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

A Note on Method

285 A Note on Method This book presents the results of a research project that aims to answer three questions: 1. Who are the Red Brigades? 2. Why do they kill? 3. Where do they come from, what is their historic-political tradition? These three questions correspond to three different stages in my research: descriptive, explicative, and genetic or historic-sociological comparison. Since I had no specific hypothesis on the reasons for political homicide in extreme-left and neo-Nazi terrorist groups,my first task was to acquire more information on the Red and Black Brigades (fascist groups). During the first research stage, I studied the characteristics of revolutionary sects (how they recruited, how internal discipline was maintained, how their work was divided up, the incentives to revolutionary violence, the organization chart, etc.) and of the individual members (age, sex, educational level, original social condition, daily life, view of the world, what they think before shooting, how they justify killing people, etc.). These initial explorations are called descriptive studies because they aim to give a detailed description of the phenomenon. Descriptive studies pose questions on the how, whereas explicative studies ask about the why, of social phenomena. In the second stage I set up a theoretical model to reconstruct the sociopsychological processes leading to violence in extreme-left and neo-Nazi terrorist groups (DRIA model). This is the explicative stage. Since the life of a terrorist group cannot be studied through participant observation, or through the administration of structured questionnaires, the DRIA model was mainly constructed on the basis of the following documents: 1. Testimonies of Red Brigades who had killed 2. Trial affidavits 3. Documents claiming responsibility for aggressions, kidnappings, thefts, assaults, injuries, and homicides 286 A NOTE ON METHOD 4. Strategic resolutions 5. Documents commemorating Red Brigades members killed by the police 6. Private letters written by Red Brigades members to their families 7. Red Brigades leaflets and writings on the walls in cities or in factories , for which responsibility has been claimed or ascertained I used the DRIA model to work out a theory, that is, a provisional explanation expressed in a controllable form specifying a particular relationship among several variables. Essentially this theory, the basis for my revolutionary -subversive feedback hypothesis, states that the willingness to give and receive death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the gnostic activity has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect.1 It can be formulated through a bivariate proposal that I express as follows: “The greater the level of integration of the gnostic activity in the revolutionary sect, the higher its propensity to give and receive death.” In this explicative stage, Weber’s method of comprehension and identification has played a central role.2 I will clarify my point of view through the words of Norbert Elias: “We cannot understand the structure of a society if we cannot manage to see it both through our perspective (speaking about it in the third person) and according to its perspective (that is, making its members speak in the first person ). At the moment it still seems that the only way to achieve a high degree of safety, according to our perspective, is by quantification, enumerating individuals and using statistical measuring tools. But there are also other methods , and they especially are necessary when one tries to determine certain creations for which a scientific approach is possible only by subdividing them conceptually into atoms, single actions, single concepts, variables, or other.”3 In the third stage I used comparative-historical sociology to investigate the main revolutionary phenomena of modern times in the attempt to find 1. The DRIA model and the subversive-revolutionary feedback hypothesis refer above all to the first militants of the Red Brigades. There is, in fact, an important difference between the motivations of militants that form a small group of terrorists such as the Red Brigades in their initial phase, and the motives of those who join when the group has become larger and commands more means and resources. In its initial phase, a terroristic group needs armed individuals who are strongly motivated by ideology. Their members have to accept the idea of kill or be killed. In the second case, ideological motivations can take a back seat to motives of a different nature, for example, economics. 2. As Max Weber teaches, comprehension and identification are not enough in themselves to guarantee the objectivity of sociological research. Researchers must ensure that what they have discovered can be...