If many books have appeared on terrorism in Italy, few are as closely read as this one, and none has been so ignored by the press. Published at the end of April 1979, and gradually distributed in a small number of bookshops, Del Terrorismo e dello Stato was out of print by the end of the summer, and has not been republished until now in Italy because of some difficulties that a stupid and vulgar judicial-police prosecution created for me, which I shall come back to. It is more interesting to ask oneself, firstly, the reason for this near-silence that has surrounded a book that deals with a subject that is mentioned daily, but always in the same lying manner, on the front pages of the Italian newspapers as well as on the radio and State television. These media have indeed spoken about my book in an ad hoc feature that preceded the news, but, as was reported to me by several people, only in order to make it said, in turn, by a heteroclite heap of experts on terrorism summoned for the occasion, that the theses of this book "are not convincing." The most curious thing is that neither the television nor the newspapers that spoke about this book have ever dared to evoke those famous "theses" on Italian terrorism, which they are, nevertheless, quick to qualify as "not convincing." Were they afraid, on they contrary, that these theses might be convincing, to silence them with such zeal? Were the media and the "experts" afraid that my arguments might be considered to be more persuasive than their clumsy fantasies about terrorism, since all these people have made it their duty not to mention them? Why so many precautions? What the devil is there written in this book that is so scandalous that it must be kept secret by those very people who have believed themselves to be under the obligation to speak about terrorism? So, does On Terrorism and the State contain State secrets?
Indeed it does: this book contains State secrets. The fact that it is the State's own secret services that organize and pull the strings of terrorism -- is this not, then, the main secret of the Italian State? And it is precisely this fact that is broadly substantiated in On Terrorism and the State.
What really is not convincing is not my arguments, but the contradictory behavior of the State and its faithful servants, in respect to my book: on the one hand, they speak about it in order to say nothing about it, if only to have Italians think that what I have to say "is not convincing"; on the other hand, a few days after the televised "account," the political police and a judge known for the unfortunate zeal with which he tries to make believable all the official lies on terrorism, initiated a complex and obscure judicial-police prosecution of me. So am I to think that I have committed the crime of not having been "convincing"? If our Legal Code were to make provisions for such an offense, there wouldn't be enough prisons in Europe to contain our politicians, journalists, judges, policemen, trade-union leaders, industrialists and priests. No: it is not about being unconvincing, nor I am accused of being so, but rather it is about the fact that I have been too convincing in accusing the State of these crimes, and that this same State has now attempted to take revenge -- but, as one will see, with the embarrassed awkwardness befitting those who are guilty and wish to pose as innocent. The men who govern this State are, as one knows, the same as at the time of the massacre at the Piazza Fontana [in 1969], and, in order not to be placed in the position of being accused, they are, as it were, continually obliged to accuse other men of their own and other crimes as well -- as if these men wished to give a supplementary practical confirmation to Madame de Stael's theory, according to which "the life of any [political] party that has committed a political crime is always linked to this crime, either in justifying it or in making it forgotten by dint of power.
A series of disparate accusations, so grossly abusive and arbitrary that they collapsed one after the other -- practically without my attorneys having to intervene -- thus followed upon each other for six months and, according to the whims of the one who dreamed them up, they ranged from the offense of smuggling to that of terrorism, naturally including the possession of arms and subversive association.
Of all these accusations, which could get me twenty to thirty years in prison if the letter of the law was kept to, or could, on the contrary, cover with ridicule those who brought these accusations against me, there are two that, if really kept to and in a certain manner, could have some basis in reality, whilst the others are completely false and absurd.
I have indeed been a smuggler; I am proud of it. Haven't I, starting in 1967, smuggled into Italy from France the driving ideas of modern revolution: the ideas of the Situationist International? And I also admit that the conditions in which the Italian State has found itself since then is ample proof that this smuggling of the French disease has not been to its advantage: the contagion has been more rapid and far-reaching here than elsewhere, and the illness here is fatal from now on. Unfortunately for my prosecutors, according to our Code -- as well as according to the Treaty of Helsinki -- the smuggling of ideas is not punishable, and it is well-known that, when the Italian State deals with ideas, it is certainly not in order to clear them through customs. The accusation of smuggling thus miserably collapsed, even if it sought in desperation to camouflage itself behind pretexts of common law.
