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- In Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, the author, who purports to have been a member of a left-wing militant group, vividly conveys the excitement and pressures of living underground as a secret operative. There are questions about the book’s authenticity—the author, who identifies himself only by the pseudonym Giorgio, declares that “what I write here can’t be true, it can only be truthful”—but there’s a telling detail in his description of mission preparation. “I would never set out to undertake a proletarian expropriation”—a communist-inflected euphemism for a robbery—“if I didn’t feel that I was dressed right.”
For today’s wannabe jihadists, whether “inspired” or “directed” by groups like ISIS, style—be it in the form of a righteous beard or a voluptuous application of kohl eye makeup—also matters. But perhaps not as much as celluloid, and for a certain kind of Islamized Giorgio the capture of atrocities on film matters almost as much as their actual commission. The British writer Neal Ascherson, in his foreword to Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist, referred to the “sinister frivolity of Italian urban terrorism.” In the case of ISIS and its so-called “lone wolf” emulators, “sinister narcissism” seems to be the more appropriate formulation.