My favorite jewelry shops

For no reason I can think of, it occurred to me to post a list of my favorite jewelry shops. In general, I like them for their classic, inexpensive silver pieces.

♥ J.H. Breakell & Co., 132 Spring St., Newport, Rhode Island

♥ Down Under Jewelry, 479 Thames St., Newport, Rhode Island

♥ Village Silversmith, 20 Bearskin Neck, Rockport, Massachusetts

♥ Idee d’Arte, Via Leucosia 3, Positano, Italy

♥ Gioielleria Rita Innacoli, Corsa Italia 137, Sorrento, Italy

Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen

I received this as a Christmas gift, which wasn’t a big surprise since I’d mentioned I wanted it. My new favorite cookbook. Straightforward, cheerful, just right. I want to make almost every recipe in it, and was happy to see that one of my favorite recipes - pizza with butternut squash, apples, spinach, caramelized onions and a garlic-white bean sauce (the sauce has also proved to be a big hit when I’ve made it alone as a dip for potato chips) – is hers. I can’t remember where I found it on the internet, but I hadn’t previously noticed the source.

I often think about the possibilities for a vegan show on Food Network or Bravo or the like. I’m sure someone at the networks must have given the possibility at least a moment’s thought – we’re a growing segment of the population, and therefore a growing market, which is what they care about - but they’re in kind of a fix. The problem, I believe, is that it’s not just another type of cuisine or niche like sandwiches or grilling. It fundamentally calls into question all of the nonvegan shows (like including representatives of atheism in nondenominational events). It could potentially draw people away from carnism and that fact could alienate the animal-products sponsors, who seem to be the majority.

So I’m not holding my breath. But if they did decide to go ahead with a vegan show, Chloe Coscarelli would be a good choice for the host. She’s photogenic, easy to understand, and according to the cookbook already “divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles.”

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 1

I’ve recently started following along with Adam Lee’s insightful and entertaining journey through Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Reading several of the older posts in his series as I’ve caught up, I’ve been struck by how well Rand seems to personify Erich Fromm’s conception of the necrophilous character. In this post I’ll describe what Fromm meant by the necrophilous character, and in the next I’ll draw on several quotations from Rand featured in Lee’s series as evidence of her necrophilous tendencies.

While Fromm saw the necrophilous* character as loosely related to sexual necrophilia, it was primarily drawn from a critical analysis of Freud’s idea of the “death instinct” and his own understanding of the human tendency and potential for biophilia. Here’s how Fromm defined biophilia and the basic biophilic ethic:

Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive. It is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.** The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things….

Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 406; all further Fromm quotations are from the same volume)

Necrophilous tendencies, as this suggests, were the antithesis of biophilic ones:

Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (369; emphasis in original)

Fromm didn’t believe that we have a death instinct or that the necrophilous character was innate and unavoidable. Instead, he thought people naturally had a more biophilic orientation which served human health and growth, but that its development could be blocked or subverted by childhood experience or culture. “Destructiveness,” he argued,

is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. (406-7; emphasis in original)

So necrophilous tendencies are likely to develop in certain cultural atmospheres that interfere with biophilic growth.

While the definition of the necrophilous character above might seem to have a fairly narrow range, Fromm saw necrophilous tendencies as encompassing much of modern Western culture. The love of the “nonliving” could be seen not only in the direct attraction to the “dead, decayed, putrid, sickly” but also in an undue affection for the technological and mechanical, one of “the simplest and most obvious characteristics of contemporary industrial man: the stifling of his focal interest in people, nature, and living structures, together with the increasing attraction of mechanical, nonalive artifacts” (381).

While one recent biographer has suggested that Fromm was anti-technology, and some of his statements superficially suggest a hostility to science, what he in fact seemed to oppose was a particular orientation toward and conception of science and technology: one that wasn’t centered on life and growth or based in love of humanity and the world, that was alienated and alienating. After describing some examples of technological necrophilousness involving cars, cameras, and – a great word – “gadgeteers,” for example, he clarifies:

…I do not imply that using an automobile, or taking pictures, or using gadgets is in itself a manifestation of necrophilous tendencies. But it assumes this quality when it becomes a substitute for interest in life and for exercising the rich functions with which the human being is endowed. I also do not imply that the engineer who is passionately interested in the construction of machines of all kinds shows, for this reason, a necrophilous tendency. He may be a very productive person with great love of life that he expresses in his attitude toward people, toward nature, toward art, and in his constructive technical ideas. I am referring, rather, to those individuals whose interest in artifacts has replaced their interest in what is alive and who deal with technical matters in a pedantic and unalive way. (382; emphasis in original)

Fromm’s go-to example of a techno-necrophilous culture (in contrast to the more traditionalist necrophilousness of the Spanish fascists) was F. T. Marinetti and the other Italian Futurists. Quoting from Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto”, he writes: “Here we see the essential elements of necrophilia: worship of speed and the machine; poetry as a means of attack; glorification of war; destruction of culture; hate against women; locomotives and airplanes as living forces” (383).

So as Fromm saw it necrophilous tendencies could be expressed through both the hatred of living things and the attraction to death, destruction, and decay and the rejection of the living world in favor of the mechanical, nonliving realm of techno-driven society. Importantly, though, in this age of ecological destruction, he recognized the latter as in some sense also an expression of the former:

The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons’, a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass. But the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic).*** He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals – and himself. He is doing this to a degree that has made it doubtful whether the earth will still be livable within a hundred years from now. He knows the facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical ‘progress’ and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. (389; my emphasis)

…It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.

…We must conclude that the lifeless world of total technicalization is only another form of the world of death and decay. This fact is not conscious to most, but to use an expression of Freud’s, the repressed often returns, and the fascination with death and decay becomes as visible as in the malignant anal character. (390; my emphasis)

Though Fromm wrote in individual terms, he saw the necrophilous tendency as a cultural product (driven by capitalism and Cold War politics; he paid less attention to patriarchy). He didn’t claim that people could be neatly sorted into “necrophilous” and “biophilous” boxes, but that most people exhibited both tendencies to some degree and that their relative strength was influenced by experience within a given culture and age. Very few people, he argued, could be described as fully one or the other. But he did mention, notably, several individual scientists (391) whom he considered representative of biophilia, and contended that there existed “a small minority…in whom there is no trace of necrophilia, who are pure biophiles motivated by the most intense and pure love for all that is alive. Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Pope John XXIII are among the well-known recent examples of this minority” (408).

