Andrea Hajek

Abstract

Although more than 30 years have passed, Italy continues to struggle with the traumatic memory of the 1970s, a decade marked by an extreme intensification of political violence. This problematic memory is immanent in history textbooks, which play a fundamental role in the diffusion of national memories of the past. This essay will focus on the (mis)representation of political violence in the 1970s in textbooks as the result of the persistence of a collective trauma which impedes any serious, impartial reflections on political violence in those years, and subsequently also complicates processes of national reconciliation. Thus, through an empirical analysis of some thirty manuals published between 1980 and 2008,1 shall analyse exactly what sort of narratives have been produced and to what extent these narratives have contributed to or rather obstructed reconciliation.

Although more than 30 years have passed, Italy continues to struggle with the difficult memory of the 1970s, a decade marked by an outburst of political violence which has become known as the 'years of lead'.¹⁹⁵ Despite the fact that important social and cultural developments have also marked the 1970s, the numerous violent incidents that occurred in those years continue to dominate public memory. This form of oblivion is immanent in historical analyses of the 1970s, in particular in history textbooks: as we shall see, most textbooks tend to reduce their account of the 'years of lead' to stereotypical images of political violence perpetrated by left-wing terrorist groups, while ignoring the involvement of neo-fascist organizations and deviated organs of the Italian State, as well significant social changes that occured in those years (i.e. law on divorce and abortion).

One reason for this misrepresentation is the fact that few judicial truths have been established with regards to the crimes committed by neo-fascist groups and to cover-up tactics by the State: as historian Giovanni De Luna (2009) observes, 'it is exactly this legal void that keeps the wounds open (p.30, my translation). Furthermore, an increasing public and political use of history forces historiography to 'compete' with alternative sources of (pseudo-) information which increasingly undermine the legitimacy of historiography as an instrument of knowledge and conservation of the past, and reduce the historians' discourse to one of many, often contrasting, discourses about the past, thus complicating the construction of a national narrative of the past, and subsequently, of a collective identity.

Finally, many of those that embark upon writing or teaching a history of the 1970s in Italy still have a direct and often painful memory of this period. In other words, the 'years of lead' constitute an open wound, a traumatic past that has never been closed off properly and which continues to resurface in present society. As Arthur Neal (2005) explains, '[t]he degree to which a nation dwells upon a trauma depends on the degree of closure that is achieved' (p.6): collective traumas need to be spoken about publically, and shared with other members of a community, if the community wants to regain a collective identity and come to some form of reconciliation (p.4). In this essay I shall analyse how the trauma of the 1970s has been transmitted through history education: more precisely, in textbooks, as these play a fundamental role in the formation of collective and national memories of the past. Before moving to the analysis of the textbooks, let us, however, first take a brief look at the historical context in which the events in question occur.

1 Historical background

The student and workers' protests of 1968 and 1969 marked the beginning of a decade of social mobilisation and emancipation, although the growing repression of the protests by authorities pushed left-wing militants more and more towards armed resistance. Violence thus became, in the alternative left-wing milieu, a legitimate and necessary instrument in the battle against a repressive State, and the last straw was the bomb massacre in the crowded Bank of Agriculture in Piazza Fontana (Milan), on December 12^th 1969, killing 17 and wounding 84 (Venturoli 2007). The discontent of parts of the society was furthermore nurtured by the economical crisis of 1973, which affected youth in particular, and pushed it further away from traditional, institutional politics and political parties. Left-wing students, for example, came to a complete rejection of the classical working ideology of the historical Left, and the situation degenerated after its success at the national elections of 1976, where the Italian Communist Party (hereafter, Pci) came in second thanks in part to younger generations of left-wing militants: these had massively voted for the party in the hope that it would eventually come to power in a left-wing coalition, or even alone (Amyot 1981, p.223). However, the Pci decided, instead, to indirectly support the centre-right government of the Christian Democratic Party (hereafter, Dc), which was perceived by many members of the alternative left-wing milieu as a betrayal, and the strong sense of political void led many to turn to terrorism instead.

A similar turn against institutionalised forms of power also marked the development of neo-fascist terrorism in the 1970s: thus, if the main aim of terrorist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that of creating the conditions for an authoritarian coup d'etat through bomb massacres in public spaces, throughout the 1970s a clear-cut break' between first and second generations of neo-fascist activists revealed itself (Bull 2007, p. 119), and a different type of right-wing extremism which turned primarily against the State and the nation (Venturoli 2007, pp.44-45; p.55 and Delia Porta 1995, p.537) developed itself.

