CAVIGLIA-CECCHINI ARB-6 political violence

Transcript

Francesco Caviglia og Leonardo Cecchini
ARB-6
C H A P T E R 10
v
Narrative Models of Political Violence
Vicarious Experience and
‘Violentization’ in 1970s Italy
Francesco Caviglia and Leonardo Cecchini
In his autobiographical memoir, Schegge di memoria, the former Brigate Rosse (BR)
militant, Valerio Morucci, describes a sequence of images which emerged from his
memory following a beating by police during a 1979 inmates’ riot in the Nuoro
high security jail:
Una faccia. Cos’è questa faccia da Kirchner? Questa faccia disperata, gli occhi
affondati nelle orbite, gli zigomi che vengono fuori da guance che sembrano
aspirate da una pompa? La faccia del vietminh sparato in testa dal capo della
polizia di Saigon? No. È il piccolo algerino torturato con la fiamma dai parà
di Massu.[...]. Disperazione, umiliazione. È lui che poi, piangendo, li porta al
nascondiglio di Alì la Pointe. L’Alì che ammazzava i lenoni della casbah. L’Alì
delle bombe nei bar di Algeri.1
Among the images that help him make some sense of his condition, Morucci finally
identifies himself most with Ali, the (fictional) figure from Gillo Pontecorvo’s
masterpiece La battaglia di Algeri (1966), who is both victim and vindicator.
In 2003, Fausto Bertinotti, then leader of the left-wing party Rifondazione
Comunista and formerly Speaker of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, underlined
how he once fully identified himself with the Algerian terrorists in La battaglia di
Algeri, although this identification, said Bertinotti, was now over:
Conosce La battaglia di Algeri di Pontecorvo? Bene, ho visto quel film almeno
dieci volte. Ne conosco a memoria le sequenze. Ora, per una vita mi sono
riconosciuto, di più, mi sono immedesimato nella bellissima algerina che si
fa saltare in un bar affollato di vita e di civili nella parte francese di Algeri,
durante l’operazione di insurrezione — anzi no, chiamiamo le cose con il loro
nome — durante l’operazione terroristica contro le truppe francesi. Istintivamente,
politicamente, ero con lei. Sarei voluto essere lei, se soltanto ne avessi avuto il
coraggio. Ero, lo dico senza timori, corresponsabile politico di quel massacro.
Oggi, mi capita di rivedere quella sequenza e quella complicità si è dissolta.2
Interestingly, although Bertinotti knows the film ‘by heart’, he sees a suicide
bomber where there is none: the ‘gorgeous Algerian girl’ in the film actually walks
away after leaving the bomb in the crowded bar. In his words the film seems still
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to provide a powerful depiction of the struggle of oppressed people against their
oppressors: however, Bertinotti no longer feels it acceptable to put a bomb in a
bar ‘full of life and civilians’: at least in this retrospective view, the images of the
oblivious customers in the bar before the explosion are also strong enough to allow
a more problematic view of political violence.3 At the same time, the Algerian girl
and today’s suicide bombers do have something in common, not only for Bertinotti:
Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb has observed how today’s Islamic terrorists
too seem to identify themselves with the Algerian insurgents portrayed in the film
and their (actually quite distinct) struggle for national liberation.4
In general terms, it is widely recognized that compelling narratives can play
a role in constructing world views and that fictional works have the power of
patterning human expectations, fears, desires and behaviour.5 However, as the case
of La battaglia di Algeri suggests, the inf luence of a piece of narrative on its readers’ or
viewers’ behaviour should never be examined through a deterministic approach: the
simplistic (and typically reactionary) view, according to which violent films generate
violent impulses and behaviour in the viewer,6 in addition to being unconfirmed by
empirical evidence in large scale investigations,7 is utterly unconvincing for anyone
— present authors included — who holds a view of narrative and discourse which
emphasizes the reader’s contribution in dialogue with the text.8
At the same time, the authors of this paper believe it valuable to better
understand how far vicarious experience — that is, experience lived out only through
the mediation of powerful, mythical narratives — may have played a role in the
decision by a small but significant number of Italian people who grew up in the
1960s and 1970s to take up arms and harm or kill other people.
As was the case with many of their generation, the authors of this essay adopted
left-wing views and values in their school years and were exposed to the same
historical and fictional narratives — concerning anti-fascism and anti-colonial
struggle — as were those who later embraced the so-called lotta armata. It is worth
remembering that while we (left-wing democrats) are still asking today why they
(left-wing terrorists) embraced political violence, they too, at least until the early
1980s, asked why we did not join them. This attitude is well represented in the
attitude of the (fictional) female terrorist in Mimmo Calopresti’s film La seconda
volta (1995), who claims that ‘erano in molti a chiederci di fare quello che abbiamo
fatto’. Although we believe this character grossly overestimates the approval of
terrorism as political action within the Italian left wing, the quotation from Fausto
Bertinotti seems to give some credence to her position.