I imagine many would question at least one person on this particular list - Fromm had an annoying tendency to idolize certain living or historical men (always men, as far as I can recall) as representatives of biophilia and as borderline messianic figures. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which Ayn Rand fascinatingly illustrates the necrophilous character – in a manner that illuminates particular features of capitalism, patriarchy, and contemporary attitudes toward science, technology, and ecology.

* Fromm took the term from an angry response from Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno to a speech by the Francoist general José Millán Astray in 1936 which he quoted frequently (368).

** Although today the term “biophilia” connotes a relationship with the whole of the living world, Fromm’s formulation was often very human-centered. As his ideas developed, they did become more ecological (as can be seen in Anatomy and also in To Have or To Be?), but they never really came to include nonhuman animals in any meaningful way; in fact, nonhuman animals were often presented as objects or oppositional forces in Fromm’s work. This is somewhat surprising since Fromm repeatedly lists Albert Schweitzer as among those most representative of biophilia – “one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person” (406). (I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising: Jean-Paul Sartre was Schweitzer’s second cousin and he still managed to become one of the most speciesist of humanistic thinkers.)

*** The best example of the overlap between these two forms of necrophilousness, in which the attraction to the “antiseptic façade” barely conceals the desire for the “stinking and poisonous place” is in contemporary factory farming. As it grows bigger and more wrapped in mechanical rhetoric and “clean,” scientific practice, the ecological destruction becomes more and more visible – the toxic lagoons that surround CAFOs, the pollution of the surrounding water, the emissions of methane, the stench,…

Fortune Is a Woman, a lesson in how to do critical theory

Have I mentioned my fondness for Italian political theorists and philosophers recently? Oh, right.

Critical analyses of political theory don’t get much better than Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s 1984 (1984! How had I been unaware of it for three decades?) Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli.



(This edition has an added afterword; mine is an earlier edition without it, which is unfortunate.)

Maybe the most impressive aspect is Pitkin’s approach to critical theory itself, the attitude she takes to Machiavelli and his thought. Underlying the book is a basic respect for Machiavelli and his circumstances and a sympathetic engagement with his politics that actively seeks to do justice to his democratic and humanist ideas and to distinguish them from what she acknowledges to be proto-fascist tendencies.* In this, Pitkin isn’t looking to distill the “real” or “true” democratic Machiavelli and discard what doesn’t fit with that conception, but to describe “Machiavelli at his best” – a phrase she uses more than once – and to understand the ideological distortions that undermined his democratic potential, producing Machiavelli at his worst.

As Pitkin notes, Machiavelli can, for many reasons, be a difficult theorist to like. A critical feminist analysis of his work focusing almost exclusively on its underlying misogyny and related failings would be worthwhile, but incomplete. This is where so much critical theory of the past several decades falls short. Understanding the ideologies of oppression that have undermined democratic-humanist theory or pushed it in the wrong direction, especially when the problems are fundamental, is absolutely necessary. And I’m not suggesting that critical theorists generally are merely interested in criticizing and have little positive or useful to offer themselves (although this is true in some cases). But when doing critical analysis, it seems to me, people are often so determined to overturn and move beyond the oppressive ideas that they come to see thinkers or even entire political philosophies as fundamentally corrupted, such that nothing worthwhile can be salvaged from them. This is in an important sense a failure of democratic and scholarly ideals, and can result in the loss of important insights and the impoverishment of contemporary theory.

Avoiding this pitfall, Pitkin is able to produce both a thoughtful analysis of Machiavelli’s democratic insights and an equally thoughtful analysis of how his (and his patriarchal culture’s) extreme misogyny not only undermined any democratic impulses but pushed Machiavelli in proto-fascist directions. I think this engaged and holistic approach can be extended to the critical analysis of Pitkin’s own work. Again, she recognizes the problems with Machiavelli’s political theory as fundamental – it isn’t a relatively simple matter of drawing out his democratic-humanist political ideas and broadening their scope by extending them to women. At the same time, though, she reproduces some of the same problems by failing to question his ideas about nonhuman animals. Generally, Pitkin’s speciesism is relatively mild, certainly lacking the nastiness of Machiavelli’s claims about women. But she does repeatedly recreate with regard to other animals the othering she objects to when it’s directed at women.** This makes her unable to expand her discussion of the benefits of mutuality within difference and plurality beyond humans, limiting its applicability and usefulness in a world characterized by the mass oppression of animals and the destruction of our environment and even weakening aspects of her feminist critique (the last two pages fall especially flat, but they’re two of 327).

That’s a major issue. A lesser issue is the inclusion of a bit too much Freudianism (which fortunately is largely confined to one chapter, even if it is pretty interesting), but I guess that’s to be expected. I don’t believe this sort of depth psychological analysis is necessary to understand the ideas themselves or even the vehemence, tenacity, and defensiveness with which they were or are held. Systems of oppression and the need for ideologies to sustain and justify them are, I think, sufficient. But then I’m a sociologist. These criticisms aside, the book isn’t just a fascinating study of Machiavelli’s ideas but has much to say that’s relevant to contemporary politics, and I recommend it highly.

* Of course, this is only true insofar as democratic and humanistic aspects are present. More purely critical approaches are suited to theorists and philosophers with almost exclusively authoritarian ideas based on false premises about the human condition and “human nature.” Pitkin’s approach is more suited to, say, Sartre or Arendt than to Heidegger or Schmitt.

** To provide one example, Pitkin correctly and usefully describes how the othering of women interferes with and diminishes men’s identity formation and relationships with themselves. They attribute negative or inherently subordinate qualities to women, and are then driven to deny these qualities in themselves and to hate themselves to the extent that they believe they share them. Throughout the book, though, she unquestioningly attributes such qualities – often the same ones typically attributed to women – to animals, and is then led to define humanity in oppositional terms. Again, this isn’t expressed in the vicious, hateful way Machiavelli wrote about women or that many democratic-humanistic thinkers have written about nonhuman animals, but it’s there all the same, and distorts her understanding of the human condition and of the possibilities for democratic politics.

Take that, Bukharin!

