Murder of Aldo Moro

You don't have to be a very old listener to remember the time when we used the phrase 'the Western world' with offhand confidence, assuming that the listener would picture the block of nations of Western Europe, the United States and Canada, united by the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance against... against, if the worst happened, the communist bloc behind the Iron Curtain.

Well, the Western world is a very uneasy collection of allies today and it would be foolish to pretend that its military confidence is not at least disturbed by the thought that communist parties flourish in or around the governments of Italy and France, while the party itself has just been legalised, for the first time in 40 years, in Spain. 

But this week the Western world and all its factions were united by the horror of the murder of Aldo Moro. Everywhere, in this country, the finding of his body and the grizzly circumstances that led up to it, overwhelmed all other topics, domestic or foreign. I don't think that moral comment is much use unless it can help defeat the plague that afflicts all of us in the Western world and beyond, namely terrorism, or what I, thinking of the spread of its tactics into street crime, I prefer to call 'the success of violence'. 

There are, however, two things that ought to be talked about. One is the bitterness, understandable enough, of the Moro family and the other is the different attitudes of the communist parties around the world. 

The Moro family, as we know, begged the government to negotiate with the Red Brigades and the government refused. The recovery of a live Mr Moro, at the cost of unloosing on the world 13 imprisoned terrorists, was too much. We know also that Mr Moro himself, weakened and despairing, felt bitter enough about this decision to request that none of the leaders of his own party, the Christian Democrats, should be present at his funeral. When this became known, surely several Christians around the globe must have been struck by a peculiar embarrassment too awful to talk about. And how can I put this without seeming to be flint-hearted at the wrong time? 

Well, let me say first that a political leader who feels bitter about such a party decision is morally in quite a different position from a leader of a party calling itself the Christian Democratic Party. The blunt and unavoidable question is ought all professing Christians to be prepared, in extremis, to die the death of a Christian martyr? There must be among all Christians a lurking suspicion that the answer is 'yes’. But among all Christians, too, there is the unspoken assumption that martyrs are akin to saints and that human frailty, being what it is, martyrdom cannot be asked or expected of the vast majority of us. 

Among all the commentaries I've read or heard, only one writer had the very risky courage to bring this up. He is William F. Buckley Junior, the most powerful, certainly the most intellectual, conservative commentator in this country. Mr Buckley is also a Roman Catholic. And in a column written before the fate of Mr Moro was known, he suggested, very circumspectly and with much compassion, that if Mr Moro was still alive, his duty was not to demand the freedom of the other terrorists, but to make his peace and steel himself to die as a Christian martyr. All the rest of us, who may have thought this, didn't dare say it because we thought first, as everybody must have done, 'Suppose it were I who was in Mr Moro's place and my family on the rack on the outside?' 

The other point which has for us more than a morbid interest is the official attitude of the communists around the world, at a time when the communist parties in several countries are trying to prove to the world that they are the only true communists and are free from the sins of dogma or of practice of their communist neighbours. The Soviet Union took notice of the kidnapping with the suggestion that it was a combined effort of both right-wing and left-wing extremists. Nobody else, I ought to say, has dreamed of the Red Brigades as a right-wing outfit. When Mr Moro's body was found, Tass reported the death without comment, as did the official Chinese news agency. 

The interesting variations came from the Spanish and French communists who were concerned to make the line of their comment very clear. Both condemned the crime but the French leader seemed anxious to remove any taint of communism from the kidnappers by sending condolences to the communists, the democratic forces and all the Italian people on the propaganda assumption that they're one and the same thing. He attributed the crime to a faction, very vague indeed, the worst reactionaries. The Spanish communist party took much the same line in seeing it as a crime against Italian democracy and one that would, quote, 'serve the darkest forces of reaction and imperialism'. The connection between the Red Brigades and imperialism was never explained, but the Spanish dropped a strong hint that Mr Moro had been murdered precisely because he had brought the Italian communists in to, or close to, the government. Therefore, whether or not Mr Moro failed to be a Christian martyr, he can now enter the official Pantheon as a communist martyr. 

