Tuesday,
January 29, 2008
Italian Red Brigades: Terrorists, Freedom
Fighters, or Puppets ?
The
ANNOTICO Report
One person's Freedom Fighter is another man's Terrorist.
Just
like the Jewish Stern
Gang in British occupied mandatory
In the
1970s and 80s European secret services infiltrated and crushed the Red Brigades (Brigate
Rosse) in
Italy, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee
Fraktion) in Germany, and Direct Action (Action Directe) in France. In the process and in application of
the strategy of tension
they exploited the same terrorist organizations, keeping them alive in name in
order to blame them, in the name of freedom, for the limitations placed on
personal liberties. [Today the name Al Qaida, the
real existence of which is dubious, is used precisely in the same manner. Al Qaida is omnipresent, forever available to be blamed for
institutional terrorism in order to justify all the patriot acts and no-fly
lists and house searches and arbitrary arrests and detentions and tortures and
concentration camps.]
BRIGATE ROSSE
Its organizational
structure is of interest because the organizers of Al Qaida
(Pakistani and
At the BR base was a
brigade of up to five persons, who provided arms and logistics; the brigades
formed poles, which in turn formed a city column. The columns made up fronts
that directed national political operations, controlled by an eight-man
strategic directorate. The supreme level was a 4-5 man executive committee that
conducted international relations and made major decisions culminating in the
abduction and eventual murder of ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro
.
The co-founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto
Franceschini, told me that the Brigadists never considered themselves
terrorists. They "resisted"
What does that very Italian story mean? It means that Power
wanted and needed the
It means also that Power
knew that the Resistance understood it.
No wonder that as time
passed former leftwing terrorists came to call themselves
"West European guerilla" to combat imperialist efforts to weld
European countries into the homogeneous structure it has assumed today,
integrated in the instrument of imperialist power, NATO. On a practical
level, the
I offer this brief look
at the Red Brigades in order to show another example of tension strategy.
Franceschini
told me that police could have crushed them quickly; however, their
existence was convenient to the corrupt, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet regime of
Christian Democracy, and to its ally, the
The real Red
Brigades died in the late 1970s. After their Executive Committee and/or
Strategic Directorate were infiltrated by Italian and American secret services,
the Red Brigades became a riddle. After reporting for many years on European
terrorism and after many meetings with terrorist leaders, my guess is that it
became an empty name in the service of governments and secret services.
EPILOGUE: In this mid
January, the Rome Daily, La Repubblica, got
its hands on heretofore top secret documents of the British Foreign Office
revealing that in 1976, the election year in which the Italian Communist
Party (PCI) garnered 34% of the vote, NATO weighed a ?coup d??tat? in
According to the
documentation the plan was eventually discarded for fear that the
powerful workers movement in
Though the coup was ruled
out,
For NATO planners the
recruitment of some BR leaders was the culmination of the refinement of the
instruments of tension strategy. It was that late version of the Red Brigades, which in
1978 abducted and assassinated the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro whose
strategic plan of so-called "historic compromise" foresaw Italian
Communists in the national government. The Red Brigades took the full blame.
Today, G-8 leaders label
anti-globals and peace protesters
"terrorists" and "enemies of democracy" and call for emergency measures
against them. They arrest anti-globals right in front
of the White House. Anti-globals on the other hand
consider themselves non-violent freedom fighters for a better world. As a
rule, police and/or police-guided, infiltrated or stimulated
"terrorists" such as the Black Bloc are the aggressors against the
anti-global peace movements.
No sane person believes that terrorism can be eradicated with military might.
It is now a truism that every bomb that falls in the poor world spawns another
terrorist, many of whom, unlike the Assassins of a millennium earlier, are
eager to strap explosives around their bodies and blow themselves to pieces on
a crowded plaza of the rich world against the naked power that
impoverishes them. If one accepts with Schiller that the oppressed will reach
to the heavens to grasp their rights and resist their oppressors, then the dire
warnings from
While America-Empire
allegedly searches for efficacious measures to combat terrorism, more sincere
American leaders are advised to examine aspects of European experience as a
guide to both what not to do, and to what can be effective. They should not be
deluded: No security measures, no no-fly laws, Patriot Act measures, secret
concentration camps and torture can eradicate what Power defines as terrorism
and the oppressed define as resistance until
For
those, who want to understand whats REALLY going with the Terrorist/Freedom Fighter, Tension Strategy,
Creating a FAKE Climate of Fear to Encourage Citizens to give up many
of their Constitutional Freedoms, to better carry out Imperialism for the
benefit of the Corporate Oligarchy, the following is a MUST READ!!!!
