The Roman Republic of 1849 (3: The Siege Begins, June 3)

Oudinot began his siege with deception. He wrote General Roselli on June 1 that though the armistice was over, he was deferring the attack on ‘the place’ (‘piazza’) until Monday, June 4. The gullible Roselli believed him, and, countering Garibaldi’s plans to fortify the outer defenses to high alert, toured the outposts of the Villa Pamfili assuring the troops that they could relax until Monday morning. With Garibaldi too ill on the night of June 2-3 (he had been wounded in the side on April 30 but swore his doctor to secret, private treatment) to urge vigilance, the defenders manning the Pamfili/Corsini outposts slept that night, the main point Oudinot targeted. At 3 AM, therefore, French troops penetrated the walls of the two villas with hardly a fight, and by the time Italian sentries fired their muskets, were pouring, wave after wave, into the Pamfili grounds. Half the 400 Italians there were captured quickly, while the other half tried to set a defense at Villa Corsini, closer to Rome’s walls. Reinforcements from the city helped them hold on, but French artillery and superior numbers soon drove the defenders down the hill to the Vascello, a villa shaped like the prow of a ship. By morning light on June 3rd, the critical Villa Corsini, without which Rome could barely be defended, was in enemy hands.

When he heard that Rome was under attack, Garibaldi rushed from his sick bed with his several officers—many in their twenties, most to lose their lives that day— to join his troops. Gathering his forces in the Piazza of St. Peter’s, he led them to the Porta Cavalleggieri, contemplating where, with Corsini now swarming with French, he could make a stand. All the bells of Rome were clanging the alarm, soldiers and their equipment flying everywhere, most headed for the Janiculum. Garibaldi with his Legion made it to the Porta San Pancrazio about five-thirty in the morning. Inside the walls, the Italian regiments were gathering to prepare for the attack; outside the walls, and opposite San Pancrazio stood the key to the entire battle—the Villa Corsini, four stories high, perched like a fortress commanding the entrance to the city—now in possession of the French. Garibaldi judged that it had to be retaken, no matter what the cost. The cost would be great that day, June 3, when so many martyrs of the siege of Rome would die. This was due in part to the way in which the Corsini had to be attacked—through a narrow gate and uphill 300 yards to a long staircase that allowed only a few soldiers at a time to run, and during which they were open targets for French sharpshooters. Even if the French had to yield the Corsini Villa, as they did several times that day, they could retire to the Pamfili grounds where a hollow provided cover for a new attack. With a force approaching 30,000 troops, they had ample reserves to do so. The Italian defenders under Colonel Galletti, meantime, had possession of the Vascello, at the bottom of the hill. They also had a battery at the Casa Merluzzo, left of the San Pancrazio gate, from which they could shell the Villa Corsini.

This became the crux of the battle on June 3, 1849. The Corsini windows, balconies and walls sprouted French soldiers firing at detachment after detachment of Garibaldi’s legionnaires dashing for the narrow, deadly entrance gate, filing through, and rushing up the narrow way to the villa. Then, the survivors of that deadly fire, if any,

would storm up the double staircase, gain the balcony, bayonet the French in the drawing-room, and stand for a few minutes masters of the villa. Often the charge failed half-way up, from sheer want of numbers. But several times the Corsini was carried, and held for awhile, against the concentrated fire of a whole army in the woods of the Pamfili beyond. On one of these occasions the Garibaldians piled up their dead comrades in the open loggias on the west side of the villa, and repulsed the French attacks from behind that barricade. (Trevelyan,175)

At 7:30 that morning, Garibaldi made his first announcement of several that day that the Corsini had been retaken. But it was soon lost again, and a new attack would begin. The losses on the Italian side were terrible: Garibaldi’s chief of staff, Daverio, was killed early. Angelo Masina was wounded and refused to go to the hospital until Garibaldi ordered him to; he was back in an hour with his arm bound in bandages. When the 900 Lombard Beraglieri finally arrived (they had been held, against Garibaldi’s plea for assistance, inside Rome by an order from the feckless General Roselli), Garibaldi sent one company to occupy the nearby Casa Giacometti, from which they could fire into the Corsini villa. Then he ordered most of the rest to capture the Corsini. Led by Luciano Manara and Enrico Dandolo, the Bersaglieri stormed the villa, only to be mowed down by the French firing from inside windows and behind protective walls. Rather than retreat, they took up positions and sought to trade fire in what was becoming a massacre. Enrico Dandolo was among the first to be killed. When Manara saw how hopeless his situation was, he ordered the retreat, but that turned out to be more fatal than the attack. As the Swiss volunteer Gustav Hoffstetter later recorded it:

And now as these defenceless men poured out of the garden, the deadly harvest began in earnest. At first I imagined that the numbers of men falling on their faces had merely stumbled in their haste over the roots of the vines. But their motionless bodies soon showed me the truth….(quoted in Trevelyan, 179)

Having lost some of his best soldiers, Garibaldi probably should have fallen back for an artillery bombardment (indeed, many commentators have criticized him for not having softened the French position before ordering the Bersaglieri to attack). In part he did. But then he indulged in what has been called a ‘piece of madness.’ Finding a reserve of Bersaglieri inside the walls, he asked for a small party to engage in a “difficult undertaking.” Though Emilio Dandolo, in charge, had just heard a rumor that his brother had been slain, he volunteered to lead the undertaking. He later wrote:

“Go,” said Garibaldi to me, “with twenty of your bravest men, and take Villa Corsini at the point of the bayonet.” Involuntarily I remained transfixed with astonishment — with twenty men to hurry forward to attack a position which two of our companies and the whole of Garibaldi's Legion, after unheard-of exertions, had failed to carry. . . .

But the 19-year-old Dandolo obeyed the order and charged towards the Corsini Villa. By the time his little band reached the entrance, only twelve men remained. His account continues:

.

.would twelve men do against a place occupied by several hundreds of the enemy ? I had nothing left but to stoop to that which more numerous forces had already done — give the signal to fire, and then retreat. When we had got half-way down the road, S and I were both struck in the thigh by the same ball. We returned to the Vascello, six in number, in a deplorable condition, and with the conviction that the really extraordinary courage which had just been so conspicuously and recklessly displayed would have no effect, beyond that of showing the French that Italians were still capable of fighting with temerity, whatever the fortune of war might be.

Dandolo, severely wounded and out of action, dragged himself from post to post that afternoon, seeking his older brother. No one had the courage to tell him the truth until he entered the Casa Giacometti and found Manara and Hoffstetter beside the dead body of his brother, Enrico. Hoffstetter stepped away, while the Colonel grasped Emilio’s hand:

“Do not seek your brother any more—it is now too late; I will be a brother to you.” The young man, sick with wounds and grief, fell fainting against Manara, who carried him out of the room in his arms. (Trevelyan, 181-82)

The afternoon then proceeded with a fierce cannonade by the Italians from the Casa Merluzzo and the walls. The effect was to make an absolute ruin of the Villa Corsini, its floors collapsing, the French trying to hold on. When fire from the French side slowed, Garibaldi ordered his last attack, with Masina’s lancers in the vanguard, followed by now-General Galletti and Masina himself with bandaged arm. The horsemen made it up the slope and followed Masina galloping up the steps of the Corsini. Behind them, Manara and Garibaldi led the infantry in clearing the last of the French from the Villa, and occupied it. Cheers erupted at the gate below, and a mad rush by citizens, artists, gunners, and stray infantrymen charged the villa in a race to glory. A defense was hastily prepared in expectation of the inevitable French counterattack, which was not long in coming. And though the mob defended the Villa with tenacity and courage, before long the overwhelming numbers of French broke through the defenses, and the retreat was called. The Villa Corsini could be taken by the Italians, but it could not be held. The most bitter casualty of that attack was Angelo Masina himself, abandoned in the confused retreat. His body, left lying a few yards from the steps he had charged on horseback, would remain there, his bleached, unburied bones to be recovered only after Rome fell.

Another renowned warrior would fall late that day: Goffredo Mameli, the 21-year-old poet of Genoa and author of the most famous hymn of the Risorgimento, Fratelli d’Italia (music by Michele Novaro). He was wounded in one last desperate charge against the Corsini ordered by Garibaldi, one which Mameli, who had served till then as adjutant, begged to join. He did, and was wounded in the knee, lay for a month trying to recover, and died from the gangrene that had set in. That last attack also failed, leaving the French in possession of the high ground outside the walls, and Garibaldi’s men in possession of the Casa Giacometti and the Vascello. Without the high ground, as everyone knew, Rome’s fate was sealed.

About 1,000 Italians lost their lives in that fierce opening battle, 30 officers and 200 soldiers from Garibaldi’s legion alone. Manara’s Lombard Bersaglieri, often called the flower of northern Italy, also estimated their losses at 200. And though many conceded that Garibaldi himself had made several mistakes (he should have prepared his attacks with more cannon fire), he emerged from the June 3rd battle more revered than ever. He had given Italians a lesson in heroism, had inspired them to a day of martyrdom that would bear fruit, if not in 1849, then in the next decade. As Alfonso Scirocco notes, that heroic defense astonished Europe, turning “June 3 into the first of several events that made it increasingly difficult to reverse the momentum toward national unification” (Garibaldi, 165). It was this that Mazzini understood, and in the month of fighting that followed, as more Italians lost their lives in what all knew was a noble but futile defense of the indefensible, the inspiration they gave to the rest of Italy would prove to be enduring, invaluable. As Trevelyan notes:

Some patriots, indeed, regretted that the defence of Rome was ever made since it was so spendthrift of Italy's treasure; yet the treasure was profitably spent. Because men remembered and told with pride and anguish the story of the uncalculating devotion of those young lives in this hopeless struggle, there grew up, as the years went by, an unconquer-
able purpose in the whole nation to have their capital: there rose that wild cry of the heart — Roma, o Morte!— (192)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (2: "We Are Again Romans")

The first test came quickly, on April 30. The Italian defenders numbered around 7,000 men: 2500 regular Papal troops and Carabinieri (both of whom had defected to the revolution); Garibaldi’s First Italian Legion, now about 1300 men; some 1400 men from Roman volunteer regiments; and an assortment of inexperienced citizens, including 300 students, about 1,000 National Guards, and several hundred unattached civilians armed with whatever they could find. Garibaldi had been put in charge of defending the Janiculum—Rome’s ‘eighth’ hill and its highest, most crucial defense point, being west of the Tiber and bordering the Trastevere district, but inside the city walls. Should it fall, the French attackers could bombard the city below at their leisure. It should be added that other citizens continually helped with building ramparts and aiding the wounded, particularly the revolutionary Princess Cristina Belgioioso, who took charge of the hospitals. One of her first acts was to put Margaret Fuller, whom she had met previously, in charge of the Fate Bene Fratelli hospital sited on an island in the Tiber River.

On the other side were the French—also with about 7,000 fully-equipped troops (a rearguard was left behind to protect Oudinot’s communications), confident that with the first cannonade and charge by the best army in the world, Rome’s defenses would melt like so much butter. Indeed, so confident were the invaders that they brought field artillery but no heavyweight siege-guns or scaling ladders. Their plan was to enter by the Porta Pertusa, unaware that that gate no longer existed (some recent scholarship suggests that the French attack had focused on the Porta Cavalleggieri all along). Garibaldi, meantime, had been zealous in setting up his defenses. He saw that, due to the height of the ground outside the walls, batteries set up there could easily bombard defenders below to shreds. So he set up his men outside the crucial San Pancrazio gate, on the high ground of the Villa Corsini and the Pamfili Villa and gardens behind it. Thus, when General Oudinot’s forces reached the non-existent Pertusa gate, they had to change plans and attack the Porta Cavalleggieri further south. This meant they had to move down a hill and over a thousand yards of open country—easily fired upon by National Guard troops on the wall and Roman batteries near St. Peter’s. By around noon, the initial French attack was stalled, though not yet driven away.

Now it was Garibaldi’s turn. Watching from his high position at the Corsini Villa, he never hesitated, but took the offensive to turn the initial rebuff of the French into a defeat in the open field. To do so, however, his soldiers had to charge down from the Pamfili Gardens and cross a walled lane connecting the Porta San Pancrazio with the main road to Civitavecchia. Unfortunately, coming up this lane were about 1,000 French infantry. Garibaldi’s students and artists suddenly found themselves fighting at close quarters with an army of veterans, and soon had to retreat. Some of Garibaldi’s Legion, under the artist Nino Costa, managed to set up a defense nearby and stalled the French advance. But the situation was perilous: both Corsini and Pamfili were being overrun, and their loss would be devastating. Garibaldi sent for reinforcements—about 800 volunteers under Colonel Galletti, still smarting from the previous year’s defeat in Lombardy. This time, however, the odds were better and, led by Garibaldi and Galletti, the Italian Legion charged the French to recapture the Corsini Villa and Pamfili Gardens. Here is how Trevelyan describes it:

Swarming over the Corsini hill, and across the little stream and valley that divide it from the Pamfili grounds, the Legionaries came crashing through the groves. The Garibaldian officers, ‘the tigers of Montevideo,’ with long beards, and hair that curled over their shoulders, were singled out to the enemy’s marksmen by red blouses, falling almost to the knees. This was the day that they had waited for so long in exile, this the place towards which they had sailed so far across the ocean. Behind them Italy came following on. And above the tide of shouting youths, drunk with their first hot draught of war, rose Garibaldi on his horse, majestic and calm as he always looked, but most of all in the fury of battle, the folds of his white American poncho floating off his shoulders for a flag of onset. (132)

The Italians managed to relieve Costa as he was about to be overrun, and soon pushed the French off the two hill positions, pursued them down into nearby vineyards, and “after fierce struggling, body to body, with guns, and hands, and bayonets, put the French to flight.” Nor was that all. The main body of the French was so slow in retreating that nearly 400 were taken prisoner. Coupled with the 500 French soldiers killed that day, this capture of prisoners made the rout—Oudinot and his ‘invincible’ army were fleeing rapidly towards Civitavecchia—both complete and sweet. And the people of Rome knew it:

That night the city was illuminated, the streets were filled with shouting and triumphant crowds, and there was scarcely a window in the poorest and narrowest alley of the mediaeval slums that did not show its candle. It was no vulgar conquest which they celebrated. After long centuries of disgrace, this people had recovered its self-respect, and from the highest to the lowest ranks men felt, “We are again Romans.” (Trevelyan, 134)

Sadly, Garibaldi’s superiors did not understand, or did not wish to understand the situation he had presented them with. The French were in full retreat, on unfamiliar ground. They must be pursued, he argued, and driven into the sea; the whole of Italy could be aroused. But Mazzini gave greater weight to two considerations. First, imposing a total defeat on the French might be satisfying, but it would probably further alienate Louis Napoleon, and Mazzini still hoped that the French would come to their senses and aid a fellow republic fighting for liberty. Second, Rome’s leaders worried about the other armies closing in on them—King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army advancing from the south, and the Austrian forces driving down from the north. If Garibaldi were to march forty miles to Civitavecchia, and get caught there in a drawn-out battle, Rome would be left without her most capable defender. It was the first, but not the last quarrel that would divide the two titans of Italian unification. In the end, the soldier had to yield to the statesman. And to demonstrate their difference from the despots ruling elsewhere, the Roman leaders ordered that their French prisoners get medical care and a tour of the city before being released. In response, the French reluctantly released some of their prisoners, including the priest, Ugo Bassi, who had been captured administering the last rites to fallen Romans.

Now the Roman forces had to turn to the threat from the south. King Ferdinand, with an army of 10,000 men, was camped a mere 20 miles from Rome near two cities in the Alban Hills, Frascati and Albano. Still fearing an attack from the French, Rome’s military leadership under General Avezzana decided it could only spare some 2300 soldiers, mostly Garibaldi’s Legion, some students and assorted volunteers, and one experienced troop, Luciano Manara’s Lombard Bersaglieri. The latter had fought the previous year in the famous “five days” of Milan, endured the subsequent loss to the Austrians, and had then headed to Rome; stopped at Civitavecchia by the French, they were only able to gain passage by promising not to engage in the fight. Though they honored their pledge by staying out of the April 30 battle, they were now eager to show what they were made of.

Garibaldi quickly saw that it was foolhardy to make a frontal attack on such a large force, so he chose to employ his guerrilla tactics—to so harass Ferdinand’s army that it could not move on Rome. Marching at night, Garibaldi on May 4 and 5 feinted north from Tivoli, before he turned south to his real target, Palestrina, where he set up headquarters on May 7. By now aware of what they were faced with, the Neapolitans sent General Lanza and Colonel Novi to dislodge the “bandit” hampering their advance. But from his high observation point, the guerrilla leader saw the columns advancing on him, and rather than waiting to be attacked, sent Manara’s Bersaglieri and another troop to attack first. So shocked were the Neapolitans by Garibaldi’s offensive that the battle was over in three hours, with the enemy in full flight—Lanza’s right wing abandoning towns right and left and not stopping till they got near enough to Ferdinand’s headquarters on the Alban lake to feel safe; Novi’s left wing retreating first to Colonna and then to Frascati. Captured prisoners made it clear that Garibaldi’s reputation as a “devil” had preceded him; the prisoners begged for their lives, and in despair over the lack of protection given them on their papal crusade, “cried out in their dialect, ‘Managgia Pio Nono.’” (Trevelyan, 144)

Once again, however, Rome’s leaders stopped Garibaldi’s advance and recalled him to Rome, fearing a new move by General Oudinot. They were mistaken. Oudinot was awaiting reinforcements that would swell his army to 40,000 men. To disguise this intention, Louis Napoleon sent Ferdinand de Lesseps (of later Suez Canal fame) as an envoy, allegedly to try to arrange a peace between Roman leaders and Pius IX. On May 17, the Assembly and the Triumvirate agreed to halt hostilities to give de Lesseps time to fashion such an agreement. But what they really did was give the French time—first for Oudinot to get his reinforcements; and then for Louis Napoleon to await elections that would increase the power of French Catholics in Paris necessary to overwhelm objections from the Left. Both would prove fatal to the Roman Republic’s survival.

For the moment, though, a truce reigned and Garibaldi took advantage of it by ordering red shirts for all of his legionnaires (previously, only his officers had them). It was a master stroke in the long run for the red shirt became not only a symbol of the sacred cause of Italian unification, but also a moral symbol of camaraderie for those who took part in apparently hopeless battles. The triumvirate also took advantage of the truce to renew their attempt to try to drive King Bomba’s army out of Roman territory. Though they made Garibaldi a General of Division commanding part of the army, they still kept him subservient to the Roman, General Roselli, who became Commander-in-Chief. This, too, would have nearly disastrous consequences because Roselli, though decent, was a wholly conventional, timid commander. Thus the Roman army moving south now combined conventional and guerrilla forces that never quite jelled. As Trevelyan describes it:

The army moved with the uncomfortable and jerky motion of a man with an excitable dog on a leash; Garibaldi dashed about in front locating and engaging the enemy, and then was forced to wait till Roselli came sulkily lumbering up with the bulk of the troops. (153)

The upshot was that though he had a force five times the one Garibaldi had led earlier, Roselli chose to avoid a direct attack, and harass the enemy flanks once again.

The picture was of a lumbering army moving slowly across the plain, with Garibaldi racing ahead to see what the enemy were up to. It turned out that, intimidated by an army as large as his own, King Bomba was in full retreat. To Garibaldi, the only danger was that the enemy would escape. Taking the initiative, he decided to try to cut off the King’s retreat by attacking him with an advance guard, simultaneously calling for Roselli to rush up quickly to finish the job. It was a breach of discipline, but absolutely justified in his mind. With 2000 soldiers, many of them his trusted legionnaires, he could disrupt the enemy’s retreat and, once joined by the main force, strike a decisive blow for Rome, and possibly for all of Italy.

Garibaldi placed his advance force outside Velletri. The main engagement there demonstrated his courage and will under any conditions. A troop of Angelo Masina’s mounted lancers, pursuing enemy soldiers ahead of them, suddenly ran into a large column of enemy cavalry. With Masina absent at another post, his young cavaliers turned and raced back towards where Garibaldi was watching, with the enemy in hot pursuit. So angered was the General by this retreat that he, alongside the giant Aguiar, sat on horseback like a statue, blocking the road. Unable to halt or turn their own horses, the cavaliers smashed into the two immovable objects, and all went down in a jumble, Garibaldi at the bottom. Fortunately, a group of young Legionnaires were fighting nearby, and rescued their chief. Suddenly, Ferdinand's troops realized that they were in the middle of the “red devil’s” position, caught in opposing fire. They fled, leaving thirty prisoners, and with Masina's lancers in pursuit, were driven up into the town of Velletri. Before even the first of Roselli’s lumbering reinforcements began to appear, Garibaldi’s men were entrenched, laying siege to the town.

When the Commander-in-Chief arrived, however, far from rejoicing in Garibaldi’s courage and valor, he focused on his subordinate’s breach of discipline in beginning the battle without him. Sulking, he refused to attack that evening, or position troops, as Garibaldi suggested, to stop the enemy retreat. Ferdinand’s army was thus able to take advantage of the night, steal out of the southern gate of Velletri, and retreat down the road towards safety. When, early next morning, some of the Roman forces climbed into the town to reconnoiter, they found the streets empty, until the townspeople emerged, overjoyed at their deliverance.

Garibaldi now sensed that King Ferdinand’s rule would not survive an invasion and urged his superiors to authorize an all-out attack. It was a repeat of the French situation. Mazzini, worried about the Austrians, who had just seized Bologna and were advancing towards Rome, recalled Roselli and half the army, allowing Garibaldi, undermanned, to pursue Ferdinand as far as he could. Garibaldi’s troops were welcomed in town after town as deliverers until they crossed into Neapolitan territory at a town called Rocca d’Arce. The townspeople had all fled, the village empty. Instead of pillaging, however, Garibaldi ordered his forces to sit down in the square and rest. Emilio Dandolo was in that group (Count Dandolo was a member of the Lombard Bersaglieri and wrote a seminal account of his experiences later) and described it as follows:

“..when the terrified inhabitants observed from the surrounding heights this admirable spirit of order and self-restraint, they hurried down to welcome us, threw open their houses and shops, and in a few minutes the whole village had regained its accustomed activity. They then related to us how many superstitious fables the Neapolitans had spread among them; according to which we were so many ogres let loose by the devil, to devour children and burn down houses…” (Dandolo, quoted in Trevelyan, 158)

Instead of allowing their Achilles to pursue his advantage and possibly bring the whole of southern Italy into the uprising (Garibaldi always believed this would have happened), however, the Triumvirs once again recalled him to Rome to fend off the attack by the Austrians they feared was imminent. With no choice but to obey, Garibaldi re-entered Rome at the end of May, followed by his exhausted troops between May 30 and June 2. With Rome secure, all hoped they would get a long-deserved rest, but it was not to be. Neither was the strategy Garibaldi favored: guerrilla war in the mountains and valleys throughout the country. As Trevelyan puts it:

Mazzini’s dream was to be realized instead—the fiery martyrdom of the Republic in one supreme scene of defiance and death. (160)

For General Oudinot’s reinforcements had now arrived, and the treacherous siege of Rome by 30,000 French regulars was about to begin (treacherous, because on the very day de Lesseps had signed a treaty with the Triumvirs agreeing that the French would protect Rome from Austria and Naples, Oudinot was outside Rome beginning his siege.)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Roman Republic of 1849 (Part 1)

Probably the most renowned phase of the Italian Risorgimento—Italy’s achievement of independence and unification—occurred in 1860 when Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “1,000” (i Mille) landed in Sicily and almost miraculously liberated not just that island, but, shortly afterward, the southern half of the Italian peninsula. When joined with King Vittorio Emmanuele’s victory in the north, Garibaldi’s triumph united all of Italy but Venice and Rome.

A decade before this, however, there was a battle that, even though it ended in defeat, lives just as vividly in Italian hearts. This was the battle to defend the short-lived, but seminal Republic established in the city of Rome in 1849. The struggle included not only Garibaldi in his first real appearance as hero of Italy, but also that other giant patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini. As G.M. Trevelyan says in his beautifully-written history, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic:

That there should ever have been a time when Mazzini ruled Rome and Garibaldi defended her walls, sounds like a poet’s dream. (Trevelyan, Intro, 3)

But it was no dream. As Mazzini makes clear in his writings, the 1849 battle for Rome in the face of hopeless odds was a necessity in order to trumpet to the Italian people not just the dream of liberation, but its possibility, its inevitability:

To the many other causes which decided us to resist, there was in my mind one intimately bound up with the aim of my whole life—the foundation of our national unity. Rome was the natural center of that unity, and it was important to attract the eyes and reverence of my countrymen towards her… (Mazzini, quoted in Trevelyan, 112)

To understand what happened and why it happened in Rome, some acquaintance with prior events is necessary. Mostly this involves the European uprisings of 1848. Due partly to crop failures in 1845-7, and partly to revolutionary ideas of liberation among the middle classes, popular uprisings rocked Europe’s monarchies in 1848, forcing many rulers to either flee or to grant concessions. Prince Metternich was forced to resign as Austria’s foreign minister; King Louis Philippe fled France and a Republic was declared; similar revolts took place in Krakow, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Madrid and elsewhere. In Italy, insurrections shook all the major territories. In January, citizens struck against Austrian rule in Lombardy by refusing to smoke or play the lottery—thus denying the Austrians needed taxes. Soon Sicily revolted against the Bourbon King Ferdinand, who then granted his Kingdom of Two Sicilies a constitution. Tuscan revolts in February ousted the Grand Duke and led to a constitution and a provisional government. Later in February, the newly installed Pope, Pius IX (Pio Nono), surprised the Papal States by initiating reforms and granting a constitution there as well. Despite the concessions, however, tensions continued to grow. An insurrection in Milan starting on March 18 resulted in the famous five days (cinque giornate) of street fighting that expelled the Austrian garrison and forced Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s army to retreat. With Daniele Manin leading a similar revolt in Venice, King Charles Albert of Sardinia/Piedmont concluded that Italy’s struggle for unification was at hand, and declared war on Austria. The whole of Italy seemed to be in revolt against her foreign rulers.

It was at this point that the two revolutionary exiles, Mazzini in London and Garibaldi in Uruguay, returned to their homeland to join the struggle. They met, for the first time, in Milan sometime in the summer of 1848. Mazzini had gone to Milan in April hoping to inspire the Milanesi to form a Republic, but after offering Charles Albert his services, became increasingly disenchanted with the King’s timidity. Garibaldi, too, had offered his services to Charles Albert on July 5, but the King mainly wanted to get rid of this uncontrollable firebrand and passed him on to staff in Turin. On the way, Garibaldi stopped in Milan, where he was offered a Generalship and, at the end of the month, asked to defend Bergamo with 3700 men under his command. Mazzini took up a rifle and joined Garibaldi’s troops at Bergamo, but both were so disgusted with King Charles Albert’s easy defeat by the Austrians (at Custoza July 25, 1848) and the subsequent armistice that Garibaldi issued a proclamation:

“The king of Sardinia may have a crown that he holds onto by dint of misdeeds and cowardice, but my comrades and I do not wish to hold on to our lives by shameful actions.” (Alfonso Scirocco, Garibaldi, Citizen of the World, Princeton U Press: 2007, 145)

Garibaldi’s legionnaires were then hunted by both the Austrians and a force sent by King Charles Albert to capture him (the second time Charles Albert had ordered Garibaldi’s arrest). By the end of August, after daring battles in Luino and Morazzone, an exhausted Garibaldi took refuge in Switzerland, where Mazzini had earlier gone, and then in his hometown of Nice (Nizza).

Though he took some time to recover, Garibaldi was soon ready to renew his efforts, deciding in October that Sicily, now at war with King Ferdinand (newly christened “King Bomba” for his bombardment of Messina), was ripe. A stop at Livorno interrupted his plans when patriots there asked that he lead a revolution in Tuscany. Though this, too, failed for lack of recruits, Garibaldi then opted to aid Daniele Manin, still holding the Austrians out of Venice. Once again, though, the hero was detained enroute, this time by Liberals in Bologna begging him to lead their revolt against Papal rule.

Just as matters were coming to a head in Bologna, stunning news arrived from Rome: On November 15, the Pope’s prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was murdered. Luigi Brunetti, son of Rome’s populist “leader” Ciceruacchio, had stabbed the minister on his way to the opening of Parliament. Rome, and most of Italy, had been simmering with resentment against Pio Nono—once hailed, not least by Mazzini and Garibaldi himself, as the potential savior of Italy, the one whose troops could finally put an end to all foreign rule. Just as his 12,000 soldiers were joining Charles Albert in Lombardy, however, the Pope backtracked with his infamous “Allocution” of April 29, 1848. It declared, among other things, that the Pontiff was not the least inclined to wage offensive war against Austria (a Catholic power). For this reversal, the democrats and liberals who had placed their hopes in Pius IX were beside themselves with rage, venting it by attacking the Quirinal Palace and firing on the Swiss Guards. So petrified was the Pope by this demonstration that, on November 24, he disguised himself as a simple priest and fled south to the protection of King Ferdinand. Then, from his safe fortress in Gaeta, the Pope refused all overtures for negotiations and demanded unconditional surrender to his temporal rule over Rome and all the Papal States.

Garibaldi saw his opportunity. He set out for Rome with his Italian Legion, now 500 in number—a force that included the recently-added cavalry of Angelo Masina. This rather motley crew passed through the Papal States, and settled in the village of Rieti to await developments. They were not long in coming. Republican leaders put together a Provisional Government. Not yet sure of itself, the government made no offers to Garibaldi when he took a quick trip on his own to Rome. But in February 1849, when a Constituent Assembly was summoned, Garibaldi again traveled to Rome with his constant companion, Aguiar—a giant of a black man from Brazil—and Ignazio Bueno, who carried the arthritic Garibaldi up the steps to the Assembly. This time, Garibaldi, as a member of the Assembly, made a speech urging quick action, and was given a command, though not of the whole army as he had hoped. Rather, he was made a lieutenant colonel in the Roman army, but with authority for only 500 troops to defend Porto San Gregorio on the Adriatic. Like Charles Albert, Rome’s leaders clearly wanted to keep him at a distance.

Still, Garibaldi remained ready—recruiting more troops as well as outfitting his legion—as Rome’s government, on February 9, declared itself a Republic. In its Fundamental Statute of Four Articles it declared: the Papacy was deposed from temporal authority, though the Pontiff was granted full independence regarding his spiritual power; the form of government was to be a complete democracy; and the resulting Roman Republic was to join the rest of Italy in a movement for a common Italian nationality. The new republic had put monarchs and foreign rulers of any kind on notice: their days were numbered. As the revolutionary priest, Ugo Bassi, had declared weeks earlier, “Choose now—Garibaldi or Pius IX! Italy or continued slavery!” Romans had now chosen Italy (though not Garibaldi as yet). They had also chosen Mazzini (he was called with these words: Rome. Republic. Come!), one of their first acts being to make him a Roman citizen (he’d never been in the city before). When he did arrive on March 5, Giuseppe Mazzini was not only welcomed as Rome’s latest and greatest citizen, he was named a triumvir—one of three men to rule the city, though in fact he was the real ruler. Mazzini then set out organizing the government, and marginalizing the criminal elements that had been threatening to pervert democratic rule. As Trevelyan notes, Mazzini replaced the unruly elements with “a spirit of tolerance and liberty almost unexampled in time of national danger.” Mazzini, at one point, put it thus to the Assembly: “We must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.”

