EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER... WE DON'T.

Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist and radical political activist in West Germany during the 1960s and '70s. She was a founding member of the Red Army Faction . She killed herself in prison before her trial, charged with numerous murders. Her cult status and subversive journalism is such that many believed and still believe that she was murdered by the authorities. The West German media held her in such contempt that she was continually labelled as insane and her medical history was used as explanation for her actions; her advocacy of and active terrorism was blamed on prior brain surgery to remove a tumour.


"Because women in this society do not need to be expelled in order to be rendered politically impotent. The social work they do raising their children goes on in the isolation of their private lives, though not in response to their own needs or those of the children. It goes on behind closed doors and in response to the norms of an achievement-oriented society whose demands hit children at school [...]. (Women) are interchangeable as workers - given what women's work is - and as consumers. In this sociey, women are not perceived as unique, irreplaceable beings. Things would be different if the Left had functioning women's organizations; such organizations could and probably would point out that the apolitical aspects of the protests about Bahman Nirumand's wife are in and of themselves an example of the oppression of women, based on the failure to recognize their needs, and on the difficulty for women to see their private trials and tribulations as social problems and to organize them accordingly. It is apolitical to protest about women, because women's issues are human, humanitarian issues. There! Everybody's talking about the weather again! What they view as apolitical is the almost completely internalized oppression of women, an oppression that is still quite beyond comprehension."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"The law that gets broken when department stores are set on fire is not a law that protects people. It is a law that protects property. [...] It protects those to whom the law in a capitalist state assigns the right to amass wealth."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"Capitalism may well produce wealth; it does not produce happiness or freedom for all."
-Herbert Marcuse

This article on the Prison Photography blog caught my attention. Institutionalised murder is, apparently, green.
Particularly looking forward to seeing Donovan Wylie's photography of the Maze Prison (formerly Long Kesh, informally H-Blocks) at the Photographers' Gallery.