March 23, 1981

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 5

Venice An Oligarchical Model

by Paolo Serri

The Miracle of the Cross in the Canal of San Lorenzo, by Gentile Giovanni. The evil Venetian state masked its absolute power behind a facade of cultist mystery and miracle, displayed in elaborate pageants and celebrations.

The Carmelite arose and stood over the kneeling Antonio, with the whole of his benevolent countenance illuminated by the moon. Stretching his arms toward the stars, he pronounced the absolution in a voice that was touched with pious fervor. . . , Antonio again bowed his knee, while the Carmelite firmly pronounced the words of peace. When this last office was performed, and a decent interval of mutual but silent prayer had

passed, a signal was given to summon the gondola of the state. It came rowing down with great force, and was instantly at their side. Two men passed into the boat of Antonio, and with officious zeal assisted the monk to resume his place in that of the republic. "Is the penitent shrived?" half whispered one, seemingly the superior of the two. . . . The officer released the person of the monk, who passed quickly beneath the canopy, and he turned to cast a hasty glance at the features of the fisherman. The rubbing of a rope was audible, and the anchor of Antonio was lifted by a sudden jerk. A heavy plashing of the water followed, and the two boats shot away together, obedient to a violent effort of the crew. The gondola of the state exhibited its usual number of gondoliers bending to their toil, with its dark and hearse-like canopy, but that of the fisherman was empty! . . . When the fisherman came to the surface, after his fall, he was alone in the center of the vast but tranquil sheet of water. There might have been a glimmering of hope, as he arose from the darkness of the sea to the bright beauty of the moonlit night. But the sleeping domes were too far for human strengths, and the gondolas were sweeping madly toward the town. The water gurgled; an arm was visible in the air, and it disappeared. The reader may be asking himself, and well he might, the significance of this dramatic story: it is a passage taken from a novel that deserves to be better known, The Bravo, by James Fenimore Cooper. An empty exercise of the imagination? Or the slightly fictionalized version of a political assassination of our own times? The answer, we believe, will soon become clear. For now, New Solidarity wishes to announce the results of a vast and in many respects disconcerting investigation into the evil role that the Venetian oligarchy has played over the past centuries and down to the present in the fate of Italy, Europe, and the world. The specific role that the "Venetian oligarchical model"to give it a nameplays is the reference point of the Italian and international "black

nobility." By "Venetian," we mean an oligarchical stereotype, a model of thinking and behavior, as we shall presently clarify. Our interest in Venice began, or rather grew, following a discussion with a respected source in the Italian intelligence services, which took place after last summer's frightful massacre at the Bologna train station, in which more than 80 were killed. We were told (more or less): "If you want to understand who is behind both right-wing and left-wing terrorism, you have to follow up the Venetian track." Venetian! For some time we had been intrigued by this ''track" and even published several articles on the subject. We thought about the Loredan brothers who in the postwar period divided

Portrait of the doge Leonardo Loredan, by Giovanni Bellini. The Doge, leader of the Venetian oligarchy of his age, is the ancestor of the Loredan brothers who today run Italian terrorism in both its "left-wing" and "right-wing" variety.

up the tasks of creating terrorist organizations on the "left" and the "right" The name Loredan belongs to one of the oldest aristocratic families of Venice. Another "noble" family name was that of the Meo, the family to which terrorist professor Toni Negri's wife belongs. And we thought of the geographical role played by the Venetian hinterland of terrorism which is made up of Padua, Verona, and Trent, and certain financial interests behind Freda, the neo-Nazi convicted in the 1969 Milan Bank of Agriculture bombing, who has solid business and terrorist connections into Central and South America. But what came overwhelmingly to mind was the extraordinarily exciting experience of reading the novel The Bravo, by the American 19th century patriot, James Fenimore Cooper. And it is from there that we wish to start in order to uncover the controllers of present-day terrorism and what seems to be the desolate, immoral and apparently unstoppable process of destabilization of Italy.