As for the accusation of subversive association, although I do not know what is precisely meant by subversive association according to the old fascist legal code still in use, I acknowledge that this also could have some foundation, since I belonged -- openly and not clandestinely -- to the Situationist International up until its dissolution in the far-off year of 1972. I find merely laughable this inquisito post mortem against the SI: on this account, a judge more concerned with equity should also start an inquest against Marx's Communist League and the International Workingmen's Association, and put out a warrant for the arrest of the descendants of all those who sheltered Bakunin during his stay in Italy.
The accusation of possessing arms rests upon absolutely nothing, and it certainly has no more foundation for having been brought several times, each time unsuccessfully, against me. Contrary to what President Pertini may babble, the civil war has not yet begun -- the proof of this is that he is still President of this thing that resembles a Republic -- and thus it is useless for me to possess arms. In any case, he who accuses me of possessing arms should first of all find them, or, at the very least, plant them in my home; up until now, neither of these things have happened.
But where arbitrariness is heaped upon the most dumb-witted arrogance is when this same public prosecutor claims that "from the contents of the documents of the Red Brigades, close links exist between the ideology of this group and that of the Situationist International, of which the said Sanguinetti is the representative." Despite the fact that the Italian section of the Situationist International did not exist after 1970, and that I could not thus have been its "representative" -- and despite the fact, ignored only by the ignorant, that the SI never had an ideology, because it fought against all ideologies, including the ideology of armed struggle -- two more things must still be noted. First of all that it would be less unproductive if the judges were to instruct themselves before making such accusations, and secondly that it is much easier to make "close links" between the police-ideology of the above-mentioned prosecutor and that of the Red Brigades (RBs), than between the ideology of the RBs and Situationist theory. And nothing in the world is more radically opposed to what I have written on the subject of the RBs than what the RBs tell us about themselves, with the support of the entire bourgeois and bureaucratic press. Finally, I note, so as not to dwell upon a too facile argumentation, that it is easy in Italy to procure for oneself the publications of the SI, and that there many people who know these publications, contrary to what this or that imprisoned Autonome may say; and anyone can ascertain that in no case do there "exist close links" between these writings and the documents of the ghostly RBs, as the impertinent prosecutor nevertheless claims.
In a parallel manner -- and at the same time that the authorities were carrying out their clumsy persecution, greatly reinforced by blows below the belt, but which had the merit of being public and official, as incriminations, searches and phone-tapping are -- some obscure and vile characters, easily identifiable from their police behavior, and with less scruples but without more success than the police, operated in the shadows in attempts to provoke or intimidate me. Not being an intellectual, nor having to live from what I write, I have thus never claimed to receive any better public recognition than this for what I myself publish at my own risk and peril, and in a time and a country in which none dares run the risk of telling people what is not desired that they should hear -- namely, the plain truth about terrorism and the rest.
For the benefit of the foreign reader, and to give Italy the publicity it deserves, I shall add further that some foreign travelers were arrested at the border by the Italian police, and forcibly driven back to a large town and there interrogated for a long while, for the sole reason that they had in their possession a copy of this book; that the Italian judiciary had likewise opened an inquest against those who had distributed copies of it; and that DIGOS [Direzione per le investigazioni generali e per le operazioni speciali] without even a confiscation order, arbitrarily seized the few copies it could find.
Hereafter no doubt remains if ever there was any: I have told the truth. And, by the evil that is wished upon me, I understand that my work is good; I surely would not have aroused such hatred if nobody had listened to me. In fact, of the many people who have read what I have written (people who are of different ages, conditions and opinions), many have approved, few have doubted and not one has refuted me.