For a long time, I had a vague idea of Nikolai Bukharin as one of the more thoughtful, decent Bolsheviks (relatively speaking, of course), an image probably stemming in part from his portrayal in popular culture (possibly this film in particular, in which, if it’s the one I’m remembering, he was portrayed as a gentle, polite, reasonable man), in part from knowledge of his opposition to collectivization, and in part from the portrait of the victims of the Stalinist show trials created through the composite character Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

As a result of this and other works, the Communists killed in the Stalinist purges, especially those like Bukharin who publicly confessed to their supposed crimes against the revolution, came to be viewed in the liberal imagination as victims of their own alleged willingness to submerge and dissolve their selves and their consciences entirely in a totalizing ideology and party organization. But as Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, biographers of Stalin and Bukharin respectively, have argued, Bukharin’s case doesn’t support this interpretation.* According to Tucker in Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941, Bukharin’s performance at his trial, read carefully and in context, was actually an act of defiance in which he managed, as far as was possible under the circumstances, to turn the proceedings into an “antitrial” of Stalin “for his crimes against Lenin’s Bolshevism.” In his confession, Bukharin sought to underline the political nature of his choices and his persecution:

Only if the public or history should see the accused Bukharin as a political man would it see that the accuser Stalin was destroying a political tendency. So it was vital to Bukharin’s case in the antitrial to show that he had been a Bolshevik oppositionist in relation to Stalin and not, as Vyshinsky was trying to argue, a criminal masquerading for long years as a revolutionary. The duel that raged between the two throughout the trial was thus one in which Vyshinsky argued that all Bukharin’s purported political acts were really crimes, and Bukharin maintained that all his alleged crimes were really political acts. If he came off well in the encounter, despite all the disadvantages of his situation compared with Vyshinky’s, the reason is that his contention was true. (500)

So I think it’s fitting and good to consider Bukharin’s political writings and acts not in terms of how well they illustrate some notion of the totalitarian mind or “mass man” or what have you but as, well, political writings and acts. We get a very different sense of Bukharin from his 1922 “Anarchy and Scientific Communism,” written during his rise to power. It’s an ideological work through and through; I don’t mean by this that it shows someone who’s abandoned his own ideas and sense of ethics to the Party or History, but that it’s written by a firm believer in and advocate of the authoritarian Marxist-Leninist program. In the article, Bukharin misrepresents, belittles, and attacks the anarchists who opposed the Communist revolutionary program. It’s not a mere theoretical exercise - written in the years in which anarchists were being not just marginalized but systematically persecuted by the Bolsheviks (see volume 2 of Gregori Maximoff’s 1940 The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia), Bukharin’s broadside forms a part of those, real, political crimes.

“Anarchy and Scientific Communism” is included in The Poverty of Statism: Anarchism vs. Marxism, a Debate (2013), along with a scathing response from the Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” and two related pieces by German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, “Anarchism and Sovietism” and “Marx and Anarchism.” Like Bukharin’s, the articles by Fabbri and Rocker were written in 1922. You can read them individually for free online at my links, or you can pay a few dollars for the Kindle edition published by the fascinating Christie Press.

I was thrilled to hear of this translation. I love reading Italian political theorists and philosophers, even those with whom I have strong disagreements or whose ideas I find repugnant. But anarchists? I’m overcome. And among Italian anarchist political theorists, Fabbri is one of the best. I read some of his work years ago in French translation and thought it was brilliant. It’s a shame that so few of his writings have been translated into English, so I was happy to read in the introduction to The Poverty of Statism that more are probably in the pipeline.

And Fabbri is at his level-headed best in “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism.” He sharply but calmly responds to Bukharin’s mischaracterizations of anarchism and anarchists, exposes the Bolshevist’s authoritarian attitudes (“These people are really odd, wanting (in theory) to achieve the abolition of the state while in practice they cannot conceive of the most elementary social function without statist overtones!”), and warns of the course the Bolshevik-dominated revolution will take. Towards the end, he states:

[I]t is the authoritarian communists…who place obstacles before organisation and mass activity and set out along the road diametrically opposed to that which will lead to communism and abolition of the state. It is they who are the ridiculous ones, as ridiculous as anyone who, wishing to travel east, sets out in the direction of the setting sun.

I wonder if Bukharin, years later during his trial, ever thought of his article or Fabbri’s... Given the fate of anarchists and anarchism in the 20th century,** it’s no comfort or joy to be able to say in 2014 that the anarchists (not just Fabbri, but a string of anarchists from Bakunin on) had accurately analyzed the Marxist political program and predicted its terrible course. That Communist leaders and ideologues like Bukharin were themselves destroyed by the very system they created just adds to the tragedy.

But while schadenfreude is hardly appropriate here, there are good reasons to attend to this and similar exchanges. First, since they were also radical anticapitalist and antifascist activists, 20th-century anarchists’ criticisms of authoritarian communism have a special moral standing and political value. They’re not compromised by complicity with non-Communist forms of oppression like others on the Left. And their writings about political action and ethics are meant not for those who want to preserve existing forms of oppression but for those working to overthrow them and build a more just world. It’s easy to simplistically dismiss or reject the Communist program from the perspective of the status quo, and even to present it, self-servingly, as the logical outcome of all projects to fundamentally upset the existing order. The disputes between anarchists and Communists, though, raise the complex questions involved with struggling for radical change.

Second, Fabbri’s critical analysis of Communist ideology applies well beyond it, because, as he suggests, the Communists’ ideas about “development,” “modernization,” and production and the top-down authoritarian practices associated with them grew directly out of capitalist ideology. We see many of these same ideas, and similar pretenses to “science,” in contemporary neoliberalism, in international institutions and government policy, and in the arguments used against labor and other oppositional movements. These anarchist ideas are every bit as relevant today as they were in 1922.

* As Corey Robin has discussed in Fear: The History of a Political Idea, understanding the real experiences and motives of Bukharin and other authoritarians and victims of authoritarianism has significant implications for political theory.

