see in the history of the RAF its strategic and tactical mistakes.

I see its low points, with which it robbed itself of legitimacy at times and which remain as a burden of history.

Probably every revolution or its attempts, probably every story of struggle between domination and liberation throughout the centuries has had its ambivalences.

The collective appropriation of revolutionary history and its reflection lays the trail into the future of the struggles of human emancipation and liberation as well as one’s own development and change within it.

The RAF is history, the question of resistance and transformation remains and is existential.

The legacy of revolutionary history is the struggle for liberation today and in the future until all domination is overcome and all are free.

Today

Today we are in the midst of another epochal turning point. The crisis of eroding capitalism has opened a window of opportunity in which new dimensions of imperialism, up to the dimensions of World War III, are realistic. It is the age of authoritarianism, progressive impoverishment, nationalism, comprehensive militarization and ecological destruction of the planet, of flight and expulsion.

Today’s epochal break is a threatening age. However, the erosion of conditions could also present the possibility and opportunity for system transformation and liberation from capitalism.

Emancipation and revolution are only possible in the coexistence of different struggles and in the “recognition of interconnectedness”, as Caroline Braunmühl wrote – and of the existence of privileges and power imbalances in all areas of humanity. This too is an important and decisive prerequisite for transformative processes. I agree with this certainty without reservation.

An emancipatory revolution begins with our own awareness and then leads to change within us.

Coming together in recognition of different axes of power and privilege and in the certainty of the need for processes of our own change – in struggles against exploitation, oppression and war in capitalism – would be a process of revolutionary transformation. This would be, in a sense, looking in the mirror and then at society.

There we see exploitation, poverty and a top and a bottom. There we see patriarchy and its relations of violence; racism as an instrument of domination and its social independence; militarism and war and the few who profit from it and the many who flee from it. There we see weapons that are produced, the class that profits from it and the many they kill. We see the protest against it and the daily repression of the protest. We see structural police violence and class justice. We see the ecological destruction of the planet for the profit of the few and the masses who have to flee because of it. These are spaces in which we can come together today in all our diversity and in the awareness of a complex and multi-layered power structure in the process of transformation. They could be the spaces of the uprising of tomorrow.

The end of violent relations, a peaceful world, a world beyond ecological destruction, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination and nation will not exist under capitalism. This is the factual prerequisite that cannot be changed and is evident.

The questions of revolutionary transformation instead of barbarism are current and existential today.

The emancipatory left today inevitably faces the question of whether it wants to save bourgeois democracy with the persistence of the relations of violence inherent in it – although the fascist option and authoritarianism are based on bourgeois democracy and the one arises from the other – or instead deal with its transformation into a domination-free and anti-capitalist future.

Bourgeois anti-fascism as a form of left-liberal politics that focuses on right-wing extremist parties, fights symptoms, negates the systemic cause and intends to save bourgeois democracy will not be able to stop the run into further authoritarianism, fascism, war and climate destruction and therefore leads to nothing. System transformation into an anti-capitalist age would be the only option that could lead to the goal.

Pure doctrines are a thing of the past. For the future of revolutionary transformation, we need the insights of the history of emancipatory movements: feminism, anarchism, communism, anti-racism, the movements of people of color, left-wing queer communities, communities of people with disabilities and their movements for self-determination, social revolutionary and subcultural movements, left-wing migrant communities, the migrant history of resistance, the failure of real socialism and many more.

Rosa Luxemburg’s words in the face of the great crisis of capitalism in 1918 are still valid today – and stand for the possibility of building a liberated society instead of domination, patriarchy, fascism, war, nationalism, exploitation and destruction:

Socialism or barbarism!

The circle closes.

The possibility of a historic moment could come and is now.

As long as we live in a system that is based on violence and locks up people who resist it in prison, diverse resistance is justified and necessary.

The special prison conditions and the imprisonment of Daniela Klette – like that of all prisoners in the history of emancipation struggles worldwide – are an expression of the violent relations of capitalist realities.

This applies not only to prisoners, but to all of humanity: we can only be free if everyone is free.

Freedom for Daniela!

smash the system

Burkhard Garweg

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17650

#anarchism #antiImperialism #armedStruggle #BurkhardGarweg #europe #germany #raf #urbanGuerrilla

“The Possibility of a Historic Moment is Now” – Burkhard Garweg

… from the German newsite “nd” …

Below we document a letter from Burkhard Garweg, which was sent exclusively to »nd«. Garweg is one of the most wanted people by German police authorities because of suspected RAF membership and several robberies in which millions of euros were stolen. His letter is a critical outline of the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and at the same time a response to Caroline Braunmühl, daughter of RAF victim Gerold von Braunmühl, who in January in the »nd« was critical of her brother’s »call for clarification« , but also responded to a previous letter from Burkhard Garweg. Burkhard Garweg now addresses Braunmühl’s statements in his current text. He criticizes the RAF for a phase lasting from 1977 to around 1990 in which the urban guerrillas made military confrontation with the state the focus of their politics and neglected social revolutionary struggles. The author, born in 1968, comes from the autonomous squatter movement and now lives illegally, alternates between two levels in his text: one that analyses and evaluates from today’s perspective and a second, in italics, that speaks very personally from the past and his youth. Burkhard Garweg’s contribution is fully documented below.

“The possibility of a historic moment is now”

On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.

“The possibility of a historic moment is now”

On the history of the RAF and the question of the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary, anti-patriarchal and internationalist movement in the present day.

In her text in »nd.Die Woche« of January 18, 2025, Caroline Braunmühl presents an alternative position to the bourgeois attitude that attempts to depoliticize the history of militant and armed resistance by reducing its content to violence and negating a political conflict.

In my statement of December 2024, it was also important to me to present resistance to capitalism in the context of the relations of violence – exploitation, the rule of man over man, nationalism, militarism and war – and thus to conduct the debate according to historical reality and to counter the historiography of the rulers and their attempts at manipulation.

The aim of bourgeois historiography is to delegitimize and criminalize anti-capitalist resistance and its history. Its elites have a fundamental interest in maintaining the conditions of exploitation and oppression and in being able to continue to make profits. This is what the proclamation from the ranks of its elites in the 1990s, which has gone down in history, stands for: “there is no alternative.”

Caroline Braunmühl associates the RAF and other militant groups, such as the Rote Zora, with radical resistance against the “violence of socially dominant groups and individuals against socially subordinates – such as class justice, patriarchal violence or transnational relationships of exploitation, oppression and war, from which the economic elites in the Federal Republic of Germany have profited and continue to profit today.” She identifies the justification for militant resistance against violent relations and at the same time denies the legitimacy of targeted assassinations by the RAF in its history.

She criticizes my statement from a feminist perspective and for lacking criticism of the RAF.

I agree with her that a reflective picture of the history of the struggles with the ability to see their weaknesses is necessary. The main thing is to be able to draw conclusions for the struggles of the future.

The world of the dominant capitalist system is moving at an increasing pace towards social and global erosion: war, poverty, displacement and the destruction of the planet’s ecological basis for life. The bourgeois state – and this affects the entire capitalist center of Europe and the USA – is increasingly using right-wing and authoritarian means. It uses the construction of a “national community” to differentiate itself from migrants, Muslims, refugees and the poor. It uses racism, nationalism and rapid militarization both internally and externally. This has repercussions – some of which are also intended – on bourgeois society.

This is becoming radicalized by the deeply rooted racist, patriarchal and social forms of differentiation, exclusion and oppression within society. The world is unmistakably moving towards an infernal tipping point of social, ecological and military erosion.

Capitalism offers no solution to this. It would also be a contradiction in terms. The elites’ solutions to the crisis are now authoritarianism, fascism, war and the process of unifying bourgeois and fascist politics. This is nothing other than a journey into the possible abyss with clear parallels to the historical crises that culminated in the world wars of 1914 and 1939 – albeit with an extremely increased global destructive potential in modern times.

Anyone who wants to prevent this should focus less on the hopeless rescue of bourgeois democracy as a facet of capitalism and the associated retention of the fundamental relations of violence, but rather on social revolutionary alternatives that can only be achieved as a result of social revolutionary and emancipatory struggles.

Existential questions arise: In which steps, initiatives and processes can the reconstruction of an anti-capitalist, social revolutionary and internationalist left be achieved?

But also: What do we take with us into the future from the struggles and concepts of history, from the attempts to overcome the thoroughly violent capitalism and imperialism? How do we as revolutionary leftists discuss and write history from below and appropriate it for the struggles of today and tomorrow and against the propagandistic, depoliticizing and criminalizing historiography from above?

I see in the history of the RAF courage and determination to dare something, to take risks and the unconditionality and seriousness and the surrender of one’s own privileges that are also needed to achieve the transformation of the misery of domination and oppression – including the overturning of power imbalances within society.

How much I was moved as a young person by their determination and unconditionality and the way they put themselves aside in deep and true solidarity with the poor and colonized people of this world, with the exploited in the countries of the starving Tricontinent and the insurgents there. How much I was moved – still wet behind the ears and without much knowledge and above all out of empathy with those who had nothing or almost nothing – by the militant internationalism they stood for. There were times when I read the texts of Ernesto Cardenal or later the last texts of Ulrike, which I was not yet able to fully understand.

I heard about Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, one of whom was a political prisoner in South Africa for decades, and the other an insurgent against South Africa’s apartheid system who was tortured and murdered by the South African police. I was outraged by this unspeakable, racist violence, including state violence, but also moved by the resistance of so many and that of the ANC. At the same time, however, I also learned that I myself lived in a country whose elite profited from this system of violence known as apartheid, and was deeply connected to the racist regime in South Africa, its military and its police. It was a regime made up of predominantly South African, German or US capital, of the local government, military and police, of the self-proclaimed elite of white colonialists, who treated people like slaves, exploited them, killed them and declared them second or third class citizens because they were black. I perceived it – and it also shaped my life – this oppressive and violent reality of this colonial and state crime, this “normality” of the world of capitalism. The perpetrators and accomplices of this unspeakable racism, also committed by the state, and these crimes of colonialism sat in their headquarters in Pretoria or Johannesburg. They sat in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich or Bonn on the boards of banks and corporations, in the German government or in the barracks of the Western world, especially the German, Israeli or US military.

For me, it was the RAF that showed solidarity in the struggle with the poor and the revolutionaries in Nicaragua, El Salvador and South Africa, those attempts at revolution that had moved me since my early youth. I began to realise that it was a shared resistance – that in the metropolis and that in the Tricontinent. And that was what the RAF meant.

History is also the history of mistakes, defeats and moments of sadness
For me, the history of the RAF is also a history of strategic and tactical errors.

In the history of the RAF, there are also moments that were not shaped by the moral compass of the revolution.

Nobody has to find the whole story correct today. For me, this does not call into question the fundamental legitimacy of the contribution of various attempts at resistance over the centuries – including that of the RAF – to liberation from the violent conditions.

The RAF emerged from the resistance of the (19)68 movement. The 68 movement reconstructed the anti-capitalist resistance that had been crushed by the Nazis in Germany. It brought the personal continuities of the elite into the consciousness of society. It is the miserable reality of the Federal Republic of Germany that it was built up by the old Nazis. They made careers as converted democrats in all state institutions and on the boards of banks and corporations – under the umbrella of the USA. The Nazi elite became the elite of West German democracy overnight.

It was a rebellion against the reactionary stuffiness of the West German democracy shaped by National Socialism and a questioning of the existing capitalist order, which was socially reactionary and repressive and structurally based on exploitation and militarization.

After the murder of the anti-rearmament demonstrator Philipp Müller by the police and after the ban on the KPD in 1956, police violence, professional bans and emergency laws were the state’s response at the end of the 1960s to the movement of students and apprentices, youth, the sub-proletariat and other sections of the population.