Since the first edition of this book, many events have succeeded each other, which not only do not necessitate the slightest modification, but even confirm, as much in the whole as in detail, all the arguments and conclusions contained it in. We have witnessed the elimination of Alessandrini, a magistrate who had become cumbersome, first, for having taken apart the faked trial of the alleged perpetrators of the Piazza Fontana bombing, and, second, for questioning an ex-head of the SID [Defense Intelligence Service] about false testimony he -- as well as other high officials, Andreotti and Rumor, among them -- had given during the same trial. (This second action was taken just a few hours before Alessandrini was killed, officially by subversives.) Then we saw a disciple of Aldo Moro, the Honorable Mattarella, President of the Sicilian region of the country, meeting the same fate as his master and for the same reason on the eve of the formation of the first regional government of compromise between Christian Democracy and the Italian Communist Party [CPI]. Similarly we have seen, and on various occasions, several policemen getting themselves bumped off in order to get passed, in the heat of the moment and without opposition, the lois scelerates [villainous laws] that supersede and invalidate the still-too-tolerant fascist laws, as well as the republican constitution. But the most important of all the novelties that have occurred in the last year is surely this one: the CPI, seeing its prospect of an active and immediate participation in power vanish with the death of Moro, adopted a position of retreat, from which it participated actively in the spectacle of terrorism and its spectacular repression. This is clearly the principal novelty that has occurred since the publication of the first edition of this book, and it deserves a few words -- because it shows, once again, that not only do the Stalinists know perfectly well that it is power that directs terrorism, but also that they know that he or she who seeks power today in Italy must also know how to direct terrorism, a fact that is so true that even a Socialist minister declared it recently in an interview. "In Italy," he said, "it is with terrorism that one conducts politics."
Until 7 April 1979, the CPI contended itself with hurling stupid, ritualized appeals against terrorism -- appeals that accepted as true all of the official versions of the outrages and thereby proved the CPI's good will toward Christian Democracy and its function as everybody's bad conscience. But since that fateful day, the Stalinists -- through the intermediary of their own magistrates -- have begun to put to profitable use their vast and rich expertise, honed for nearly half a century, in the discovery of supposedly guilty persons, in the staging of fake trials, and in the production of false witnesses and pre-fabricated evidence.
So the CPI's double aim was to display its merits and worthiness to the Christian Democrats, and to dispose of a limited but embarrassing political force that was to the left of the CPI and an insult to it, namely, the Autonomes, in whom the Stalinists found the exclusive culprits for ten years' of assassinations, massacres and terrorism. There wasn't a single crime committed in the 1970s that did not find its perpetrator in such-and-such Autonome. From insoluble murders to the Moro affair, from kidnappings that remained mysterious to thefts of works of art and race-horses -- all were solved, suddenly, as if by magic; and each crime had a perpetrator and each perpetrator found his proper reward in a prison sentence. In order to obtain such a harmonious settling of trials in this decade, l'estro dell'armonia e dell'invenzione [title of a collection of concertos by Vivaldi] of a single Stalinist magistrate certainly wasn't enough: the entire occult and public organization of the Party was mobilized with the aim of proving that Autonomia was the armed struggle, and the sole Autonomous leader remaining at liberty, the naive Pifano, was -- as if by chance -- caught holding "the bag," which literally contained two Russian missile launchers, which were obsolete, supplied to him by the PFLP, a Stalinist Palestinian organization that, by the admission of General Micelli himself, is notorious for its ties of reciprocal gratitude to the Italian secret services. Thus, if the links between Autonomia and terrorism couldn't have been proved, the zealous Pecchioli [a Stalinist leader assigned to "problems of the State," that is to say, terrorism] was able, a few hours later, to proudly declare to Parliament that, in view of such a telling fact, nobody any longer had any right to doubt that the Autonomes constituted the strategic leadership of terrorism -- as had been already upheld without any proof by the Stalinist magistrate Calogero. The poor Autonomes -- who, for their part, never had much of a clue about either terrorism or revolution -- have thus ended up, like a coveted prey, in the sack of the Stalinists and the judiciary, without even understanding why or how! One now hopes that they will make better use of prison than they did of their freedom in their attempts to enlighten themselves.
As much in their ingenuity as in their vulgarity, these admirable methods of Stalinist accusation are not very original, but bear a close resemblance to those used in the famous Moscow show trials of the 1930s, the only difference being that the arrested Autonomes have not yet declare themselves guilty of all the crimes they are accused of. One must not harbor resentment for the Stalinists because of the incongruity of such a legal procedure: undoubtedly, if the Stalinists' well-tested and infallible system had the police force under its control, and could use it at will in their interrogations, the legal proceeding would quickly disappear.