** Fabbri himself was forced into exile by Mussolini’s fascist government.

The Warrior Zone

“Our bases in Italy are making it easier to pursue new wars and military interventions in conflicts about which we know little, from Africa to the Middle East. Unless we question why we still have bases in Italy and dozens more countries like it worldwide -- as, encouragingly, growing numbers of politicians, journalists, and others are doing -- those bases will help lead us, in the name of American “security,” down a path of perpetual violence, perpetual war, and perpetual insecurity.” – David Vine

Speaking of imperialism, I recently read this interesting piece by David Vine: “The Italian Job: How the Pentagon Is Using Your Tax Dollars to Turn Italy into a Launching Pad for the Wars of Today and Tomorrow”:

The Pentagon has spent the last two decades plowing hundreds of millions of tax dollars into military bases in Italy, turning the country into an increasingly important center for U.S. military power. Especially since the start of the Global War on Terror in 2001, the military has been shifting its European center of gravity south from Germany, where the overwhelming majority of U.S. forces in the region have been stationed since the end of World War II. In the process, the Pentagon has turned the Italian peninsula into a launching pad for future wars in Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

…Base expert Alexander Cooley explains: “U.S. defense officials acknowledge that Italy’s strategic positioning on the Mediterranean and near North Africa, the Italian military’s antiterrorism doctrine, as well as the country’s favorable political disposition toward U.S. forces are important factors in the Pentagon’s decision to retain” a large base and troop presence there. About the only people who have been paying attention to this build-up are the Italians in local opposition movements like those in Vicenza who are concerned that their city will become a platform for future U.S. wars.

[Here’s some more background about the base in Vicenza and the local resistance.]

The organized opposition to the expansion of US military installations in Europe and around the world came to my attention several years ago when mayors and other groups in Poland and the Czech Republic campaigned to block the construction of missile shields in their countries while Italians around Vicenza protested Dal Molin.



Anti-base struggles often concern local issues, but they also involve core struggles against the culture of militarism and imperialism. The global movement resisting an expanding US military presence includes women, indigenous and displaced people, migrants, former soldiers, and others who bear the brunt of militarization. It includes peace, democracy, and human rights activists. It includes those in the US and Latin America who oppose US interference in the politics of the other countries in the hemisphere - the US military’s support of authoritarianism and repression, its partnership with US corporations, and its role in ecological destruction. (The 2008 Hemispheric Conference against Militarization was held, interestingly enough, in Honduras, just months before the coup. It concluded with a protest at Soto Cano airbase, which president Zelaya was planning to convert to a civilian airport.)

Vine’s description of Dal Molin is striking:

Last month, I had a chance to visit the newest U.S. base in Italy, a three-month-old garrison in Vicenza, near Venice. Home to a rapid reaction intervention force, the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), and the Army’s component of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the base extends for a mile, north to south, dwarfing everything else in the small city. In fact, at over 145 acres, the base is almost exactly the size of Washington’s National Mall or the equivalent of around 110 American football fields. The price tag for the base and related construction in a city that already hosted at least six installations: upwards of $600 million since fiscal year 2007.

…Publicly, U.S. officials say there are no U.S. military bases in Italy. They insist that our garrisons, with all their infrastructure, equipment, and weaponry, are simply guests on what officially remain “Italian” bases designated for NATO use. Of course, everyone knows that this is largely a legal nicety.

No one visiting the new base in Vicenza could doubt that it's a U.S. installation all the way. The garrison occupies a former Italian air force base called Dal Molin. (In late 2011, Italian officials rebranded it “Caserma Del Din,” evidently to try to shed memories of the massive opposition the base has generated.) From the outside, it might be mistaken for a giant hospital complex or a university campus. Thirty one box-like peach-and-cream-colored buildings with light red rooftops dominate the horizon with only the foothills of the Southern Alps as a backdrop. A chain link fence topped by razor wire surrounds the perimeter, with green mesh screens obscuring views into the base.

If you manage to get inside, however, you find two barracks for up to 600 soldiers each. (Off base, the Army is contracting to lease up to 240 newly built homes in surrounding communities.) Two six-floor parking garages that can hold 850 vehicles, and a series of large office complexes, some small training areas, including an indoor shooting range still under construction, as well as a gym with a heated swimming pool, a “Warrior Zone” entertainment center, a small PX, an Italian-style café, and a large dining facility. These amenities are actually rather modest for a large U.S. base. Most of the newly built or upgraded housing, schools, medical facilities, shopping, and other amenities for soldiers and their families are across town on Viale della Pace (Peace Boulevard) at the Caserma Ederle base and at the nearby Villaggio della Pace (Peace Village).

I was especially intrigued by the “Warrior Zone” entertainment center (and the idea of people heading there for evening entertainment after a day in Peace Village). It’s described on the base’s web site:

The Warrior Zone is a modern multipurpose entertainment center designed specifically for Single Soldiers as a home away from home. It is a place where Soldiers and their guests can come to socialize, relax, and grab a bite to eat and enjoy a beverage from our full service bar. Unwind in the comfortable lounge areas and outdoor patio or enjoy a movie in the cinema room.

On the menu? Hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon cheeseburger, grilled chicken sandwich, Philly cheese steak sandwich, and BLT. The first two (of four) sides are a hot dog and - I’m not making this up - two hot dogs. I’m surprised they don’t serve lamb shakes.

Pope condemns global capitalism

As reported by Al Jazeera:

...He discarded his prepared speech after listening to Francesco Mattana, a 45-year-old married father of three who lost his job with an alternative energy company four years ago.

Mattana, his voice trembling, told the pope that unemployment "oppresses you and wears you out to the depths of your soul."

The crowd of about 20,000 people in a square near the city port chanted what Francis called a prayer for "work, work, work." They cheered each time he spoke of the rights of workers and the personal devastation caused by joblessness.

The pope, who later celebrated Mass for some 300,000 people outside the city's cathedral, told them: "We don't want this globalized economic system which does us so much harm. Men and women have to be at the center (of an economic system) as God wants, not money."

Leaving Capri

So what do I want to do with all of my brightly colored photos capturing the lush beauty of the Amalfi coast? Remove a lot of the color, of course.

I’m working on some that I took on the boat returning from Capri. I’d hoped to go to Pompeii but didn’t make it this trip, which has been a sort of blessing in disguise since it's been pushing me to think of different ways of talking about time and history and memory and so on. My first effort:

I’m not entirely sure about it (too…gimmicky, maybe?). But I like the direction, and I’m having a ball with hue desaturation in GIMP.

The Path of the gods, it has many steps.

No, I haven’t converted to polytheism. The title is a reference to the Sentiero degli dei, a hiking trail that hugs the Amalfi coast, overlooking the Mediterranean. I walked/climbed the stretch between Praiano and Positano last month, and thought I would share some pictures and information.

Before I get into details, though, I should say that it was a remarkable experience and I would do it again in a second. If and when I return to the area, I’ll make sure not to miss it. Looking at my pictures, I’m wishing I could transport myself back there.…

But I think having more knowledge ahead of time can only enrich the experience. I’d done a little – in retrospect, not enough – internet investigation before I left the US, and went into it with some impressions that turned out to be inaccurate. Three subjects that could use some attention are: the difficulty of the trail, its suitability for people afraid of heights, and the quality of the signage.

