This Leftist “Action Directe,” my dear, “the French equivalent of the Italian Red Brigades,” exploded bombs in the midst of the cleaning ladies at Orly Airport (…) Seven injured. You say it is Leftist. “Action Directe” fired upon police officers on guard in front of the Iranian embassy, injuring two people. Despicable Leftists! Unluckily, detectives from the Brigade criminelle arrested one of the truly guilty parties. He was a detective from the Renseignements généraux, also an extreme-Right militant and someone implicated in pro-Corsican-independence attacks (all Leftists, as well).

Complete silence has greeted Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s book, On Terrorism and the State, which I recommended to you three weeks ago. Everyone should read it; that is why no one has spoken to you of it. Certain people in France need “Action Directe” to exist. Thus one has provoked the birth of the French Red Brigades; one has even fabricated them, because such a group can always be useful if power threatens to change hands. Those who push the passage to “direct action” are the very ones who have reasons to present people like Piperno and Pace as the assassins of Aldo Moro. Have you noticed their formidable discretion since the arrest of the detective from the RG? This cop was in possession of the weapon that fired upon the gendarmes; in other words, this should make waves. This same cop was tasked by the RG with surveilling anarchist groups. Snicker and meditate upon that.

(Delfeil de Ton [Henri Roussel], Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 July 1980.)

This implacable diagnosis comes from Milan and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, whose book has been quashed in Italy by the political police. Nevertheless, this importer, this smuggler, of “situationism” into Italy attained runaway sales with his “Truth Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy,” signed Censor, behind whom everyone thought they saw a politician close to power (…)

Sanguinetti keeps it short and hits home. For him, “those who want power in Italy must demonstrate that they can manage terrorism,” and “if the States have recourse to direct terrorism, they must perpetrate it against the population.” For him, there is no doubt that the [recent] attack in Bologna must immediately be connected with the one at the Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969, where the role of certain Italian secret services has finally been exposed. Thus, it appears that “the original terrorist group” objectively becomes, not only an accomplice, but “a defensive appendage of the State.” In fact, Sanguinetti says, they are the same people! Moro was assassinated to terminate the “historic compromise” between Communists and Christian Democrats, and also to warm “liberals” who are a little too tempted by timid reforms.

The text was written in April 1979. This past Saturday, 2 August [1980], Aldo Moro’s widow, heard by the ad hoc investigatory commission, confirmed that, during an international summit, her husband was warned or, rather, threatened that he should change course as soon as possible or leave the political stage. She also emphasized how Andreotti, then the President of the Council, and the current one, Cossiga, who was then the Minister of the Interior, refused to give Moro an armored vehicle. Case made, and Moro’s widow is not a “situationist” (…)

There will be other attacks, Sanguinetti easily predicts, because “like a drug, artificial terrorism necessitates and demands to be administered in always more massive and more frequent dosages.” One comprehends that, by describing all this, he has hardly made friends. One comprehends that his book has hardly been discussed, because it insults almost all the journalists in Italy “who count” by treating them like lachrymatory sheep. And yet all he had to do was think logically to create this small bomb of probability about Italy and the modern State.

(Dominique Durand, Le Canard enchaîné, 6 August 1980.)

The publication of the “Proofs of the Nonexistence of Censor by His Creator,” which explained the hoax that had victimized the “well-informed minds” of Italy and exposed their misery openly, as well as instructions that come “from above,” no doubt explain the silence in Italy that has fallen upon his most recent publication (…)

Even “Libération” [is silent]. This is not a question of “not dispiriting Billancourt,” but of “not dispiriting Lotta continua.”

The specialists in Italy at this newspaper have known about the book since April, but have said nothing about it. Here and there one grants that Sanguinetti “is a brilliant person,” but F.L. “has read the summary and finds his theories absurd.” Our prized Katia Kaup proposed to publish a few “good pages” the day of the funerals, but nothing came of it, though the profound reason for the hostility towards Sanguinetti’s book was finally revealed. “He has a house in the country and goes horse-riding.” One will understand that I jumped at the occasion (…) to speak of this book, which seemed cursed until now (…)

More than a year before the new attack in Bologna, Sanguinetti announced in his book that, “the detached units of the State, having reached their current power, can only continue to make use of the same tactic of infiltration used with success with respect to the RBs, by extending it today to all the institutions of the State. In these conditions, not only will terrorism not stop, but it will increase, qualitatively and quantitatively.”

In fact, the author only recognizes a single [form of] terrorism: “the terrorism of the truth”; for him, “a thousand Via Fanis and Piazza Fontanas will not benefit capitalism as much as it is harmed by a single anti-bourgeois and anti-Stalinist wildcat strike or a simple, violent and successful sabotage of production (…)”

Gianfranco Sanguinetti has been prohibited from visiting France since 21 July '71.

(Hélène Hazera, Libération, 18 August 1980.)

“(…) the most intelligent book one has written on the question (…) tragically confirmed by the attack in Bologna (…) In my opinion, what he has said is greatly applicable to terrorism in France (including Corsica) (…) a book that we should study in our departmental groups.”

(L’Ecole Emancipée, 5 September 1980.)

In the last ten years, there haven’t been a dozen works, and I am being generous, that have been so completely subversive. With the result that we cannot give any review of it alongside the cultural chatter, which would be absolutely inappropriate. Get a copy now: although our French State is formally liberal (as well as cuntish), we do not see how a text as manifestly harmful can long remain freely available. But, on the other hand, its means of distribution (…) is such that its circulation cannot be suppressed.

(The Manchette Bros, Charlie Hebdo, 17 September 1980.)

Perhaps the strongest page in this very strong little book that Gianfranco Sanguinetti dedicates to so-called “Leftist” and “black” [fascist] terrorism in Italy is simply the reprint of a manifesto that he and his friends published in 1969, exactly one week after the massacre caused by the bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan.

Soon after, Valpreda, the “guilty party,” was arrested and spent several years in prison before his complete innocence was recognized and the real assassins, who were neo-fascists, were put on trial. Meanwhile, unfortunate Pinelli, who got in the way, was defenestrated. Later, the shady police commissioner Calabresi was liquidated because he was too involved and knew too much about it. In 1969, all of the press and the official voices screamed about the “anarchist” attack. But right from the start, Sanguinetti and his friends stated that it was a staged attack, a provocation. Which today is obvious.

Whether it's Red Brigades or Black Brigades, the number of infiltrated agents in their ranks (from the monk Girotto to the informer Pisetta), the role that the Italian secret services have played (from the Borghese conspiracy and the “Rose des vents” to the arrest of General Miceli, head of the SID), and the strange discoveries produced by each new “red” or “black” attack (from the massacre at Brescia in 1974 to the massacres in Bologna in 1974 and 1980, and from the kidnapping and assassination of Moro to the most recent attacks) makes things such that, from this sorcerers’ cauldron, comes the powerful scent of machination, an odor comparable to the stench that comes from the archives of the Czarist Okhrana – which, under the direction of the famous Azev, did not fear to have its own agents kill Plehvo, the Minister of the Interior, or Grand Duke Serge, the uncle of the Czar, and which had “raised” its “Lenin agent,” Roman Malinovski, up to the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee. In Rome today as in St. Petersburg yesterday, who profits from terrorism? The response is clear: not the people.

(Claude Roy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 October 1980.)

(…) with biting conviction and in an implacable style, stuffed full of Latin quotations and verses from Dante, he accuses the Italian secret services of having organized all the attacks (including the assassination of Aldo Moro) to reinforce the unsteady national consensus. Id fecit cui prodest?

(Guy Rossi-Landi, Lire, October 1980.)

A “scandalous” book (…) Two years later, nothing has contradicted Sanguinetti. And in any event, reading these 139 pages will much better inform the reader than the torrents of bad literature unleashed on the question ever since the spectacle of terrorism took hold of the mediatic stage.

(Marc Kravetz, Magazine Littéraire, January 1981.)

(Collected and published by Le fin mot de l’Histoire, 1982. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 15 October 2012.)