NOT BORED! writes:

Operation Censor:

A New Translation of a Situationist Text

In August 1975, ex-Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, with the help of Guy Debord, another ex-Situationist, executed an exemplary prank: they created an author (a powerful industrialist called "Censor") and wrote for him an anonymous pamphlet on Italian politics, and printed up copies and sent them to 520 of the most powerful people in the country. The very cynical pamphlet was very well received -- no one suspected a fake. Finally, in December 1975, two months after the pamphlet was reprinted, Sanguinetti revealed himself, and a major scandal ensued.

Here, for the first time in English, is Sanguinetti's December 1975 statement. It contains links to the other important texts involved in "Operation Censor."

Proofs of the Nonexistence of Censor
by his Author

by Gianfranco Sanguinetti

I. Of Phenomenology

"For example, in the last six years, and considering all of the democratic countries, it seems to us that an intelligent censorship need only ban three or four books. But it would be a mistake to make these books disappear absolutely, for all citizens [...] It isn't a question of criticizing their authors, but of annihilating them [...] We should treat the authors of certain books as disturbers of the peace, unlucky for our civilization, which they don't want to reform, but to destroy." -- Censor, Veritable Report.

"Have you read Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel, Atheists and Antichrists? If you don't already know, I can tell you that, under the secret seal, the authors are Bauer and Marx. I have truly laughed heartily reading it." -- G. Jung, letter to Arnold Ruge (December 1841).

Those who, until now, have regreted not knowing who is the author of the Veritable Report will regret their new-found knowledge. Those who were scandalized by Censor's anonymity will have reason to be even more scandalized. Those who have praised Censor, believing him to be powerful, will not be proud; and those who, until now, have prudently preferred to keep their mouths shut, so as not to take a position until the author's name was known, will expose everything that allows their opportunism to get over, such as their fearful hesitation, which they believe makes a fortress when they are in trouble.

In 1841, under the pretext of denouncing Hegel for his atheism, Marx and Bauer wrote and published an anonymous pamphlet in fact directed against the right-wing Hegelians, but which, in its style and tone, seemed to have been written by a right-wing metaphysician. This pamphlet [1] in reality showed all of the menacing revolutionary traits that the Hegelian dialectic had in that epoch, and was thus the first document to establish the death of metaphysics and, consequently, the "destruction of all of the laws of the State."

Today, it isn't any longer a question of demonstrating the atheist and revolutionary character of the Hegelian dialectic, but of knowing if there exists in the dominant class strategic thought capable of conceiving the prospects for capitalism. I have proved that no such thought exists. I used the following method: if class power today possesses a strategy and a project for the preservation of the dominant order, even if these are put into practice with the usual misfortunes, what would they be? Everyone knows that, on all occasions, power's representatives never say anything serious, not even about the affairs that touch them the closest; but one can ask about what these people say between themselves, far away from the public.

Under the pseudonym of Censor, I wrote and in August [1975] published 520 copies of the now famous Veritable Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy. This pamphlet was sent to ministers, members of parliament, industrialists, union leaders and the journalists most respected by public opinion. The Veritable Report quickly inspired a lot of interest and a vast discussion that still continues today.

On one point, at least, all were unanimous, because all believed that Censor exists and ventured to see his form in some personality active in the economy or politics (from Guido Carli to Cesare Merzagora, from Giovanni Malagodi to Raffaele Mattioli himself, who, according to certain journalists, directed "Operation Censor" from beyond the grave).

All are deceived: Censor doesn't exist. It's a good thing he existed, because the class he represents no longer has the strength necessary to produce someone of his lucidity and cynicism. "What makes Censor's exceptional pamphlet so valuable," Giorgio Bocca wrote, "is the fact that it is one of the rarest examples of right-wing culture, which either doesn't exist here in Italy or doesn't have the courage to show itself." Attributing the pamphlet to Merzagora, Enzo Magri wrote that, "assuredly it [this pamphlet] is the most cynical politico-economic diagnostic that has ever been made in Italy [...] The logic is iron, forceful. Censor's rigorous and pitiless analysis doesn't leave room for doubt."