It was the time of the Vietnam War, the merciless brutality of the US military machine, which tried to wipe out the Vietnamese attempt at revolution and went down in history with the massacres of the Vietnamese population and the use of the chemical warfare agent napalm. Huge movements of solidarity against the imperialist war and for the right to liberation by the Vietnamese armed and revolutionary movement arose around the world. “Bring the war home” – a slogan of the US anti-war movement. The 1968 movement and the RAF did exactly that and brought the worldwide resistance against the Vietnam War into German society. With the immense resistance against the Western world’s war of terror, the possibility of liberation had entered the consciousness of humanity worldwide and was on the table at the time. Revolutionary, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles developed worldwide. Capitalism and imperialism were up for debate. Armed struggle of the Gauche Proletarienne in France, the Red Brigades in Italy, armed struggle in Spain, Northern Ireland, England, the Basque Country, Greece, Japan, Palestine, the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the USA, the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the urban guerrillas in Mexico and Brazil or the anti-fascist uprising of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

It was the time of anti-colonial struggles in the South, in Mozambique, Algeria and many other places of anti-colonial liberation against the crimes of the West there.

The “racial segregation” of apartheid in South Africa, the state and social racism in the USA, the murder of a million people during the crushing of the Communist Party in Indonesia by US military forces or the CIA-led military coup against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile are examples of Western self-evident truths and brutalities that humanity should accept.

This violence of Western capitalism and imperialism generated revolutionary counter-violence around the world, such as the resistance of the ANC and the Black Panthers. It showed millions of people around the world that capitalism is built on the foundation of violence.

In Paris, a million people took to the streets, on strike and on the barricades – large parts of the population, students and proletarians together.

Berlin, Turin, Paris, New York: Revolution no longer seemed unthinkable. Things were shaking tremendously in the Western world.

In Germany, the state attempted to crush the insurgent movement with harsh repression, emergency laws, professional bans, the imprisonment of thousands and police violence. The first shot came from the weapon of the German state: the police murdered Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967.

The social democratic version of the crackdown consisted of carrot and stick, of repression and the offer of integration, which was intended to bring about the abandonment of any resistance to capitalism and imperialism in the march through the institutions – and continues to this day.

The situation in the world at that time, this age of uprisings and imperialism, whose state terror is visualized in the image of the Vietnamese girl fleeing from the bombs of the West, the social situation in the post-Nazi Federal Republic of Germany, the harsh and systematic state repression against the awakening, the elite of the Federal Republic of Germany riddled with Nazi perpetrators, the strikes – including wild ones, those marked by migrants – at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, the virulence of ideas of the revolutionary transformation of the status quo in all parts of society and the worldwide uprisings against imperialism, state racism and colonialism as well as the emergence of urban guerrilla groups in many countries, including the metropolises – allow, in my view, only one conclusion: the emergence of the various armed fighting groups in the Federal Republic of Germany, this risk, this revolutionary experiment was completely justified and had to be attempted. Not trying would have been a failure in revolutionary history. A historic moment was possible.

1972
The “Urban Guerrilla Concept” and other RAF texts of this period were also an attempt to halt the decline of the movement, which had been plagued by repression and integration, and to bring it into the perspective of liberation.

The RAF’s actions were directed against the imperialist war, against the means of power through repression and the aggressive and violent manipulation of society by the Springer press and other media. In all attacks, they were a link to the (19)68 movement.

By attacking the US Army headquarters and destroying the computer there, which was essential for the state terrorist bombing, the RAF clearly sided with the oppressed and those trying to free themselves, and thus played a part in defeating the cruel Western imperialism that was raging in Vietnam as part of the worldwide resistance. The destruction of the US military computer in Heidelberg meant that the bombing and the mass killing of people that went with it had to be stopped for several days. In Vietnam, the massacred population appreciated this.

In 1972, the RAF had a social revolutionary and anti-imperialist concept that was in a social context and proclaimed the primacy of practice. How sympathetic and right as a part of the class struggle was the serious and credible reference of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Raspe, Holger Meins and Ulrike Meinhof and all the others to the fringes of society, the sub-proletariat, the children in care homes, those who had become mentally ill in the system or to the proletarian women of the Märkisches Viertel – that proletarian and poor part of Berlin. The militants of the RAF came from all classes and from the history of different political ideas of this time of awakening: anarchism, communism, feminism, social revolutionaries and anti-imperialists. That is what I assume. How open the RAF was.

The RAF had a base in the insurgent movement that was in decline. Its practice was an attempt to take this movement into the revolutionary struggle against the decline. It was in line with social reality and the worldwide, revolutionary and anti-colonial awakening.

The RAF in its inception – just like 2 June and later the Revolutionary Cells and the Rote Zora – was, in its relationship to state violence and to the fundamental power relations in capitalism, legitimate revolutionary counter-violence and a legitimate attempt at liberation. All of the actions in its early days, which ended with the arrests of the militants of the time in 1972 and ’73, are a very clear expression of this and convey exactly that.

In a survey conducted at the time, one in five German citizens said they would be willing to protect a member of the RAF from arrest.

The time was ripe for this revolutionary attempt and it was part of worldwide revolutionary attempts. The emergence of the urban guerrilla groups RAF and 2 June at that time was based on historical conditions.

Given the circumstances, an attempt had to be made to reconstruct the fundamental resistance and the option of liberation that the Nazi state had once destroyed with the extermination of the workers’ movement and whose Nazi elites now opposed it again as converted, flawless democrats.

Looking back on this history of resistance and this contribution to the liberation attempt, how important this early period of the RAF is to me and how it helped to shape my relationship with it. I would not be able to understand the history of the RAF in its entirety – neither in its merits nor in its lows – without being aware of this time and the legitimacy of its creation. That time – I was just born at the beginning of it – seems distant, but the content of their attempt, even if it is history, is close to me.

After the arrests in 1972/73, the RAF only existed as prisoners
“Dare to be more democratic,” as Willy Brandt said in 1972, had no reality in the execution of Tommy Weisbecker, Georg von Rauch, Petra Schelm or of bystanders during the manhunt, such as Ian McLeod – shot through a closed door – or the killing of the unarmed apprentice Richard Epple by the police.

In the prisons, it was the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Justice and the government – in other words, the state – that decided on war against the imprisoned RAF and bore responsibility for it: solitary confinement for all political prisoners, daily cell raids, physical abuse by the rolling squads in the prisons, the dead wing in Cologne-Ossendorf, in which Ulrike Meinhof and Astrid Proll were sealed off from all sensory perceptions, or the research into isolation as a method of subjugating people in prison at the University of Hamburg.

The state’s plan to forcibly open Ulrike Meinhof’s skull in order to examine her brain and “prove” that her resistance was due to “brain damage” was only prevented due to public protest. The factual parallels to the research of the Nazi perpetrator Josef Mengele, who carried out forced examinations on living people in the German extermination camps during the Nazi regime and killed or mutilated them in the process, are obvious. These are traces of this period and of the state’s attempt – in its excesses one could also call fascist – to annihilate or subjugate those who had questioned the existing order in a revolutionary way and were at the mercy of the system as prisoners.

The death of Holger Meins in 1974 during a hunger strike against the torture of solitary confinement through force-feeding, the dosage of which was designed to lead to his death, and the denial of medical help, was a state murder. They knew and wanted him to die as a result of their measures. In the war against prisoners and in the attempt to subjugate or destroy them, the elite clearly broke with the basic law of bourgeois democracy that they proclaimed: “Human dignity is inviolable” and openly showed the violence inherent in the bourgeois state.

The former officers of the Wehrmacht of the Nazi state: Schmidt, Buback, Herold and others, were the ones who ordered this extreme form of state violence and were responsible for it.

Even much later in the next decade of the (19)80s, as a young person I was moved by the violent and state-terrorist reality of that time and helped me to understand that the foundation of the bourgeois state in capitalism is based on violence, terror, war and exploitation.

A little later, in the 1980s – I remember being very moved by it myself – I once told my mother about the torture of prisoners in solitary confinement. She was visibly moved. Unbeknownst to her, I had broken the windows of some banks with others to support the prisoners on hunger strike. Many years later, I would hear that my father and mother had themselves moved in solidarity with the prisoners and had begun to support the Kurdish liberation struggle as part of their lives.

Social and societal empathy is something they gave me in life. It was also reflected in their decisions, which led them to become involved in the history of resistance in solidarity and, despite the repression of German or Turkish “security forces”, were prepared to leave the privilege of their own safety behind at times.

1975, Stockholm
After the death of Holger Meins, whose death also demonstrated that the German state was once again prepared to liquidate prisoners 29 years after the end of Nazi fascism, the justified fear of further state murders of prisoners and in an attempt to free the prisoners from the obvious attempt at subjugation and extermination in the prisons led the newly formed Holger Meins Commando of the RAF to the German embassy in Stockholm. It demanded that the German government release 26 political prisoners and threatened to blow up the embassy if it did not do so. The state refused to contact the occupiers and preferred to sacrifice its embassy staff for the sake of German state interests.

During the occupation and in response to the German government’s refusal to enter into negotiations, the commando shot the diplomats Andreas von Mirbach and Heinz Hillegaart.

Siegfried Hausner, a member of Holger Meins’ commando, was seriously injured during the occupation of the embassy. With burns all over his body, he was no longer able to be transported. Contrary to medical instructions, the federal government insisted on transporting him to Stuttgart-Stammheim, which was tantamount to a death sentence. They knew he would die from it, and he died.

The RAF’s reaction to the tough stance of the federal government, which placed military priority over politics, was to be countered with the same logic. By shooting the two hostages, who themselves had no direct responsibility for the violent situation to which the RAF responded by murdering them, the RAF lost the moment of revolutionary morality and legitimacy in this action.

1976
Ulrike Meinhof died after four years in the dungeons of the powerful.

After the failed occupation of the embassy in Stockholm, there was no longer any visible RAF outside until 1977. The state’s war against RAF prisoners, solitary confinement, special laws and special justice remained. With the verdict against the Stammheimers, the prisoners in the power’s isolation cells were to disappear forever. The system of annihilation or subjugation and special justice continued unbroken.

The brutality of the ongoing state terrorist war in the prisons, which could not be stopped by Stockholm or by the prisoners’ hunger strikes, shows today a historical phase in which the attempt at self-defense and, in principle, the attempt to free political prisoners from the torture of solitary confinement was justified and legitimate. The occupation of the Stockholm embassy and the RAF’s ’77 offensive took place under this banner.

This is also demonstrated by the successful liberation of prisoners through the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz in 1975 by the June 2nd Movement.

1977
Siegfried Buback, Federal Prosecutor General and largely responsible for the repression of the time and in particular for his orders for solitary confinement and special justice as well as for the murder of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner and Ulrike Meinhof, was killed by the RAF’s Ulrike Meinhof commando. From the perspective of those who were aware of the violent relationships in capitalism and who perceived or were affected by the extreme state violence of the time, this act was a form of legitimate counter-violence and self-defense. Denying this connection cannot in any way capture the historical reality.

This was the beginning of Offensive ’77, with which the RAF attempted to end the “special detention” of the RAF prisoners by liberating them and to enable a reorientation of the RAF and the prisoners.

She wanted to kidnap the head of the Dresden bank, Jürgen Ponto, but failed and ended with his unintentional killing.

Schleier kidnapping 1977: “Those responsible for the crisis team decided to sacrifice Schleyer for the sake of state.”

During the kidnapping of Hans Martin Schleyer, four police officers, Schleyer’s bodyguards, were shot dead.

The federal government declared a state of emergency. The executive branch assumed decision-making power in the crisis team. The press declared itself to be in line.

Historically, the state of emergency at that time represents the fascist power option that bourgeois democracy can use in capitalism. It also represents the elite’s willingness to use it when necessary.

Those responsible for the crisis team decided to sacrifice Schleyer for reasons of state. They refused to exchange him for the prisoners. This was the state’s decision for a purely military solution. This was accompanied by discussions in the crisis team at the time about shooting RAF prisoners every hour. All of this speaks of the government’s responsibility for the course of history.

The RAF responded, in the hope of persuading the ruling crisis team to adopt a different stance, by authorizing a commando of the Palestinian PFLP to hijack an airplane carrying innocent civilians.

The Offensive ’77 completely isolated the RAF. It created a situation in which the entire left turned away from it and the RAF closed itself off to the left. Revolutionary goals that attempted to achieve a social impact were no longer a visible and direct element of its actions. It acted primarily for itself and therefore subjectivistically. It escalated the question of power against the state on a purely military level and thus opened a duel against the state that it could only lose.

