"[...] Before the wars of the French Revolution, this way of seeing was rather dominant in the sphere of theory. But when, with a single blow, these wars opened up an entirely new world of war-like phenomena [...] one put to the side the old models and concluded that everything was the consequence of new discoveries, grandiose ideas, etc, but also transformed social conditions. Thus one estimated that one no longer had need of methods belonging to the past [...] But in such changes of opinion, there are always two parties in opposition, even in this circumstance old conceptions found their knights and defenders, who considered recent phenomena to be shocks of brutal force, who carried with them the general decadence of the art, and who defended precisely the game of balanced war -- devoid of results, empty -- that came to be the goal [...] This last way of seeing lacks so many logical and philosophical bases that one can't define it otherwise than as a distressing conceptual confusion. But the opposing opinion, according to which all that previously happened will not be reproduced, isn't pondered at all. A tiny proportion attributes the new phenomena in the field of the art of war to new discoveries or new concepts; the largest part attributes them to new circumstances and social conditions [...] To begin with defense and end with offense plainly corresponds to the natural development of war. -- Karl von Clausewitz, Of War.
One knows that the truth is all the more difficult to hear the longer it has been killed. Besides, we have too much past and present experience with the real play of forces in the heart of human societies to be counted among those who pretend, either by ingenuity or hypocrisy, that one can govern a State without secrets or deception. If we therefore reject this utopia, we resolutely reject nothing less than the pretension of governing a modern democratic country uniquely founded on the lie and the systematic bluff[1], as was tried with impunity by ex-President Nixon, who repented in the end. On the contrary, we have always firmly believed that the people, when they say that they want the truth, which democratic constitutions give them the right to have, they really want nothing more than explications: and then, why not give them? Why mislead the people into the impasse of the most maladriot lies, as was done, for example, with regards the bombing of Piazza Fontana?[2] Our governors, our magistrates, and those responsible for the forces of [law and] order too easily forget that there exists nothing in the world more noxious to power than those who engender within the spirit of the democratic citizen the feeling that he is continually being taken for an imbecile: because that is actually the spring that inevitably puts into action the subtle gears of passions and human resentments that inspires even the most timorous petite bourgeois to rebel and nourish radical ideas. It is then that the citizen comes to reclaim "justice," less out of love for justice than out of fear of being the next victim of injustice.
Today, our political class has begun to notice the cost for all the stupid and embarassing justifications that have accumulated, and always at the wrong moments, on the crucial question of the 1969 bombs [at the Piazza Fontana]. If there's never existed a good politics principally founded on truth, there will always be the fear of a politics exclusively founded on the improbable: and this because such a politics incites the citizen to doubt everything, to construct conjectures, to try, with prodigiously casual suppositions and chimerical fantasies, to penetrate into all of the State's secrets. No matter which imposter has been given the key to the city and can work with complete freedom, at the moment that everything takes on the impudent figure of artifice, the voter, who habitually contents himself with the probable, will express the pretension of wanting to know the truth about everything and thus directs to political power a menacing hic Rhodus, hic Salta [3]. At this point, everyone is bold and full of courage in confronting the cowardice for which they reproach the State, which is thus caught in a vicious circle, which successively contradicts all of the preceding official versions of the facts. And thus a State fatally uses up its forces, we don't want to say in correcting its errors, but in simply admitting to them. Therefore, it is necessary to recover these forces, to expose oneself to the risk of finally telling the truth, because power in Italy is in a situation, always perilous for any State, where it is no longer possible to tell anything else.
And when it finally is told, after all the lies that contradict one another, the truth, although its powers appear improbable, is strong enough to confront all sorts of suspicions and prevail over the general mistrust:
To that truth which has the look of falsehood
A man should always close his lips, if he can,
Because he incurs shame when there is no fault:
But I cannot be silent here; and swear,
Reader, by the verses of this Comedy [...][4]
Goethe was convinced that "writing history is a way of getting rid of the past," and we add that it is necessary at present to definitively get rid of the phantasm of the Piazza Fontana, cost whatever it may, because the moment has come at which it is infinitely more costly to artificially maintain it. Moreover, starting from the title, we want what is veritable for this Report, and we desire that the healthy forces of Italy know how to profit from the bitter lesson we have inflicted upon ourselves.
