Troy, yet upon his basis, had been down,
And the great Hector's sword had lack'd a master [...]
The specialty of rule hath been neglected:
And, look, how many Grecian tents do stand
Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions [...]
When that the general is not like the hive [...]
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask [...]
When the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! [...]
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself [...]
Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

-- Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida [1]

When the present doesn't regret the past, and the future doesn't appear compromised by the precariousness of a present such as ours, men live their lives in all their richness: to give an evocative example, in the second half of the 18th century, with the arrival from Vienna of the new masterpieces of Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Venetian society offered the luxury of literally forgetting the masterpieces of Vivaldi and Albinoni.

But in an era in which the poverty of the troubled and stagnant present heralds a troubled and tragic future; in an era in which the rediscovery of past masterpieces that are quickly stolen hardly consoles us; in an era in which poverty and, notably, cultural poverty dominates our societies of lost abundance and attacks us (individuals and classes, leaders and those they lead, even the State itself) -- in sum, all things seem to exist in a sort of "absolute inquietude of not being what one is," as Hegel said. Thus, we are witnesses to a strange, generalized and universal alienation, in which no one can play the role that defines him or her: the workers no longer want to be workers; the leaders fear appearing to be leaders; the conservatives hide or silence themselves; the bourgeoisie fears to be bourgeois; and so we repeat:[2] "when all the ranks are disguised, the most indignant are also beautifully figured in the masquerade," and "the unity and the peaceful marriage of classes" has disappeared, because there's no longer "fixed condition" for anyone.

And, concerning the Italian bourgeoisie -- of which Giorgio Bocca vainly recalls that "it wasn't born yesterday," and that it was in fact the first bourgeoisie to appear in history and the one that invented banking -- today we see it take literally all of the prophecies made by its adversaries, according more credence to the Marxism of the moment (and its expectations) that spouts vain subtlties concerning the proletariat and the best means by which the workers should conduct their struggles, than to its own history and culture, which is forgotten or ignored; so much so and so well that, for part of our bourgeoisie, all cows are red in the sunset of capitalism. [3]

This general crisis of identity, in its turn, is only a particular aspect of the current global crisis, but doesn't merit our attention any less; and, as long as we are on the subject, we would like, for the sake of this bourgeoisie, to quote, without making any comments, an eloquent passage from a private letter that was addressed to us immediately after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by a Russian diplomat, whose name we will keep private:

[...] It is stupidity that creates a "worker question" in your country: I absolutely don't see what you want to do with the European worker after having made him into a question. If you want slaves, you are crazy to treat the workers like they were masters; but you, who have destroyed the basic instincts that make the workers possible as a class, and have admitted as much, why should you be surprised that your worker sees his life as a calamity, or, to speak the language of morality, as an injustice? [4]

We have recalled this morsel, in which the italics are original, not out of taste for anecdote, but to show that the cold and brutal language that is proper to the Soviet bureaucracy can sometimes contain more truth, sincerity and realism than the Marxist dissertations of certain more or less intellectual bourgeois writers in our country. It would, nevertheless, be the height of historical irony if our politics, unmindful of Machiavelli, had to get its science lessons from the bureaucracy dominant in Moscow! And yet, in Moscow, the class that owns power has not forgotten its identity, and, despite its immense failures, is still aware of its interests, knows how to defend them, and knows against whom they must be defended. In Russia and elsewhere, the Communists know better than anyone that, today, a veritable revolution is impossible if it isn't really proletarian, that is to say, if it isn't turned against all domination and all ruling classes, even those that the workers themselves have constituted in the countries in which they hold power. It isn't by chance that all of the Communist parties outside of the Soviet Union have stopping talking about a revolution that is acceptable to them, because, in Russia in 1917, they saw revolution up-close; and if these Communist parties have been used to seize power, it is only at the extremities that they have stayed at the head of the State and the economy.

