Red Brigades Terrorist Dies at 72, But Is the Revolutionary Zeal Dead?

Italian media reported on Thursday on the death of Anna Laura Braghetti, saying she died at the age of 72 of an unspecified illness. The name likely rings a bell with few of our readers, although she did rise to ‘fame’ more than four decades ago: she was a member of the Red Brigades, and one of the terrorists responsible for the kidnapping and murdering of Italian Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro in 1978.

Braghetti came from a lower-middle-class family and was working as a simple clerk when she became involved with the radical, extra-parliamentary Left. She must have been one of those “young Marxists disillusioned with the Italian Communist Party,” as a CIA document put it in 1982. Mind you, a Communist party that itself was so extremely Stalinist that it actually supported Moscow during the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. In fact, Braghetti probably thought the Italian Communists were too lukewarm, so she decided to join an “armed organization,” as she put it in an interview. 

By 1978, still with no criminal record, Braghetti was an active member of the Roman column of the Red Brigades, led by Mario Moretti. That year, she was assigned the task of renting an apartment near the EUR district that would then serve as the prison for two-time Prime Minister Aldo Moro during the 55 days of his kidnapping between March 16 and May 9, 1978. 

Let’s pause for a moment: it is worth recalling here what Moro’s ‘sin’ was. He was the chief advocate of the so-called Historic Compromise, a rapprochement between the Italian Christian Democrats and the Communists, who, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, were turning away from Moscow and embarking on a more moderate, democratic route towards a possible grand coalition. That was something radical fanatics like the members of the Red Brigades could not stomach. 

Braghetti’s task was to serve as a cover for the other Red Brigades members who kept Moro prisoner in the apartment, pretending to be the girlfriend of one of the terrorists, and securing food supplies for the group in the hideout. 

After Moro was killed, Braghetti went underground, only to actively participate in some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks carried out by the Brigades’ Roman column. On May 3, 1979, during the raid on the Christian Democratic Party’s headquarters in Piazza Nicosia, she and another Brigades member opened fire on a police car that had rushed to the scene, killing two officers, Antonio Mea and Piero Ollanu. A few months later, on February 12, 1980, Braghetti participated in the assassination of Vittorio Bachelet, vice president of the Superior Council of the Judiciary and former vice president of Catholic Action, at La Sapienza University in Rome. She was finally arrested on May 27, 1980, then tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.

While Braghetti was caught and put behind bars for what she did right after the Moro assassination, many of her fellow terrorists managed to escape justice for years, with some possibly still being at large (provided they are still alive). In 2021, Emmanuel Macron’s office said it had detained seven former members of the Red Brigades, at the request of Italy, and that they would be extradited to Rome. This was not something that could be taken for granted, as the Left never renounced the exculpation of violence in the fight for ‘social justice’: former French Socialist President Francois Mitterrand offered left-wing radicals protection from extradition, provided they renounced violence and had not been accused of violent acts. This so-called Mitterrand Doctrine led to tension between France and Italy for decades.

As for Braghetti, she was granted parole in 2002, after serving 22 years in prison. In the following years, Braghetti devoted herself to social work, coordinating a service for prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families. She also wrote two books, the first, interestingly, in collaboration with another terrorist, Francesca Mambro, a former militant of the neofascist Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari. 

As Il Giornale noted, she never denied her past and, in her late years, described her motivation for joining the Red Brigades thus: “I was looking for a way to change the world and I tried to understand if the Red Brigades were the instrument to make the revolutionary dream come true. But that dream turned into a nightmare.”

This confession seems to confirm the idea proposed in the book Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mindset of Modern Terrorists, according to which “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 effects of capitalism and imperialism.”

This revolutionary zeal that wants to redeem the world while giving little consideration to moral imperatives or the suffering of actual individuals is unfortunately still not defunct. Ilaria Salis and members of the German Hammergang, the Antifa extremists who beat people ‘looking like Neo-Nazis’ to pulp on the streets of Budapest, are the ideological heirs of the Red Brigades. And they refuse to repent.