The Red Brigades

Anomie: Anarchy in the 21st Century

Formed in 1970, the Red Brigades sought to create a revolutionary state through armed struggle, and to remove Italy from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The organization attained notoriety in the 1970s and early 1980s with their violent acts of sabotage, bank robberies, the kneecapping of certain industrialists, factory owners, bankers, and politicians deemed to be exploitative; and the kidnappings and/or murders of industrialists, prominent capitalists, politicians, law enforcement officials, and other perceived “enemies” of the working-class revolution. Nearly fifty people were killed in its attacks between 1974 and 1988.

Models for the BR included the Latin American urban guerrilla movements and the World War II Italian partisan movement, which was itself a mostly leftist, anti-fascist revolutionary movement that the BR saw itself as a continuation of, an example of a youthful anti-fascist minority using violent means for just ends. The group was also influenced by volumes on the Tupamaros published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, "a sort of do-it-yourself manual for the early Red Brigades".

In the 1980s, the group was broken up by Italian investigators, with the aid of several leaders under arrest who turned pentito and assisted the authorities in capturing the other members.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBruqMpk5-4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTmFgGOlqTM&ab_channel=Reddebrek