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9 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. 1. Red Brigades pamphlet no. 4. Attack, strike, liquidate, and disperse the Christian Democrat Party, pillar of the restructuring of the State and of the imperialist counterrevolution. This is a resolution of the Red Brigades’ strategic management, November 1977. In Dossier Brigate rosse, 2:148. 2. V. Morucci, La peggio gioventù, 140. 10 CHAPTER 1 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 3. P. Peci, Io, l’infame, 41 and 103. It is the same determination we see in the testimony of the brigadist Raffaele Fiore: “I had an immense faith in the organization. I believed in its political programs and in the revolution....I was sure that the way was sound, that it was just.” See A. Grandi, L’ultimo brigatista, 64–65. 4. Crush the fascists in Mirafiori and Rivalta! Throw them out of our factories and our districts, leaflet issued in Turin on 26 November 1972, in Dossier Brigate rosse, 1:194. 5. Red Brigades—Fighting Communist Party’s document claiming responsibility for wounding the Labor Ministry adviser, Gino Giugni, issued 3 May 1983 (full text available at www.brigaterosse.org). 6. Diary of the Struggle: Special Tribunes of Bologna, Torino, Milano, Red Brigades document of September 1977, in Dossier Brigate rosse, 2:128. 7. Red Brigades document claiming responsibility for the Labate kidnapping issued 12 February 1973, in ibid., 1:216. Bruno Labate was a Cisnal...

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