Terrorists: Assassins Or
Freedom Fighters?
CounterCurrents.org –
By Gaither Stewart
January,27 2008
When the oppressed
man can find justice in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky
and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the
stars, imperishable. When no other means remains, then he must
needs take up the sword.
(Friedrich
Schiller, William Tell)
[Throughout History in]... Middle Eastern nights.
Secret societies conspired against religious oppressors. Justice! Revenge! Stop
your evil ways or in the quiet of the night the Hashshashin
[Assassins, refferred to themselves as Fedayeen, or freedom fighters] will exact
justice....
The term Fedayeen has been used by Arab militant groups throughout
history: volunteers dedicated to causes in which the government fails to act.
For our purposes here, the
Assassins of then were associated with resistance against foreign occupation or
tyranny. And as a rule resistance is not a joyful affair. The Fedayeen made of murder a meticulous system for killing
targeted individuals in public, without however, as historians note, the loss
of innocent life and they never
considered suicide.
I just read an article by T.E.
Lawrence about British occupation of todays
A thousand years ago and
one hundred years ago and again today, there has always been confusion
between terrorism and resistance. As it was for mainstream Islam, it is a
point of view for todays
...What Power so
unceremoniously, so handily labels terrorism, has become fixed and omnipresent in
our day-to-day lives. But since it is no joking matter either, we have to treat
it seriously, severely also
somewhat terroristically.
As Schiller wrote in his
1804 play, William Tell, (written in the aftermath of the French Revolution to
justify tyrannicide), that which for Power
anywhere and at any time is terrorism, for the oppressed will always be
resistance, revolt and rebellion. RESISTANCE! Neocon
America instead simplifies a complex matter. It applies the label
terrorism to any and every form of resistance to American imperialism
abroad and today, at home, Power attaches the label to dissidents and
anti-globalists and anti-war protesters and no-sayers under convenient provisions of the Patriots Act
and other such illegal and anti-Constitutional legislation. Unfortunately,
history is not an American forte.
In certain times and
certain places genuine terrorism is so complex as to be an almost taboo
subject. Paradoxically official
Such built-in complications
are then intensified by the difficulty of recognizing institutional
terrorism, i.e. terrorist acts organized by the state in order to
justify harsh restrictive measures and laws, authoritarianism and in the most
extreme cases, war. September 11
is the clearest example of institutional terrorism, though that historic date
is far from the only one. We remember sinking of the
About Legitimate
Resistance, the Strategy of Tension and Agents Provocateurs
The strategy of tension
is an old story;
yet, after all this time, agents provocateurs continue
to be strange words to the untuned American ear.
Italian terrorism of the 1970s and 80s, coming on the heels of the
youth, student and worker uprisings in revolutionary 1968, illustrate the
meanings quite well.
Terrorism is first of all defined as
a method of political struggle based on the systematic use of violenceassassination,
sabotage, kidnapping, and today human suicidal bomberspracticed by political
extremists or by secret organizations of a nationalistic nature.
The second
aspect of the definition is less recognized: terrorismaccording to my
encyclopediais also the instrument used by a political regime to grasp and to
retain power.
A terrorist is thus a
member of an organization that uses terrorism and who executes terrorist acts.
Or, he is a member of a regime whose existence is based on terror. Nazi Germany was a terrorist
regime. Ditto Stalinist
By extension, terrorist
crimes are both those committed in revolt
against a state to damage the collective and not specific
individuals and they are violent acts
against an oppressive regime.
Again by extension, terrorist crimes are likewise the criminal acts of an oppressive regime against the oppressed.
This is the key: institutional terrorism is the catalyst for
insurgency and resistance throughout the world today. The
short geographical list is easy to pinpoint:
Thus terrorism
is the story of relationships between power/authority and its subjects, and
between oppressors and oppressed. We are used to the words, power and authority, often
used synonymously, as if they were equivalent. But thats
not the case at all. Power and authority are
not the same thing, and the distinction between the two concepts is
significant.
