Baader Meinhof Questions

1. They protested through the mass destruction they caused by kidnapping, robbing, and bombings.
2. I felt sympathy at first when I could see that the group just really wanted people to understand how they felt and viewed things, but when they decided to do such horrible things to prove their points I stopped feeling bad. The violence just continued to escalate and people stopped viewing them as social activists but instead as terrorists so their violence ruined the chances of most people wanting to follow them for their causes.  
3. Andreas Baader played a huge role in the RAF and was a big part of why the violence escalated the way it did. He planned from the very beginning to have violence as part of their group. If he wasn’t part of the group I think they may have done things differently and actually maybe still around today. The group followed his crazy ideas and I think they did because they actually thought his way would make people want to change for their causes, but in actuality caused the exact opposite.
4. My personal views would always be non violence, but I understood where the people who choose violence are coming from. Sometimes people get so desperate that they think violence is the only answer when in reality it’s never a answer at all.

The RAF

The Rote Armee Fraktion" RAF was formed in 1970. The group was post WWII and Germany’s most famous left-wing militant group. It started out as the group called Baader-Meinhof known for protest movements in West Germany. “The RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance against what they deemed to be a fascist state.”(Wikipedia sited below) The founders also known as the “first generation” of this group were Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, and Ulrike Meinhof.  The “second generation” consisted of a lot of former members of the Socialist Patients Collective during the 1970s and the “third generation” was during the 1980s-1990s. The group did a lot of operations and the most remember able one was during the fall of 1977 called “German Autumn”. “German Autumn” was responsible for 34 deaths many of them being not their targets but body guards and chauffeurs instead. The RAF was known for being one of the most violent left wing groups in all of Europe. A very well known member was Meinhof, she was involved with Baader’s escape from jail in 1970, and she was a well-known journalist. On April 20, 1998 all came to an end when the Reuters news agency received letter signed “RAF”. 

Sources: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

"The Baader Meinhof Complex," film Reaction

This film is inspirational, intense, and very sad to see what people had to endure during such difficult times in history. The quality of this film is very good; it captures the realism of the events that took place. While I was watching this film I could understand why the youth of Germany could get themselves involved with the RAF. Being educated can change a lot of things as well as knowing and understanding what is going on around you in the world. The Baader-Meinhof group decided to take action if they didn’t like something for example an institution they would make sure that the world knew how they felt and express their emotions in a very questionable way. Harmful bombings, robberies, and attacks were attached to the RAF. I can understand not liking the struggle that life puts you through sometimes but nether less such actions aren’t required to get attention. People can always find a way to get their point across it doesn’t have to be violence. For example think about Martin Luther King who made sure that everyone knew he stood against violence and made huge changes without it. The RAF got crazy they let their feelings take over their lives and starting with the bombings. Once they started to do all of these horrible things such as robbing banks, bombing buildings, and using guns doing bad things became very easy for the RAF members. Things just got way out of control very fast and the violence took over the group. When the time came for the group to commit suicide a lot of people just viewed the RAF as terrorists because of all the harm they caused to try to express what they wanted. They clearly did it the wrong way. I started to feel bad for the members of this group because I can understand they wanted people to have their views as well but they did too many horrible things to not have a bad ending.

Berlin Calling

In the movie Berlin Calling Ickarus is the main character who is a DJ and loves his music. Ickarus is addicted to the feeling of being high. He uses drugs on a daily basis and most of them are pills, cocaine, and meth. Ickarus wants to live an exciting life and drugs are his way of doing that. These habits turn into addictions and one bad pill almost even kills Ickarus but that doesn’t stop him from doing drugs.  Most of the young people are trying to fit in and they think that if they take drugs they will.  Most young people think that nothing truly harmful will hurt them. They think about the fun affects of drugs and not the harmful ones. In every society there will be people who do drugs, people who will be pressured into doing drugs, people who are in different about drugs, and the people who strongly feel against anything to do with drugs. The society that I grew up in most people frowned upon drugs but it didn’t stop a lot of people from doing them. In my home town the most popular drugs were pot and meth. Nobody had the connections in my little town to get cocaine at least not that I’m aware of. The huge differences are that Ickarus and his friends let drugs take over their lives. In my town people would do drugs to have fun or fit in while hanging out with people who do drugs, but drugs never stopped them from going to school or taking care of their responsibilities. Fads are always going to be changing from month to month. The youth generation will continue to change and there will always be people in the four groups that I previously discussed. Ickarus’s work ethic is basically that he loves his music, but he continues to blow off working on his new album that is coming out because he wants to get high. He eventually finishes and makes a very good album. Alice is Ickarus’s label director who ends up having to fire him because he freaks out and messes up her entire office. However, after she hears the album she decided to re-sign Ickarus because the songs are good and she wants to make money from it.