On Via Fani on March 16th it was no mysterious “007s” from who knows where who went into battle (Red Brigades, March 1979)

We want to be clear:

On Via Fani on March 16th it was no mysterious “007s” from who knows where who went into battle; it was comrades from the political vanguard. Tempered in the struggles of the working class and the proletariat in our country. They were communist fighters who were trained in “our own backyard” exactly as the dazed Mr. Craxi does not dare to imagine; the weapons used were not sophisticated and ultra-­modern devices (unfortunately we don’t have these, while the enemy possesses them in abundance; we regard this as a shortcoming and not a point of pride, and it is our clear responsibility to improve the weapons at our disposal any way we can) but were much more modest, many of them being old leftovers of the partisan war of ’45 (this will cause an attack of bile for the Berlinguerians but the legacy, including the military legacy, of the communists who fought in the resistance has not been their exclusive property for quite some time).

We offer these clarifications, not in order to trivialize the enormous technical and military difficulties which the guerrilla must overcome, but to bring the specifically military question of the class war into its proper proportions, into the proportions of the real, removing it from those of an action movie.

FROM Red Brigades #6, The Spring Campaign: The Capture, Trial, and Execution of the President of the DC, Aldo Moro (March 1979), in: 1978: A New Stage in the Class War? Selected Documents from the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades