TERROR IN ITALY

...All these were undertaken in the attempt to attain a specific yet limited goal, which might even be unknown to the perpetrators, since only the leaders who had planned and ordered the act knew the goal...

...Recently, the South American Tupamaros, ERP, and Montoneros have given expression to the convulsions within Third World nations enmeshed in the struggle with the despotism of military Juntas...

...The progression of events in 1977 illustrates certain characteristics of this phenomenon and the "social culture" in which terrorism will germinate and thrive...

...The Italian situation is above all the most abnormal self-disruption of government in our time among the democracies...

...In November, in broad daylight, using a Nagant 7.62 pistol, terrorists fired four shots into the face of the assistant managing editor of Turin's La Stampa, a daily with a liberal-socialist position...

...And then there is the ever-more frequent assertion by the ultra-left that the existing society, compared with that other society it has in mind, is intolerable for even one more day and that, faced with the State's repressive violence, revolutionary terrorism is simply counterterrorism...

...today he exhorts the workers to limit their strikes...

...Yet the very same ultra-leftist theoreticians continue tenaciously to inculcate such concepts in people's minds and to do everything to keep these concepts afloat...

...Cultivating conventional images of a revolutionary epic and eschatology, a generation has been educated to historic optimism and does not know the actual history of the revolutionary wars...

...With the economic crisis, the shift became quite obvious...

...In the United States, the Weathermen and similar groups have done very little in terms of disrupting the status quo...

...On the contrary, with the founding of the Red Brigades in 1972, of the Armed Proletarian Nuclei in 1974, and the subsequent proliferation of revolutionary sects, the ultra-left has now taken over this field...

...153 "comrades who are making a mistake...

...In the last two years, however, the terrorism of the ultra-right has suffered grave, perhaps definitive setbacks...

...So one must return to the psychological and ideological characteristics of armed extremism...

...Indeed, the very facts of the sociological crisis cannot explain everything, at least for anyone who does not want to put his entire trust in that "sociological determinism" that absolves almost every act by referring to the social condition of the person performing it...

...Who are these new terrorists, whose minds are so full of furious ideological hatred...

...it has never seen revolution and would like to...

...The leap from ends to means has been favored by such circumstances as the suggestive power of the mass media, which has poured out images and accounts of distant guerrilla wars, revolutions, and acts of terrorism, the fascination with danger after 30 years of peace, and by the economic and political crisis...

...In such areas of "social parking" nothing could be easier than to recruit troops for revolutionary extremism...

...For a number of years now a significant proportion of extremists have gone into clandestine work, protected by an area of social support and conspiracy of silence that the armed extremists of other nations do not enjoy...

...2Among the major organizations, in order of importance, there are the Red Brigades, the Armed Proletarian Nuclei, the Front Line, and the Armed Struggle for Communism...

...Who would find it to their interest, and for what purpose, in view of what solution, to demonstrate that Italy is ungovernable...

...The "rank and file" of the clandestine movement now seems to be present in the world of the factories, from Sit-Siemens to Marelli, from Breda to Pirelli, from Ansaldo to Fiat...

...Perhaps they think that they are mistaken only in their marksmanship...

...At the University of Rome they launched a virulent assault on a speaker's platform that was occupied by Luciano Lama, secretary of the CGIL, the Communist-led trade-union movement...

...We have neither past nor future," they wrote on the walls, "history is killing us...

...Just as Guevara thought he was repeating the Long March of the Chinese revolutionaries in the mountains of Bolivia, so the guerrilla fighters of the Red Brigade believe that, confronted by their "metropolitan Long March" in the industrial triangle of Milan-Turin-Genoa, Italian society is not merely vulnerable but profoundly weak, and in any case cannot be lived in, like the burning building in Brecht's parable: I saw a house...

...In any case, it would be difficult today for the Russians to overlook the fact that Italian ungovernability can bring the first of the Eurocommunist parties, whose politics has for some time now been heretical if not schismatic, into a ministerial coalition...

