The Red Brigade & others.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

To the Editors:

I appreciated David Pryce-Jones's interest in my book Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition ("Delusion & inhumanity;' December 2003). In some important respects, he would have approached the subject differently from the way I did. I noted, however, that in summarizing the book he did not take exception to any of my major points. My main quarrel with his review concerns three factual errors that he makes about the Red Brigades, whose ideological pedigree in the Marxist revolutionary tradition is my principal subject. Left uncorrected, these errors would give the readers of The New Criterion a badly distorted impression of what the Red Brigade threat was and is.

First, Mr. Pryce-Jones mistakenly declares that the members of the Red Brigades were "almost exclusively born into privileged backgrounds." The numerous trials in the Aldo Moro murder case, about which I wrote a book in 1995, revealed that the Red Brigades recruited members and attracted supporters from every level of society. The ubiquity of the revolutionary dream in Italy gave Red Brigadism its propulsive force. At the peak of their power, they only had approximately three hundred members, but for years tens of thousands of people across Italian society supported them. Had the Red Brigades been what Mr. Pryce-Jones says they were, the Italian government could have dealt with them easily, in much the same way that the government of the United States did with the Weather Under ground, a revolutionary group that more closely resembles his characterization of terrorists with privileged backgrounds. Instead, for more than a decade and to an extent unmatched by any other group of its kind in an advanced industrial society, the Red Brigades succeeded in terrorizing the upholders of Italian democrat.

Second, in stating that the Red Brigades murdered twelve hundred people, Mr. Pryce-Jones is guilty of a wild exaggeration. In fact, over the fifteen-year period of this Marxist-Leninist organization's heyday and its immediate aftermath, 1974 to 1988, they murdered no more than ninety people, a statistic that many on the left in Italy ...