The Affaire Moro and Notes for a Reinterpretation of the Cold War and the Nature of Terrorism
ABSTRACT
The abduction and assassination in March 1978 of Christian-Democrat statesman Aldo Moro—Italy’s “JFK mystery”—is treated by the managing establishment of collective memory in two different ways. One—the so-called “reductionist” (i.e. anti-conspiratorial) approach takes the whole affaire at face value—in other words, it regurgitates the episode through the black-and-white rendition of a crisis-stricken government that, for the length of roughly a decade (the 1970s), became so untiringly sieged by popular grievance that such collective revulsion eventually degenerated into pathological forms such as terrorism. Of these terrorist acts, the elimination of Moro came to represent the epitomic and symbolic climax. Whereas the other—a conspiracy theory of the Left, and a highly popular one (hereafter referred to as “the vulgate”)—imputes the elimination of the statesman to highly sophisticated scheming, ultimately directed by foreign powers (the United States and/or Britain according to a few variants), which were bent on denying Italy any kind of political autonomy. In particular, this script maintains that Anglo-American circles conspired to foil a proto-nationalist alliance, led by Aldo Moro from the Catholic center and by Enrico Berlinguer from the Communist Left, whose common vision would have animated a far-sighted policy of international independence in the Mediterranean basin. Being “reductionism” not worth the critical effort, it is here argued that “the vulgate,” instead, is a myth; that this proto-nationalist alliance was never contemplated. Rather, what seemed to have occurred from 1969 until the early 1980s was an unrelenting attack of different factions (with foreign ramifications) against Italy’s Catholic tenure. One such onslaught appears to have been launched by way of Italian Communism in the late 1970s, and it was in one of the defining episodes of this ruthless fight that Moro came to be “sacrificed.”