• Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    I don’t know much about the Red Army Faction so I looked it up and

    The RAF has been held responsible for 34 deaths, including industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, the Dresdner Bank head Jürgen Ponto, federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, police officers, American servicemen stationed in Germany

    they sound pretty great ngl.

    • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 month ago

      von der leyen was hiding from them in london lmao, the greatest miss after thatcher (although as a relative nobody, so it wouldn’t be that pog)

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Yah IIRC they were students and young adults who started their org after WWII so they could get revenge on Germans who escaped punishment for their crimes. Especially people who participated in the Holocaust that served light prison sentences or none at all in exchange for research/testifying against someone higher up.

      What got them into trouble was when they kidnapped some kids and started killing people who were too young to have done anything during the war. People were already iffy on the use of violence, but it was understandable because a lot of German young people were upset how their relatives helped the nazis. When you start doing too much adventurism and bystanders get harmed, that’s when the public no longer wants to tolerate bombings.

      • weeen [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        11 days ago

        They didn’t actually kidnap kids etc, the police did that and said it was them in order to make them look stupid or incompetent. They constantly denied false flag attacks in statements but people believed it was them due to the media, even today I recommend reading this if you want to find out more about them https://archive.org/details/the-red-army-faction-a-documentary-history-volume-1-projectilesforthe-people (page 83 shows them explaining themselves)

        It’s not really about too much adventurosm but rather it’s easy for the state to make you look bad by doing false flag attacks, until people get scared and the police use this to justify harsh crackdowns (like torturing them in prison). It’s hard to think about a way around that

    • 30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      The book that the movie Die Hard is based on had an RAF cell as its antagonists. When they adapted it to a screenplay, they had to change them to thieves because at the time, killing Nazi-hunters was a “bad look.”*

      *

      Just kidding, it’s because Americans were too oblivious to eastern European politics to understand nuance, and they didn’t want to bog down the pace of the story explaining that the Nazis didn’t magically disappear because we did a heckin’ D-Day-erino or that Germany was kinda fucked up as a result of it, and so forth.

      Besides, it was a Christmas movie. You don’t want it to be sad, do you?