The controversy against Giorgia Meloni, for having evoked the years of lead and accused the left of fomenting political hatred, He led me to take old books dedicated to the birth of the reinforced party in hand. In particular, I returned to browse one entitled what the BR. To write it, more than twenty years ago, was a Panorama journalist, Giovanni Fasanella, together with one of the founders of the red brigades. In the form of an interview with the former terrorist Alberto Franceschini, the volume digs in search of the roots of a movement that bloodied and terrified Italy. With a partisan grandfather who ended up making, after the war, the custodian at the headquarters of the Chamber of Labor of Reggio Emilia, Franceschini grew up on bread and PCI, breathing in the family stories on the resistance and revolutionary nostalgia. At 14 he was already in his pocket the card of the communist youth federation and 16 dreamed of a not very peaceful way to the revolution. He was not twenty years old when, around the FGCI section, he began to train a very large and fierce group of young people. “The nucleus of future red brigades?” He asks Fasanella. «The most important one, at least. The most important from the numerical and organizational capacity “.
It was 1967 and despite the fact that there had not yet been the massacre of Piazza Fontana, That according to the vulgate of the left pushed in the arms of terrorism an entire generation as a reaction to fascist violence, some of the young people welcomed in the party section had already had their baptism of fire, shooting, without hitting him, to a National Manager of the PLI. At the time Franceschini was a member of the FGCI Federal Committee and also that of the PCI. And his companions were called Prospero Gallinari, Roberto Ognibene, Attilio Casaletti, Fabrizio Pelli, Tonino Paroli, Lauro Azzolini, Franco Bonisoli. They all came from communist families and all ended up in the BR. A group that had the armed struggle as its objective. I have heard these days that the brigatists were born against the PCI: nonsense. Franceschini’s testimony is clear from this point of view: they appeared inside the Communist Party, nourished by the stories of the former partisans, who after hiding the weapons used during the resistance dreamed of passing them to the youngest, as some of them did. «We were in 1968-69. The idea we had, clear and precise, was that we had to build an armed structure ». “While staying inside the PCI?” He asks Fasanella. “The idea was born in 1967, then none of us thought of leaving the party.” Franceschini and his companions were not yet terrorists but rather participated in the demonstrations for peace, such as the one against the visit to Italy of American President Richard Nixon in Italy. However, while the red flags of the FGCI agitated, they prepared those with the 5 -pointed star. The first action of the group dates back to a few months later: Franceschini, Gallinari and Paroli entered the Reggio Emilia engine factory at night, Lombardini. They were armed because the factory was patrolled by the night guards, but they did not worry about the risk of a shooting: they cut the net and, once inside, on the wall of the department they wrote “Lombardini we will learn you”.
Violence as growing up
You will wonder why you tell all this. I explain it immediately. First, political violence did not come suddenly in our lives: it was a crescendo. At the beginning, verbal, then also physical, with clashes in the square. Then the rest came. Second, it is not true that the left has always fought the BR: for years, instead of recognizing that they were born inside, she continued to talk about self -styled red brigades, accrediting the idea of groups of provocaters maneuvered by the secret services, and unrelated to the communist movement. No, they were companions, born and raised in the PCI. And, as we have seen, also engaged in struggles against NATO and for peace in Vietnam. Under the fire of the BR some militants of the social movement, exponents of the DC, many men of the police, magistrates and journalists fell. In 1979, that is, more than ten years after the birth of the terrorist group, Guido Rossa, a worker of the “guilty” Etalsider, was killed that he had denounced the “postman” who distributed flyers with the five -pointed star inside the steel. Red, a communist trade unionist, after a heated discussion among the representatives of the factory council, was left alone by his companions, who refused to put the signature under the complaint to the carabinieri. Other than extraneous to the PCI: the BRs grew and were able to operate by enjoying the silence of a large area of militants. In the book by Massimiliano Griner, the gray area, a environment made up of intellectuals, professors, journalists, lawyers, magistrates and workers, who did not participate in terrorist actions, but sympathized for them. Franceschini said: “Hundreds of people passed in the BR, one -day brigatists, a month, a year, then returned to their work.”
The political hatred that returns
Where do I want to arrive? To observe that, although taking into account the inevitable differences, it cannot be ignored that the national and international situation is incandescent and dangerous. Remembering that political struggle can escape from hand and can turn into armed struggle. If then there were the pacifists who contrast American imperialism, today there are those who go against Trump in defense of democracy and Palestine. At the time we with Vietnam had little to do, but this did not prevent someone from starting from there to end up shooting. Today even with what happens to Gaza we have little to do, but certain slogans, certain verbal violence, make no distinctions. Hate is hate: you know where it begins (against Netanyahu, against Trump, against Meloni), but you don’t know where it ends.
