The Red Brigades and the Discourse of Violence

Revolution and Restoration

Marco Briziarelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317679905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

This book explores the communicative practices of the Italian radical group Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, or BR), the relationship the group established with the Italian press, and the specific social historical context in which the BR developed both its own self-understanding and its complex dialectical connection with the society at large. The BR's worldview and the dominant ideology(ies) mediated by the press are treated as competing responses to structural issues of Italian history: the structural weakness of the nation state, the contradictions of an uneven economic development, and the consequent struggle of the bourgeois class to achieve hegemonic rule.

1 Introduction

1.1 Necessary or Elective Affinities? the Red Brigades and a Normal Country

The present book recounts the story of the Brigate Rosse (BR), a radical group that in the 1970s wanted to change the course of Italian history. The BR did in fact change it, although it also ended up being subject to it in unfortunate ways that could not be anticipated. At the same time, this is a book about a country that vehemently condemned the organization’s activities without recognizing in the BR its own dialectical self, its contradictions.

On the one hand, one finds Italy a very peculiar country that has for a long time aspired to normality. However, the more it aspired to the dominant understanding of social and political norms, the more the dialectical nature of its own project of modernity became evident: a country that combines liberal-democratic ideology with an enduring neo-corporatist tradition; a nation which by prosperity and population belongs to the side of France, Britain, and Germany but that has “never played a comparable role in the affairs of the continent, and has rarely been regarded as a diplomatic partner or rival of much significance” (Anderson, 2002, p.1); a society permanently walking along the borderline of dysfunctionality, which at the same time consistently produces remarkable examples of wealth, culture, and civic virtue.

In the mediated public discourse, Italy always wanted to become a “normal country” because, as Veltri claims, “no one [in Italy] has the perception of living and working in a condition of normality, everything seems provisional: life, law, rules, the world, commitments” (1995, p.12). Nevertheless, as an Italian-born citizen, sometimes I wonder about our level of performativity and the void between what we really want and what we do to achieve it, i.e. the distance between ideas and action. A perfect example of that was the moral panic caused by the pressure financial markets exerted on the Italian public debt during summer and fall 2011 as the threat of default created a state of emergency. Such a crisis was felt so deeply and impacted public opinion so much that it was able to terminate the “interminable” mandate of Prime Minister Berlusconi.

When Berlusconi “abdicated,” more than half of the nation felt liberated from a politically and culturally degrading condition. It was followed then by a short period of intense public self-reflection concerned with the structural problems of the nation: the enduring legacy of depression of the so-called “South,” the reactionarism of the Northern League, the pension reform, the rigidity of the job market, and the fiscal evasion. Many thought history was finally moving again and hoped for a cathartic opportunity that would finally lead to the desired normality. However, the supposed renewed trust of the international markets for Mario Monti’s technical government was more than enough to send everybody back to a condition of self-indulgent oblivious torpor.

Thus, as it happened with the “Second Republic” in the mid-1990s, the “First Republic” in the late 1940s, and the Risorgimento in the 1860s, everything had to change so that everything could remain the same. It is a way of living that combines Manzoni’s ideology of divine “providence” and Lorenzo de Medici’s famous maxim “Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so: about tomorrow there’s no knowing.” De Medici and Manzoni seem to relegate Italians to the present and invite them to neglect both the past and the future circumstances of their actions.

On the other hand, one finds in the Red Brigades a radical organization that was never able to discern between two opposed objectives: to liquidate the Italian state and the infrastructures that held in place an unjust society and to place its armed struggle into the realm of accepted, legitimate, and recognized political praxis. This incongruity finds its highest manifestation in the relationship BR-Italian State: a state that in relation to the BR represented at the same time an object of mimesis and nemesis. For this reason, the overwhelming presence of normative tensions in the “normal” Italian aspirations constitutes a powerful narrative that almost naturally incorporates the story of the Red Brigades: the BR, subject and object of history, hovering between revolution and restoration, seeing itself as the inheritor of a revolutionary tradition tracing back from Garibaldi to the partisan Resistenza, aspiring to conquer the future without understanding the historic limitations that its past created.