(A few general notes, on which people seem to agree: First, it’s best to walk toward Positano rather than away from it. Second, start early, before the sun is high in the sky. We were fortunate to be sheltered by some misty clouds that diffused the sunlight and made the climb more interesting, but you shouldn’t go if there’s any threat of rain. If you’re taking the bus andor ferry to your starting point, plan accordingly and find the schedule that will get you there as early as possible. Wear sunscreen, and bring more. Bring plenty of water. Bring some cash. Bring your camera – you’ll want it.)

So, first, the level of difficulty. Maybe the most important element is the amount of climbing. The path itself is high, close to the top of the cliffs, so you have to reach it somehow. I saw several references to the 1700-step staircase at the Positano end, but I guess I hadn’t taken enough note of the discussions about starting the path in Praiano as opposed to Agerola. Apparently, if you begin in Bomerano (a neighborhood in Agerola), the bus drops you off high on the cliffs so you don’t have to climb up to reach the path itself. In contrast, where we entered in Praiano, the bus leaves you relatively low on the cliffside and you have to climb 1900 steps, to many of which the term “step” is loosely applied.

You won’t really see much of this portion in people’s pictures, because it’s extremely difficult and vertigo-inducing to take pictures as you’re climbing. Here are a couple from places we stopped to catch our breath.

After we’d climbed probably more than a thousand steps, we came upon a little church/monastery with a cute snack bar and a bathroom.

The man there was quite nice, and we also met a family of hearty Belgians who were just leaving as we arrived. Catching our breath, we asked hopefully, “There isn’t much more climbing after this, right?” “I don’t want to get your hopes down,” the man said gently, “but yes, there is.” Resigned to our future after hearing that, we set off climbing again, and yes, there was quite a bit more. Once we’d accepted it, though, and knowing we were making progress toward the top, the climb became more pleasant and the views increasingly amazing.

So, the Praiano climb is an important element in assessing the trail’s difficulty, and could explain to some extent the widely varying accounts. The descriptions I’d read before I left for Italy were largely ones like this (from recent posts on TripAdvisor):

“I had read many reviews about this walk hoping to find out if it would be suitable for someone with a bad knee and hip could walk it and I found no difficulty at all.”

“There is quite a bit of up and down but it is very achievable and no where near as hard as some reviews have suggested. My step mother (60) who has low to average fitness managed the walk and 1600 steps down [in Positano] and has now a great sense of achievement.”

“This is an easy walk on good paths, the one or two rougher patches are very short not difficult so long as sensible footwear is worn.”

“Agree with previous posters that this isn't really a ‘hike’. It's more of a stroll along an extremely beautiful path.”

If I’d dug deeper into the older posts on TripAdvisor, I would have found ones more like this, several pages in:

“The walk is quite demanding as the path is often no more than rough gravel and steps made from granite rocks. Wilst the path roughly stays at 600 metres or so above sea level, it does go up and down alot. We are both fit and active and would not describe this as a modest stroll.”

“This is a wonderful hike with awesome vistas along the entire route. Be advised that it is somewhat challenging and rocky at points.”

“Although a hard walk and very high at times, the walk was absolutely fantastic.”

“I consider myself in good shape (I run and workout several times a week) but there were a couple of times I was huffing and puffing. The hike is strenuous, but doable, with breaks, water and snacks.”

As I said, I probably hadn’t paid enough attention to the fact that most if not all of the people describing the walk as easier had begun in Agerola and not Praiano as we did. And that makes a difference – climbing almost 2000 stone steps carved into a cliff adds considerably to the overall difficulty. From what I’ve come to understand, the section that goes from Agerola to Praiano is comparatively leisurely.

However, even as a description of the part of the path from above Praiano to Nocelle/Positano, the first set of statements I think give a false impression. Very few sections could honestly be characterized as an easy walk or stroll, or suitable for people who aren’t physically fit or have knee or hip problems. Any trail where you have to use your hands in parts and keep your focus in finding your footing amongst rocks is pretty much by definition not a stroll. At one point we turned and took pictures of the path behind us:

Not a stroll. (I had to laugh as I was looking through my pictures, and then when I did a search online to see others’. None of them really show the narrow, rocky, ascending/descending sections, leaving the impression that the path is wide and flat throughout. I eventually realized that this is because it’s generally only in the easier sections that it’s advisable – or possible, really – to take pictures.)

Which brings me to the fear of heights. Here are a couple of descriptions from TripAdvisor:

“For the most part, the trail is wide and not as precarious as the overall steep slopes would seem to suggest.”

“People mention that there are some bits that aren't great for vertigo sufferers which worried me a bit but I saw nothing that was an issue. I think it would only be a problem if you have serious vertigo rather than a dislike of heights which is what I have.”

I can’t agree with this. Again, this is probably in some part related to the Praiano climb, since it included some of the narrowest sections beside steep drops. Climbing there, even for me and my companion who aren’t especially afraid of heights, often involved not turning around. I did a couple of times, and I imagine that if I were afraid of heights panic might have set in. (I would not recommend descending those steps in Praiano to anyone, really, but especially not to people with any fear of heights at all. It’s one thing to have the cliff at your back, but quite another to be facing the drop while propelled forward and downward.) But even setting this portion aside, the trail itself is often narrow (see the picture just above) and you’re often separated from the edge by a rickety excuse for a fence or nothing. This is in my view the more useful assessment for the acrophobes:

“If you are like me and do not like heights or being close to the edge of some extremely high and sheer drop offs on somewhat treacherous terrain, either go shopping, wear blinders or just figure on dealing with it. I managed to wear out a pair of leather gloves by crabbing across rocks and clutching at rock walls and there were several times where I really thought panic seemed to be the only way to a merciful end of the fear. I am however delighted that I didn't give in as this is truly a spectacular hike. I do believe though that a career in mountain climbing is not in my future. ;-)”

Finally, signage. Once again, although there are several people providing accurate information, there are some strange claims being made on TripAdvisor and elsewhere:

“The trail is easy to follow and there are signs that guide you along the way, just follow the red and white marks left on certain landmarks, such as rocks.”