James Fenimore Cooper, Patriot J. F. Cooper (1789-1851) grew up in the American Neoplatonic tradition that was celebrated with the victory of the Revolutionthe tradition of Franklin, Washington and Hamilton which brought to fulfillment the European humanist conspiracy of the great Leibniz, Colbert, and Milton's "Commonwealth Party" in England. Cooper took active part, along with writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe and painter-inventor Samuel Morse, in the constitution of the emerging secret American intelligence apparatus to defend the existence of the federal republic against ongoing attempts to restore British rule. Those attempts, as Allen Salisbury has shown in his book The Civil War and the American System, led to the manipulation that set up the Civil War, but were defeated by the combined efforts of the political faction of Poe, Morse and Cooperthe faction that later chose Abraham Lincoln as its political leader. This was the leadership faction of the Cincinnatus Society that grew out of the veterans of the Revolutionary War and which is still today far too little known. Cooper arrived in Europe as an already famous author in 1826. He had been appointed American consul to Lyons, but actually had the task of putting back in order the continental Neoplatonic faction and reestablishing contacts and the alliance with American patriots. Besides Lyons and Paris, from 1826 to 1828 we find him in England, and he also went to Switzerland that year. Then he was transferred for two years to Italy, visiting Rome, Venice, and other cities. His greatest work of this period, and perhaps in general, is The Bravo, A Venetian Story, written in 1831. As we shall see, The Bravo is an extraordinary Neoplatonic lesson in the conception of Republic as counter posed to an oligarchy. The question that immediately comes up is: How was it that Cooper, who had to deal with the aims and intrigues of the still-threatening British power on a daily basis, happened to divert his attention from this recognized and visible enemy toward a Venetian story? Venice was a republic that had been defeated for decades and in decline for centuries. Was it perhaps an artifice to educate American citizens through analogy on the maliciousness of the British oligarchy and its motives? While all this is true, there is more to the story. As Cooper himself states in his brief preface, he wants to furnish a picture of the social system of one of the soi-disant [so-called] republics of the other hemispheres.

For the members of the Cincinnatus Society, the fundamental task, beyond blunting the enemy's specific attacks and plots, was to elevate the American people to the level of citizens, and strengthen it intellectually, consolidating that citizenry as a republican militia in the Machiavellian tradition. Were we to characterize a republic, we should say it was a state in which power, both theoretically and practically, is derived from the nation, with a constant responsibility of the agents of the public to the people: a responsibility that is neither to be evaded nor denied. Then he adds, allusively: How far Venice would have been obnoxious to this proof, the reader is left to judge for himself. The novel clearly counterposes to this Neoplatonic position Aristotelian formulations expressed by the arrogant and evil oligarchy. Signor Gradenigo, the hateful, corrupt and effete oligarch of The Bravo, lies about his true political role (kept secret) in the Council of Three, the highly restricted absolute power in Venice, but declares: I sometimes visit the Council of Three Hundred; [the broader and less powerful Venetian state organismed.] but my years and infirmities preclude me now from serving the republic as I could wish. This expresses with surgical precision the cultist and fraudulent essence of the Venetian government. Defending the secrecy of the two Councils of the Senate, Signor Gradenigo, member of an oligarchical family that actually existed, expresses himself in this way: Those august organisms are secret, so that their majesty will not be obfuscated by communication with vulgar interests. They govern like the invisible influence of mind over matter and, in a manner of speaking, like the soul of the state, whose [passages], like those of reason, remain a problem that goes beyond human comprehension. It is impossible to summarize the unfolding of this book without spoiling the "detective story"-like tension and pleasure of reading it. Suffice it to indicate here that the story, deliberately set in an imprecise moment of Venetian history between the beginning and the end of the 17th

century, narrates the adventures of a southern nobleman of Venetian origin, Don Camillo Monforte, Lord of St. Agatha, who returns to the lagoon to reclaim his property and rights. Having saved a young woman, Violetta Tiepolo, from drowning in the canal, he falls in love with her and she with him. But Violetta, the orphan scion of a very old and rich family, is the ward of the Senate which plans to reverse the Republic's decline by forcing Violetta to marry a powerful person. For the moment, Violetta is entrusted to the mean and powerful hands of Gradenigo, whom we have encountered above, and the corrupt ambitions of his son, the unbalanced Giacomo. Like Gradenigo, the Tiepolo name belonged to a family that actually existed. It is interesting that Cooper should have chosen this name of Violetta: the Tiepolo were in fact strenuous opponents of the oligarchical restoration that took place between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th, and they opposed the Locking [Serrata] of the Great Council (1297), that sealed the creation of a kind of closed ranks of oligarchical families to control the city's government and its territories. In 1310, one Baiamonte Tiepolo lost his life when he failed in an attempted coup against the oligarchy's overweening power. The other two main characters are the old fisherman Antonio, and the "bravo" (hired assassin) of the title. Antonio, a kind of miniature Christian Socrates, is fighting against the unjust impressment into Venetian galley service of his 14-year-old grandson, the innocent offspring of Antonio's son who had been killed fighting the Turks. Take note! Antonio, with arguments on natural law (similar to those contained in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice) does not deny the duties of a citizen of a Republic, but rejects and combats the abuse of power of an oligarchy masquerading in republican disguise: I do not see why the son of a patrician should walk around free, while the son of a fisherman is forced to bleed in a galley. . . . [My old] breast is full of scars. I have fought against the Infidel and shed my blood like water for the state. And they have forgotten it, while in the churches luxurious marbles have been erected to record what the nobles did, the same nobles who returned unwounded from the same wars.