...This generation believes that revolution is beautiful, like a movie by Theo Anghelopoulos...

...and produced a thick fog of intransigent theories, which then resulted in the pollution of the armed groups...

...In Italy an extremism of ends has always been more congenial to the left than the right, while an extremism of means could be seen in the very terrorist symbols flaunted by the Fascists (the daggers and skulls), producing even in recent times such neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi grouplets as the New Order, the Black Order, Year Zero, Phoenix, National Vanguard, and Avenge...

...In Italy the economic maladjustment caused by the enormous inflation of oil prices has had shattering effects, and our political life could best be recorded on a seismograph...

...Fascist terrorism, which used mainly explosives, was blind, indiscriminate, and impersonal...

...They do not contemplate the hypothesis that after leaving terrorism behind there will be a dictatorship, and that will be that...

...perhaps only the solidarity of the various terrorisms that operate in other nations...

...Of the 24 persons killed by and among terrorists since January 1976, only one killing can be ascribed to the criminal activity of the Black Bands...

...Thus the problem of truth regresses to a pre-Hegelian and predialectical stage...

...In the past the Italian CP was Stalinist...

...Here these rival faiths often clash...

...Usually terrorism has gone with despotic or colonial regimes...

...It discovers that our time was born in Russia a century ago, with the first Nihilists...

...For example, one cannot exclude the possibility that during certain days of urban guerrilla warfare, when the young people of the Manifesto, PDUP, Workers' Vanguard, and Continual Struggle groups were continually astonished at being infiltrated by the members of the Autonomous group armed with 38s, while in their turn the Autonomous group discovered that they were being infiltrated by Red Brigadists and Napists, there might have been some professional sharpshooters on hand who had come from far away and had even infiltrated the Brigadists and the Napists...

...On the contrary, every extremism of means not necessarily tied or proportionate to that of the ends, indeed often rather petty when it came to ends—consisted of simple direct action: dynamiting, political kidnappings for extortion or punishment, assassinations as warnings or reprisals, and other acts of violence...

...In Italy, the conscious spread of psychological and ideological aversions that regard as debilitating and repugnant any form of debate with an "enemy," insofar as he represents a form of absolute evil, can be traced back to the '60s, when "revolutionary" thought was molded by the emotional influence of distant conflicts (Vietnam, South America, and the Middle East), the social disorders caused by the economic boom, and the rise of the youth movements...

...Revolutionary subjectivism, which measures every individual act, does not measure all the conditions in which it operates, does not see a connection between means and ends in terms of logic, but rather responds to revulsions and feelings of irritation of the kind that Dostoevsky regarded as "passions of the mind" or "tragedies of imagined passion...

...How has it come about that an extremism of means has also developed on the left, even though the Italian left, which bases its ideas on Marx, not Stirner, is far from believing in the "conceptual necessity" of terrorism...

...This often is the condition in Italy, a country that holds a kind of frontier between the faiths of West and East, Europe and the Third World...

...For example, even now the ends, often pursued with sensational means by terrorists in Northern Ireland or by the Palestinian Fedahyn, are confined to nationalist ends, which in Italy is also true of the Fascists who employ terrorism but do not have any plan for a society that might result from a total change in social relations...

...The inquiries of the magistrature, though not yet concluded, have ascertained that 50 "timers" (English in original) had been bought by the neoFascist Franco Freda, a member of a conspiratorial group on the extreme Right...

...What happened among the young Communists was obvious: as the party's revisionism transformed the CP's character, the revolutionary virus formerly held in check and, as it were, guarded by the party's armature with the promise of a "day of reckoning," bubbled over many theoretical magazines and left-oriented radio stations...

...The Communists hailed from the traditional CP strongholds, such as Reggio Emilia, where the grip of party control had been loosened with the dissolution of Leninist doctrine regarding the concept of revolution...

...During the demonstrations in September 1977 at the Palasport Stadium in Bologna, at least 10,000 people shouted, "Long Live Curcio...

