Keeping moral issue front and center is key

By Peter McDermott

On Aug. 2, 1980, a bomb exploded in the air-conditioned waiting area at Bologna's Central Station. Eighty-five people were killed and more than 200 injured in the worst and final significant act of the period of history Italians call the "Years of Lead." It began with a bomb in a Milan bank in 1969, when 17 people died. Both were the work of the far right, who, fearful of leftist advances, instituted a "strategy of tension."

Sign up to The Irish Echo Newsletter

Sign up today to get daily, up-to-date news and views from Irish America.

The Northern Ireland conflict saw its share of deaths from no-warning and, more frequently, non-enough-warning bombs. And the same is true about other situations around the globe. But outright nihilism, with no apology or apparent need for moral explanation, is particularly associated with both the far right and Islamic extremists (sometimes referred to as Islamists). We saw it with the Oklahoma bombing in 1995 and in Iraq and elsewhere in more recent years. But the worse single act of terror, of course, was the attack and destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

Terrorist groups are essentially military NGOs (though sometimes rogue government elements are pulling the strings or turning a blind eye). And because they can't physically defeat their enemy, they tend to place more emphasis on the symbolism of their targets.

Bologna was attacked, presumably, because it had always been a leftist town, and, since the Resistance and World War II, was ruled by the Communist Party (and still is by its main successor). The atrocity was specifically the work of the neo-fascist NAR - in English, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. A former child actor and far-right militant Valerio Fioravanti and his wife Francesca Mambro, 23 and 22 at time the bombing, were among those NAR members charged with mass murder. Fioravanti admitted to several killings, but said that neither he nor his wife were responsible in that instance. Nonetheless, he was convicted in 1988, and acquitted in the 1990s, before the supreme court later reaffirmed the earlier sentence.

The fact that the case has been in the courts for three decades, and that convictions have been controversial, has kept the Bologna massacre in the public eye. But, crucially, too, members of the families of the victims formed an association, a response to outrages that became more common in subsequent years. The best-known example of the trend was the activism of relatives of the Lockerbie victims.

"People's trial"

Terrorism has proven remarkably ineffective when used against Western or Western-style governments. One reason is that the human victims become symbols in ways not intended by the perpetrators; they form the central part of the narrative of the event. (Only when the state overreacts by mistreating prisoners, for instance, or convicting the wrong people does the narrative shift back closer to the one desired by the perpetrators.)

Perhaps the best example of how terrorist intentions spectacularly misfired was the kidnapping, by the far-left Red Brigades in Rome on March 16, 1978, of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democratic Party

Moro, who was supposed to symbolize a corrupt system, was held in a "people's prison," a tiny windowless room in a Rome apartment, and subjected to a "people's trial." It's true that large swathes of the ruling Christian Democratic Party were indeed corrupt, but the dour Moro himself was not. He was seen as a decent man. He wasn't particularly loved by the public, but he was respected as a skilled politician, an intellectually able lawyer and a devout Catholic.

The Rome column of the Red Brigades issued regular communiqués, which were occasionally accompanied by photos of their prisoner. Some of Moro's correspondence from his cell - to colleagues and family members, including his 6-year-old grandson - was published in the press. Italian citizens didn't think of him as agent of an oppressive system or of the multinationals, as alleged, but rather as a husband, father and grandfather at the center of an unfolding tragedy.

After almost eight weeks, during which the government refused to negotiate the release of prisoners, the Red Brigades put Moro to death. During his "interrogation," however, the politician attempted to show his captors that the world was rather more complicated than they imagined. He sowed the seeds of doubt in some them, which was a factor in the Red Brigades imploding within a few years. The group compounded its error, in January 1979, by murdering trade union organizer and Communist Party member Guido Rossa, who'd informed the police of Red Brigades activity in his factory. That death enraged the labor movement, which had a new martyr it could add to those who'd fought the Fascists in the 1940s.

The room for ambivalence had narrowed considerably; nor could one easily condemn such acts and then try to change the nature of the conversation. One couldn't say: "let's deal with the root causes" when the problem was the violence itself; just as with alcoholism, whatever the factors that led to it, it's the drinking that's the problem.

Tone as position

Yet, when 9/11 happened - with a death toll of almost 40 Bologna massacres - there was some ambivalence, at least abroad, but a lot more changing the conversation.

The context that most people would need was provided in the fullness of time by the Report of the 9/11 Commission and by excellent books such as "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright, Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" and "Perfect Soldiers" by the L.A. Times' Terry McDermott (whom I interviewed for this newspaper).

But, in the days and weeks after the worse act of terrorism in history, some tended to view the event through the prism of their own obsessions.

In a piece posted on the Nation's website less than 72 hours after the four plane were hijacked and crashed, British Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali wrote: "To the victims of the attack and their relatives one can offer our deep sympathy, as one does to people whom the U.S. government has victimized."

A period after "sympathy" might have gone a long way. In the same publication the following year, Adam Shatz suggested that that doyen of the anti-imperialist left Noam Chomsky took a position that wasn't very different from people closer to the center, but faulted his dispassionate tone. Another left-leaning writer Todd Gitlin commented bitterly about Chomsky: "The tone was the position."

That was certainly true of Ali, who condemned Russia, India and Israel's repression and referenced America's crimes dating to the last weeks of the World War II - and this for a publication in a city that had an unknown number of dead under the rubble.

Offering solidarity

Placing America's meddling in the world at the center of the 9/11 story, just after it happened, might be compared to discussing Stalin and the threat of Bolshevism when reporting on the Luftwaffe's attack on Guernica in April 1937.

Peter Preston has written in "A Short History of the Spanish Civil War," citing another historian of the conflict: "As Raymond Carr has pointed out, compared to Hiroshima or Dresden, the bombing of Guernica seems 'a minor act of vandalism.' Yet it has provoked more savage polemic than virtually any incident in the Second World War. That is not as some would have because of the power of Picasso's painting but because Guernica was the first total destruction of an undefended civilian target bombardment."

The world was a different place on Sept. 12, 2001, just as it was on April 27, 1937: the destruction of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan seemed to prefigure a terrible new world with new horrors to come. Chomsky, Ali, the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright just couldn't relate to how people felt.

A dozen years earlier, Ali had staunchly supported novelist Salman Rushdie when the fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini. He called for full support for the British police forces that were charged with protecting him. He didn't seek to contextualize the fatwa. This suggested that he had evolved somewhat from the "street-fighting man" of the late 1960s and the member of the 1970s far-left faction that was supportive of "anti-imperialist freedom fighters" at odds with those very same police forces.

In that Nation piece, Ali said that the Iranian clerics were moderates compared with the Taliban, Al Qaeda's hosts in Afghanistan. Yet, he seemed unable to convey the same sense of solidarity with the victims in New York - window washers, bond traders, secretaries, insurance brokers, firefighters, waiters, cops and the rest - or indeed with the city itself, that he'd offered to a fellow author years earlier.

Gitlin was right: it was all about tone.

France's most influential newspaper Le Monde got it just right with its headline the following day: "We are all Americans."

PHOTO BY PETER MCDERMOTT

 

Donate