We say that the dialectic of revolutionary struggle is more important
than the imperialist doctrine of the inflexible stance.
In the maximum security wings, in the prisons, on the whole social
terrain throughout society, both here and internationally, the
imperialists are piling up the weapons of war and repression in order
to strangle the history that, throughout the whole world, desires to
break with the system of capital.
Their power is military strategy, counter-insurgency, the machine - but
it is hollow violence and nothing more.
We are now fighting with the consciousness of the unity of the
prisoners from the guerilla and the resistance, using the hunger strike
to gain our association in large groups. We demand the application of
the minimum guarantees of the Geneva Convention [1]. Against the
institution of torture and criminalization, this is both the political
demand for which the political prisoners struggle together and
protection that is possible.
We are faced with the same problem in our situation that all the
revolutionary left faces: how, from a deadlocked balance of forces, to
break through the defenses, to turn the striving, the attempts, the
will into struggle and to
create new political breakthroughs.
For us, that means to begin from the fact of isolation, of forced
separation, and to trust in our own strength in a situation in which
the imperialist State,
due to its substantial instability and its progressive loss of
legitimacy, only wants to demonstrate its potential for domination and
perceives all change,
even regarding the prisoners, as a question of power.
Our struggle joins with the struggles of the prisoners of war in
France, Ireland, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and in occupied Palestine, and
opens new ones. And it is integrated into the task which presents
itself to the whole revolutionary left here: either it fights its way
forward, in the tradition of resistance, to an authentic revolutionary
process by being the subject of the struggle for liberation, or else it
can only comment on the crimes of imperialism and
its road to the completely restructured fascist State as a marginal
opposition.
Unity in the struggle of the anti-imperialist front.
Prisoners of the Red Army Faction - December 1984
Footnotes
N.B. All footnotes in this document were
added by the translator and editor. None are originally from the RAF.
[1] Geneva Convention - the Geneva Convention
specifies minimum conditions for the treatment of prisoners of war and
political prisoners. [return to text]