We have already noted what disquieted the social situation towards the end of 1969: without obeying any leaders, the workers freely took action both outside of and against democratic legality; they refused to work and their own union representatives didn't want to renew the tacit social contract upon which is founded all of the rights of the State, and notably those of our Republic, which declares "founded on work" in the first Article of its Constitution. Every day, everywhere, the workers de facto violated this Constitution in a hundred different ways. What was the dramatic alternative faced by our Republic? The alternative was neither more nor less than this: vigorously restore constitutional legality and civil order, or certainly disappear.
At the moment when the forces of public security and the unions were powerless, and when forming a government with Communist participation was a hypothesis rejected as blasphemy by all the other political parties, on whom did the State count to impose the return to order? After the riot of 19 November, [5] the State could only count on the secret security services and on the effect on public opinion that their means information and propaganda could have, and this at a time when sufficient craziness had been created by the "unfortunate and traumatic deed" of the 12 December [1969] bombing [at the Piazza Fontana].
The recourse to bombs: was it an error or salvation? At the time, it was both: the provisional salvation of [the State's] institutions was, at the same time, a perpetual source of successive errors. It is for this reason that we are persuaded that one can never sufficientlty criticize the operation of 12 December 1969, because the Piazza Fontana bomb was, at one and the same time, the smallest reprimand to the menace of proletarian subversion and the first shot in the civil war; and, from the manner in which this shot was fired, one could measure the incapacity of our forces in such a war. The burlesque of the successive failed putsches of our extreme right[6] were already contained within this demonstration of grandiose incompetence.
We wouldn't dream of denying the utility, in any one of the modern countries, of similar initiatives that are imposed by necessity at particularly critical moments, nor would we deny that the Piazza Fontana bombing had, in its fashion, an evidently salutory effect in that it completely disoriented the workers and their fellow countrymen, and allowed the Communist Party to rally the workers to democratic "vigilance" against a phantom fascist peril, at a time when the unions were moving quickly and finally to conclude the last round of some difficult contract negotiations. We resolutely do not deny that this positive effect was, at least where the dangers were forseeable, obtained within a suitable margin of security; that is to say, if one didn't have to resort to an even worse and more dangerous remedy by using an identical parallel action in an approximate manner in the first place. And this leads to a double point of view. Above all, too many people were informed about an operation of this kind before 12 December. Concerning this fact, we will limit ourselves to advancing a single consideration: if a single representative of the Left, among those who knew, had, immediately after the explosion, said publically the truth that, today, is on everybody's lips[7] -- well! those on TV could have said what they pleased, but the civil war would have started at that very moment, and nothing would have stopped it. It was, one can rightly say, a real lucky break that the political class was, at that moment, in session, murmuring to itself, but observing rigorously. Moreover, we note that, just as the "guilty ones" are the worst possible choices -- in each case, Valpreda[8] probably wasn't the perpetrator, even if a hundred taxi drivers had, prior to dying, conveyed so many equally ulterior witnesses -- the police and magistrates have comported themselves in such a fashion as to make this grotesque farce of gloomy mistakes more worthy of a South American dictatorship than a European democracy.
Despite all that, in what way can the operation of 12 December be considered successful? The bombs successfully produced the desired effect insofar as the means of information, in the place of their only true meaning, advanced their multiple labels (the in-and-outs of "anarchists" and "fascists"); and the means of information were at first believed, despite the contradictory versions or prehaps precisely because of them. On the one hand, the attack was successful because one had never seen, under the circumstances, such reciprocal support among all the institutional forces, such a strong solidarity between the political parties and the government, between the government and the forces of order, between the forces of order and the unions. Thus, that which appears to public opinion as a plot "against" the government, the government "against" the bombs, and the bombs "against" the Republic, wasn't a conflict between one legislative or executive constitutional power and another, but was truly a conflict that the State, in extreme peril, found itself compelled to fight against itself, using certain extreme instruments of its own bearing: to make everyone see that everyone, along with the State, was in peril.
Several years now separate us from the events, which were dangerous for all and sad for some, and which we now critique publically. However, one shouldn't underestimate what was admirable in this "lyrical expression of history in action," as Don Raffaele[9] called the Piazza Fontana bombing, where the State, reduced to the role of deus ex machina, had to stage its own terrorist negation to reaffirm its power; because the ruse of reason that governs and advances universal history is present in each of these contingent and decisive episodes, as well as in the men who don't immediately perceive it, because they are dominated by their particular passions that serve as the pretext for permanent conflict with each other. Someone who has enough courage not to fear an assessment of ingenuity will today be surprised when he or she considers the costs of the expedient of the bombs that produced a good effect on the masses, but this naive[10] hypothesis deceives itself, because, as Machiavelli says, "Most men take what appears for what exists: often they are animated more by things that appear than by things that are."[11] But -- and here the negative limit of similar expedients is also formulated by Machiavelli: "[...] such ways and extraordinary recourses yield bad and unhappy results for the Prince himself, because the more he uses cruelty, the more his government becomes weak."[12]
However incomprehensible or terrifying this appears to certain people, it is no longer possible to deny the new reality: starting in 1969, Italy has had a revolutionary "party," informal but, precisely for this reason, all the more difficult to attack. For sure, here we don't refer to the extra-parliamentary student groupuscules, which don't frighten even the most fearful provincial employee, but instead to all those who, in the factories and the streets, individually or collectively demonstrate a total refusal of the current organization of work, and of work itself, which, in truth, is already a refusal of the society that is founded on the organization of work. Since 1969, all deeds, failures and successes of our domestic politics and economy are not comprehensible if one doesn't place them into relation with the partly overt and partly secret conflict between this new reality and all of our traditional institutions, which are now in crisis.
Lacking leaders as well as a coherent politics, the workers, young people, women, homosexuals, prisoners, students, and mentally ill people have spontaneously decided to desire all that is prohibited and, at the same time, to reject all of the goals that our society has permitted them to pursue. They refuse work, the family, the school, morality, the army, the State, the very idea of hierarchy. [13] This heterogenuous, violent, uncouth and inexperienced "party" wants to impose itself everywhere with brutality, and thus become the measure of all things: of that which succedes, because no one does anything to stop them; and of that which fails, since our institutions are no longer in a position to make anyone obey.
To say that this situation is a product of errors in the administration of Italian society would be false, because the injustice -- and the Communists know this well -- can be found in Poland and all of the industrial countries, whether they are bourgeois or socialist -- and the Communists know this as well. But such a claim doesn't console us. The fact is that, in Italy, the virus of rebellion has, more than elsewhere, found a broth, particularly propitious for its development, in the syndrome of pathological infirmities that have chronically afflicted our institutions, as one read in the second chapter of this Report.
In Italy, how should one have reacted to the new revolutionary menace? At first, our politicians simply denied its existence, finding it more convenient to regard the actions of the workers of 1969 in the same manner as the students of 1968: little more than a rite of passage, as a sort of contestatory "fashion," eventually passed through, like all fashions. They neglected to consider the fact that the State can temporarily do without the universities, which have in effect ceased to exist as universities, but the State can't do without the factories. Later on, when the daily and measurable reality of the damages caused by the social conflict made enough noise, our ruling class, awoken from its comfortable sleep, found itself beseiged by an enemy that was everywhere and, for that very reason, difficult to circumscribe and define; ever since then, our ruling class has been entrenched in a politics of absolute defense.
In our youth, we were expected to take a course in military strategy. The lieutenant colonel who was in charge -- and whose only defects, without doubt, were being too expert in military questions and too distant from the political regime of the time to have a successful career in the Italian Army, and the fact is that, since then, we have refused to speak with him again -- gave out copies of a beautiful book that we have always kept and that is too little known by the men currently in power: Of War, by Karl von Clausewitz. As early as the 1930s, Benedetto Croce[14] deplored the Italian negligence of this book, when he said, "It is only the poor and unilateral culture of those who ordinarily study philosophy, their unintelligent specialization, their provincialism, in other words, their breeding and customs, that keep them at a distance from books like the one by Clausewitz, which they estimate to be foreign or inferior to their subject." As for us, who judged, as soon as that book was offered to us, that for a man of power it should be as important as The Prince, we would like to cite here a passage that critiques the political strategy of absolute defense, which our governors have applied over the course of the recent past.