Accordingly, the relationship between the group and the Italian social whole is understood as the essential connection between a particular historical phenomenon and the horizon of conditions that determined both its possibility and its limitations. Consequently, the present project establishes a hermeneutic circle that utilizes both the story of the BR as a privileged perspective to understand its Italian context and the country’s background as a privileged perspective to understand the story of the group.

However, the social whole that explains the group extends well beyond the Italian borders, as the BR also mirrors a grander condition, which reverberates with deeper historic processes concerning Western Europe and North America. Thus, if the goal to understand the vicissitudes of the Red Brigades directly leads us to examine the distinctive historical development of a specific country, it also, more implicitly, points to the larger geopolitical landscape of the region of the world defined as “the West,” which constitutes the landscape of both the Red Brigades’ and the Italian’s condition.

1.2 The BR and the Global Zeitgeist of Radicalism

By examining the inherent tensions characterizing the “armed struggle” of the Red Brigades, one of the intentions of this manuscript is to push against the dominant existing frame that treats political violence (defined as “terrorism”) as the socially, morally, politically, culturally alter to Western modern tradition. In fact, according to currently dominant political-philosophic assumptions—a selective history that has transformed the complex ensemble of reflections produced by the Enlightenment into a liberal/democratic telos—politics and violence constitute an irreconcilable aporia. According to such a perspective, the apparent binary opposition between rational politics and irrational violence can only be solved through the adoption of a specific political-economic system that brings social harmony through “civil” competition—that is, by introducing self-regulating systems that organize in orderly fashion human rivalry over scarce material resources and ideas: the marketplace and the democratic state.

In relation to those two powerful modern projects of pacification, the “homegrown” condition of a group such as the Red Brigades stood as an unpleasant blemish. It represented the manifestation of an undisciplined villain in the modern fairy tale which, just like in Disney’s movies, needed to be systematically externalized. Indeed, capitalist societies function as enormous externalizing machines that treat the collateral effects of their productive process as externalities (such as pollution, the degrading of non-renewable resources, poverty, exploitation, violence, and social tensions). By the same logic, the social discontent expressed by radicalism such as that of the BR has been described as a product of heteronomic factors: drugs, a spoiled youth, Soviet Union secret service infiltrations, madness, or, as the famous film eloquently puts it, the men and women of the BR were just like “Rebel[s] without a Cause.”

However, the social strategies of externalizing alternative voices could not manage with the diffuse and intense moment of social uprising that characterized the historical period in which the BR operated. That global zeitgeist of radicalism was quickly and simultaneously disentangling in various region of the world. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s, social movements mobilized to challenge existing institutions by attacking governments, armies, established ideologies, as well as conventional ways of thinking, living, and acting. As a result, many groups, such as the Red Army Faction in Germany (RAF), the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the Weathermen Underground Organization (WUO) in the US, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain, Direct Action in France, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Angry Brigades in the UK, and the United Red Army in Japan brought exaltation and hope, but also fear and anxieties.

However, even among the organizations that opted for political violence, not all groups shared with the Red Brigades the embracement of the so-called “armed propaganda” and the “dream” of a socialist revolution. According to Laqueur (2001), although operating almost in the same historic moment, Western left radicalism needs to be distinguished from Latin American guerrilla and other separatist/nationalist groups.

First of all, it is a question of noticeably different social landscapes: for instance, compared to the prevalently metropolitan settings in which groups such as the BR or RAF or WUO operated, most Latin American movements understood urban guerrilla warfare as tactical support for insurrections to be mainly developed from remote countryside provinces, far from central government and military headquarters. Only in the final stages of the struggle would those movements gradually move towards the urban centers. Even when the urban scenario constituted the key battleground, as in the Venezuelan insurrection of 1962–63, it was always coupled with the other equally important objective: mobilizing the peasantry.