Despite the lucid cynicism of Censor, or perhaps because of it, bankers and financier have greeted my pamphlet with interest; a good number of ministers, parliamentarians and high functionairies of the State have courteously thanked the first publisher of the Veritable Reprt. Certain journalists have not hidden their admiration or stupefaction, because the truth is one of those rare things capable of eliciting their surprise and resentment, but also because Censor, with a single blow, destroyed the fragile house of lies that they had patiently but maladroitly constructed over the course of the last few years, for example, on the crucial question of the bombs of 1969. But how can anyone pretend that the journalists who are incapable of understanding the Veritable Report will be able to understand what has happened in this country these last few years? Or from whence came the bombs of 12 December 1969?

Giorgio Bocca has, nevetheless, honestly recognized that "this book says more true and terrible things about the 'hot autumn' and the black conspiracies than all of revolutionary literature," but this makes him implicitly admit that he doesn't know much about effectively revolutionary publications, because, exactly one week after it happened, on 19 December [1969], I published the truth about the bombs of 12 December 1969. [2]

More irritated than the others, poor Massimo Riva notes in the pages of Corriere della Sera that "this influential person shows that he has important knowledge of particular facts that reinforce the thesis of a State massacre"; and in consternation he lets escape a cry of the heart: "How can we not see a sign of the decadence of [the State's] institutions in this inability of their agents to serve them in silence?" Enzo Magri adds: "The anonymous author supports the thesis of a State massacre. And his logic is iron, forceable." The sometimes noisy other times silent embarassment in which this book has plunged the Italian governing class and all the [political] parties is complete, distressing. In the case of "Operation Censor," there is no doubt that the proprietors of the social spectacle have, in their turn, become victims of appearances.

Here are several other examples of this "phenomenology" of error: "Censor [...] is an enlightened and thoroughbred conservative, a grand guardian of the bourgeoisie, an agent of private capital [...] In reading this book, one divines clues as to the identity of Censor" (Carlo Rossella, Panorama). "This pamphlet is certainly a salutory provocation, an 'Enough' of progressive eloquence [...] An authentic event, a novelty that one will rejoice in, in the name of culture, even if one isn't in agreement" (Europa Domani). "Who is Censor? [...] His liberal philosophy, his penchant for scorn and reprimanding politicians, the haughty character of a grand bourgeois who possesses a very vast experience in the economic domain, emanates from every page of his writing" (Enzo Magri, L'Europeo). "Censor has made known his Veritable Report in the worst conditions: [only] 520 copies in total, published by an editor with no prior experience, and distributed in the midst of August. And, nevertheless, its success was immediate. Perhaps because the thesis of the author is very suggestive" (L'Expresso). "Despite his 'conservatism,' Censor sees a benevolent utility in the Communists and the historic compromise, an infusion of cash that the new political equilibrium wants to use to keep capitalism standing" (Corriere d'Informazione). "Published less than a month ago in a numbered edition, this lampoon unexpectedly arrived as a reprint by a commercial house. It is, at the same time, just and unjust, because it is rare and precious, and thus bizarre in our publishing world, besides which it is exemplary as a model that merits being proposed to a much larger audience [...] Censor makes a [political] party on his own: he is a true gentleman of the old stamp, who has in his life combined cultural tastes and economic interests, but has always been careful to preserve the decency of life and thought, with a style of comportment and morality, the true" (Vittorio Gorresio, La Stampa). "The reader sees a conservative of vast culture, very refined [...] We would like to know more; we'd like to have proof of all that the anonymous author asserts. And, until then, we note that Censor has himself a debt to public opinion: helping to obtain more proof, without giving away too much" (Gianni Mazzoleni, Il Resto de Carlino).