1.1 Neo-fascist terrorism in the 1970s

The first major neo-fascist attack that occurred in Italy was the bomb massacre in Piazza Fontana, preceded by a number of smaller attacks in Milan, in April and August 1969 (Bull 2007, p.21). In May 1974, the country was shocked again by a bomb exploding during an anti-fascist demonstration in the Northern city of Brescia, killing eight and wounding 94 people, while two months later a bomb killed 12 and wounded 94 on a train heading from Florence to Bologna. In the summer of 1980, the city of Bologna would be struck a second time, when a bomb exploded in the crowded waiting room of the railway station: 80 people lost their lives, another 200 were wounded (Venturoli 2007).

Although a verdict was reached only in the latter case, which attributed the massacre to members of a neo-fascist organization, it is very likely that all these crimes have been the work of neo-fascist terrorist organizations. Thus, historian Anna Cento Bull (2007) explains that, on the basis of judicial evidence, it has emerged that these massacres were, at least until 1974, [... ] part of a deliberate strategy to place the blame upon leftist groups, whereas extreme-right groups were in fact responsible for the massacres' (p.7). Regarding the long-lasting Piazza Fontana trial, for example, the two main suspects -neo-fascists Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura - were sentenced and subsequently discharged, then condemned for the attacks of early 1969, until the Court of Cassation eventually 'ruled that there was sufficiently strong evidence to establish that Freda and Ventura were indeed guilty of the Piazza Fontana massacre': by then, however, the suspects 'were no longer judicially liable' (p. 21). Moreover, both the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation 'concluded that the massacre was to be attributed without doubt to the extreme-right group Ordine Nuovo' (ibidem).

Other neo-fascist attacks that occurred in those years include a trap set by members of Ordine Nuovo ('New Order') in a Northern town called Peteano (1972), which killed three police officers and wounded one, while a bomb launched in front of police headquarters in Milan, a year later, killed four people and wounded 46 (Unione delle Asso-ciazioni tra i Familiari delle Vittime delle stragi 1996). In the first case, hypotheses regarding a communist, 'red trail' - and subsequently even a 'yellow trail', which focused on local criminality - were pursued with particular zeal, revealing an explicit desire to put the blame on left-wing terrorism, while investigations that could have led to what would eventually turn out to be the truth were systematically obstructed (Bull 2007, pp.54-55). Eventually, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed to the crime, and 'officers of the armed forces were found guilty by the Courts and sentenced to some years' imprisonment for their obstructing actions' (ibidem).

Similarly, an 'anarchist trail' seemed evident in the case of the massacre at the police headquarters in Milan: the bomb was thrown at a crowd attending the inauguration of a commemorative bust for Luigi Calabresi, a police superintendent assassinated one year earlier by a left-wing terrorist group that held him responsible for the death of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, (falsely) accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre and who had died 'falling' out of the window of Calabresi's office, back in 1969 (Di Giovanni et al.

2006). The executor of this bomb attack furthermore proclaimed himself an anarchist, but he was eventually identified as a sympathiser of a neo-fascist terrorist group, and intelligence structures were suspected to have been the instigators of the crime (Bull 2007, pp.34-35).

However, the role of the State in these attacks has remained dubious and unclear, as we shall also see in our analysis of Italian history textbooks. Thus, Francesco M. Biscione (2003) observes that, 'while [...] the investigations of the 1990s [...] have produced a clear and convincing picture of the responsibilities of the neo-fascists from the Veneto and Lombardia regions in a countless number of attacks [...], elements to describe the political and institutional role in these events are still too scarce and hypothetical to be of any significance' (p.240, my translation). And yet, as Bull (2007) explains, judicial investigations have uncovered evidence 'showing that the extreme-right perpetrators of this kind of violence had been abetted, protected and shielded from the investigating magistrates by sections of the intelligence services and the armed forces' (p.7).

1.2 The Red Brigades

The relation between the State and left-wing terrorism, on the other hand, has also been significant, although in a completely different manner. As we have seen above, this type of terrorism originated after the Piazza Fontana massacre, which gave a new impulse to the many autonomous, militant groups which originated in Northern factories, in 1969.¹ One of these groups was the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano ('Political and Metropolitan Collective'), founded in September 1969 and which would eventually merge into Sinistra Proletaria ('Proletarian Left'), before the latter dissolved and led to the creation, in October 1970, of the Red Brigades, the most 'famous' terrorist group on the Left (Casamassima 2008).

