We Are All Dissociati

Abstract

After their capture, Antonio Savasta and the rest of the brigatisti involved in the Dozier operation (save one) began to confess in great detail. Savasta had recognized for some time that the position of the Organization was hopeless:

The organization Red Brigades did not have the possibility of affecting Italian social reality. Its loss of a connection to the mass movements and to the class sectors to which [the BR] referred — the worker, the prisoner, the marginal person — this isolation we were seeing day after day. The political impossibility of having an effect did not derive, does not derive, simply from tactical errors, but from the very foundation of our political analysis, of the analysis of the State, of the analysis of the movements … which led us to believe that the armed struggle was the only possible political expression of the avant-garde of the movements. This oversimplification caused us to read as imminent the possibility of civil war … if not in temporal terms then in political terms, a possibility that might then effectively take root. This rooting has not occurred.¹

Emilia Libera had come to the same conclusion. ‘[W]e made a somewhat superficial analysis’, she said with notable understatement.²