During the 1970's and 1980's, great fear had been spread throughout Italy. A group known as the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, had developed and left its mark on the Italian political scene. Fear was commonplace as bomb plots, kneecappings, and assassinations became the norm. As we go through this paper, the fascinating yet horrifying story, including the history, ideology, and current activity of the Red Brigade will be told. This paper consists of the history of the Red Brigades as a radical leftist organization and its reputed founder Renato Curcio.
The following inquiries will be answered.What was the The Red Brigades was founded on rigid Marxist-Leninist principles. Marxism-Leninism is a set of communist ideals and political philosophies based on the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, which promote the creation and development of an international communist society. This type of communist society would be governed by the leadership of a vanguard party, which would preside over a revolutionary socialist state (defined as a country’s power being seized of political power through mass movement of the working class community.
This radical leftist group advocated violence in the pursuit of class warfare. Concentrated in Italy, the Red Brigades targeted businessmen and politicians and were a notable terrorist threat in Italy during the 1970s and early 1980s. Due to developments during its existence, the Red Brigades took on some qualities of anarchist groups while still proliferating its especially virulent and violent Communist philosophy.In the end, the Red Brigades' increasingly brutal attacks eroded the support of those sympathetic with the group's Communist ideals. The reputed founder of the Red Brigades was Renato Curcio, who in 1967 set up a leftist study group at the University of Trento dedicated to figures such as Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin and Che Guavara. In 1969 Curcio married a fellow radical, Margherita Cagol, and moved with her to Milan, where they attracted a horde of followers.
Proclaiming the existence of the Red Brigades in November 1970 through the firebombing of various factories and warehouses in Milan, the group began kidnapping the following year and in 1974 committed its first assassination; among its victims that year was the chief inspector of Turin’s antiterrorist squad. Despite the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of alleged terrorists throughout the country, including Curcio himself in 1976. the random assassinations continued. In 1978 the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered former Prime Minister Aldo Moro(39th prime minister.
In December 1981 a U. S. Army officer with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Brigadier General James Dozier, was abducted and held captive by the Red Brigades for 42 days before Italian police rescued him unharmed from a hideout in Padua. Between 1974 and 1988, the Red Brigades carried out about 50 attacks, in which nearly 50 people were killed. A common nonlethal tactic employed by the group was “kneecapping,” in which a victim was shot in the knees so that he could not walk again.
In 1978, the Second BR, headed by Mario Moretti, kidnapped and murdered Christian Democrat Aldo Moro, who was the key figure in negotiations aimed at extending the Government's parliamentary majority, by attaining a Historic Compromise between the Italian Communist Party and the Democrazia Cristiana also known as the Christian democratic Political party in a team of Red Brigades members, using stolen Alitia airline company uniforms, ambushed Moro, killed five of Moro's bodyguards and took him captive. The captors, headed by Moretti, sought the release of certain prisoners in exchange for Moro's safe release.The Government refused to negotiate with the captors, while Italian political forces took either a hard line ("linea della fermezza") or a more pragmatic approach ("linea del negoziato"). From his captivity, Moro sent letters to his family, to his political friends, to the Pope, pleading for a negotiated outcome.
After holding Moro for 54 days, the Brigades realized that the Government would not negotiate and, fearful of being discovered, decided to kill their prisoner. They placed him in a car and told him to cover himself with a blanket. Mario Moretti then shot him eleven times in the chest.Moro's body was left in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani, a site midway between the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party headquarters, as a last symbolic challenge to the police, who were keeping the entire nation, and Rome in particular, under strict surveillance. Moretti wrote in Brigate Rosse: una storia italiana that the murder of Moro was the ultimate expression of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary action.
Original founder Alberto Franceschini wrote that the imprisoned members did not understand why Moro had been chosen as a target.