II. Of Ontology

"The first duty of the press is to undermine all of the bases of the established political order." Karl Marx, New Rhineland Gazette (14 February 1849).

"I think with pleasure about our time together in Cologne. We did not compromise. This is essential! Since Frederick the Great, no one has treated common German people like the New Rhineland Gazette has. Georg Weerth, letter to Marx, 28 April 1851.

Naturally, the anonymous pamphlet by Marx and Bauer was a scandal; but after a few weeks, its "rightful" origin was placed in doubt, and the subversive imposture of Marx then appeared in all of its menacing reality. A century and a half later, in Italy, six months have gone by without anyone perceiving Censor's nonexistence and his emancipation from metaphysics.

Saint Anselme claimed to prove the existence of God by showing, "ontologically," that if a Being of infinite perfection is conceivable, it is also conceivable that this Being has the fundemental quality of existing; in the same fashion, but a millennium later, the Italian bourgeoisie candidly believed that a bourgeois as perfect as Censor, who had all the qualities -- sincerity, rationality, culture, etc -- that it lacked, must also exist. And, in believing in Censor's existence, the bourgeoisie concurred on his good health.

Why did our decadent bourgeois so easily believe in the existence of an ally like Censor? It is very simple: they believed it because they need to. And yet, according to Vittorio Gorresio, "the only person who could possibly have identitied the author of the Veritable Report is Raffaele Mattioli, who is, unhappily, deceased." If one couldn't conceive of a bourgeois like Censor without finding it necessary to invent him, this is an excellent proof of the fact that, in our governing class, no one can flatter themselves with the idea that they have the qualities attributed to Censor.

If one can now, retrospectively, be surprised that no one among the many who wrote about the subject publically doubted the existence of Censor, it isn't any less surprising to find out that plenty of "progressive" bourgeois and a non-Stalinist Leftist political party have applauded the Veritable Report, "although or even precisely because it is right-wing," as Giorgio Bocca said. In all cases, Censor belonged to a right-wing that doesn't appear more cynical than it is effective, but which assuredly speaks more cynically than it has ever dared to act; to comprehend the fullness of this situation, it is sufficient to consider the terrible extremity that has been accepted and admired by the Italian bourgeoisie in its downfall. Therefore, it is worth the pain of recalling several passages from the Veritable Report.

[...] One could continue to cite other truths contained in the Veritable Report. Moreover, these truths are so simple that all are obliged to admit them, once they've been told; but these are truths so atrocious that, until now, no leader has wanted to proclaim them; these are the truths of this world; and if they aren't pleasing, it is the world that must be transformed. And since no one among all those who have written long articles on Censor has protested against any of these atrocities, according to the principle "Who says nothing, consents," all these beautiful bastards have accepted them [3]. It will be necessary to remember this.

If these virtuosic admirers of Censor were intelligent, they would have immediately realized that such a pamphlet wasn't written from the point of view of social revolution (cui prodest?); and, if they had been less debilitated and desperate, they would have at least concluded that, as a bourgeois, Censor is very imprudent and completely unrealistic, since his central project of reconstituting an elite worthy of the name is obviously the most impossible of utopias. "Operation Censor" and the unlimited stupidity that it has revealed [4] exposes, in the purest experimental light, those who have nourished even the smallest illusion concerning it. But all the ingenuous spokesmen for decadence, hearing of an elite, dreamed of already belonging to it.

III. Of History

"Presents of hospitality to our enemies: death as gift." -- Archilocus, Fragments.

"There are times when one must dispense contempt with economy, because of the large numbers of those in need of it." -- Chataeubriand, Posthumous Memoires.

So that one doesn't believe that I'm motivated by a particular hostility towards Italy: I am an international. [5]

What did I intend by writing a parallel book and inventing such a person? I intended, in fact, to injure Italian capitalism, which is the weakest and stupidest element of class domination in the world; and more particularly to injure all those who are engaged in the unhappy enterprise of saving such domination, as are the neo-capitalist bourgeoisie and the Communist Party.