The military dynamics ran counter to political analysis. The isolated and subjectivist struggle was the precondition for an unjustifiable hijacking that ran counter to revolutionary principles and the idea of ​​revolution as class struggle.

The killing of the four police officers as a prerequisite for negotiations is difficult to understand today and corresponds to a purely military logic. The killing of Ponto was not intentional and in itself ran counter to a realistic negotiating position for the release of the prisoners. Therefore, this action is part of the actions of the offensive at the time, which had lost its revolutionary legitimacy.

October 18, 1977
The German government had rejected any political solution and risked the lives of the hostages by storming the plane in Mogadishu for the sake of German state interests.

Gudrun Enslin, Jan Raspe and Andreas Baader did not survive the night of October 18th in Stammheim. Irmgard Möller survived with serious injuries and declared: It was murder.

With Schleyer died a man who went down in history as the right-hand man of the SS leader Heydrich, head of the Protectorate of Czech Bohemia/Moravia, which was occupied by the Nazi state. Schleyer was a careerist in the SS and responsible for the deportation of more than 40,000 Jews to the German extermination camps. As a person, he was partly responsible for the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah.

He died as the personified continuity of Nazi perpetrators who made careers in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945 and whose elite he represented. He died as the boss of bosses, as the person responsible for the exploitative conditions of the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany state.

He also died as a prisoner of the RAF.

The death of the Nazi perpetrator and the representative of the continuity of Nazi fascism in West German capitalism is certainly not a moment of mourning.

Killing a prisoner or hostage is per se a moment of weakness and even a moment of defeat.

The defeat of ’77 marked the beginning of long phases in which the military dominated the visible path of the RAF before the political moment. The military confrontation between the guerrillas and the state was the focus of politics, unlike during the May ’72 offensive.

’77 shows that armed struggle can only work if it is part of political movements and is politically committed to them. Armed struggle is always only one possibility for revolutionary movements and not something that can work on its own. The isolated guerrilla always runs the risk of entering into a militaristic and subjectivist dynamic. In the conflict based on military logic, it can only lose in the metropolis.

The RAF was completely isolated after ’77. It had no base and had decided against social revolutionary politics in ’77.

The militaristic moment of Offensive ’77 marked the beginning of a policy focused on assassinations for the next 14 years.

The dissolving base of the guerrilla by the mid-1970s had led the Stammheim prisoners in their statements of 1976 to begin to emphasize that the RAF in anti-imperialism was beginning to distance itself from the social revolutionary and class struggle aspects of its concept of revolutionary struggle.

1979
With the attacks from 1979 to ’81 against the US military and two of its generals as high decision-makers and co-responsible for the most aggressive and powerful part of Western imperialism, the RAF ushered in the policy of urban guerrilla warfare focused on anti-imperialism. From then on, it sought its purpose in the international coordinates between liberation and the counter-strategy of imperialism. It saw itself – and was – part of the anti-imperialist liberation movements of the world. However, it was separated from the social conditions of its battle terrain. It shifted its analysis to the coordinates between liberation and imperialism. It only knew the world proletariat, which mutated into an abstraction without orientation to the social conditions.

May 1982
The strategy statement of the “May Paper”, which formulated the RAF’s policy and contained its purpose, conceptualized the mistakes of ’77 and laid the groundwork for the 1980s. The idea of ​​politics in the ’82 concept was an anti-imperialism whose focus was no longer on the consciousness of the society in which it fought. The bombs against the state and US imperialism had been planted. What was not intended were bombs in the consciousness of society.

It was a departure from the strategic principles of the “urban guerrilla concept” of 1972. The RAF’s anti-imperialism was now detached from any social revolutionary strategy.

The offer to others was militant attack or militancy in general at various levels in the context of the guerrilla’s anti-imperialist strategy and under its leadership.

In doing so, it appropriated a concept of avant-garde, with which it declared itself to be the avant-garde. However, whether something is avant-garde is ultimately decided by the course of history and the potential to bring others into the revolutionary struggle.

Due to the RAF’s lack of class analysis and its reduction to anti-imperialism in international coordinates, politics remained abstract and did not lead the guerrillas out of their isolation throughout the 1980s. Isolation here means isolation in a social relationship. The RAF was deeply connected and organized with comrades in the resistance and other small urban guerrilla groups, especially Action Directe from France, on the anti-imperialist and Western European fronts. But that was not enough for the revolutionary process, which fundamentally develops in a social context.

Without the social reference and without the primacy of the political, politics remained subjectivist and did not lead it out of the duel between state and guerrilla.

This was not changed by the “Fighting Units” strategically linked to the RAF or by militant groups calling themselves otherwise, who carried out a large number of arson and bomb attacks throughout the 1980s – for example, in 1982: militant actions against Siemens, AEG, US military barracks; 1984/85 Turkish consulate, NATO pipelines, NATO/US/German armed forces facilities, US secret service, Interior Ministry in Hanover, AEG data center; 1988 Renault branch, Deutsche Bank training center; 1989 Frankfurt Stock Exchange; 1990 Deutsche Bank data center and many more – all militant, non-armed actions in which the killing of human life was excluded and never happened.

In reality, the Western European front was weak and could not replace the missing strategy in social relations, which as a fundamental opposition could only have been social revolutionary and anti-imperialist.

The policy, reduced to anti-imperialism and free of class struggle, was an immense strategic mistake and was rightly criticized, for example, by the Belgian CCC, the Belgian communist urban guerrilla group of the 1980s, and completely ignored by the RAF throughout the 1980s.

The factual and historical prerequisites for a redefinition of politics since 1979 would have been both the completely isolated RAF and its reasons as well as the class situation in neoliberalism: the pacified proletarian layers, the integration of the proletariat with the promise of mass consumption in the metropolises; as well as isolation as a neoliberal principle of life, which was a result of the restructuring of industry in globalized neoliberalism. This was also a consequence of capitalism in response to the uprisings in the factories at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, as had occurred in Italy and France. The rulers feared the “mass worker” and preferred the isolation of the population in production and society.

The development of the worldwide liberation movements, the strategies of NATO in the coordinates between liberation and imperialism and the existence of various large, naturally reformist but partly also militant sub-sector movements would also have been the prerequisite for the necessary strategic repositioning of the urban guerrilla.

An urban guerrilla that was also socially revolutionary and not just anti-imperialist might have had the chance to bring together the movements that emerged independently of the RAF in the late 1970s and 1980s, some of which were also militant: the house-to-house fighting movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-NATO movement, the feminist movement and the solidarity movements with the liberation movements of the Tricontinent, into a socially revolutionary and anti-imperialist fundamental opposition. Then it would undoubtedly not have been possible to focus on the RAF/state conflict within the international coordinates and to set a militaristic dynamic in motion.

But the RAF was only committed to itself and did not manage to break out of it in the 1980s.

Politics from 1977 and throughout the 1980s involved only a few people. The radical left largely became spectators in the conflict between the anti-imperialist RAF and the state.

1984
The militaristic actions of the second half of the 1980s, which were rightly criticized as incomprehensible, had little political connection to society and remained abstract and subjectivist, were based on the strategic errors that had occurred in 1977 and were declared a concept in 1982.

With the lack of revision of the strategic errors since ’77 and their conceptualization in May ’82, a militaristic logic took on a life of its own in the course of the 1980s, which, from a revolutionary perspective, brought moments of loss of the moral compass of the revolution and moments of loss of legitimacy into the struggle.

The shooting of Gerold von Braunmühl in 1986 is an expression of this. The lack of response by RAF militants to legitimate questions posed by the von Braunmühl brothers at the time is a further expression of political weakness and the destructive development after ’77.

From the failure to come to terms with the ’77 offensive as a phase of militaristic logic and the resulting lack of revision, to the militaristic strategy of May ’82, in which the social question mutated into an abstraction detached from society and in which class struggle only played an abstract role, and the equally class-struggle-free and militaristic independence with the unjustified killing of the US soldier Pimental, it was precisely a coherent path.

The reduction to anti-imperialism and “politics of assassination” after ’77 tells more about subjectivism and the independence of the military from the political than about class struggle and social revolutionary processes. The primacy of the practice of an anti-imperialist and social revolutionary urban guerrilla of the awakening from 1970 to ’72 ended up in a militaristic dynamic with the dividing line between oneself and the enemy as a now subjectivist consciousness.

The lack of pause since the defeat of ’77 – meant as a collective conclusion, summary, reflection, new justification and change of strategy – characterized the policy of the primacy of the RAF’s practice from ’79 through the 1980s. 1979 would quite obviously have been the time for social analysis or class analysis and a re-positioning of the fundamental opposition in the form of the RAF. The re-formation of the RAF in 1984 would also have provided reason to pause, as would the epochal break in 1989.

After 1977, the state used a manhunt against the guerrillas: no prisoners were taken. Willy Peter Stoll and Elisabeth von Dyck were deliberately shot by the police without resistance. Rolf Heißler survived a shot to the head when he entered an apartment, but was seriously injured.

The harsh repression and massive criminalization reached large parts of the left and forced various legal activists to go underground in the course of the 1980s in order to avoid arbitrary arrests. Some ended up in exile for many years. The climate of repression, not only against the RAF, was extraordinary and, if seriously examined, its structure and form since the 1970s can only be seen as state terrorism.

1989
There came a turning point and the hunger strike of the political prisoners.

The permanent state of emergency, designed to destroy or subjugate the political prisoners, continued into its 19th year as a form of terror.

19 years of a state of emergency in prisons meant 19 years of isolation, sometimes in the form of small group isolation. 19 years of isolation as white torture and internationally condemned. 19 years of various hunger strikes as the remaining possibility of fighting for survival and dignity and of defending oneself against torture and extermination.

Günter Sonnenberg, who was seriously wounded by a gunshot wound to the head, was denied appropriate life-sustaining treatment by the state for many years, which would have been a prerequisite for his release. Sigurd Debus died during a hunger strike against solitary confinement torture.

The misery of prisons and solitary confinement torture was endless.

The turning point and the hunger strike of the prisoners occurred in the same year, 1989. It was the end of real socialism and a decisive change in the global coordinates between real socialism, liberation movements and capitalism.

With the hunger strike in 1989, the prisoners tried one last time to collectively bring about a change in their situation. They also declared that they wanted to initiate a discussion with other social groups.

The end of the international order of the 1980s, which was the prerequisite for the RAF’s determination in May 1982: The dissolution of the real socialist bloc and the decline of the remaining liberation movements dissolved the RAF’s determination framework.

After the hunger strike, the political changes at various levels, including international ones, and the invalidity of the guerrilla strategy of May 1982, the state executive was sure that the RAF would not return to this practice.

The state reacted to the prisoners’ political openness and their attempt to put an end to extermination imprisonment, and despite the broad solidarity for their demands from many people across all sectors of society, as it had done for 18 years: it maintained the extermination regime in the form of isolation torture.

In retrospect, the epochal turning point in 1989 would have been a historically imperative moment – ​​as it was after 1977 – to review the continued existence of the RAF, to conduct an appropriate investigation and class analysis and to decide whether the project should be transformed or terminated.

At that moment, the RAF did not have the political strength to fully grasp the dimension of this historical moment in relation to its own situation. However, it was determined not to give up in the face of the gloom of the times, which loomed large with the prospect of German capital now gaining what it had not achieved under National Socialist rule: becoming one of the world powers behind the USA, the hegemonic power in Europe and an active actor in imperialist wars.

In retrospect, it is unrealistic that the RAF would have simply carried on in the face of the epochal turning point of 1989 if, at the same time, an end to the hostage-taking of the prisoners, which was designed to destroy them, could have been enforced and thus the discussion about updating the transformative strategies of the left and the old fundamental opposition inside and outside would have been possible.

In this respect, the state bears its share of responsibility for the killing of the head of Deutsche Bank and the head of the Treuhand by the RAF. The action against Herrhausen was also clearly a response to the persistence of the state’s desire to destroy the prisoners. The RAF was objectively at a historical point at which it could only have disbanded or come back as a new project with a new strategy – if at all, given the real state of society and that of the remaining left.

