Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-set of Modern Terrorists

Appendix: Red Brigades and Black Brigades

263 Appendix Red Brigades and Black Brigades What do the Red Brigades and the Black Brigades have in common? From 1975 to 1980 in Italy there are around 8,400 attacks against people and things,most of them carried out over the three years from 1977 to 1979. Of these 8,400 attacks, some 3,000—a little over 35 percent—can be attributed with certainty to the subversive Right.1 Fascist revolutionaries have left a long trail of blood behind them. The wait for the end, radical catastrophism, binary-code mentality, apocalyptic vision of historical development, obsession with purification, and identification of evil: these are the typical traits of professional revolutionaries. Whether communists or fascists, they always justify their means through the end.2 The neofascist terrorist Pierluigi Concutelli—political and military mind of the Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (MPON), multiple murderer , condemned to four life sentences—proposes the same lesson as the brigadist Raffaele Fiore. Before killing, you have to break all the social bonds that prevent the use of revolutionary violence. You have to separate yourself from your family, since these bonds are an obstacle to the professional 1. R. Minna, “Il terrorismo di destra,” in Terrorismi in Italia, ed. D. Della Porta, 63. 2. P. Concutelli, Io, l’uomo nero, 56. Concutelli writes, “For the association, the end justifies the means.” 264 APPENDIX revolutionary’s salvific mission. Those who embrace “the utopia of the revolution”3 take a road of no return: “First of all, you had to break contact with all those you had left behind: friends, family, boyfriend or girlfriend. You had to give up the ‘middle-class’ life and accept that the road you were about to take could lead you either to the cemetery or, at best, to prison for the rest of your days. And you always had to move in a hostile environment. You had to become invisible, never arouse suspicions, and act with extreme caution. It just needed the smallest error,a tiny negligence,and wham:either they arrested you or,worse still,they killed you. And goodbye to your dream of revolution. The most difficult thing for those who make an absolute choice was to overcome taboos. The first is that of emotional ties:they had to be eliminated or removed. Because when you’re being hunted,when you live underground, you can’t allow them. You can’t allow yourself anything.”4 Concutelli—whose revolutionary vocation sent him to Angola, where he participated in the civil war that broke out in 1975 after the Portuguese left—is an all-around revolutionary just like the Red Brigades. He is part of the same anthropological category as Curcio and Franceschini. Concutelli is a Black Brigadist: “I was prepared and I was a fanatic to the death. I was convinced. I had an unshakeable, blind faith.”5 Ties with this world have to be definitively cut to achieve the conditions for conquering “the most important and at the same time the most dramatic taboo: to commit murder, to shed blood. However,a war on the state,a revolution like the one we wanted, couldn’t be achieved without blood.”6 The Obsession with Purity Like all professional revolutionaries, Concutelli is a pure man. The Red Brigades ’ contempt for the Communist Party (PCI) is the same as Concutelli’s for the Fascist Party (MSI): “I considered the party of Michelini and Almirante a contaminated hothouse where even the most luxuriant plants were destined to become stunted, dry up, and die.”7 The MSI was “the plague itself: a disease to run away from as fast as you could.”8 “I had realized that 3. Ibid., 72. 4. Ibid., 77–78. 5. Ibid., 111–12. 6. Ibid., 78. 7. Ibid., 38. 8. Ibid., 133. RED BRIGADES AND BLACK BRIGADES 265 the MSI was a party of fascists who weren’t fascists at all. It was a masterpiece of political bad faith.”9 The Black Brigadists feel “chosen.” Their mental condition is that of those who live “in a kind of Indian reserve created for the very few elect. You were quality as opposed to quantity. You were right whereas the others were wrong. You were the heir to a past, by now remote, that we still considered alive.”10 This obsession with purity condemns the black terrorist to a “life in hell,”11 to a fanatic and permanent war against...