We may distinguish between two phases in the history of the Red Brigades: during the first four years, the actions are limited to the industrial area in Milan, and are mostly symbolic in nature, i.e. the burning of cars of company directors. From 1975 onwards, a more violent and scrupulous approach is adopted, and the Red Brigades turn into an almost military organization, where the principal enemy becomes the State (Moretti

2007). The terrorists move from relatively innocent actions to premeditated killings, no longer limiting themselves to managers, company directors or union leaders, but aiming more at representatives of the State and other public figures, mostly journalists. A climax is reached in 1978, when statesman and leader of the Christian Democratic party Aldo Moro is abducted and assassinated, after which the situation degenerates even further until a fierce anti-terrorist offensive and new laws on terrorism, in the early 1980s, brings an end to the experience of the Red Brigades (Ginsborg 2006). Naturally, other terrorist organizations of the Left were also active in those years, but the Red Brigades tend to dominate the collective memory of the 1970s: apart from their communicating through the media and the often 'spectacular' nature of their actions -especially after 1974 - which drew even more media attention, this dominance can be explained by the fact that many former terrorists have published autobiographies or novels about their experiences.¹⁹⁷

2 History education in Italy: learning to forget

If we accept the postulate that the main function of historiography is to offer a narrative description of past events which may contribute to the creation of a national narrative, as historian Nicola Gallerano has it, education primarily has the task of diffusing this identity among the members of that community (cited Venturoli 2007, p.226). In Italy, however, no more than 2% of the school manuals that deal with 20^th century Italian history are dedicated to the period ranging from the 1960s to the 1980s (p.278): consequently, younger generations of Italians suffer from an excessively poor knowledge of the 1970s. In fact, two opinion polls held in 1999 and 2006 among high-school students resident in the three Italian cities where the most aggressive terrorist attacks of the 1970s occurred, demonstrated how knowledge of these events decreases over time: whereas in 1999, 96,6% of the students in Milan claimed to be familiar with the Piazza Fontana massacre, in 2006 this number had gone down to 81,6% (pp.260-262). Furthermore, almost half of the students identified, in both occasions, the Red Brigades as the authors of the attacks, ignoring the simple fact that this group had not yet been founded at the time (ibidem).²

2.1 The accessibility of the past

But are these events really forgotten? Or have they simply never been told? As historian fohn Foot observes, '[y]ou cannot forget what you have never learnt' (Foot 2001, p.213, my translation). Furthermore, forgetting does not necessarily mean that something is lost; it merely becomes temporarily inaccessible. Indeed, if information is available, 'it does not follow that it is at any given time accessible' (Singer & Conway 2008, p.280), and from all the possible memories that are available to us, only a small number of these are accessible. As Ann Rigney (2005) has noted, 'memories are always "scarce" in relation to everything that theoretically might have been remembered, but is now forgotten' (p. 17), and depend mainly on the social group or community we belong to. Thus Singer and Conway observe that 'cultures [...] make selections through textbooks, celebrations and educational curricula (p.282), selections which rely on the values this culture aims to defend and represent. When these selections change, this implies a shift or 're-assignment of meaning and accessibility rather than banishment from memory' (ibidem).

Thus, events such as the Piazza Fontana massacre have apparently become less 'accessible' to younger generations of Italians. If anything, there is a local memory which relies on the presence of the so-called 'sites of memory' (Nora 1984), i.e. monuments or commemorative plaques, which allow us to archive and thus preserve our past in a more tangible and visible manner. In fact, the opinion polls mentioned above also demonstrated that the memory of a specific bomb attack depended strongly on the place of residence of the interviewees: students in Milan, for example, were most familiar with the Piazza Fontana incident (96,6%), while they were much less informed about the bomb attack in Bologna (62,8%) and in Brescia (55,8%). Students in Bologna, in their turn, were much more familiar with the Bologna massacre than with the incidents in Milan or in Brescia; 50,6% against 12,8% and 8,9% respectively (Venturoli 2007, pp.260-61).

