“Boia imperialisti, spie di regime e corrotti buffoni”. La lingua dei comunicati delle brigate rosse durante il Sequestro Moro

Abstract

On March 16th 1978, Italy goes through one of the worst pages in its history, when the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), the armed party, kidnap the politician Aldo Moro and brutally kill five bodyguards; the BR thus begin their swan song. During the fifty-five days of imprisonment of the president of the DC (Christian Democratic Party), the terrorists elaborate and issue nine statements in which they illustrate the motivations and strategies of both the kidnapping and the armed struggle. It is definitely one of the events that has most impressed the public opinion since the second postwar, and that a large bibliography keeps examining. However, one aspect has always remained less explored than others: the linguistic one. Through a syntactic, morphological, and lexical analysis this article gives an account of the salient features of the statements, including the rhetorical devices and the communication strategies used by the authors. The linguistic observation highlights the complexity of the nine texts, and the opportunity to consider them as a coherent corpus of writings that share common traits which, although they do not constitute a technical language, still define a peculiar way to communicate of a specific terrorist group. The present work is inspired by a general enthusiasm of the recent Italian studies for the Seventies and for the so called ‘Years of Lead’, and is meant to suggest a particular attention to the role of language in the study of terrorism and of political violence of that period.