Nicholas Rao
Ed. Piemme, Milan 2024
pagg.223
Hazet 36 e teaspoon are terms unknown to most people today, but well known to those who, in the Seventies, found themselves living through the period of violent protest in cities like Milan - the scene of the greatest and most tragic acts of political violence - where this essay by Nicola Rao, director of communications for Rai, is set. The author had the opportunity to view the minutes of school and municipal councils and the sentences relating to that period. He also interviewed some of the protagonists of that era, an era in which it was considered normal to go out and see blood on the sidewalks, an era in which a real war was fought, with deaths and injuries, a war, however, forgotten or that people wanted to forget and that was fought on the streets, but above all in schools and universities.
“After more than half a century, there are still those who lived through those years who prefer to talk about that period under the guarantee of anonymity.”
The Settimo and the Molinari, two schools in the outskirts of Milan, “they are the outposts of militant anti-fascism. […] Yes, because political militancy is another of the youth musts of these black and white years”. Here the Katanga - the security teams of the Student Movement of the University of Milan commanded by Mario Capanna - and Avanguardia Operaia, both far-left collectives, are in charge.
Mario Capanna is the one leading the protests against the professors of the Statale, guilty of opposing his diktat “which established what to ask students during the exam and also what to ask them. And above all what grade to give them”.
Professor Pietro Trimarchi, full professor of private law institutions, for having dared to rebel against this system, as reported in the deposition of a policeman who had tried to defend him, “He was covered in spit in an impressive way. Spit was running down his face, down his neck, onto his clothes. The students were throwing him around.”
In 1971, the weapon appearsHazet 36, a wrench, very comfortable and functional as it can be hidden under a trench coat or jacket without being seen. And it is starting to spread “a neologism: cucchino. That is, the organized aggression of a group of people on a single, defenseless target".
“The first head broken by the keys was that of twenty-year-old Leonardo Avella, a militant of the Youth Front.” It is Christmas Eve 1972. It will be the first of a long series.
Violence spreads, from both political sides, and escalates. On May 28, 1974, in Piazza della Loggia, Brescia, a bomb explodes during a demonstration against fascist violence. “The one in Brescia is perhaps the least mysterious of the massacres, at least in terms of its origin and motivation: a fascist bomb placed in a demonstration of declared enemies, of anti-fascists. […] Anti-fascist anger explodes throughout Italy”. Many sections of the MSI and Cisnal were attacked. “Moreover, the syllogism of these years is stringent and does not allow nuances or distinctions: the massacre is fascist – the MSI is the party of fascists – the MSI is responsible for the massacre. Obviously this is not the case, but now logic and lucidity are increasingly giving way to madness and the desire for revenge”. And so on June 17th it happened that the Red Brigades attacked an MSI headquarters, in via Zabarella, in Padua, killing the two people who were inside. “These are the first two deaths caused by the Red Brigades.”
Meanwhile, in Milan, attacks on right-wing students continue at school. “The diktat is always the same: you must not enter because you are a fascist.” At Molinari there is a student who is being monitored by the moral police of the institute. His name is Sergio Ramelli and he frequents the Fronte della Gioventù.
A day in the first week of December “the Italian teacher assigns Sergio's class an essay on the Red Brigades”. Sergio expresses his ideas by pointing the finger at the murderous violence of the Red Brigades, referring to the massacre in Padua. “The classmate in charge of collecting the essays and taking them to the teachers’ lounge is intercepted by a red patrol, who steals his writings and begins to sift through them. To see if anyone has written something wrong about the Red Brigades. And they find someone. Yes, it is Sergio, guilty of having called the Red Brigades murderers and manipulators, not revolutionaries. A few hours later, two sheets of paper, pinned up with thumbtacks, appear on the noticeboard in the large atrium of the Molinari. On them is a red writing: HERE IS THE ESSAY OF A FASCIST. The text is full of red underlining. The gates of hell are about to open for Sergio”.
The following year, on January 13, during a lesson, he was taken by a cell of Avanguardia Operaia and forced to erase, with a brush, fascist writings that had appeared on the school wall. On February 3, accompanied by his father to ask for permission to transfer to another school, he was attacked by about fifty “guardians of the revolution”, who had gathered outside the principal’s office. “Sergio feels ill and faints, the ambulance and the police are called."
Sergio changes school, enrolling in a private institute. After all, the aim of his "companions" was to “expel the ‘fascists’ from all public schools to prevent them from engaging in […] even the slightest proselytism”.
On March 13, at 12.55:XNUMX, while he was parking his scooter under his house, the attack that would lead to his death took place. Attacked by several people with wrenches on his head, he was admitted to the Beretta hospital. “The immediate diagnosis is as follows: Head trauma. Lacerated-contused wounds to the scalp with leakage of brain substance and comatose state.”
The 29 April 1975, after 47 days of agony, Sergio, at just 18 years old, dies.
The funeral procession, for fear that there might be more violence, more blood, more deaths, was not authorized, but the coffin, on May 2, was escorted by neo-fascist militants from the morgue to the church, passing in front of the Faculty of Medicine, from whose windows many militants of Avanguardia Operaia took photographs of the "blacks". “It must be said that newspapers of all the parties represented in Parliament, from Unità to Secolo d’Italia, will condemn Sergio’s killing without any ifs or buts.”
After 10 years of silence, “because many people in the city knew who the perpetrators of that murder were,” the eight responsible, who at the time of Sergio's murder were part of the security service of Avanguardia Operaia of the Faculty of Medicine and, for the most part, had become doctors in the meantime, were arrested in 1985, thanks to the investigations conducted by judge Guido Salvini, and subsequently convicted of voluntary homicide. After the arrest, in a conference on 12 October 1985 organized in Milan by Democrazia Proletaria and attended by all those who have made the history of the Italian left and far left, one of the fathers of contemporary philosophy, Ludovico Geymonat, claims: About violence, there are those who say: "I am against all forms of violence". Well, I am not. I am not against all forms of violence. I was a partisan and I exercised violence, but I believe that the important thing is to distinguish between just and unjust violence.
Miriam Mafai, journalist, also intervenes “president of the National Federation of the Press, close to the PCI, who in the previous days wrote a very harsh article in his newspaper against Ramelli's assassins”. Addressing Mario Capanna directly, he says: “Ramelli was not a mistake, but a crime.” This is because the line that they wanted to get across was that “an episode of violence, even if murderous, is still an episode, which cannot invalidate or tarnish the history of the radical left and militant anti-fascism.[…] The truth is exactly the opposite. Due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, only coincidentally the Ramelli murder was the only fatal episode, but the attacks with wrenches on internal and external 'enemies' were an organised, systematic and widespread practice, which involved hundreds and hundreds of young people, many of whom have never been identified, arrested and tried”.
In Milan alone, the reported “cucchini” are about two hundred, with an average of four-five attackers for each beating with clubs and wrenches. Adding to this the hierarchical superiors of the attackers, we arrive at about a thousand people involved. “Well, the far-left militants identified, accused or convicted for these attacks were less than 100.” To these "we must add those people who have conducted "parallel police" activities: stalking, taking photographs or videos, threats, anonymous phone calls, lightning kidnappings with thefts of diaries or documents. Here too, there will be very few identified perpetrators".
A season of violence, therefore, that experienced in those years, where in addition to the political ones, there are also other responsibilities, to be sought. “in families, in trade unions, in journalism, in schools. […] Because only if we fully understand how what happened could have happened, will we be certain that the season of intolerance will remain only a tragic memory in the history of this country. And that it will never return”.
Gianlorenzo Capano
