#coaltion propaganda

[empirearchives]

“In other cities, the often harsh censors forced writers to tone down or delete their enthusiastic comments [about Napoleon]. As Houben has shown, Heine suffered especially from a severe censorship. In the 1830’s, however, he battled not only with the official German censors, but also with the editors of Cotta’s Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung who were reluctant to offend the conservative reader. This double censorship is a significant factor in Heine’s less enthusiastic representations of his hero in the Französische Zustände and later in Lutezia.”

[long70s]

ANNI DI PIOMBO

Since the 1981 release of Die Bleierne Zeit, Margerethe von Trotta’s film about west-German terrorists, Italians have referred to the 1970s as the anni di piombo–the leaden years. The expression may also be an allusion to the high number of bullets fired. Both meanings are appropriate: from the 1969 bombing of the Banco Nazionale d'Agricoltura in Milan to the explosion in the Bologna train station that killed 85 people in 1980, domestic left-wing terrorist groups mounted a decade-long, armed assault on the Italian state, its ruling classes, the governing Democrazia Cristiana party, and ultimately, the postwar settlement of Italy.

The violence reached a climax at precisely the moment when the extreme left was to be given a formal role in national politics for the first time. To perpetuate their hold on the government, in 1977, under the leadership of Aldo Moro and Giulio Andreotti, the Christian-Democrats forged the compromesso storico, which admitted the Italian Communist Party into the ruling center-left coaltion. The inclusion of the PCI was opposed by leftists who viewed the plan as cynical co-option of their cause, and by the right, which opposed the recognition of Communism categorically.

In an effort to derail the implementation of the compromise, the Brigate Rosse kidnapped Aldo Moro, who had served as president of the Consiglio dei Ministri, foreign secretary, and coalition leader, in Rome on 16 March 1978 and executed him two months later when demands for the release of leftist prisoners were denied.

Investigations (which dragged on until the 1990s) eventually implicated senior members of the government, the judiciary, the national police and intelligence agencies and secret right-wing Masonic societies like the Propaganda Due. The CIA and KGB were also said to have participated in Moro’s “punishment” for upsetting the status quo imposed by the Treaty of Yalta. Despite the vast scale of of the web of intrigue and corruption, no one beyond the members of the Brigate Rosse were prosecuted, and the life imprisonnent sentences of those who were convicted were commuted.