When from Canada, 40 years ago, the Red Brigades began to lose

 

“If it works, it is old”.

 

Marshall McLuhan

 

Giuliano Compagno*

 

I am stating the obvious when I say that Marshall McLuhan was honoured all over the world. After all, his activity as a scholar represented a resounding exception, due to his timely ability to interpret those phenomena and concepts dominating his times. Even today, regardless of the thought of McLuhan, it is very hard to understand any of the mechanisms of communication and transmission of facts and thoughts: the mass-media, the fashion industry, the advertising, the energy…McLuhan was incredibly fast to anticipate and understand the global society, and his contribution to the comprehension of contemporary society deserves an accurate critique and a serious judgement.

 

The world owes much to Marshall McLuhan, even though celebrations in his name often took place in an academic climate not really consistent with his speed of thought. Derrick De Kerckhove brilliantly explained this fact. He is a quite lively and serious scholar, always travelling around the world. In time De Kerckhove inherited part of the magic of McLuhan, without claiming to be the only follower of his school of thought. Kerckhove was simply the best pupil of that school of thought, as well as its freest interpreter. And without doubts, McLuhan was a scholar worthy of such a freedom exercise, such a bravery. From the city as a classroom to the global village; from the endless versions of on-line glocalism to the brand-new media, never supplanting the old ones; from the overheating to the cooling down of the same news to the extremely illuminating and banal idea that means of communication represented the “condition of experience”—how come did it not come to our minds?—. Every experience and media, being it the Nile or the movable type, the horse or the last Bmw series, the letter delivered by a messenger or a wapp sorted by a server…were and are all transitory stages in the world, regardless of the truth and the reality of human experience.

 

However, as mentioned above, it is surprising that the fundamental contribution given by Marshall McLuhan to our country as regards one of the darkest times of our history is still today ignored. On the 19^th of February 1978 McLuhan gave an interview for the Roman newspaper “Il Tempo” in which he suggested that our rulers adopted a sensational solution to defeat terrorism. Gino Agnese, who already was the director of “MassMedia”, one of the most distinguished and specialised magazine dealing with massmediology, would speak of that scoop in this way: “The interview aroused great interest. McLuhan said: “We need to pull the plug!”. What he meant was: we need to shut down communications, that is no longer spreading terrorist messages, we need to stop talking about terrorism. It would be the only way to defeat it. And I remember that after that interview the newspaper hosted a debate in which I made an intervention objecting to McLuhan that the electrical man, as he used to define him, could not be deprived of his electricity. You cannot cut off power from today’s electrical man, the society of communication cannot be denied by means of a decree: it is impossible”.

 

Gino Angese was not totally wrong, albeit what happened after…In this sense, it is worthwhile to remember the chaotic events taking place in that days. On the 12^th of December 1980 an armed core of the Red Brigades kidnapped Giovanni D’Urso, head of the third department of the Italian Prison Service. The Red Brigades aimed to exploit the prison system as a new battlefield. As a consequence, two weeks after a huge riot broke out in the prison of Trani, in which seventy detainees demanded the closing of the prison of Asinara. A blitz by the Police suppressed the uprising and managed to release the hostages. Anyways, it is only with public announcement n. 6 that the Red Brigades lost their first, true battle. Indeed, among the conditions requested to release D’Urso, the Red Brigades solicited that the Press published the statements issued by the prisons of Trani and Palmi. Meanwhile, Mario Scialoja, a journalist of “L’Espresso”, managed to interview the prison officers of the management office. This climate of Big Brother of political crime was shattered by the shots killing General Galvaligi. Then, Scialoja and his colleague Bultrini were arrested and two days later the Red Brigades released a statement in which they deputed the choice over the death sentence or the amnesty of general D’Urso to the committee of Trani and Palmi. Moreover, they demanded that the newspapers published the sentence. Things were getting to a collective madness. Nonetheless, something unexpected happened: from its darkest abyss, the public conscience came to its senses. The media understood that they were being chocked by the grasp of the terrorists and reacted as McLuhan had suggested three years before.

 

It is Sunday the 4^th of January 1981, 8 p.m. when the TV news Tg1 broadcasted the following message to its audience: “We refrain from providing any further information while the police are investigating the Red Brigades’ document”. The “Corriere della Sera” newspaper followed this strategy as well, issuing the following considerations to in its pages: “Our director’s office, in agreement with the editorial group and after informing the Editorial Committee, opted as of today for the news blackout about the requests of the terrorists detaining the judge D’Urso.(…) The Brigadists’ last moves clearly show that their objective is to gain space in the newspapers and on TV in order to regain the ground they have lost with defections and detentions…nevertheless, our reader must keep in mind that this decision will not obstruct the news flow: as of today we are intentioned to make an even more rich and well-informed newspaper, eliminating from the terrorism news only those pieces of information which represent a complete blackmailing attempt on the part of the Red Brigades, who aims at poison and distort the truth by transforming the newspapers into an instrument of subversion”. Others newspaper would take the same stance as the “Corriere della Sera”, among which “Il Giornale”, “La Notte” e “Il Giorno”. In the end, “Repubblica” through the pen of Eugenio Scalfari: “we will not provide any space for their proclaims but we intend to continue publishing all the information regarding the Red Brigades, including their requests, with the aim of informing the public opinion about them”.

 

After sinking into a silence far more tragic than a solitary confinement spent in prison, the Red Brigades started to experience some serious asthma attacks. Their arrogance, once representing their vital breath, gave out. So did their ability to allure followers. Every fleeting bond between their theory of death and the general impatience of the people that they stupidly thought to represent, finally broke. The Red Brigades were defeated also thanks to a genius from Toronto, a brilliant mind that had foreseen and understood everything 20 years before than our most influential scholars started to imagine a solution to this issue. “Thinkers” later on cloned in their weak way of thinking and all its weaker expressions, inside the hermeneutics labs and resulting from the mobile phones ontology.

 

It is very likely that we owe much of our democratic integrity to that McLuhan directly connected to the society, to that true interpreter of facts, to he who would warn us once again years later, this time about the drift represented by the spectacularisation of politics, as well as about the TV circus subduing the people, forcedly lobotomised by a group of useless people. Without doubts, if McLuhan witnessed too many demonstrations of acquiescence towards the powerful, he would hope for a “oratorical moratorium”. Microphones turned off, plug pulled, only meagre comments to explain things carried out seriously. That, at least, would make someone be committed to something, instead of talking. Surrounded be the typical silence of the hills of Siena, or by the characteristic maple woods in Nova Scotia, attempting at giving decency to the exercise of listening.

 

*Writer and essayist