History of an Oligarchy In the course of centuries and down to our own day, Venice and the Venetian oligarchy have been hated and fought by Neoplatonists, since Dante's time and his suspicious sudden death when returning from an unsuccessful diplomatic mission on behalf of Ravenna in the city of the Lagoon. After him came Cosimo de' Medici in the 15th century and Machiavelli, and Giordano Bruno who in 1592 fell into the hands of the oligarch Mocenigo in Venice, and was then turned over to the Jesuits in Rome, who finished him off. This was the reason that Bruno's cothinker, Tommaso Campanula, let fly his stinging arrows against the Most Serene Republic. After him, it was Leibniz's turn to face the shifty Venetian operations, orchestrated by Abbot Conti, and another Mocenigo, especially through their manipulations of the archivist and historian Ludovico Muratori. Then in the early 19th century it was the turn of the great Friedrich Schiller who denounced the Venetians in his novelette Der Geisterseher (The Visionary). From Schiller we reach the Poe-Cooper group and Giuseppe Verdi, whose little known early opera I Due Foscari (The Two Foscari) exposed the ruthless power plays of the Venetian doges. Finally in the recent postwar period the "Venetian question" flashed into public view with the clash between the creator of Italy's national hydrocarbons agency, Enrico Mattei, and the Venetian "dinosaurs." Let us now take a brief look at this "Venetian model" before returning to review in more depth its various aspects. The oligarchical importance of Venice resides in the fact that for an unfortunately all too long period, it incarnated Byzantium and the Byzantine model in the West. Venice was never a true economic and military power; like England from the so-called Glorious Revolution onward, the power of Venice was measured in what in the 20th century has come to be called geopolitical operations. Venice was a maritime power that maintained strategic control by military means of islands, straits, and passages in key positions, positions that were obtained and maintained by military conquests or manipulations conducted through spying or "diplomacy." From the economic, social, or military, point of view, Venice has never generated significant progress. The state and its administration were nothing but the armed administrative branch of a small circle of oligarchical families, the legalized defense of

massive historic family fortunes. There is no other way to explain the fundamental economic contradiction given by the fact that in the 18th century, at an advanced stage of Venetian decadence, a noble Venetian had an average of twice as much property as his Amsterdam counterpart, when the Dutch were enjoying economic ''success" far superior to that of the Venetians. As in our times, these noble fortunes were preserved and expanded through flights of capital and speculation on exchange, control over ''state" and municipal income through forms of obligations, usurious credit rates, and control over raw materials and high-technology sections of industry (prevalently of a military character). The maintenance of this aggregate of great family fortunes represented and still represents what we properly call today a fascist economy. In his story, Cooper describes Venice as a system so vicious [that it] was, perhaps, only indeed tolerable to those it governed, by the extraneous contributions of captured and subsidiary provinces, on which, in truth, as in all cases of metropolitan rule, the oppression weighed most grievously. The reader may at once see that the very reason why the despotism of the self-styled republic was tolerable to its own citizens was but another cause of its eventual destruction. And if this was true for the fate of the "republic," unfortunately it is not true for those oligarchical families who used it for their private gain. From the time of Genoa and its bankers, to the Venetian fortunes and Venice's geopolitical power, we shall see this legacy, these family fortunes, were able to assimilate parvenus, ally with other oligarchies, and "rise again" elsewhere, in the Dutch East Indies Company and later in the British. We encounter them again supporting the creation of the Swiss finance and banking empire; launching alliances (''social contracts") with other oligarchical clans in Geneva and Hamburg; and finally coming together again, especially after World War II in the City of London, in lower Manhattan and in control of the Eurodollar market and "offshore" illegal money circuits. Was it not these same Italian fortunes that fed the Eurodollar market with their capital flights in the 1960s? Malthus's Venetian Precursor The best characterization of such a fascist economy comes from the Venetian monk Giammaria Ortes, the true precursor of the bestial population

theories of Parson Malthus. It is not an accident that Ortes limited himself to describing the Venetian economy, a description that is lauded by another

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) as a young naval officer. Cooper was a leading member of the Poe-Morse circle, the heirs of Benjamin Franklin who established the first U.S. intelligence networks. This year marks the 150th anniversary of Cooper's stinging attack on the Venetian oligarchy, The Bravo.