Clausewitz asks, "What is the fundamental idea of defense? Prepare for attacks. What is the characteristic of defense? Await the attack for which one has prepared [...] But an absolute defense would be in complete contradiction with the idea of war, because it would amount to supposing that only one side in the conflict fights; consequently defense cannot be relative [...] The defensive form of the conduct of war shouldn't limit itself to preparing for attacks, but should include the clever use of ripostes, as well. What is the goal of defense? To conserve." A little later, he goes on to say, "the goal of defense is negative, conservation; while that of attack, conquest, is positive; and conquest augments the means of war, conservation doesn't [...] It follows that defense shouldn't be used when one is in distress or poor, because then one will be too weak; one should abandon defense as soon as one is strong enough to propose a positive goal."
With even a minimum of attention, one can observe that, contrary to Clausewitz's advice, Italian domestic politics from 1969 to today appears to be an absolute defense, with the sole exception of -- and one has seen the level of skill involved in -- the riposte of 12 December. We want to specify our thoughts on this matter, so as to reach the foundation of our critique. All this year, up until last month, one expected and one didn't need to wait long before the crisis became aggravated; only the bosses at FIAT -- proving their foresight, as early as the end of June [1975] -- sought out a "global solution" in their contract negotiations. However, this "solution" was insufficient, because one can't hope to resolve a general crisis with a local agreement. What was the meaning of waiting? It meant, as one saw, that the workers had the time to launch an offensive, to plan, unite, reinforce and close-up their ranks; it meant abandoning a precious alliance that the unions had used in thousands of daily conflicts with the working class. We don't really know -- and knowing will henceforth be of little importance -- if, at the root of this wait-and-see attitude in the governemt, there is a conscious and erroneous choice or a pure and simple refusal to choose, which is more probable. We do, however, know that this refusal explains all of the ulterior errors of political behavior, and that, at the beginning, there was a gross error in evaluation or, what's worse, a crass ignorance of revolutionary matters. In reality, some of the men who were then and still are in the government don't believe it's possible that the workers, without leaders, without any means, and without apparent coordination, are capable of constituting a real threat to the security of the State and the survival of our social order. Some simply worry about the economic damages of the strikes, which are thought to be enormous, and don't realize that it is the slightest damage, because the economic situation was so much rosier back then than it is today.
On the contrary, we insist that we are in circumstances in which the worst error consists precisely in not fearing such an adverse "party" because it doesn't have any leaders; one must bear in mind that this party is informal and the State is armed; and, nevertheless, we have long been persuaded -- and history offers a great many examples -- that one must count much of the population among the ranks of this party, because "the misfortune is that their force exists in their imaginations; and that one can say with truth that they, unlike all of the other kinds of power, when they have come to a certain point, can be all that they believe themselves to be," as Cardinal Retz said, speaking of the Fronde. Moreover, all of the revolutions of history have begun without leaders, and when they've had them, they've been defeated.
Absolute defense presupposes that only the workers can accomplish "acts of war," to remain within Clausewitz's schema; this attitude gives the workers tremendous encouragement. One waits, almost with resignation, and one makes nothing of both. Or, more precisely, one tried to justify this attitude by bringing back into play some derisive episodes of an artificial and worthless pseudo-offensive, which is what happened between April and August [1969].[15] One can only admire this monument to political irrationality: the attacks, according to calculations or expectations, won over to the side of the party of order at least part of public opinion, which had generally been favorable to the strikers; those who joyously expect to win this war with the weapon of public opinion forget the simple truth that public opinion vacillates so much that its allegiance counts for nothing.