2.2 The curriculum

But who determines what is 'made accessible and what is, on the other hand, left out of the textbooks? In other words, who creates the curriculum? Does the ministry, for example, produce textbooks, prescribe guidelines for them or perform controls on the textbooks regarding the information they should contain? The answer is negative, as Emilio Zanette - author of a number of Italian history textbooks - explains: 'There are neither criteria, nor any directives or indications for the determination of contents or the cultural edge of the textbooks' (personal communication, October 28, 2009, my translation).³ At the most, the ministry provides programs for the different subject matters and where 'inescapable contents' are described, as Peppino Ortoleva - another renowned historian - defines it, i.e. the Unification of Italy in 1860 or the Second World War (personal communication, November 23, 2009, my translation).⁴Publishing houses do perform a somewhat superficial form of control as to the presence of'key issues' in the texts, the comprehensibility of the language used, the balance between information, etcetera (ibidem). In fact, Giorgio Valdre of the educational office of the Zanichelli publishing house - one of the primary Italian publishing houses in the field of school textbooks - confirmed that the editorial board controls, among other things, whether 'the authors produce trustworthy and updated texts as far as well established facts go' (personal communication, November 30, 2009, my translation); 'We pretend a scrupulous verification of the established facts and an attentive evaluation of opinions, also in reference to the prevailing opinions in the scientific community' (personal communication, December 9, 2009, my translation). How is one, however, to verify facts with regards to the 1970s, and what should one regard as 'established facts', considering the many unanswered questions and judicial uncertainties? And what do the specialists within the 'scientific community' base their knowledge on? Perhaps history education in Italy relies on some sort of publicly accepted interpretation or 'official memory' of the past?

The selection of textbooks by schools, finally, is very much determined by the teachers and does not follow any guidelines either: in general, representatives of publishing houses propose a number of textbooks to a school, from which teachers choose - either individually or in groups - the texts they feel most appropriate for the course they are or will be teaching (M. L. Mareschalchi, personal communication, October 28, 2009). Thus, there is no national curriculum in Italy, and the selection of textbooks for history education in Italy varies perhaps also according to the geographical location (Cuomo 2005).

2.3 Method of analysis

Despite the absence of a national curriculum, I tried to establish some sort of 'canon' of textbooks that are used in Italian schools by studying similar research projects (D'Agnelli 2005 and Venturoli 2007), and by consulting with a number of historians and history teachers as well as the National Laboratory for School Education (LAN-DIS), which contains a rich corpus of more recently published school manuals. My selection of textbooks centred around three factors: first of all, I consulted those texts published for teaching to students between 16 and 18 years old, since these contain more elaborate information than the textbooks used at lower levels of instruction and may therefore be more representative for history education in Italy: second, I chose texts written or edited, with some exceptions, by a variety of authors and published by different publishing houses: finally, I tried to gather a similar number of manuals for each decade and at least one manual published every two to three years, so as to get an idea of how representations of the 1970s evolve over time.

The analysis consists of a quantitative and a qualitative examination of the material, and is divided in two parts. First, I inquired which incidents of political violence that occurred in the 1970s recur in the textbooks, and which have instead been omitted and for what reason, by counting the number of references to these incidents (see Table 1). Second, I examined how these incidents have been defined, that is, what definitions were most frequently used in the manuals and what is expressed in these definitions: the way the manuals distinguish, for example, between acts of violence perpetrated by left-wing and right-wing terrorist organizations, if at all, and what this says about the type of narrative the author is constructing, was central to the analysis. Thus, I selected three different notions that can be related to political violence in the 1970s, and counted the number of references to these in the textbooks (see Table 2).

3 Recurrent themes and 'forgotten' memories

Apart from political violence, the main themes discussed in most of the textbooks under analysis include important social developments and political changes, in particular the attempts of the Italian Communist Party to enter the government through political alliances with parties of the opposition. I'm referring to the so-called 'historical compromise', a project launched by Pci secretary Enrico Berlinguer, in 1973, which implied a coalition with the Christian Democratic Party (Amyot 1981), and which is often used, in the textbooks, to explain the intensification of left-wing terrorism in the second half of the 1970s, as we shall see further on. Other themes related to the countries' political and economical situation include the oil crisis of 1973 and financial scandals, although these are much less elaborated.⁵

3.1 Political violence

The dominant theme in the history of the 1970s is however political violence. Obviously, the textbooks necessarily offer a selection of events, where omissions may be motivated by reasons of brevity or comprehensibility. Nevertheless quantitative analysis has demonstrated how only very few references are made to a series of incidents which - although they may not all have had a great impact on the collective imaginary

- reveal much about the type of 'narrative' the textbooks promote. Very few manuals mention, for example, the bomb attack in Peteano (1972) and in Milan (1973), both perpetrated by neo-fascist terrorists, as we have seen. Nor do the textbooks refer much to two incidents that occurred in Southern Italy: the Battipaglia massacre of 1969 (one mention), where police killed two people and wounded 200 during a protest against the closure of local factories, the only means of income for the inhabitants of this poor region, and the so-called 'rebellion of Reggio Calabria (1970), another particularly poor locality, which resulted in three deaths and more than 200 wounded (seven mentions). Finally, only two out of the twenty-nine textbooks mention the so-called Ustica incident of 1980, which relates to an airplane that was heading towards Sicily before it mysteriously went down and crashed into the sea, not far from the island of Ustica: all 81 passengers died (Ginsborg 1996).