With regards to the vast, global question that we want to summarily discuss in this chapter, we note that it has only been since the autumn of 1973 -- our point of reference here is the most recent and quite significant Arab-Israeli War -- that the social crisis experienced by nearly every European country (as well as some others) in 1968 has become global and total. This crisis is global because, extensively, all of the globe's regimes and countries are, in one fashion or another, affected by it at the same time, even if the specific characteristics of the crisis can initially manifest diverse predominant traits, depending on the different countries. On the other hand, this crisis is total because, intensively, the contagion has touched the very center of life, such as it unfolds inside each of these countries.

No matter what the issue -- political and economic crises, the chemical pollution of the air we breathe, the falsification of food, the cancer of social struggle, the urbanistic leprosy that proliferates upon the towns and the countryside, the growth of suicide and mental illnesses, what's generally called the population explosion, noxious noise, public order disturbed by troublemakers or bandits -- one is confronted by the impossibility of going further down the road towards the degradation of what was once the conquest of a proper bourgeoisie.

We must admit: we, not us personally, but all of the inheritors of these conquests, haven't learned how to think strategically, but -- more like commoners than proprietors -- we have thought and lived day-to-day, by mortgaging the present to pay for accumulating insoluble debts in the future, that is to say, by renouncing every day a future truly worthy of our past, in favor of several negligible advantages, false advantages in a fleeting present. And, as the poet from Vaucluse has said:

Life flees and can't stop an hour,
And death pursues in broad daylight,
and things present and past
make war on me, even the future[5]

Thus, our ruling classes today seem reduced to discussing the expiration of their mandate, which we too often forget was not issued by God or The People, but our own capabilities; and this discussion can more or less be reduced to a sad examination of the most appropriate palliatives that might delay this expiration. And this because, as the result of a process of decadence-in-acts, one had arrived at the point of total incompatibility, when the social, economic and political system that we manage appears to be inextricably bound to a ceaseless continuation of a growing and intolerable deterioration of the conditions of existence of one and all. One has said that the crisis caused by the oil embargo by the Arab oil-producing countries, and the subsequent increase in the price of crude, provoked the very serious economic crisis in which the world finds itself, and this observation is true, but it is only part of the truth, and certainly the most contingent (if not fleeting) part of it. It is necessary to say with regard to the current global crisis what Thucydides said about the Peloponnesia War, when he shows [...] [6] which is really "the most true and least put-forward cause," because today the veritable crisis that one doesn't speak about isn't an economic crisis (as it was in 1929), which we will be able to survive somehow; above all, our crisis is a crisis of the economy, that is to say, a crisis of economic phenomena in their totality, a general crisis into which oil and a particular economic crisis are later inserted.

This is the most troubling effect of a convergent double-process: on one side, the workers who have escaped from the union framework impose upon us their conditions for going to work and their incessant claims for salary increases, which seriously disturb our decisions and the forecasts of our economists; on the other side, these same workers, insofar as they are consumers, appear to be disgusted by the goods that they have voluntarily just purchased, thus creating difficulties, even hindrances, to the circulation of commodities. And so we find ourselves at an impasse: [7] we don't succede at selling commodities that the workers refuse to produce or consume. At the root of this crisis, there isn't, as some think, a subjective attitude among individuals -- which nevertheless inserts itself into the process and subsequently increases the damages. The economy is on the verge of a crisis by itself, and, by its own proper movement, it is lead astray on the route of its own self-destruction. It certainly isn't quantitatively that the economy discovers itself incapable on all sides of increasing production and developing the forces of production, but qualitatively.

The development of this economy, the crisis of which we remain the owners, was -- one might as well say it -- anarchic and irrational: we have followed archaic models that are better suited to an agrarian economy than to an evolved industrial economy, because, just like the ancient societies that always struggled against an effective penury, we have pursued the maximumization of a productivity that is purely and progressively quantative, "not discerning the excess of what suffices" [8] This identification with the agrarian mode of production has been translated into the pseuodo-cyclical model of the superabundant production of commodities, into which one has knowingly "integrated wear and tear" [planned obsolescence] so as to artificially maintain the seasonal character of consumption, which justifies the incessant reprise of productive efforts to preserve the proximity to penury. [9] And this is why, today, the cumulative effects of such production, which is indifferent to both utility and noxiousness, return to us under the forms of pollution and social struggles; because, on the one hand, we have poisoned the world and, on the other hand, we have thus given the people (in each instant of their daily lives) a special reason to revolt against us, who have poisoned life [itself]. In the last chapter, we will discuss several remedies that we propose to this "economic sickness."

We note that our power -- which, from the first symptoms of social war, defended (and not too brilliantly) the abdundance that was attacked by subversion -- today defends lost abundance: in a word, we find that we must manage the world's unhappiness. We would like the reader to be attentive to the following paradoxical coincidence, which is unprecedented in universal history: at the same moment that all the powers of the world are disposed to reciprocally come to each other's aid -- despite the divergences of detail that no longer truly separate them -- each of these powers is in such great need of aid that none is in a state to effectively help the others; because it is gravely compromised on the interior of its frontiers, the power of each State is very limited beyond its own frontiers.

On the other hand, the so-called peaceful coexistence of the great powers isn't at all the fruit of a praiseworthy choice deliberately made in the sphere of global politics, and isn't any longer the result of successes recorded by modern diplomacy, as many people believe. We know that peaceful coexistence isn't a virtue, but a necessity and one much less joyous than one would like to believe: if global conflict no longer has a place in the hypothesis, this isn't because of the danger represented by thermonuclear weapons, but because of the new and (to us) serious social conflict that each nation must now try to surmount on its own. In a few words, one can say that a global war is no longer possible because peace has abandoned this world; [10] and to the greatest degree of military power corresponds the greatest degree of impotency.

Clausewitz said that war "is the continuation of politics by other means"; but this definition, valid until now, is no longer valid, because so-called "peace" has become the continuation of war by other methods; but this is the continuation of another type of war that the States have neither chosen nor declared. The armies must be quickly restructured, following the English example of a professional army, [11] so that they are capable of fighting domestically, against subversion, in the same way that the secret services must henceforth be principally occupied (and from a military point of view) with domestic politics, not foreign affairs [12] (but, for charity's sake, not following the example of the Italian SID!). The next "great war" will announce itself as a generalized civil war and thus welcomes theoreticians who will be capable of instructing the units of professionals that will be engaged in this combat for our altars and native lands. [13]

Naturally, there will still be wars between States; but they will be, like those in the Middle East, local wars [14] and the great powers can only intervene in them indirectly so as to limit the global damages and repercussions that can affect the advanced industrial countries, all of which find themselves in precarious conditions. And here it is important to emphasize the political failure of the great powers and, consequently, the world, in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. The Israeli victory, applauded by Europe, was (as one knows) obtained with the military and diplomatic equipment of the United State; this "victory" has cost and continues to cost the United States much more than a defeat in the global theatre of operations. At this moment, even those who have been the most reticent to admit it are convinced of the vulnerability of our economic and monetary system, which has already been weakened by the social crisis.

David Ricardo once defined wheat as "the only commodity that is necessary, as much for its own production as for the production of all other commodities," because, in the economy of his time, wheat assured the survival of the laboring forces in a privileged manner. [15] The times have changed and today it is oil that must be defined as the product that is necessary and indispensible for the production and consumption of all the others. During the "Yom Kippur War" [1973], Europe got a glimpse of the possibility of passing the winter in the cold, at the same time that the Atlantic Alliance, which was created to resist armed powers from beyond the Iron Curtain, melted like snow in the sunlight: only Caetano [16] remained loyal to NATO, and today NATO can no longer count on even him.

Later on, and even more seriously, the energy crisis, the successive increases in the price of crude oil, and all the resulting displacements of economic and financial equilibria have, at the center of the crisis of the economy, intensified the economic crisis; and, at the same time, one has given to the Arab countries a sword of Damocles that, for our comfort, they willingly hold suspended over our industries. Here we mention in passing the mental debility that manifests itself in the economico-political calculations of those who have ruled our affairs for a generation: because one wants to pursue one particular form of economic expansion, which is based upon [plentiful] supplies of low-price oil, one must continue the old forms of colonialism and not risk everything on the illusions of the immediate profitability of a "neo-colonialism." For less than thirty years, troops deployed by the principal bourgeois States have had control of nearly all of the countries that produce our raw materials and sources of energy. By the most simplistic calculation, one has chosen to abandon these countries while expending the least and then develop our technology as if we still had control of the countries we've abandoned! A decade of permanent colonial wars didn't cost us a quarter of the current troubles.

