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© 2007
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Primary Source Material
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Ulrike Meinhoff: Writings
The Urban Guerrilla (excerpt)
The guerilla always emanates from nothing. This is no different in Brazil, in Uraguay, in Cuba or with Che in Bolivia. The first phase of its organization is the most difficult. There is a group of comrades, who have decided to take action, to leave the level of lethargy, verbal radicalism, strategic discussions, which become more and more non-substantial, to fight. It only becomes evident at this point what kind of a person one is. The metropole individual is discovered. He or she comes from the process of decay, the false, alienated surroundings of living in the system - factory, office, school university, revisionist groups, apprenticeships and temporary jobs. The results of this separation between professional and private life, the psychic deformation caused by the consumer society begun to show.
But that is us, that is where we come from: bred by the processes of elimination in a metrople society, by the war of all against all, the competition between each and everybody else, the system of fear and pressure for productivity, the game of one at the expense of somebody else, the separation of people into men and women, young and old, healthy and sick, foreigners and natives, the fight for reputation. That is where we come from: from the isolation of the suburban home, the desolate concrete public housing, the cell-prisons, asylums and special prison sections. We come to the guerilla organization brain-washed through the media, consumerism, physical punishment and the ideology of non-violence; from depression, sickness, declassification, insult and humiliation of the individual, of all exploited people under imperialism. Eventually we perceive the misery of each of us as constituting the necessity of liberation from imperialism, the necessity of anti-imperialist struggle. We understand there is nothing to lose by destroying this system through armed struggle, but everything to win: our collective liberation, life, humanity, identity.
Psychological Warfare (excerpt)
In its first phase the guerilla is shocking, in the way that our first action was shocking: by having people act without being determined by the pressure of the system, without seeing themselves with the eyes of the media, without fear. It is shocking to see people acting on true experience, both their own and of others. The guerilla acts upon facts which people experience every day: exploitation, media terror, insecurity of living conditions despite the great wealth and refined technology in this country - the psychic illnesses, suicides, child abuse, distress within the schools, the housing misery. What shocked the imperialist state about our first action was that the RAF has been perceived in the consciousness of the people as what it really is: the practice, the thing which results logically and dialectically from present conditions. Action returns dignity to the people and meaning to their struggles, enabling people to have a consciousness of their history. Because all history is history of class struggle, people who had lost a sense of the dimensions of revolutionary class struggle are forced to live in a state of no history, deprived of self-consciousness, i.e. its dignity.
In reference to the guerilla, everybody can define for himself where he stands - is able, after all, to see for himself where he is standing, his position in the class society, within imperialism. For many think they are standing on the side of the people - but as the people start to fight, they run off, denounce, step on the brakes, move to the side of the police. This is the problem which Marx cited endless times, that a person is not what he claims but what his real functions, his role in the class society, defines him as. This is what, unless acting consciously against the system, i.e. taking up arms and fighting, he has been practically instrumentalized to be for the aims of the system.
Letter from a prisoner in the corridor of death
Feeling your head exploding. Feeling your brain on the point of bursting to bits.
Feeling your spine jammed up into your brain and feeling your brain like a dried fruit.
Feeling continuously and unconsciously and like an electric wire.
Feeling as if they've stolen the associations of your ideas.
Feeling the soul piss from your body, as if no longer able to hold water
Feeling your cells move. You open your eyes. The cells move. In the afternoon, when there is sun, it stops suddenly. But it still moves, you cant extricate yourself from that sensation.
Impossible to know if you are trembling from cold or from fever.
Impossible to explain to yourself why you're trembling, why you're freezing. To speak audibly, you must make an effort, must almost howl, as if speaking very loudly.
Feeling yourself becoming numb.
Impossible to recall the meaning of words, except very vaguely.
The whistlings -s, ss, tz, sch-, intolerable tortures.
The warders, the visits, the court celluloid reality
Sick in the head
Flashes.
No longer mastering the construction of grammer, syntax.
If you write - at the end of two lines, impossible to recall the start of the first.
Feeling that you are consumed within.
Feeling that, if you were freed, to tell what it's about would be exactly like throwing boiling water in the mouth of others, scalding them, disfiguring them for life.
A mad agressivity without outlet. That's the worst. Being persuaded that you don't have the least chance of dragging yourself out of it: impossible to make that
understood.
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