The rural environment was also prominent in the theorization produced by Castro and Guevara in their reflections on the Cuban revolution and the so-called “focalist” strategy. In both cases, the revolutionary plan was characterized by a negative bias towards the urban scenario. First of all, clandestinity, concealment, and mobility were easier to achieve in the physical element of the forest. Second, as the activist Regis Debray (2000) claimed, contrary to the classical Marxist conceptualization, the urban proletariat was considered to be more conservative than the peasantry. That is because both living conditions and the forms of consciousness of the urban proletariat were more prone to political compromise as well as to following the social charisma of the bourgeoisie.

An important exception from the rural guerrilla tradition in Latin America was the organization of the Tupamaros in Uruguay, which exemplified for the Western European and North American movements the viability of urban guerrilla conflict. Still, even in the Tupamaros’s case, the social environment was radically different compared to the Western context. The Tupamaros originated as an urban-located peasant support movement. Conversely, in countries such as Germany, the US, or Italy, where peasant populations represented in the 1970s a consistently shrinking fraction of their economy, the countryside could not be considered as being in a revolutionary stage.

Another fundamental difference regarded the level and quality of involvement of the people. In general, the Latin American approach implied a much stronger participation of the masses compared to the Western groups. Even in Guevara’s foco theory, the guerrilla cadres were understood as a means to focalize and activate the masses without replacing them. Such a vision therefore rejected the avant-gardist idea that small groups of militants could alone bring radical change. Conversely, in the North American and Western European context, the very ideological framework of continental critical thinkers (such as the Frankfurt schoolers), which provided the theoretical tools to mobilize the New Left movement, offered a negative conceptualization of the mass. The “mass” was considered to be hypnotized by the “society of spectacle” denounced by Debord (1967), deceived by means of mass communication, as Horkheimer and Adorno claimed (1972), reified by bourgeois philosophical assumptions, as Lukacs affirmed (1971).

Equally distant from the leftist radical groups were those movements mainly propelled by separatist/nationalist sentiments. Arguably, two substantial differences distanced the former from the latter: the overall political objective and the role played by ideology. First of all, groups such as the ETA and IRA did not primarily focus on a radical transformation of society but on the emancipation of a part of that society, which was considered to be unjustly colonized. To be sure, both the ETA and IRA had revolutionary factions explicitly drawing from both Marxism and Anarchism but ththose factions played minor roles compare to the separatist and independentist components.

In contrast, the radical left organizations exemplified by the BR or RAF were consistently drawn by a deep ideological engagement with Anarchism, Leninism, and Maoism. In cases such as the IRA in Ireland, the ETA in the Basque country, the Quebec FLO in Canada, and Ustasha in Croatia, the motivations could only be partially explained by radical political ideologies. For instance, the ETA’s view is characterized by a heterogeneous and highly contradictory mix of traditional Basque nationalism, revolutionary socialism, and anti-colonialism. On the one hand, the socialist component exalted the urban working class and carried an argument of labor exploitation; on the other hand, the Basque Nationalist component was anti-liberal and idealized the rural life, ancestral traditions, and its relationship with the church. Moreover, the Basque’s perspective was mostly informed by an ethnically based argument rather than than a political or social one. In several cases religion played a fundamental role, as in the case of the IRA and the armed faction of Arab Fatah.

In sum, compared to Latin American and other nationalist/separatist movements, organizations such as the BR, the RAF, and the WUO appeared as the social historical products of advanced capitalist societies, working in urban environments and embracing radical ideologies heavily influenced by Marxism and Leninism. As a matter of fact, the ideological mediation of those groups was such that they were consistently accused of Realitätsver-lust, loss of touch with reality.

