Blue Planet Notes: 2021-09-12

This essay was based on the Italian Wikipedia. The English-language Wikipedia was not consulted. References to the English-language Wikipedia are merely for the reader's convenience.

The New Red Brigades (Nuove Brigate Rosse)[1] presented themselves as the successors of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), who among other things had in 1978 abducted and mudered Aldo Moro,a top Christian Democratic politician, during the Years of Lead.[2] The Red Brigades (RB) were an Italian far-left terrorist organization formed in 1970 to propagate and develop the revolutionary armed struggle to attain communism. They had a Marxist-Leninist ideology. They were the largest, the most numerous and the longest-lived left-wing terrorist group in Western Europe after the 2nd World War.[3]

Between 1969 and 1984, 18 left-wing Italian terrorist groups are listed. About 5 of them killed people, usually one or two each. The only big one was the Red Brigades, which killed 86 people by 1988. Their names were: 22nd October Group, Red Brigades, Partisan Action Groups, Communist Brigades, Venetian Political Collectives, Armed Proletarian Groups, Revolutionary Communist Committees, Armed Communist Formations, Front line, Communist Combat Units, Revolutionary Action, Armed Proletarians for Communism, Communist Assault Units, Communist Combat Formations, Communist Territorial Groups, Revolutionary Communist Movement, 28th March Brigade and Communists Organized for Proletarian Liberation[4]

During the Years of Lead there was also much right-wing terrorism in Italy, which is not mentioned here. Its purpose was to create panic in the population at large through massacres, while left-wing terrorists sought fairly precise political objectives.

The RB's decision to undertake the armed struggle was made at a conference held in August 1970 in Vezzano sul Crostolo (province of Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy), which was attended by a hundred left-wing extremists from Milan, Trento, Reggio Emilia and Rome. The organization was joined by the militants of the so-called "Reggio group", including Alberto Franceschini, people from the University of Trento (in northern Italy), including Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol, and workers and employees from the Pirelli (tire manufacturer) and Sit -Siemens (electrical engineering) factories in Milan

Aldo Moro during captivity

By 1988 the RB had killed 86 people, mostly police, judges, politicians and factory owners. Its biggest action was the kidnapping in 1978 of top Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro, whom they proposed to exchange for RB prisoners.[5] The government refused and Moro was eventually killed. Both the fascists and the Communists opposed any exchange, while some politicians like the socialist Bettino Craxi proposed giving in. Aldo Moro belonged to the left wing of the ruling Christian Democrat party. He proposed including the Italian Communist Party in government, a project called the so-called "historical compromise". He was by no means comparable to the other top hostage captured in Europe at the same time, Hanns-Martin Schleyer,[6] who was kidnapped by the German Red Army Faction, held for ransim and untimately murdered, Schleyer was the head of the German employers' association, and was a very tough negotiator with the German lanbopr unions. He had begun a brilliant career during the 2nd World War as a top organizer in the SS. Although he did not actually commit any murders, he was a hard-line Nazi, who managed to restart his career after the war after a few years of penance. On the whoile Aldo Moro was a sympathetic figure influenced by Catholic philosopers like Jacques Maritain.[7]

That fact is not reflected in the RB reports on Moro's interrogation.

"The answers Aldo Moro provides make increasingly clear the counter-revolutionary strategy that the imperialist centers are implementing; they clearly outline the contours and the substance of the "new" regime which, in the course of the restructuring of the Imperialist State of the Multinationals, is being established in our country and whose pivot is the Christian Democratic Party."

The Christian Democratic Party was much too amorphous an organization to be the pivot for anything. It was composed of numerouas competing wings that proposed varying policies.

Eventually in 1988 -- after 18 years -- the RB gave up the struggle for Communism.

The New Red Brigades[8] took up the cause of the RB in 1999 and repeated its methods and ideology. But it was a very small group, only managed to kill 3 people, and was dissolved by the police after only five years. The New Red Brigades assassinated two labor law scholars who were involved in drafting Italian laws that reduced the power of labor unions and labor court judges, allowing capitalists greater flexibility in hiring and firing. The Nuove Brigate Rosse reasoned, and I think in hindsight that their reasoning was accurate, that greater labor market flexibility would cause more precarious conditions for workers. However everything depends on the social safety net. In Denmark bosses are free to hire and fire, but workers who are laid off draw generous unemployment benefits. Consequently in Denmark workers have no objection to the arrangement, they just look for a new job, and the outcome seems to be better allocation of labor and greater efficiency. But in Italy greater labor market flexibility was apparently not flanked by any improvements in the social safety net.

From Italian Wikipedia:

1999: murder of Massimo D'Antona

The murder of the lawyer and consultant for the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, Massimo D'Antona was perpetrated by the Nuove Brigate Rosse (New Red Brigades) on the morning of 20 May 1999 on via Salaria in Rome where, just after eight a.m., the law professor was blocked by a commando of the New Red Brigades composed of Mario Galesi and Nadia Desdemona Lioce, backed by three other terrorists in the role of relays. Galesi, armed with an automatic pistol, discharged all nine rounds from the magazine, shooting a coup de grâce into D'Antona's heart. D'Antona was rushed to the Umberto I hospital where he was pronounced dead at 9.30 a.m.

At the trial for his murder, 17 people were tried on the charges of belonging to an armed gang and of murder, and on 8 July 2005, the Assize Court of Rome imposed life sentences on Nadia Desdemona Lioce, Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma. On 1 March of the same year, a summary trial was held against defendants Laura Proietti and Cinzia Banelli, who had already been sentenced to life and twenty years of imprisonment respectively. ...

2002: murder of Marco Biagi

At 8.15 p.m. of 19 March 2002, the labor lawyer and consultant at the Ministry of Labor and Social Security Marco Biagi was assassinated in Bologna, killed by several gunshots before his home while returning home from the train station on his bicycle. The commando that perpetrated the assassination used the same gun as for the murder of D'Antona. Their crime was greatly facilitated by the fact that Biagi had no bodyguards, since a few months earlier his police escort had been withdrawn.

The Nuove Brigate Rosse issued an announcement claiming the murder, which showed several points in common with their previous announcement claiming the murder of D'Antona. Already the first lines of the proclamation revealed the sort of crime planning typical of the organization. As in the D'Antona case, the victim was a government official involved in flezibilizing the labor market. At trial, on 1 June 2005, the Court of Assizes issued five life sentences against Nadia Desdemona Lioce, Roberto Morandi, Marco Mezzasalma, Diana Blefari Melazzi and Simone Boccaccini.[9]

Remarks:

I notice the assassination operations were heavily overstaffed but poorly equipped, since they only had one gun and they used it for both murders 3 years apart. There was no need for 3 or 4 terrorists to cut them off on the street and fire nine shots at them. That was what led to their eventual arrest and conviction. It would have been more practical for a sniper to shoot them from a distance and then sneak off quietly. Italian terrorists had the same complaint as American politicians: they spent too much of their time fundraising. Perhaps if they had adopted more efficient methods they wouldn’t have needed so much money.