More Aldo Moro context, from a commenter on my blog:
- Moro was prime minister when I left Rome for stateside, and he was by all accounts one of the more competent italian elected officials (admittedly not a high bar).
It's difficult to convey how terrorized Roman citizens felt as a result of the Brigati Rossi's 1970's terrorist campaigns. I was there at the time -- each day my parents would read the paper to see whether they knew the latest kidnap victim, and where the latest body of a former kidnap victim had been found, if the family had been too slow in paying the ransom.
The ex-pat community was fairly small in Rome in those days, so we knew the Getty family, even though we didn't socialize with them. When John Paul Getty III was kidnapped at the age of 16, my friends and I were all terrified we'd be next. When his ear arrived in the mail, we all assumed we'd be eventually cut up and returned piecemeal to our parents.
That the Italian government was unwilling, even in those circumstances, to stoop to torture is a testament to their principles. Whether this administration would take the moral high road in similar circumstances would now seem to have been answered unequivocally in the negative.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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