Talk:Red Army Faction

Mention of terrorist organisation in the lead
I am reverting Revision as of 12:50, 16 May 2018 by user:Cloud200, because although the citations that were added show that at least thee media outlets called the Baader-Meinhof Gang a terrorist organisation, they do not say explicitly that "most Western media and literature" does so. To include that statement you will need a reliable source that states as much. Although we (Wikipedia editor) use surveys of reliable sources to decide on the title of an article those same type of surveys can not be used to synthesise statements about "none, few, most, some, all" usage of a phrase by the news media and literature within an article because it is a SYN (pun intended) "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources". -- PBS (talk) 12:29, 12 September 2021 (UTC)


 * @user:Cloud200 your edit (Revision as of 14:55, 12 September 2021) semi revert of my reversion of your edit (by reinstating the text "as well as" and a number of citations in identical format) without discussing it here first is a breach of WP:BRD. So please engage in discussions about your addition.
 * Please read Terrorism
 * "On one point, at least, everyone agrees: terrorism is a pejorative term."
 * Media outlets who wish to convey impartiality may limit their usage of "terrorist" and "terrorism" because they are loosely defined, potentially controversial in nature, and subjective terms.
 * Then please see "Let the facts speak for themselves". The lead already has a citation to the FRD usage, what additional weight is added to the FRD's legal (and moral) position by adding a list of media outlets to the sentence?
 * Using an internet search and selecting a few media outlets that use the word terrorist to describe the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then listing them falls under WP:INDISCRIMINATE collection of facts and such a list is also a breach of WP:NPOV. What you need to do is either find a book that states most news media described them as terrorists, or a terrorist organisation, or reliable sources that writes that other organisations also considered them to be so — for example another government or international organisation.
 * — PBS (talk) 15:36, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * The general method for dealing with organisations is to include designation by whatever countries designate them, and in the absence of a formal designation include that the government(s) of the country(s) they were active in considered them to be terrorists, assuming that is the case and can be properly referenced of course. We don't generally include lists of whatever newspapers or other media have said it. FDW777 (talk) 21:46, 13 September 2021 (UTC)
 * you reverted a WP:RS edit that was introduced after a heated discussion here and survived 3 years being a well-sourced consensus description of RAF designation. The fact, supported by WP:RS sources, is that most people in widely defined "West" considered RAF to be a terrorist organisation driven by USSR, and rightly so because they applied terrorist methods using weapons and logistic support supplied by USSR. A minority on far-left used euphemisms like "revolutionary", "armed struggle" to describe bomb attacks on civilians, and your cherry-picking from Terrorism doesn't really change much here. You didn't like the general character of "most" and used it as a pretext to raise WP:SYNTH claim, so I proposed a more specific statement even though I don't think it's necessary. If you prefer academic sources, feel free to pick up from Google Scholar, there's plenty of them. Cloud200 (talk) 09:39, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
 * I am not against highlighting in the lead that this group were considered a "terrorist organisation". If you look back through the history of this article you will see (Revision as of 12:37, 3 August 2013) that it was me who added the mention of "terrorist organization" to the first paragraph within the WP:TERRORIST guidance.
 * @User:Cloud200 "is that most people in widely defined 'West' considered RAF to be a terrorist organisation driven by USSR" and your source for this is? [as most people in the West have never heard of the Red Army Faction]. You have not addressed point of WP:INDISCRIMINATE collection of facts, and therefore that such a list is a breach of WP:NPOV. Selecting a similar list from Google Scholar or from any other survey conducted by Wikipedia editor will not remove this as an issue. Further you have not addressed User:FDW777 point, with which (as you can see by my article edit mentioned at the start of this post) I agree. -- PBS (talk) 12:14, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
 * What about political backgrounds ?
 * Old RAF which obviously indicates a connection to USSR Red Army.
 * Ala a terrorist faction.PBS Zweite (talk) 16:07, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
 * "Green RAF"
 * has been at least since 2011 (“Green Army Faction”)
 * About what ? They think. Young people in Germany. If they are caught, they will be subjected to punishment. The same torture and torment. Dozens of years will come!
 * ( Главный) RAF Commander, Hadjabekovitsch , - ended his career. In the torture chamber.
 * RAF women - executed with nerve agents, - "Novitschok".
 * What will happen to you??? In case of arrest by the police.91.183.159.198 (talk) 17:29, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Alleged official Stasi / GDR support
Quoting from the source in the article (emphasis added):


