The murder of negotiator Marco Biagi in Italy - which is being blamed on the reconstituted 'Red Brigades' seems almost too good to be true for Berlusconi who is facing the prospect of an imminent general strike. It gives him an excuse to continue his repression of the radical left in Italy. He has already called for the planned general strike to be called off. The media in general in the west is completely ignoring the well documented history of state and right wing involvement in terrorism in post-war Italy.

A shadowy group called P2 was behind a large percentage of terrorist incidents in that period - incidents which were blamed on the left and used to criminalise and repress very strong left wing movements in the state.

Could this be happening again?

The question needs to be asked.

Why?

Berlusconi was a member of P2.

Here are a series of links that give a historic context to these recent events in Italy.

Fascism and the Establishment in Italy: The stratergy of tension: 
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/freeearth/fe3_italy.html

When Neo-Fascists Storm Into Government (A Context for Genoa):
 http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/nov98/drake.htm

An Enemy of Democracy
Berlusconi has learned that it's more profitable to manipulate the parliamentary system than to overthrow it.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4268224,00.html

The Relevance of Antonio Negri
 http://www.notbored.org/negri.html
What's missing from the usual biographies of Toni Negri is the charge that it took him far too long to come to the now commonly accepted conclusions that 1) the terrorist campaign inaugurated by the bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milano on 12 December 1969 wasn't the work of either the far-left (the anarchists) or the far-right (the fascists), but the Italian secret services; and 2) this campaign -- now called "the strategy of tension" -- wasn't undertaken to destabilize or topple the government, but to provide a pretext for its most reactionary elements to strengthen themselves against an increasingly strong and effective working class movement. The situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti came to these conclusions as early as 19 December 1969, when he published the extraordinary tract Is the Reichstag Burning?

Is the Reichstag Burning?
A Seminal Situationist text on 'tension strategy'.
 http://www.notbored.org/reichstag.html