Anatomy of the Red Brigades

The Religious Mind-set of Modern Terrorists

Alessandro Orsini, Sarah J. Nodes

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801449864
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461392
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies intended as a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State," the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group of violent anticapitalist terrorists revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. Like their German counterparts in the Baader-Meinhof Group and today's violent political and religious extremists, the Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia.

In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, Alessandro Orsini contends that the dominant logic of the Red Brigades was essentially eschatological, focused on purifying a corrupt world through violence. Only through revolutionary terror, Brigadists believed, could humanity be saved from the putrefying effects of capitalism and imperialism. Through a careful study of all existing documentation produced by the Red Brigades and of all existing scholarship on the Red Brigades, Orsini reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. Orsini has devised a micro-sociological theory that allows him to reconstruct the group dynamics leading to political homicide in extreme-left and neonazi terrorist groups. This "subversive-revolutionary feedback theory" states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect.

Orsini makes clear that this political-religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled "purifiers of the world." From Thomas Müntzer's theocratic dream to Pol Pot's Cambodian revolution, all the violent "purifiers" of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony. Orsini's book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.

Chapter 1

The Pedagogy of Intolerance

You will ask if these are the means to use? Believe me, there are no others.

—Mara Cagol

The Revolutionary Vocation

The first lesson that the aspiring revolutionary receives is that the world is in danger.

The “children of the light” are engaged in a fight to the death against the “children of the shadows.” The outcome of this battle—however steep and painful the road leading to the goal—is already written: society will be cleansed of the “pigs”1 that infest it. After this, communism can finally be constructed and people will no longer suffer hunger and oppression.

“The politics on which our conduct was based,” recounts the brigadist Valerio Morucci, “was revolutionary, and the revolution would have led to a society without conflict. A society without the need for mediation, compromise, or filthy bourgeois politics. A pure politics.”2 Without these certainties you don’t find the vocation to become a revolutionary. The Red Brigades conceived revolutionary action as a mission and not as a simple profession to be performed and paid for.

The brigadist Patrizio Peci, arrested on 19 February 1980, accused of being directly or indirectly responsible for seven homicides, seventeen injuries, and dozens of other crimes, states: “It is obvious that you don’t make this choice if you don’t believe completely in communism, if you don’t believe in the armed struggle as the only way to bring it about, if you don’t believe in victory. I had these three certainties…. If I’d not been sure of winning, I wouldn’t have continued.”3

To achieve the grand design of a society in which conflicts are banned forever, the Red Brigades have to follow an ongoing training pathway. Their first task is to learn to think differently from the “common” person: the enemies of the proletariat are hidden everywhere. To recognize them, you have to embrace a new vision of the world, enabling you to grasp what others can’t see. Evil has to be flushed out, fought, and destroyed because our enemies—this is written in a Red Brigades document of 26 November 1972—are “an army of bastards.”4 Only the dialectic method, that of Marx and Engels, gives access to the knowledge of reality. There is only one truth. True brigadists cannot and must not tolerate opinions other than theirs. Those who oppose the revolution are “pigs.”5 They must be killed or disabled for the rest of their lives.

To kill for the revolution is the noblest of gestures, a demonstration of love to humanity awaiting redemption. We read in a Red Brigades document of September 1977: “The revolution signifies continuity, solidarity, and love.”6 And it is in the name of love that the organization exercises the power of life or death over its enemies. Brigadists—according to the document claiming responsibility for the Labate kidnapping (12 February 1973)—must shake off their bourgeois morality and understand that the enemy has to be eliminated. Denying it would mean not being able “to distinguish between the violence of the oppressor and that of the slave.”7

The Red Brigades are philanthropists, friends of the people. The brigadist Patrizio Peci is firmly convinced that political violence “is also a question of altruism and generosity: it means risking everything for a cause you believe is just, forgetting personal advantage.”8 The feeling that inspired the brigadist Sergio Segio “was basically, totally, a feeling of love.”9 “Love and strength,” we read in a Red Brigades document of 26 May 1982, “will subdue and destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie; we shall build a society free from the slavery of salaried work.”10

But the brigadist is not everyone’s friend, because those who are against the revolution are enemies of humanity. They are accessories to and responsible for all unhappiness and suffering. This is what Renato Curcio writes to his mother in a letter from prison dated November 1974: “Yolanda dearest, mother mine, years have passed since the day on which I set out to encounter life…. Seeking my path, I found exploitation, injustice, and oppression. People who handed them out and people who submitted to them. I was one of the latter. And these latter were in the majority. I therefore understood that my history was their history, that my future was their future…. What more can I say? My enemies are the enemies of humanity and of intelligence, those who have built and still build their monstrous fortunes on the material and intellectual misery of the people. Theirs is the hand that has banged shut the door of my cell.”11