 * The evidence that is not circumstantial is grounded in three sources: internal documents of the Ministry for State Security relating to the support of terroristic organizations by the GDR, listed under the code-names Stern I and Stern II; the court depositions of former officers of the Ministry's specialist 'anti-terror' department devoted to RAF members and grand jury proceedings against these officers in the Federal Republic to see if there was probable cause to charge them with support of terrorism; and, finally, the testimony of the 'retired' RAF members, ten in all, who were swept back to West Germany after eight to ten years of clandestine life in the GDR as part of the backwash of reunification.
 * The first category is not publicly available except in hearsay form, as reported by journalists claiming to have had access to the files and generally adding in a pastiche of events already reported elsewhere. The second is considerably more reliable, as all but one of the officers of the terror department have been examined, and their testimony can be compared against each other and the files in the possession of the federal investigating authorities — although these files are not in the public domain. The third must be viewed on a case-by-case basis, bearing in mind that the former members have an interest in minimizing their own roles or shielding others not yet apprehended or sentenced.

This is a 1993 article, so it's conceivable that more concrete information (i.e. not self-interested parties making self-serving claims) has been made public in the past 30 years -- but in the absence of such, I'm adding a Dubious tag for the claim in the lead: it's wildly inflammatory and salacious, and readers should be aware that its entire "non-circumstantial" basis is hearsay repetition of conjecture about a codenamed group mentioned in sealed documents.

Thanks! 2600:1702:6D1:28B0:B8D8:1B0F:6171:5DDD (talk) 02:08, 9 September 2023 (UTC)


 * This is not the only source for RAF being helped by Eastern European communist security services in general, not only Stasi. There are sources for RAF members being smuggled through the Eastern German border into hiding in communist Poland for extensive periods of time. There's also reports of Putin being involved in Stasi-RAF cooperation as KGB supervisor:
 * "By the end of the seventies, when the West German police stepped up a campaign of arrests, the Stasi began providing safe haven in the East to members of the group. “They harbored not just one but 10 of them. They lived in cookie-cutter buildings around Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin,” said Franz Sedelmayer, a German security consultant who later worked with Putin in St. Petersburg. The Stasi had provided them with false identities, and also ran training camps."