For the secret services and the Christian Democratic gangleaders, who have had to endure so many legal humiliations in the last few years -- not, of course, owing to the honesty of the judges, but to their incompetence -- these great trials of the Autonomes, so skillfully staged, open up unhoped-for prospects and new horizons for action. In fact, since these trials, the spectacle of terrorism has made immense progress. If temporarily disagreeable legal consequences had up until then prevented the secret services from going too far, the way the Stalinists proved themselves to be skillful and unconditional allies of the State gave the secret services grounds to believe that, like Ulysses, they will make for themselves, as Dante says: ali al folle volo, sempre acquistando dal lato mancino [wings to fly madly, always gaining more to the left].
In taking this step, the CPI bureaucrats do not do anything other than what they are capable of doing and incapable of not doing when they find themselves within reach of power. They know perfectly well that they have, this time more than ever before, all the motives for being dishonest, for it is at the current moment that their historic undertaking is passing, and it is natural that they should bring the whole of their forces into play when the whole of their fortune is at stake [cf. Machiavelli's Discourses]. Moreover, the CPI bureaucrats have a further reason to show without delay all of their dishonesty, because they are certainly not unaware that it is solely on account of their dishonesty -- and not for their well-hidden virtue -- that the bourgeoisie can employ them in its service. And, more precisely, the Stalinists know full well that they must continually invent and discover conspiracies against bourgeois democracy, be it to pretend to love this democracy more, or to show the world all the dangers it would risk being exposed to without them.
If the CPI behaves like this in public life, then it must behave with the same despicable baseness in its "private life" at the factory, informing the boss on which workers are "terrorists" to be fired and denounced to the labor court, for the sole reason that they are insubordinate and practice absenteeism, that is to say, for the sole reason that they struggle.
Contrary to what the crafty Berlinguer has hoped, the bosses and the most informed men amongst the Christian Democrats have come to the opposition conclusion -- namely, that the more the CPI shows its usefulness without being in the government, the more pointless it is to make the Stalinists an official part of it. The result is that all that the Stalinists may do in order to be in power at all costs is, quite to the contrary, that which keeps them away from it -- in the process alienating what had remained of the electorate's sympathies for and illusions about the CPI. But this is the drama of the Stalinists, and it is not our concern, at least in as much as they have not become nasty enough to revert to practicing their favorite art, which is to say, political crime. In the meantime, and for that which immediately concerns us, it must be noted that bourgeois terrorism and Stalinist terrorism, which have the same aim, are showing themselves for what they have always been, and give the working class an excellent opportunity to recognize and combat all of its enemies, bureaucratic and bourgeois.
The active servility with which the entire left-wing intelligentsia at first tolerated, and then made its own, the official accusatory theses on terrorism and the Autonomes could well seem puzzling to anyone who might not know that the intelligentsia has always behaved in this manner every time that they have the opportunity to behave otherwise. The State/Stalinist version of the facts has been accepted point-by-point, and thus approved for being publicized, without the slightest respect for historical truth or so-called intellectual dignity. It is well known that, for half a century, the role of the Italian intellectuals (Stalinophiles for the most part) has been irreplaceable in the diffusion of the lies on the subjects of socialism and revolution. Today, when they can no longer lie about Soviet or Chinese or Cuban "socialism," the intellectuals are reduced to spreading, without restraint, lies about bourgeois democracy, which -- to safeguard -- they would gladly make any and every sacrifice, even the sacrifice of doing without it. Thus it was without protest and in homage to the fetish of democratic guarantees that a governmental decree was passed on custody, which increased the penalties for terrorist offenses and "the possession of subversive documents" [punishable by up to four years in prison], and that the new arrangements about detention on suspicion make it possible to hold an accused person in prison for twelve years without trial. Henceforward, the Italian judiciary, whose obsequiousness has never been a state secret and does not need to be proved, will not any longer have to prove the guilt of whoever they wish to condemn to prison for twelve years, and that is only to begin with. From now on, accusation coincides completely with sentencing, and the fiction of democratic legality in Italy has been done away with even as a fiction. Italy is [as suggested by the first article of the Italian constitution] a democratic republic founded upon the exploitation of work and upon lettres de cachet.
In a passage in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, a book that is little known to our intellectuals and quite relevant to the terrorism of governments, Hegel says:
The government can only thus present itself as a faction. That which is called "the government" is only the victorious faction and, exactly in the fact of being a faction, it immediate finds the necessity of its own decline; and the fact that this faction is in power renders it inversely faction and culpable party. . . . Being guilty substitutes itself for being suspect, or has the same signification and effect.
