Never Again Without a Rifle:

...He traces the passage of Roberto Ognibene, a young, intelligent high school student who made his way from the traditional Communist Youth Organizations to the Red Brigades, only to be wounded in a shoot-out with the cops, one of whom he killed...

...Three years ago Alessartdro Silj tried to make sense out the terrorism that was beginning to fill the Italian press, and which was usually explained away by both the public and the journalists...

...All of Silj's terrorists grew up with the idea that society can be changed, and when peaceful means fail (and they all tried them), violence is justified...

...After interviewing the family and friends of a few exemplary terrorists, he wrote a good, detailed book which was in press in the Spring of 1977 when Aldo Moro was shot, and the riots in Bologna ruined that city's image as the showplace of enlightened, reformist Communism...

...The book, wisely, makes no attempt to illuminate the mystery of such a choice...

...The translation is usually a little less turgid than the original, but is frequently and perhaps unavoidably awkward.dably awkward...

...They disdain charity, which Curcio defined as "the odious outstretched hand...

...Their lives of secrecy isolate them from other men...

...What made sensitive, reflective persons, all from loving families, and who had grown up in the stable, prosperous Italy of the fifties and early sixties, choose terrorism as their only possible relation with the world...

...The language, the ideas, the faces are all familiar...

...By the time the book appeared, the public realized that a new, mysterious and perhaps, at bottom, very simple phenomenon had come to disturb it...

...Silj then follows the parallel journey of Mar-gherita Cagol, a good, conservative girl from a strong Catholic family, an accomplished classical guitarist, a practicing Catholic who went out of her way to attend certain sermons because they "satisfied" her, and who ended gunned down by the police, in the belief she was fighting against capitalism at the side of her husband with whom she had founded the Red Brigades...

...To do so, more information is needed...

...Curcio learned it at the University of Trento, where the Christian Democrats had established a university around a strong sociology department intended to provide social engineers for the new Italy of the 'economic miracle.' Italian Catholics and Communists blame this terrorism on one another, and they are both right, up to a point...

...Silj provides a penetrating, sympathetic portrait of her husband, Renato Curcio, the earnest son of a poor Waldensian mother, who left his studies in sociology at Trento to become an armed revolutionary, and is now in prison...

...Terrorists are hard to understand because, one suspects, in their ingenuity there is so much that they do not understand...

...Ognibene learned this at home in the usual Communist analyses of the conditions that lead to revolution...

...There are many injustices in Italian society, as any Italian will point out, and they appear to be increasing...

...They know the Marxist theory of work, but they do not work...

...Just two years later, we are fortunate to have his book in English...

...Giorgio Amen-dola, the tough, heroic, narrow-minded Communist blames it all on the "exasperated populism" of Catholics who broke into his nice, tidy class struggle sometime in the late sixties with their "unhistorical" vision of history...

...The temptation is to dismiss it as inexplicable, lunatic violence, rather than to examine it as something new and strange...

...But the violence of the terrorist is perceived by most Italians as incommensurate with the government's violence, if only because it adds to existing violence, and allows the government to justify increasingly repressive behavior...

...Silj, an accomplished historian, is here strongest when he narrates, and weakest when he analyzes...

...The first and strongest section narrates the transformation of a few high-minded young people into political terrorists in two small, quintessentially Italian cities: Catholic Trento in the Alps and Communist Reggio Emilia on the plains of the Po Valley...

...And, in fact, the Vatican Council and Pope John's support of a Christian Democrat-Socialist alliance (which now looks like any other cynical, political expedient) introduced a whole generation of Italian Catholics to the idea that they bore some responsibility for implementing social justice in daily life...

...They end by killing the pity in their hearts that first moved them to concern...

...Most can be laid at the door of the corrupt Christian Democrats who have ruled the country for the past thirty years...

...When you finish this book, you understand how intelligent and even noble people in Italy are led by the circumstances of their lives to choose violence as a means of regenerating society...

...John Ahern TERRORISM is hard to understand when your only information comes from television news and daily newspapers...

...He is caught in the reform/revolution dilemma that obsessed these terrorists in their early stages...

...The parallel with the CIA's logic, and hence that of our own government, is not fortuitous...

...But members of Amendola's own party have observed that, reading about these terrorists, they have the feeling of flipping through a family album...

...They do not understand that when they murder a middle-level manager of a Fiat plant, they have by that act cut themselves off from others...

...As they try to torture abstractions into reality, they find that they become obsessed with guns, bombs, clock-work efficiency, trust, betrayal, and the police...

...The answer can be found in the changed intellectual climate of postwar Italy, where Marxism has established hegemony over the country's intellectual and cultural life...

...In the name of other men, whom they never consulted, they save society by 'destabilizing' it...

...The language of his analysis of their failure is dangerously close to the debased, turgid language of the Red Brigades themselves...

...But why in all the centuries of grinding injustice has such a phenomenon never arisen before...