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Throughout the 1970s, Italy was convulsed by a series of bomb attacks, political kidnappings and assassinations. At the height of the so-called anni di piombo (years of lead — as in bullets), Italian factory bosses, judges and other potential victims of left-wing terrorism were known to carry tourniquets in case they were shot in the leg. The most feared of the subversives, who inflicted class warfare, were the Brigate Rosse — the Red Brigades or BR.
Until it disbanded in the mid-1980s the brigatisti combined a Marxist-Leninist utopianism with a murderous disregard for human life. On March 16 1978 — a dark date in Italian history — it abducted the former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro and machine-gunned to death his five-man police and carabinieri escort. After 55 days spent blindfolded in a “people’s prison” in Rome, Moro was found dead in the boot of a Renault 4; he had been summarily executed. The kidnap and murder of Margaret Thatcher by the IRA might have been a comparable outrage.
John Foot, a history professor at Bristol university, has written a grimly absorbing history of the Red Brigades and its 18-year reign of terror. In superbly researched pages he considers the hydra-headed conspiracy theories that surrounded the BR’s attempts to bring down the Italian state. After a bomb planted by the neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo (possibly with the help of other collaborators) killed 17 people in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in the winter of 1969, Italy’s far left became obsessed by the possibility of a neo-Blackshirt military coup. Further bomb attacks were perpetrated by the right in Italy during the next two decades. The extreme left believed that crypto-fascists were conniving with Christian Democrat ministers and secret service chiefs in a “strategy of tension” to implicate communists and others in acts of terrorism. The intention of the neo-fascists, Foot explains, was to create a climate of such fear and instability that Italians would clamour again for an authoritarian leader.
In a fascinating chapter, Foot considers the bizarre case of the leftwing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who in 1972 was found dead and disfigured on wasteland outside Milan, having reportedly blown himself up while trying to detonate an electricity pylon. True or false? The left cried murder; the right blamed Feltrinelli for the Piazza Fontana enormity and identified him as the BR’s puppeteer-in-chief. Disillusioned by the resurgence (as Feltrinelli saw it) of Italy’s Blackshirt movement, he had conceivably hoped to avenge the enemy by turning to violence himself, only to die a squalid terrorist.
Behind the Red Brigades’ campaign of urban warfare lay a conviction that Italy’s anti-fascist resistance was far from ended. Three decades had gone by since the Italian Republic was founded in 1946 but in that time the hopes for a socially equitable Italy had apparently not been met. The discontent was keenly felt by an older generation of Italian militants who had theoretical links with revolutionary groups such as Potere Operaio, Sinistra Proletaria and Lotta Continua (if not with the Red Brigades). Foot shows how these and other far-left factions agitated in factories and universities during Italy’s “hot autumn” of 1969, when there was a spate of unrest against the directors of companies that were perceived as exploitative.
In time, the Red Brigades took the “class struggle” out of the factory and on to the streets, having by then lost all touch with its worker base. In 1977, drunk with the possibility of political power, it executed the Turin newspaper editor Carlo Casalegno, a neighbour and associate of the industrial chemist and writer Primo Levi. Later that year the journalist Indro Montanelli, a gruff conservative opinion-maker, was kneecapped while on his way to work in Milan. Montanelli survived but, according to Foot, many Italians were secretly pleased — “or even not so secretly” — at the BR shooting, as Montanelli was confessedly still in thrall to aspects of Mussolini and the cult of ducismo.
As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the Red Brigades came to resemble the Mafia in its attempt to inculcate a hatred of state “authority” and hunt down and kill police informers. To what end? Moro’s persecutors, having served their time in jail, are now in their late seventies and lead normal enough lives. In their political arrogance they had subjected Italy to some of the bloodiest acts of terrorism yet seen in an industrialised society. As Foot points out in this excellent book, the story of the BR ultimately amounts to “a national tragedy”. The revolution never came but hundreds were maimed or killed in its name.
The Red Brigades: The Terrorists Who Brought Italy to its Knees by John Foot Bloomsbury £25, 464 pages
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