“We found the path to be very well marked…”

By no stretch of the imagination is the path well marked. You often have to search the rocks around you for a splash of paint that looks like an arrow, and one of the funniest parts to me was that you would have to feel your way and pretty much guess for a long stretch, only then to come to a tiny, inconspicuous sign when you no longer needed it. The consensus seems to be that the entrance to the path in Agerola is well marked, and I can’t confirm or refute that, but neither the entrance nor anything else in Praiano is, and the stairs down to Positano are extremely hard to find.

Despite some initial surprises and confusion, we had a great experience. But I think everyone should go into it with as much information as possible, so here are my thoughts and suggestions:

- If I have the opportunity to do it again – and I hope I do soon – I would probably try it from Agerola. If you’re staying in Positano, though, it seems like this can be a bit of a pain, since you have to take a bus or ferry to Amalfi and then a connecting bus to Agerola.* Several people reported that the buses can be crowded, and the whole process can take more time than you might want to spend before you even get on the trail itself. (A few people mentioned hiring a private driver to take them, but the idea of spending 60 euros or more to get to a free hiking trail seems strange to me.) I’ll reiterate that the experience is well worth these minor difficulties.

But I would also probably do the Praiano stairs again, now with the full knowledge of what I’m in for. I would recommend the Praiano climb to people who a) want a serious workout,** b) want a sense of accomplishment, c) are physically fit, and d) have no or minimal issues with heights. (As I said above, I wouldn’t recommend descending in Praiano to anyone, really.)

- The path is moderately difficult in parts, but absolutely worth it as far as I’m concerned. The climb has probably to some extent colored my impression of the path as a whole, making it seem slightly more difficult than it would be for those beginning high up in Agerola, but still people should know that reports that it’s an easy stroll aren’t correct. We had possibly the best conditions: it was fairly early in the morning when we began; we had some light, misty clouds; and it wasn’t an extremely hot day, especially for mid-July. Even under these conditions, there were sections that were more difficult and strenuous. I don’t think you have to be in perfect shape to walk it, but don’t expect an easy stroll.

- For people who are slightly afraid of heights, I wouldn’t say “Don’t do it.” You should absolutely do it if you want to challenge or push yourself. But you should go into it with the knowledge that it might be a challenge. Claims that the trail doesn’t contain sections that would be stressful to people with some fear of heights aren’t correct. But if you want to try to confront and reckon with such fears, I can’t think of a more beautiful place to do it.

I hope this is useful information. Please feel free to ask questions or share your own impressions or advice in the comments.

*Of course, if you’re already at or near that end of the path you would want to begin there. Wherever you plan to begin, if you’re taking the bus you should probably have written on a card (or be able to say in understandable Italian) “Sentiero degli dei” and the name of the exact stop you need to get off, and show/tell this to the driver. It doesn’t hurt to ask the other passengers, either. Even if the driver doesn’t know what you’re talking about, you might well run into others going to the path – you’ll know them by their clothes - or locals who can show you where to enter. Speaking of locals, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the hikers weren’t all foreign. We met several Italian people, and later learned from some local people that they’ve walked it many times.

**As one person said: “We started in Praiano, hiked up 2000 stairs, then trekked over the mountains back to Positano. There are other approaches to the path - I was told this is the best one if you want exercise (which I did after 2 weeks of Italian dinners!).”

Sanity? Stewart and Tresca

I saw much of “The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” this afternoon, and later read my feeds. One in particular seemed apt. The AK Press blog is evidently down for maintenance at the moment, so in response to the rally I’ll reproduce, as food for thought, their entire excerpt from chapter 12 of Nunzio Pernicone’s Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel, with special attention requested for the last segment:

Fighting Fascism became the great crusade of Tresca’s life, the struggle in which he achieved unrivalled preeminence among Italian-American radicals and reached the pinnacle of his career. The fight against Italian-American Fascism represented a new phase in the class struggle Tresca and other sovversivi had waged against the consuls, prominenti, and Catholic Church since the turn of the 20th century. No compromise with the enemy was possible; no quarter given and none expected. Tresca’s war against Fascism was a fight to the death.

Testimony to Tresca’s unique status and formidable abilities as a resistance leader was provided repeatedly by the Fascists themselves. Italian ambassador Giacomo De Martino reported to Mussolini in 1926 that Tresca topped the list of “three renegades” (Vincenzo Vacirca and Arturo Giovannitti were the others) whose deportation would most benefit the Fascist regime. By 1928, Tresca had distinguished himself as such a dynamic and implacable foe of Fascism that the Political Police in Rome dubbed him the “deus ex machina of anti-Fascism” in the United States. That same year, overjoyed that Tresca was the target of a smear campaign intended to undermine his status, the consul general of New York, Emilio Axerio, notified Ambassador De Martino that “the definitive liquidation of Carlo Tresca, imposed upon his followers as well, would administer a mortal blow to anti-Fascism, which depends so much on Tresca.”

Had Tresca still lived in Italy, his “liquidation” would have been physical rather than figurative. His presence in the United States, however, was no guarantee of security. Since paranoia is endemic to all police states, the Fascist regime in the 1920s consistently over-estimated the strength of the anti-Fascists, worrying that their activities might undermine Mussolini’s prestige and influence among Italian Americans and jeopardize his cozy relations with the American government and the Wall Street moguls. The anti-Fascist who caused Rome its greatest concern during the early years of the regime was Tresca. Directly or in collusion with American authorities, Mussolini’s official representatives and local disciples caused Tresca to suffer periodic harassment, several arrests, loss of his Italian citizenship, a four-month prison term, a narrow escape from deportation, destruction of his property, and a bomb attempt on his life. But Tresca never relented.

Tresca’s principal weapon against Mussolini and Fascism was Il Martello, described by the consul general of New York in 1925, as “the most dangerous [anti-Fascist newspaper], because of the skillful manner in which it is edited, and because of its influence over certain elements of the people.” A consummate political analyst, Tresca understood that propaganda and myth were the indispensable props of Mussolini’s regime. Therefore, nearly every issue delivered “hammer blows” (martellate) to dismantle the false image of idealism and heroism with which Fascists enveloped themselves, and to dispel the notion that the Blackshirts had turned back the red tide.

