Third Hunger Strike

September 13th, 1974

If someone understands their situation—
how can they be stopped?

This is our third hunger strike against special conditions and the extermination strategy being used against political prisoners in the Federal Republic and West Berlin; against the counterinsurgency program of imperialism’s machinery of destruction, the baw, the bka’s Bonn Security Group/State Security Division for the annihilation of revolutionary prisoners and prisoners who have begun to organize and struggle in the prisons.

We can only be kept down if we stop thinking and struggling. People who refuse to stop struggling cannot be kept down—they win or they die, rather than losing and dying.

Resistance against the extermination strategy, the special conditions and the counterinsurgency program means resistance against:

• dehumanization through years of social isolation;
• the torturous re-education program and the pressure to cooperate in the brainwashing units—Ronald Augustin has been held in the Hannover prison dead wing since early May;
• the new acoustically sealed cells in Berlin-Tegel, Berlin-Lehrter Strasse, Bruchsal, Essen, Cologne, and Straubing, based on the model of the Hamburg dfg Research Project,[1] which are constantly watched by cameras and are always overheated, and where one is under constant acoustic and video surveillance;
• delays during every visit, total isolation, eliminating even the possibility of shouting to other prisoners in the Berlin-Moabit dungeon, the Essen dungeon, the Straubing dungeon, the Perungesheim dungeon, the Fuhlsbüttel dungeon, and the Mannheim dungeon, or being under video observation in the soundless bell jar at Hamburg remand centre—where one is kept in restraints for days on end;
• attempted murder by withholding water during hunger strikes in Schwalmstadt, Munich, Hamburg and Cologne;
• concentration units for political prisoners in Lübeck, Stuttgart, and Berlin;
• being shackled during yard time in Hamburg and Lübeck;
• being placed in special cells directly beside the main prison entrance in Cologne-Ossendorf for the past two years—there is never silence; the same is the case in Berlin-Moabit;
• psychiatric research and the threat and use of forced drugging in order to carry out further investigations;
• cells with plexiglass dividers for meetings with lawyers in Hannover, Stuttgart, and Straubing, making any political discussion impossible;
• periodic confiscation of defense materials—records and mail— by the Bonn Security Group/State Security Division;
• the Bonn Security Group’s cell raids tied to media hate campaigns against the lawyers representing political prisoners;
• criminalizing lawyers who represent political prisoners;
• the withholding and manipulation of files by the bka;
• the prompt relaxation of isolation conditions only once the prisoner is in the clutches of the police and is being groomed as an infiltrator or a crown witness; in Cologne-Ossendorf, Jan Raspe has refused yard time, because he is only permitted yard time with an ever-changing selection of prisoners, which is disorienting and prevents communication. All these special rules continue to be applied so as to allow the police (Security Group) to structure and control the prisoners’ contacts.
• the terrorizing of relatives with house searches, spies, verbal abuse and surveillance before and after visits, to pressure them into behaving with the prisoners in a way that serves the interests of the police.

In isolation, the hunger strike is our only possible form of collective resistance to imperialism’s counterstrategy. Revolutionary prisoners and prisoners who have begun to organize themselves to fight are to be psychologically and physically, that is to say politically, destroyed. Disarmed, imprisoned, isolated, this is our only option for asserting our psychological and spiritual strength, our identity as people, so that the stones the ruling class has thrown at us may land on their own feet.

To struggle is to turn weakness into strength.

Isolation is the favored weapon for executing prisoners who decide not to let themselves be destroyed by prison, who struggle against the human experiments, the brainwashing, the imperialist extermination program. Most of all, they hope to use prison isolation to liquidate political awareness and resistance. As to the other prisoners, they still don’t understand how completely oppressed they are, although they are just as poor and downtrodden as we and have nothing to lose but their chains.

We encourage all prisoners being held in isolation to join us in the struggle against isolation.

The abolition of isolation is the condition that we must all struggle for if prisoners’ self-organization, revolutionary politics, and prison liberation struggles are to have any real possibility of expressing proletarian counterviolence—in the context of the class struggle here, in the context of the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds, in the context of proletarian internationalism and a united anti-imperialist liberation front in the prisons and in the stockades developed for political prisoners in those parts of the world controlled by imperialism.

All power to the people through violent conquest!

Freedom through armed anti-imperialist struggle!

The raf Prisoners
September 13, 1974