...The tradition of terrorism is almost unknown in Italian history, except for some isolated instances, such as the assassination of King Umberto I and a few episodes accompanying Fascism's rise to power...

...A writer who was formerly a Communist has explained the consequences of this with the following analogy: "lt is as though suddenly the biggest dealer in drugs cut off all supplies...

...For "the good of the cause," fearing that their faith might be slightly damaged, they have even suggested to the generation of 1968 a psychological self-censorship on the southeast Asian experience at the end of the revolutionary war, despite the Vietnamese 155 "reeducation camps," the slaughter of Cambodian peasants—and, indeed, the new Gulag...

...30n December 12, 1969, a time bomb caused the death of 17 people and wounded 87 others in the Farmers' Bank at the Piazza Fontana in Milan...

...In March, the urban 150 guerrilla campaign exploded in open battles in the streets of Rome and Bologna, and the police intervened with armored cars...

...These students are often economic outcasts living on the fringes who cannot look forward to any substantial future in terms of jobs or careers...

...The sociologist Francesco Alberoni also connects this phenomenon to the parallel difficulties of the Catholic Church and the Italian Communist party, both authoritarian structures that have in large measure lost their traditional power to impose "rigorous discipline, simple faith, and the pleasure of obedience...

...These circumstances permit one to reply only with the greatest caution to a question that for years now always crops up in regard to Italian terrorism: "Who is behind it...

...Yet even if by chance it found out that Engels described history as "the cruelest of all gods, driving its triumphal chariot over mountains of corpses," there are few pedagogues who are willing to remember Engels's warning: "Those who imagine that they've made a revolution always discover the day after that they did not know what they wanted and that the revolution that was made has nothing in common with the revolution they meant to make...

...This confirmed the prognosis that a generation alienated by the collapse of mass education and the economic crisis would oscillate easily between one irrational movement and another, much as the masses of the unemployed middle class did during the years before Fascism...

...Armed extremism is thus favored above all by such circumstances as the PCI's pragmatic turn...

...The ritual murder of prominent figures in the legal apparatus, such as Genoa's attorney general and the president of the Turin Bar Association, continues inexorably, and the cases of criminal arson in the factories mount higher and higher...

...The terrorism of the ultra-left, which can be described as an anomalous partisan movement at war with a democracy, chiefly uses pistols, strikes at precise symbolic and individual targets, and tends to infiltrate street riots in order to direct them toward ever more frequent forms of urban guerrilla warfare...

...2 '1 refer here to all the organizations to the left of the CP, from Manifesto to the movement called Continual Struggle, from Workers' Vanguard to the collectives organized by the Autonomous groups, together with 152 If at the beginning the strategy of violent distruption was the work of the right, at least at the time of the massacre in the Piazza Fontana, 3 by now numerous articles and accounts have documented the seditious activities of the left, along with hundreds of biographies of the persons involved...

...The itinerary of the groups of Catholic origin has been similar, for in Italy, as in South America, after contact with the Communists, they reinterpreted the ancient apocalyptic aversion to "the authorities, the rich, the educated, and the powerful...

...and now in 1977 alone nine factory managers in Fiat plants were violently attacked with firearms...

...A widespread political literature, and not a few students, regard the terrorists as 5 Among the most recent episodes, a bloody feud has started in Rome in January 1978 between young extremists of right and left, and several pistol fights have ensued...

...Civilian guerrilla warfare," Popper recalls, "was an endemic condition, which from time to time would erupt in a serious explosion...

...Terrorists, with their dark tangle of ideas and passions, are not by necessity organized from the outside...

...They have four ideas in their head and a revolver in their pocket," some frightened theoreticians of Italian ultraleftism now complain...

...But at least until recent times, the risk element in Italy was present only in the thought of the traditional extremists...

...Extremist thought, which in its theoretical fixity ignores everything outside its own sphere, proclaims itself innocent and does not raise such problems and scruples...

