In his 1999 book, Marxist Angiolo Gracci lists the four principal strategies of the Right's "revisionist culture," in all their deviousness: (1) isolating and blocking the Revolution's expansion, (2) corruption and absorption of the revolutionary leadership, effectively "decapitating" it, (3) weakening and "social eradication" of the masses, and (4) "disperson and manipulation of memory" or "historical cancellation." The fourth agenda item is the particular strategy of the evil writers and editors of Percorsi with respect to the short-lived Neapolitan revolution of 1799 and its martyrs.
My particular crime against the people is self-evident in the quotations he culls from the above essay:
Yes, Maistre's personae in the St Petersburg Dialogues do explore that parodox of sovereignty, the"the life-and-death power of of the state, inherently absolute, even inspite of constitutional limitations." But, as I say in the essay, it is Isaiah Berlin who concludes—as a liberal who thinks himself a realist and as a misreader of Maistre looking for scapegoats in history's ideational chain of causation—that "totalitarianism works; it is here to stay; Maistre was its prophet." Surely I could not expect fairer textual treatment from the Huffington Post.
No doubt the editors' iniquitous use of "finestre" foreshadows the "defenestrazione" of Marxist scholars in the coming neo-fascist counter-revolution.
In my only other direct experience of Italian radicals, I met grad students who had come to Chicago to research their dissertations on the Haymarket riot. And how many dissertations on the Haymarket riot does Italian Marxist scholarship need?
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