ABSTRACT
Domestic terrorism in Italy ended with a series of mass trials. Nineteen eighty-three and the following year was the season for these trials. Some of the defendants appeared defiant in the face of bourgeois justice; others seemed lethargic; a few exhibited contrition. While the terrorists may have operated on the basis of the polarized and deductive conceptions, the political system as a whole was moving in the opposite direction. The Communist party no longer represents an opposition in principle to the constitutional system. The reward and punishment case for the Communists is admittedly more complicated. Ironically the mass media's picture of terrorism was even made to fit the public's pre-existing perception of an ineffective and incompetent Italian government. Just as this government had been depicted on many occasions as incompetent in its handling of such natural or man-made catastrophies as earthquakes and cholera epidemics so too it was portrayed as ineffective in its struggle against terrorism.
