The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy

Richard Drake

Description

University of Padova presentation of The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy
An Interview with Richard Drake in the Italian newspaper Avanti!  
Hear Richard Drake speak about his book on the Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael podcast

What drives terrorists to glorify violence? In The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Richard Drake seeks to explain the origins of Italian terrorism and the role that intellectuals played in valorizing the use of violence for political or social ends.

Drake argues that a combination of socioeconomic factors and the influence of intellectual elites led to a sanctioning of violence by revolutionary political groups in Italy between 1969 and 1988. Drake explores what motivated Italian terrorists on both the Left and the Right during some of the most violent decades in modern Italian history and how these terrorists perceived the modern world as something to be destroyed rather than reformed.

In 1989, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy received the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. It was awarded for the best book that year on Italian history. The book is reissued now with a new introduction for the light it might shed on current terrorist challenges. The Italians had success in combating terrorism. We might learn something from their example. The section of the book dealing with the Italian "superfascist" philosopher, Julius Evola, holds special interest today. Drake's original work takes on new significance in the light of Evola's recent surge of popularity for members of America's alt-right movement. 

Introduction for the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Contemporary Italian Terrorism and the Limits of History
1. The Two Faces of Italian Terrorism: 1969-1974
2. Surging Red Brigadism: 1975-1977
3. Living the Revolution
4. Aldo Moro and Italy's Difficult Democracy
5. 7 aprile 1979
6. The Blast Furnace of Terrorism: 1979-1980
7. The Children of the Sun
8. The Crisis and Defeat of the Red Brigades: 1980-1982
Conclusion
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Terrorism
• Italy
• History of Europe
• My Last Duchess
• Julius Evola
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253057150
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 39 Mo

