The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies, the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. The Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence i ... More

The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies, the Red Brigades' most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy's former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. The Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia. This book contends that 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. The book's “subversive-revolutionary feedback theory” states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. The book makes clear that this political–religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled “purifiers of the world.” From Thomas Müntzer's theocratic dream to Pol Pot's Cambodian revolution, all the violent “purifiers” of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony.