Professor Paolo Corsini was a guest of the «Pomeriggi» organized by the Clementina Calzari Trebeschi Foundation in the San Barnaba auditorium, Piazzetta Benedetti Michelangeli, in the city. The meetings, promoted by the Municipality and organized with Casa della Memoria and the Micheletti Foundation, are inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Piazza della Loggia massacre. Below is a textual abstract and the complete video of his speech.
The massacre committed in Piazza della Loggia on 28 May 1974 represents the last, dramatic link of a chain of provocations, beatings, violence, “exploits” carried out in Brescia against trade union and Left exponents, former partisans, students of the “movement” by neo-fascist militants from MSI or attributable to the radical Right which, in close agreement with sectors of the state apparatus with a strong aptitude for pursuing subversive aims, became the protagonist of the strategy of tension that continued throughout the Seventies.
A qualitative leap from a season of widespread microviolence to one of terrorist violence was carried out with the bomb attack on the headquarters of the socialist federation of Brescia on the night between 3 and 4 February 1973. The markedly criminal features of the initiative, the danger of the bomb, the political connotation of those responsible – all from the «National Avant-garde» -, configure the crossing the border between hooliganism and squad action on the one hand, terrorism, targeted and covert action on the other.
A strategy that has its roots in preparations already underway in the Brescia area since the end of the 1960s, when the MSI, with the return of Giorgio Almirante to the party secretariat, adopted the “double-track” strategy, oscillating between “double-breasted” and revolutionary alternative to the system”. Environments and characters of black extremism form connections with organizations prone to authoritarian or even coup-plotting suggestions.
The subversive plot with the former “white” partisan Carlo Fumagalli, founder of the “Revolutionary Action Movement” in 1962 at its summit, is emblematic: two “TNT couriers” from Brescia are arrested in Sonico in Valle Camonica, on 9 March 1974, while they are working for the organization. The existence of forces that in conspiracy cultivate projects of anti-democratic destabilization comes to light. They in the city and province translate into a steady stream of attacks the extent of which is made clear by an episode fortunately without consequences which could cause a massacre: the attack on the provincial headquarters of the CISL on 8 May 1974.
It takes on more and more body a process of dramatization of the political struggle which, in the wake of the referendum campaign on divorce, heralds developments full of tension and harbingers of tragic events. It is the entire neo-fascist Right that is boiling: those of direct Salodian ancestry, survivors of the RSI, the hardened nostalgics of “revolutionary fascism”, but also that of the jeunesse dorée, the scions of a reactionary bourgeoisie that belongs to environments and sectors of an employer never willing to accept the union dialectic, determined to re-establish “law and order” in the factory. Next to and in close contact with this varied world of ambiguous characters, swindlers, common criminals dthe underclass extraction looking to be hired.
And then, as we read in the ruling of the Court of Cassation of 20 June 2017 which sentenced the former Venetian exponent of «Ordine Nuovo» Carlo Maria Maggi and the former Tritone source of the secret services Maurizio Tramonte to life imprisonment, a whole series of coverage “up to the direct support of members of state apparatus, national and foreign security services”: a transparent reference to the top brass of the force, to officers of the Sid, to people stationed at the NATO base in Verona. The slogans previously launched by the MSI neo-fascist Right – “forward to the polls and the squares” – are followed by the gloomy announcement – an indication – that “the bombs will make their voices heard”. It was the union that promptly grasped the danger of a plan with “very precise objectives” and proclaimed a four-hour strike, as well as the provincial anti-fascist unitary committee that called a demonstration in support of democracy against “black delinquency which must be isolated and crushed without hesitation.”
The bomb that exploded in Piazza della Loggia therefore had a targeted and frontal target: democracy and the union that defends it. In Piazza della Loggia, in the most political of the massacres perpetrated between 1969 and 1974, not innocent victims fell, but men and women “guilty” of a coherent anti-fascism, animated by a determination that does not give up, to the point of testifying with martyrdom one’s civil awareness, one’s democratic passion, one’s political commitment.
