Ending Terrorism in Italy by Bull Anna Cento; Cooke Philip;

Author:Bull, Anna Cento; Cooke, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The defeat is now acknowledged [by the dissociated], but as a defeat of an entire ideological patrimony.

(p. 302)

Gallinari’s last acts in prison went precisely in the direction of trying to safeguard this ideological patrimony, admitting defeat but preserving a Marxist political identity for posterity. In 1988 he and other Red Brigades members released an official declaration from prison in which they accepted defeat and called for the need to engage in a ‘political struggle, a mass struggle, as the fundamental terrain upon which it is possible to rebuild antagonistic movements in the present’ (p. 340). Significantly, his book ends with the sentence: ‘End of a history. History continues’. (p. 340)

It is interesting to note that, in the Preface to this book, Erri De Luca, a radical left-wing writer and an intellectual sympathetic to the ideals of those who took part in the armed struggle, addresses Gallinari as follows: ‘This is not a political book, dear Prospero, it is the book of a father who has had no children’ (p. 9). His meaning is obviously metaphorical rather than literal, and appears to refer to the absence of a new generation ready to take on the ideals of its predecessors. Yet it seems also to contradict the ending of Gallinari’s book, which leaves open the possibility that a new antagonistic generation may yet emerge.

In the Preface to her first book, Compagna luna, in which she alternates a narrative of herself-as-hero in the past with present-day reflections upon the armed struggle and the way it ended, Balzerani clarifies that

This is not the story of the Red Brigades. I could not do it. It is only a part of what and how I lived. It is the outcome of my most urgent questions. It is a request for help in trying to address them. It is the hope that one day it will be possible to tell that story.

(p. 9)

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