 * Evidence for RAF cooperation with Stasi, SB and KGB is generous and found in archives of many ex-communist countries. I don't see anything "inflammatory" in this: you have an organization that calls themselves "Red Army Faction" and you're surprised they're run by Soviets? How otherwise they would have unlimited access to weapons, explosives and safe-houses in communist countries? Cloud200 (talk) 11:36, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * If the evidence is generous, then by all means add some sources that support the claim to the article. Last night I did find / link the source for the specific claim you are referring to while checking the German-language article (which, incidentally, doesn't seem to make the far-reaching claim of "official support", but I admittedly just did a keyword search for Stasi / MfS because my German is weak).
 * If everywhere the article made / qualified the claim with "in the 1980s the Stasi harbored ex-members and was suspected to have provided training for a specific late-1980s operation” that seems pretty unimpeachable, but it also seems pretty clear that would spoil the intent of including the claim at all, namely creating the impression in the reader that the RAF were from their inception literal puppets of the socialist government(s).
 * The aforementioned source also states explicitly that the Stasi were monitoring the group and viewed them with consternation during the 1970s, which also deserves mention if we want to avoid leaving readers with that mistaken impression. I'd be in favor of to put all of the actual evidence / claims into their section, where it can be properly contextualized, but today it's pretty hopelessly garbled: e.g. the section that I fixed up last night was "RAF since the 1980s", but it ends with talking about the 1978 "exfiltration", sourced to a Polish-language article. I know the 1978 escape was covered in Aust's English-language book, but I son't see any reason to expand / fact-check that anachronistic aside that was clearly just shoehorned in to build the "soviet puppeteers" case, without regard for the readability of the article.
 * I'm not an expert and wouldn't be shocked if there are better sources available -- but I'm not seeing anything in the article that would support the broader claim of official state support for the group in general, but an uncritical a reader of the article today could certainly come away with that impression.
 * And that should be avoided, right? ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 17:16, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Regarding today's edit and the sensationally-titled Politico article "Did Vladimir Putin Support Anti-Western Terrorists as a Young KGB Officer? Putin has sworn his time as a KGB officer in Dresden was uneventful. There’s a lot of reason to doubt that claim", this line from the end after breathlessly reporting an ex-member's assertions as fact, is even worse than the 1993 academic source that I referred to in the first post:
 * The former Red Army Faction member’s story is near-impossible to verify.
 * But even if we follow Politico's lead and take that as sufficiently reliable to repeat (though here in an encyclopedia article), AFAICT the claims are again restricted to the post-1980 era of the group, so the unqualified claim is still unsourced and dubious, and IMO still pretty clearly intended to paint the group as "puppets" from their inception. Put another way, it's like adding "Members of the band have attracted controversy for using racial slurs" in the lede of the Grateful Dead article: nominally true, but obviously intended to create an untrue impression.
 * I hope that clears up what I'm trying to get at with the Dubious tag, and why this Politico article doesn't resolve it. Thanks! ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 21:28, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Our job is not to repeat journalist investigation of a former RAF member only because you want to whitewash RAF and create an impression they were ideologically pure revolutionary group rather than KGB puppet. Politico is WP:RS and this is why it's referred in the article. Your artificial limiting scope to post-1980 is also not justified by any sources. Bettina Röhl, daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, wrote a whole book about her early experiences with the Baader and RAF circles and in general the whole community was filled with Soviet influences from the very beginning. Cloud200 (talk) 07:31, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The journalists I was repeating were the sources given in the article; I believe the quotations are relevant because they show that these sources don't back up the broad claim being made -- I'm not disputing Politico's reliability: they even make it clear in the headline that the article's insinuations are disputed, rather than established fact. But even taking them as gospel, they absolutely have nothing to do with the RAF "from the beginning".
 * As to whether a daughter remembering "Soviet influences" in her early childhood is sufficient to claim that the KGB was puppeteering the RAF from the start, I'll gladly look at the source when it gets added, but from your choice of words it also sounds pretty dubious?
 * Regarding motivations, the fact that you're reading this as "whitewashing the RAF", as opposed to "tagging a dubiously-sourced claim that is clearly intended to tarnish socialist governments by association to an infamous terrorist group" is moot to this discussion, but maybe worth reflecting on?
 * ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 14:38, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't quite get your last postulate - is the association between KGB and RAF is more tarnishing for "socialist governments" running KGB or for RAF? I personally don't think it's "tarnishing" for any of them: RAF was a terrorist organisation, which is tainting on its own. KGB ran many terrorist organisations, including RAF, PLO and performed hundreds of assassinations abroad, so how could it be "tarnished" by association with their puppet? Cloud200 (talk) 16:53, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry for derailing the thread by trying to find an antonym for "whitewashing" and landing on "tarnishing". An uncharitable reader might take that to mean that I thought they were "untarnished" otherwise, which is clearly not the case. My fault! I'll try to do better, by sticking to the point:
 * The phrasing of the dubious claim is clearly creating the impression -- which you evidently share? -- that the RAF was an officially-sanctioned organ of actual, UN-member socialist state(s), and the current sources do not back that up. If the intent was merely to document the connections that did actually exist between late-era RAF members and the Stasi or other intelligence organizations, it should not be phrased in a way that would propagate this misconception.
 * Since I'm not an expert on this topic I'm not going to try to write that nuanced section; the best I can contribute is a tiny warning to readers / editors that the claim in the article today goes well beyond the scope of the source that it's citing. By all means if there is a RS that does support the broader claim, add that -- but "Meinhof's daughter detected Soviet influence as a child" or "the KGB is documented to have done even worse things than the RAF" don't sound promising.
 * 2600:1702:6D1:28B0:81EF:A604:56F1:F7BF (talk) 19:29, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but the idea of RAF being an "officially sanctioned organ" is an absurd you made up, and yes, that's is derailing the discussion. Of course it was not "official". RAF was a terrorist organisation covertly curated, controlled and supported by Stasi and SB under KGB umbrella, just like they curated PLO or Carlos "Jackal". And this status is entirely supported by the quoted sources. Cloud200 (talk) 21:29, 26 September 2023 (UTC)
 * The unqualified "received support from Stasi and other Eastern Bloc security services" currently invites the inference -- that you seem to have drawn as well -- that socialist governments were in fact puppeteering the RAF throughout their existence, which absolutely is not supported by the source currently cited in the article: one of the sources (if not perhaps the Politico article) explicitly stated that through the 1970s they were being monitored as a threat, not as assets -- and that's certainly not the impression one would get from the existing text.
 * This broad misinterpretation is invited by its inclusion in the introduction to the article, immediately after an uncontroversial statement that does apply to the group in general; it would be like saying "Ted Kaczynski was motivated by a disgust at modern technology's effect on society, and he received training from the University of Michigan" -- both parts are literally true and well-documented by reliable sources, but juxtaposing them is obviously intended to convey a false impression that itself is not supportable.
 * If there is a source that does support that broader inference, let's add that. But it's misleading as it stands today -- even if the broader inference is true, that's absolutely not what the cited source says. Alternatively, we could change the text to be less misleading about what the source actually supports -- but it seems like that would defeat the purpose of including it in the intro in the first place.
 * ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 16:51, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Ted Kaczynski received education from UoM prior to his terrorist activities. RAF received weapons and explosives from KGB right as it conducted its attacks, and was even evacuated by them to their safe houses to avoid prosecution in Germany. I hope you do see the slight difference in the level of engagement of both institutions here. Cloud200 (talk) 07:05, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Apologies for the confusion, I'm not trying to draw an equivalence between the Stasi and the University of Michigan -- I was trying to pick a case where there was no question of a correlation between the two halves of the statement, so that litigating the degree of connection could be avoided, to instead emphasize the type of misleading juxtaposition.
 * But since we're here again, as far as I can tell from the sources in the article, this support came after the attacks that make up the bulk of the rest of the article, I thought my earlier analogy already illustrated why I find the content of the existing text misleading:
 * it's like adding "Members of the band have attracted controversy for using racial slurs" in the lede of the Grateful Dead article: nominally true, but obviously intended to create an untrue impression.
 * This example would be misleading because the member with the racial slur controversy was not in the band for most of its history, just as the events in that Politico source came after most of the events documented in this article.
 * Again, if there are reliable sources that document that these intelligence services had a comparable degree of influence on the group as "the perceived failure of their parents' generation to confront Germany's Nazi past", let's include that source in the lead and remove the dubious tag. But I don't think you've even asserted that such a source exists, let alone cite one?
 * If not, it would be less misleading to split the claim into a separate sentence that more faithfully represents the facts that are in the cited source.
 * ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 16:43, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Dubious unsourced attack
Earlier this month an IP user removed |removed the unsourced 1981-08-07 attack from the article. That got rolled back, and I added a citation needed tag; that in turn led to |a few odd edits (incl an unverifiable Ref tag) by @Dergeistertutanota, but no actual source.

As far as I can tell, the only places on the internet that reference this attack seem to be scraped from (some version of) this article; there is abundant English-language press about the other attacks in that period, but no references to an attack on US personnel in Kaiserslautern that day, let alone one matching this extremely detailed description.

I'm inclined to just remove it again, but I'd be curious where this even came from. ShadyNorthAmericanIPs (talk) 22:33, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Faction or Fraction?
Red Army Faction is the usual English translation of the German Rote Armee Fraktion, but in my opinion it is not true to the original meaning. It's a mistranslation.

A faction, in English, is "a group of persons forming a cohesive, usually contentious minority within a larger group."

A fraction, in English, is "a portion", "a part of a whole".

The same happens in other languages, such as Italian (fazione, frazione), Spanish (facción, fracción), French (faction, fraction), Portuguese (fação, fração) and Dutch (factie, fractie), but not in German, which has only one word with the two meanings, Fraktion.

In this case Fraktion should be translated as Fraction in English, not Faction, which would suggest a contentious minority or a splinter group.JBarreto (talk) 16:19, 1 June 2024 (UTC)