With the exception of the latter, a possible reason for the scarce attention these incidents have received in the textbooks is the smaller number of fatal victims that they have caused, compared for example to the massacre of Bologna (85 deaths). However, in the cases of Battipaglia and Reggio Calabria, the number of wounded was considerably high, and the dramatic circumstances in which the incidents occurred seem serious enough to be taken into consideration; in the case of Reggio Calabria, for example, the conflict lasted for an entire year (pp.457-458). Perhaps the omission of these incidents may be explained by the fact that they cannot be considered strictly terrorist acts of violence, which would imply that the majority of the textbooks aim at producing a strictly 'terrorist narrative' of the 1970s. What then about the Ustica incident, which did have a high number of deaths? For a long time the airplane crash was put off as a simple technical failure, and therefore did not fit well into a narrative of terrorism. However, investigations eventually revealed that the tragedy was actually caused by an (unauthorized) anti-terrorist military intervention by the United States, which Italian officials had subsequentiy tried to cover-up: it was therefore more than a simple incident and to a certain degree related to the theme of political violence (Erminio & Benedetti 2005).

The bomb attacks in Peteano and Milan - mentioned twice and six times respectively

- offer similar examples of a desire to forget an 'uncomfortable', compromising past, and raise questions about a possible (political) strategy of forgetting: contrary to the other incidents described here, these did actually have a terrorist matrix, as we have seen, and their omission can therefore not be motivated on the basis of their not 'fit-ting' in a story about terrorism. The omission or sidelining of these cases as well as that of the incidents mentioned above - especially in more recent textbooks, which could have incorporated new information provided by ongoing investigations - implies a selective process of interpretation which 'privileges' forms of political violence directed against the Italian nation, rather than acts of violence, injustice or throwing off tacks performed by the State. These omissions may thus be explained as a form of'prescriptive forgetting', that is a type of forgetting that helps restore 'a minimum level of cohesion to civil society' and 're-establish the legitimacy of the state' (Connerton 2008, p.62) by 'keeping quiet' about incidents that reveal an undemocratic, criminal side of a State which is primarily concerned with 'the continuity of existing institutions' (Bodnar 1992, p.13): in other words, any references to the dubious role of authorities, obscure connections between the State and neo-fascist terrorists, or attempts to protect these terrorists by the State, are omitted in order to avoid jeopardizing the present legitimacy and authority of the State, creating instead a narrative where the capacities and willingness of the State to defend the nation from and condemn all acts of political violence cannot be put into question. Subversive acts of anti-institutional terrorism, on the other hand, seem more 'appropriate' for the type of narrative these texts aim to transmit, as we shall see in the next paragraph.

3.2 Narrating political violence

An important - if not primary - role in remembering traumatic experiences must however also be attributed to the language in which these experiences are conveyed, and it is precisely the lack of words capable of expressing traumatic events which leads to certain pasts being 'forgotten. In fact, when a language 'lacks linguistic categories to describe a stimulus, speakers of that language exhibit poorer memory for that stimulus than do speakers of a language that offers better linguistic means to capture the stimulus' (Echterhoff 2008, p.263). As Jeffrey Olick (2007) has observed, memory is, first and foremost, transmitted through 'language, narrative, and dialogue' (p.29), but when the collective memory of a community is not consolidated through language, that is, when the linguistic code of a community does not suffice to express certain events, 'in the social practices, in which memories are shared and provided with a signification, the memories remain mute' (Jedlowski 2000, p.61, my translation). In other words, those that have undergone a traumatic event literally do not find the words to express - in the language of their culture - what they have witnessed: their personal accounts cannot be confirmed or acknowledged by the other members of their community. With regards to political violence in the 1970s, we shall in fact see that a commonly shared vocabulary to define the various acts of violence that marked these years is absent, which adds to the misrepresentation of political violence in history education. In the rest of this essay, I shall mainly focus on the three most frequently used definitions: terrorism, 'stragismo', and 'strategy of tension, and the way these concepts are used in the textbooks.