It was the first of these objectives that induced the Roman government to finally turn to Garibaldi. The enemy was indeed at the gates. Pius IX, faced with the end of his temporal rule, had called for help not only from the hated Austrians, but also from the Spanish and the French—indeed from any Catholic monarch who would restore him. That the Austrians and the Spanish came to his aid was not surprising. But that the French—a fellow Republic and the initiators of revolution against despotic rule—would answer it was met with near disbelief. As the American, Margaret Fuller, wrote in one of her letters from Rome:

The interference of the French has roused the weakest to resistance. “From the Austrians, from the Neapolitans,” they cried, “we expected this; but from the French—it is too infamous; it cannot be borne;” and they all ran to arms and fought nobly. (May 6, 1849)

Nonetheless, the French President Louis Napoleon saw an opportunity to regain some of the influence France had lost when the Pope chose Naples as a refuge, rather than France. His ministers, too, saw an opportunity to curry favor with French Catholic voters in the future. And when the Austrians won a total victory in the battle of Novara (Charles Albert had decided to try war with Austria again; even more soundly defeated on March 22-23, 1849 at Novara, he resigned his throne to his son, Vittorio Emanuele) the French president, worried about Austrian domination, ignored his republican scruples and joined in the race to be the first to “liberate” Rome. As justification, he used words similar to these used by the Pope in his April 20 Allocution:

Who does not know that the city of Rome, the principal seat of the Church, has now become, alas, a forest of roaring beasts, overflowing with men of every nation, apostates, or heretics, or leaders of communism and socialism? (Trevelyan107)

Rome’s Republic was portrayed not as a movement for liberation, that is, but as a plot hatched by foreign agitators and terrorists. If they could get there first, the French would be the liberators.

Accordingly, the French Army, consisting of some 10,000 troops under General Oudinot, landed at Rome’s sea port, Civitavecchia, on April 25. Within days, they would be at the gates of Rome, expecting an easy victory over the “cowardly” Italians.

What Oudinot did not count on, of course, was the genius and charisma of Giuseppe Garibaldi, now elevated to general. With skills honed in South America, and in guerrilla war against the Austrians, Garibaldi was now at the height of his powers. Though he would have preferred to retreat to the Italian hills and fight a guerrilla war there, he yielded to Mazzini’s urging that Rome had to be defended at all costs (even though both knew the defense was eventually doomed to fail). When he arrived in the city on April 27, Garibaldi was met by the citizens of Rome in a manner befitting a god, or, at least, one of the Caesars:

“He has come, he has come!” they cried all down the Corso. (Trevelyan, 111)

In the next two days, he supervised the preparations for the coming siege, mainly digging trenches and fortifying villas near the expected point of attack. Never standing on ceremony, he rode round the city, encouraging the diggers—which even included elegantly-dressed women—himself. In later years, one Italian artist related his first encounter with him:

I had no idea of enlisting. I was a young artist; I only went out of curiosity—but oh!
I shall never forget that day when I saw him on his beautiful white horse in the market-place, with his noble aspect, his calm, kind face, his high, smooth forehead, his light hair and beard — every one said the same. He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries. I could not resist him. I left my studio. I went after him; thousands did likewise. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him; we could not help it. (Trevelyan, 119)

Nor was it only the great warrior who was described in these terms. Margaret Fuller, in describing Mazzini’s March 8 visit to her three days after he arrived in Rome, used similar metaphors in two separate letters, the first to her friend Marcus Spring:

I heard a ring; then somebody speaks my name; the voice struck me at once. He looks more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings. Freely would I give my life for him….

and two weeks later to her friend Caroline Tappan:

His soft radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life that like the Magdalen I may at the important hour shed all the consecrated ointment on his head.
(both from Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: A Romantic Life, 119)

With two such leaders and an aroused citizenry facing thousands of battle-seasoned French troops, the battle for Rome could not help being legendary.
(First of four parts.)

Lawrence DiStasi

The Essential American Soul

Years ago, in graduate school, I was introduced to D.H. Lawrence’s seminal work, Studies in Classic American Literature. It is a brilliant tour-de-force, a foreigner’s slant on the American classics hardly taken seriously before its publication. What came to mind after the assassination attempt this weekend on Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords (a chunk of the left side of her brain was destroyed by the assassin’s bullet, though she seems to be heading for a miraculous recovery; six bystanders, including a federal judge, were killed and another fourteen wounded) was one of the most shocking of Lawrence’s prophetic statements. In his examination of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels (The Last of the Mohicans, the Deerslayer, et. al.), up until that time passed off as “children’s literature,” Lawrence pens this adult analysis: “And Natty (Bumppo), what sort of white man is he? Why, he is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer…” And then Lawrence expands his assessment to include all of mythic America:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

Writers are often said to be prophets, and here, D. H. Lawrence, an Englishman who lived some of his later life in and around Taos, NM (where, perhaps, he saw firsthand what the essential American was like), was more prophetic than he knew. Think of the major American figures gunned down in the past half century: Pres. John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, John Lennon, Mayor of San Francisco George Moscone and now Gabrielle Giffords and Judge Roll. And that doesn’t even consider the numbers of citizens gunned down in the streets who make the news for a few days, and are then forgotten. Bill Quigley reminds us in a Jan. 10 column on Common Dreams:

The US has well over 250 million guns in private hands according to the National Rifle Association. That is more, according to the BBC, than any country in the world. In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States according to the Brady Campaign.