This not unforseeable failure has coincided with the decline of American power in the world; it has intensified that country's domestic political crisis, which had previously unseated the disgraced [Richard] Nixon; and it has carried beyond the danger point the crisis that has, for years, secretly torn at America's domestic social fabric. The first effects of all of these errors have only recently become visisble and one hasn't seen the end of them. And so what can one say of the artless off-handedness with which Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, proclaimed (in his acceptance speech): "Henceforth, we know that the State that is strong enough to give you all that you need, is also strong enough to take from you all that you have"? "Henceforth, we know": what do we know? Today, we know that, a month after this audacious declaration, the federal deficit had once again grown vertiginously, and that Ford hoped that the new figures (as they appeared on the balance sheet for the fiscal year 1975-76) wouldn't exceed 900 percent of those recorded the previous year. The wretched thinkers of a power that visibly impoverishes itself, if they forsee what's good, see badly and, if they forsee what's bad, see well. For example, Henry Kissinger, [17] although he isn't a "man without qualities," resembles Musil [18] in his defect: that he constantly dissolves action in the vanity of action, and utility in uselessness; in other terms, he lacks, like the majority of the people he meets every day in the four corners of the world, a strategic vision of what it is necessary to do or avoid doing (beyond contingent obligations) to save this world, which we master with increasing difficulty; because it is useless to want to dominate what's fallen into ruin, when one would rather save what one can dominate. And concerning this war in which the Israelis defeated the Arabs, it suffices to say to all the modern-day Metterniches [19] that they had better heed a couple of old maxims: first, that "it is never wise to reduce the enemy to despair" (Machiavelli), [20] and second, that "those who know defeat are more numerous than those who make good use of their victories" (Polybus). [21]

As for Europe, which seems to have forgotten that it has produced all of the masterpieces of human thought, and which, in the last thirty years, has put more confidence in foreign [22] thinkers than in its own, it is clear now that it has disintegrated even as a simple "economic community." And, in Italy, the best efforts by certain elements of economic and political power facing this crisis can go without comment, unless one considers that the only result of these efforts would be a laughable attempt to return to the old fascist "solution," and at precisely the moment in which the last ruins of fascism have been destroyed in Portugal and Greece. [23]

The politicians can deny it as much as they want, but their currency of exchange, the lie, has been worn away by inflation (even more than the Lire): an era is over and a new era has begun. We know that men, who are often ready to interpret the past in new terms, frequently interpret what's new in old terms; and thus they don't understand what must be done, because changing times always (and above all) express that which has arrived. The concubinage of an era with the one following it never risks being institutionalized by marriage, except in the thought of Amintore Fanfani, who will indubitably be more esteemed as an interpreter of the Tuscan landscape than as an interpreter of history. [24]

But one sees all of the intellectual poverty that is ensconced in power in our countries (even the desolate ones) when one reads the apparently innocent (and to us amusing) reflections that attempt to find an as-of-yet unknown panacea, which abound in our press, and not only among the worst publications. We think, for example, of the candor with which our most important daily newspaper has affirmed many times "that we envy the French for Giscard d'Estang." It is quite true that our political class, considered in its totality (with certain exceptions), would bring shame to a tribe of pygmies; but nevertheless this isn't a sufficient reason to poke fun at our neighbor, unhappy France, by pretending to envy its politicians, with whom no tribe of Watusis would be content. Someone less urbane than us, but who has had the occasion to dine once or twice with the French neo-President, came to conclusions not too different from those offered by Messire Nicolas [Machiavelli] in the epigram in memorial [25] of the Gonfalonier:

The night that Pier Soderini[26] died
His spirit went to the gates of hell;
Pluto cried: What in hell? Simple spirit
Go to Limbo, among the other children!