1989
The RAF’s action against Herrhausen was a contradiction in terms: the RAF was clearly reacting in the context of the state terrorist violence of immense proportions that had existed since 1970. At the same time, it was no longer acting within an inadequate strategy, but without a strategy. There is, of course, a visible contradiction here: an action of this magnitude without an explainable strategy, but as the initiation of a process of search and redefinition, has a legitimacy deficit from the outset.

At the same time, however, an action against Deutsche Bank at that time represented a return to a policy that was objectively determined by a social relationship. Herrhausen was the man who set the course for German capital’s reunification, for Germany’s rise to become one of the world’s leading economic powers, and represented the emerging new German imperialism after the fall of the Soviet Union like no other on the side of German capitalism. In political terms, addressing and/or attacking the Deutsche Bank group at that time – regardless of its form – was objectively the possibility of a social revolutionary and anti-imperialist perspective and marked a departure from subjectivism – that is, acting outside of the social relationship.

1990
The RAF’s practice in the 1990s was clearly an unconditional adherence to fundamental opposition in the form of the RAF in the face of Germany’s rise to the “Fourth Reich”, as many on the left feared at the time, and the rise of German capitalism. Their will to change something that had long since become wrong was unmistakable. Their courage to define themselves as seekers and not as responders was clear.

However, it was also marked by its obvious theoretical weakness. In this respect, it was clearly a child of the 1980s. The early RAF group and the comrades of the 1970s still drew on the wealth of profound and diverse, worldwide discussions of the 1968 era and the effort to collectively acquire theoretical knowledge. In the 1980s, the RAF militants then drew on the wealth of May 1982 and remained stuck in it. The 1980s were years of practice rather than theory, even in the legal sub-movements.

In the 1980s, at the historical moment of epochal change, I myself was part of the squatter movement and a resident of Hamburg’s Hafenstrasse – what a unique, special and formative time in my life, I thought of it for a long time with nostalgia and affection – and was more driven by a youthful, emotional and immature radicalism and determination than by profound conceptual debates or the theoretical acquisition of knowledge.

I was not yet aware of the importance of the wealth of knowledge of my fellow residents on Hafenstrasse at the time, some of whom had already brought experience from the 1970s, and some of whom were anarchists, social revolutionaries or former prisoners of June 2nd and the Red Army Faction, nor of the possibility of drawing on it and taking it with me into life.

1990
The action against the then Secretary of State for the Interior, Neusel, showed how the RAF, despite the recognition in their statement that something had to change, still acted outside of social relations, i.e. subjectivistically, despite the fact that it was still influenced by the 1980s. A non-fatal assassination attempt in the context of the hunger strike of Spanish revolutionary prisoners during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the takeover of the GDR by the FRG, i.e. the triumph of capitalism with its serious social upheavals in Germany and Eastern Europe, is absurd in retrospect. Not that solidarity with the Spanish prisoners would not have been a good thing – but an assassination attempt in this context during the fundamental changes in the world and the social and political effects of this in Germany was completely politically disorientating. A true irony of history.

1991
The action against the US embassy in the war against the people of Iraq, the first violent expression of the new world order in which only the capitalist centres would have power, a war that would lead to millions of deaths as a result of military force and sanctions, was a first departure from the “assassination policy” of the 1980s. It was the first political/military non-lethal action, the declared aim of which was not to endanger others, since the action against the Springer group in 1972, which only resulted in accidental injuries on the part of the RAF. This action in 1972 was an attempt to reach out to a dying movement of the 1968 generation, which was denounced by the constant lies of the Springer press.

The action against the US embassy in 1991 was also declared to be the first clear approach to left-wing movements since the early 1970s and an attempt to connect with them – even without the expectation that they should join the guerrillas with militancy. In fact, the false concept of avant-garde was off the table and obsolete in the proclaimed process of searching.

1991
With the action against Rohwedder, the RAF returned, in contradiction, to the “politics of assassination.” In political terms, in contrast to the 1980s, it acted in a clear relationship to society. The action explained itself in terms of social conditions: the “incorporation” of the GDR by capitalism and the social upheavals that this brought about. It was essentially class-fighting and socially revolutionary. It had an obvious and declared addressee: the workers and masses affected by the upheavals and the realignment of capitalism, who were exposed to the new conditions of capitalism. The decision to attack the Treuhandanstalt as a front institution of West German capital in this process was self-explanatory and politically coherent as an attack on the institution, regardless of the form.

At the same time, the RAF was in the process of searching for a new conception and a path to an updated strategy and therefore did not yet know a possible future of a “political-military” conception.

Furthermore, the RAF’s “assassination policy” had been thoroughly discredited since 1977, which should have inevitably led to a break with it as a political decision and marked a moment of political weakness and lack of foresight on the part of the RAF at that time.

Both delegitimized the attack on the Treuhand boss. So what had to happen happened: it left society and the remaining left as spectators on the sidelines. The attack’s severity ran counter to the growing together of the urban guerrillas and the remaining left. The same applies to the obvious attempt to reach out to others who were battered, degraded or downgraded by great uncertainty and social upheaval in the new Germany. Many people noticed this attempt by the RAF, and not just leftists, but also on a broader social level – especially that of the downgraded and insecure, proletarian sections of the population of the defunct GDR. But nothing came of it. Despite its unmistakably social revolutionary orientation and purpose, an assassination attempt could not contribute to a new beginning.

Individual assassinations in the long history of revolutions and uprisings over the centuries can only be assessed in a differentiated and historical context. In fact, history can only be discussed in a differentiated and political manner. On the other hand, an “assassination policy” – there is no way around calling it that in the form of practice that has been elevated to dogma (and the RAF never called it that, but the term sums up the practice from 1977 to 1990) – and this term already tells of its political weakness – could not achieve what revolutionary politics and practice in the metropolis are all about. “Assassination policy” in its structural application is an expression of militaristic independence and subjectivist consciousness. “Assassination policy” negates the structural interchangeability of individual decision-makers in bourgeois democracy, which inevitably leads to a legitimacy deficit. “Assassination policy” simply has too little effect on society’s consciousness in the construction of revolutionary counter-power in the metropolis.

“Assassination politics” reaches only a few people and leaves those it wants to reach as spectators on the sidelines.

A primary goal of revolutionary strategy should surely be to reach the consciousness of the addressees in the social context – those who are to be reached.

The RAF has been losing this since 1977 and could not be eliminated with the necessary consequence even at the beginning of the 1990s. Here the form of the assassination was at odds with the goal and countered the proclaimed political realignment in the early 1990s.

Historically, there are of course assassinations as a form of revolutionary self-defense and counter-violence that are clear and whose legitimacy cannot be denied from a revolutionary perspective: for example, the assassination attempt against the former boss of Schleyer and SS mass murderer Heydrich, the attempt by Georg Elser to kill Hitler, or the assassination attempt in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain on Carrero Blanco – the successor and deputy of the Spanish fascist and dictator Franco.

At this point it should be said that the violence of the Federal Republic of Germany in the fight against insurgency, which from a realistic point of view can only be seen as state terrorism with partly fascistoid forms, led to moments of legitimate self-defense in the history of the RAF.

There were undoubtedly moments of weakness in the RAF’s struggle and political decisions that were wrong. There were also moments when the moral compass of the revolution did not determine the historical moment. Every moment of this is one too many and remains as a burden on history.

Moments of collective memory of the revolutionary left are also linked to the numerous militants of the RAF and the resistance who did not survive the fight for a world free from the rule of man over man and state terrorism, either in prison or outside.

1993
The year in which Wolfgang Grams was executed by the police while lying incapacitated on the tracks in Bad Kleinen. For Birgit Hogefeld, long years of life in prison began.

Before that, the RAF blew up the Weiterstadt prison. This was the end of the RAF’s armed politics and the beginning of another possible perspective of militant politics.

The destruction of the prison had opened up a social relationship in which prison as a means of domination affects all those who are affected by the repression and misery of prison out of need and necessity or because of their awareness of it. They are the poor; they are those who do not have the money for tickets; they are those who sink into drugs so that they no longer have to feel the misery of the violent conditions; they are the recalcitrant; they are those in deportation detention, they are those who defend themselves and those who rebel against domination and violent conditions – and who end up in prison for it.

The bombing of the Weiterstadt prison will go down in history as a political direct hit. It touched the hearts of many. And that is how it should be.

The RAF of the 1990s – with all its weaknesses, its sometimes lack of foresight and the weakness of its theoretical foundations, and despite the fact that in moments of its search it was more “clumsy” than sharp-witted and analytical, but what distinguished it was courageous enough to move forward in a questioning and searching manner, and despite the fact that it did not bury “assassination politics” until 1992: Under the changed conditions of that decade, it had tried to find its way back to the social revolutionary, class-fighting and internationalist principles that the RAF had known in its early days.

With the actions against the US embassy and the blowing up of the Weiterstadt prison, the guerrillas found their way to propaganda of action, that idea of ​​revolutionary practice from the history of the anarchist movement. In this way, their return to acting within the social context was appropriately populist in the best sense. A moment that also guided the Red Brigades in Italy in their early days up to 1974 – despite completely different circumstances and incomparable strength.

Ultimately, the left, the RAF and the social conditions in the 1990s were not ready for an armed struggle for a social revolutionary transformation.

The West German left and what was left of it was preoccupied with the emerging nationalism and racism and its fascist and widespread violence.

They, the radical left, had neither the strength nor the foresight to find a social revolutionary response to the surprising incorporation of the GDR. The up to 50,000 people who took part in individual demonstrations in the defunct GDR at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall against the integration into capitalism and in the dwindling hope of a “third – socialist and emancipatory – way”, beyond the great mistakes of repressive and rigid real socialism and beyond capitalism, remained more or less alone. In the years that followed, no relevant, social revolutionary left was formed, and none that could have posed a political threat to the new German imperialism that had begun to kill during the war in Yugoslavia.

The RAF had already become history and any idea of ​​a repeat is absurd.

The time in the 1990s was not ripe for new forms of militant struggle as an arm and option of large emancipatory movements that no longer existed and do not yet exist.

After the upheavals and divisions among the RAF prisoners at the time and the RAF itself – and after the RAF declared its end in 1998 – I felt an inner distance from this story.

Today I see in the history of the RAF the moment of justified resistance and its moments in history.

In these 28 years of history, I see those who gave everything for the goal of a better and fairer world. I see those who had to bear the decades of misery of prison on their shoulders or those who died in this fight for liberation from the violent conditions of the capitalist system.

I also see in the history of the RAF its strategic and tactical mistakes.

I see its low points, with which it robbed itself of legitimacy at times and which remain as a burden of history.

Probably every revolution or its attempts, probably every story of struggle between domination and liberation throughout the centuries has had its ambivalences.

The collective appropriation of revolutionary history and its reflection lays the trail into the future of the struggles of human emancipation and liberation as well as one’s own development and change within it.

The RAF is history, the question of resistance and transformation remains and is existential.

The legacy of revolutionary history is the struggle for liberation today and in the future until all domination is overcome and all are free.

Today

Today we are in the midst of another epochal turning point. The crisis of eroding capitalism has opened a window of opportunity in which new dimensions of imperialism, up to the dimensions of World War III, are realistic. It is the age of authoritarianism, progressive impoverishment, nationalism, comprehensive militarization and ecological destruction of the planet, of flight and expulsion.

Today’s epochal break is a threatening age. However, the erosion of conditions could also present the possibility and opportunity for system transformation and liberation from capitalism.

Emancipation and revolution are only possible in the coexistence of different struggles and in the “recognition of interconnectedness”, as Caroline Braunmühl wrote – and of the existence of privileges and power imbalances in all areas of humanity. This too is an important and decisive prerequisite for transformative processes. I agree with this certainty without reservation.

An emancipatory revolution begins with our own awareness and then leads to change within us.

Coming together in recognition of different axes of power and privilege and in the certainty of the need for processes of our own change – in struggles against exploitation, oppression and war in capitalism – would be a process of revolutionary transformation. This would be, in a sense, looking in the mirror and then at society.

