It was a very gloomy time.... And then all of a sudden, there's something to celebrate, and people are feeling happy.
Reminds me of when Italy won the World Cup in 1982 - to me, that marked the end of the dark-dark "Years of Lead" - from night to day!
In a country where people had for years the last 12 years or so - with a little help from our Gladio friends -been literally-murderously politically obsessed and polarized to the point of "cold civil war", with "reds" and "blacks" distinguished by neighbourhood/city/region-of-origin, dress, speech, lifestyle... to such an extreme extent that for young people in Rome it was physically dangerous to walk around in an upper-middleclass area such as Parioli wearing faded jeans and a parka, or in a working-class area such as Testaccio in a camelhair coat and flannel trousers or skirt - allofasudden we were "all Italians" together, all celebrating wild with joy, all united - it was unbelievable!!
And the weeks and months after that, compared to the previous dark bitter years spent counting corpses and meditating revenge, were quite dreamily relaxed ... political extremism was suddenly "out".. miraculously, everyone-but-everyone was suddenly sporting light, bright, summery and non-politically-specific clothes, reading sports mags instead of marx or julius evola ... half the country seemed to be spending its time wandering round the piazzas arm in arm joyfulling reminiscing about every tiny detail of the Great Match while licking lemon icecreams ... then off to the beach.
Not quite the end of the "strategy of tension" ... but it was a watershed - marked a huge mass-psychology turnabout. "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
Meaning relations between the various groups on the left/left-left/left-left-left were as divisive as all the rest ... and no less vicious: Il Manifesto hated Autonomia Operaia which hated Lotta Continua which hated the Maoists who hated the Anarchists - and they ALL hated the PCI!!... and of course vice versa. My experience - friends, friends of friends - was that the far-left covens spent far more time and energy hating each other - and of course the PCI - than they did hating the Fascists, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the govt.... or even NATO itself!
And IMHO the BR (apart perhaps from the very first group which developed around Curcio.?) were an elitist power-worshipping gun-loving gang of self-appointed "saviours/leaders" of "dumb faceless masses"... whom they totally despised. Think it was Alberto Franceschini(??) who said that once when he was trailing Andreotti in central Rome he brushed right up against him, almost had an orgasm on the spot because he had come into contact with "power itself"???
And apart from nasty questions such as Senzani's extremely dubious real allegiance etc. etc. - I can still remember - will never forget - when in 1981 I found myself in the same compartment on a train to France as a group of "brigatisti". All trying to look workingclass-inconspicuous so reading comic-books in the compartment - but their manner, attitudes .. "aura"???....and above all, snatches of jargon-heavy overheard conversations in the train corridors switched on my alarm-bells. I later recognised two of them for sure, the two sitting beside me - including one of the women - on TV when they were arrested several years later. Still don't know who the others were but they were seriously creepy.
'Course I didn't actually tell the railway personnel about my suspicions... typical cowardly omertà-reaction, OK? But I was seriously afraid of a shoot-out on the crowded train (... not bad intuition on my part as that's exactly what happened when Nadia Desdemona Lioce was arrested in 2003) - also because during the night, in the small hours before crossing the frontier they had been messing around in the dark and the nearest they could get to dead silence, but I could hear them -- and just make out their silhouettes through fake-closed eyes - surreptitiously shifting stuff around from ... a couple of suitcases to "somewhere else" (?)... when they believed everyone in the compartment was sound asleep. I hadn't been able to sleep because I was already rigid with anxiety, had been forcing myself to act normal and unconcerned but it was the scariest train-journey of my life. "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
Se vedi rosa spara a vista - o è una saponetta o è una femminista
(If you see pink shoot at sight - it's either a cake of soap or a feminist)
...
They used to try to get the girls from the women's lib. movements put as near as possible to the lead-position in "united" leftwing demo marches - the "testa del corteo" - i.e. if the police started shooting the women would get the bullets instead of them, they could do their own shooting with their beloved P-38s from conveniently behind those human-shield "cakes of pink soap".
This isn't a feminist-victimist legend, btw - I got it straight from a guy who used to be part of Autonomia's Via dei Volsci setup.
Baaaaad times, grrrr - see why I was so elated about that World Cup victory and its pacifying aftermath??? "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
Hey, you know, I would be really, really, really, really interested in a diary about that time and your recollections. This has been a fascinating series of comments.
Soon afterwards she ended her 'latitanza', became one of Italy's first 'pentite' and, as such, didn't have to do time. There were however comrades in via dei Volsci who didn't like that. Neither did the secret services who put me on a 'most undesired foreigners' list and banned me from entering Italy for two years.
The ban was eventually lifted when the president of the German Bundestag committee who has oversight of the federal sec services talked to his collegue in Rome.
The affair cost me my wine business and ten hectars of land in Tuscany and put an end to my hippie period. It brought me to start working in Brussels. "The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819
And it was so very easy in those days to get sucked into the quicksands/crossfire. I was more Berlinguer-zone myself (still am I guess?) and had the blind luck not to come into friendship-contact or loveaffair-contact with any brigatisti - but half the people I knew were either "autonomi" or "lotta continua" (generational factor, particularly if they were two or three years younger than me) and a friend of mine was a close childhood-through-schoolyears friend of a "latitante" - a "known brigatista" on the run -dunno whether real or purported? - so her telephone was constantly wiretapped and at times so was mine. I also remember staying in a cheap pensione in central Rome - just steps away from the Viminale (Ministry in charge of police etc), oddly enough! - while apartament-hunting after my first marriage broke up and finding what looked like half the autonomi from Via dei Volsci were camped out on the 2nd floor, so seeing my friend (female) knew some of them we ended up drifting upstairs most evening to keep company with them, drinking cheap wine by the gallon and all singing "El Pueblo Unido .."... "Bandiera Rossa" and "Bella Ciao" hour after hour as someone plinked out a few chords on a beat-up guitar...
Dunno quite what my feelings are about all this - nostalgia, semi-nostalgia or just-plain-irritation that we all messed up so badly? "Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami
