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 Staël’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 ing it or in making it forgotten by dint of power.”
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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.