3.2.1 The 'strategy of tension' and stragismo

The notion of'strategy of tension' appeared for the first time in an article of 1969 on The Observer, where the journalist attributed various bomb attacks that had struck

Italy in those years to some sinister strategy which aimed at increasing the fear of a revolution in order to justify an authoritative response which would bring an end to the social upheavals of 1968 and 1969, and eliminate or weaken the power of the Left in general (Biscione 2003, p.242). According to the textbooks, the 'strategy of tension manifested itself for the first time in Piazza Fontana, a few days after the publication of the article. However, a number of similar violent incidents which involved the State, either directly or indirectly, preceded and may very well be related to the 'strategy of tension : these include the repression of labourers by police forces in the Sicilian town of Avola in 1968 (two deaths and 48 wounded); an attempted neo-fascist coup detat in 1964; violently repressed protests against the government, which was supported by a fascist party, in 1960; and we may even draw the line back to the massacre in the Sicilian town of Portella della Ginestra in 1947, when gun fire was opened on a group of peasants marching through the town in celebration of the International Workers' Day (Rapini 2001).

Thus, as Andrea Rapini (2001) observes, Piazza Fontana was not an isolated event, and its significance lies perhaps more in the changing modalities of violence. What binds these incidents, Rapini continues, is the 'intrinsic goal of political violence to bring a stop to or, at the least, slow down the emancipation of subordinate classes' (p. 199, my translation), which threatened to disturb the international (pro-American) relations Italy had developed in the wake of the Second World War (p.200). Thus, by ignoring any relation between the previous incidents - which again represent 'uncomfortable' memories that destabilize the idea of a democratic State - and the massacres of the 1970s, a longer history of violent State repression of protest movements and other forms of political control - which suggest the existence of a more complex, anti-communist programme - is undermined.

Furthermore, the textbooks interpret the 'strategy of tension in a rather simplistic way, adhering to the dominant, public interpretation of the strategy as 'a sort of universal complot' (Venturoli 2007, p.236, my translation). Thus, Capra et al (1993) describe the strategy as a 'design of déstabilisation aimed at provoking an authoritarian solution and based on a progression of provocations and attacks having reference, almost beyond doubt, to a right-wing matrix' (p.898, my translation). However, historian Cinzia Venturoli (2007) - who has done extensive research on the memory of 1970s terrorism in Italy - observes that the multitude and heterogeneity of the elements behind the strategy excludes the idea of a clearly outlined project, and we should rather consider the 'strategy of tension a political climate of fear and alarm provoked by a variety of right-wing organizations who, while attempting to put the blame on the left-wing milieu, tried to legitimate a turn to a more authoritative, right-wing government (pp.235-36; p.31).

Venturoli's assumption that the massacres of the 1970s were committed by right-wing terrorist organizations is confirmed in most of the analyzed textbooks, although the authors at times choose their words carefully and fail to go beyond the mere judicial facts, or even ignore these: thus, Carocci (1985) notes how the instigators of the Piazza Fontana massacre 'were never found' (p. 1473, my translation), completely ignoring the involvement of the two exponents of Ordine Nuovo who were eventually considered guilty but not tried as they were, by then, 'no longer judicially liable', as we have seen (Bull 2007, p.21). Ignoring the neo-fascists' involvement in the massacres of the strategy of tension thus again reveals a (political) strategy of forgetting, perhaps also nurtured by a certain reluctance to be more explicit about cases which might arouse polemics and debates (Venturoli 2007).

Venturoli's description of the scope of the strategy, that is to create a situation of alarm and panic among the Italian population, also finds consensus in the majority of the textbooks, though again choice of words may differ and the gravity of the situation is not always acknowledged. Some authors use, for example, very restrained words, bringing the situation down to a case of déstabilisation or disorientation, which obviously weakens the impact and the undemocratic character of these massacres. In the following statements, for example, the 'strategy of tension' is presented as an almost legitimate political action which was created to 'draw the moderate opinion's attention to the re-establishment of order, even if this meant damaging democratic liberties' (Finzi 1990, p.B38, my translation), or which aimed at the disorientation of 'Italian public opinion in order to promote, if necessary, changes in the institutional order' (Galasso 1994, p.723, my translation).

