Anatomy of the Red Brigades. The Religious Mindset of Modern Terrorists

In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, the author 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, the author reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. 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. Alessandro Orsini’s book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.