Argentina 1976-1983: Military regime and 30,000 desaparecidos.
Chile 1973-1990: Pinochet and his military regime.
Brazil 1964-1985: the 1964 coup d'état and the 21 years military regime.
Prague Spring 1968: and the Soviet tanks invasion.
Budapest 1956: the rebellion of Hungary and the invasion of Soviet tanks.
Greece 1967-1974: The "Regime of the Colonels".
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua: some right regimes in Central America.

These are some examples of how the cold war wasn't so cold in some places of both the western and the eastern world. And in Italy? We didn't have a military coup d'état (not that there wasn't one planned and fully organized), but with our usual Italian inventiveness, we had a unique recipe, the Italian way of the cold war: "La Strategia della tensione" (the strategy of tension).

It all started in the spring of 1969, with the "anarchist" bombs of April 25th, it really took off on December 12th with the bombs in a bank of Piazza Fontana in Milano that killed 17 people, and injured 88, again "anarchist" bombs, at least according to the official version of the police and the main media, and continued with bombs on trains, piazzas, in Bologna, in Brescia, on trains under tunnels, and in other places around Italy. Since day one the anarchists declared that these bombs were not anarchic bombs, they were a "state massacre", they were part of a strategy of tension that was directed at preventing the strong Italian communist party from entering the government. "A Rivista Anarchica" was founded at the beginning of 1971 with the purpose of doing counter-information, of bringing the truth to life. This dossier collects many articles on the subject published by the magazine over the years, together with articles from the sister magazine "Libertaria".

As a final note: from the day the cold war was over, and the Berlin wall was down, nobody in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Prague, Budapest, Greece or in the countries of Central America has bad dreams of going back to the times and modes of the cold war, this is very positive, but for the Italian way of the cold war it's a different story: it's enough to have a "Berlusconi government" in difficulty with his allies, and with demonstrations on the streets, to see "anarchist" bombs magically reappear. Are all the Italian anarchist so stupid? Or is the Italian system always the same, and can be used also now that the cold war is a distant past for everybody else?