This paper moves therefore from two concerns or questions, one personal and
one which is more closely connected with our current academic profession: how
is it possible that someone who basically shared the authors’ views and values and
was exposed to the same historical and fictional narratives should come to embrace
political murder; and, secondly, did some of the founding narratives which were
part of our generation’s shared background play a role in this choice?
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Explaining violence from Eco to Athens
Public discourse on political violence in Italy was largely dominated either by
political explanations and political criticism of terrorism, especially in the 1970s and
1980s, or by the popular view that terrorists were just insane criminals. One of the
few voices that suggested looking elsewhere — to ethics on the one hand and to
biology on the other — was Umberto Eco. In a 1978 article originally published in
La Repubblica (‘Perché ridono in quelle gabbie?’), Eco refuses to consider terrorists
as human or political monsters, but he also denies them any significant political
status. On the contrary, he suggests that heroes and revolutionaries may have more
in common with religious fanatics and scoundrels than we are prone to believe
and provocatively suggests that ‘se a Curcio e Gallinari fosse stato offerto un bel
mito nazionalista o colonialista, [...] a questo avrebbero aderito e non al sogno di
colpire il cuore dello Stato borghese.’9 Eco therefore invited the reader to take the
challenge of discriminating between would-be heroes from the viewpoint of ethics
— ‘Il problema è di sapere, di capire, come non tutti i sacrifici, non tutto il sangue,
sia speso per gioco’10 — and distanced himself from the BR attitude to action by
declaring his sympathy for accidental, involuntary heroes:
L’eroe vero è sempre eroe per sbaglio, il suo sogno sarebbe di essere un onesto
vigliacco come tutti. Se avesse potuto avrebbe risolto la faccenda diversamente,
e in modo incruento. Non si vanta né della sua morte né di quella altrui.
Ma non si pente. Soffre e sta zitto, sono se mai gli altri che poi lo sfruttano,
facendone un mito, mentre lui, l’uomo degno di stima, era solo un poveretto
che ha reagito con dignità e coraggio a una vicenda più grande di lui.11
While several scholars and writers have already carried out in-depth analyses of
challenges to moral values in times of violence and civil war, personally we have
encountered some difficulty in following Eco’s second provocative suggestion in the
same article, that is to look away from historical/political explanations of terrorism
and to look instead to scientific analyses of violent behaviour: ‘Riconoscere la
violenza come forza biologica, questo è vero materialismo (storico o dialettico che
sia, importa poco) e male ha fatto la sinistra a non studiare abbastanza biologia ed
etologia’.12 Certain ‘biological’ explanations of why people kill each other seem
inspired by an almost ideological urge to present violence and competition as a
natural condition of humankind.13 Ethological analyses of our close animal relatives
indeed underline how primates are adept at both violence and cooperation, and how
they are able to forge quite complex alliances in order to change power relations
within the group;14 however, such analyses are still too general for our purpose of
explaining differences in behaviour within a conspicuously homogeneous culture
and environment.15
Nevertheless, a growing, interdisciplinary body of research, mainly working
outside the traditional boundaries of humanities, has focused on understanding
violence and terrorism. For example, the conceptual framework offered by Taylor and
Horgan for addressing ‘psychological processes in the development of the terrorist’
provides a basis for addressing both the social and the individual dimensions of
becoming a ‘committed insider’ in a group devoted to political violence.16 However,
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with regard to our question of why individuals sharing the same social and cultural
background may take different paths towards actually committing or rejecting
violent acts, we have found useful a general theory of violence developed by the
sociologist and criminologist Lonnie Athens and popularized by the investigative
journalist Richard Rhodes.17 This theory — which we believe to be compatible, in
its general terms, with Taylor and Horgan’s conceptual framework — is specifically
focused on understanding the individual choice of employing (or not employing)
violence, within the context and constraints of a given community.
Athens’s theory about the development of violent criminals assumes that violence
may become an adaptive way of life for some people. His theory of violentization
(that is, socialization into violence) is based on extensive interviews with inmates
convicted for violent crimes, compared with the life histories of other people who,
like Lonnie Athens himself, grew up in a violent environment and were exposed
to violence, but did not embrace violence as a way of life. Athens is vehemently
sceptical about genetic explanations of crime, and maintains instead that appropriate
conditions and training can turn most normal people into violent criminals. He
represents the process in four stages:
(1) Brutalization through violent subjugation and violent coaching: the subject is repeatedly
the victim of extreme violence by being directly subjugated, or by witnessing the
violent subjugation of an intimate, and the mix of anger and impotence becomes
unsustainable; the person then receives violent coaching by an authoritative figure
who advocates, through direct examples or through credible narratives, the use of
unrestrained violence as an adaptive solution and lifestyle; this whole stage is a long
one, and most people who enter it do not proceed any further;
(2) Belligerency: the subject decides that he must stop people from brutalizing him
and understands the full import of the violent coaching he received; he resolves to
make use of violence, in the case of provocation, in order to seriously harm or even
kill an opponent;
(3) Violent performance: the subject reacts to a provocation by making use of violence;
if and when the subject realizes that it is advantageous for him to use violence,
either because he can defeat malevolent opponents or because it allows him to gain
respect and status in his environment, the subject can move to the last and more
dangerous stage;
(4) Virulence: the subject develops a new violent personality, making use of violence
in response to little provocation or none; he becomes a social outcast or seeks
company in groups for whom a violent reputation is a prerequisite.
