The case of Aldo Moro — a forty year-long Italian saga
What was the role of the secret societies in Moro’s brutal assassination?
The murder of Aldo Moro is an undoubted signature of the covert actions perpetrated by the dark, proverbial ‘cloak-and-dagger’ circles which acted for years ‘outside’ of the world order of a country which formally belonged to the ‘Western democracies’.
This year exactly 40 years have passed since the kidnapping and the assassination of one of the most prominent Italian politicians Aldo Moro.
It was an unprecedented event in modern political history of Italy which has not ceased to stir interest among the general public. One wonders why Aldo Moro was assassinated? Who was behind this assassination?
What was the role of the secret societies in Moro’s brutal assassination? What were their paymasters’ geopolitical goals behind this heinous crime which at the time was marked as the brutal attack on democracy?
Ultimately, ‘can the Moro case’ be explained without an analysis of a broader epoch-related context which was characterized as the cold war conflict of the two great super powers: the USA and the USSR?
These are but a few questions related to one of the most turbulent periods in the recent Italian history. One thing is certain. The murder of Aldo Moro is an undoubted signature of the covert actions perpetrated by the dark, proverbial ‘cloak-and-dagger’ circles which acted for years ‘outside’ of the world order of a country which formally belonged to the ‘Western democracies’.
What is known today is that these circles ‘invisible to the public gaze’ were meant to control Italian political elite and to direct their activities towards the politics of the US hegemony, not allowing the leftists to ever come to power.
Who was Aldo Moro?
Aldo Moro (born in Maglie near Bari, Italy on 23 September 1916–9 May 1978) had a successful political career. As a member of Demo-Christian Party (Christian Democracy) he was elected in 1946 in the Constituent Assembly of Italy and from 1948 he was a representative in the Parliamentary House of the Republic of Italy). He was a professor of the institutions of law and criminal procedure at the University of Bari, and then until his tragic death he was a lecturer at the University of Rome.
He was the President of the Parliamentary group of the Demo-Christian Party, and then Minister of Justice (1955–1957), and then Minister of Education (1957–1959), Demo-Christian Party Secretary (1959–1964), the President of the coalition governments of the left centre Demo-Christians, social-democrats, republicans, socialists (1963–1968), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1969–1972 and 1973–1974), and the president of the government again (1974–1976). He was elected President of the Party in 1976.
Although he was a southerner by birth, his character was not typical of the locals from this part of Italy. Instead of grand gestures and rhetoric, he was naturally bestowed with some characteristics which were not common in an Italian politician: patience and reason.
As such, he dominated Italian political scene for three decades. His biographers indicated that he had ‘his first political challenge’ immediately after he completed his studies in law at the University of Bari, when he was about to join the Socialist Party of Italy.
When he was asked by the secretary of a local organization if he was a confirmed Marxist he replied that he was a Roman Catholic and therefore he could not accept the world views based on historic materialism’.
In Moro’s political career the events in this political party in 1959 had a huge significant. Namely, that year Amintore Fanfani was overthrown, apparently the omnipotent leader of the party up to that moment, and due to the most profound infighting and deep divisions within the party which resulted in the appearance of fractions, Moro was elected as an interim solution as a party secretary.
At the Congress in Naples in 1962, the Demo-Christians after the Moro’s seven- hour long speech with lots of hesitation and ‘trials and tribulations’ new political line of the ‘left centre’. In that way the political Rubicon was crossed and the socialists were given an open entry into the government sphere’, which opened up space to personally take the risk of this political experiment by forming its first left centre government on 4 December 1963.
With the socialists in power he formed two more governments and contrary to the then political predictions, he performed the duties of a premier until 1968.
Therefore, he despite much opposition, within the country and out of it, Moro proved the justification of the policies of the left centre and more importantly he proved his inclination as a statesman to reflect on and consider its economic, social and political needs of a country more realistically.
