(From left) Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, Ulrike Meinhof, and Andreas Baader, with the Italian “Brigate Rosse” (Flag of the Red Brigades) at top.
The December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by alleged gunman Luigi Mangione on the streets of New York City had all the hallmarks of a bold revolutionary act, broadly spelled out in three words inscribed on cartridge cases found at the murder scene: “Delay,” “Deny,” “Depose.” For revolutionaries in waiting, what could be more idealogically orchestrated than using capitalist terms against a CEO versed in deploying them, especially in the life-and-death realm of health insurance that funds most of our health care system?
Those who side with the rule of law, regardless of how heartless market forces can sometimes behave, framing cold-blooded murder as somehow vogue in leftist circles or worthy of sympathy was rightly viewed as ghoulish, if not downright depraved.
What rarely followed in the wake of Thompson’s murder, however, was a brief history or summary of the many recorded instances in which far-left, or at least anti-capitalist, radicals terrorized Western Europe, and sometimes even the continental United States, during the Cold War that followed the defeat of European fascism.
Whole books have been authored on the brief, but intense, phenomenon of disillusioned German and Italian students taking up arms against the capitalist state their World War II forefathers rebuilt after the war, but perhaps the best overall account, folded expertly into the history of post-war Europe, belongs to Tony Judt in his 2005 book titled. appropriately, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.
Not content to revolutionize from their studio apartment sinks armchairs these über-angry students kidnapped key government officials, robbed banks and, yes, maimed and murdered in cold blood. For ringleaders Andreas Badder, child of a Munich historian, and Ulrike Meinhof, daughter of a museum curator in Saxony, executing Daimler Benz chairman Hans Schleyer was just a day at the office, if a successful one at that. If they could murder the head of Dresdner Bank, which they did also, so much the better, and sooner for the revolution to come.
The radicalized students of Italy under the banner of Brigate Rosse (the Red Brigades) raged even harder, or as Judt documents: “Between 1970 and 1981 not a year passed in Italy without murders, mutilations, kidnapping, assaults and sundry acts of public violence. In the course of the decade three politicians, nine magistrates, sixty-five policemen and some three hundred others fell victim to assassination.”
As the 1970s progressed, right-wing terrorist cells and organized crime joined in the orgy of national violence.
Judt writes, “That democracy and the rule of law in Italy survived these years is a matter of no small note. From 1977 to 1982 especially, the country was under siege from random acts of extreme violence by far Left, far Right, and professional criminals alike—it was in these same years that the Mafia and other criminal networks assassinated police chiefs, politicians, prosecutors, judges and journalists, sometimes with apparent near-impunity.”
The “Lead Years,” as Italians called them, became so fatiguing, according to Judt, and with daily life so untenable, that Italians gravitated toward the political middle-ground of merely sustaining civil society. Up north in Germany, order prevailed with the arrest, trial, and sentencing of Badder and Meinhof, both of whom would die of suicide in prison.
Rather than skulk in the corners of history, however, these turbulent figures found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treats them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.
Perhaps the most moving portrait ever of a Red Brigade member resides in the 2003 Italian film epic, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth). The story of Matteo and Nicola Carati, two brothers from Rome with contrasting personalities and life philosophies, the film chronicles their lives across successive eras of modern Italian history. The “Lead Years” come into sharp focus when Nicola falls in love with fiery university student and talented pianist Giulia. Both protest while students in Turin, but while Nicola concentrates on a career in psychiatry, Giulia falls deeper into Marxist-Leninist dialectics. Once their baby daughter Sara reaches toddlerhood, Giulia leaves her family for a life of underground terrorist assignments on behalf of the Brigade. All the while, or at least gradually, she comes to the stark realization of the mistake she has made. Meeting with Nicola in secret, she pleads for knowledge of how her daughter is doing, and where she might steal a glimpse of how she has grown. The film never spares the feelings of the child Sara, either, portraying her as stable thanks to her father Nicola, yet half lost and perplexed at the world over the mysterious loss of her mother to blind ideology. On balance, and in Italy’s post-war history context, La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) may be the most humane portrait of a leftist terrorist ever committed to film.
Director Olivier Assayas, by contrast, dispels empathy for cold, analytic objectivity in his 2010 film Carlos. A long (339 minutes) trawl through the international travels, travails, and hit list of the Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (better known as Carlos the Jackal), Assayas uses actor Édgar Ramírez in the lead role almost as the frontman of a rock band. Through kidnappings, bombings, hijackings, and murders, Carlos never once hesitates to give his actions any second thoughts, never shows his targets the slightest courtesy before they become his victims, and never fails to polish off the corners of his relentless narcissism, which, in one scene, includes masturbating in front of a mirror after a shower. Once Assayas’s film finishes its job, and with a few other leftist terrorists thrown into Carlos’s orbit, you might breathe a sigh of relief that the “revolution” promised by these hardened 1970s terrorists never arrived.
Popular music has produced too many tributes to 1970s leftist terrorists, tongue-in-cheek or sincere, to name. Three songs, however, stand out from the crowd.
The Talking Heads said it best with their 1979 hit “Life During Wartime,” a danceable ode to the determined, lonely spirit of someone hell-bent on changing the world through a paranoid lens of oppressive power structures everywhere they look, even in peacetime. Groceries must be bought, hiding places must be found, and perpetual fear and caution must be maintained.
Hailing from Sheffield, UK, the industrial band Cabaret Voltaire left nothing to the imagination with their 1978 track “Baader Meinhof.” Not a song so much as a mutilated prayer over the dead bodies of radical German leftist hopes, it strives toward an astringence as brutal as terrorism itself. It is an interrogation, not a celebration: “Do they feel the guilt of their nazi ancestors? Or are they bored middle class seeking outlets for their frustrations? Are these the heroes, or the villains of the modern world?”
Finally, there is the dirge “Che,” by the New York City synth-voice duo Suicide, in honor of the man whose name shouts revolution from every hill and mountain top. This is the sound of a martyr’s death searching for a home but finding only a series of unending resting places. “When he died / the whole world lied,” intones singer Alan Vega. “They said he was a saint / but I know he ain’t.” The closer the song’s pulse gets to repetitive panic, the more you are compelled to listen.
Mangione may or may not have fancied himself becoming a romantic figure in the eyes of frustrated leftists looking for a way, any way, to condone another stab at the hydra-headed beast of for-profit health care. What he should have stopped to consider before allegedly pulling the trigger of his 3-D printed gun at Thompson’s back is that depictions of modern leftist “heroes” who resort to violence are not heroes at all. They might, however, pass for heroic in the ways they doom themselves to teach us violence rarely changes anything except for adding to history’s sum total of political violence. Most of all, it transforms perpetrators into people with little understanding of themselves, let alone the world they hope to change.