It was exactly because, at first, one didn't want to understand the nature of the conflict, and then because one underestimated the danger, that one arrived at the insurrectionary episodes of 19 November, of which we spoke in the preceding chapter. The big fear of 19 November was necessary and sufficient to produce the change of direction that led to the operations of 12 December, which were precipitious and approximate because they were frenetically organized. One might say in fact that all the time that elapsed between 19 November and 12 December was dominated by the anxiety that accompanied the approach of an imminent event, which the majority imagined would be a riot with very serious consequences. Each day of new alarms, real and false, served to put pressure on such-and-such a sector of power or opinion. A friend, who sits in Montecitorio[16], reports that Parliament was so obsessed by the idea of declared social conflict, which appeared inevitable and for which the State, by all appearances, wasn't prepared, that one could read the words civil war written on the walls of the auditorium. According to the habits of parliamentary assemblies, that which most troubled their spirits was that about which one spoke the least: but it was implicitly proved at every instant that no one had forgotten. To this was added the fact that the unshakeable tranquility of the head of the government was a subject of preoccupation for those who didn't know his motives and who regarded his calm as a kind of unconsciousness, and was an even bigger subject of preoccupation for those who did know the reason. We know that if the High Commander of our Army is incapable of fighting a classic war, he is even more incapable of fighting a civil war; and, as for the Army itself, to use a recent expression taken from an anonymous book of "science fiction": "Although some never spoke of it, our divisions were more disorganized than our postal systems."
As we have always found the personality of Admiral Henke [17] to be the least disconcerting, we felt authorized at the time to counsel him to be prudent and to beware the melee that certain politicians had created around him, in order that he not compromise without utility either his person or his reputation in the chaos that we saw coming; which is always good counsel to give to a man so impassioned by action, but so little accustomed to taking action, a man who always seemed to us ready to undertake the noxious and dangerous, rather than do nothing at all; but advice has little efficacy for all those who take human nature off-balance! The consequence was the confirmation.
This is precisely why one didn't try to prevent the situation in which the operation of 12 December became necessary, and why one has let Henke lead in a maladroit style that, later on and in all of Italy, imperceptibly took on the habit of confronting all the critical situations of the subsequent years by exhibiting at every turn the false card of artificial terrorism, devoid of probability but particularly useful. Since the expedient of the bombs obtained good results the first time, one has, without asking other questions, made this tactic the unique strategy, which has since become known under the names the "strategy of tension" or the "strategy of opposing extremisms." Our State, which perpetually continues to defend itself from its phantom and badly fabricated enemies (sometimes Red, sometimes Black, according to the mood of the moment), has never wanted to confront the problems posed by the real enemy of society that is founded on property and work; and wastes time by fighting the phantoms that it itself has created and by trying to create an alibi that exonerates its real desertion. And the sort of State that we have doesn't get support in its least believable struggle from the population: it has, on the contrary, harvested the results: having the para-State emergency services completely ridiculed and, as one says, "burned," and having been obliged, when the game was discovered, to put the chief of the secret services in prison. Some didn't believe that General Micelli [18] would stay in prison any longer than it would take to get him out: the shameless hypocrisy with which one accused him was only a prelude to the greater hypocrisy that freed him from detention. Good results! The S.I.D. [Service d'Informations de la Defense] became the biggest scandal in the nation.
We will say it clearly and once and for all: it is time to stop the uncontrollable use of parallel action, which is brutal, worthless, perilous to order, and, at the same time, incapable of safeguarding the most efficient procedures. And, most particularly, we would like to ask, What have been the effective fruits and the practical utility of each of the terrorist acts that have followed 12 December 1969? What was the utility of the pre-electoral attack on the person of the editor Feltrinelli, who was an inoffensive leftist industrial? [19] What was the utility of the elimination of Commissioner Calabresi [20] when, today, every last citizen knows more about the attacks than he did?
The alternation between inefficiency and hyper-efficiency proves that, all this time, our secret services have been trying to incite a worrisome equivocation: those who provide the rising, don't want it, and those who want it, don't provide it. In this matter, the more one knows of the ambiguous backstage maneouvres, the less one risks denouncing them, or because those who have the proof are personally implicated in the vicious circle, or because they fear death, like all those trial witnesses of the last few years, whom one doesn't want to subpeona. Moreover, it is notorious that all modern secret services are in a state of deception, largely due to their secret character (and, therefore, their power), and that they enjoy a despotism that is well beyond what is necessary for the defense of the general interests of a given society, and are compelled to silence, in one manner or another, anyone who advances a well-founded suspicion about the practices that are certainly not above suspicion: but then, "is there some hope of justice when the malefactors have the ability to condemn their critics?" [21]
The paradox resides in the fact that these are not the means by which one maintains public order, which sees itself covered by military secrets, but the means by which one fails at maintaining it, because everyone has henceforth seen how much these methods have generally exacerbated the disorder, when they haven't created it deliberately.