Those groups also shared important similarities among themselves. Like the BR, the RAF and WUO were formed by youth frustrated with the institutional left. Several members of the Red Brigades came from the student movements of the late 1960s who reproached the Italian Communist Party for being an accomplice of the Italian state and imperialist capitalism. Similarly, the RAF grew out of the “Außerparlamentarische Opposition” and the Socialist German Student Union, two of the main groups of the New Left. The German radicals abandoned any hope for conventional politics after the so-called “Grand Coalition” between the two major political parties in Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats. Finally, the WUO originated as a radical wing of the Students for a Democratic Society. As per the other two organizations, the Weather-men were extremely discontented with the strategy of SDS and the Democratic Party, as well as being vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War.

Like the Red Brigades, the RAF and WUO were inspired by Mao’s revolutionary strategies and the guerrilla approaches of the Tupamaros. Furthermore, despite their limited success in unleashing “civil wars,” the three organizations also provoked a disproportionate state reaction characterized by violence and repression. In all three countries, both police and military actions consisting of illegal searches, mass arrests, and repression of strikes and public protests were launched against any perceived radicalism.

In this sense, all three groups were also reacting against domestic violence. The BR reacted against the state repression of student and working class protest as well as against the so-called “strategy of tension” and its anonymous bombings. The RAF reacted against the war that the state set forth against radicalism, including the killing of several activists and unjustified incarcerations. Similarly, in the US, in the spring of 1970 in the wake of the killing of student demonstrators at Kent State and Jackson State universities, the WUO decided to go underground and starts its armed campaign.

Each of those groups had also to deal with past turmoil: Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and social/racial tensions in the US. A powerful narrative in Italy connected the Red Brigades to the strong symbolic value of the partisan Resistenza, the moral and political vengeance of the left against Fascism. For young West Germans, the Nazi past was not only a source of confusion and anger but also an impetus to activism. Determined to prevent a resurgence of Fascism, they reacted strongly to contemporary forms of injustice and persecution. Finally, in Northern America, civil society was still recovering from the mass hysteria of McCarthyism and racial struggles.

Because of the perceived period of unrest, in all three countries a self-justifying powerful state rhetoric emerged, a raison d’état, which argued that the democratic state had to be defended at all costs. In Northen America, this was more clearly framed in terms of the Cold War threat, whereas in Western Europe, the “Red Scare” was combined with the fear of resurgent Fascism.

Violence was also perceived internationally. Those groups framed capitalism as a global issue of imperialism, which required, as Guevara once said, creating two, three, many Vietnams. Indeed, the Vietnam War revealed two aspects of violence: the violence of aggressive imperialism that was ready to expend thousands of human lives in order to preserve its geopolitical interests and also the violence that could awaken in its opposition, therefore creating a revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary subjects.

1.3 The Specificities of the Red Brigades

As just mentioned, the BR seemed to have emerged in an intense and international climate of rebellion. Such a convergence may lead one to think that the BR’s activity could be solely explained as the result of larger systemic dynamics of the West. However, the Italian organization also presented very distinctive traits, which made of the BR an original organization with its own idiosyncrasies. First of all, even within the apparently common field of Marxist tradition, there was a considerable ideological distance between the BR and other organizations. For instance, compared to the RAF and WUO, mainly drawing on the Neo-Marxist literature of the New Left, the BR seemed to acknowledge twentieth-century Marxist theorization only as far as Lenin and Mao.

On the one hand, mainly inspired by Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse, Adorno, and Bloch, the RAF and WUO held a vision that abandoned (or at least highly problematized) the classic Marxist view on social struggle and the involvement of the working class. On the other hand, as the journalist Rossana Rossanda once claimed, the BR belonged to what in Italy was defined as “vetero communism,” a doctrine still based on the Second International conceptual framework and traits of Stalinism. Thus, whereas the RAF was citing Marcuse’s “active intolerance” and the WUO advocated the emancipation of the blacks, women, and gays, the Red Brigades carried on more traditional Marxist soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Past, Present, and Future
• 3 Competing Voices
• 4 An Italian Narrative (1943–80)
• 5 Operation Sunflower
• 6 Operation Fritz
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index