There we see exploitation, poverty and a top and a bottom. There we see patriarchy and its relations of violence; racism as an instrument of domination and its social independence; militarism and war and the few who profit from it and the many who flee from it. There we see weapons that are produced, the class that profits from it and the many they kill. We see the protest against it and the daily repression of the protest. We see structural police violence and class justice. We see the ecological destruction of the planet for the profit of the few and the masses who have to flee because of it. These are spaces in which we can come together today in all our diversity and in the awareness of a complex and multi-layered power structure in the process of transformation. They could be the spaces of the uprising of tomorrow.

The end of violent relations, a peaceful world, a world beyond ecological destruction, freedom from patriarchy, exploitation, domination and nation will not exist under capitalism. This is the factual prerequisite that cannot be changed and is evident.

The questions of revolutionary transformation instead of barbarism are current and existential today.

The emancipatory left today inevitably faces the question of whether it wants to save bourgeois democracy with the persistence of the relations of violence inherent in it – although the fascist option and authoritarianism are based on bourgeois democracy and the one arises from the other – or instead deal with its transformation into a domination-free and anti-capitalist future.

Bourgeois anti-fascism as a form of left-liberal politics that focuses on right-wing extremist parties, fights symptoms, negates the systemic cause and intends to save bourgeois democracy will not be able to stop the run into further authoritarianism, fascism, war and climate destruction and therefore leads to nothing. System transformation into an anti-capitalist age would be the only option that could lead to the goal.

Pure doctrines are a thing of the past. For the future of revolutionary transformation, we need the insights of the history of emancipatory movements: feminism, anarchism, communism, anti-racism, the movements of people of color, left-wing queer communities, communities of people with disabilities and their movements for self-determination, social revolutionary and subcultural movements, left-wing migrant communities, the migrant history of resistance, the failure of real socialism and many more.

Rosa Luxemburg’s words in the face of the great crisis of capitalism in 1918 are still valid today – and stand for the possibility of building a liberated society instead of domination, patriarchy, fascism, war, nationalism, exploitation and destruction:

Socialism or barbarism!

The circle closes.

The possibility of a historic moment could come and is now.

As long as we live in a system that is based on violence and locks up people who resist it in prison, diverse resistance is justified and necessary.

The special prison conditions and the imprisonment of Daniela Klette – like that of all prisoners in the history of emancipation struggles worldwide – are an expression of the violent relations of capitalist realities.

This applies not only to prisoners, but to all of humanity: we can only be free if everyone is free.

Freedom for Daniela!

smash the system

Burkhard Garweg

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17650

#anarchism #antiImperialism #armedStruggle #BurkhardGarweg #europe #germany #raf #urbanGuerrilla

Israel sends tanks into West Bank for first time in decades, says fleeing Palestinians can’t return | News Today News https://www.byteseu.com/773455/ #ArmedStruggle #ceasefire #Conflicts #DangerousEscalation #DefenseMinister #Gaza #Israel #IsraelHamasCeasefire #IsraeliControl #IsraeliCrackdown #IsraeliDefenseMinister #IsraeliPrimeMinister #IsraeliTanks #jenin #MilitaryRule #OccupiedTerritory #PalestinianAuthorities #PalestinianRefugees #PalestinianTerritories #StampOutMilitancy #Troops #WestBank

Peru. After 29 Years in Prison, MRTA Revolutionary Miguel Rincón Dies

COMMUNIQUÉ:

A revolutionary has died.

Long live the revolution.

Miguel Rincón R. was 2nd secretary general of the MRTA.

In his intense political life, at the time of being secretary general of the Peruvian communist youth, he led a tendency that proclaimed the political-military struggle, and joined the ranks of the MRTA with 80% of the communist youth. In 1980.
It was a substantial contribution that allowed Tupacamarismo to make the leap from armed struggle in the fields, jungles and mountains of Peru. Throughout the ’80s and much of the ’90s, he led the political front of the MRTA (People on the Move, and then Free Homeland) and was political advisor for the newspaper CAMBIO, an unofficial spokesman for Tupacamarismo.
After the fall into prison of the general commander of the MRTA, comrade Victor Polay Campos, in June 1992, Commander Nestor Cerpa Cartolini assumed the general command. And, Miguel the 2nd in command.
In this condition he was arrested on November 30, 1995, in Lima, after a whole night of combat, the most important urban combat in the history of the guerrillas in Peru. This happened when the party had an important military force of commandos concentrated in Lima, to take over the national congress, deal a hard blow to the Fujimori dictatorship and demand the release of all its brothers and sisters who were political and war prisoners. In number, approximately 500.
The imperialist bourgeois enemy frustrated this central task of the organization.
From prison, the comrade carried out an intense campaign of comprehensive training of cadres, preparing us for the next liberation that the party was preparing.
This was the seizure of the Japanese ambassador’s residence.
The story is known.

After this new tactical defeat of the revolutionaries, the comrade was transferred to the military prison of the Callao naval base.
There, together with Victor, they faced with dignity and consistency a brutal extermination prison of the Peruvian state.
This did not prevent them from continuing to develop revolutionary theory and write several books each, which will be a source of knowledge for our people and our militants.
Here is the result.
He died with 29 years in prison.
He was sentenced to 35.

Miguel, brother, you are one of the dead who never die.
An example of integral revolutionary.
COMMANDER MIGUEL RINCÓN, YOUR CONDORS ARE WAITING FOR YOU SINGING SONGS OF STRUGGLE AND VICTORY.

UNTIL VICTORY ALWAYS‼️‼️

Santiago, 11 December 2024

Resumen Latinoamericano, December 11, 2024.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13089

#armedStruggle #MiguelRincón #MRTA #peru #PoliticalPrisoners #rip #southAmerica #Tupacamarismo

Peru. After 29 Years in Prison, MRTA Revolutionary Miguel Rincón Dies

COMMUNIQUÉ:

A revolutionary has died.

Long live the revolution.

Miguel Rincón R. was 2nd secretary general of the MRTA.

In his intense political life, at the time of being secretary general of the Peruvian communist youth, he led a tendency that proclaimed the political-military struggle, and joined the ranks of the MRTA with 80% of the communist youth. In 1980.
It was a substantial contribution that allowed Tupacamarismo to make the leap from armed struggle in the fields, jungles and mountains of Peru. Throughout the ’80s and much of the ’90s, he led the political front of the MRTA (People on the Move, and then Free Homeland) and was political advisor for the newspaper CAMBIO, an unofficial spokesman for Tupacamarismo.
After the fall into prison of the general commander of the MRTA, comrade Victor Polay Campos, in June 1992, Commander Nestor Cerpa Cartolini assumed the general command. And, Miguel the 2nd in command.
In this condition he was arrested on November 30, 1995, in Lima, after a whole night of combat, the most important urban combat in the history of the guerrillas in Peru. This happened when the party had an important military force of commandos concentrated in Lima, to take over the national congress, deal a hard blow to the Fujimori dictatorship and demand the release of all its brothers and sisters who were political and war prisoners. In number, approximately 500.
The imperialist bourgeois enemy frustrated this central task of the organization.
From prison, the comrade carried out an intense campaign of comprehensive training of cadres, preparing us for the next liberation that the party was preparing.
This was the seizure of the Japanese ambassador’s residence.
The story is known.

After this new tactical defeat of the revolutionaries, the comrade was transferred to the military prison of the Callao naval base.
There, together with Victor, they faced with dignity and consistency a brutal extermination prison of the Peruvian state.
This did not prevent them from continuing to develop revolutionary theory and write several books each, which will be a source of knowledge for our people and our militants.
Here is the result.
He died with 29 years in prison.
He was sentenced to 35.

Miguel, brother, you are one of the dead who never die.
An example of integral revolutionary.
COMMANDER MIGUEL RINCÓN, YOUR CONDORS ARE WAITING FOR YOU SINGING SONGS OF STRUGGLE AND VICTORY.

UNTIL VICTORY ALWAYS‼️‼️

Santiago, 11 December 2024

Resumen Latinoamericano, December 11, 2024.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13089

#armedStruggle #MiguelRincón #MRTA #peru #PoliticalPrisoners #rip #southAmerica #Tupacamarismo

‘Surrender or Fight’: Leila Khaled on Palestinian Liberation, Women’s Participation in Armed Struggle

Historic Palestinian activist praised Brazil’s MST and said Cuba will always be an example for liberation movements

Leila Khaled is a historic activist for the liberation of the Palestinian people. At 80 years of age, she continues to be active in promoting international collaboration with political organizations, popular movements and governments to denounce Israeli violence and expand the struggle for the formation of the Palestinian state.

Venezuela is one of the countries that most echoes this struggle. The defense of the Palestinian people has been, since Hugo Chávez, one of the pillars of Venezuelan foreign policy. In the last week of November, Khaled was in Caracas to participate in the International Conference of Solidarity with Palestine. She received Brasil de Fato at the hotel where she was staying in the capital of Venezuela. In a conversation that lasted almost 1 hour, she spoke about the relationship between socialism and the Palestinian liberation process, the role of women in the armed struggle, and the relationship between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other countries.

According to Khaled, it is necessary to discuss a specific political formation in each state that adapts to the reality of each country. That is why the Popular Front understands that Marxism-Leninism is an important tool, because it is an instrument of action that can be incorporated by any country.

Khaled was born in Haifa, which was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, but had to leave her home after Israel’s founding in 1948. She then grew up in the Tyre refugee camp in Lebanon. At the age of 15, the young Palestinian began her activism and over time expanded her participation in the struggle for the formation of a Palestinian state.

Joining the PFLP was decisive for the political line Khaled would adopt to this day. As a communist activist, she began to be inspired by leaders such as Fidel Castro, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. She is responsible for founding one of the Popular Front cells in Kuwait and participated in military operations in the Middle East, including the hijacking of two planes, one from Trans World Airlines and the other from the Israeli airline El Al.

Khaled sees two challenges in women’s participation in the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine: from society, because society is sexist and patriarchal, and also from the Israeli occupation. According to her, for women in this context there is no middle ground: “surrender or fight”.

Brasil de Fato: Leila, what are the necessary adaptations of socialism in the liberation struggles of Palestine?

Leila Khaled: The Palestinian people are in different countries and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is where the Palestinian people are. There are many people in occupied Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank, and others in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other Arab countries. Our party is in these countries and we have a political program. And this is similar to other organizations. In some countries we do not say that we are from the PFLP because it is an organization banned in some territories. That is why we speak in committees for a democratic Palestine or form a union of delegations.

The political program is what guides the policy of the Popular Front. But labor policy is different as an objective situation in each country. Some countries do not accept a militant organization, so we changed the names. But they are still militants of the Popular Front. Therefore, the mission of each group of activists in each place is for them to design and carry out their own line of work that fits our political program.

And here comes the discussion about socialism. In our cultural and educational program we have theory. From the beginning we adopted Marxist-Leninist thought. But at the fifth congress of the Popular Front, in 1993, we put Marxism-Leninism not only as a political line, but as a working instrument. As we are citizens of the third world, talking about socialism and Marxism-Leninism has to be adapted to each territory and objective condition.

The context of each country is different in relation to another country. That is why Lenin always said that theory is gray, but reality is green. We apply a socialism different from ours in each country. These are experiences that we adopt from other countries. We, as a political organization, build alliances based on the political position of any country. And the position of a given country on the Palestinian cause is what determines our position in relation to that country.

And how can we build a Palestinian society that is socialist in a context of increasing Israeli attacks and an increase in violence in more than 12 months?

It’s a challenge, we need to educate our activists, educate them about socialism at the same time that we’re in a process of national liberation. We set ourselves the historic goal of returning to our land to build a new society. In a process of liberation, all taboos and paradigms are broken, from religious to political. That is why we are interested in confronting the war and genocide that our people are suffering. We raise our slogan: we have the right to return and to be a people whose self-determination is respected.

Can the coordination of international agencies help end the conflict?

It is the first time in Israel’s history since its founding that there has been a decision to hold Israelis accountable, as was the International Criminal Court’s decision that Netanyahu is a war criminal as its defense minister.