In all the States of this world a secret service receives orders from executive power, but executive power, by luck, is not managed in all other States of the world as it is in our country: isn't one permitted to conclude that the secret service in our country has become the "double-edged sword in the hands of an imbecile," as the Latins say?[22] Pummeled by punches and dramatic turns of events, the majority of the population are like drug addicts, and have become so much better accustomed to learning (all at the same time) about another slaughter, a report to Rome on the preceding inquest, or the "recusal from office" of a magistrate who came dangerously close to the truth, that, henceforth, one has little hope that the healthy forces of the country are capable of obliging the State to perform a radical purification from the bottom up. This purification is urgent, and needs to go to the summit; and our own public intervention shows its necessity and marks its beginning: "When all is bad, it is a good thing to know the worst."
The magistrature, on which sit the men of great valor, is governed in such a manner that it currently resembles an old-time, poor troop of comedians who fly from place to place, always hopeful and vain about finally becoming a box-office attraction in another town; and if it dares to exhibit itself in the North, the public finds the performances obscene; in Rome they are thought to be daring. Catanzano is brought on to convene a new Court of Justice and, using the same libretto, again stages the performance, which is inevitably suspended after the customary contrasting prologue, because the reputation of the preceding failure has upstaged the spectacle. A humorist of another century once said that one of the principal differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
After an instance of stupidity, men ordinarily do a hundred other stupid things trying to hide the first one; and our State, always dominated by the same men, doesn't comport itself like a State, but like those men: it looks to limit the damages of an error and makes another, more serious error, and finally arrives at the point at which it isn't possible to make anything other than errors. The defense of a bad cause, one knows, is always worse than the cause itself; but the defense of a just cause -- and we have the weakness of believing that our world merits being defended -- when it is conducted maladroitly and without dignity, is in every case a crime that on all points achieves the opposite of what was desired.
On the question of the "strategy of tension" and the parallel services, it is necessary to be much more radical than the Communists, and it pleases us to resume here our thinking on the question of these phrases, which aren't ours: "[...] It seems to me that we are in extreme peril, and that there is no longer any choice between enlightening the people and preparing to fight them [...] If the plebian troubles are frightening, do not dread any less popular disgust, and we must guard against all of the steps and proceedings that excite it. Popular disgust can lead to much larger and non-exclusive troubles that are more serious and reasonable." (Thus wrote Francesco-Maria Gianni, a former State Counselor to the Grand Duke Pierre-Leopold, in a 1792 opus evocatively entitled The fears I have and the disorders I dread concerning the current circumstances of the country.)
In conclusion, we will say that the dramatic turn of events, this scenic protagonist of decadence -- and its political chronicle in Italy -- so completely demonstrates the powerlessness of the governors that there's a general desire to change the scene, the intrigue and the actors. All of the serious problems of 1969 are upon us again, and if one doesn't say more, it is only because others, no less serious, are beginning to speak up; while the men who lack resolution are always in power and, at the moment that we write, are quibbling about the abortion, whereas it is our very Republic that is starting to abort. Frailty, thy name is Italy![23]
All notes and comments [in brackets] by NOT BORED! except where noted:
[1] English in original.
[2] The bombing of a busy bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana on 12 December 1969, which resulted in 16 deaths and 88 serious injuries, signalled the beginning of the so-called "Strategy of Tension" -- the general aim of this strategy, developed in the face of working class militancy, was to create a heightened sense of fear, disorientation and atomisation amongst the general population resulting form spectacular terrorist acts, leading to an increased identification with the authority of the state.
[3] hic Rhodus, hic Salta: "here is the rose, dance here." In his translator's footnotes, Guy Debord, following Karl Marx, renders the phrase as c'est ici le pied du mur, c'est ici qu'on voit le macon ("here is the foot of the wall, here one sees the mason").
