Looks at the history and motivation of the Red Brigades, recounts the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, and assesses Italy's anti-terrorist efforts.

The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies intended as a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State," the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group of violent anticapitalist terrorists revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. Like their German counterparts in the Baader-Meinhof Group and today's violent political and religious extremists, the Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia. In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, Alessandro Orsini contends that the dominant logic of the Red Brigades was essentially eschatological, focused on purifying a corrupt world through violence. Only through revolutionary terror, Brigadists believed, could humanity be saved from the putrefying effects of capitalism and imperialism. Through a careful study of all existing documentation produced by the Red Brigades and of all existing scholarship on the Red Brigades, Orsini reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. Orsini has devised a micro-sociological theory that allows him to reconstruct the group dynamics leading to political homicide in extreme-left and neonazi terrorist groups. This "subversive-revolutionary feedback theory" states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. Orsini makes clear that this political-religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled "purifiers of the world." From Thomas Müntzer's theocratic dream to Pol Pot's Cambodian revolution, all the violent "purifiers" of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony. Orsini’s book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.

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This book explores the communicative practices of the Italian radical group Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, or 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 its complex dialectical connection with the society at large. The BR’s worldview and the dominant ideology(ies) mediated by the press are treated as competing responses to structural issues of Italian history: the structural weakness of the nation state, the contradictions of an uneven economic development, and the consequent struggle of the bourgeois class to achieve hegemonic rule.

This collection brings together a spread of writers, revolutionaries and reprobates to offer up a variety of critical perspectives on key European armed struggle groups from the 1970's . Gianfranco Sanguinetti, founding member of the Italian Section of the Situationist International, writes in 'On Terrorism and the State', 1978 : "Italian terrorism is the last enigma of the society of the spectacle and only those who reason dialectically can solve it.... Today, all those who speak of social revolution without denouncing and combating the terrorist counter-revolution have a corpse in their mouths." Dave and Stuart Wise, (King Mob) look into the relationship between the Italian Communist Party, workers struggles post 68' and the roots of the Red Brigades, concluding of the latter: "they added to the substitutionism of Lenin, who replaced the proletariat by the Party, by replacing the Party with the armed struggle." Prof. Charity Scribner (MIT), contributes "Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction", exploring how and why the SI and the RAF's differing definitions of autonomy produced divergent modes of resistance : "Both the RAF and the Situationists drew from the arsenals of anarchism and Marxism. But whereas Debord critiqued the society of the spectacle...the leaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavy on style, but light on political analysis." Tom Vague contributes fast paced, potted histories of the RAF and Angry Brigade, both strong on time line energy, both useful entry level introductions to the respective narratives. John Barker was sentenced to ten years at the Old Bailey in 1972 for his Angry Brigade activities ("they framed a guilty man"), and here he laments Tom Vague's "fetishisation of the Angry Brigade" and "how comfortable he is with ‘the situationist angle' while saying nothing about the analysis and theory that came out of the Italian movement from Potere Operaio onwards, which was more important to us." Barker's piece, dated from the late 1990's, goes on to give a brief, but uniquely frank first person perspective on the AB's activities, viewed through the prism of realism, maturity, and continued belief in the revolutionary potential of mass working class action over the clandestine, substitutionist activities of the few - a fitting end to this book.

When Strike One to Educate One Hundred was written, Italy's Red Brigades were crashing out of our daily newspapers into everyone's awareness. Yet, almost no real information about them was available here. Strike One was written for that need. It was not an academic study. It was written by people who were doing it, and read by people who wanted to do it.Now there are many books and countless papers and articles about the Red Brigades' history, but most are from a police and state point of view. Strike One is still a unique and practically useful work, because it tells the other side, of innovative anti-capitalism. It details how the spectre of urban guerrilla warfare grew at last out of the industrial centers of modern Italy. Showing how this was a political project of a young working class layer that was fed up with reformism's lies. The authors, who were varied supporters who chose to remain anonymous due to Italy and NATO's draconian "anti-terrorist" laws, tell much of this story in the militants' own words: in translations of key political documents, news reports and communiqués.Practical details of the BR's innovative politics are a backbone of this book, and especially about its distinctive fighting style in the early defining battles . These working class rebels were categorically opposed to bombings-which they labeled as the indiscriminate, anti-working class tactics of fascists and right-wingers-opposing any armed violence which couldn't precisely target the ruling class and its active servants. This writing also placed that urban guerrilla project in its context in Italy's large, complex 1960s left. Long circulated by left circles as a photocopy, Strike One is finally published here as a book for the first time.