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The book is about the history of the Italian Secret Services from the pre-unitarian states to the ultimate events.
The CIA has been accused of a massive intelligence failure in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks -- the result, it is said, of a moralistic and bureaucratic approach to information-gathering. But the CIA's spies had few qualms when it came to cultivating terrorist organisations and interfering in the internal politics of Cold War Italy. Puppetmasters reveals how US intelligence services exploited the P2 masonic lodge to prop up friendly Christian Democrat-dominated governments and counter the growing political influence of the Italian Communist Party. It was a ruthless strategy involving coup plots, right wing terrorist bombings and the manipulation of the Red Brigades. And it gave Italy one of the bloodiest and most protracted periods of terrorist violence ever seen in a modern, industrialised society.
The nature of 'fascism' has been hotly contested by scholars since the term was first coined by Mussolini in 1919. However, for the first time since Italian fascism appeared there is now a significant degree of consensus amongst scholars about how to approach the generic term, namely as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism. Seen from this perspective, all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis. This collection includes articles that show this new consensus, which is inevitably contested, as well as making available material which relates to aspects of fascism independently of any sort of consensus and also covering fascism of the inter and post-war periods.This is a comprehensive selection of texts, reflecting both the extreme multi-faceted nature of fascism as a phenomenon and the extraordinary divergence of interpretations of fascism.
A collection of essays comparing key aspects of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
What drives terrorists to glorify violence? In The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Richard Drake seeks to explain the origins of Italian terrorism and the role that intellectuals played in valorizing the use of violence for political or social ends. Drake argues that a combination of socioeconomic factors and the influence of intellectual elites led to a sanctioning of violence by revolutionary political groups in Italy between 1969 and 1988. Drake explores what motivated Italian terrorists on both the Left and the Right during some of the most violent decades in modern Italian history and how these terrorists perceived the modern world as something to be destroye...
On the cutting edge of current research on surrogacy and proxy warfare
The authors argue that the potential threat of a resurgence of "fascism" has been consistently exaggerated from 1945 until present day; that the ongoing lack of conceptual and definitional clarity with respect to terms like "fascism," the "radical right," the "alt right," "white supremacism," "populism," "racism," etc., has enabled ill-informed or dishonest commentators to distort their meaning and abusively misapply those labels so as to delegitimize their political opponents; and that the political and economic elites in charge of contemporary Western societies are now deliberately exaggerating and exploiting the threat posed by the domestic radical right in order to facilitate vilifying, harassing, de-platforming, censoring, "canceling," and repressing disgruntled citizens (no matter where they may lie along the political spectrum) who openly criticize and vigorously oppose their agendas. The authors also advocate the use of well-established scholarly methods for carrying out research on the right and provide precise definitions of various terms in order to facilitate the development of more accurate categorizations.
This book examines a wide array of phenomena that arguably constitute the most noxious, extreme, terrifying, murderous, secretive, authoritarian, and/or anti-democratic aspects of national and international politics. Scholars should not ignore these "dark sides" of politics, however unpleasant they may be, since they influence the world in a multitude of harmful ways. The first volume in this two-volume collection focuses on the history of underground neo-fascist networks in the post-World War II era; neo-fascist paramilitary and terrorist groups operating in Europe and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s; and the manipulation of those and other terrorist organizations by the security forces of various states, both authoritarian and democratic. A range of global case studies are included, all of which focus on the lesser known activities of certain secular extremist milieus. This collection should prove to be essential reading for students and researchers interested in understanding seemingly arcane but nonetheless important dimensions of recent historical and contemporary politics.