A notion that is linked to that of the 'strategy of tension is stragismo, a word derived from strage ('massacre') and which implies some sort of uncanny terroristlike 'practice' (Zingarelli 2003). It is used very rarely in the manuals, although Bull (2007) considers it a key notion in relation to the 'strategy of tension, and describes it as part of a wider conspiracy that included the secret services of the State (p.7). However, there is not yet consensus on the existence of any such coalition, and so again this concept is perhaps still too controversial and compromising to be analysed thoroughly in the textbooks. In fact, information about the role of the secret services of the State are rarely elaborated, and references to the Italian State 'as subject/object of international, military and nuclear politics, and as subject of violence' are rare (Luigi Cortesi cited Venturoli 2007, p.240, my translation) are rare. Similarly, an essay by historians Cucchiarelli and Giannuli on the role of the State in the 'strategy of tension demonstrates that only 'an average of 1% of the texts dealing with the history of the Italian Republic since 1946 [is] dedicated to these themes' (cited Venturoli 2007, p.239, my translation). Thus, contrary to right-wing terrorist groups, whose culpability in acts of stragismo is more or less acknowledged, hardly any attention is given to the role of the State.

This absence is not only the result of the lack of court sentences or the fear of provoking public, political debates, but must also be attributed to the difficult accessibility to documents that may reveal important information on the possible involvement of the State in the stragi, and which suggests that 'in all these incidents representatives of the State have been involved' (De Luna 2009, p.31). It is a vicious circle, though, since the inaccessibility of these documents ties in with the problem of not having any judicial sentences, and the fact that many trials are still running or have been reopened makes it 'more difficult, if not impossible, to transfer the primary sources to the State Archives' (Carucci 2002, p.47, my translation). Perhaps this is why historians recur to less controversial and conflicting notions such terrorism, mentioned no less than 169 times against six mentions to stragi and 51 to the 'strategy of tension'.

3.2.2 Terrorism

With regards to the notion of'terrorism', the textbooks make a rather indistinctive, undifferentiated use, simply dividing it into two poles; right-wing (or 'black') terrorism, on the one hand, is usually connected to the 'strategy of tension, whereas left-wing (or 'red', 'proletarian') terrorism is represented mainly by the Red Brigades, and the Aldo Moro assassination of 1978, which features in all textbooks and is often accompanied by photographical material. Other victims that are mentioned include the assassination of a Public Prosecutor in 1976, the first premeditated killing which is thus seen as some sort of breaking point, and the abduction of the terrorists' very first hostage in 1972.

Especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, the two 'terrorisms' are represented as two sides of the same coin with one and the same goal, that of destabilizing the Italian democratic system: '[R]ed or 'proletarian' terrorism [...] accomplished, objectively, the same results as black terrorism' (Camera et al. 1987, p. 1384, my translation); 'left-wing terrorism [...] contributed, along side terrorists of opposite colour, to the creation of an increasingly dramatic situation in the country' (Salvadori 1990, p.593, my translation). Consequently, any ideological, moral differences between the two types of violence are eliminated, and the important distinction between left-wing terrorism generally attacking single, selected individuals, as opposed to right-wing terrorism which aimed at large masses of people, is ignored.

Often this division is backed up by a temporal differentiation, as the manuals tend to allocate right-wing terrorism in the very first years of the decade, while left-wing terrorism is connected to the second half of the 1970s. Although the Red Brigades were active from the early 1970s, after 1975 their actions did become more frequent and violent, a process which - as we have seen - most manuals attribute to the Pci's unacceptable political compromise. However, to separate the two 'terrorisms' in such a simplistic way is to ignore the complex political and social situation of the time. Furthermore, right-wing terrorism continued throughout the entire 1970s, as we have seen, and rather than to bring everything down to a simple opposition between two 'types' of terrorism, it would be more sensible to distinguish between developments in forms of violence within the groups themselves.

