I remember the Aldo Moro incident, and some of the rest. Italy, as they say, was a f*****g mess, but it was only the worst example. In 1985, I was shepherding a group of high school students through Syntagma Square in Athens. Five hours later, someone set off a bomb- ineptly, and in typically Greek fashion as it turned out. Only a few shops were damaged, but the intent was to kill many American tourists.
HOLY CRAP! Does it spook you to think that you and all those poor kids were mere minutes away from sustaining massive internal injuries and/or dying? Wow!
Look, there's no reason to think what happened in Italy won't happen again--or happen elsewhere. In some places, it already is.
June of 1975 is when I enlisted in the army. I shipped out to Germany in ... derp, w/o looking at my DD214, I'd say a year later. In those days, the Baader-Meinhof (Germany's version of the Red Army Faction) were busy partying it up. I didn't know names or dates, but I knew that the shit was going down in Italy as well.
People forget that, back in those days, there was still an East Germany (I was stationed 12 kliks from the border. On the *west* side, I mean.) Active communist insurgent groups were a very real thing in those days, and even I sometime forget how tense things could get. (There was a day on the tac site when our good friends on the other side of the wire flew an unmarked DC-3 over the border trailing a banner that said "Yankee Your Day Is Coming." Well, the thing was loaded to the gills with ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) equipment, so we just put our radars into standby and let them have their little joke. No point in feeding them valuable intel about our equipment.
Part of me is hesitant to call a militant organization that exclusively targets relevant individuals "terrorist" in the strictest sense of the word. Terrorism (in my very "Professor Twist" sense of the word) is about *terror* in the general population. So, while Italy's RAF would have given me no notice, their neo-fascists would have been just as happy to blow me to Jesus as the next random bystander. I'm not aware of a good term to distinguish between the target versus arbitrary violence, but it seems to me like there ought to be such a term, because there is something important happening in the difference.
I wonder of the reason Italy took a hard line re: Moro's abduction precisely because of what he was about to do?
That's a hell of a story. Two movies for you, if you haven't already watched them (and no, they're not about Baader-Meinhof, but they are German, and they do hearken from that period): Goodbye, Lenin and The Lives of Others. So freaking amazing.
Italy's hard line on Moro's abduction continues to bewilder. Much of the government back then still had the old hardliners from the Mussolini era, and Moro was a compassionate, centrist leftie. So ... it's possible that the fix was in. I know the carabinieri and other policing agencies were a HOT MESS back then. Many of them carried submachine guns, which they were quite willing to shove in your face. A lot of drug use, too.
I'm pretty fatalistic about things like that. That's not the only example of a time when I've just missed something terrible. In fact, there's a far worse example I'll spare you. I don't want to seem laissez-faire about my mortality, but I always figures that if something happens, I hope I'll at least be able to take a few of the bastards with me. 😊
I remember the Aldo Moro incident, and some of the rest. Italy, as they say, was a f*****g mess, but it was only the worst example. In 1985, I was shepherding a group of high school students through Syntagma Square in Athens. Five hours later, someone set off a bomb- ineptly, and in typically Greek fashion as it turned out. Only a few shops were damaged, but the intent was to kill many American tourists.
Europe was fun then, wasn't it??
HOLY CRAP! Does it spook you to think that you and all those poor kids were mere minutes away from sustaining massive internal injuries and/or dying? Wow!
Look, there's no reason to think what happened in Italy won't happen again--or happen elsewhere. In some places, it already is.
The ghost in the machine isn't "them." It is us.
June of 1975 is when I enlisted in the army. I shipped out to Germany in ... derp, w/o looking at my DD214, I'd say a year later. In those days, the Baader-Meinhof (Germany's version of the Red Army Faction) were busy partying it up. I didn't know names or dates, but I knew that the shit was going down in Italy as well.
People forget that, back in those days, there was still an East Germany (I was stationed 12 kliks from the border. On the *west* side, I mean.) Active communist insurgent groups were a very real thing in those days, and even I sometime forget how tense things could get. (There was a day on the tac site when our good friends on the other side of the wire flew an unmarked DC-3 over the border trailing a banner that said "Yankee Your Day Is Coming." Well, the thing was loaded to the gills with ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) equipment, so we just put our radars into standby and let them have their little joke. No point in feeding them valuable intel about our equipment.
Part of me is hesitant to call a militant organization that exclusively targets relevant individuals "terrorist" in the strictest sense of the word. Terrorism (in my very "Professor Twist" sense of the word) is about *terror* in the general population. So, while Italy's RAF would have given me no notice, their neo-fascists would have been just as happy to blow me to Jesus as the next random bystander. I'm not aware of a good term to distinguish between the target versus arbitrary violence, but it seems to me like there ought to be such a term, because there is something important happening in the difference.
I wonder of the reason Italy took a hard line re: Moro's abduction precisely because of what he was about to do?
That's a hell of a story. Two movies for you, if you haven't already watched them (and no, they're not about Baader-Meinhof, but they are German, and they do hearken from that period): Goodbye, Lenin and The Lives of Others. So freaking amazing.
Italy's hard line on Moro's abduction continues to bewilder. Much of the government back then still had the old hardliners from the Mussolini era, and Moro was a compassionate, centrist leftie. So ... it's possible that the fix was in. I know the carabinieri and other policing agencies were a HOT MESS back then. Many of them carried submachine guns, which they were quite willing to shove in your face. A lot of drug use, too.
War destroys people, even after it's over.
The German polizei I saw in the airport at Frankfurt (the only place I ever saw them), always moved in pairs, one of whom carried an SMG as well.
I'm pretty fatalistic about things like that. That's not the only example of a time when I've just missed something terrible. In fact, there's a far worse example I'll spare you. I don't want to seem laissez-faire about my mortality, but I always figures that if something happens, I hope I'll at least be able to take a few of the bastards with me. 😊