Anyone who has followed my substack for a while now has probably deduced that all my articles fall into one of two categories. The first species of commentary involves the fantastic. The genre that I describe as “speculative paranoia.” Conspiracy, metaphysics, mysticism. This eclectic ensemble of high strangeness is a great passion of mine. I love the weird, for I am a weird man. These articles should be taken with a grain of whimsical salt. They are nothing more than exploratory pathways to more concrete research—a form of divination. However, the content of these articles is not meant to offer a coherent worldview or model for interacting with the world outside of limited experimentation. The second category of articles involves the real. Attempts at objective political or societal analysis.
My last article on the Trump assassination attempt fell into the first category. A kind of paranoid dérive to unlock new vistas of possibility. Now I will offer my readers a commentary on the failed Trump hit from within the context of the second category.
This article will also serve as the first installment in a wider project I will be working on. I am becoming convinced that the history of Post War Italy to the end of the First Republic is the most important historical subject to research for the European and American Right today.
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Less than a month has passed since the bullet skimmed the cheek of Donald J Trump. In less than a month, this world-historical event has been effectively memory-holed by the world at large. But there remains a dedicated cadre of individuals who continue to pursue the truth, as the men of memory thirst for answers. Unfortunately, I believe it to be an exercise in futility.
The truthers are searching for a smoking gun. They are searching for the wizard behind the curtain. “Who called the hit?” Was it Biden? Kamala? The head of the Secret Service? Iran???
I am not here today to join in this particular genre of speculation. Instead, I wish to offer a possible framework to contextualize it. A framework formulated by my research into Post War Italy.
If my suspicions are correct, then there is no man behind the curtain, no singular mastermind twiddling his mustache with a cigar. And yet, my theory is far more damning.
The interpretation I am offering today is based on the explanatory frameworks offered to explain the mechanisms behind the terrorist attacks during Italy’s Anni di piombo, the years of lead. The period of political violence that plagued the Italian peninsula during the second half of the 20th century.
In the aftermath of the various politically motivated bombings that occurred in Italian cities, the masses wanted answers. Was it the Communists? The NeoFascists? P2? The CIA? The Secret Service? Everyone wanted an entity or agent to point to. Who was the man calling the shots? Who was the mastermind?
Human psychology is a funny thing, and easily exploitable. We want a face and a name to point to when the world goes to shit. But as the Italian people would discover, they would never get any concrete answers. No trials provided any true closure in their convictions. They could not locate “the man behind the curtain.”
It is because there was no man behind the curtain. At least there was not a man standing at the summit of a single chain of culpability.
I would like you to read this passage from Giorgio Galli's book La venerabile trama: La vera storia di Licio Gelli e della P2.
"In reality, instead of a centralized and organic plan, it was a trickle-down series of initiatives which led to massacres like the one in Piazza Fontana. Corrado Guerzoni described the framework of these initiatives in an interpretation he defined as the “concentric circles,” which he explained at the massacre commission on June 6, 1995. Guerzoni says:
“In concentric circles, everyone knows what they have to do. It’s not the honorable X who tells the secret services to go to Piazza Fontana the next morning and plant the bomb. At the highest level, they say that the country is drifting, that the communists will end up in power. At the next circle, they say: “Look, the guys above are worried. What can we do? We have to influence the press.” So it goes on to the last level, the one that says: “I understand,” and what must happen finally happens. Nobody ever has direct responsibility. If you go and tell this hypothetical honorable that he is the mastermind of Piazza Fontana, he will answer no. In reality, this process has occurred in concentric circles.”
What needs to be reconstructed is the political context of this or that set of projects and initiatives. The objective (of Gladio) was never a coup d'état, but stabilization centered around the Christian Democrats. The model was not Santiago 1973 (General Pinochet's coup in Chile), but Paris 1968 (the Gaullist electoral recovery after the French May): not military repression but instead a stabilizing plebiscite. This was the project for which Gelli endeavored, with the explicit or implicit endorsement of the Masonic leaders. A reactionary solution, but not an overtly subversive one."