Athens claimed to have found clear traces of the four stages in all the violent
criminals he interviewed. All had undergone experiences of brutalization (in the
family, the gang, the neighbourhood), all had received violent coaching, and all had
gained some psychological and social advantage from resorting to violence. Athens
underlines also how the whole process he calls violentization is protracted, slow, and
can still be interrupted until the fourth stage is completed; he also insists that there
is a huge leap between fantasizing about violent revenge and actually resorting to
physical violence.
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Of special interest with respect to our concern with models of violence is Athens’
idea of how an individual constructs a self-image and reaches decisions through a
dialogue (Athens actually refers to a soliloquy) with phantom others:
[the people we are physically with] are not our only interlocutors. We also
converse with phantom others, who are not present, but whose impact upon us
is not less than the people who are present during our social experiences. [...]
the phantom other is both a single and a multiple entity because the individual
phantom companions, when taken together, comprise a phantom community,
which provides people with a multi but unified voice and sounding board for
making sense of their varied social experiences.18
Athens observes how violent coaching turns into a kind of founding narrative of
the violent criminal’s self-image, well beyond the physical presence of the real
person who impersonated this role. Athens’ theory of violentization is in response
to a context of ultra-violent criminality within a socially destitute environment
quite different from the politically engaged milieu in which most future terrorists
grew up in Italy. Caution is therefore required when suggesting that this theory
is applicable to quite a different kind of violent career. At the same time, Athens’
theory boldly claims to offer a general model of development of violent behaviour
and lends itself to be verified in different contexts. In particular, Athens’ idea of
how an individual constructs her or his self-image in dialogue with phantom others
contains elements of great heuristic value for explaining processes of violentization in
which the first stage of brutalization occurs not (just) by means of direct, personal
experience of violence — as in the case of Athens’ violent criminals — but (also)
through vicarious, discourse-mediated experiences.
The Milanese public prosecutor Armando Spataro — one of the leading
investigators against left-wing terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, and now engaged in
investigating Islamic terrorism — has recently made some observations which seem
to support Athens’ theory. As he points out, modern Islamic terrorists are made,
not born. On the basis of his contacts with Islamic terrorists who had become state
witnesses, Spataro notices that they too had undergone a process which has clear
contact points with Athens’ violent coaching. He underlines how the indoctrination
process of aspiring martyrs of jihad bombers was carried out by authoritative figures
(imams, community leaders) and catalysed by the impact of unbearable images
and narratives (e.g. images of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, as well as images
of the Muslim victims of indiscriminate bombardments) that aroused a sense of
humiliation and rage.19
Violentization through vicarious experience?
What we know about the life stories of Italian left-wing terrorists in the 1970s does
not correspond to the accounts of childhood abuse in culturally deprived settings
typical for the violent criminals interviewed by Athens. While a few of the former
terrorists may have suffered some form of affective deprivation as children, and
others might not have been socialized into respecting rules and laws, it would not
have been easy — as far as we can judge — to predict that any of them would
later come to kill other people in cold blood or celebrate the death of those they
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perceived as their enemies, as they notoriously used to do when news of BR attacks
reached the courtroom during their trials. However, they did make a choice, at a
given moment, to embrace a line of behaviour which involved the possibility of
becoming killers. In Renato Curcio’s words, apropos the first two victims of the
BR (the killings were not premeditated, but Curcio felt the organization had to take
responsibility): ‘Devo però ammettere in tutta sincerità che nell’ottica dello sviluppo
della lotta armata il fatto che vi potessero essere dei morti, sia fatti da noi che fatti
a noi, era un’eventualità che avevo senz’altro accettata’.20 Curcio’s words, however
aberrant, made sense within an extreme left-wing milieu in the 1970s. How could
such an attitude to violence have become natural to him and to his group?