The world is divided into two. On one side the oppressors of humanity, on the other the avengers. This is why “we have to kick the bosses’ asses, after kicking those of some work colleagues; we have to kill the team leaders one by one; we have to kill the department heads, workshop heads, and all toadies.” Brigadists have to “organize teams for lynching scabs and managers; the struggle continues without respite: strikes, thrashings, and beatings; violent struggles,”12 until it is clear that “those who intervene to stop the workers’ struggle and their interests are our enemies and as such must be struck down!”13

And yet violence is never a choice. The Red Brigades are forced to violence by circumstances. They kill because the “imperialist system of the multinationals,”14 “society,” the “means of production,” the “capitalist state,” “imperialist technological fascism”15 leave them no alternative. In other cases the formulas are even more abstract. It is “the antagonistic contradiction with the general system of economic, political, and cultural exploitation”16 that means the enemy has to die.

For the Red Brigades, society is always “ready to explode.”17 The conviction that the revolution is imminent gives an extraordinary emotive charge to gnostic activists. This certainty enables them to cope with even the most dramatic consequences of the armed struggle, such as the death of one’s fighting comrades, prison, or separation from the family, dictated by the choice of going underground.

The brigadist is convinced that everything is possible. Happiness is around the corner. The world might live in abundance, but the “system,” explains the brigadist Margherita Cagol, in a letter of 1969 to her mother, stops this. Society oppresses us; it “rapes” our lives continuously. We are never free, even when we think we are. Happiness is an illusion. It’s the fruit of the manipulation of minds that “the system” uses to guarantee its own survival. The world has to be destroyed to be totally re-created. Those who don’t fight to bring down society are guilty of a crime against humanity. It’s the “rejection of everything”18 that characterizes the militants of the ultra-left terrorist groups. The world is described as a “fierce monster,” inhabited by “vampires.”19 The brigadists feel deprived of everything. Oppressed, humiliated, and degraded, they move in a “spectral” landscape from which every gleam of humanity has disappeared.

In the words of Cagol to her mother:

Milan is a great experience for me. At first sight this big city seemed full of light and attractions, but now it seems like a fierce monster that devours everything that is natural, human, and essential in life. There is barbarity in Milan, the true face of the society we live in…. This society does violence to us all the time, taking away anything that could emancipate us or make us really feel what we are (it makes it impossible to cultivate a family, to cultivate ourselves, our needs, it represses us on a psychological, physiological, and ethical level, it manipulates our needs, our information, etc., etc.). This society has to be changed by a profound revolutionary process…. When I think that all this could be easily remedied (remember I said to you last year that, by using modern technology in the production process, it would be possible to pay 10 billion people the American average wage?) if we no longer had political systems like the European or American ones. But we now have the opportunity to change this society and it would be criminal (toward humanity) not to exploit it. We must do everything possible to change this system, because this is the profound meaning of our existence. These things are not impossible, you know, Mama. They are serious and difficult things that are really worth doing…. Life is too important to waste or fritter away in stupid chatter or squabbles. Every minute is vital.20

The Red Brigades document in which the catastrophic-radical concept of history is expressed most fully is Gocce di sole nella città degli spettri (Drops of Sun in the City of Ghosts), written by Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini in 1982. The world, they write, has become a “total factory.” Men are engulfed by the shadows and wander around like “ghosts,” swallowed up by capital “that suffocates and kills everything.”21 Egoism triumphs. There are no longer any spaces for freedom. The most elementary needs are trampled on. Capital has taken over bodies and minds. No one, except the Red Brigades, is aware of this, because the “system” plays with its victims. Reality is just a show; happiness is self-deception. A happy person is a person who does not see. Only the Red Brigades know, see, and live. All the others are caught up in a “nonlife.” A new social formation has been formed, called “computerized metropolises.” It’s a “huge pris...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Pedagogy of Intolerance
• 2. The Sacralization of Politics
• 3. Toward the Bloodshed
• 4. The Genesis of the Red Brigades
• 5. The Masters of the Red Brigades
• 6. The Purifiers of the World in Power
• Not a Conclusion: Portrait of a Red Brigadist
• Appendix: Red Brigades and Black Brigades
• A Note on Method
• Bibliography