When the arbitrary no longer fears appearing as what it has always been, when being guilty or innocent no longer has any importance since conviction becomes the sole certitude, he who fights against the arbitrary no longer has to fear being guilty: sentenced for sentencing's sake, one might just as well be convicted for committing an honorable crime. One cannot let oneself be governed innocently. And so, while waiting to destroy all prisons, let us give the enemy good reasons to fill them, surely not by falling into the well-set trap of terrorism, but rather by combating openly, and by all means, all those who today make use of and practice terrorism: the ministers, politicians, bosses and policemen.
Nowadays, intellectual Jesuitism calls the arbitrary "democracy," the freedom to lie "freedom," and systematic and obligatory denunciation "testimony": Sic delatores, genus hominen publico exitio repertum et ne poenis quidem umquam satis coercitum, per praemia eliciebantur [thus informers, a species discovered for the public ruin, and never controlled enough by legal penalties, were enticed by rewards], as Tacitus used to say -- Tacitus, who nevertheless, unlike our modern intellectuals, swore he preferred the dangers of freedom to the quietude of slavery. These same intellectuals, after having discoursed far and wide on courage, have proudly concluded that today one must have the courage to be cowardly. The reasoning that is most in fashion these days is simple: if one loves democracy, it must be defended; to defend it, one must fight its enemies; in order to fight the enemies of democracy, no sacrifice is too great; the nobility of the ends justifies the ends; no democracy for the enemies of democracy! That which was not essentially a democracy has now ceased to be one visibly.
So who are these enemies of democracy? The enemies of democracy are all those who objectively put it at risk, by propagating ideas that are incompatible with it, and all those who, by not upholding the right of this State to exist, objectively support its enemies. In a word, the enemies of this "democracy" are precisely all those who practice it.
If, in 1924, instead of Mussolini, there had been this democracy in power -- this democracy that is so sincere, so eager to pretend to be the opposite of what it effectively is -- we can be certain that the means of accusing Leftists of the murder of Matteoti [a Socialist leader and Member of Parliament who was killed by the fascists] would have been found, just as, today, Leftists are arrested for the murder of Moro. But, since he had less need of lies than the current State does, Mussolini did not feel the need to employ intellectuals such as Leo Valiani [a "former" Stalinist who was appointed an Italian "Senator for Life"] to speak to us about the crimes of the State with the same admiration that one would display in speaking of the virtues of Cato.
I know full well that the Italian intelligentsia have a number of reasons to be fearful and dishonest; I even know by heart their arguments to justify themselves, and I would never dream of refusing them the freedom to be despicable. What I find tedious is that these intellectuals constantly intervene in the newspapers and weeklies when the subject of terrorism is broached, as if some obscure force was pushing them to publish proof of their obtuse baseness, and as if they had to convince somebody of it -- and this at a time when it should have been clear to them that they should confine their baseness to their works, so that it would be known to neither posterity nor their contemporaries.
For instance, not one of these great reasoners on the question of terrorism has formulated this most simple and reasonable of questions: If the ghostly Red Brigades were, as is said, a spontaneous grouping of subversives, and if [Antonio] Negri and Piperno were, as is made out, the heads of the RBs, then why should these artful RBs allow their leaders -- who, however, declare that they are not leaders of the RBs -- to be imprisoned without ever seeking their exoneration, even if such an effort was only in order to reclaim them for the revolution? If, on the other hand, Negri and Piperno are not the heads of the RBs, and are not even among the ranks of its militants, then these facts should give all the more reason for the hypothetical subversives of the RBs to help get these men publicly cleared of all charges against them. And this for three good reasons: so as not to let leaders be wrongly attributed to them without protest; so as not to be accused of letting innocent people be condemned in their place; and finally, because the RBs are protected by anonymity and therefor have no fear of clearing those currently accused.
Since, on the contrary, none of this has happened, it must be concluded that the real heads of the RBs have the same desire as our State to make it widely believed that Negri and Piperno are in fact the RBs' leaders. This new convergence of interests between the State and the RBs has nothing fortuitous or extraordinary about it, and can only bemuse the stupid, who do not perceive that the RBs are the State, that is to say, one of its multiple armed appendages.