Since the end of 1968, when he left the Prime minister position, the situation in Italy became more complex and the new governments of Mariano Rumor and Emiliano Colombo, have not found adequate political responses. Although up until 1974 he performed the duties of a minister for foreign affairs, Moro expressed his opinions about the internal events in the country from time to time, mostly via one faction of his staunch followers within the ruling party.
Being fully aware of the deep confrontations of an Italian society and the complexity of geopolitical circumstances, Moro launched a concept of ‘historical agreement’ even then with ever more popular Italian Communists.
According to Moro’s observations on the then circumstances, the government of the Demo-Christians had an obligation to establish the new relationship towards the opposition in the Parliament, particularly towards the Communists because their approaching the field of government was of fundamental significance for Italy. The Communists before that on the 12th Congress in 1969 already gave off certain positive signals in the direction of ‘a historic compromise’.
When in the middle of 1974 at the referendum a proposal by the Demo-Christians failed on the divorce of their ‘marriage of convenience’, it became clear that the Christian Democracy was in a most profound crisis. Exactly in these conditions Aldo Moro formed his fourth (December 1974 — January 1976) and then his fifth government (February to June 1976), after which general Parliamentary elections were held. The triumph of Communists at the 1976 elections opened up Pandora’s box but it consolidated Moro even more in his belief about the necessity of ‘a historic compromise’.
When in October 1976 he was elected President of the Demo-Christians, Aldo Moro found himself amid a historical political turmoil which by far surpassed the borders and the limits of the then Italy.
The cause of a great turnaround
When the abduction of Aldo Moro on the 16th March, 1978 was made public, the events in Italy have again came into broad daylight of the world politics. The world has thus entered the most dramatic period of its post-war history.
As a European country which extends its expanses in the heart of the Mediterranean, and then as one of ten industrially highly developed countries, as the cradle of culture and the crossroads of the worlds, Italy was one of the most prominent pillars within the system of the Western military alliance. Therefore, its geostrategic development was huge. Then, it is well known that it is to do with a country whose democracy was fragile, that it is to do with the region where Fascism was born, and the roots of which after the second world war were not uprooted.
A lot of Italians with the overwhelming feelings of nostalgia used to talk of the unity under the crown of Savoy and the symbols of ‘the Fascist Party’, as well as the tradition in the spirit of one empire. Yet, the then Italy had its other side. It was a country with multimillion population with educated working class which found its political stronghold in the Italian Communist Party, which enriched the Marxist thought and practice with its novel ideas and steps towards the Italian route to socialism’.
The political rise of the ICP surely at the time was a unique European political phenomenon. Truth be told, in other Western European societies pro-Communist forces rose, but nowhere as in Italy did they have such powerful social and intellectual stronghold.
One should look for the reasons in the social and economic structure of a country which at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s had huge problems to deal with. Three decades after the war, almost half of Italy (the south of the country) had a status of an undeveloped region in comparison with the highly developed industrial north. The statistics about the depth of the economic and social crises in the Italian south were devastating.
Tens of thousands of cheap labourers flocked to the north looking for work in the triangle of Milan-Torin-Genova. At the same time, a high number of citizens ‘left for more arable pastures’ across the ocean. In the regions of Sicily and Calabria only semi-feudal social relations remained, and parallel with the migration to the north criminal gangs were on the rise.
There was growing dissatisfaction among the university youth which began to present their own requests in the spirit of 1968 protests. By the middle of the 1970s 135,000 students were studying in Rome only and the percentage of those who were completing university was around 7,6% only.
A feeling of a complete loss of life prospects represented a fertile soil for the rise of a number of extreme groups within not only student populations, but within other walks of life as well.
The dissatisfaction and frustration were mainly directed against the leading Demo-Christians, the representatives of which opposed the reforms and the dismantling of the strictly centralized state apparatus. The situation in big cities posed a particular problem. For instance, in Rome at the time around 800 000 people were at the borderline poverty levels. All that contributed to the crisis of confidence in the government institutions and it represented an ideal political climate for the rise of political terrorism.
