A website called La storia nascosta (The Hidden Story) quotes something I’m supposed to have said in El País: “The Red Brigades had the right idea about fighting against multinational companies, but were wrong to believe in terrorism.” It implies that I would go along with the formula “comrades who get it wrong,” and concede that “one could agree with the ideas, but not with the methods.” And it concludes: “If this is all Italian culture has to say thirty years after the assassination of Aldo Moro, it’s the same old story. Alas.”
But the site also has comments from visitors, including these sensible words from an anonymous person: “I rather doubt that Prof. Eco would have said something so banal. Foucault’s Pendulum includes, among other things, his own personal assessment of the Red Brigades in the 1960s and ’70s, which certainly doesn’t glorify the world of terrorism. I would be curious to know his exact words, and not the version that comes from the newspapers.” The person who runs the website, on the other hand, has read neither my Foucault’s Pendulum nor the articles I wrote in La Repubblica at the time of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder, which were republished in my book Sette anni di desiderio (Seven Years of Desire). That is his right, which I will defend until my dying day. But I suspect he hasn’t read my interview in El País either, based on a number of paragraphs in Italian, and which the article summed up in a few lines. To make a deduction from incomplete and false premises is an error of logic.
I will nevertheless respond, out of respect for that cautious anonymous contributor, and for others who, from a visit to this insidious website, might be led astray in all good faith.
What I said in the Spanish interview was the same as I had written thirty years ago. I said that the newspapers described the statements of the Red Brigades as “insane” when they talked about the so-called “Imperialist State of the Multinationals,” whereas, though expressed in rather colorful terms, it was the only idea that was not insane—save for the fact that the idea was not theirs but had been borrowed from European and American publications, in particular the Monthly Review. Talking at that time about the State of the Multinationals meant believing that world politics was no longer determined by individual governments but by a network of transnational economic powers who could moreover decide on questions of war and peace. In those days the prime example was what became known as the Seven Sisters, the seven oil companies that dominated the world’s petroleum industry. But today even children talk about globalization, and globalization means that the lettuce we eat is grown in Burkina Faso, washed and packaged in Hong Kong, and sent to Romania before being distributed to Italy or France. And that is the government of multinationals, and if the example seems banal, think about how large transnational aircraft companies can influence the decisions of the Italian government when it comes to the future of Alitalia.
What was truly insane in the thinking of the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups was the conclusions they drew from it: first, that to fight the multinationals there had to be a revolution in Italy; second, to throw the multinationals into turmoil they had to kill Moro and many other good people; third, that their actions would lead the proletariat to revolution.
First of all, revolution in a single country would have made little difference to the multinationals, and in any event international pressure would have quickly restored order; second, the influence of one Italian politician in this game of interests was entirely irrelevant; and third, they ought to have realized that, however many people the terrorists killed, the working class would not have been drawn into a revolution. And to understand this, there was no need to forecast how events would develop. It sufficed to look at what had happened with the Tupamaros in Uruguay and similar movements that managed, at most, to persuade colonels in Argentina to carry out not a revolution but a coup d’état, while the proletarian masses lifted not a finger.
Now, anyone who draws three wrong conclusions from a premise that is, all in all, quite acceptable can only be wrong. If one of my school friends had said that because the Sun rises and sets, then it revolves around the Earth, I would have called him not just wrong, but an idiot.
2008