QUICK THOUGHTS: Night Out, a great movie

QUICK THOUGHTS: Night Out, a great movie

(The end of Aldo Moro, and also of the hopes of my generation)

Rome 16 March 1978, while I was walking through the underpasses of the "Tortorious Wall" in the direction of Piazzale Flaminio, a carabiniere raised his paddle and stopped me for a check. All in order, but it was the first time that a machine gun supplied to the police was aimed at me, when I pulled over my car, when they made me get out, when I got back up to get away and continue on my way. A behavior that surprised me up to a certain point, that morning the Andreotti government presented itself in Parliament, that same morning Aldo Moro will not arrive in Parliament. That morning the history of Italy changed, all the illusions of my generation ended. Why am I recalling that story today? For a film by Marco Bellocchio, a director who has always fascinated me with the singularity of his ideas and clarity of narration. Let's go back for a moment to what happened on March 16, 1978 and to the 44 years of controversy that followed. The thoughts of the Italians revolve around two questions, belonging to two opposing sides: whether or not the BR (Brigate rossa) should be considered a true, autonomous, honestly sincere organization, or if instead, it was the armed wing of a conspiracy of a military-political. The adhesion to the BR of an insignificant number of communist Italians cannot exclude the intervention of a state apparatus capable of reaping the advantages, in the chaos of those days. This dilemma has accompanied my generation for 44 years. The film, "Esterno notte" by Marco Bellocchio is an excellent work and as such has the power to clarify many doubts. Like all works of art, this film displaces us, forces us to change our point of view, the brutal facts are only a small part of the story, the beginning of the film, what happened which constitutes the indispensable prerequisite for subsequent events. The great director places center stage not the perpetrators, or the manuals of the kidnapping, but an entire apparatus of power: secret agents, psychiatrists, ministers, policemen, priests, fixers, soldiers, piduist Masons. This "palace" of power builds a double strategy, the one with Moro alive and the one with Moro dead. It soon becomes clear that the fate of the prisoner is sealed in an irreversible way. He was sentenced to death. Pope Paul VI, a great friend of Moro, collected over 10 billion of the old lire as a slush fund for exchange with the BR, but the generals, the communists, and secondly Andreotti, blocked the way to the ransom. Every negotiation takes place inside the palace of power, without leaving the kidnapped person any chance of saving himself. Who for one reason who for another, everyone wants him killed. Even the Pope ends up resigning and renounces the dream of paying a ransom, the Moro family understands that they can only wait for the end of the joint. A state death planned by the institutions. In the film, the members of the Red Brigades appear to us as irrelevant figures, the scenes in public show them indifferent and extraneous to the reality of the metropolitan population, absolutely detached from any social relationship. The film moves towards an epilogue, to say the least farcical, the double funeral: the private one strictly reserved for the family and the public one deserted by relatives, without a body, immersed in the hypocrisy of the regime. The state funeral without Moro's body marks the beginning of the "broad understandings" which will emerge as a transitional period, effectively erasing the democratic achievements of our generation, and imposing a new order guided by today's capitalism. By a paradox of history, Aldo Moro, the architect of the communist entry into the majority of the Italian government, must be killed to allow the success of his project, Italy's full membership of NATO even with the PCI and despite the PCI (party Italian Communist). This is a really great movie. It is the film that somehow defends a generation of Italians who believed in many ideals, who recognized themselves in the constitution and in the highest values of existing democracies. As democrats, ecologists, pacifists, animal rights activists, attentive to social justice, they believed in solidarity between peoples and believed in the human value of helping the weakest. "This generation has lost" sings Gaber in a song, he was talking exactly about us. Looking towards a better future, we always took to the streets to defend workers, defend the poor, defend peace, in favor of women's rights. In two or three years, between 1975 and 1978, that generation was annihilated politically, like the American Indians it was dissolved. Public opinion, manipulated by the media, never so in agreement, "assembled" us to terrorism, the same terrorism that is shown to us in the film as an expression of the political power of the time. Today if we asked our children for an opinion on the young students of those years, on the demonstrators of those years, a large majority of them would answer: "they were all terrorists", but also, "idealistic dreamers", "they ruined Italy" . Yes, that's right, not only did they annihilate us politically then, but in thirty years of journalistic narratives and public debates, they erased the memory of those years, erased our history. We have never existed, we do not exist.