Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [122]
Beginning in the autumn of 1967, at the Catholic universities of Trento and Milan, students held occupations in protest against attempts to increase fees or to restrict access, protests that mushroomed into discussions about what universities were for and what should be taught by whom. There was much conformist experimentation, whether involving sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, or collectivised housing and squatting. Remote conflicts, in Latin America and South-east Asia, or in the race-torn cities of the USA, added visceral moralising passions while inclining young people to admire guerrilla-type violence. They were especially impressed by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella, whose Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla was published by Feltrinelli. Marighella pioneered political kidnapping when he abducted the US ambassador to Brazil, releasing him only after fifteen of his own comrades were freed by way of exchange. Since most of these youthful radicals no longer subscribed to the simple-minded Communist myth of the Soviet Union, their hatred of the existing liberal capitalist democracy was devoid of any reference to an existing ideal society. As in other European countries and the US, the transmission of knowledge and culture for their own sake was despised, while the high culture of the West was repudiated in favour of popular music and the cults of the bandit and outlaw as celebrated by such figures as the British Marxist Eric Hobsbawm. Worryingly, at Turin University a student ‘scientific’ commission cut books into five pieces to overcome the problem of ‘book fetishism’. As the mother of a student radical who became a terrorist only to be shot dead in 1976 put it, the university her son attended ‘had become a shambles, not a school’.4
While not every rock-throwing student became a terrorist, this was the general leftish milieu from which Red terrorists often came. It was part of a wider counter-cultural scene. As a German terrorist described it: ‘the new ways of life, communes, Stones music, long hair -that exerted an enormous pull on me. In addition to that, socialism and other revolutionary theories, and the sense of justice born during the revolt.’5 A low level of militarisation was evident in the increasingly ugly confrontations between Italian students and a police force not known for its gentle approach. After the police had used considerable force to eject students occupying Rome’s La Sapienza university, future demonstrators came wearing crash helmets and prepared to fight back. Some manufactured and threw Molotov cocktails or fired ball-bearings with catapults and slings, the first stage in getting used to handling weapons.
The ‘autonomous’ left-wing groups which sprang up everywhere developed strong-arm security squads, which would eventually detach themselves from political control, becoming terrorist groups in their own right. For a minority, this often involved first storing guns, then getting used to handling, stripping down, reassembling and loading them, and on to the life-changing decision, for the terrorist and for his or her victim, to fire weapons at a living, breathing person. This was the point of no return, where the fact of having killed someone would cast an eternal shadow. Guns also had aesthetic and sexual appeal: ‘arms have a fascination of their own, it is a fascination that makes you feel in some way more… more virile… this sensation of feeling stronger, more manly… I found myself… showing them to women to try to impress them … and then it seemed somehow more noble to use arms instead of, I don’t know, fighting with one’s fists let’s say,’ recalled a former terrorist of the Italian Red Brigades.6
The denigration of what universities traditionally represented did not mean an absence of ideas. The most modish thought emanated from dissidents within the two dominant religions of Italy, that is Roman Catholicism