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This chapter describes the life of a revolutionary. Discipline is essential in the Red Brigades, with every moment of the brigadist's life subjected to a series of rigorous rules. The Red Brigades do not possess anything, not even their own thoughts, and are completely subject to the rules of the group. The place in which they live is like a barracks. They are forbidden to have children, nor are they allowed to create ties of friendship or love with people outside the group. They have given up everything: friendship, human relations, habits, and amusements; they spend their days with the nightmare of being discovered and recognized or running into an informer. Their path towards bloodshed involves a complex process of interaction that can be divided into four stages. These include: (1) social marginality (disintegration of social identity stage); (2) acquisition of “binary code” mentality (reconstruction of social identity stage); (3) entry into a political–religious group or “community of absolute revolution” (integration in the revolutionary sect stage); and (4) detachment from reality (alienation from the surrounding world stage). The aim of this model is to reconstruct the “marginal” individual's route toward revolutionary behavior, of which the most intense expression is the willingness to give and receive death.

This chapter discusses one of the typical traits of the Red Brigades' mentality, the sacralization of politics. The Red Brigades have the task of redeeming people, showing them the way to salvation. Like all self-respecting saviors, they are the guardians of an absolute truth that contains the “formula” for eliminating every form of human suffering. This formula consists of the destruction of the present world through revolutionary violence, which means that the future of humanity depends on politics. The Red Brigades practice a “new” politics that aspires to a metapolitical aim: the perfect society. Human conduct is meaningful only in the service of the revolution. Someone who does not espouse the Marxist ideal is not even a person.

This chapter attempts to reconstruct the genesis of the Red Brigades. It suggests that Red Brigades was a consequence of the social mobilization process and of the accompanying dislocation in postwar Italy. Their foundation was a declaration of war on an entire system of values (competition, individualism, etc.) carried by the wave of modernization. In other words, the Red Brigades were the “victims of the great transformation.” They were suffering from a psychological unease that had a social origin. The first members of the Red Brigades saw their present condition as a nightmare and were firmly decided to change it. They felt victims of injustice, abandoned to a painful and hopeless fate. “Emptied” of value, uprooted from their original communities, subjected to the “merciless” laws of capitalism, they felt like outsiders in the hated and despised “new world”.

This chapter explains the ideology of the Red Brigades. The Red Brigades conceived revolutionary action as a mission and not as a simple profession to be performed and paid for. Their first task is to learn to think differently from the “common” person, to embrace a new vision of the world in order to grasp what others cannot see. True brigadists cannot and must not tolerate opinions other than theirs. Those who oppose the revolution are “pigs” who must be killed or disabled for the rest of their lives. To kill for the revolution is the noblest of gestures, a demonstration of love to humanity awaiting redemption. The Red Brigades reject the values of the society in which they live. Their aspiration for a better world clashes with a reality that appears impossible to change through reforms and good intentions. For them, violence is a compulsory route.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of a pathos that became a political movement and kept an entire country under siege for almost twenty years, leading it to the brink of civil war. The story of the Red Brigades and their homicidal fury is the story of a sociopsychological process that strips the victim of humanity. This process is called the “pedagogy of intolerance.” The book attempts to see the world through the eyes of professional revolutionaries. It reconstructs the Red Brigades' mental universe, which “sees politics as indivisible from the use of force” and is based on the “denial of reality.” Renato Curcio, Alberto Franceschini, Margherita Cagol, Mario Moretti, Mario Galesi, and Nadia Desdemona Lioce, to cite just some of the more famous names, are all part of a shared history: the history of revolutionary gnosticism and of the pedagogy of intolerance—the educational process that turns the rebel into a professional revolutionary.