...In the historic "three waves " of terrorism described by Walter Laqueur, even in the last wave that for a decade now has engulfed some Western societies, phenomena of this kind never appeared on so vast a scale within the liberal political systems...

...Yet, every day members of clandestine groups organized in honeycomb-like cells, aim their pistols at the legs of judges, police officers and ordinary policemen, journalists, local representatives of various political parties, factory managers and foremen (many of whom must now walk on crutches...

...The Greek Colonels no longer exist, nor does the Salazarist Pide, nor Franco's state power...

...Nothing similar has ever happened in connection with the exploits of the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany...

...The boys go nuts...

...The notion that precisely such a vision of the world led to the ideological blood bath of the first half of our century, the epoch of Stalin and Hitler, seems far from widespread...

...One of them, as the flames were scorching his eyelashes, asked if by chance it was raining outside, if the wind was blowing, and if there was another house, and so on...

...During the '60s and the beginning of the '70s, "the strategy of tension" was chiefly the work of neo-Fascists who enjoyed the complicity of sections of the secret service...

...The source of these operations seems to have been Fascist, with the obscure complicity of the secret services, even though at the start the anarchist Pietro Valpreda was accused...

...This gave rise to rather premature judgments concerning the decline of the Communist hegemony, since the pathological spread of splinter groups presupposes some sort of final reckoning, and in any event the dust is bound to settle on the largest gravitational mass...

...But when they began to aim their shots higher in order to "execute" the simple interpreter of a system of thought and judgment, there suddenly burst onto the scene the dark shadow of a group that arrogated to itself the "ideological" right of life or death over anyone standing in its path...

...the coup de grace, the fourth bullet, was delivered as the victim lay on the ground...

...The University of Rome alone must take in 120,000 students (which in practice means about 70 square centimeters of space per student) without commensurate material and technical resources, without a job supply proportionate to expectations...

...They then finally converted to the postreligious ideology that transfers the absolute values of transcendental faith to the sanctification of social events...

...Already that history seems to be unknown, and it appears to be very difficult to transmit the experience...

...today it is not even in complete agreement on the question of Leninism...

...In 1968, in Moscow, Enrico Berlinguer still cited statistics of Italian strikes as proof of his party's revolutionary commitment...

...Franco Ferrarotti, once the sociology teacher of the Red Brigadist Renato Curcio at the University of Trento, observed: "They refused to accept distinctions between the mediated and the immediate, between principles and direct action...

...And so, by dint of repetition and saturation, and the rise of an extremism of ends;' there also exploded on the ultra-left an extremism of means...

...The Catholics—such as Renato Curcio and, even more, Margherita Cagol who was later killed in a shoot-out with the police—had actually been practicing Catholics until two years before...

...The programmers of the "Italian civil war of the '80s" want to persuade as many as possible in the areas of recruitment, above all among the ultra-left theorizers and the militant base of the Italian CP, that things will inevitably go this way...

...The daytoday chronicle of Italian events now resembles the philosopher Karl Popper's memories of Austria in the period between World War I and the rise of Nazism...

...It was in July 1927, after a full-scale shoot-out in Vienna, that I began to fear the worst...

...Finally, a third and general factor of instability: the "interrupted development" after the oil crisis, caused by the changed terms of trade that put shackles on the Italian economy (since it is purely a refiner, not a producer), has sharpened the contradiction between the continuing expectations of the mass of the people and the limitations of the productive setup...

...And thus one can understand how the advocates of extremism of means consider their Manichean and militant vision of the struggle between the forces of "good" and "evil" an infallible one, even to the point of believing themselves called upon to kill in the name of a goal that appears to them so obviously great as to transcend any and all of the ordinary moral rules of conduct...

...They seemed possessed by a millennial fury...

...Who was behind Nechaev when he welcomed Bakunin's slogan "learn from the bandits...

...It presupposes that an ideology is without doubt a sublime truth rather than a hypothesis and, when pushed to the extreme, such an ideology becomes an absolute, sublime truth...

