Political tribute of the imprisoned member of Anarchist Action Thanos Chatziangelou on the 47th anniversary of the murder of RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof.
Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.
Ulrike Meinhof
9 May 1976
RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof is murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement. This is preceded by the murder of hunger striker Holger Meins, who was constantly subjected to force-feeding, 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 legitimacy during 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 person 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 centres. 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 fired upon by the imperialist interventions of the United States.
At a time when Schmidt’s German chancellery was an imperialist centre of decision-making and operations, carrying Nazi droplets in the mechanisms of power, the flourishing of the urban guerrilla put into practical question and annulment 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 death wings of the sensory isolation cells.
Comrade Ulrike was just that disobedient star. Her theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of the armed struggle in Germany and the unification of the resistances in Europe and the Middle East categorized her as a central target for elimination in 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, citing the obviousness of suicide. Indeed, state revanchism was not content with Ulrike’s death, desecrating her dead body when it removed her brain in secret to conduct investigations.
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 life and death of comrades and comrades like Ulrike are a cry to the rebellious hearts that yearn for the enduring revolutionary necessity, deafeningly declaring themselves to their persecutors: I was, am and will be.
Honour to our comrades Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Andreas Baader, Ingrid Schubert who were murdered in the sensory isolation cells by the German state.
Honour to our 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, Wolfgang Grams who dedicated their lives to the anti-imperialist struggle for liberation through the ranks of the German urban guerrilla .
“Behind all of us lies a common history – we will meet again on the unknown and complicated paths of liberation.”
Thanos Chatziangelou, captured member of the Anarchist Action Organization
C’ Wing, Larissa Prison
9/5/2023
Source: athens.indymedia