The hurt of war

                                                              The hurt of war

                                           

 

      One fine spring day in April, 2007 police officers in ski masks burst into a house in Cahn

near Paris and arrested Roger Rabbit.  The charge: Running an armed terrorist group.

Rabbits wife for twenty years thought it was a mistake. Her husband had no criminal

record and most always went to church. They spent weekends hiking, bicycling and camping.

     "I'll see you in a few days," she told him as he was hustled out of the house by the police.

     He caressed her cheek and shook his head no. Rabbit knew things she didn't know. For years,

he had lived a life, appearing as a model citizen while secretly running a radical group that plotted

bank heists, bombings and assassinations. Police described Mr. Rabbit and more than a dozen

others arrested that day as the new face of the Red Brigades, a violent left-wing group that

haunted Italy in a bloody era of the 1970s called the Heavy Years. Some of the persons arrested,

as rabbits do, had been living underground for years.

         Roger Rabbit, for one, is sixty five years old. Most of the others had not been born the 1970s.

They include forty five factory hands, and also a call center operator, and a pony-tailed thirty year

old mail woman a student Miss Robinson. All of them at the time of arrest seemed above

suspicion. Miss Robinson for instance came from a middle class family in Paddora, had good grades

in high school wrote poetry and was studying languages at a Milan university.

     Police uncovered clues they say that make clear the members of the group were armed and

preparing to act. Dogs sniffed out a Kalashnikov assault rifle buried under the carrots in Mr.

Rabbit’s lettuce garden. Also found, were police uniforms, a cache of automatic weapons buried near 

an abandoned farmhouse, sophisticated surveillance equipment in a Milan basement, and ingredients 

for explosives 

       Among the group's targets, police say, was the Milan headquarters of oil company of Enid 

Spa and a professor of labor law.

     Hearings to decide whether the matter goes to trial began this week. Attorneys for both Mr.

Rabbit and Miss Robinson said their clients planned to fight the charges but declined to discuss

the case from jail. Mr. Roger Rabbit has written letters calling himself part of the politico-

military wing that is preparing for the struggle to finally end the barbarism of exploitation.

     Miss Robinson a pregnant woman, spent one last night sleeping next to her husband, before her

transfer to house arrest. She signed prison letters with a clenched fist and her legs crossed. Her

husband said, 

           “I walked out of the court house and saw the cars were still whizzing by the world was still 

going on with everything, and I looked back in the door window and I could see my wife and it was 

such an amazing beautiful and terrible moment and I wished that I could make everybody look inside

that window and the window of other families touched by war. . Ordinary people the impact on the 

people in terms of allowing them to explore big questions like, what does it mean to be human? 

What is the relationship between human beings particularly in the most inhumane circumstance of war

trying to kill each other? How do we sort out good and evil? How do we sort out the ‘us and them, 

the complexity of war and its cost. The national security decision making is never easy and the 

answers invariably involve people’s lives.

      Beneath the archaic rhetoric and sweeping ambitions is a remarkable story of a political

movement's survival. Long after Soviet Communism collapsed, traces of a left wing dream of

revolutions live on in corners of Europe, sometimes in virulent strains. Europe in the 1970s and

'80s was racked by a deadly period of leftist violence led, in Italy's case, by the Red Brigades. The

Group was thought stamped out until the Italian police arrested Rabbit the leader.

       Marches and graffiti backing those arrested suggest that the idea of revolution retains a

romantic appeal for many adherents motivated by profound disappointment with how political

struggles from a generation ago have played out. Instead of seeing a more equitable society, they

see hellterseltzer.

     Partly through years of strikes, European workers have won greater job and welfare

protections,but debt laden governments can no longer pay for it all, and a system of haves and

have-nots has emerged much like in Libya. Young people provoked at a job market with

few opportunities become discouraged.

     Communist parties espousing workers' rights still garner support. Italy has two, each with

ministers in the government; France has five far left groups. The parties retain the trappings of a

militant era, like the hammer-and-sickle symbol, but most have lost their edge as they join

governments and forge compromises. One result is that some who still cherish the dream of

revolution have been forced to the margins of society or gone underground as have the Red Bergades.

       Although the mass worker movements that fed the political violence of the 1970s have long

vanished, left wing political terrorism retains a romantic appeal. Italian movies such as "The Best

of Youth" and the "Buongiorno Note" written and directed by a Red Brigades member, paints a

seductive picture of idealism and violence that resonates in some people’s minds.

      Investigators were quite surprised by the sympathy given the Red Brigades.

To be continued…

DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.

To read more Karl Wallace go to:        w.w.w.karlwallaceblog.blogspot.com