If we start by considering phase 2, the stage of belligerency, and onwards in Athens’
model, certain characteristics from his schema seem recognizable in the memories
of former terrorists. Autobiographical or docu-fictional accounts seem to confirm
that the act of embracing violence raised the status of militants and groups before
their peers, an experience that several remember in vivid detail.21 In the following
account, Renato Curcio recalls one of the first actions of so-called ‘propaganda
armata’ carried out by his group, the kidnapping of Bruno Labate, a representative
of a right-wing trade union:
Il giorno dopo [...] riporto Labate in macchina davanti al cancello uno di
Mirafiori, al momento dell’uscita del turno. Davanti a centinaia di operai, lo
facciamo scendere dall’auto, lo ammanettiamo a un lampione e gli mettiamo
al collo il solito cartello. Poi, a viso scoperto, con calma, distribuiamo i nostri
volantini BR e ce ne andiamo non senza suscitare qualche applauso. Labate
rimane lì alla gogna fino all’arrivo della polizia, per più di un’ora, circondato
dagli operai che gliene dicono di tutti i colori. E nessuno apre bocca per fornire
indicazioni utili a identificarci.22
Similarly, former Prima Linea terrorist Silveria Russo confessed in an interview that
protagonismo (self-promotion) inside the group was a powerful incentive underlying
many actions.23
However, what concerns us most in this article is the first stage (brutalization),
which describes a long process that apparently all the violent criminals Athens met
have undergone, and which is rooted in the parallel processes of violent subjugation
and violent coaching. Our hypothesis is that left-wing terrorists in the 1970s may have
also undergone a process of violentization. Unlike the violent criminals investigated
by Athens, however, the first stage of their process was largely based on vicarious
experience mediated by authoritative narratives.24
It has often been observed that the struggles against fascism and colonialism are
founding narratives of the Italian and European left wing. Such narratives prompt
a strong identification with the oppressed and sympathy for their fight for freedom;
we suggest looking separately at the two components in the tentative chart below:
violent subjugation
Fascism 1920–43 and, especially, 1943–45
Colonialism
Fascism in the 1960s–70s (in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, Argentina;
neofascist bombs in Italy)
violent coaching
Resistance 1943–45
anti-colonial struggle
anti-fascist struggle
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As many have recalled, identification with the oppressed and the victims of injustice
was indeed part of a more general internationalist or ‘Third World-ist’ attitude in
the 1960s and 1970s. To illustrate this is a humorous recollection by the satirist
Michele Serra of a typical meeting in a local section of the Partito Comunista
Italiano (PCI):
Il segretario della sezione introduceva il dibattito secondo uno speciale criterio
logico, afferrato il quale potevi ben dire che cosa voleva dire essere comunisti.
Prima il mondo — la situazione internazionale. Poi l’Italia — la situazione
nazionale. Poi Parabiago, o Ceriano Laghetto, o Magenta — la situazione
locale. Infine, sola possibile salvifica guida in questo folle viaggio dall’enorme
al minuscolo, ‘i compiti del partito’. Il partito, l’intelligenza collettiva, il diopuzzle che ricomponeva milioni di destini in un solo disegno, il traduttore
simultaneo che permetteva agli operai lombardi, ai braccianti pugliesi, ai soldati
cinesi, ai contadini messicani, ai minatori cileni, ai tranvieri russi, alle mondine
indocinesi di sentirsi coinvolti nella stessa immaginata vicenda di gloriosa
intelligenza.25
In one sense, Renato Curcio’s claim, made in his memoir of the BR, that his gener
ation displayed ‘generosity’ in trying to take responsibility for others’ problems
is quite defensible (Curcio and his group’s role in dissipating the value of that
generosity is another matter).26 At the same time, identification with the oppressed
also meant identification with their struggles. There was no question among the
whole left wing, and even among ‘socially engaged’ Catholics like the priest
Lorenzo Milani, that the oppressed had the right or even the duty to fight against
their oppressors. After mentioning all ‘unjust’ wars fought after Italy became a
nation, Milani observes: ‘Ma in questi cento anni di storia italiana c’è stata anche
una guerra “giusta” (se guerra giusta esiste). L’unica che non fosse offesa delle altrui
Patrie, ma difesa della nostra: la guerra partigiana’.27
Our point is that the whole process of identification with victims and freedom
fighters from other times and places was largely based on reported and therefore
vicarious experiences. We say largely because there were indeed episodes of injustice
and police violence in Italy, and there were indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s,
forces that plotted to turn Italy into a dictatorship on the model of Greece or
Argentina.28 But, however imperfect Italian democracy, Italy was not occupied by
an enemy army nor did it become a dictatorship in the post-war period.
The discourse of violence and the Italian left
Former BR militant Valerio Morucci, ref lecting while in prison on how he came
to embrace a political project he later recognized to be absurd, was troubled by the
possibility that his part (us, the good guys, the champions of the subaltern) had ended
up resembling his enemy (them, the bad guys, Power, Capitalism, Colonialism, etc.),
and he recalled the feeling that he was acting as a vindicator: ‘Ma quale differenza
[between us and them]? Non avevano loro ucciso, umiliato e torturato? Non avevano
lasciato nelle piazze centinaia di comunisti ammazzati, prima che noi sparassimo un
solo colpo di pistola? Non era quindi tutto lecito per sconfiggerli?’29
It is true that many left-wing militants were killed by the police during
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political demonstrations between 1948 and 1968, and that members of the PCI
were discriminated against in many ways throughout the 1950s and even during
the 1960s.30 But the PCI was by no means a clandestine presence in Italy, and its
leadership was thoroughly committed to legality in political action. At the same
time, however, a strong sense of their own otherness was deeply rooted in the
self-image of activists as well as the myth of the anti-fascist Resistance ready to be
resumed, as indicated, for example, in the well-known song ‘Per i morti di Reggio
Emilia’ written by Fausto Amodei in 1960, following the killing by police of five
workers during an anti-fascist demonstration (our italics indicate allusions to the
Resistance):31
Compagno cittadino fratello partigiano
teniamoci per mano in questi giorni tristi
di nuovo a Reggio Emilia di nuovo là in Sicilia
son morti dei compagni per colpa dei fascisti
di nuovo come un tempo sopra l’Italia intera
urla il vento e soffia la bufera.
