Quotes:Red Army Faction

Quotes From Official RAF Documents

• It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!
  • Build the Red Army! (833, 5 June 1970)
• It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals—understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning! That an end to police domination is in sight! It is to them that we want to say that we are building the red army, and it is their army. It is to them that we say, “It has begun.” They don’t pose stupid questions like, “Why right now precisely?” They have already traveled a thousand roads controlled by the authorities and managers—they’ve done the waiting room waltz; they remember the times when it worked and the times when it didn’t. And in conversations with sympathetic teachers, who are assigned to the remedial schools that don’t change anything, and the kindergartens that lack the necessary spaces—they don’t ask why now—damn it!
  • Build the Red Army! (1970)
• Don’t complain that it’s too hard. The action to free Baader was hardly a walk in the park. If you understand what’s going on (and your comments indicate that you do understand, so it’s opportunism to say that the bullet also hit you in the stomach—you assholes), if you understand anything, you need to find a better way to organize your distribution. And we have no more to say to you about our methods than we do about our plans for action—you shitheads! As long as you allow yourselves to brought in by the cops, you aren’t in a position to be giving anyone else advice about how to avoid being brought in by the cops. What do you mean by adventurism? That one only has oneself to blame for informers. Whatever.
  • Build the Red Army! (1970)
• those who have nothing to gain from the exploitation of the Third World, of Persian oil, of Bolivian bananas, of South African gold, have no reason to identify with the exploiter. They can grasp that what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.
  • Build the Red Army! (1970)
• Stop lounging around on the sofa in your recently-raided apartment counting up your love affairs and other petty details. Build an effective distribution system. Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you.
  • Build the Red Army! (1970)
• Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie. Plans to kidnap Willy Brandt are meant to make us look like political idiots, and claims that we intend to kidnap children are meant to make us look like unscrupulous criminals. These lies go as far as the “authentic details” in konkret #5, which proved to be nothing more than unreliable details that had been slapped together. That we have “officers and soldiers,” that some of us are slaves of others, that comrades who have left us fear reprisals, that we broke into houses or used violence to take passports, that we exercise “group terror”—all of this is bullshit.
  • The Urban Guerilla Concept - 1. Concrete Answers to Concrete Questions (April 1971)

Quotes by Thorwald Proll

Note: Proll was not a member of the RAF proper, but was involved with the firebombing of two department stores, an action which served as a precursor to the RAF, with future RAF members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and his sister later became a founding member of the group.

• Faced with a justice system that makes laws against the people rather than for them, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Human rights only for the right humans (the state that leans to the right). Right is what the state does, and it’s always right. The state is the only criminal activity allowed. In a capitalist democracy such as this, in an indirect democracy such as this, it is possible for anyone to end up ruling over anyone, and that’s how it should stay, and don’t ask for how much longer. The ruling morality is bourgeois morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Bourgeois morality is and will remain immoral. If it is reformed, it will only result in a new form of immorality (and nothing more).
  • Faced With This Justice System, We Can't Be Bothered Defending Ourselves (Closing statement at Frankfurt Department Store Firebombing Trial, October 1968)
• If you go to see the minister, don’t forget it’s just a crutch. Don’t go to church; God is dead, but Che lives. Study the rudiments of socialism, and you will have everything you need.
  • Faced With This Justice System (1968)
• Every citizen should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.
  Every socialist should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.
  Every citizen should go to prison so that he develops a correct relationship to socialism.
  • Faced With This Justice System (1968)
• Grievances are pointless, particularly as you are not permitted to file common grievances. Grievances are suppressed at will. Grievances are pointless, because you must submit them to the ruling structure. Common dispositions are common dispositions, and solitary dispositions are solitary dispositions. You can’t give in to loneliness. You can’t lose the dialogue. You can’t lose the socialist dialogue. In prison you have nothing to lose and lose nothing. You have everything to win.
  • Faced With This Justice System (1968)
• Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free time, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence.
  • Faced With This Justice System (1968)
• Faced with a justice system that has such an indescribable prison system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system must itself be indicted. Such a justice system must be exposed by the revolutionary process. It is the responsibility of every antiauthoritarian judge to take legal action against this justice system. We encourage the antiauthoritarian segment of the justice system to use its strength to call a general strike. We particularly encourage antiauthoritarian interns to call a general strike.
  • Faced With This Justice System (1968)