Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

From the outset, Italian Left terrorists placed far greater emphasis upon their purported relationship to the ‘workers’; and indeed in certain industrial towns of the north, Milan in particular, the more respectable fringes of the ultra-Left did have a small popular following. Unlike the German terrorists, grouped around a tiny hard core of criminals, the Italian far Left ranged from legitimate political parties through urban guerrilla networks to micro-sects of armed political bandits, with a fair degree of overlap in membership and objectives. These groups and sects replicated in miniature the fissiparous history of the mainstream European Left. In the course of the 1970s each violent act would be followed by assertions of responsibility by hitherto unknown organizations, frequently by sub-sections and breakaways from the original unit. Beyond the terrorists themselves orbited a loose constellation of semi-clandestine movements and journals whose sententious ‘theoretical’ pronouncements offered ideological cover for terrorist tactics.