In a newly translated and published letter, written around the time that he was completing "On Terrorism and the State" (1978), Gianfranco Sanguinetti reveals the attacks he was exposed to at the time. In this document, he speaks of,

Prologue: In the 1999 film Run, Lola, Run, the female protagonist is magically given three chances to cope with a dodgy situation. Like having a reset button on a video game, if Lola screws up, she gets to go back and start from the beginning.

Many people imply that unless a critic expounds a specific strategy for change, his/her assessment is worthless or, at the very least, too negative. This reaction misses the essential role critical analysis plays in a society where problems -- and their causes -- are so cleverly disguised. When discussing the future, the first step is often an identification and demystification of the past and present.

Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terror plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory, this isn't the premise for a Kafka novel; it's reality in the post-9/11 United States.

Sleeper cells, domestic terrorists and the Seven Dwarfs had better beware: Florida’s Orange County Sherriff’s office is getting hyped to unleash unmanned drones over Orlando skies this summer.

Please allow me to remind you that we’re coming up on the 23rd anniversary of a somewhat forgotten American intervention into a little place David Lee Roth likes to call Panama.

On Dec. 20, 1989 -- just two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall -- President George H.W. Bush ushered in the post-Cold War era by sending 25,000 U.S. troops into Manuel Noriega’s Panama. Called Operation Just (sic) Cause, the foray would have been deemed a “surprise attack” if any other nation had initiated it.

It is our great pleasure to announce that, one month after producing a good translation of Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s masterpiece, Truthful Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, we have produced a good translation of his second book, On Terrorism and the State.

It is with both pride and some embarrassment that we announce that we have once again translated Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s masterpiece, Truthful Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, from French into English. We are proud of our most recent translation because we know that it is good, and a bit embarrassed by our previous translation, which we completed in 2005 (at a time when we were just beginning to teach ourselves to read French), because it wasn’t.

In Holland, in a region among the least impoverished, the most moderate and the most “democratized” in this poisoned world, where one can get together to criticize the quality of the heroin, and where pneumatic drills that have chased away the inhabitants are subsequently displayed, with the graffiti that denounces them, in the city’s subways like works of art – here in Holland as well as elsewhere the taste to follow the excellent example of our Italian comrades grows: “their absenteeism; their wildcat strikes that no particular concession can appease; their lucid refusal of work; their scorn for the law and all the Statist political parties” (Guy Debord, Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of “The Society of the Spectacle”).

Our history books and newspaper headlines portray an ever-benevolent United States minding its own business yet incessantly plagued by surprise events and unprovoked threats to test its celebrated patience.

Mic Check: This long record of conjuring up dubious rationales to wage war indicts those on both sides (sic) of the proverbial aisle -- equally.