Who can make similar use of the Veritable Report? This is a question no one has asked. As shown by the article devoted to the pamphlet in Il Borghese, it keeps on injuring the right-wing. For the Christian Democrats and the other bourgeois parties of government, "Operation Censor" was greatly annoying due to its definite denunciations of their enormous errors and shameless provocations. For the Stalinist-bureaucratic Left, the pamphlet has been as harmful as a 100 wildcat strikes, because it irrefutably demonstrates the effective aims in Italy today: the silence on the whole subject maintained by the newspapers of the PCI [Partie Communiste d'Italie] -- very docile in obeying the directives of the Ministry of the Interior -- is excellent proof of this.

In reality, all of the parties are suffering, because all are complicit. But with this operation, the miserable Italian State -- which in these last few years has done nothing to save us, has stopped counting the bombs and assassinations, has since 1969 continually provoked, duped and insulted the workers and nearly the entire population, all with the consent of the bourgeoisie and the amiable silence of the Stalinist party -- this State of provocateurs, was finally provoked in its turn.

In the Veritable Report, there are only truths, truths that capitalist thought, however, lacks both the courage and the ability to think. One must ask: who injures the truth? and who profits from these injuries? In human history, the truth has always been Public Enemy Number One to all power and the principal ally of the exploited: and the Stalinists know this better than anyone, because more than anyone else they specialize in combatting the truth, in Russia and elsewhere.

What did I want to prove in publishing this pamphlet? I wanted more than anything else to prove that the map of the "historic compromise" is the map of the least backward capitalism, the one that, nevertheless, has enough intelligence to understand that the so-called "Communist" Party and their bureaucratic unions are the best allies in the permanent social insult that they perpetrate upon the workers: and I haven't wanted to demonstrate this to the capitalists, who, because of their limited experience, don't know very much, but to the workers. The fact that the bourgeoisie has taken seriously the proposition, advanced by Censor, that the "historic compromise" should be concluded without further delay, shows that, in effect, they think it is necessary to conclude it in the first place: "Censor is serious," wrote L'Europeo, "so serious that his pamphlet can certainly be considered as a real and authentic manifesto of the Italian political and economic right-wing"; "One quickly understands that Censor is serious and doesn't get lost in hyprocrisies and salamalecs [bowing and scraping]," Il Giorno wrote.

On the other hand, I wanted to prove that the party of social revolution can understand the party of Stalinist-bourgois reaction much better than the latter can understand itself; and I proved that the party of reaction can neither understand nor recognize the party of revolution, not even when it has advanced to the point of being harmful.

Italian workers are beginning to learn what their Portugeuse comrades learned recently; what revolutionary French workers learned in 1968; and what the Russian and Czechoslovakian proletariats, exploited as they are by the foul bureaucratic capitalism that dominates their countries, have always known: the bureaucrats who call themselves "communists" and unionists aren't at all disposed to accept the abolition of the capitalist exploitation of work in any of the world's countries; in Italy these bureaucrats are the best servants of our disastrous capitalism, to which they offer good services for saving bankrupts.

In the decline and fall of Italian capitalism, Censor is nothing other than the reverse image, as in a mirror, of the Italian revolution; and the lucid extremism of the non-existent bourgeois, Censor, illuminates the revolutionary current that invented him. The difference between the two is the fact that the revolutionary current actually exists and Censor does not.

The Ministers of the Interior of all countries, as well as the bureaucrats of the so-called Communist parties, keenly feel the same powerless anger when faced with the appearance of the modern revolutionary movement. In Italy, where the PCI hopes to utilize the class struggle to participate in power and desperately searches for its opening, this anger couldn't be greater. Because, at this point, revolutionaries have already injured power, have in fact already inflicted serious injury -- look at Portugal: for the last year and a half, we have prevented all State power from coalescing. The "historic compromise," this Sainted Alliance between the bourgeois and the Stalinist bureaucrats, which one has proposed to enthrone in Italy, has been ruling Portugal since 25 April 1974: it rules but doesn't govern. See the pitiful results, the ridiculous failure!