The voices of anti-Fascist opposition required amplification from outside sources abroad, as the free press in Italy was progressively stifled. Tresca therefore placed Il Martello at the disposal of many prominent radicals who lacked publication outlets. Once Il Martello became distinguished as an anti-Fascist organ, letters from Italy requesting the newspaper poured into Tresca’s office; he responded by sending free copies to comrades throughout the country. Alarmed, the Italian Postal and Telegraph Ministry banned the importation and circulation of Tresca’s newspaper in May 1923, prescribing stiff penalties for violators. Tresca attempted to circumvent the ban by asking Italian Americans to send copies to friends and relatives (a risky proposition for recipients) and by establishing clandestine operations to smuggle Il Martello into Italy. By 1928, for example, he was sending 100 copies of each issue to a former lover in Locarno, who ferried them by boat across Lake Maggiore. Tresca’s efforts were greatly appreciated, as indicated by the legendary anarchist Errico Malatesta: “I receive Il Martello very irregularly, because it gets through only when it escapes the police bloodhounds; however, I have read enough to admire the energy and fighting courage you sustain against Fascism, which torments us in Italy.”

Interdiction of Il Martello in Italy did not prevent Tresca from utilizing his newspaper to raise vitally needed funds for the anti-Fascist opposition. Channeling money to comrades in Italy was a long-standing practice of the sovversivi. By raising funds, Tresca helped sustain the Italian anarchist press until its complete suppression in 1926. Funds were also collected on a regular basis to help the victims of Fascist violence and persecution. Over the next two decades, countless anti-Fascists in Italy, Europe, and South America would have found themselves in hopeless circumstances if not for the financial support of Italian immigrant workers in the United States, a factor of major importance invariably overlooked by Italian historians of the anti-Fascist resistance.

Tresca was not content to attack Mussolini’s regime merely with “propaganda of the word” and by assisting political victims with money. The best means of subverting Mussolini was to strike where the regime was most vulnerable—the Italian economy. Rising unemployment and taxes, falling wages, the declining value of the lira, military expenditures for the re-conquest of Libya, and the unresolved dilemma of war debts all added up to one inescapable conclusion by 1923: the Fascists could not make good on their promises to improve the lives of the Italian people. Convinced that Mussolini’s prestige at home and abroad would suffer if recovery failed, Tresca advocated economic sabotage and boycotting of Italian financial and state institutions that generated income for the government. He urged workers in Italy to employ obstructionist tactics on the job, abstain from state monopolies (tobacco, salt, lotteries) that generated revenue, purchase food and other provisions only from merchants friendly to the anti-Fascist cause, avoid luxuries and other non-essential expenditures, and boycott all bourgeois establishments. On his own turf, Tresca sought to deprive the Italian economy of the benefits derived from the remittances sent to family members back home by immigrants in the United States. Tresca urged immigrant workers to boycott all Italian financial institutions that operated in the United States, to deposit their savings in American banks, and to avoid utilizing Italy’s Cassa Postale and other agencies that collected fees for transferring remittances. He also exhorted immigrant workers to boycott every Italian American—doctor, lawyer, shoemaker, grocer, barber, etc. — who was a Fascist. Adoption of his boycott strategy, Tresca acknowledged, would inevitably impose hardships upon Italian workers and peasants, but in his words, “war is war.” Mussolini’s government viewed Tresca’s scheme with genuine concern, and the consul general of New York was instructed to remain vigilant for any sign that the plan was gaining momentum. It never did.

Given the unlikelihood of undermining Mussolini’s regime from abroad, Tresca and other anti-Fascists were obliged to conduct their anti-Fascist activities mainly within the Italian-American community. The struggle, however, was never fought on terms even remotely equal. Anti-Fascists numbered not more than 10 percent of the Italian American population, if that. The majority of anti-Fascists within the political spectrum that spanned middle-class liberal to conservative were neither organized nor generally active. Only a handful of bourgeois liberal democrats, like Gaetano Salvemini and Dr. Charlo Fama, functioned as important resistance leaders prior to 1938, when a sizeable contingent of professionals, intellectuals, and former political leaders—known collectively as the fuorusciti (exiles) — were admitted to the United States and assumed a dominant role. The most numerous and dedicated anti-Fascists were working-class sovversivi, and the chieftains of the movement were generally the same radicals and labor leaders who had led Italian immigrant workers prior to the advent of Fascism: Tresca, Giovannitti, Girolamo Valenti, Vincenzo Vacirca, Luigi Antonini, the brothers Frank and Augusto Bellanca, and many others.

But a resistance movement based on workers could not possibly generate resources comparable to those available to the Fascists, assisted as they were by Mussolini’s regime, the prominenti, and the Italian-American middle classes generally. Moreover, the radical and labor movements were significantly weaker in the 1920s than before World War I, thanks in large measure to wartime and postwar repression. Many of the most important radical leaders and hard-core militants, who would have contributed significantly to the resistance, had been deported or imprisoned. Some had returned to Italy of their own accord, hoping to participate in the revolution that beckoned, while others sought refuge in clandestine life underground or became completely inactive. Another factor that weighed against the resistance was the ongoing hostility of the American authorities, who generally regarded Fascists and pro-Fascists as good, conservative patriots, while the anti-Fascists were considered dangerous Reds. Accordingly, fear of arrest and deportation often limited the effectiveness of anti-Fascist activity, for without such dangers hanging over them, many of the sovversivi — anarchists and communists especially — would have been far more aggressive in their methods.

A new levy of anti-Fascists arrived in the United States between 1919 and 1924, before the new immigration quota system effectively barred Italians. Some newcomers entered the United States illegally or arrived with provisional status as political refugees. Others had previously returned to Italy or had been deported after World War I but managed to re-enter. The most important of them would play leadership roles in the resistance: the socialist Vincenzo Vacirca; the communists Giovanni Pippan and Vittorio Vidali; and the anarchists Raffaele Schiavina, Armando Borghi, and Virgilia D’Andrea. The fuorusciti, the last contingent of newcomers, arriving in 1938 and 1939, included some very prominent liberal and democratic anti-Fascists (Carlo Sforza, Randolfo Pacciardi, Alberto Tarchiani, Lionello Venturi, and others) who had long resided in exile in Europe or were refugees fleeing from Mussolini’s recently promulgated anti-Semitic laws in Italy. Although few in number, the fuorusciti provided the Italian-American resistance with an important infusion of much needed energy and talent.

Despite acquiring some new blood during the interwar period, the Italian-American resistance undoubtedly lost more adherents than it gained. The primary reason was the failure of the sovversivi to produce a second generation large enough to replace the departed. This was a problem of long standing for Italian-American radicalism. The offspring of the sovversivi were generally more assimilated into American society than their parents, accepting American values and rejecting the ideas and principles of their elders. Political and cultural discontinuity between parents and children was also a function of the disproportionate number of male to female radicals, a deficiency fatal to the movement because marital unions generally occurred between a radical father and a non-radical mother, who raised the children Catholic and conservative.