[4] Dante. Cf. Inferno, Canto XVI, lines 124-128.
[5] The riots were in Milan, 19 November 1969.
[6] In 1964 a secret plot called "Piano Solo" (Plan Solo), organised by the fascist, intelligence chief and carabinieri leader General De Lorenzo, called for the assassination of Aldo Moro, who had promised an "opening to the left" (i.e. the Socialist Party), a precursor of the "Historic Compromise." The planned coup was called off at the last minute due to a compromise between the Socialist Party and the Christian Democrats. In September 1974, the head of the Servizio Informazioni Difesa (Defence Intelligence Service), General Vito Micelli, was arrested and charged with involvement in a failed 1970 coup attempt by the veteran Fascist Valerio Borghese and state asset Stefano delle Chiaie's neo-Nazi Avanguardia Nazionale organisation.
[7] Though not a "Leftist," Eduardo Rothe and Puni Cesoni did indeed, immediately after the explosion, say publically -- in the text of Il Reichstag Brule -- that Italy's secret services had perpetrated the bombing.
[8] An anarchist initially accused of perpetrating the bombing at the Piazza Fontana.
[9] Raffaele Mattioli, a one-time antifascist and later the President of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, died on 27 July 1973 at the age of 78. The entirety of the Veritable Report is dedicated to his memory.
[10] French in original.
[11] Alternative translation of remark in Machiavelli's The Prince: "[M]en in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands; because to see is for everyone, to feel for a few. Everyone sees what you appear, few feel what you are." Cf. Angelo M. Codevilla's translation, 1997, Yale University Press.
[12] Alternative translation of remark in Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nonetheless, the prince must make himself feared in such a way that, if he does not obtain love, he may escape hatred; because being feared and not hated can go together very well; which he will always do when he keeps himself from his citizens' and his subjects' possessions, and from their women." Cf. Angelo M. Codevilla's translation, 1997, Yale University Press.
[13] A passage taken directly from Guy Debord & Gianfranco Sanguinetti's Theses on the SI and its Time, thesis 12.
[14] Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was an Italian critic, idealist philosopher, and political figure. He wrote on numerous topics, including the philosophy of history, linguistics and aesthetics, as well as liberty. His influence on Antonio Gramsci is quite notable.
[15] On 25 April 1969, a bomb exploded at a trade fair in Milan, injuring twenty people. Though initial investigations centered on anarchist and left-wing circles, two right-wing publishers (Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura) were eventually arrested, charged and convicted. Between 8 and 9 August 1969, ten different bomb-attacks took place on trains in Northern Italy.
[16] Note by Guy Debord: The meeting place of the House of Deputies.
[17] Admiral Henke was head of Service d'Informations de la Defense (SID). He replaced Vito Micelli (see footnote [18]).
[18] In September 1974, S.I.D. head General Vito Micelli was charged with involvement in a failed 1970 coup attempt by the veteran Fascist Valerio Borghese. During his trial, Micelli defended himself by in part disclosing the existence of a "Parallel SID" formed as a result of a secret agreement in the framework of NATO (i.e. "Operation Gladio").
[19] Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, millionaire publisher with Leftist sympathies. Killed in 1972, apparently during an attempt to blow up an electricity pylon on his own land, as part of an Armed Partisan Group (GAP) action. At the time of Feltrinelli's death, sections of the media insinuated that the Situationists might be behind his death, basing this disinformation on the fact that the Situationists, and Sanguinetti in particular, had had an acrimonious exchange with members of Feltrinelli's publishing house concerning the translation of some situationist publications.
[20] Luigi Calabresi, the cop who was questioning the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli at the time of his "suicide," was himself assassinated outside his Milan home in May 1972.
[21] Translator's note by Guy Debord: a quote from Saint-Just, slightly modified, in French in the original.
[22] Latin in original. In an interesting "coincidence," the Latin phrase used by Censor/Sanguinetti (gladium ancipitem in manu stulti) includes the word "gladium": "Operation Gladio" was the Italian code name for a secret NATO plan in which "stay behind" groups prepared to rise up and defeat Communist governments that had not yet been set up.
[23] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I Scene II, line 146.