18 Jun 2012

Italy’s Great Anarchist Terror: the Red Brigades return from the dead

By Richard Cottrell: Being an ancient country, both events and time tend to run around in continuous circles in Italy. To find clues in understanding the current maze of affairs in that country, the best thing to do is organize a fishing expedition into the past. It is amazing how the most complex issues are thus invariably resolved.
For example, take the following burning question, Is Italy currently laboring under a dictatorship?”
To answer this, we flip back the pages of history to the arrival of Benito Mussolini, back in 1922. The story that he led the march on Rome is, by the way, a hoary old canard. In fact the penniless insurrectionist cadged the train fare from one of his acolytes.
Nonetheless Mussolini’s pledges of nearly a century ago ring a familiar chord in modern Italy.  He preached the virtues of a balanced budget, reorganizing the economy, shaking up the labor markets and so forth.
He got himself elevated to power with the votes of the radical, liberal and Catholic parties, since the Blackshirts had little more than a token force of deputies in parliament.
Seems familiar? Well all becomes clear when you simply swap Mario Monti for Benito Mussolini.

The forces behind Monti obviously boned up on their history books and staged a legalized putsch more or less identical to Mussolini’s, replete with the same promises to clean up the kitchen. The king waved the rising dictator to power. This time around President Giorgio Napolitano kindly obliged on behalf of the new globalist techno-premier. Not being himself short of the readies, Monti obligingly paid his own train fare.
Parliament is reduced to a cipher, little more than a talking shop equipped with an automatic rubber stamp. It will stay that way until the scheduled elections due next spring. The idea is that a new institutionalized force cleaving rather close to a right-wing institutional ‘popular’ force, similar in structure and aims to Mussolini’s popolari (minus the black shirts), will dominate the new parliament.
So, by using this rather simple but elegant analytical tool, we not only gain a better education on current affairs but also important insights into the future. I find that it works for any country, or a given set of circumstances. But Italy is the topic here, for important reasons that I now reveal.
I posted recently on the horrid affair of the schoolyard bombing in Brindisi. This terrible business should be viewed in the same frame as the wave of arrests presently sweeping the country, an enormous round-up of purported ‘anarchists’ bent on anti-establishment acts of violence.
The targets are the alleged members of a shadowy outfit calling itself (or, alternatively, labeled) the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), and a sister cellular organization of similar stripe, the International Revolutionary Front. Between them they are held responsible for attacks both inside Italy and abroad on targets that seem to fit the standard bill of routine anti-establishment violence.
Take for example the Cie detention and expulsion center for illegal immigrants located at Gradisca d’Isonzo in north-eastern Italy, a den of iniquity widely condemned for inhuman conditions akin to a concentration camp. A year ago the reluctant inmates almost burnt the place down. Now it has received a pasting from the anarchists.
The pricey independent Bocconi University in Milan was tailor-made to receive the attentions of the alleged angry brigades, since the rector there was none other than Mario Monti, before he was plucked away to a higher calling.
The offices of the widely-hated Equitalia tax collection and assessment offices, including the headquarters in Rome, received their fair share of attention in the form of letter bombs and other such devices including that famous old stand-by of fulminating anarchists, Molotov cocktails.
In Genova recently, the port city on the north west coast, a prominent official of the Ansaldo Nucleare engineering company, was shot in the leg and thigh by a masked gunman riding pillion on a motor-cycle. This one attack  was cited by the unelected techno-government to roll out a massive force of 14,000 security personnel to safeguard so called ‘exposed’ sites and potential targets around the country. Think the Italian version of the American Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Other attributed attacks – in these instances, outside Italy – include a bombing of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, and for some odd reason, an attack on the Greek embassy in Paris last year.
These incidents are odd unless one takes seriously the remarks of General Giampaolo Ganzer, commander of the ROS special ops organization of the Carabinieri. In the course of rounding up suspects in the aftermath of the shooting in Genova, he gushed excitedly to one of the main TV news channels that his men had uncovered a link between what called the “Greek and Italian components of anarcho-insurrection.”  He added for good measure. “It’s the real news.”
I’d say it’s nothing more than stale, reheated propaganda. The ‘anarcho-insurrection’ is the repeat concoction of  counterfeit synthetic fear-inducing adrenalin cooked up in the same laboratories which gave Italy much of the violence of the anni di piombo, the years of lead,  of the 1970s and 80s.
The Raggruppamento Operative Speciale has Wikipedia admitting that infiltration of suspect cells is one of its main tools.  This means that ROS undercover people penetrate gangs and cells of organizations suspected of smuggling narcotics, arms, human beings for trafficking purposes, and in general a long laundry list of ill-doers.
Several things have to be stated immediately. All those penetrative skills, yet the mighty Italian Mafia is flourishing as never before, knocking up close to 10 per cent of GDP. It seems to be much easier for ROS agents to slip like smoke into basements containing a handful or so of feverishly hallucinating plotters aiming at the hinges of the state, rather than disturb the tranquil meditations of the honorable societies.
It is a matter of documented fact (and by no means solely by myself) that the Italian Red Brigades and their counterparts in Germany (the Red Army Faction, and their cousins in the Revolutionary Cells), the UK (Angry Brigades), Greece (November 17 and lookalikes) were routinely penetrated by military and state secret services.
The British media is alive with stories of environmental protest groups where MI5 and the police routinely deploy sleepers as a matter of course. Old habits die hard.