"great" Venetian economist of our own century, Gino Luzzatto, who belongs to one of Italy's most important Jewish families and who turned out a series of politicians and economists (essentially, the Action Party of World War II) whose influence has been lethal. Luzzatto brought Italy, indirectly, the four years of abuse of power carried out by the U.S. ambassador to Rome, Richard Gardner, who is Luzzatto's son-in-law. Nonetheless, what most distinguishes the "Venetian model," its "byzantine" feature, is the highly refined manipulation of Delphic techniques of political control. Just as in the Britain of the Anglican Church, in Venice state and church were one in a highly twisted fashion. The "state" religion was nothing but the cult of social control, and the state was nothing but the armed branch of a special caste of priests, the narrow circle of the ruling oligarchs. It is therefore not amazing, that Ignatius Loyola's Jesuits were an original invention of the Venetians, which were then passed on second-hand to others to continue their geopolitical game. The evil Gradenigo in The Bravo says:

Many things can be done with the influence of friends, properly used. This is the secret of our success in the present condition of Venice. Thus the Byzantines, or the Normans, or the continuous Turkish or Mongol menace, were the best weapons used historically by Venice to maintain and increase its power. The historian Hart writes that the Mongols found that the Venetians were somewhat disposed to sacrifice the interests of Christian Europe to the end of obtaining advantages. . . . In exchange for Mongol aid in chasing Genoese commercial centers out of the Crimea, the Venetians acted as part of the Mongol secret service. It would be more correct to declare the opposite: The Venetians manipulated the Mongols and other peoples via their espionage, to defend their own interests. The invention of modern sophisticated espionage is achieved in Venice, from Marco Polo to Casanova down to our own days. Their diplomatic corps was always surrounded with extraordinary prestige. The British secret services, which today are considered as the best in the world, recognize their model in Venetian diplomacy and espionage. It is well known that even in the 18th century, with the existence of powerful, large nation-states, Venice had the largest diplomatic corps in the world and the thickest spy networks. As Cooper says: "One person in two in Venice is well paid to report what the others do and say." In effect it is a question of the very institutionalization of secrecy and arbitrariness, whose epitome was reached by the notorious State Inquisition. This is how Cooper describes it: A political inquisition, which came in time to be one of the most fearful engines of police ever known, was the consequence. An authority, as irresponsible as it was absolute, was periodically confided to another and still smaller body, which met and exercised its despotic and secret functions under the name of the Council of Three . . . [a] despotic power that was wielded by men who moved in society unknown . . . influenced by a set of political maxims that were perhaps as ruthless, as tyrannic, and as selfish as ever were invented by the evil ingenuity of men.

It is not so much the extreme power and its abuse that count, so much as that Delphic mantle that enfolds everything under words like "democracy" or "gentle government"what Cooper defines as "adding hypocrisy to usurpation." Here is his description of this Venetian, Aristotelian, Delphic, or Jesuitical methodhowever one wishes to name it: Thus Venice prided herself in the justice of St. Mark, and few states maintained a greater show or put forth a more lofty claim to the possession of the sacred quality than that those real maxims of government were veiled in mystery. . . In this article we did not set out to plumb the depths of any of the historical aspects to which we have alluded here, nor have we entered into the conspiratorial political labyrinths of the modern heirs of the Council of Three or the "Club of the Bucintoro" of the cited work by Schiller, or the Venetian manipulation of Irredentism [Italian claims on ethnic-Italian parts of Yugoslaviaed.] and its firm control (up to a certain point) over the fascism it helped to create. Nor have we treated the financial continuity down to the insurance companies of our days, directly connected with the British drug trafficking interests in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Nor have we touched upon the turbid assemblies of secretive masonic sects, or the creation and use of terrorism for political goals, both "left" and "right," without distinction. By announcing a series of articles on this subject we merely wish to raise a question of method, and stimulate the intellectual curiosity which is the healthy premise for understanding what has been hidden for all too long. And we are beginning to cause some sleepless nights for our enemies, who, after all, are not immortal.