Red Brigade

[YA BASTA VIVA]

Was the red brigade a bad communist group so far i have herd only bad things about them? Were they just the E.Z.L.N of that time? :ph34r:

[bolshevik butcher]

Hmm, I wouldn't say they were 'bad' so much as their tactics were wrong. Like the red army faction in germany the tactics they employed were isolationists and no way were they going to build up a mass movment. It also allowed teh intelligence services to do things like plant bombs and blame them, tarring their image.

[LoneRed]

But would you say that there were more pro's than con's?

[EusebioScrib]

The BR were a pretty good group (note the avatar). Clenched Fist got it sorta right when he said their tactics were wrong.

The problem with the BR was that their tactics were too "political" and they began to steadily divorce themselves from the VERY strong working class movement in Italy at the time (the BR's high-point was in the 70's, the period immediately after the Italian Hot Autumn).

The late 60's early 70's were a strong time in terms of working class power. Worker take overs, councils, strikes, and literal class warfare (a few instances of blowing up bosses cars or homes) were frequent occurences in the industrial sectors of northern Italy (note: the movement was not connected at all with the PCd'I [Italian Communist Party]...the movement actually grew out of anti-vanguardism and the Autonomist tendency started to manifest itself in this period).

Because the BR's actions were strictly political, they lost support of workers who were more concerned with issues that effected them directly. This ultimately led to their demise.

[Leo]

I would say that they were a rather unfortunate group... They weren't the EZLN of their time, if they were like the EZLN they would try to organize in Southern Italian villages instead of central and urban northern Italy. They were more like the RAF of Italy, those organizations like that are a kind of their own. (CCC in Belgium, The Angry Brigade in England, November 17 in Greece, Weather Underground in US and despite its Stalinism DHKP-C in Turkey can all be accepted as the same kind.) Red Brigades, like other organizations of that kind, was an organization which had a great potential of doing great things. Their members were very young, very excited and they were eventually manipulated. The kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro was the action that completely killed the Red Brigades as well. Their members were rapidly captured, they were seperated from the masses.

Red Brigades were probably manipulated by the stay-behind agents of NATO (Gladio) to kill Aldo Moro. They didn't seem to know what they were doing, Gladio had infiltrated in the Red Brigades and Italian left, collectively was crippled by the media and the public opinion after this event.

Unfortunately, when you look up to those organizations, all you will see is who or what they damaged. Their ideologies are lost behind their actions. We can however learn something from them, and it's this: you can't make propaganda with guns no matter how good your vision is!