But Israel considers itself above the law. They do not surrender internationally because they are protected by the colonial West and U.S. imperialism. For the first time, Israel in the war against Gaza asks the United States for protection, this frightened Israel. But because of this protection, they follow it.

Could China’s growing involvement on the geopolitical chessboard change this?

Of course, today there are the BRICS, which is an economic alliance that must be reflected in a political alliance to confront the imperialists. Not through weapons, but through the economy. I think this will change and the United States will no longer protect Israel, they are giant and powerful countries. In its history there are revolutions and we learn from these revolutions. In the Cold War between the USSR and the United States, the United States won and today the world is changing. And it must change in favor of the people. And this provides a positive environment for the people of the world. Specifically Latin America, because it is close to imperialism. This means that all together we can break this rule. This world will no longer be ruled by the United States.

You have already mentioned several times the imperialist actions of the U.S. in different places, mainly in stifling revolutionary struggles. What has been the role of the United States today in the Palestinian liberation movement and in Latin American revolutionary movements?

We always present our experience and the particular problems we face, but Latin America began to have revolutionary experiences a long time ago and Cuba is the great example. And this is reflected in a reaction of imperialism. Cuba has suffered sanctions since it decided to have its own revolutionary process and this has had a huge effect on Latin American politics. [Salvador] Allende’s revolution in Chile and Venezuela was also influenced by Cuba. Cubans play an important role in Latin American politics.

In many other countries there were revolutions that failed and this is because the U.S. and the Zionist movement penetrate these societies and have the role of destroying them. So that these societies see the United States as the “liberator”.

How was your relationship with Venezuela over time and with Chávez?

Chavez supported the Palestinian cause from the beginning and publicly announced it at the UN in 2003. This created a relationship between Venezuelans and Palestinians that was marked and continues to be an important point of support. I saw him in 2005 in Brazil, when I went to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. We also saw each other in other cities. When I first came to Venezuela, he was already undergoing treatment for cancer.

How do political struggles in other countries serve as a reference for the Palestinian liberation struggle?

We study the results of different processes. In any process of national liberation in a country, since the Bolshevik revolution, in China, in Vietnam, in Algeria, in South Africa, it is necessary to educate our activists through ideas. Our struggle is not a few years, it is from one generation to another. Because we are facing a common enemy: the Zionist movement, which has Israel and US imperialism as its governments. This is the enemy’s camp. We understand in advance that we have to sacrifice ourselves and pass the banner of liberation from generation to generation until we liberate the Palestinian territory and return to Palestine, expelling the Zionists.

Personally and in general, we carry a scientific thought and it is not something emotional based on this. I continue to carry this responsibility when I see friends in the world. Many revolutionary and progressive movements fought for our cause. From Europe to Tokyo and Latin America and this gives more hope that we will return to our homeland.

Carlos Ilich Ramírez was a Venezuelan activist who, from an early age, was involved in the struggle of the Palestinian people. Patricio Argüello, Nicaraguan, who became a martyr when he hijacked a plane. We also have militants and comrades in Japan. They went on a military operation in occupied Palestine and were killed there. There are many internationalists who fought with us and this is not the only way to support them. We attended training courses in several countries of the world: China, USSR, socialist countries. And we also received a university education through university scholarships from these countries. So we are surrounded by friends in the world and we see these relations now with what is happening in Gaza, with the whole world expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, including the United States and Europe.

And at the same time it reveals the real reason for the conflict. It demonstrated the terrorist face of Israel. This is what gives us strength and motivation to continue working.

How important is revolutionary and theoretical training for a militant and militancy for a theoretician?

Knowledge has its effect on men and women. We live in the age of telecommunications, so communication is easier through technology. We communicate more easily and this helps us to see that victory is closer. Therefore, the more knowledge we have, the easier our process of liberation will be.

We used to read books, today everything is on the internet, on Google. This makes it easier for activists to learn more through communication. We used to see each other at international forums and conferences. Nowadays there are many applications that help not only with video conferencing, but also with training. Getting information or accessing training is easier.

The Palestinian people suffered the Nakba in 1948 and left Palestine. The context of the Palestinian people forced Palestinians to confront Zionism through university education. and this facilitated the entry of men and women to universities. We only have 8% illiteracy, because we help everyone to be educated and to be students. Compared to other Arab countries, Palestinians have the highest university education and this increases the number of intellectuals.

For this reason, many of our students and young people will study political science, philosophy and culture to help spread and publicize the culture of resistance.

What are the main challenges for you as a woman in the armed struggle? Is there a different context within this gender?

I grew up in a political family. I’ve never had a problem with this with my family, but the family is always afraid and worried. But this wasn’t an underlying problem for me. Other women had difficulty joining activism because of their families. And there came a time when many fathers forced women to stay at home, not to leave the house.

With the evolution and development of militancy work, this helped women to get involved in militancy, especially from 1987 onwards. This was the first Intifada and this gave women the opportunity to enter into direct confrontation with Zionism. Thus, the face of the first intifada was that women were on the front lines defending their children. Many women have been arrested and are still being arrested. The enemy did not imagine that Palestinian women would participate in the Intifada. When women engage in this work of organizing and revolutionary activism, they are defending their family. Women in this context of Palestinian struggle suffer a double oppression: from society, because society is sexist and patriarchal, and also from the Israeli occupation. There are currently many Palestinian women in Israeli prisons.

For women, there are two paths in this scenario: surrender or fight. A woman will always choose to defend her family and take on this role. She will not raise a white flag. That is why I did not experience oppression or challenges in this issue, but it is something that is above the diaspora, all these problems we suffer in a different way.

How do Palestinian popular movements discuss the particular issues of the life of each group?

We have people’s unions, the Palestinian women’s union, and this group adopts the program of resistance. Workers, peasants, doctors, journalists, each sector has a union. And this gives popular support and when Israel attacks the people join the revolution to defend them. Today we are witnessing a genocide against our people. And the world is studying this genocide.

Israeli attacks have a direct impact on land use. How is the dispute over land in Palestine?

Our problem is that settlers are occupying the land with the support of the Tel Aviv group. There is a decision by the Court of The Hague that says that the colonies are not legal and now they say that there could be genocide, but unfortunately that is not said. We saw this problem in the 1990s, because the Intifada was resisting and the Palestinian leadership signed the Oslo Accords and this affected the Palestinian revolutionary movement.

You have already been to Brazil and had contact with leftist movements in the country. How do you see the political organization of Brazilian popular movements that struggle to transform the relationship between the State, population and land?

Brazil is huge and has had many dictatorships that changed the system of government. Therefore, geography plays an important role. In Brazil, the MST has an important role in liberating land and handing it over to the people. In the previous administration, Lula helped to some extent in this process in one way or another. During Lula’s government, the MST played a very important role and began to have a broader social base because these lands were appropriated to the feudals.

And the MST managed to promote a law that determines that whoever does not make productive use of the land should not have possession of it. But the Brazilian oligarchies killed MST leaders and carried out acts of violence against militants. Many of the leaders of the Movement were assassinated by imperialism through terrorist and fascist groups in Brazil. But the MST continues today. Today the MST is a giant organization because it plays an important role for the people. Because when you give the poor something to live on and give them work, the social base expands.

We studied the experience of the MST, but this cannot be applied to Palestine. The majority of the Palestinian people are outside Palestine. In some countries it’s called land reform, but what you did wasn’t just the struggle for land reform, people now have a better future and homes. And all this was done by workers and peasants, men and women. We saw this with our own eyes.

By Lorenzo Santiago, Brasil de Fato / Resumen Latinoamericano, December 5, 2024.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=12966

#armedStruggle #brazil #LeilaKhaled #mst #palestine #pflp #southAmerica #venezuela #westAsia #women

‘Surrender or Fight’: Leila Khaled on Palestinian Liberation, Women’s Participation in Armed Struggle

Historic Palestinian activist praised Brazil’s MST and said Cuba will always be an example for liberation movements

Leila Khaled is a historic activist for the liberation of the Palestinian people. At 80 years of age, she continues to be active in promoting international collaboration with political organizations, popular movements and governments to denounce Israeli violence and expand the struggle for the formation of the Palestinian state.

Venezuela is one of the countries that most echoes this struggle. The defense of the Palestinian people has been, since Hugo Chávez, one of the pillars of Venezuelan foreign policy. In the last week of November, Khaled was in Caracas to participate in the International Conference of Solidarity with Palestine. She received Brasil de Fato at the hotel where she was staying in the capital of Venezuela. In a conversation that lasted almost 1 hour, she spoke about the relationship between socialism and the Palestinian liberation process, the role of women in the armed struggle, and the relationship between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other countries.

According to Khaled, it is necessary to discuss a specific political formation in each state that adapts to the reality of each country. That is why the Popular Front understands that Marxism-Leninism is an important tool, because it is an instrument of action that can be incorporated by any country.

Khaled was born in Haifa, which was part of the British Mandate of Palestine, but had to leave her home after Israel’s founding in 1948. She then grew up in the Tyre refugee camp in Lebanon. At the age of 15, the young Palestinian began her activism and over time expanded her participation in the struggle for the formation of a Palestinian state.

Joining the PFLP was decisive for the political line Khaled would adopt to this day. As a communist activist, she began to be inspired by leaders such as Fidel Castro, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. She is responsible for founding one of the Popular Front cells in Kuwait and participated in military operations in the Middle East, including the hijacking of two planes, one from Trans World Airlines and the other from the Israeli airline El Al.

Khaled sees two challenges in women’s participation in the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine: from society, because society is sexist and patriarchal, and also from the Israeli occupation. According to her, for women in this context there is no middle ground: “surrender or fight”.

Brasil de Fato: Leila, what are the necessary adaptations of socialism in the liberation struggles of Palestine?

Leila Khaled: The Palestinian people are in different countries and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is where the Palestinian people are. There are many people in occupied Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank, and others in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and other Arab countries. Our party is in these countries and we have a political program. And this is similar to other organizations. In some countries we do not say that we are from the PFLP because it is an organization banned in some territories. That is why we speak in committees for a democratic Palestine or form a union of delegations.

The political program is what guides the policy of the Popular Front. But labor policy is different as an objective situation in each country. Some countries do not accept a militant organization, so we changed the names. But they are still militants of the Popular Front. Therefore, the mission of each group of activists in each place is for them to design and carry out their own line of work that fits our political program.

And here comes the discussion about socialism. In our cultural and educational program we have theory. From the beginning we adopted Marxist-Leninist thought. But at the fifth congress of the Popular Front, in 1993, we put Marxism-Leninism not only as a political line, but as a working instrument. As we are citizens of the third world, talking about socialism and Marxism-Leninism has to be adapted to each territory and objective condition.

The context of each country is different in relation to another country. That is why Lenin always said that theory is gray, but reality is green. We apply a socialism different from ours in each country. These are experiences that we adopt from other countries. We, as a political organization, build alliances based on the political position of any country. And the position of a given country on the Palestinian cause is what determines our position in relation to that country.

And how can we build a Palestinian society that is socialist in a context of increasing Israeli attacks and an increase in violence in more than 12 months?

It’s a challenge, we need to educate our activists, educate them about socialism at the same time that we’re in a process of national liberation. We set ourselves the historic goal of returning to our land to build a new society. In a process of liberation, all taboos and paradigms are broken, from religious to political. That is why we are interested in confronting the war and genocide that our people are suffering. We raise our slogan: we have the right to return and to be a people whose self-determination is respected.

Can the coordination of international agencies help end the conflict?

It is the first time in Israel’s history since its founding that there has been a decision to hold Israelis accountable, as was the International Criminal Court’s decision that Netanyahu is a war criminal as its defense minister.

But Israel considers itself above the law. They do not surrender internationally because they are protected by the colonial West and U.S. imperialism. For the first time, Israel in the war against Gaza asks the United States for protection, this frightened Israel. But because of this protection, they follow it.

Could China’s growing involvement on the geopolitical chessboard change this?