One will pardon us for this literary artifice, but, in the current generalization of bad habits, each stupidity deserves to be given its due and imbecility never lacks protectors: here in Italy, we respect things too much to be dignified with respect. Basically, it isn't even Giscard that this journalistic triviality envies (even worse): he envies the alluring image of the Manager-President, efficient, a technocrat full of hope, casually making several spectacular changes in etiquette and promoting with youthful fervor a hundred different innovations concerning details, which for an instant manage to distract the attention of his country from the approaching subversion, which still smolders underneath the cinders of the month of May, seven years later.

The "Italian question," or the French question, or the English question, cannot be answered by replacing Flaminio Piccoli or Rumor, [27] for example, with someone more "telegenic," less implicated in past bankruptcies, or less compromised with the Mafia than Minister Gioia. That it is also both necessary and urgent to replace the major part of the men who have defended our interests, this is something no one can deny; but replacing them with people like Giscard is a remedy that in no way combats the problem. One speaks of the pain from which we suffer, discusses it, writes about it, and the maladies infect the medicines: the politicians' diagnostics are thus always sickly [maladif] and their prescriptions are simply a supplementary symptom of this shared malady. Manzoni's opinion is that "we others, we are generally made thus: we revolt with indignation and anger against mediocre evils, and we resign ourselves to extremes: we support -- by no means resigned, but stupidly -- the height of what we declared to be insupportable at its first appearance." [28]

We will not dissimulate to the reader that addressing him coldly is, for us, a thankless task; furthermore, to speak otherwise seems impossible to us, and silence seems shameful. And our coolness in treating things that touch us closely isn't the product of cynicism, which certain malevolent spirits want to attribute to us, but the necessity of guarding our cool self-control [sang-froid] in the presence of the peril of the end of our world: on the contrary, those who don't sense the peril of this end will never truly be able to put an end to it.

In Italy and elsewhere, those who currently venture to make risky forecasts concerning the economic "revival," feigning to believe that the crisis resembles certain unfavorable but successfully resolved "situations" in the past, and, with especially demagogic intentions, estimate that it wouldn't be unprofitable to pretend to the people -- to whom they can no longer promise mountains and marvels -- that revival next year is held to be a certainty by the rulers at least, if not the workers; but with each quarter that passes, these prophets of revival are inevitably obliged to slightly delay or postpone the coming of this unfortunately chimerical development: the illusion of change isn't anything but the change of illusions. Piero Ottone [29] recently wrote, and with good reason, that "expecting misfortune is oppressive, nerve-wracking; when the misfortune finally strikes, we almost sigh with relief and, paradoxically, we suffer less. Until yesterday, one feared that this country would collapse; the simple fact that it hasn't collapsed procures, to those who are the most pessimistic, a curious sensation of victory."

We, who are neither pessimistic nor optimistic, do not enjoy the rewards of this "curious sensation of victory"; but, as we do not want to aggravate the bad mood of the reader who has arrived at the end of this unhappy chapter, we offer a small pleasantry, the spirit of which isn't foreign to our subject. The pleasantry, which is a fine Italian minor art (the only one that has survived), exists in an inversely proportional relationship to the times: the unhappiest times produce the happiest pleasantries, which provide some sort of unique consolation. "It's a shame" -- the president of one of our most famous industries once said to us -- "it is a shame that pleasantries aren't priced on the Exchange!" Here's a small story, from somewhere else, in another time: the Chief of a tribe of Sioux, after a year in which the harvests were destroyed by catastrophic rain, reunited his tribe at the approach of winter to communicate to them the news; and he, not knowing the mood of his audience, which suspected the calamity, found an oratory expedient that our politicians would do well to envy; and he said, "My brothers, I have two bits of news: one is good and the other is bad. Let us begin with the bad news: this year, we will have nothing to eat, other than shit. The good news is that, as compensation, there will be enough of it for everyone."

All notes and comments [in brackets] by NOT BORED! except where noted:

[1] William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida. Lines spoken by Ulysses, Act I, Scene III. One isn't sure if the significant differences between Guy Debord's translation into French of "Censor"/Sanguinetti's Italian and the original lines from Troilus and Cressida are the result of Shakespeare's text being translated too many times (from English into Italian and then into French), or the result of deliberate "detournement" by Debord and/or Sanguinetti. Some of the "mistakes" are too good to have been accidental: for example, "The unity and married calm of states" rendered as l'unite et le paisable mariage des classes, and "when degree is shaked" rendered as quand la hierarchie est ebranlee. (See footnote [2].)