Extrait

THE Revolutionary
Mystique AND Terrorism
IN Contemporary ItalyTHE Revolutionary
Mystique AND Terrorism
IN Contemporary Italy
SECOND EDITION
Richard Drake
indiana University PressThis book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Offce of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.org
© 1989 by Richard Drake
© 2021 by Richard Drake
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this
publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Drake, Richard, 1942- author.
Title: The revolutionary mystique and terrorism in contemporary Italy /
Richard Drake.
Description: Second edition. | Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University
Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2020050359 (print) | LCCN 2020050360 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780253057129 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253057136 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780253057150 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism—Italy—History—20th century.
Classifcation: LCC HV6433.I8 D73 2021 (print) | LCC HV6433.I8
(ebook) | DDC 363.3250945/09045—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050359
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050360In homage to Gaetano Mosca, whose
Elementi di Scienza Politica was the one treatise of political theory
I had to read all the way through in order to write this book.Every age and every society has a cherished lore and
will draw on it in season and out of season.
L. B. NamierContents
Introduction for the Second Edition xi
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction: Contemporary Italian Terrorism
and the Limits of History xxiii
1. The Two Faces of Italian Terrorism: 1969–1974 1
2. Surging Red Brigadism: 1975–1977 17
3. Living the Revolution 32
4. Aldo Moro and Italy’s Diffcult Democracy 63
5. 7 aprile 1979 78
6. The Blast Furnace of Terrorism: 1979–1980 100
7. The Children of the Sun 114
8. The Crisis and Defeat of the Red Brigades: 1980–1982 135
Conclusion 153
Glossary166
Notes168
Bibliography200
Index210
Illustrations are on pages 59–62Introduction for the Second Edition
Between 1969 and 1988, the so-called years of lead in Italy, the country suffered from the
worst outbreak of terrorist violence in the industrialized world. According to the Italian
Association for Victims of Terrorism website (www.vittimeterrorismo.it/memorie/memorie
.htm), terrorists killed 428 people and wounded some 2,000 more in 14,615 attacks. This same
source notes, however, that a precise and reliable accounting for all the victims is still not
to be had. Indeed, statistics for the terror in Italy vary from source to source. Not all acts of
violence in this period were claimed by the groups that perpetrated them, making it
impossible to determine the responsibility for every case or whether the involvement of political
motives associated with terrorist violence could be presumed. It is unlikely that a defnitive
tally ever will be forthcoming.
Yet numbers alone do not convey the true signifcance of the years of lead. Day after day,
newspaper headlines and television news reports related shocking accounts of kidnappings,
mutilations, assassinations, and mass terror bombings. Among the killed and wounded were
judges, politicians, factory executives, union offcials, journalists, policemen, military offcers,
prison guards, and university professors. For twenty years, Italy presented a unique spectacle to
the world: an advanced Western nation unable to maintain even a semblance of public order
by the usual democratic methods employed by other capitalist societies. To tens of thousands
of Italian activists and sympathizers, the mystique of revolution justifed the bombing and
shooting spree against a democratic establishment that to them had no moral legitimacy at all.
The government and fnancial scandals of the 1990s known as Tangentopoli (Kickback City)
would reveal that the country’s power structure did reek of corruption. For revolutionaries of
the Right and Left, however, the primordial fault of the system lay not in ethical irregularities
but in its intrinsic nature. The system could not be reformed. Violence alone would suffce
as the means of liberating the Italian people from their enslavement by the most exploitative
and destructive ruling class in all history.
In writing this book, I wanted to explain why it had been Italy’s fate to set such a gruesome
record in the years of lead. As always in the writing of history, the frst question was where to
begin. I found in newspaper accounts, court records, and parliamentary commission reports
the basic outlines of the sanguinary story. For people who think of Italy as the eternally
pleasing and carefree land of dolce far niente, the prolonged spate of terrorist attacks seemed utterly
out of place. Those with a deeper sense of Italian history would have been less surprised by
the violence.
The book’s epigraph, L. B. Namier’s “Every age and every society has a cherished lore and
will draw on it in season and out of season,” provided me with the governing conception for
the work that I wanted to do. The terrorists came from the communist left and the neo-fascist
right. A cherished lore of revolution long had existed in both these Italian political traditions.
Fascism was conceived in Italy and carried to triumph there in that ideology’s pioneering
regime. Radically anti-liberal and anti-socialist, fascism had a long history of violent episodes
in its acquisition and retention of political power. When the regime of Benito Mussolini
fell, fascism did not disappear. It survived in a postwar neo-fascist movement that sought to
maintain his legacy and to adapt it as an instrument of struggle against both the
pro-American Christian Democratic establishment and the Soviet-aligned Communist Party. The
neo-fascist movement included moderates and radicals. Among the latter were to be found
fanatics eager for violence.
The Marxist revolutionary tradition went back even farther in Italian history. It began
with a group of nineteenth-century intellectuals and activists who imported their ideology xii | Introduction to Second Edition
from Marx himself and his political heirs in Russia. I related their story in a subsequent
book, Apostles and Agitators: Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (2003). Most of them
were southerners, and the desperate poverty of that region fgured prominently in the radical
political choices they made. As one of them asked at the time, who in Italy with a heart and
a mind could be other than a revolutionary. By the time of the First World War,
revolutionary Marxism had become a national phenomenon. The epochal success of the Bolshevik
Revolution in 1917 led to the creation of the Italian Communist Party, which defned itself
in opposition to the Socialists as the country’s authentic party of revolution. Throughout its
history, the Communist Party would have an umbilical relationship with the Soviet Union.
When I wrote this book in the late 1980s, I had no more idea than the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) did that the Soviet Union and its entourage of communist client states and
parties stood on the verge of oblivion. Only two years after the book’s 1989 publication, the
Soviet Union went out of existence, leaving the United States with its entourage of client
states and parties as the world’s lone superpower. Communism, which throughout the Cold
War loomed as the chief alternative to the American consumer capitalist way of life, suddenly
had become an exhibit for the museum. For the Cold War’s victors, the end of history seemed
to be at hand, with the American political and economic model triumphant as the way, the
truth, and the life for all mankind.
The post–Cold War period proved to be politically disorienting for the Italians. T-he Com
munist Party, the largest such organization in Europe outside the Iron Curtain, disappeared
almost overnight. The Italian left has been in a state of suspended animation ever since. With
the propulsive ideological force of Marxism almost entirely missing now in Italian political
life, the left has struggled in vain to defne itself anew. The faction-ridden and ideologically
rudderless Democratic Party, an heir many times removed from the old Communist Party,
is the chief example in Italian politics today of the left’s identity crisis. Communism’s other
political heirs barely register in polling data.
For the moment, the revolutionary mystique of communism that I sought to portray in
this book has subsided into politically impotent nostalgia for diehards on the radical - left. Vir
tually everyone else in Italian public life today looks elsewhere for political and intellectual
inspiration. At the time of the events in