Of course, today there are the BRICS, which is an economic alliance that must be reflected in a political alliance to confront the imperialists. Not through weapons, but through the economy. I think this will change and the United States will no longer protect Israel, they are giant and powerful countries. In its history there are revolutions and we learn from these revolutions. In the Cold War between the USSR and the United States, the United States won and today the world is changing. And it must change in favor of the people. And this provides a positive environment for the people of the world. Specifically Latin America, because it is close to imperialism. This means that all together we can break this rule. This world will no longer be ruled by the United States.

You have already mentioned several times the imperialist actions of the U.S. in different places, mainly in stifling revolutionary struggles. What has been the role of the United States today in the Palestinian liberation movement and in Latin American revolutionary movements?

We always present our experience and the particular problems we face, but Latin America began to have revolutionary experiences a long time ago and Cuba is the great example. And this is reflected in a reaction of imperialism. Cuba has suffered sanctions since it decided to have its own revolutionary process and this has had a huge effect on Latin American politics. [Salvador] Allende’s revolution in Chile and Venezuela was also influenced by Cuba. Cubans play an important role in Latin American politics.

In many other countries there were revolutions that failed and this is because the U.S. and the Zionist movement penetrate these societies and have the role of destroying them. So that these societies see the United States as the “liberator”.

How was your relationship with Venezuela over time and with Chávez?

Chavez supported the Palestinian cause from the beginning and publicly announced it at the UN in 2003. This created a relationship between Venezuelans and Palestinians that was marked and continues to be an important point of support. I saw him in 2005 in Brazil, when I went to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. We also saw each other in other cities. When I first came to Venezuela, he was already undergoing treatment for cancer.

How do political struggles in other countries serve as a reference for the Palestinian liberation struggle?

We study the results of different processes. In any process of national liberation in a country, since the Bolshevik revolution, in China, in Vietnam, in Algeria, in South Africa, it is necessary to educate our activists through ideas. Our struggle is not a few years, it is from one generation to another. Because we are facing a common enemy: the Zionist movement, which has Israel and US imperialism as its governments. This is the enemy’s camp. We understand in advance that we have to sacrifice ourselves and pass the banner of liberation from generation to generation until we liberate the Palestinian territory and return to Palestine, expelling the Zionists.

Personally and in general, we carry a scientific thought and it is not something emotional based on this. I continue to carry this responsibility when I see friends in the world. Many revolutionary and progressive movements fought for our cause. From Europe to Tokyo and Latin America and this gives more hope that we will return to our homeland.

Carlos Ilich Ramírez was a Venezuelan activist who, from an early age, was involved in the struggle of the Palestinian people. Patricio Argüello, Nicaraguan, who became a martyr when he hijacked a plane. We also have militants and comrades in Japan. They went on a military operation in occupied Palestine and were killed there. There are many internationalists who fought with us and this is not the only way to support them. We attended training courses in several countries of the world: China, USSR, socialist countries. And we also received a university education through university scholarships from these countries. So we are surrounded by friends in the world and we see these relations now with what is happening in Gaza, with the whole world expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, including the United States and Europe.

And at the same time it reveals the real reason for the conflict. It demonstrated the terrorist face of Israel. This is what gives us strength and motivation to continue working.

How important is revolutionary and theoretical training for a militant and militancy for a theoretician?

Knowledge has its effect on men and women. We live in the age of telecommunications, so communication is easier through technology. We communicate more easily and this helps us to see that victory is closer. Therefore, the more knowledge we have, the easier our process of liberation will be.

We used to read books, today everything is on the internet, on Google. This makes it easier for activists to learn more through communication. We used to see each other at international forums and conferences. Nowadays there are many applications that help not only with video conferencing, but also with training. Getting information or accessing training is easier.

The Palestinian people suffered the Nakba in 1948 and left Palestine. The context of the Palestinian people forced Palestinians to confront Zionism through university education. and this facilitated the entry of men and women to universities. We only have 8% illiteracy, because we help everyone to be educated and to be students. Compared to other Arab countries, Palestinians have the highest university education and this increases the number of intellectuals.

For this reason, many of our students and young people will study political science, philosophy and culture to help spread and publicize the culture of resistance.

What are the main challenges for you as a woman in the armed struggle? Is there a different context within this gender?

I grew up in a political family. I’ve never had a problem with this with my family, but the family is always afraid and worried. But this wasn’t an underlying problem for me. Other women had difficulty joining activism because of their families. And there came a time when many fathers forced women to stay at home, not to leave the house.

With the evolution and development of militancy work, this helped women to get involved in militancy, especially from 1987 onwards. This was the first Intifada and this gave women the opportunity to enter into direct confrontation with Zionism. Thus, the face of the first intifada was that women were on the front lines defending their children. Many women have been arrested and are still being arrested. The enemy did not imagine that Palestinian women would participate in the Intifada. When women engage in this work of organizing and revolutionary activism, they are defending their family. Women in this context of Palestinian struggle suffer a double oppression: from society, because society is sexist and patriarchal, and also from the Israeli occupation. There are currently many Palestinian women in Israeli prisons.

For women, there are two paths in this scenario: surrender or fight. A woman will always choose to defend her family and take on this role. She will not raise a white flag. That is why I did not experience oppression or challenges in this issue, but it is something that is above the diaspora, all these problems we suffer in a different way.

How do Palestinian popular movements discuss the particular issues of the life of each group?

We have people’s unions, the Palestinian women’s union, and this group adopts the program of resistance. Workers, peasants, doctors, journalists, each sector has a union. And this gives popular support and when Israel attacks the people join the revolution to defend them. Today we are witnessing a genocide against our people. And the world is studying this genocide.

Israeli attacks have a direct impact on land use. How is the dispute over land in Palestine?

Our problem is that settlers are occupying the land with the support of the Tel Aviv group. There is a decision by the Court of The Hague that says that the colonies are not legal and now they say that there could be genocide, but unfortunately that is not said. We saw this problem in the 1990s, because the Intifada was resisting and the Palestinian leadership signed the Oslo Accords and this affected the Palestinian revolutionary movement.

You have already been to Brazil and had contact with leftist movements in the country. How do you see the political organization of Brazilian popular movements that struggle to transform the relationship between the State, population and land?

Brazil is huge and has had many dictatorships that changed the system of government. Therefore, geography plays an important role. In Brazil, the MST has an important role in liberating land and handing it over to the people. In the previous administration, Lula helped to some extent in this process in one way or another. During Lula’s government, the MST played a very important role and began to have a broader social base because these lands were appropriated to the feudals.

And the MST managed to promote a law that determines that whoever does not make productive use of the land should not have possession of it. But the Brazilian oligarchies killed MST leaders and carried out acts of violence against militants. Many of the leaders of the Movement were assassinated by imperialism through terrorist and fascist groups in Brazil. But the MST continues today. Today the MST is a giant organization because it plays an important role for the people. Because when you give the poor something to live on and give them work, the social base expands.

We studied the experience of the MST, but this cannot be applied to Palestine. The majority of the Palestinian people are outside Palestine. In some countries it’s called land reform, but what you did wasn’t just the struggle for land reform, people now have a better future and homes. And all this was done by workers and peasants, men and women. We saw this with our own eyes.

By Lorenzo Santiago, Brasil de Fato / Resumen Latinoamericano, December 5, 2024.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=12966

#armedStruggle #brazil #LeilaKhaled #mst #palestine #pflp #southAmerica #venezuela #westAsia #women

#CivilResistance scholarship recommends #SocialMovements adopt a #nonviolent (NV) strategy for #SocialChange. The #violence analyzed is usually #ArmedStruggle, but it recommends NV in all tactics (thus excluding property destruction, #rioting, confrontation w/ #police). Benjamin Case's excellent "Street Rebellion" shows movements involving rioting are more likely to be successful, largely b/c riots lead to wider #CivilSociety participation in movements. Well-researched book!

#AKPress #Reading

#CivilResistance scholarship recommends #SocialMovements adopt a #nonviolent (NV) strategy for #SocialChange. The #violence analyzed is usually #ArmedStruggle, but it recommends NV in all tactics (thus excluding property destruction, #rioting, confrontation w/ #police). Benjamin Case's excellent "Street Rebellion" shows movements involving rioting are more likely to be successful, largely b/c riots lead to wider #CivilSociety participation in movements. Well-researched book!

#AKPress #Reading

#CivilResistance scholarship recommends #SocialMovements adopt a #nonviolent (NV) strategy for #SocialChange. The #violence analyzed is usually #ArmedStruggle, but it recommends NV in all tactics (thus excluding property destruction, #rioting, confrontation w/ #police). Benjamin Case's excellent "Street Rebellion" shows movements involving rioting are more likely to be successful, largely b/c riots lead to wider #CivilSociety participation in movements. Well-researched book!

#AKPress #Reading

#CivilResistance scholarship recommends #SocialMovements adopt a #nonviolent (NV) strategy for #SocialChange. The #violence analyzed is usually #ArmedStruggle, but it recommends NV in all tactics (thus excluding property destruction, #rioting, confrontation w/ #police). Benjamin Case's excellent "Street Rebellion" shows movements involving rioting are more likely to be successful, largely b/c riots lead to wider #CivilSociety participation in movements. Well-researched book!

#AKPress #Reading

#CivilResistance scholarship recommends #SocialMovements adopt a #nonviolent (NV) strategy for #SocialChange. The #violence analyzed is usually #ArmedStruggle, but it recommends NV in all tactics (thus excluding property destruction, #rioting, confrontation w/ #police). Benjamin Case's excellent "Street Rebellion" shows movements involving rioting are more likely to be successful, largely b/c riots lead to wider #CivilSociety participation in movements. Well-researched book!

#AKPress #Reading

International Call for a Day of Action in Memory of Anarchist Comrade Kyriakos Ximitiris

Athens, Greece.

We call on comrades around the world for an international day of action in memory of the death of anarchist warrior and beloved comrade Kyriakos Ximitiris (November 16).

We invite comrades from abroad to send messages that they would like us to read at the political rally in memory of comrade Kyriakos, which will take place on the same day in Athens.

[email protected]

October 31 forever engraved in the heart of every warrior.

With rage and determination we stand by our comrades.

On 31/10/204, after a device exploded in an apartment in Ampelokipoi, our anarchist comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris fell in the battle for social and class liberation, while our anarchist comrade Marianna M., who was also in the apartment, ended up with multiple injuries and is so far being treated and guarded at the Evangelismos Hospital. At the same time, two more people were arrested and taken for investigation, comrade Dimitris and anarchist comrade Dimitra were arrested.

Comrade Marianna M. is detained and guarded in Evangelismos, with all the repressive apparatus and the anti-terrorism agency with the aim of extracting statements from the comrade. We have not forgotten the cases of torture of comrades who were captured and guarded in health institutions and suffered physical abuse through medical practices, being exploited in their physical, emotional and mental state. Such impositions of state power are clearly torture.

It should not cross their minds that the police continue to exert pressure or continue the process of (pre)investigation on the seriously injured comrade Marianna, while she is hospitalized and trying to manage the emotional, spiritual and political burden after the explosion. Their interrogation is torture and all kinds of participants in it are torturers of state power.

The administration and staff of Evangelismos have the primary responsibility for anything that happens to our comrade. Any member of the medical community who consents to or simply remains silent in such a process will be complicit in the intentional state violence and attempted torture of comrade Marianna. State violence has been perpetrated against our comrade with the anti-terrorist bastards taking her fingerprints, while she was under the care of medical personnel, without having left danger and without her consent, since she was unconscious.

The cannibalism on the faces and bodies of the comrades has begun with all kinds of methods of the entire state apparatus under the guidance of the anti-terrorist agency and the Ministry for Citizen Protection Chrysochoidis. Their slanders on television channels and the front pages of the well-known media thugs is another part of the media’s emetic role of state and capitalist propaganda. The detailed reporting and the release of photos and videos of the scene of the incident punish the dead comrade and capture the brutality faced by his family and loved ones. At the same time, with the depoliticization of the action of our comrades, they are being presented as amoral terrorists who destroy the homes of citizens, with the aim of isolating them socially to expose them to repression.