Italian Communist Party aware of the most profound crisis was the first one to begin the process of internal party transformation. Unlike the Christian Democrats used to do in the three decades of government, Italian Communists, having acted as the out-of-system opposition, were forced to perform a series of creative solutions in their own political practice. For ICP one of the crucial theoretical and practical solutions was the relationship towards the Roman Catholic issue’.
Luigi Bettazzi, a Roman Catholic bishop from the North of Italy, dealt with this topic at the time. Bettazzi asked an essential question to Enrico Berlinguer, ICP general secretary. Bettazzi asked an essential question in his letter. Where did such a success of the Communist Party come from in a Catholic country such as Italy, the success of a political party headed by Marxists, therefore, with materialistic and atheistic inspiration and ideology? Monsignor Bettazzi particularly referred to the case of those well-established Catholic intellectuals who did not denounce their own religious beliefs. That Catholic bishop posed a question what sort of a relationship of ICP would be towards the religious institutions which were dealing with the social and humanitarian activities in the country.
The Italian ‘third way’
Enrico Berlinguer’s response published in a political and cultural magazine published in Rome, Italy, Rinascita on October 13, 1977, represented perhaps at the time a small but crucial step in establishing a “historic compromise” with the ruling Christian Democrats. Berlinguer, writing to Monsignor Bettazzi, was actually writing to Aldo Mora. The crux of this response was based on the positions of Gramsci and Togliatti as per the “Catholic issue”.
Namely, Antonio Gramsci inferred that Catholicism was in no way purely an ideological issue, metaphysical abstraction, a myth which one should fight against with the weaponry of philosophy; it was a social phenomenon, historically determined in its contents and forms, as well as all the social phenomena which only a historical experience of masses struggling for their emancipation could change and direct toward the ways how to surpass it for it to die out and ‘vanish into political thin air’.
Berlinguer in his address to the Catholic public particularly denied ICP having any intention of imposing its ideological philosophical doctrine or at least making it privileged in the broadest public, pointing out that the position of the Party is ‘neither teistic nor atheistic and neither is it anti-theistic’, but according to their choice opt for a democratic country in accord with the needs of a layperson.
The second part of this response to Bishop Bettazzi that he related the charitable activities by the Church to its public interest and catering for the social needs of ordinary citizens’, which practically meant a positive response to this sort of requests by the clergy. In this manner there was ‘ample room’ to overcome a deep crisis and the formation of the new government which in turn opened up routes for the participation of the Communists.
Berlinguer’s response was surely a consequence of very complex relations at the top of the Curia Romana within which at the time temporarily the pro-reform trends prevailed, led first by Pope John XXIII, who called for ‘the modernisation of the church, depending on the time and circumstances impertinent to the church’. After his death, on 3 June 1963, the reformer’s ‘political baton’ was passed on to Pope Paul VI.
He was the first one to bravely declare in public that the monolith Roman Catholicism per se would have disappeared by the end of the 20th century under the relentless pressure of the scientific progress, citizens’ disobedience and new alternatives to Christianity’. After the death of Pope Paul VI, on 26 August 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected, who would symbolically assume the names of both of his predecessors i.e. John Paul I. Being the son of a poor socialist, in his position of the Cardinal he assumed an independent attitude somewhat distant and independent from the Curia Romana.
He remained on the Papal throne for 33 days only. He died a sudden death under mysterious circumstances without an autopsy ever being performed. According to the popular belief, he is believed to have been poisoned.
What is known is that his election, just like Aldo Moro’s policies, was not viewed with approval by the US administration, as well as the influential Masonic lodges — particularly the Propaganda Due or P-2 lodge, the activities of which appear to have been linked to many of the highest circles in the Vatican.
to be continued …
P.S. This article is my translation (with their kind permission) based on the article and a live lecture given by Milorad Vukasinović on 19 June 2018, a well-known Serbian journalist and a geopolitical analyst for KCNS Cultural Centre, Novi Sad, Serbia, South East Europe.
by Natasha@geopoliticon