Power [pouvoir, potere, Macht] implies the faculty to act, and in our minds is
related to force, coercion and violence, in the sense of
authoritarian. That is why I like to capitalize the word Power used
in that sense. When one hears the word terrorism, the responsibility
of Power must always be in front of your eyes; otherwise you will miss the
point.
Authority instead implies
legitimacy, in the sense of legitimate authority, or the legitimate faculty
to act or perform. The distinction is between legitimate authority on one hand
and crude naked power on the other. Authority can be good or evil; naked Power
will never be good. As we all know, authority too, like democracy itself, is a
shaky business because the criteria for who establishes and who legitimizes
authority, varies from time to time and place to place. Authority and democracy stand on the edge of an
abyss, perpetually menaced by power, easily transformed into authoritarianism.
In the same way, opposition
to legitimate authority and opposition to naked power/authoritarianism differ:
democratic opposition to legitimate authority should suffice in a democratic
setting. But when the democratic process is inhibited, more violent means
become necessary. In an article Is There A Good Terrorist in the New
York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash cites
Schillers for Power pertinent lines from Wilhelm Tell:
When the oppressed man can find justice
in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his
eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the stars, imperishable.
When no other means remains, then he must needs take
up the sword.
The reality is that you can feel horror at indiscriminate killing and bombs and
kamikaze attacks and still hold to and even encourage the use of legitimate terrorism, that is, resistance
and armed rebellion, against naked illegitimate Power. As
Hezbollah learned easily in south
Some years ago, at the end
of a daylong interview with me in Pariswhere he was a political refugeethe former
Italian terrorist theoretician, Lanfranco Pace,
defined himself as living testimony to the limits of western democracy
that is a precious possession that must be constantly enriched. Democracy,
he said, is a mobile frontier. At times there is less of it, and one must
fight for it.
The result is that golden
rule: what for the oppressed is resistance, resistance to naked poweras
we see today at all latitudes peoples of the world oppressed by the tentacles
of the global octopus-like market economy, by poverty and hopelessnessfor the
oppressor smacks of conspiracy and terrorism. Like Iraqis in 1920 and
today, nationalistic Hungarians in 1956 considered themselves freedom fighters;
for their Soviet oppressors they were terrorists in a conspiracy against the
New Order. Like the Jewish Stern Gang in British occupied mandatory
Since oppression today is
global, no one should be scandalized that resistance to that power is also
global. It is no surprise that three-quarters of the world is up in arms
against US powereither naked military power or disguised by the misnomer,
globalization. A good rule is to substitute the word globalization with
imperialism. It usually works.
The argument that problems
of ethnic, religious, economic and political opposition have emerged precisely
from the liberalization of political freedoms in third- and fourth-world
countries brought by golden globalization rings hollow and hypocritical in the
face of the testimony to the growing poverty of 4/5ths of that world. Wider
political freedoms might create more spaces for rebellion and unleash wider
resistance and violence, but evidently the near universal rebellion today is
the effect of pervasive poverty and hopelessness, not of newly acquired
freedoms.
Moreover, for the hungry the risks of rebellion and terrorism will
always be thousands of times better than sitting in apathy and waiting.
The origins of modern terrorism are problematic. They have been since the
French Revolution. As justified as the French were to rise up against
oppressive aristocratic rule and ugly poverty, Robespierr
e was one of the first in the modern era to up continually the ante of
revolutionary goals precisely in order to increase the obstacles to their
achievement and to create the necessary tensions in order to justify crushing
the enemies of his power. Robespierres terror was transformed into
naked power at work against peoples natural
tendency toward reaction. Throughout modern times his trick of tension
strategy has been used over and over by authoritarian powerused to crush
opposition.
Tension strategy is
always and always a tactic of oppressors. It refers to first permitting, stimulating, organizing,
or even committing terrorist acts, in order to turn around and crush all
opposition to the regime.
The use of agents provocateurs is an old story with which Americans should
familiarize themselves. Old as Adam! Go out into the world and sow discord!
Make the people rise up, then crush them. On an
international level we are familiar with the Gulf of Tonkin as first the provocation, then the
subject of false consciousness inculcated in the American public, and
the catalyst for the Vietnam War. In
recent days, the
Its
an old story.
Every place in the world peace movements are
anti-government.
