On April 16, 1978, Italian President Giovanni Leone made a public appeal to the Red Brigades, one of the most violent terrorist groups in modern European history, to refrain from carrying out a death sentence imposed by their “people's court” against former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Three weeks later, following 54 days of captivity, the bullet-ridden body of the former Italian leader was discovered in a car parked in the center of Rome.

Shortly afterwards, in a courtroom in Turin, Italy, approximately 700 km from Rome, Renato Curcio, founder of the Red Brigades, stood up and announced that the killing of Aldo Moro was the “highest act of humanity in this class-ridden society.” Such rhetoric might seem nonsensical, perhaps even irrational, but Alessandro Orsini provides an explanatory framework that explains Curcio's logic in this powerful and sweeping study of the Red Brigades. He writes, for instance, that the Red Brigades viewed Moro as a tyrant who had oppressed the Italian people for thirty years. Thus, eliminating Moro, along with the rest of the Christian Democratic government which he led, was a matter of “political hygiene” (p. 133).

The assassination of Aldo Moro, arguably the most horrific and sensational attack by the Red Brigades, was just the tip of the iceberg. For more than fifteen years, the Red Brigades carried out a campaign of pervasive terror in Italy, featuring hundreds of murders, attacks (on persons and property) and kidnappings. Following the group's abduction of American General James Dozier (who was later rescued by Italian police), the CIA would describe the Red Brigades as “Italy's most formidable terrorist organization” that sought to “separate Italy from the rest of Europe” by ultimately turning it into a Marxist state.

To sustain such a campaign in the face of police surveillance and security crackdowns required a disciplined and viscous ideology. The Red Brigades, like other “red” European terrorist groups of the same era, are commonly classified as Marxist, secular organizations. Yet, in many ways, the Red Brigades were more “religious” than many contemporary “religious” terrorists of the post 9/11 era. The title that Orsini chose for his book reveals much about what he views as the religious underpinning of the Red Brigades, concepts that are addressed in depth in the first two chapters.

Chapter one introduces the reader to the Red Brigades' ideology of binary struggle between “the children of the light” versus the “children of the shadows” (p. 9). On this view, humanity is in a state of crisis and thus “the world is in danger” (p. 9). The pursuit of the revolution is not a mere profession, but a mission. Moreover, it is a struggle, facilitated and propelled by necessary violence, in which victory is assured. Through this “pedagogy of intolerance,” the Red Brigades, consistent with many terrorism movements in history, sought power “to take over the establishment and purify the world from the moral corruption generated by private property” (p. 26).

Chapter two further delves into the Red Brigades' ideology by describing the “sacralization of politics”; in other words, how the doctrine and ideology undergirding the group was essentially a religion with absolute truths and demands on its adherents. An individual entered the group “with the same absolutism as that involved in a sacrifice.” (p. 31) Like many groups before it, the religion of the Red Brigades sought to purify and provide salvation to individuals mauled by the destructive machinery of capitalism and its exploitive tendencies: “As soon as they are born, people are inserted in a machine that humiliates, degrades, and exploits them twenty-four hours a day.” (p. 33)

Chapter three addresses more functional aspects of the Red Brigades, including how members conducted operations and maintained secrecy, while at the same time preserving effective command and control. Effective conduct of operations required training in which depersonalization of the enemy was stressed; this helped the assassin achieve the emotional detachment necessary to effectively perform the act. “The dehumanization of the enemy comes before his physical elimination” (p. 61). The training was complete when an assassination could be achieved without any feeling of empathy: “The revolutionary education completes its ‘dissertation’ when the victim's pain, his cries, his anguish no longer arouse any emotion in the killer” (p. 64).

Chapter four analyzes the background of the Red Brigades and the formative experiences of key founding members of the organization. Renato Curcio is described as an “emblematic figure” whose life is full of “radical breaks” (such as his happenstance conversation in a bar in Genoa in which a man spoke to him about the newly opened Faculty of Sociology in Trento, where Curcio would later enroll in classes that would change his life). On the question of whether the Red Brigades were genuine revolutionaries or simply “imbeciles,” Orsini argues that the members were sincere: “They were [willing to] to sacrifice their own lives on the altar of communism, prompted by the desire to succeed in an ‘immense’ undertaking: the construction of a ‘perfect society’” (p. 123).

In chapter five, Orsini takes his study in a different direction, searching for Western progenitors of the ideology underpinning the Red Brigades. His purpose in this section of the book is to advance one of his key theories that “the Red Brigades belong to a revolutionary tradition that, in its most complete form, boasts at least two centuries of history” (p. 287). His first subject is the Protestant theologian Thomas Müntzer, who in his attempt to “install paradise on earth,” became what Orsini characterizes as an “anthropological type” that persists to this day.

Orsini also explores other individuals or groups, including Jan Beukelszoon (a.k.a. John of Leiden), the English Puritans, François-Noël (Gracchus) Babeuf, Karl Marx and the Russian populists, including Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. In chapter six, Orsini examines the influence of multiple Communist leaders and theorists, including Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, and their influence on Red Brigades' ideology. Lenin, Orsini writes, believed that a ruthless struggle of terrorism would not only bring about revolution, but also serve as the basis for the exercise of political power. What the Red Brigades gained from Lenin, Orsini writes, was a worldview in which the international community is divided into two: supporters of the revolution and “all those who deserved only to be crushed” (p. 209). Through violence the current world order would not only be destroyed; it would be purified.

Orisini then catalogues the various forms of ingenious violence and torture meted out by Soviet, Chinese and Khmer leaders and their agents against perceived enemies. State terror and Communist campaigns were, from a body count perspective, extremely bloody affairs; Orsini, quoting various sources, estimates that the numbers of people who perished under Soviet, Chinese and Khmer political campaigns and state terror were 62 million, 70 million and 2 million respectively.

Overall, this is a powerful book that not only describes the Red Brigades (their ideology, organization, key leaders), but also seeks to address the “why” behind the phenomenon. However, some subjects relevant to the ultimate demise of the Red Brigades are not addressed, at least not extensively (for example, the Italian government's introduction of the pentiti system and how this unraveled at least portions of the Red Brigade command structure). It might also have been helpful—albeit perhaps beyond the writer's intended scope—to highlight some parallels between the Red Brigades and contemporary groups, such as the Southeast Asia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which conduct recruitment, training and indoctrination in a manner similar to the Red Brigades.

Nevertheless, this is a compelling and accessible book that would benefit both scholars and practitioners in the field of terrorism and political violence. The Red Brigades were one of the most important terrorist groups in modern history. Alessandro Orsini has made an enormous scholarly contribution that explains why. In this way, Orsini's study is not only an explication of the Red Brigades, their background and modus operandi, but is also an examination into the timeless nature of terrorism itself.