So it's clear that however strongly the millions of the non-communist world believe the Red Brigades to be Marxist terrorists, the many more millions of the faithful in the communist countries have been led to believe that Mr Moro was kidnapped and murdered by right-wing extremists, by imperialists, by those vague, but awful, reactionaries, who could not bear the thought of having communists in the Italian government. 

I doubt it has occurred to many of us that, numerically, most of the world is likely to cite Mr Moro from now on as the supremely cruel example of what happens to a Western statesman if he tries to make his peace with the communists. It's a bleak thing to think about. I mention this obscure, but crucial, point and pass on. 

If there had been no Moro case, I imagine that the big and contentious issue to bombard the papers and the television more than it has done would have been Mr Carter's so-called 'package' arms deal with Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. By now it's extremely complicated and embarrassing to the administration because when Mr Carter first announced it, he did so with confidence as a way of showing his even-handedness, his praiseworthy lack of partisanship in dealing with the Arabs and the Israelis. I should guess that Mr Carter's motive was a peacemaking one after the long and tortuous arguments between Mr Sadat and Mr Begin, about the true basis of a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. As we all know by now, the heartening initiative of Mr Sadat at Christmas time has come to nothing. 

Evidently Mr Carter and his aides did not think through the effect on the country of his package deal, certainly he did not correctly check the pulse of public feeling. There may have been – there was, for a time – widespread resentment over the Israeli refusal, in the United Nations jargon, to implement '242', that's to say, carry out the old UN resolution requiring Israel to withdraw from all the lands – the resolution says 'lands' – she captured in the 1967 war. But pretty soon, and after the speechmaking tour here of Mr Begin, people began to see that one hair-raising way of resolving the deadlock between Egypt and Israel was to give, to sell, Saudi Arabia 60 of the most advanced warplanes in the American arsenal – the F-15 jet fighter. 

In no time, Congress was up in arms. In the most biting opposition speeches, it was suggested that Mr Carter was being even-handed only in the sense that on the one hand he was swearing to uphold the integrity of the state of Israel and, on the other, giving Saudi Arabia the means to destroy it. The administration backed away from its Republican critics by saying it was only continuing or carrying out a policy created by President Ford. However, on Tuesday, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger came in to a session of the Senate foreign relations committee to say firmly that the Ford administration had simply talked to Saudi Arabia about the possibility of warplanes, had had technical discussions but had never entertained any formal request. 

It may be mischievous, but it's interesting to notice that this excuse of the Carter administration that it's only following out a policy of the Ford – the previous Republican – administration is a line that would have heaped derision on Mr Carter's head and lost him very many votes when he was running for president. Then, he assured us passionately, he was going to scrutinise, without mercy, the democratic credentials of any nation wanting arms, he was going to reduce the military budget by billions – well, it's gone up and the military customers of the United States make very strange, democratic bedfellows. 

Anyway, the ball was thrown back to Mr Carter. His original package deal entailed 15 F-15s for Israel, 60 F-15s for Saudi Arabia, 75 lesser planes for Israel and 50 for Egypt. He now suggests a compromise. Israel to get, in all, 60 F-15s, bringing its total to that of Saudi Arabia and a promise, or a provision, that the F-15s sold to Saudi Arabia will not be equipped with air-to-surface weapons. In other words, they will be able to fight only in the air. They will, also, he promises, not be based close to Israel. He doesn't say how this can be guaranteed. 

So now the administration rests and the opposition flourishes. I hope it's not flippant to end on a very different note, on the note of a songwriter. He's a very harried songwriter. He's made a commitment for a new show, he's written the songs but he's scared. 'Once I make a commitment', he says, 'I have to go through with it. You feel good one day, bad the next and, if you have a bad night's sleep – and I've been a bad sleeper all my life – then I say to myself, why the hell did I take this on?' 

Poor fella! Plainly he needs experience. He should work with some old pro who's learned to sleep well and work calmly, every day. But you have to salute this tyro, he's just had his 90th birthday. His name is Irving Berlin.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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