A diciannove anni è morto Ovidio Franchi
per quelli che son stanchi o sono ancora incerti
Lauro Farioli è morto per riparare il torto
di chi si è già scordato di Duccio Galimberti
son morti sui vent’anni per il nostro domani
son morti come vecchi partigiani.
Marino Serri è morto, è morto Afro Tondelli
ma gli occhi dei fratelli si son tenuti asciutti
compagni sia ben chiaro che questo sangue amaro
versato a Reggio Emilia è sangue di noi tutti
sangue del nostro sangue, nervi dei nostri nervi
come fu quello dei fratelli Cervi.
Il solo vero amico che abbiamo al fianco adesso
è sempre quello stesso che fu con noi in montagna
ed il nemico attuale è sempre ancora eguale
a quel che combattemmo sui nostri monti e in Spagna
uguale è la canzone che abbiamo da cantare
scarpe rotte eppur bisogna andare.
This song, which virtually everybody on the left knew by heart in the 1960s and
1970s, is built on a parallelism between the anti-fascist struggle then (the Spanish
Civil War and the Italian Resistance) and the anti-fascist struggle now, faced with
the attempt of the right wing of the Democrazia Cristiana to forge a government
coalition with the neofascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano. The primary goal of
this song was to mourn fallen comrades and to allow left-wing militants to reassure
themselves that they were ready to resist fascism and to fight if necessary. The song
is so far consistent with the political goal of the PCI to keep the neofascists outside
of the institutions and to avoid the risk of a large-scale repression such as occurred,
for example, in Greece.32 But is this song also a call to arms?
We believe that texts like this song or La battaglia di Algeri or even, say, Lettere
di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana introduced part of a generation to the
idea that you might have to fight, die and even kill in order to defend freedom,
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but only as a last resort, should politics fail.33 If a few left-wing militants did take
inspiration from these texts to fantasize about killing right-wing militants or
policemen, they did not put such ideas into practice during the 1960s; that is, as
long as left-wing discourse about the means for political struggle, including the
use of violence, remained under the cultural hegemony of the PCI, as playfully
but earnestly recalled in the above-mentioned quote by Michele Serra. However,
around 1968 the PCI lost its power to establish the political agenda for a growing
number of left-wing militants. At the same time, a strong feeling of otherness and
the myth of ‘just’ violence survived in the left wing and was enriched by entirely
different models, in a mixture in which the myth of the anti-fascist Resistance as a
‘failed revolution’ ready to be resumed merged with fictional narratives produced
by modern mass popular culture, especially film.
Such an eclectic mixture is distinctively represented in Valerio Morucci’s
autobiographical account of the inf luences that shaped his political views. Morucci
describes how, as a twelve-year-old, he spent entire afternoons listening fascinated
to the words of a ‘calzolaio romano, stalinista marcio’, who ‘con gli occhi accesi
e con la sicurezza piana nel parlare di fatti per lui scontati’ spoke about the Soviet
Union as the Promised Land of the Working Class: ‘l’unico paese al mondo dove
gli uomini sono liberi, dove non esiste lo sfruttamento. [...] tutti lavorano, tutti
hanno una casa, l’assistenza gratuita, e sono felici’. The shoemaker undeniably
dreamt of a violent revolution: ‘Bisognerà far piazza pulita. Bisognerà fare ‘sta
benedetta Rivoluzione, che non s’è potuta fare nel ‘48 perché sennò arrivavano gli
americani’.34 And the shoemaker’s naive political explanation of the right to hate
could serve as a justification for Morucci’s urge to act: ‘odiavo il potere che uccide
per rappresaglia [...] dagli occhi del calzolaio avevo appreso che non si poteva essere
comunisti senza odiare, che chi capisce odia e chi non odia non capisce’.35 But
along with the Stalinist shoemaker he had chosen as mentor, Morucci also took
inspiration from other stories and other models:
Ricordo che non sopportavo di leggere storie, di vedere film nei quali gli uomini
venivano schiacciati, non dal cattivo di turno, ma dalla violenza meccanica,
impersonale, inattaccabile della società. [...] Meglio si accompagnavano al
mio stato d’animo altre storie, altri modelli. Non l’impotenza muta di fronte
all’imprevisto sopraggiungere della sconfitta, ma la sconfitta come esito di una
battaglia, di una ribellione. Dietro la finzione di un genere questo sentimento
prese a viaggiare di contrabbando attraverso le produzioni hollywoodiane. Un
film dopo l’altro quella dei losers divenne un’epopea. I losers non avevano la
sconfitta davanti a sé ma dietro di sé. La sconfitta era nella loro carne, come ci
fossero nati.
