CHAPTER 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 influence 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 violent coaching Fascism 1920–43 and, especially, 1943–45 Resistance 1943–45 Colonialism anti-colonial struggle Fascism in the 1960s–70s (in Spain, anti-fascist struggle Portugal, Greece, Chile, Argentina; neofascist bombs in Italy)

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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 dio- puzzle 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, reflecting 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 influences 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 reflection 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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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 well- integrated 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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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 conflict 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 conflict, 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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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 influence 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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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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