Numerical weakness might not have mattered so much if anti-Fascists had been unified and equally militant. The resistance was multi-factional: anarchists of various orientation; communists of the newly-established Communist Party; revolutionary syndicalists of the moribund IWW; left-wing and right-wing socialists of the FSI (SP); social-democratic trade unionists (particularly leaders of the ILGWU and ACWA), and a small contingent of Mazzinian (i.e., democratic) republicans. All were committed to the anti-Fascist struggle. The crusade against Fascism, as Rudolf J. Vecoli correctly asserted, was the raison d’être of Italian-American radicalism between the wars. Yet, while commitment to the cause might have been equal in the abstract, the zeal and tenacity with which the various radical elements fought against Fascism often differed from group to group. Moreover, the internecine conflicts they incessantly waged were so ferocious and divisive that an outside observer might have concluded that the anti-Fascists devoted more time and energy to fighting among themselves than they did to combating Fascism.

Tresca always pursued his anti-Fascist mission with singular commitment and intensity, excelling at more roles than any of his radical contemporaries: journalist, public spokesman, lecturer, strategist, agitation leader, and front-line fighter. Tresca’s pattern of struggle was set in the early 1920s, when the resistance existed in little more than name. High on his list of targets were local Blackshirts and visiting Fascist leaders and dignitaries. As potential opponents, Tresca held the Blackshirts of the fasci in low regard. Having confronted every imaginable combination of policemen, private detectives, company thugs, and vigilantes during his years as a strike leader, Tresca would not so much as flinch in the face of Blackshirts, whom he considered strutting bullies and cowards afraid to battle the sovversivi on even terms. If the Blackshirts dared to move against them, Tresca and his “boys” would know how to deal with them. To demonstrate his contempt for the Blackshirts, Tresca in July 1923 moved the offices of Il Martello to 304 East 14th Street, a mere stone’s throw from the headquarters of the New York Fascio founded in 1921.

The presence of Giuseppe Bottai between August and October 1921 provided Tresca and the anti-Fascists with their first opportunity to make life miserable for a prominent Blackshirt visiting the United States to win favor for Mussolini and Fascism. A deputy and political secretary of the Fascist parliamentary group prior to the “March on Rome,” Bottai was a particularly vicious Blackshirt who later would become a major figure in the regime. Bottai’s ostensible purpose of his visit was to raise funds for blind war veterans, but he admitted to the American press that his mission as a representative of Fascism was to help fight “Bolshevism” among Italian Americans — a theme repeated endlessly by visiting and indigenous Fascists to win acceptance and support from American society. In every city he visited, Bottai was feted by consular officials and prominenti, a clear sign of Fascism’s popularity within the highest circles of the Italian-American community more than a year before Mussolini assumed power. That he should receive the red carpet treatment was galling enough, but anti-Fascists were seething because a socialist deputy had recently been murdered by Fascists, a crime that prompted Bottai to boast at a local fascist meeting that he personally had killed five communists in Rome.

The arrival of this despised Blackshirt represented one of the few occasions when most anti-Fascists acted in accord. A protest campaign was launched at a mass meeting in New York, at which Tresca, Pietro Allegra, Arturo Giovannitti, Nino Capraro, and Luigi Antonini, head of the ILGWU’s Local 89, each denouncing Bottai in turn. A more dramatic confrontation followed in Utica, New York, where Tresca was scheduled to address an anti-Fascist rally at the same time Bottai would address local admirers. En route to their own meeting place, Tresca led a column of several hundred anti-Fascists past the theater where Bottai had just finished his speech. Shouting “Abbasso Bottai!,” “Morte a Bottai!,” “Assassino!,” anti-Fascists had to be held back by police lest they attack the fascist celebrity and his hosts. During his next engagement, in New Haven, a threatening crowd of anti-Fascists so unnerved Bottai that he spoke for only ten minutes before leaving the theater under police escort. A week later Bottai was scheduled to speak in Philadelphia, home to the largest Italian immigrant populations outside of New York. On hand to greet the Fascist were the Italian vice consul; the wealthy publisher of the daily L’Opinione, Charles Baldi; and a host of other prominenti. But the audience also included some 2,000 anti-Fascists. The orchestra attempted to play the Italian “Marcia Reale” and the American “Star Spangled Banner” but was drowned out by cries for the musicians to play the “Internationale.” Bottai spoke for ten minutes, repeatedly interrupted by shouts of “Abbasso Bottai!” and “Morte a Bottai!” before police drove the anti-Fascists from the theater with clubs. Outside, another 4,000 anti-Fascists joined the demonstration but were dispersed by mounted police who charged the crowd.

Livid with rage as he fled the stage, Bottai was overheard muttering that the demonstration had been organized by “that vulgarian Tresca” and “if only we were in Italy.…” Tresca answered the implicit threat:

To be sure, if we were in Italy, you would already have had the Fascist royal guards stab us in the back. But here in America, you had to reply on your own forces or those few cowards who surround you. Here we forced you to take to your heels ashen faced, as in Utica, or to protect yourself with Cossack horsemen, as in Philadelphia.

Then Tresca issued a threat of his own: “The four fascist scoundrels in New York [leaders of the local fascio] know it: we will never permit them to raise their heads. We will never permit the lying consuls, the thieving bankers, the exploiting bosses to raise their heads from the swamp—never, never.”

Tresca was shot dead on the street in New York in 1943, most likely by the mafia.

Linkage Love, Awesome Female Atheists, Sabina Guzzanti

It’s in the air. Already mine is the Quote of the Day! Thanks, Rational Rant. I’ve looked through some of your earlier posts, but I don’t really know you well at all, so please don’t be anything bad. I’d hate to link to anything bad.

In that warm spirit, I’ll belatedly draw more attention to Blag Hag’s Large List of Awesome Female Atheists.*

(By the way, how’s that database coming along, Dr. Dawkins?)

Well done, Jen. I thought at the time that Sabina Guzzanti should be added, but couldn’t find clear evidence that she’s an atheist (though she certainly appears to be). Regardless, this should be watched:

Here it is in English, but it appears to be only her narration that is translated, so it misses a lot.

*This has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I’m on it.

Shut up.