...To suppose an external conspiracy directed from a single tenacious center, which can manipulate groups on the right and multitudes on the extreme left in the same way that the Nazis used the paranoiac Dutch Communist van der Lubbe to set the Reichstag fire, one must first of all clarify the cui prodest—who would gain from it...

...There were people inside...

...At the beginning of the '70s, partly because the 30-year stalemate between the major political parties that made it impossible to achieve any real change in government, it became clear that a shift from an extremism of "ends" to an extremism of "means" was taking place...

...But all this would be of little consequence without the mass that can be maneuvered by these groups and that now is supplied by the Italian social collapse...

...And all this would be inconsequential without a utopian-literary culture in which every day it "seems that even the most intelligent play, quite coldly, the comedy of exaltation...

...The social and political roots of the 154 phenomenon are here, in Italy...

...In its turn, the CIA, whether or not it is controllable since being subjected to open publicity, can hardly ignore the fact that demonstrating Italy's ungovernability increases the probability of the "historic compromise" between the Communists and Catholics—just as the German BND cannot ignore this...

...The Palestinian, Lebanese, Cypriot, Croatian, Basque, and Northern Irish movements all have radical, atavistic-religious, nationalist, and separatist rather than revolutionary characteristics...

...it lacked a social base or "cover...

...They have even advised against reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag books, though Le Roy Ladurie considers the exiled writer "contemporary Russia's best historian," and Roy Medvedev warned that after reading this book few people could possibly remain "the same as they were before...

...Since the "criminal simple-mindedness" of Dostoevsky's "devils" (in The Possessed), European terrorists have utterly failed, save for Ireland, where the inspiration of their movement was ethnic rather than ideological...

...These and other episodes illustrate the exceptional nature of the Italian phenomenon, while the growth of the area of social support around armed extremism seems to be directly proportional to the changes in the Italian Communist party...

...Hence the appearance of uprooted, subproletarian masses and the overcrowding in the cities—the "belts" that surround Turin, the so-called Koreas in Milan, and the illegal shantytowns that have sprung up on the outskirts of Rome because of the chaotic settlement of migrants from the countryside...

...Every extremism concerned with ends— that is, utopian-existential ends—rests on a persuasion that the excellence of a goal is commensurate with its grandeur...

...When they assassinated important figures in the legal apparatus of the State, they were' possessed by the impulse to strike down, at least in effigy, those powers they could not overturn...

...It was burning...

...Perhaps nobody...

...There were other attempts of this kind...

...It is stated in every document, quite obstinately and without variation: the prolonged challenge to the "heart of the State" and to the organization of society will provoke an authoritarian counterattack and this, by means of a catalytic process, will in turn provoke a revolutionary civil war...

...In January 1977 there appeared in our universities a new group called the Metropolitan Indians, with their derisive nihilism, frenzied dances, and faces marked with war paint...

...Terrorism thus comes to be pure ideological homicide, the violent extinction of any alternative opinion or thought, the extreme personalization of an obsessive form of the "class struggle...

...For example, the Red Brigades emerged out of the Metropolitan Political Collective of Milan, which was composed of both dissident Communists and Catholics...

...Earlier when the terrorists used to aim their pistols low as a kind of intimidation or reprisal, they revealed an exaltation already inclined to homicide but held back, calculated, still capable of taking things gradually and of making distinctions— that is, with some political awareness and some sense of pity in their summary judgments...

...It does not know that since Goethe's time revolutionary war has always been a history of "corpses and excrement," like war in general, right down to the times of "good old Orwell," and beyond him...

...In February the Indians and, close on their heels and armed with 38s, a neo-Leninist group called the "Autonomous," rebelled against everyone, including the Communists...

...At this point, it is obvious that the uprooted semiintellectual products of the universities living on the economic fringes of society (like the declassed, nihilistic intellectuals of the times of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Alexander Ulianov, Lenin's brother—but now on a mass scale) would go out into the streets with the uprooted of the shantytowns (a Lumpenproletariat filled with grim fury, just like the Russian masses before the revolution), in the weakest of the industrial societies, thus offering a kind of social "cover" for the armed sects...