He goes on to speak of the cult film The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah,1969):
Loro [The Wild Bunch] vanno al bordello. I due ‘gemelli’ sbeffeggiano una
puttana [...] Holden si riveste [...] Dice agli altri ‘Andiamo’ [...] Senza una parola,
bardati da guerra, si avviano allineati. Non sembrano chiedersi se ne usciranno
vivi, l’urgenza è altra. Cos’è? Vendetta, odio, onore, riscatto, di sé, di altri?36
Morucci sees himself through the model of a fictional character from a context
which is entirely different from Italian history and politics: the aging outlaw Pike
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Bishop, the leader of the ‘wild bunch’ who summons his group for a last (suicidal)
battle. The scene of Morucci’s ‘return to arms’, which in his book precedes the
reference to The Wild Bunch, is closely modelled on the film scene, especially in the
description of his comrades’ reaction:
Presi ad andare in giro tutto il giorno con la moto e non vedevo nessuno.
Moto, vacanze, cinema. Quanto durò? Forse meno di un anno. Non ricordo.
L’odio lavorava sordo. Quando arrivò a formicolarmi fin sulla punta delle dita
richiamai i compagni che mi erano più vicini, ritirai fuori pistole e mitra,
esplosivo. [...] Uno ad uno, mentre [i compagni] entravano, vidi dalle loro facce
che era come se avessero inconsapevolmente atteso il richiamo.37
Morucci reconstructs his past identity on the basis of narrative models, and his
community of phantom others, in Athens’ terms, seems made of both real and fictional
personae. It is at the very least curious that The Wild Bunch was a cult-movie for the
generation which grew up in the 1970s and it is tempting to ascribe this fascination
to the sheer visual and narrative impact of the film.38 In our view, however, the
historical–political scenario portrayed in The Wild Bunch provides a view of the
world which was appropriate to the expectations of an extreme left wing in search
of an identity: the four members of the wild bunch redeem themselves by trying to
rescue or at least vindicate the only true hero in the film, a young Mexican who
wants to help his people fight against inhumane oppressors.39 This kind of solution
must have seemed appealing to those militants of the Italian left who felt impatience
or even guilt and despair about their lack of impact both in Italy and in the Third
World; a clamorous act might have seemed more appealing than patient political
work.40 Moreover, The Wild Bunch offers a comfortable self-image (the losers’ epic)
for a former terrorist many years later: the heroes in the film are far from innocent,
but their enemies are worse and are governed by some impersonal superior force
(referred to in the film as ‘the railroad’ or simply as ‘they’, a clear manifestation
of what we called il potere in the 1970s). Moreover Morucci’s recollections show
how cinema — in addition to providing material for ref lection on terrorism and
its lasting effects on Italian society — may help to reconstruct the place of violence
in the collective imaginary of a generation that wished to take responsibility for
changing the world for the better.41
Conclusions: Invented enemies and real victims
We acknowledge that a larger empirical enquiry into the role of narratives in the
life of former terrorists is necessary in order to satisfactorily answer the question
of whether indirect and discourse mediated experiences of suffering and using
violence have indeed played a decisive role in the choice to become a terrorist.
However even anecdotal evidence like Bertinotti’s admission — cited in the first
section of this essay — that he had once fully identified himself with the Algerian
woman placing a bomb in a crowded café, suggests that more than a few individuals
on the Italian left had undergone a process of brutalization (in the sense intended by
Lonnie Athens), which included a dehumanization of the adversary into an enemy
to be destroyed. In Italy in the 1970s, this process of brutalization, which was in part
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148
mediated by powerful narratives about fighting for freedom and justice, concerned
many more people than those who eventually resorted to the armed struggle.
Many, indeed most of them, did not make the step to the use of violence; others,
like Morucci, Moretti and numerous lesser-known militants, went further in their
violentization.
Indeed, the many episodes of political violence in the 1970s suggest that
the brutalization process could reach the stage of a violent performance for an
alarmingly large group of people. One of the most tragic and emblematic episodes
was the killing of 18-year-old, unarmed right-wing militant Sergio Ramelli
in Milan in 1975 by a group of about ten militants of the leftist organization
Avanguardia Operaia. The perpetrators were all ‘ordinary’ students at the faculty
of medicine, were just a few years older than their victim and — as far as we know
— had never taken part before in similar acts of violence. Twelve years later, when
they were identified by imprisoned Prima Linea militants, most of those accused
had graduated, started working as doctors and become husbands, fathers and wellintegrated citizens.42 Equally well-integrated might have become those who did
not materially kill anybody, but shouted, during demonstrations, and painted on
walls slogans like ‘la Resistenza ce l’ha insegnato, uccidere un fascista non è reato’
or ‘dieci, cento, mille Ramelli con una riga rossa tra i capelli’. Together with other
episodes of the bloody feud which caused casualties among young activists of both
left and right in Milan, Rome and elsewhere in Italy, the action against Ramelli was
meant by the perpetrators and their supporters to be an act of antifascismo militante.
In other words, their aggression (violent performance, in Athen’s terminology) was a
degraded form of that same antifascism which constituted the founding narrative
of their and our identity.
