Attacks
Action directe carried out some fifty attacks, including a machine gun assault on the employers' union headquarters on 1 May 1979 as well as attacks on French government buildings, property management agencies, French army buildings, companies in the military-industrial complex, and the state of Israel. They carried out robberies or "proletarian expropriation" actions, and assassinations, killing Engineer General René Audran, the manager of French arms sales, in 1985. They were also accused of Georges Besse's 1986 killing, a murder allegedly justified because he was the then head of the French automaker Renault. However, they denied it during their trial. Besse was also former president of Eurodif nuclear company, in which Iran had a 10% share. They also claimed joint responsibility for the 1985 bomb attack carried out by the Red Army Faction at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, which killed 2 people.
Read more about this topic: Action Directe (armed Group)
Famous quotes containing the word attacks:
“I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The rebel, unlike the revolutionary, does not attempt to undermine the social order as a whole. The rebel attacks the tyrant; the revolutionary attacks tyranny. I grant that there are rebels who regard all governments as tyrannical; nonetheless, it is abuses that they condemn, not power itself. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, are convinced that the evil does not lie in the excesses of the constituted order but in order itself. The difference, it seems to me, is considerable.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)