The state, its ideological mechanisms and its capital are once again trying to strike at the lines of the movement, to annul its political contents, its options for struggle and its decades of revolutionary tradition. Before comrade Marianna recovers her strength and speaks as she wants and as the dead comrade would wish, they have furiously unleashed state propaganda against them, against the whole world of the Struggle and its options. The derision and slander of the revolutionary struggle are equal to the spear of counter-revolutionary propaganda. We firmly oppose it, defending the revolutionary cause, but also the will of the people who are in the framework of repression.

The events of 31/10 and the political choices of the struggle that led to them will not be commented on by the thugs of the state machinery and capital. The comrade who suffered and paid a high price and the comrades who are persecuted for it will speak first, when they wish.

The movement will speak, all of us who walked together with comrade Kyriakos and comrade Marianna, who were inspired and continue to be inspired by their clear vision and their unwavering commitment. We, who recognize their presence in all fields of struggle, and realize that comrades are the embodiment of open dialogue within the movement. The comrades have dedicated their lives to the struggle against oppression, to build a world of equality and freedom, taking responsibility and the decisions that led to Kyriakos’ death and Marianna to be imprisoned and receive multiple injuries. With their attitude and their presence they have given themselves body, soul and thought to the revolutionary Cause and on this path they are in the vanguard of society in struggle.

Marianna and Kyriakos for years have been continuously present in solidarity projects with prisoners, in the internationalist movement against the war, in the struggle for Palestinian resistance, in the actions of defense of the Exarchia neighborhood, in the struggles within the universities, in the defense of liberated spaces, of occupations and in all social and class struggles. Dedicated to these struggles, always ready to discover together their most rebellious extensions. Not only have they theoretically defended the multifaceted struggle for social liberation, but they are its most faithful incarnation. They have taken a position of struggle, by all means, against the world of power, the State, capital, racism, patriarchy, on the side of the oppressed and the rebels, always with the vision of a better world, a world of solidarity, equality and freedom.

Against a world that marginalizes anyone who does not fit into its normality, that naturalizes the exploitation and oppression of those from below, the anarchist-anti-authoritarian movement fights by all means. It is the multiform action that will lead to radicalization and the fullness of our responses and to our attack on what exists. The options of revolutionary counterviolence and armed struggle, as an integral part of the multifaceted struggle, exceed the limits of bourgeois legitimacy and challenge the state monopoly of violence. It is these options of struggle that keep the thread of the rebellion alive from that November of 1973 until today. Such choices are an integral part of a historical insurrectionary continuum, which keeps the vision of social revolution alive in our hearts and minds.

The operation to undermine the revolutionary discourse and the subsequent repression shows that the bastards of the agencies of state terror fear people who do not compromise with injustice, inequality, exploitation. Against the propaganda and intimidation operation of the State and the bosses, as well as against the attempt to depoliticize the improved options, we first respond politically and regardless of the specific case. We owe it, apart from everyone else, to all those who gave their lives, to those who were imprisoned, to those who fought during so many years of social and class war. Armed struggle is an integral part of the radical movement, of the multifaceted social and class struggle, deeply rooted in our militant tradition, and we defend it without compromise.

Against the world of individuation and fatalism, we raise the struggle by all means. We strengthen each other, we defend our comrades. Undoubtedly, comrades and friends, no one will be left alone against the repressive campaign of the state and capital. In the face of the anti-terrorist tactics and cannibalism of the media, may our solidarity be a bulwark for our captive comrades and any other prosecution. Repression does not scare us and we will support each other without hesitation.

TO NOT LAY DOWN ARMS FOR COMRADE MARIANNA

KYRIAKOS XIMOTIRIS, ONE OF US, ALWAYS WITH US IN THE WAYS OF FIRE

FREEDOM FOR COMRADE DIMITRIS AND ANARCHIST COMRADE DIMITRA

Assembly in solidarity with the imprisoned, fugitive, and persecuted warriors.

Source: La Zarzamora

#anarchist #armedStruggle #callToAction #europe #greece #internationalist #KyriakosXymitiris

International Call for a Day of Action in Memory of Anarchist Comrade Kyriakos Ximitiris

Athens, Greece.

We call on comrades around the world for an international day of action in memory of the death of anarchist warrior and beloved comrade Kyriakos Ximitiris (November 16).

We invite comrades from abroad to send messages that they would like us to read at the political rally in memory of comrade Kyriakos, which will take place on the same day in Athens.

[email protected]

October 31 forever engraved in the heart of every warrior.

With rage and determination we stand by our comrades.

On 31/10/204, after a device exploded in an apartment in Ampelokipoi, our anarchist comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris fell in the battle for social and class liberation, while our anarchist comrade Marianna M., who was also in the apartment, ended up with multiple injuries and is so far being treated and guarded at the Evangelismos Hospital. At the same time, two more people were arrested and taken for investigation, comrade Dimitris and anarchist comrade Dimitra were arrested.

Comrade Marianna M. is detained and guarded in Evangelismos, with all the repressive apparatus and the anti-terrorism agency with the aim of extracting statements from the comrade. We have not forgotten the cases of torture of comrades who were captured and guarded in health institutions and suffered physical abuse through medical practices, being exploited in their physical, emotional and mental state. Such impositions of state power are clearly torture.

It should not cross their minds that the police continue to exert pressure or continue the process of (pre)investigation on the seriously injured comrade Marianna, while she is hospitalized and trying to manage the emotional, spiritual and political burden after the explosion. Their interrogation is torture and all kinds of participants in it are torturers of state power.

The administration and staff of Evangelismos have the primary responsibility for anything that happens to our comrade. Any member of the medical community who consents to or simply remains silent in such a process will be complicit in the intentional state violence and attempted torture of comrade Marianna. State violence has been perpetrated against our comrade with the anti-terrorist bastards taking her fingerprints, while she was under the care of medical personnel, without having left danger and without her consent, since she was unconscious.

The cannibalism on the faces and bodies of the comrades has begun with all kinds of methods of the entire state apparatus under the guidance of the anti-terrorist agency and the Ministry for Citizen Protection Chrysochoidis. Their slanders on television channels and the front pages of the well-known media thugs is another part of the media’s emetic role of state and capitalist propaganda. The detailed reporting and the release of photos and videos of the scene of the incident punish the dead comrade and capture the brutality faced by his family and loved ones. At the same time, with the depoliticization of the action of our comrades, they are being presented as amoral terrorists who destroy the homes of citizens, with the aim of isolating them socially to expose them to repression.

The state, its ideological mechanisms and its capital are once again trying to strike at the lines of the movement, to annul its political contents, its options for struggle and its decades of revolutionary tradition. Before comrade Marianna recovers her strength and speaks as she wants and as the dead comrade would wish, they have furiously unleashed state propaganda against them, against the whole world of the Struggle and its options. The derision and slander of the revolutionary struggle are equal to the spear of counter-revolutionary propaganda. We firmly oppose it, defending the revolutionary cause, but also the will of the people who are in the framework of repression.

The events of 31/10 and the political choices of the struggle that led to them will not be commented on by the thugs of the state machinery and capital. The comrade who suffered and paid a high price and the comrades who are persecuted for it will speak first, when they wish.

The movement will speak, all of us who walked together with comrade Kyriakos and comrade Marianna, who were inspired and continue to be inspired by their clear vision and their unwavering commitment. We, who recognize their presence in all fields of struggle, and realize that comrades are the embodiment of open dialogue within the movement. The comrades have dedicated their lives to the struggle against oppression, to build a world of equality and freedom, taking responsibility and the decisions that led to Kyriakos’ death and Marianna to be imprisoned and receive multiple injuries. With their attitude and their presence they have given themselves body, soul and thought to the revolutionary Cause and on this path they are in the vanguard of society in struggle.

Marianna and Kyriakos for years have been continuously present in solidarity projects with prisoners, in the internationalist movement against the war, in the struggle for Palestinian resistance, in the actions of defense of the Exarchia neighborhood, in the struggles within the universities, in the defense of liberated spaces, of occupations and in all social and class struggles. Dedicated to these struggles, always ready to discover together their most rebellious extensions. Not only have they theoretically defended the multifaceted struggle for social liberation, but they are its most faithful incarnation. They have taken a position of struggle, by all means, against the world of power, the State, capital, racism, patriarchy, on the side of the oppressed and the rebels, always with the vision of a better world, a world of solidarity, equality and freedom.

Against a world that marginalizes anyone who does not fit into its normality, that naturalizes the exploitation and oppression of those from below, the anarchist-anti-authoritarian movement fights by all means. It is the multiform action that will lead to radicalization and the fullness of our responses and to our attack on what exists. The options of revolutionary counterviolence and armed struggle, as an integral part of the multifaceted struggle, exceed the limits of bourgeois legitimacy and challenge the state monopoly of violence. It is these options of struggle that keep the thread of the rebellion alive from that November of 1973 until today. Such choices are an integral part of a historical insurrectionary continuum, which keeps the vision of social revolution alive in our hearts and minds.

The operation to undermine the revolutionary discourse and the subsequent repression shows that the bastards of the agencies of state terror fear people who do not compromise with injustice, inequality, exploitation. Against the propaganda and intimidation operation of the State and the bosses, as well as against the attempt to depoliticize the improved options, we first respond politically and regardless of the specific case. We owe it, apart from everyone else, to all those who gave their lives, to those who were imprisoned, to those who fought during so many years of social and class war. Armed struggle is an integral part of the radical movement, of the multifaceted social and class struggle, deeply rooted in our militant tradition, and we defend it without compromise.

Against the world of individuation and fatalism, we raise the struggle by all means. We strengthen each other, we defend our comrades. Undoubtedly, comrades and friends, no one will be left alone against the repressive campaign of the state and capital. In the face of the anti-terrorist tactics and cannibalism of the media, may our solidarity be a bulwark for our captive comrades and any other prosecution. Repression does not scare us and we will support each other without hesitation.

TO NOT LAY DOWN ARMS FOR COMRADE MARIANNA

KYRIAKOS XIMOTIRIS, ONE OF US, ALWAYS WITH US IN THE WAYS OF FIRE

FREEDOM FOR COMRADE DIMITRIS AND ANARCHIST COMRADE DIMITRA

Assembly in solidarity with the imprisoned, fugitive, and persecuted warriors.

Source: La Zarzamora

#anarchist #armedStruggle #callToAction #europe #greece #internationalist #KyriakosXymitiris

We affirm that Saraya Al-Quds in the West Bank are fighting the zionist enemy with full strength and resilience, alongside the forces of the resistance, armed with Allah’s support and the duty of combat and confrontation left by the martyrs, prisoners, and wounded as a trust upon the shoulders of every free and honorable person. We will not compromise nor break.

Saraya Al-Quds in the West Bank and its camps are operating in complete unity with all resistance forces in the battle of “Horror of the Camps,” just as the fieldwork is conducted in Gaza in the battle of Al-Aqsa Flood, believing in the importance of merging into a unifying crucible against zionist arrogance and fascism.

The martyrdom of Commander Mohammed Jaber “Abu Shujaa” and his brothers will further ignite the battlefields, and with each martyrdom, our determination increases, and with each martyr, more join the resistance, and the chances of taking revenge on the Nazi zionist enemy increase.

A few days ago, we reached the heart of “Tel Aviv” alongside our brothers in Al-Qassam Brigades in a heroic joint martyrdom operation. This is an important message that everyone should grasp, especially as it will not be the last, Allah willing.

We say to Netanyahu and the enemy’s leaders that it is too late to thwart the resistance project in the West Bank. Cells spread across all cities and camps are now operating, thanks to Allah, within the formations of Saraya Al-Quds and various resistance factions. We will see what happens in the coming days to the soldiers and armored vehicles that have infiltrated the cities of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem, Allah willing.

Today, the blood of Saraya Al-Quds fighters in the West Bank, Gaza, Damascus, and Lebanon is mingled to confirm that the battlefield is one. Victory and martyrdom are our choices, which we will neither change nor abandon. Our jihad will continue, and our weapons will remain raised in all arenas on the path to the freedom of Al-Quds and Palestine.

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/08/31/saraya-al-quds-commander-in-the-west-bank-details-current-struggle/

#alAqsaFlood #armedStruggle #guerrilla #palestine #resistance #sarayaAlQuds #westAsia #westBank