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MEDIATING the EXPERIENCE of the RED BRIGADES by MARCO BRIZIARELLI B.A., University of Perugia, 2001

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MEDIATING the EXPERIENCE of the RED BRIGADES by MARCO BRIZIARELLI B.A., University of Perugia, 2001 REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION: MEDIATING THE EXPERIENCE OF THE RED BRIGADES by MARCO BRIZIARELLI B.A., University of Perugia, 2001 M.A., University of Iowa, 2004 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Journalism and Mass Communication 2012 This thesis entitled: Revolution and Restoration: Mediating the Experience of the Red Brigades written by Marco Briziarelli has been approved for the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Andrew Calabrese Janice Peck Peter Simonson Stewart Hoover Isaac Reed Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. iii Briziarelli, Marco (Ph.D., Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication) Revolution and Restoration: Mediating the Experience of the Red Brigades. Thesis directed by Professor Andrew Calabrese The study explores the communicative practices of the Italian radical group Red Brigades (BR), the relationship the group established with the Italian press, and the specific social historical context in which the BR developed both its own self-understanding and the complex dialectical connection with the social whole. I provide an interpretation of the experience of the BR as a group that wanted to make history and ended up being subjected to it. In relation to both scholarly treatment and popular perceptions, which tend for the most part to depict the BR as an “absolute negation” of the constitutive values of the Italian society, I suggest that the BR represented only a “determinate negation” of their historical conditions, a dialectical product of the very dominant ideology they attacked. This will be mainly exemplified by the contradictory relationship the group came to establish with the state, which represented both the “absolute enemy” and the ultimate source of political recognition and legitimation. I try to historically ground the specific reasons and circumstances that determined such dialectics between “revolution” and “restoration.” The main claim of this study is that the BR’s worldview and the dominant ideology(s) mediated by the press represented competing responses to issues that had been haunting Italy since its modern constitution: the structural weakness of the nation state, the contradictions of an uneven development within the capitalist mode of production, and the consequent struggle of the bourgeois class to achieve hegemonic ruling. I suggest a link between a never completely successful process of constitution of the nation-state, iv a never completely successful class hegemony attainment, and a never completely successful revolutionary elaboration in Italy. This idea translates more concretely in following the general framework provided by Sartre’s progressive regressive method (1968): a method for historical investigation that tries to reconcile the dialectical unity between, on the one hand, the existential/individual motivation, and on the other, the dimension of collective and structural causality. The outcome is an account of the group that resembles a musical counterpoint made up by the analysis of concrete episodes of the BR’s experience and the Braudelian longue durée historical context in which those emerge. v CONTENTS CHAPTER I: Introduction…………………………………………………………….9 1.1 A Normal Country ....................................................................................9 1.2 A Communicative Paradox ....................................................................12 1.3 Mediating Terrorism and Terrorizing Mediation ....................................17 1.4 Some Caveats ..........................................................................................20 1.5 The Project ..............................................................................................22 1.6 Dissertation Overview ............................................................................25 CHAPTER II: Theoretical Framework………………………………………………30 2.1 People Make History but in Conditions not of Their Own Making…….31 2.2 The Braudelian Configurations of Time .................................................38 2.3 Hegemony and Ideology .........................................................................41 2.4 The Operationalization of the Framework ..............................................46 CHAPTER III: The Four Voices……………………………………………………53 3.1 Introducing the BR………………………………………………..…….53 3.2 BR’ s “Absolute Enemy”: the Bourgeois State………………….……..64 3.3 Discourse of the arms: State of Necessity VS. Necessity of the State ....69 3.4 The BR’s Communicative Mode ............................................................75 3.5 The Scholarly Representation of the BR: the Heteronomic Prejudice. ..79 3.6 Contextualizing the 1970s Italian Press: Media, State and Capital ........81 3.7 The BR and the Media: The Dilemma of the Discourse of Violence...90 vi CHAPTER IV: An Italian Narrative (1943-80)……………………………………..97 4.1 The Incomplete Project of Risorgimento and the Structural Weakness of the Italian State…………………………………………………….….…..98 4.2 Exiting Fascism: The contested ground of Collective Memory....…. .104 4.3 The Postwar Settlement: The Republic and the Reconstruction. …......110 4.4 The “sinful” Economic Miracle: The lost appointment with Fordism and Another Passive Revolution. .................................................................115 4.5 The collective actions and Social Unrest of 1960s and 1970s….…….124 4.6 The Strategy of Tension, and The Historic Compromise: Towards a Hegemonic Historic Bloc……………………………………………135 CHAPTER V: Operation Sunflower…………………………………………………141 5.1 Operation Sunflower ………………………………………………..….144 5.2 The Thematization of BR’s Communiques……………………………......147 5.3 The Rhetoric of Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and L’Unita……….160 5.4 The Red and the Black: The Open Confrontations of the Ideological Level…………………………………………………………………....166 5.5 The common ground: the Struggle over the State inhabitants ………….171 CHAPTER VI: Operation Fritz…………………………………………………….....176 2.1 Moro and the Proletariat Justice: The BR’s Narration……………….....180 6.2 The rhetoric of the Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and L’Unitá.…...196 vii 6.3 Ideological Polarization……………………………………………..….207 6.4 Convergence into the Myth of the regeneration of Italian Nation-State. 209 CHAPTER VII: Conclusions………………………………………………………….220 7.1 Discussion of the findings ……………………………………………….227 7.2 The Immanent Critique of the BR………………………………………..236 7.3 What is (still) To Be Done ……………………………………………...248 7.4 An Attemptive Epilogue…………………………………………………249 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………..………………………………………………252 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the guidance of my committee members, help from friends, and support from my family and wife. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Calabrese, for his excellent guidance. Above all and the most needed, he provided me unflinching encouragement and support. I am indebted to him more than he knows. I gratefully acknowledge Dr. Peck, Dr. Simonson, Dr. Reed and Dr. Hoover for their advice, their supervision, their crucial contributions and last but not the least their friendship. I am extremely proud of my dissertation committee. I would also like to thank my parents and my elder sister. They were always supporting me and encouraging me with their best wishes. I would like to thank my daughter Emma for her generous smiles. Words fail me to express my appreciation to my wife Susana whose dedication, love and persistent confidence in me, has taken the load off my shoulder. I owe her for being unselfishly let her intelligence, passions collide with mine. 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1.1 A Normal Country To every generation is associated a deficit of memory, an always incomplete process of information turn over in which some myths remain to be overcome and some to be conserved. In this liminal space between continuity and epochal factures, the qualitative intervention of cultural institutions such as the academy and media intervene by analyzing, purifying and reconstructing the generational paths of individual and collective experiences. From such an intricate process, simultaneously systematic and random, deliberate and accidental, emerges the official history of a country, a selective tradition that in any single time, seems to conciliate with the interests of the dominant class. We are so much socialized to think about social reality as a hypostatic product of the past, that such a cultural enterprise of producing historical narratives, even when theoretically projected into the future, re-assures the reproduction of an eternal present state of things. This may be accomplished by the manipulation and selection of memories, knowledge and ambition of the subaltern and, in Italian case, this also involves the force of habit of a nation which systematically displaces memories into the collective amnesiac. So, for instance if one were to carry out a survey in Italy by asking a simple question such as “were you a fascist during fascism?” no one, absolutely no one, would answer “yes.” Fascism is for most Italians, as Croce once said, just a parenthesis within the history of the country. Similarly if you were to ask: 2 “Have you ever voted for Berlusconi?” millions of supporters would be reduced to few people
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