This chapter examines the thoughts and political practices of other revolutionaries, namely Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot. Lenin is considered the greatest purifier of the world known to history. He achieved power and set about regenerating humanity. His political actions have enabled the effects of the gnostic recipe to be verified “in the field.” The Bolshevik Revolution also demonstrates what happens when professional revolutionaries gain power. Mao Tse-tung was one of the staunchest critics of bureaucracy, the new state bourgeoisie, corruption, and betrayal. Similar to Robespierre, Mao stood for radical catastrophism, the binary-code mentality, the obsession with purity, the identification of the Devil, and the doctrine of purification, according to which your enemies can only be exterminated. Pol Pot was a firm supporter of the Leninist organization of the Khmer Rouge. He was convinced that only a political party based on a rigid hierarchy and a fierce ideological determination would be able to transform the present world.

This chapter engages with the idea of terrorists “acting” as monsters. In contrast to the view that the shocking and apparently beastly behavior of some “terrorist” actors has no rational justification, it suggests that the performative construction of terrorist acts by impersonating some of the components of the prototype of monstrosity can be seen (in most circumstances) as rational. In fact, it argues that this pattern of behavior has a long history in terrorism through the concept of “revolutionary terrorism.” This chapter traces the origin and evolution of this concept by discussing the idea of the “Propaganda of the Deed” and by presenting the stages through which, from Sergey Nechayev to Che Guevara and then on to the Red Brigades, the ideologues of the anarchist and left-wing guerrilla movements perfected the idea that “terrorists” and insurgents should act as cold, unpredictable, and emotionless “killing machines.”

This chapter focuses on the illustrious predecessors of the Red Brigades. They belong to a politico-religious tradition that, in its most complete form represented by the Jacobin revolution, boasts at least two centuries of history. Although the core event was Robespierre's ascent to power, the historic rise of revolutionary gnosticism started with the Protestant theologian Thomas Müntzer, the first to accomplish a revolution in the attempt in install paradise on earth. He represents an “anthropological type” that still exists today. The chapter also considers John of Leiden who, between 1534 and 1535, helped establish a theocratic-communalistic republic, based on the massive and systematic use of totalitarian terror; François-Noël (Gracchus) Babeuf who organized a rebellion, “the Conspiracy of the Equals,” to implement communism against the Thermidorian Reaction that had overturned Robespierre; and Karl Marx who sought to remedy the evils of capitalism and build a “new world” where men would have been free and happy forever.

This chapter analyzes why in the 8th century a Spanish monk set out to write a mammoth commentary on a few pages of St. John's Book of Revelation, making it more obscure and ambiguous than it originally was, and why this salmagundi from different sources had an unprecedented success. The 1970s were in Europe the years in which the political springtime of 1968, after a short and very hot summer, entered an ambiguous fall in which the first terrorist movements started to show up, from the Bader Meinhof group in Germany to the Red Brigades in Italy. The original leaders of the Red Brigades did not come originally from a Marxist background but were on the contrary born Catholic. This chapter shares, in passing, some of the book's historical reflections, which are perhaps also introspections.

This chapter forms a consideration of the poetry that the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow wrote about his overseas experience. The poetry occasioned by his various sojourns in England, America, and Italy is explored, and in particular how an outsider addresses the political realities of places visited. There are discussions of Curnow's poems about the Kennedy era, and about the kidnap and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1970s Italy. The chapter concludes with a section on ‘mental travelling’ and on long-distance flying.

This chapter focuses on how monster-like creatures may be used by “terrorist” groups to frame their own enemy. If monster-like creatures play a crucial role in the “cosmic war” narrative adopted by many “terrorist” groups, their main goal usually is not to present the enemy as an uncontrollable monster but rather “othering” it in order to cause the “social death of the victim,” which in turn helps them justify the resort to morally liminal behavior and cement their in-group cohesion. The examples discussed in this chapter span from the use of exterminatory rhetoric to frame the targets of terror bombing during World War II, the “buck” and Incubus symbolism in white supremacist terrorism, the metaphorical constructs chosen by left-wing groups in the 1970s, and the use of concept of “taghout” by Islamist movements.