Each epoch uses a particular vocabulary to exorcise the demons that plague it. At the time when the situationists were an active force, they were rarely referred to or treated as terrorists, even though the idiotic concept of 'intellectual terrorist' was purposely popularized in reference to them. But the Situationist International was dissolved in 1972, at a time when artificial terrorism had just begun, a terrorism which, from that point on, would be in vogue for the governing of states and which, in the crusade to defeat it, has granted these same states their certificates of democracy. If the Situationist International still existed today, it would inevitably be called a terrorist group. And that is precisely why certain strategists, and the trumpeters who follow at their heels, would like to make believe that it still exists.

In this vein, on 23 March [1984] Le Nouvel Observateur asked itself: "In the end, isn't King Lebovici no more than a man under the influence? Since knowing Debord, has he not drifted towards extremist organizations such as the Red Brigades or Direct Action, groups he could have financed because of his taste for scandal and provocation? The police did not find his name in the files of the French Red Brigades -- which have been thoroughly infiltrated and monitored -- and in Rome they say that the anarcho-maoist-leninism of Champ Libre was 'light years away from the archeo-leninism' of the Brigades . . . . " What they say in Rome is condemned by all those who are still able to think in this world. The Great Whore of spectacular terrorism [Italy] has recently and officially confessed that its special services, with the complicity of the useful elements of the Mafia and Vatican, have been consistently present in all of the bloody operations that have been conducted since 1969, [1] under the command of Italy's parallel government, which has managed to shelter itself under the sensitive pseudonym of P2. [2] These confessions were not proof enough to make Le Nouvel Observateur decide to update its files [...]

(Written by Guy Debord in January 1985 and published by Editions Gerard Lebovici in 1985. Translated from the French by Robert Greene and published 2001 by Tam Tam Books. Translation slightly modified August 2003 by Eamon Butterfield and John McHale. Footnote by NOT BORED! July 2004.)

[1] On 12 December 1969, a bank in the Piazza Fontana in Milan was bombed. Sixteen people died and 88 others were seriously injured.

[2] Founded in the 19th century, P2 was a "covered" masonic lodge: the identities of its members were not known by anyone, even the Grand Lodge. In 1964, General Licio Gelli -- a fascist from the Mussolini days who had been sheltered in Argentina by its dictator Juan Peron -- returned to Italy, took charge of P2 and used his extensive connections to establish a connection between the various drug mafias and neo-nazi extremists in Latin America and Southern Europe. After the exposure of "The Rose of the Winds" group in 1974, P2 took up the burden of maintaining NATO's "Operation Stay Behind" in Italy. In 1982, the existence of P2 itself was discovered. At the time, the lodge counted among its members more than 2,400 people.