Anatomy of the Red Brigades : the religious mind-set of modern terrorists / Alessandro Orsini ; translated from the Italian by Sarah J. Nodes.

Cover image for Anatomy of the Red Brigades : the religious mind-set of modern terrorists / Alessandro Orsini ; translated from the Italian by Sarah J. Nodes.

ISBN:

9780801460913

Title:

Anatomy of the Red Brigades : the religious mind-set of modern terrorists / Alessandro Orsini ; translated from the Italian by Sarah J. Nodes.

Author:

Orsini, Alessandro, 1975-

Personal Author:

Orsini, Alessandro, 1975-

Uniform Title:

Anatomia delle Brigate rosse. English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 317 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

1. The Pedagogy of Intolerance -- The Revolutionary Vocation -- Violence as the Only Way -- The "Binary Code" Mentality -- Political Violence and Social Marginality -- Eschatological Politics -- 2. The Sacralization of Politics -- The "Fanaticism of a New Religion" -- Radical Catastrophism -- The Revolutionary Sect and the Obsession with Purity -- The Hatred of Reformists -- 3. Toward the Bloodshed -- Daily Life in a Revolutionary Sect -- The Red Brigades' Organization Plan -- The Blood Crime and Its "Story" -- The Path to Bloodshed -- Shedding Blood and the Role of the Revolutionary Sect -- The Detachment from the Surrounding World -- 4. The Genesis of the Red Brigades -- The Red Brigades' Social Roots -- The "Cultural Lag" Theory -- When Were the Red Brigades Born? -- The Red Brigades: "Imbeciles" or Real Revolutionaries? -- Antonio Gramsci and the "Hour of Redemption" -- The Italian Communist Party's Role in the Genesis of the Red Brigades -- An Oxymoron: The "Leninist-Reformist" Party -- 5. The Masters of the Red Brigades -- Illustrious Predecessors: Thomas Muntzer -- John of Leiden, King and Revolutionary -- The English Revolution and the Puritan Movement -- The French Revolution and the Jacobin Experiment -- Babeuf: "The world has plunged into chaos" -- Karl Marx's Pantoclastic Dream -- The Revolutionary Tradition of Russian Populism -- 6. The Purifiers of the World in Power -- Lenin and State Terrorism -- The Bolshevik Revolution and the "Victims of the Victims" -- The Gulag, or The Promise Kept -- Mao and the Myth of the "New Man" -- The Cambodian Revolution -- Not a Conclusion: Portrait of a Red Brigadist.

Local Note:

eBooks on EBSCOhost

Corporate Subject:

Brigate rosse.

Subject Term:

Ideology.

Terrorism.

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

Click here to view

Publication Date:

2011

Publication Information:

Ithaca, N.Y. :

Cornell University Press,

2011.

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
363.3250945 22	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

Alessandro Orsini is professor of political sociology in the Faculty of Political Science, LUISS University of Rome "Guido Carli." He also teaches at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and is the author of several books in Italian.