FAO Mister teh ECH

[Cain]

I remember ages ago you suggested to me I read Empire, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.

As such, this information I recently discovered about Negri's role in the "Strategy of Tension" may be of interest to you.

Negri was, of course, a left-wing professor at Padua University, where he preached a gospel of violent revolution to his politics students, and was in contact with members of the Red Brigades.  Negri is also suspected of having written some of the highly technical and advanced commuiques of the Red Brigades, dealing as they did with rather advanced Marxist concepts in a high-level manner, something that most of the Brigades, with their modest intellectual skills, could not have hoped to have written.

However, delving into his past, before he bloomed as a radical professor, preaching pie-in-the-sky utopianism, a rather odd picture emerges.

Firstly, his family were devoted supporters of Mussolini.  So much so that, in fact, Negri's older brother died whilst fighting to protect the Salo Republic, the fledgling Italian fascist puppet-state created by German military might.  Negri was very close to his brother, and his death affected him tremendously.  That he was shot by Communist partisans may have a bearing on this.

During the 1950s, Negri was a member of the Christian Democrats - party made up almost entirely of former Mussolini collaborators, powerful businessmen and pro-American nationalists.  He also obtained, at some point, a Rockerfeller Foundation grant to study in the United States - at a time when Communists and those on the far left were routinely denied entry to the country.  Even after his supposed conversion to Marxism, he routinely returned to the United States and suffered no difficulties in obtaining visas.

Friends of his from his student days described him as "viscerally anti-Communist".

Most interestingly of all, an Italian journalist with links to the security services and a penchant for blackmail wrote a very interesting article that suggested Negri was working with a CIA-paid Christian Democrat who was trying to reduce Communist and Socialist influence over the trade unions, and that there was every reason to believe his "revolutionary" past was fake and constructed by "industry professionals", by which I presume he meant some sort of secret service agency.  This journalist was eventually assassinated, though the identity of those responsible remains unknown.

After the original leadership of the Red Brigades were all dead or imprisioned, those with links to the Hyperion Language School in Paris, a front organization which procured weapons for the Red Brigades (among others) and were associated with a secretive terrorist group calling itself the Superclandestini (which bears remarkable parallels to Negri's notion of the "invisible party") came to power within the group and assumed a leadership position.  A shift in tactics then occured among the Red Brigades, with almost random killings taking place, along with assassinations of some of the most honest individuals in Italian politics, including those with responsibility for investigating fascist terrorism in the country (ostensibly one of the reasons the Red Brigades had been formed, to combat fascist terrorism directed with state collusion).  The culmination of this new strategy was the kidnap and and execution of Aldo Moro, just as he was preparing the "historic compromise" which would allow the Italian Communist Party to take seats in government as part of a ruling coalition.  Negri was named as having definitive links to the Hyperion Language School by Rome Police in 1979.

Finally, those who suspected at the time that Negri was helping coordinate terrorism on the behalf of conservative causes within Italy, including a colleague at Padua University, a professor of history called Angelo Ventura, and Examining Magistrate Emilio Alessandrini, were assassinated by the Red Brigades in the later stage of their existence, under the control of the Superclan.

All of which makes me think that the co-author of one of the books so beloved of the anti-globalization movement, hard left and those looking to bring down America and capitalism in general is actually an American agent of influence.  Negri even suggests it himself in the book, when he talks about how Empire is total - therefore meaning acts of resistance carried out through terrorism are also parts of the mechanism of Empire.

Anyway, thought you'd like to know.

[East Coast Hustle]

That's awesomely twisted. I'm'a have to do some digging on this when I have time, sounds pretty interesting. Thanks for the heads-up dude!

[Cain]

No problem.  I came across his name while doing some completely unrelated research and got intrigued.  The idea that left-wing terrorism in Italy was manipulated is still contentious in some circles (that right-wing terrorism was also manipulated is considered pretty much public knowledge) but the evidence is, I believe, good enough to suggest it.  The Red Brigades hated the Italian Communist Party more than most fascists did...and were even willing to work with fascist terrorists in order to bring about "revolutionary conditions".  Negri may have been egocentric enough to believe he was playing the USA, rather than being a conscious stooge, but at the end of the day it was US interests that were served, and not any revolutionary program, from the left or right, so his individual stance matters little.

This also makes me wonder about the 1990s anti-globalization movement which was, of course, packed to the brim with police agent provocateurs, but that is a theory for another day (and needs more research as well).