Furthermore, the choice of the expression 'years of lead' by a number of textbooks, in the description of the 1970s, also implies a political strategy of forgetting, since lead is used as a metaphor for bullet and thus refers almost exclusively to left-wing terrorism, right-wing terrorism having mostly recurred to bomb attacks (O'Leary 2007). In fact, all textbooks tend to underscore the role of right-wing terrorism, while descriptions of left-wing terrorism overflow. Thus, if most of the manuals attribute the 'strategy of tension' - although not explicitly - to right-wing terrorist groups, the occasional use of the adjectives 'occult' and 'obscure' in the description of these groups keeps the information somewhat vague and open for interpretation (Zingarelli 2003). Some manuals even refuse to take a clear stance on the question who is to be held responsible for the massacres: we read, for example, how 'often neither the executors nor the motives [of the massacres] have been clarified' (Galasso 1994, p,723, my translation).⁶The culpability of left-wing terrorists, on the other hand, is much more explicit, for example when the textbooks omit information about cover-up schemes and throwing off tacks by the State and at the detriment of the left-wing milieu, as we have seen earlier on. The Left also dominates in appendices: half of the documents which deal with terrorism focus entirely and exclusively on the Red Brigades, while the other half deals with both forms of terrorism. In other words, no documents can be found which refer exclusively to right-wing terrorism (Venturoli 2007). Undoubtedly, the fact that we have more judicial truths with regards to left-wing terrorism, as most left-wing terrorists have been arrested, tried and have often written about their experiences, contributes to the dominance of left-wing terrorism in the collective imagery and thus in the textbooks. Right-wing terrorists, on the contrary, tend to consider themselves as blameless and innocent victims of the 'strategy of tension, and will not easily admit to having committed the crimes they are suspected of (Bull 2007). All in all, the predominance of the extreme Left in the collective memory of the 1970s as transmitted by history education does not seem to be the natural outcome of events, but the product of a highly distorted, manipulated representation of the past.

Conclusion

We have thus seen how, by omitting, sidelining, underscoring or simply ignoring facts, the authors of history textbooks in Italy generally promote a distorted and incomplete narrative of the 1970s, where only certain facts are made 'accessible' to the public. We have seen, for example, how hardly any of the analysed textbooks offer any information on the role of the State in the massacres, and that the almost certain responsibility of neo-fascist terrorists is ignored or left in the open, while the textbooks overflow with accounts of left-wing terrorism. In other cases, the historians bring the political violence of the 1970s down to a simple division between left and right-wing terrorism, placing the different culprits (and victims) on the same (moral) level. This incapacity of history education to create a more complete national narrative of the 1970s is partially a result of the failure of the Italian State to bring justice to the victims of terrorism. However, court sentences and the mass media are not the only sources on which historians should base their analysis, and perhaps a more critical, independent approach, less conform to the 'prevailing opinions in the scientific community' (see p.8), would contribute to a healthier and stable relation with the past. At present, some memory communities are working in that direction through the collection and filing of documents, testimonies and other material which may enhance research on the stragi. Furthermore, they connect these archives through networks and make the material easily accessible through internet.²⁰³ Most importantly, though, these projects have a significant didactic purpose: they organise workshops on the theme of political violence, and create courses in collaboration with teachers. Thus, in sight of a State which fails to do justice to the victims of terrorism and stragismo, and stimulate a process of reconciliation that is not limited to a mere equation of left and right-wing violence, these memory communities seem to have become the new promoters of a truth which has been denied to the Italian nation for much too long.

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Annex

1 As former terrorist Mario Moretti (2007) explained in an interview: 'The entire movement experienced the bomb at the Bank of Agriculture as an attack' (p.22, my translation).

Thus, Ruth Glynn (2008) has noted that in Italy a 'cultural space and discursive prominence' is granted to left-wing perpetrators, who 'continue to enjoy a high public profile and to be granted access to the media and publishing industries' (p.2).

2 Similarly, almost a quarter of the students in Bologna (21,7%) again point the finger at the Red Brigades, with regards to the Bologna massacre of 1980, despite the fact that two neo-fascist terrorists were actually found guilty (Venturoli 2007, p.203).

3 Similarly, the director of another publishing house stated that there are no prescriptions for authors of history textbooks, but only 'general indications' with regards to content, whereas more specific indications relate to the chronological description of history (Antonio Laterza, personal communication, December 4, 2009).

4 See for an example: http://wvvw.insegnareitaliano.it/docuinenti/Programmi/Storia/superi-ori/programmi storia snperiori.htm.

5 The textbooks mostly mention the famous Lockheed bribery scandal, which implicated international political and business leaders as well.

6 Perhaps similar descriptions also reflect some sort of uncanny desire for the unknown, and the popularity of TV programs, movies and detective novels dealing with the so-called 'mysteries of Italy' may explain this fascination with the unresolved crimes of the 1970s.

The creation of the 'Network of Archives Against Oblivion' in 2006 is particularly interesting in this perspective as this network brings together all the victims' associations, documentary centres and archives which work on political violence, on the national territory, and which tries to make these communities more visible for and accessible to the public. See: http:// www.archivioflamigni.org/.