On 12 December 1969, a bomb ... exploded in Milan, in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana, causing 16 deaths. The initial investigation was led by the police officer in charge of monitoring the local radical Left, Luigi Calabresi; his investigation focused on a local anarchist group. While being interrogated, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli fell, or was pushed, from the fourth-floor window of Calabresi’s office. On the Left, Piazza Fontana was immediately (and, as it turned out, correctly) labelled a state massacre; the bombing, the death of Pinelli and the subsequent repression were widely believed to form part of the Right’s preparations for a coup
The actions of the [leftist] ‘armed struggle’ groups were mainly directed against property rather than people; all violence against the person was directed against individuals, and most was non-lethal; and targets were invariably selected for political or strategic reasons, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy. Interviewed by a former member of the BR [Red Brigades] in 1997, former Minister of the Interior Francesco Cossiga went so far as to deny that the BR had been terrorists: ‘Terrorists plant bombs in cinemas. This was something else: your forms of action were precisely those of the partisan war’
in 1973 the BR would commit itself to ‘the war against fascism which is not only the fascism of [neo-fascist] black shirts but the fascism of ... Christian Democrat white shirts [and] the resistance inside the factories’ ... the BR exploited the emotional appeal of the Resistance even as they reconceptualised it.
"Austerity, by definition, means restrictions on certain availabilities to which we have become accustomed . . . But we are deeply convinced that to replace certain habits of life with others that are more exacting and not extravagant, can lead not to a worsening in the quality of life, but to substantial improvement, to growth in the ‘humanity’ of life" (Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer recommending pay cuts, January 1977)
Speaking from the back of a lorry, surrounded by union stewards, [Communist union leader] Lama was faced by an absurd and vicious parody: a dummy mounted on a set of library steps, surrounded by Metropolitan Indians and bearing a pink cardboard heart with the message ‘Nessuno Lama’ (‘Nobody loves him’). Chanting ironic slogans such as ‘More work, less pay!’ and ‘Poverty to the workers!’, the Indians pelted the stewards with water and paint. Lama exhorted his audience to save the university from the autonomist provocateurs: "We must fight and defeat fascism, reactionary temptations, subversive provocations, every form of violence and every irrational temptation. Breaking windows and smashing up university buildings ... only damages the students’ cause. The workers’ movement ... also fought against fascism by jealously defending the factories, preventing them from being destroyed". After his address the stewards counter-attacked, destroying the Indians’ dummy. The fighting escalated ... by the end of the day the autonomists had driven the Communists out and withdrawn, after which the campus was evacuated and surrounded by police
[For the Communists] what was unacceptable about the movements was that they used violence; what was unacceptable about the violence of the movements was that it was carried out by the movements. The Party’s critique of ‘violence’ and ‘intolerance’ can be understood as a form of scapegoating, loading the movements (and the Autonomists, above all) with all that was unruly and troubling about physical force tactics while associating the Party itself with ‘firmness’ and ‘discipline’.
By 1979, the activists of the second cycle had been comprehensively excluded from the workplace, from working-class communities and from the streets; there was almost no one left standing, apart from the BR. As a result, significant numbers of activists moved on to the terrain which the BR had prepared. It was the ideological and physical exclusion of a strong movement, rather than the absorption of a movement in decline, which gave a brief period of mass support to armed struggle tactics, as well as helping the more organised armed groups to gain an extended lease of life.
The hostility of the Communists towards the armed groups and the remnants of Autonomia reached its peak in April 1979. On 7 April the Communist-aligned judge Pietro Calogero issued a warrant for the arrest of [twelve] autonomists, who were accused of involvement with the BR. According to the ‘Calogero theorem’, the BR, the smaller armed groups and the area of Autonomia made up a single subversive organisation, operating on overt and clandestine levels. Successive waves of arrests, and a series of qualifications to Calogero’s highly coloured model, followed in June, July and December 1979
For the most committed activists of the armed groups, the closure forced by Calogero seems, like the 1977 closure of engagement with the mass movements, to have prompted a renewed commitment to yet more confrontational repertoires. ... the years after 1979 saw some of the worst excesses of the ‘years of lead’, with a dwindling number of groups carrying out more violent actions.
One final quote, from the novel The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini. The narrator's friend has visited him in prison, where he's awaiting trial for membership of an armed group (he's not guilty, but he refuses to denounce people he regarded as his friends).
I said to him I ask myself sometimes now it’s all over I ask myself what did it all mean our whole story all the things we did what did we get from all the things we did he said I don’t believe it matters that it’s all over I believe what matters is that we did what we did and that we think it was the right thing to do that’s the only thing that matters I believe
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