Red Army Faction Red Brigades Angry Brigade The Spectacle Of Terror In Post War Europe

This collection brings together a spread of writers, revolutionaries and reprobates to offer up a variety of critical perspectives on key European armed struggle groups from the 1970's . Gianfranco Sanguinetti, founding member of the Italian Section of the Situationist International, writes in 'On Terrorism and the State', 1978 : "Italian terrorism is the last enigma of the society of the spectacle and only those who reason dialectically can solve it.... Today, all those who speak of social revolution without denouncing and combating the terrorist counter-revolution have a corpse in their mouths." Dave and Stuart Wise, (King Mob) look into the relationship between the Italian Communist Party, workers struggles post 68' and the roots of the Red Brigades, concluding of the latter: "they added to the substitutionism of Lenin, who replaced the proletariat by the Party, by replacing the Party with the armed struggle." Prof. Charity Scribner (MIT), contributes "Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction", exploring how and why the SI and the RAF's differing definitions of autonomy produced divergent modes of resistance : "Both the RAF and the Situationists drew from the arsenals of anarchism and Marxism. But whereas Debord critiqued the society of the spectacle...the leaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavy on style, but light on political analysis." Tom Vague contributes fast paced, potted histories of the RAF and Angry Brigade, both strong on time line energy, both useful entry level introductions to the respective narratives. John Barker was sentenced to ten years at the Old Bailey in 1972 for his Angry Brigade activities ("they framed a guilty man"), and here he laments Tom Vague's "fetishisation of the Angry Brigade" and "how comfortable he is with ‘the situationist angle' while saying nothing about the analysis and theory that came out of the Italian movement from Potere Operaio onwards, which was more important to us." Barker's piece, dated from the late 1990's, goes on to give a brief, but uniquely frank first person perspective on the AB's activities, viewed through the prism of realism, maturity, and continued belief in the revolutionary potential of mass working class action over the clandestine, substitutionist activities of the few - a fitting end to this book.

A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel” In this fiery, theoretical tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health. Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health.

Art and the Historical Film provides an important examination of fine art's impact on filmmaking, grappling with the question of authenticity. From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.

In this rigorous study, Marcus Collins reconceives the Beatles' social, cultural and political impact on sixties Britain.

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 intended as a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State," 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 of violent anticapitalist terrorists revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. Like their German counterparts in the Baader-Meinhof Group and today’s violent political and religious extremists, 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. In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, Alessandro Orsini 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 putrefying effects of capitalism and imperialism. Through a careful study of all existing documentation produced by the Red Brigades and of all existing scholarship on the Red Brigades, Orsini reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. Orsini has devised a micro-sociological theory that allows him to reconstruct the group dynamics leading to political homicide in extreme-left and neonazi terrorist groups. This "subversive-revolutionary feedback theory" states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. Orsini 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. Orsini’s book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.

The first major ideological text from West Germany's most famous urban guerillas. This document merits attention from anyone who wants to understand the motivation and ideology behind the beginning of a long and violent confrontation between the Red Army Faction and the German State. Apart from setting out the justification for armed struggle, this text touches on: the strength of the capitalist system in West Germany; the weaknesses of the revolutionary Left; the significance of the German student movement; the meaning and importance of internationalism; the necessity for taking a revolutionary initiative; the importance of class analysis and political praxis; the failure of parliamentary democracy and how this had the inevitable consequence of political violence; the factionalism of the German Left; and the organization and logistics of setting up an illegal armed struggle.

"Krueger proves...that terrorists are not desperately poor killers but well-educated politicians using violence to draw attention to their 'market'--violent change."--Hernando de Soto, author of The Mystery of Capital. Features a new Introduction by the author.he author.

Looks at the history and motivation of the Red Brigades, recounts the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, and assesses Italy's anti-terrorist efforts.