But, even these few simple deductions, which alone should suffice to prove the enormity and fragility of the generalized lie about terrorism, are too bold to be formulated by our freethinkers, who are so free that they manage to think no longer. On the contrary, they glut themselves with clumsy sub-Machiavellian theories, like that which sought to prove that the dissolution of Potere Operaio, which occurred six or seven years ago, was a diabolical simulation that was designed to allow its leaders and militants to devote themselves all the better to armed struggle. And this is reiterated for months without it being noticed that the hypothesis is absurd, and this for the same reasons that it puts forward: if Potere Operaio was really the cover for terrorist activity, why then would its leaders have deprived themselves of a such a valuable legal screen?
The truth is quite another thing entirely, and, as usual, it is sufficient to discover it by reversing the shameful lie with which it had wished to camouflage itself: for surely it is not Potere Operaio that pretended to dissolve itself all the better to devote itself to terrorism, but rather the famous Italian secret service SID that has pretended to dissolve itself all the better to make its past terroristic acts better forgotten and to practice its current ones better. Other salaried thinkers, from Scalfari to Bocca, use the same equally fraudulent reasoning when, while admitting (as I have shown) that the strategy of the RBs aims, among other things, to prevent the CPI from coming to power, they make this fact stem not from the aversion that the Stalinists arouse in certain sectors of Italian capitalism and the secret services, but from the aversion Soviet Stalinists feel for their Italian counterparts. Our small-time thinkers then conclude that Moro was kidnapped with the aid of the KGB and the Czechoslovakian secret services. Italian capitalists, the military, and agents of such Italian secret services as the SISDE, the SISMI, the CESIS, and the previously mentioned DIGOS, along with American President Carter, would have been glad to see the CPI in power in Italy, but unfortunately that is not possible because the Russians and the KGB do not want it. What bad luck! If behind the Moro affair there is the KGB, who then is behind the bullshit of Bocca and Scalfari? Is it possible that they could have hoisted themselves up to such heights with their own strength?
Whatever it may be, this curious and most stupid theory, which the untimely Pertini hastened to make his own after the event, clearly serves to reassure the bad conscience of all those who would have us believe that this State, since it is at war with terrorism, could not conduct it.
For my part, I note with a legitimate satisfaction that my book, which has firstly reduced to silence those who are paid to speak, has also obliged them to commit themselves to an interminable series of blunders in order to maintain the opposite of the truths that have at last begun, with the publication of this book, to circulate freely in the country.
In a quite different sense, one could in this context, however, evoke Russia. For present-day Italy and Stalinist Russia are perhaps the only States in the world to have been maintained exclusively due to the efforts of the secret police: in Stalinist Russia, "counter-revolutionaries" were discovered everywhere, and every and any opponent was accused of being one; in today's Italy, "revolutionaries" are discovered everywhere, and every extra-parliamentarian -- even the most timid -- is hit with this accusation. Negri, Piperno, Scalzone, and the rest are, according to the judges and journalists, the leaders of the Italian revolution, the "brains" and its strategists. I have defended them here as innocent men and I would never dream of defending them as revolutionaries, as they are neither guilty nor revolutionaries. In reality, all these autonomous leaders are nothing but naive politicians, and even as politicians they are imprudent and failures -- one has never seen revolutionaries going to dinner with judges, as Negri did, or dining and conversing with an ex-minister of the likes of Mancini, as Piperno did -- and they are not revolutionaries in any sense for so many other and equally obvious reasons that it is pointless to recall them. The Italian revolution follows quite another path and quite another set of ideas, and it readily leaves these leaders, brains and strategists behind, in the same way that it leaves behind all those who have understood nothing about terrorism, that is to say, counter-revolution.
The passion of the freest people, the ancient Greeks, for solutions to riddles (which they considered as the Hic Rhodus, hic salta of wisdom) is well-known. Confronted with the riddle, the wise man had to find out how to solve it at the cost of his life: it was a contest in which he who could not bring it off could beg no indulgence. If one believes a legend recounted by Heraclitus, as well as by Aristotle, the most wise of the Greeks, Homer, died of despair because he could not find out how to solve a riddle. He who does not solve it is deceived by it; he who lets himself be deceived is no wise man; he who is not a wise man dies, because the wise man is a warrior who must either know how to defend himself or succumb, and because it is in the fight alone that he must prove who he is.
