“Protest is when I say that I don’t like this and that. Resistance is when I make sure that what I don’t like doesn’t continue.” – Ulrike Meinhof
9th of May, 1976
The RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof is murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement, preceded by the murder of hunger striker Holger Meins, who was constantly being force-fed, and a year later Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement cells and Ingrid Schubert is murdered in Stadelheim.
The fighter Ulrike Meinhof was a revolutionary, flesh and blood of the armed anti-imperialist struggle, born and died on the path of contributing to the struggle for individual and collective liberation. She abandoned legality during an action to free the imprisoned revolutionary Andreas Baader and became an organizational member of the first generation of the Red Army Faction.
She was a charismatic woman who balanced theory through practice, playing a leading role in both the theoretical formulation of the RAF’s ideological and political line, without ever leaving the operational field of armed metropolitan resistance. It was a key part of those initiatives that carried the legacy of the Latin American guerrilla movements on their backs, building the armed metropolitan front in the European centers. Who took the hostilities to the “heart of the beast”, putting solidarity into practice with the peoples of Vietnam, Palestine and the third world countries that were under attack by the imperialist interventions of the United States.
At a time when Schmidt’s German chancellery was an imperialist center of decision-making and operations, bringing its Nazi dregs into the mechanisms of power, the flourishing of the urban guerrilla put into question and annulled both the regime’s omnipotence and the oppositional tolerance of imperialist crimes by the reformist left. The history of revolt and resistance was written in the blood of those tortured in the internment hellholes, those murdered in ambushes and anti-terrorist operations by the special SoKo B/M department of the Federal Criminal Investigation Service – BKA and those executed in the dead wards of sensory isolation.
Comrade Ulrike was just that disobedient star. Her theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of armed struggle in Germany and the unification of the resistances in Europe and the Middle East categorized her as a central target for elimination on the BKA’s lists. From slandering her political integrity and standing, to spreading false news of her death while she was struggling in an illegal regime, to her exterminating treatment in the isolation of the dead ward, the social democratic chancellery initiated Ulrike’s execution in the Stammheim hellhole, claiming the obvious lie of suicide. Indeed, state revisionism was not content with Ulrike’s death, desecrating her dead body when it removed her brain in secret to conduct research.
Revolutionary history is written in blood and gunpowder. In this history, personalities like Ulrike and the other RAF comrades are taken out of the matrix of the class struggle for social liberation. They stand unscathed, translucent through time like the brightest stars, with the same integrity that challenges and denigrates the monopoly of tyranny. The lives and deaths of comrades like Ulrike are a cry to the rebellious hearts that yearn for enduring revolutionary necessity, deafeningly declaring themselves to their persecutors: I was, am and will be.
Honour to the comrades Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Andreas Baader and Ingrid Schubert who were murdered in the sensory isolation wards by the German state.
Honour to the comrades Petra Schelm, Georg Von Rauch, Thomas Weissbecker, Katharina Hammerschmidt, Ulrich Wessel, Siegfried Hausner, Werner Sauber, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Wilfriend Böse, Willi-Peter Stoll, Michael Knoll, Elisabeth Von Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Wolfgang Beer, Sigurd Debus, Johannes Thimme, Jürgen Peemoller, Ina Zipman, Gert Albartus and Wolfgang Grams who dedicated their lives to the anti-imperialist struggle for liberation through the ranks of the German Urban Guerrilla.
“Behind us all lies a common history – we will meet again on the unknown and complicated paths of liberation.”
Thanos Hatziangelou, imprisoned member of the Anarchist Action Organization
Third Ward, Larissa Prison
9/5/2023
source: https://www.athens.indymedia.org/post/1625140/
translated by Nae Midion