What is my goal? The triumph of my party, naturally. And my party is the autonomous organization of assembled workers, who assume all powers of decision and execution; the party of revolutionary workers' councils, with delegates instantly revocable to the base; the only party that combats the dominant bourgeois and bureaucratic classes everywhere; the party that, each time it manifests itself, undertakes to abolish classes and the State, salaried work and the commodity, and their spectacle. And I'll never serve any other.

December 1975

Gianfranco Sanguinetti

Author's footnotes:

[1] Die Posaune des Jungsten Gerichts ueber Hegelden, Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig, 1841).

[2] In the manifesto distributed in Milan, entitled Il Reichstag Brule.

[3] The bourgeois and journalists who preferred to be more scandalized by the anonymity of Censor than by the truths contained in his Report, are the same people who haven't been the least embarrassed to commit or cover up misdeeds and the monstrous errors of power, which managed to shame Censor-the-cynic, that is, if he exists. The fact that Censor's nonexistence -- plausible to those who'd read what I wrote with a grain of salt -- wasn't imagined by anyone definitely proves the nonexistence of the political personnel and bourgeois and bureaucratic intellectuals of Italy. One already knew that the majority of journalists don't know how to write; now one knows that they can't read, either.

No contemporary event has shown these people to be so stupid; and since most Italians aren't that stupid, this is the best proof that there are others who speak in their place: and the Italian proletariat will soon take its affairs directly into its own hands, and refuse to tolerate an instant more of the monopoly of their government and the imbecilic words of proven incompetence.

[4] I insist on observing that I'm not lowered by subtlely deceiving the "qualified" public to which I sent copies of the Veritable Report: any person of average culture would have quickly and easily realized that, for example, the letter attributed to Louis XVIII is in fact a celebrated literary fake by Paul-Louis Courier; and that the letter attributed to a Russian diplomat is a very recognizable passage from a well-known work by Nietzsche; long detournements of Tocqueville and an entire page from The Veritable Split in the International (Paris, 1972, Editions Champ Libre) and thousands of other obvious impertinences. The last phrase of the Veritable Report is a properly Swiftian piece of nonsense. And yet no one remarked any of this by coming to the only possible conclusion.

[5] If something could console the Italian intellectuals and politicians whose incompetence has been so well proven, it would be the fact that their police as their equals. Several times before publishing the Veritable Report, I was almost sent to prison, where I was eventually thrown, in March 1975, under the extravagant charge of stockpiling weapons of war, which only existed in the police's plainly fantastic accusations. This arbitrary act permitted the carrying out of four successive searches in two of my homes; and the police who were in charge of this operation turned up nothing notable in the partially finished manuscript of my Censor pamphlet, which they read with an indiscreet stupidity. At this moment, a directive from the Italian Minister of the Interior has orchestrated a campaign of calumnies in nearly all of the newspapers; even Stalinists and their Leftist imitators present the Situationist International as an occult force, both anarchist and facist, that organized terrorism in all of Italy.

I am honored to have belonged to the Situationist International, which, using many means, let loose in the world an authentic and vast subversion. But one knows that the Situationist International dissolved in 1972, owing to the success of its historic operation, which was accomplished as promised: "We will dissolve into the population" (I.S. #7, April 1962). Moreover, in April 1972 I counter-signed the act of dissolution with Guy Debord, the well-known author of The Society of the Spectacle (cf. The Veritable Split in the International). It would be completely vain to show that such police machinations come a whole historical period late! If one absolutely wants to see the situationist critique at work today, it is necessary to look in the revolutionary factories of Portugal.

(Details of Italian publication unknown. Translated from the Italian into French by Guy Debord, and published along with the Censor pamphlet and various press clippings by Editions Champ Libre in January 1976. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! July 2004.)