Many of the quotations examined in this article attest to a widespread tendency
in the generation that grew up in the 1960s and 1970s to make sense of the world
by appealing to powerful narratives, including fictional ones. But the very same
generous attitude that permitted identification with the oppressed by way of
vicarious experiences, may have also been responsible for ‘inventing’ an enemy
which was not there. As observed by the commentator and former partisan Giorgio
Bocca, left-wing political violence in the 1970s was, paradoxically,
una storia confusa, ambigua e che con il passar degli anni [gli ex-terroristi]
hanno ricostruita e abbellita immaginandola come una guerra civile che in
realtà non ci fu, che fu solo una eversione di parte, con nemici inventati che non
sapevano neppure di esserlo, come la maggior parte dei gambizzati od uccisi.43
Notes to Chapter 10
1.V. Morucci, A guerra finita: sei racconti (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1994), p. 11. Morucci’s references
are to the German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915),
now at Allen Memorial Art Museum at Obelin College, Ohio; to one of the most famous
photographs of the Vietnam war, which shows general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a
Vietcong suspect on a street in Saigon on 1 February 1968; and to Gillo Pontecorvo’s film La
battaglia d’Algeri (1966).
2.F. Bertinotti, ‘Questo movimento è nuovo’, interview by Carlo Bonini, La Repubblica, 2
November 2003; our italics.
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149
3.According to Michael Ignatieff, the film ‘is a masterpiece, at once a justification for acts of terror
and an unsparing account of terror’s cost, including to the cause it serves’. See M. Ignatieff,
‘The terrorist as auteur’, The New York Times, 14 November 2004, NYT Magazine, pp. 50–58. In
this paper, however, we focus on the traditional interpretation, which sees La battaglia d’Algeri as
endorsing terrorism (albeit without hiding its human costs) as a resource for initiating a political
process, similar to the decolonization process. See also F. Caviglia, ‘A Child Eating Ice-Cream
before the Explosion: Notes on a Controversial Scene in The Battle of Algiers’, P.O.V. A Danish
Journal of Film Studies, 20 (2005), 4–19.
4.A. Meddeb, ‘Quarante ans après: conversation entre Marie-José Mondzain, Abdelwahab
Meddeb et Jean-Michel Frodòn, à propos de La Bataille d’Alger, revu aujourd’hui’, in Cahiers du
Cinéma, Septembre 2004, 66–69 (p. 66).
5.See for example M. Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); R.
Raskin, The Functional Analysis of Art (Aarhus: Arkona, 1983); J. Bruner, The Culture of Education
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996), pp. 130–49.
6.See B. S. Centerwall, ‘Television and Violence’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 267
(1992), 3059–63; D. Grossmann and G. Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action
Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (New York: Crown, 1999).
7.J. L. Freedman, Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression: Assessing the Scientific Evidence (Toronto:
Toronto University Press, 1992); J. Fowles, The Case for Television Violence (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 1999).
8.See M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press
1981).
9.U. Eco, ‘Perché ridono in quelle gabbie?’, in Sette anni di desiderio (Milano: Bompiani, 1982), pp.
119–22 (p. 120). First published in La Repubblica, 16 April 1978.
10.Ibid., p. 121.
11.Ibid., p. 122.
12.Ibid. See A. Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); T. Todorov, Face à l’extrême (Paris:
Seuil, 1991), and Une tragédie française: été 1944, scènes de guerre civile (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
13.S. Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
14.F. B. B. De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (New York: Harper and Row,
2000), and ‘A natural heritage of conf lict resolution’, Science, 289 (2000), 586–90.
15.Jared Diamond, a biologist-turned-historian, offers an interesting account of the interplay of
environment and culture in determining how violence may be regarded by different cultures as
a more or less apt solution to conf lict, but is not especially concerned with the individual choice
to embrace or refuse violence. J. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody
for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 53–66.
16.M. Taylor and J. Horgan, ‘A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the
Development of the Terrorist’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 18 (2006), 585–601; K. Hundeide,
‘Becoming a Committed Insider’, Culture and Psychology, 9 (2003), 107–27.
17.L. Athens, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992),
and Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1997); Richard
R. Rhodes, Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist (New York: Vintage Books
1999); Violent Acts and Violentization: Assessing, Applying and Developing Lonnie Athens’ Theory
and Research, ed. by L. H. Athens and J. T. Ulmer (London: JAI, 2003); I. O’Donnell, ‘A New
Paradigm for Understanding Violence? Testing the Limits of Lonnie Athens’s Theory’, British
Journal of Criminology, 43: 4 (2003), 750–71.
18.L. Athens, ‘The Self as a Soliloquy’, Sociological Quarterly, 35: 3 (1994), 525–26; author’s
emphasis.
19.A. Spataro, ‘Why Do People Become Terrorists? A Prosecutor’s Experience’, Journal of
International Criminal Justice, 6 (2008), 507–24.
20.R. Curcio and M. Scialoia, A viso aperto: memorie del fondatore delle BR (Milan: Mondadori, 1993),
p. 96.
