Anonymous
Thoughts on the last writings of Ulrike Meinhof
On social anarchy, communism & revolutionary action
“Because we should never hurt others and the innocent in a social liberation process, because we all feel pain, because all blood is red and the Earth not flat”
Ulrike Meinhof has often been called an anarchist by the media and RAF members were portraited as anarchist on wanted posters.
She did express her sympathy and support for anarchist individuals and groups, freedom movements and for a social revolution in general but above all Ulrike was a believer in the power of the ‘proletariat’.
Ulrike worked as a journalist for a German leftist magazine called ‘Konkret’ and was involved in the Oktober revolution. In 1970 she co-founded the RAF, the revolutionary front; Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion).
The name can also be seen as a gimmick on the English RAF; the ‘Royal Air Force’, that once fought against Nazi Germany.
Ulrike was a communist more than a ‘social-anarchist’, in her mind and writings. Often she writes on the situation in Russia, China, Palestine and on people like Lenin and Marx.
One of the differences between the ‘guerilla communist revolutionaries’ and ‘social-anarchists’ is of course their belief in or rejection of a state power in control or a ‘revolutionary government’.
But beyond this (important) difference there is of course the ‘same’ struggle for liberty, equality and solidarity for all people.
I find the writings and letters of Ulrike interesting and passionate. Ulrike was a devoted person and willing to take action on the matters she found important with good intensions, to liberate the people and herself from capitalism and imperialism. For a social revolution and against the oppression of the people. Ulrike became a ‘revolutionary icon’ to many. I did however not translate these texts to glamourize all the RAF actions or to idolize Ulrike.
The following texts and parts of her letters are written during her process in the Stammheim prison.
Ulrike Meinhof died in prison, the same night as two other RAF co-founders; Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Officials claim it was a collective and planned suicide, others say it was murder.
Quotes from ‘The Last Writings of Ulrike’
“The masses are willing for rebellion but often totally unaware. They want to free themselves but do not know where to begin”
“Objection is when I say; this doesn’t suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn’t suit me never happens again.”
“We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the separation of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From the isolation in individual housing blocks, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of non-violence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism”
“We come from here; out of the brutality, of the humiliation and disruption processes, out of the war of all against all. The competition of everybody against everybody. The system in which the feeling of fear, the stress rules, of -one living on the costs of another-, the dividing of people..”
“Till we will, every one of us see the necessity of liberation of imperialism, the need for an anti-capitalist war, has understood and does understand that nothing is lost with destroying this system in armed warfare, but everything to be won: the collective liberation, life, humanity, identity; matters of the people, the masses, the factory workers, the handicapped, the prisoners, the students, the bottom classes of society, the freedom movements of the developing countries, which is all our case; armed anti-imperialist resistance is the case of the people, the masses and vice versa. Also when at first it brings a long and hard process of the development of the military-political offensive of the guerilla, so that the uprising of civil battle can become real, shall become reality.”
“The idea of a psychological war to set up the people against the Guerilla, is to isolate the Guerilla from the people. It is; the ‘material”, real purpose of the revolution, which it is about freedom from the rule of imperialism, of occupied areas, of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of military dictatorship, exploitation and fascism. This is done by personification and psychological means to disturb, to mystify, to make the understandable make no sense, to let the rational seem irrational, the humanity of revolutionaries look unhuman. The method is; hatred, lies, dirt, racism, manipulation, mobilization of the conscience fears of the people...”
“The Chinese attempt in the sixties to use the Sino-sowjetunion conflict as a conflict between ‘white communism’ and the communism of the ‘black, yellow and red people’ in Latin-America, Africa, Asia was if we look back, an attempt to take over, stranglehold the strong tradition of the ’3rd International’ for the case of China. This while the Chinese foreign politics do not organise these colourful freedom movements, but instead neutralises and stops them by supporting reactionary regimes like the one of Bandareike in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) against the freedom movements..”