An eminent Hellenist has remarked that the formulation of a riddle "harbors the distant origin of the dialectic, called upon to blossom without breach of continuity, starting from the sphere of the riddle -- according to the structure of the Agon as according to the terminology itself." Nietzsche himself had already said that the dialectic "is a new form of art of the Greek Agon."
So Italian terrorism is the last riddle of the society of the spectacle, and only he who reasons dialectically can solve it. It is because of this lack of dialectic that the riddle of terrorism continues to deceive and mow down all the victims liberally sacrificed on the altar by the State, because it is on this unsolved riddle that the State provisionally maintains itself. It is thus necessary and sufficient to solve the riddle, not only in order to put an end to terrorism, but also to provoke the collapse of the Italian State. Only he who has an interest in this collapse will be able to solve the riddle of terrorism practically. But who has an interest in deciphering the riddle of terrorism? Clearly nobody, except the proletariat, for only the proletariat has the necessary urgency, motives, force and capacity required to destroy the State that deceives and exploits it. The aims of the provocations of the last few years and the pedagogic campaign of indoctrination of the masses that followed it were to teleguide people's thinking, to oblige them to think certain things. With terrorism, the State has hurled a mortal challenge to the proletariat and to its intelligence: the Italian workers can only take it up, and, in doing this, prove that they are dialecticians, or they can passively accept "inevitable" defeat. All those who today talk about social revolution without denouncing and combating the terrorist counter-revolution have a corpse in their mouths.
Having attained the height of imposture, the State has never felt so sure of itself, but in this it deludes itself more than it thinks, because it has succeeded in deceiving people less than it had hoped, and even less than what had been required. But, most especially, this discredited State deceives itself in thinking itself always to be believed, in other words, in thinking that the lies propagated by all the organs of information on the subject of terrorism would be sufficient to corrupt the whole population for the simple reason that it can listen to nothing else. The proletariat, which has no means of freely expressing itself (a fact that is well known), also cannot even express its legitimate incredulity with respect to the tragic-comic farce of terrorism -- short of shutting the mouths, once and for all, of all the sycophants who speak about the proletariat in the manner with which we are all too familiar, as well as the mouths of the sycophants' mandators, who are also the mandators of terrorism and the beneficiaries of exploitation.
This said, never -- not even in time of war -- has the Italian State feigned to use systematic intoxication to corrupt so many minds at such little expense.
In present-day Italy, all that which is manifestly false -- and only that which is false -- finds a place, is sold, is bought and is a source of profit. The staging and propagation of the terrorist infection is a colossal and viable enterprise that ensures the jobs of thousands of journalists, cops, secret agents, gentlemen of the robe, sociologists and specialists of all denominations. "Only the truth has no clients," as Montesquieu said in less deceitful times; but this is because only the truth has no need of them.
I hope that this preface will contribute to help the foreign reader understand which forces, which interests and which fears have made Italy, in scarcely ten years, the country of falsehood and enigma -- to take up the title of Anton Ciliga's famous book on Stalinist Russia. On this peninsula -- whose vestiges of past grandeur attract so many foreign visitors, this birthplace of modern capitalism, seat of the papacy, center of Christianity and Euro-Stalinism, the privileged place for counter-revolutionary experimentation, from the Counter-Reform to the current undertakings of the secret services and the Stalinists, touching on fascism along the way -- today there are putrid wastes that contain the decomposition of everything that has marked this millennium. Today in Italy, the entire population is plagued by the fetid miasmas of Christianity, capitalism and Stalinism -- each one at the highest stage of infection; each one sustaining the others (if only for one instant longer); one and all imminently faced with the menacing aspect of the most-modern of revolutions; one and all trying to find the position from which they could set in motion the most merciless and desperate of all repressions; one and all arguing about the most efficacious way to condemn history, when it is history that has condemned them.
But whatever vicissitudes may await us, the sole certainty is that events will oblige the Italian proletariat to make its own the words of Lucius Junius Brutus: Juro nec illos nec alium quemquam regnare, Romae passurum [I swear that I shall never let those men nor anybody else rule Rome].
Note: translated from the French by Michel Prigent and Lucy Forsyth, 1981, and thoroughly copyedited and proofread by NOT BORED!.