21.Besides Curcio and Scialoia, see M. Moretti, C. Mosca and R. Rossanda, Brigate Rosse: una storia
italiana (Milan: Anabasi, 1994); A. L. Braghetti and P. Tavella, Il prigioniero (Milan: Mondadori,
1998); A. Franceschini and G. Fasanella, Che cosa sono le BR (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004); V. Morucci,
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150
Ritratto di un terrorista da giovane (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1994), and La peggio gioventù:
una vita nella lotta armata (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004); T. Zoni Zanetti, Rosso di Mària: l’educazione
sentimentale di una bambina guerrigliera (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 1997), and Clandestina (Rome:
DeriveApprodi, 2000).
22.Curcio and Scialoia, A viso aperto, p. 80.
23.S. Zavoli, La notte della Repubblica (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 374. Even so, using violence had
its psychological costs. A striking example of the point that killing people could be perceived
as a terrible burden but also as a way to earn respect among other militants is revealed by the
still-open question of who really killed Aldo Moro. Initially, Prospero Gallinari was convicted
of the killing, but Mario Moretti, in a dramatic moment during his interview with Carla Mosca
and Rossana Rossanda, asserted that he could not have left such a responsibility to someone
else and that he himself had done it (Brigate Rosse, p. 167). Yet another account suggests now
that at the crucial moment Moretti was not able to kill Moro and that a third militant (the late
Germano Maccari) felt it his duty to step in although he was among the few members of the BR
who strongly opposed the decision to execute the hostage (see L. Pace, Interview with Claudio
Sabelli Fioretti’, Sette, 6 September 2001).
24.For the concept of action mediated by discourse see J. V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A
Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991).
25.M. Serra, Cerimonie (Milano: Feltrinelli 2002), p. 71.
26.Curcio and Scialoia, A viso aperto, p. 212. This passage from Curcio’s memoir/interview is read
aloud by the character of the victim who has survived an assassination attempt (played by Nanni
Moretti) in Calopresti’s La seconda volta.
27.L. Milani, ‘Lettera ai cappellani Militari Toscani che hanno sottoscritto il comunicato dell’11
febbraio 1965’, Rinascita, 6 March 1965.
28.See A. Cento Bull, Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), and F. Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia: la Destra radicale e
la strategia della tensione in Italia nel dopoguerra (Milan: Feltrinelli 1995).
29.Morucci, Ritratto, p. 7; our italics.
30.For a balanced account of the extent of discrimination, see G. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano:
culture, identità, trasformazioni fra anni cinquanta e sessanta (Rome: Donzelli 2003), pp. 9–15.
31.See Lisa Gerusa’s discussion in this volume of the discourse and lexicon of violence on the Italian
left (Chapter 9).
32.P. Cooke, Luglio 1960: Tambroni e la repressione fallita (Milano: Teti, 2000).
33.Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana: 8 settembre 1943 — 25 aprile 1945, ed. by P.
Malvezzi and G. Pirelli (Turin: Einaudi, 2003) [first pub. 1952].
34.Morucci, Ritratto, pp. 15–16.
35.Ibid., pp. 7 and 17.
36.Ibid., pp. 26–27.
37.Ibid. pp. 24 and 26.
38.For more on the putative inf luence of the cinema of violence on a generation of militants,
with particular reference to The Wild Bunch and Morucci, see Christian Uva, ‘Le “relazioni
pericolose” tra il piombo e la celluloide: il cinema visto dai terroristi’, in Schermi di piombo: il
terrorismo nel cinema italiano, ed. by C. Uva (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2007), pp. 173–83.
39.The former BR militant Alfredo Bonavita speaks, too, of his identification with vindicators:
‘mi identificavo con la gente perseguitata e anche con la gente che avrebbe dovuto vendicarla’
(in Zavoli, La notte della repubblica, p. 95).
40.At least two films made at the end of the 1970s, Pontecorvo’s Ogro (1979) and Margarethe von
Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981), accuse terrorists of oversimplifying reality and of forgetting the
primacy of political projects and popular support over spectacular individual actions.
41.See Guido Panvini, ‘Il “senso perduto”: il cinema come fonte storica per lo studio del terrorismo
italiano’, in Uva, ed., Schermi di piombo, pp. 98–113 (especially pp. 108–10).
42.Indeed, following the deadly attack against Sergio Ramelli, two members of the group became
involved in an attack on a bar where right-wing militants used to meet, while the others turned
away from political violence, or from politics altogether. When Ramelli’s killers were arrested,
all of them immediately pleaded guilty, apparently almost with relief, and confessed the feelings
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151
of guilt which had haunted them for years. They had not meant, they said, to kill Ramelli, they
did not even know him personally, and just wanted to ‘teach him a lesson’. See Sergio Ramelli,
ed. by S. Girando et al. (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2007).
43.G. Bocca, ‘La nostra orribile stagione di sangue’, La Repubblica, 20 March 2004.
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CAVIGLIA-CECCHINI ARB-6 political violence

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