[2] Here "Censor" repeats a few phrases from the quotation from Troilus and Cressida that is used as the epigraph for this chapter. Rather than once again quote from the "correct" English original, I have chosen to translate directly from Debord's "inaccurate" French (see footnote [1] above).

[3] A detournement of G.W.F. Hegel's preface to The Phenomenology of Mind (1807): "To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that 'in the Absolute all is one,' against the organized whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development -- to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black -- that is the very naivete of emptiness of knowledge."

[4] As Sanguinetti himself later made clear, this letter is actually a detournement of a passage that appears in a text by Nietzsche.

[5] Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist who lived in Vaucluse.

[6] I have been unable to translate this sentence, which Guy Debord didn't translate into French from the Greek employed by "Censor."

[7] French in original.

[8] Quotation from Francois Guichardin (1483-1540), Italian historian and politician.

[9] See "Time and History," in Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

[10] See Guy Debord's remarks addressed To liberatarians (1981): "Spain will never be peaceful, since, in the rest of the world, peace is dead."

[11] The armee de metier ("army by trade") was first developed in England by Henri II Plantagenet, as an alternative to raising an army by conscription. For its expression in French, see Charles de Gaulle, Vers l'armee de metier (1934). See also Charles VII's compagnies d'ordonnance (circa 1435), which were discussed by Machiavelli in The Prince.

[12] This plan for reorganization is a good summary of the primary features of NATO's anti-Communist "Operation Stay-Behind," which, in the aftermath of WWII, installed and occasionally made use of secret paramilitary units in every country in Western Europe. In Italy, "Operation Stay-Behind" was called "Gladio" (a double-edged sword).

[13] Latin in original. Rendered into French by Guy Debord.

[14] See Mustapha Khayati's unsigned article about the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Two Local Wars, in Internationale Situationniste #11, October 1967.

[15] David Ricardo, On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).

[16] Marcello Caetano was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1968 to 1974, when he was overthrown by a military coup.

[17] Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon's national security advisor and Secretary of the State between 1969 and 1974) is so relevant to "Censor's" entire pamphlet that it is both inevitable that he should be mentioned and surprising that he is only mentioned this one time. If "Censor" accuses Kissinger of lacking "a strategic vision of what it is necessary to do or avoid doing (beyond contingent obligations) to save this world," it is certainly because of Kissinger's anti-Communism, which led him, among other things, to oppose Aldo Moro's long-standing attempts to bring the Communists into Italy's coalition government. According to Moro's wife, when she testified at an inquiry into her husband's abduction and execution in 1978 (supposedly by the Red Brigades), Kissinger told Moro during the latter's 1974 trip to Washington, DC, "You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration . . . or you will pay dearly for it."

[18] Robert Musil, an Austrian novelist, author of The Man Without Qualities (1942).

[19] Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859), a conservative Austrian politician and diplomat, suppressed nationalistic and democratic trends in Central Europe.

[20] This remark cannot be found in Machiavelli's The Prince; but it can be found in Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

[21] Polybus, ancient Greek physician, author of Nature of the Child and On Man.

[22] The exact phrase used here is outre-Atlantique (outer or beyond the Atlantic).

[23] In 1974, long-standing fascist regimes in both Portugal and Greece were driven from power.

[24] Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an Italian political leader, scholar, and historian. He served as Italy's Premier a total of six times.

[25] Latin in original.

[26] Machiavelli. Pier Soderini was the Gonfalonier of the Republic of Florence, between 1502 and 1512. Note that these lines were quoted in a letter Debord wrote to Sanguinetti on 18 April 1972.

[27] Flaminio Piccoli was the General Secretary and President of Italy's Christian Democratic Party. Mariano Rumor, a Christian Democrat, was Italy's Prime Minister on and off, between 12 December 1968 and 6 July 1970.

[28] The writer Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) is considered the "father" of modern Italian.

[29] Piero Ottone was a famous journalist who wrote for, among other publications, Corriere della Sera.