We can safely say the same of the Greco-Italian ‘anarcho-insurrectionists.’ The problem with the career of an infiltrator is the irresistible attraction to plant not only information-gathering harvesters but full-blown agents provocateur. The environment connection that I just illustrated in the UK led to the courts, where it became clear that activists were indeed stirred up by the implants to perform aggressive acts.
Editor’s note: of course this is exactly what happens in the United States as well with the planting of informants and provocateurs that actually push people to engage in activities they otherwise would not have through encouragement and providing them the resources they need to carry out fake plots.
This is the standard ploy, that worst-kept secret responsible for much of the horror in the course of the long-running republican rebellion in Northern Ireland (aka Ulster). British military intelligence and the home security agencies steered a good deal of the violence committed by both republican and loyalist paramilitaries. Of course state secrets privilege prevent us from knowing the cold hard truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but having had some experience of reporting the Irish war at first hand, I’d say that very little factual information concerning state co-ordination of Irish terrorism is so far in the public realm. Most of it we will never know in any event.
These are important observations that form the background to the Great Anarchist Terror now shaking Italy and, if we are to believe it, Greece as well. Is it any co-incidence that both countries recently experienced the usurpation of their democratic constitutions by the globalista and, as a consequence, now find themselves ground under the heels of the robber barons?
I think not, for the following reasons. In the 1970s and 80s the fear of communist urban guerillas stalked Europe. This was the bogeyman to drive voters to the open arms of safe, Right-wing governments.
The bomb and the bullet were the agencies of fear then, and they have returned once again. Fear needs a driver, so now it is maddened anarchists huddling in dark cellars planning to destruct civilization as we know it. A police raid on the home of one suspect usefully yielded a training manual entitled, “To each his own; 1000 ways to sabotage this world.”
It’s true that the trawlers have caught lots of little fish wriggling in the nets of the anti-terrorist organizations. These are so obviously small fry it seems unreasonable to magnify their importance. But of course their existence is a necessary requirement to convene and dramatize the mirage of rampant anarchist felons on the loose.
It sounds about as useful and effective as dunking witches in the village pond. But if we remember the pre-Soviet use of the medieval ducking stool as a form of repentance-confessional was intended to maintain the discipline of the church and the feudal lordships. What is so striking in this context is the similarity between witch-baiting of yore and the ‘enemy within’ culture of the anni di piombo, namely reds under the bed and now the great utterly fictional anarchist fright.
If George Orwell were alive today, he would doubtless ask a variation on the question that he famously once posed of communism back in the 1930s. Namely, what exactly do anarchists stand for? In the Belle Époque of the late 19th century they threw their bombs at the bourgeoisie and noted captains of the state. That got them precisely nowhere. It was anarchism itself that in the end died the death.  And to cap it all, much of the mayhem was accountable to false flag attacks carried out by state agents.
But the lasting profit fell to governments which used the atrocities to deflect reforms, strengthen rentier-capitalism (to the lasting benefit of the established classes, of course), construct great war machines and justify territorial conquest and expansion.
What is so very different in all of that compared to what we see round us today?
The fabricated anarchist scale has arisen in two countries, Italy and Greece, which are acutely exposed to the great austerity rip-off organized by Wall Street. My educated guess is that the virus will miraculously travel to wherever there is resistance to the austerity bulldozer (Spain, Portugal, and Ireland) and the sprawling omnivorous state-throttling octopus called the EU.
Moreover I expect the scale of violence to increase, possibly to startling proportions – perhaps even reflecting the Bologna station massacre of 1980.
In the UK, David Cameron brazenly deployed the anarchist menace as the source of huge protests against his government’s deeply unpopular austerity policies.
In fact, it is perfectly obvious that secret state troublemakers steered mass demonstrations towards acts of violence of which the targets are always the standard towers of capitalism, such as banks and big department stores.
Synthetic, made-to-order terrorism is an old Italian story – and political tool. Yet the media are self-gagged from measuring the stark similarity between the former Red Brigades and the latest hatching anarchist cells. What could be the reason? A quite well-known commentator working for a large newspaper privately agreed that the Italian state could never be entirely divorced from the direct inspiration and waging of terror.
But any such admission – it was same lame tale during the years of lead – could not be openly discussed because doing so it would expose once and for all the deep-rooted non-functionality of the Italian state itself.
In my new book (see below) I demonstrate that scores of acts were actually performed by neo-fascists in collusion with organized crime, both working as sub-contractors of the secret state.
Gladio, the Italian arm of NATO’s secret armies operation, acted as co-coordinator and promoter of the violence, mainly to sabotage the large and influential communist party, chiefly to keep it away from government.
NATO of course is nothing but an extension of the Pentagon, which led one of main mercenaries of the period, the neo-fascist gunman and bomber Vinci Vinciguerra to admit that he was working all along for a ‘sentient foreign power.’
The reel of time has now carried history forward. The wild-maned satirist Beppe Grillo, whose independent 5 Star Movement presently rides at a rather astonishing (and to the cliques clustered around Monti, perfectly terrifying) 21% in the polls, pulled no punches by stating the bombers and masked gunman are back in a new phase of the state-inspired ‘strategy of tension.’
In the classic but invariably handy phrase borrowed from those vultures of Wall Street, you may be sure that when it comes to synthetic terror, what goes around comes around.

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