...Moreover, the phenomenon is favored by three sociological factors, which do much to foster the disintegration of the living tissue of everyday existence...

...The second factor: in the hearts of the cities, the university population has reached a million students, three times that of England...

...Since June, guerrilla tactics have gone hand-in-hand with day-by-day terrorism, which still continues...

...4 The two processes ran parallel...

...How did they get to this point...

...The first factor contributing to social instability—the tempo of the rural exodus, a sudden "Biblical" migration—has far surpassed the tempo of industrial development...

...The Red Brigades in the North and the Armed Proletarian Groups in the South use as cover for their activity the violent struggles in the factories, urban guerrilla warfare, 5 and politicized uprisings in the prisons...

...Or perhaps just two ideas: the "revolution" as the absolute good, the "enemy" as the absolute evil...

...included, that has not set limits to mass recruitment for the universities, at least in relation to the available resources...

...They were shocked by any discussion of the opportuness of a particular action...

...In Germany the Red Army Fraction has always been circumscribed, even though efficient and pitiless to the point of blindly following the Hitlerian precept: "Ferocity can sway souls...

...And precisely here is what is "behind" Italian terrorism, apart from the crises of a decade...

...This is what the Communist Giorgio Amendola, remembering the contribution of Catholic groups to extremism, called "an ahistorical conception of the world...

...Without saying anything in reply, I left...

...Pursuing the goal of universal higher education, which might be conceivable at the end of a long process but not at its beginning, Italian society is the only one in the industrial world, the U.S.S.R...

...There is also Quadaffi, whom Sadat calls "the fool of Libya," but he appears to be more interested in buying large packets of stock...

...Translated from the Italian RAYMOND ROSENTHAL q 156...

...In Italy it was this transition from one type of morality to another that set off the explosions on the left...

...Now 155 members of the "Armed Band" are in jail charged with various crimes, another 88 are to be tried and have been provisionally set free, and only 22 suspects of terrorism are still being sought by the police...

...Who would be interested in the disruption of Italian society...

...4The origins of the Montoneros in Argentina, led by Mario Firmenich and Fernando Vaca Narvaja, are quite similar...

...What is the specific, realistic goal of the strategists of revolutionary guerrilla warfare...

...There have been 702 terrorist episodes in Italy in 1975, 1,353 episodes in 1976, and 2,081 in 1977...

...First of all, one must 151 distinguish between subjective and objective data, the prime psycho-ideological factors (the genetic blueprint of the extremists) and the sociological conditions that foster the spread of revolutionary terrorism (the sick areas of society, from which its followers can be recruited, e.g., the universities overflowing with declassed masses of students, the urban peripheries swarming with impoverished people, and the prisons...

...This does not exclude the possibility that behind certain episodes there may be someone who at times bets on the vulnerability of Italy as "the weakest link in the European chain," on the irreparable nature of its crisis, and on the apocalyptic subculture in revolt against the very left culture that generated it...

...It continues to give legal recognition to all the diplomas granted...

...In a school in Rome the announcement of an assassination attempt on a Demo-Christian leader was greeted with applause...

...But in Italy now for the first time terroristic guerrilla combat, on a broad scale and with revolutionary motives, has become a chronic state of affairs, translating into the terms of metropolitan strategy set down in Carlos Marighella's manual for the focos de guerrilla of the South American peasants: "One hundred flowers have bloomed and they are one hundred armed groups...

...Italy's instability is unique among the disorders common in contemporary industrial societies in which, as Pierre VianssonPonte puts it, "many dikes in the collective unconscious have begun to give way...

...It imagines a struggle between the forces of good and evil, yet it explains all defeats as a conspiracy of the gods of Olympus...

...As for the KGB, there is no confirmation of the rumor that certain leaders of the Red Brigade stayed for some time in Czechoslavkia...