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By Root 1087 0

her or his son again until they visited him in prison. He has described life on the run rather well. He was a temporary guest of other people, a sort of phantom, watching their everyday lives without really being a part of them. He had to judge people and situations in a split second, because the slightest mistake could have catastrophic consequences.13 Acclimatisation to violence was incremental. It began with hurling cobblestones or Molotov cocktails at the police. Next came some proof of higher reliability, such as hiding a fugitive or storing guns and explosives, perhaps followed by reconnaissance of a potential target. This was followed by using guns in robberies and then firing them at someone, always for reasons of political necessity. They internalised Mao’s dictum: ‘All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.’ There were weighty deaths, on behalf of the revolution, and deaths of ‘Fascists’ which were ‘light as a feather’. As Adriana Faranda conceded, extreme violence was inherent in the social revolutionary project: ‘You convince yourself that to reach this utopia of idealized relationships it is necessary to pass through the destruction of the society which prevents your ideas from being realized. Violence is a necessary component of this destruction. The concept of the purifying bloodbath is axiomatic to the model of the socialist revolution.’14 Sam Peckinpah’s existential splatter movie The Wild Bunch was also a firm favourite in these circles; one Red Brigades terrorist had seen it twenty times.15

Kneecappings and murder represented a higher order of violence than burning cars and kidnappings. This was premeditated violence, where someone was identified as a symbol of larger political processes, and meticulous plans were laid to harm or kill them. As one former terrorist said, ‘you make a person correspond to a political need’, while concealing the brute facts of bloodshed within an obfuscatory, leaden language derived from sociology seminars. Having identified the target, the terrorist decides he is guilty and determines the penalty: ‘so in actual fact he is not a person any more, he has been emptied and you load him up with other crimes, other responsibilities … At this point you can’t afford to be totally involved … you are someone who is meting out justice, who is stating values, and so there is no place for … strong emotions even if you have them inside, even if the situation is charged with feelings… but not in that role, not at that time.’ In fact, most terrorists were constantly anxious to distinguish their actions from those of mere criminals, even when they were robbing banks in order to pay for foreign holidays, for those went with the job too.

These terrorist attacks in Italy in the late 1970s took place against a backdrop of crisis, natural disaster and political scandal. Droughts were succeeded by torrential rain, and an earthquake devastated Friuli. Aid for the victims was systematically misappropriated. An accident at a Hoffmann-La Roche subsidiary manufacturing herbicides near Seveso released large quantities of dioxin gas similar to Agent Orange, which threatened an epidemiological disaster that the government badly mismanaged even as it handed out over a hundred billion lire to deal with it. At the same time it emerged that both the CIA and Exxon Corporation had been feeding tens of millions of dollars into corrupting the Italian political process, while Christian Democrat and Social Democrat politicians had taken bribes from Lockheed to rig a major aircraft contract. There were rumours that Mossad was trying to destabilise Italy to make Israel the US’s sole strategic ally in the Mediterranean. Fatally dependent on the inflated prices OPEC demanded for oil, the government of Giulio Andreotti had to go cap in hand to the IMF, the EEC, the US and West Germany. The lire was devalued by 30 per cent, while unemployment rose by 8 per cent, the same figure for the drop in industrial production.

Meanwhile, Rome’s La Sapienza university was the scene of days of rioting, which turned