ABSTRACT: In December 1980, the Italian terrorist group the "Red Brigades" kidnapped the Judge Giovanni D'Urso asking for the closure of the special prison of Asinara. He was a member of the political class, supported by the more important daily papers, the "partito della fermezza" which accepted no dialogue with terrorists. It needed the murder of D'Urso to achieve an authoritarian "coup". The press decided on the embargo of all communications from the Red Brigades. Only the Radical Party continued to follow, through its radio and television programmes, the thread of the dialogue with the "comrade murderers". On January 14, 1981, Leonardo Sciascia addressed the Red Brigades in a public appeal which we are publishing here.

On January 15, Giovanni D'Urso was released by the Red Brigades.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

It is the first time that I am addressing the Red Brigades directly. Not the individual members of the Brigades, but the whole monstruous abstraction which is so named. And I am not addressing them in the name of the values they have been transgressing for years, nor in the name of their future repentance, but I am setting them this simple problem and leaving them to see in their own time the solution. You have scornfully refused to be the "blind instrument of shrewd manipulation" by others. But by killing the Judge, D'Urso, at this particular moment, doesn't the doubt of becoming so strike you? Look around you, look among yourselves, reflect, you are capable of doing so. Your cause, the cause for which you say you are fighting has been lost ages ago; it would be a tragic joke to realise tomorrow that you have acted in such a deadly way in the interests of those by whom you would be the first to be destroyed.