(Extracted from the novel,
In most circumstances,
terrorism is too weak to overcome the power of the modern state/regime. Terrorists of
Now,
In the 1970s and 80s European
secret services infiltrated and crushed the Red Brigades (Brigate
Rosse) in Italy, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in Germany, and
Direct Action (Action Directe) in France. In the
process and in application of the strategy of tension they exploited the same
terrorist organizations, keeping them alive in name in order to blame them, in
the name of freedom, for the limitations placed on personal liberties. Today
the name Al Qaida, the real existence of which is
dubious, is used precisely in the same manner. Al Qaida
is omnipresent, forever available to be blamed for institutional terrorism in
order to justify all the patriot acts and no-fly lists and house searches and
arbitrary arrests and detentions and tortures and concentration camps.
BRIGATE ROSSE
Its organizational
structure is of interest because the organizers of Al Qaida
(Pakistani and US intelligence services) seem to have borrowed from it since US
Special Forces just cant seem to locate that bearded man in a cave or his
cohort riding his mule over remote Afghan mountain paths. At the BR base was a
brigade of up to five persons, who provided arms and logistics; the brigades
formed poles, which in turn formed a city column. The columns made up fronts
that directed national political operations, controlled by an eight-man
strategic directorate. The supreme level was a 4-5 man executive committee that
conducted international relations and made major decisions culminating in the
abduction and eventual murder of ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
The co-founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini,
told me that the Brigadists never considered
themselves terrorists. They resisted
What does that very Italian story mean?
It means that Power wanted
and needed the
It means also that Power
knew that the Resistance understood it.
No wonder that as time
passed former leftwing terrorists came to call themselves West European
guerilla to combat imperialist efforts to weld European countries into the
homogeneous structure it has assumed today, integrated in the instrument of
imperialist power, NATO.
On a practical level, the
I offer this brief look at
the Red Brigades in order to show another example of tension strategy. Franceschini told me that police could have crushed them
quickly; however, their existence was convenient to the corrupt,
anti-Communist, anti-Soviet regime of Christian Democracy, and to its ally, the
The real Red Brigades died
in the late 1970s. After their Executive Committee and/or Strategic Directorate
were infiltrated by Italian and American secret services, the Red Brigades
became a riddle. After reporting for many years on European terrorism and after
many meetings with terrorist leaders, my guess is that it became an empty name
in the service of governments and secret services.
EPILOGUE: In this mid
January, the Rome Daily, La Repubblica, got its hands
on heretofore top secret documents of the British Foreign Office revealing that
in 1976, the election year in which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) garnered
34% of the vote, NATO weighed a coup d?tat in Rome to keep the Communists
out of the government. One released document states verbally: An
authoritarian regime in
According to the documentation the plan was eventually discarded for fear that
the powerful workers movement in
Though the coup was ruled
out,
For NATO planners the
recruitment of some BR leaders was the culmination of the refinement of the
instruments of tension strategy. It was that late version of the Red Brigades,
which in 1978 abducted and assassinated the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro
whose strategic plan of so-called historic compromise foresaw Italian
Communists in the national government. The Red Brigades took the full blame.
Today, G-8 leaders label
anti-globals and peace protesters
terrorists and enemies of democracy and call for emergency
measures against them. They arrest anti-globals right
in front of the White House. Anti-globals on the
other hand consider themselves non-violent freedom fighters for a better world.
As a rule, police and/or police-guided, infiltrated or stimulated
terrorists such as the Black Bloc are the aggressors against the
anti-global peace movements.
No sane person believes that terrorism can be eradicated with military might.
It is now a truism that every bomb that falls in the poor world spawns another
terrorist, many of whom, unlike the Assassins of a millennium earlier, are
eager to strap explosives around their bodies and blow themselves to pieces on
a crowded square, place, piazza, or Platz of the rich
world against the naked power that impoverishes them. If one accepts with
Schiller that the oppr essed
will reach to the heavens to grasp their rights and resist their oppressors,
then the dire warnings from
While America-Empire
allegedly searches for efficacious measures to combat terrorism, more sincere
American leaders are advised to examine aspects of European experience as a
guide to both what not to do, and to what can be effective. They should not be
deluded: No security measures, no no-fly laws, Patriot Act measures, secret
concentration camps and torture can eradicate what Power defines as terrorism
and the oppressed define as resistance until
The
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Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net