Did you get that? In one year, seven other countries have a combined total of 545 gun murders, while the United States alone registers 9,484. And of course, when it comes to an assassination like the recent one, by a young white male, the first thing the gun-lobby folks want to say is: “a nut case.” The guy was a lone nut case. Can’t blame that on guns. Can’t blame that on the insane political rhetoric spewing from the hate-mongers on the right. Can’t blame that on Sarah Palin, whose web site—until Saturday of course, when it was quickly wiped clean—had a map of Arizona with gun sights targeting the districts of “traitorous” democrats to be defeated, one of them the district of Gabrielle Giffords herself. Oh no. These are not terrorists. These are not respectable gun-toting National Rifle Association zealots. These are nut cases. Like Clay Duke, Michael Enright, Byron Williams and Joe Stack, these are just mentally deranged white guys who happened to be attacking the big government types taking our money, nothing right-wing about it.

Same applies to the state of Arizona, where it happened. Right wing? Perish the thought. Except when you look at the proposed bills to be debated this very day, Monday, January 10. One, H2001, will allow faculty members to carry concealed weapons on campus. Another, H2014, will allow students themselves to carry weapons on campus. After all, what’s so special about places of learning? If Arizonans can carry concealed weapons into bars and restaurants, and everyplace else in Arizona (bills signed into law by Governor Brewer in 2009 and last April), why can’t everyone be armed on campus? Has anything bad ever happened at a college? (Well, aside from that aberration at Virginia Tech!) But this is Arizona. In Arizona, the Firearm Freedom Act allows weapons and ammunition made in Arizona to be sold without being hampered by those socialistic federal regulations. So anyone can buy whatever weapon he or she chooses. Even someone named Loughner who virtually announces on his website that he’s getting ready to commit murder. And does.

But then he was deranged.

Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think this whole country is deranged. A nation that allows the open carrying of weapons, even to political rallies, is a deranged nation. A nation that allows the purchase of the most deadly weapons, like the Glock 19 automatic used by Loughner, and a host of other assault weapons for the common shooter, is absolutely deranged. A nation that hides behind the notion that every red-blooded American male has a right to hunt and shoot like his forefathers did—with Glock 19s? with Kalashnikovs?—is confirming what D. H. Lawrence said years ago:

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.

And we had better start taking measures to keep the hate mongers, the inciters to violence, the hypocrite politicians prating about their devotion to “freedom,” from jump-starting more of the truly sick puppies in our midst to act our their fantasies. (And don’t even get me started on the power-broking bastards—David Koch, the oil money behind the Tea Party, comes to mind—who finance all this hate. And don’t even get me started on the video games training all of our kids to destroy every “being” that comes in sight so when they grow up they can be just as nimble maneuvering drones; or the TV airwaves filled with murder-and-mayhem cop shows twenty-four hours a day. Don’t get me started. )

Lawrence DiStasi

Who/What Do You Think You Are?

The year’s end often brings up thoughts about fundamentals, and this one is no different. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this odd fact: though we have all kinds of religions and spiritual practices, and though science has brought us insight and evidence about natural processes from the inconceivably huge—the universe, said to have originated 15 billion years ago with a Big Bang—to the infinitely small—particles so puzzling they can hardly be said to have an actual existence beyond a certain probability, yet the whole existence in which we are engaged is still an almost total mystery. Who are we? What are we? We don’t know. We all have beliefs about this; and half-baked ideas from popular versions of science; but when it comes right down to it, we not only don’t know who we are or what we are, but even less about why we’re even here. How we’re even here. Why the human race is even here (sometimes, and often these days, it appears we’re here to fuck up the planet so badly that it becomes unlivable not just for us, but for all else. Even prehistorically, as Edward O. Wilson in The Future of Life says, man, far from being a “noble savage,” was and is “the planetary killer…Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse.”)

But for now, let’s just look at this simple question: Which is primary, matter or mind (sometimes referred to as spirit, soul, etc.)? Science, of course, has few doubts about this. Matter spontaneously generated life (it used to be thought that light energy, a flash of lightning perhaps, was needed to ignite basic chemicals into amino acids; now, much research is focused on life originating in the oceans near the deep vents—sites where exudations of sulfur and heat from the earth’s interior generate anaerobic bacteria, and strange life-forms that require neither light nor oxygen), and from tiny one-celled organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex organisms over billions of years until finally, there was us. In fact, for most of the previous hundreds of years, scientists did not even consider ‘mind’ a fit term to investigate. More recently, though, psychologists and neuroscientists have been looking more seriously into this thing called ‘mind.’ And though they’re still not sure what mind is, or where it’s located, it appears to be some product of matter, specifically the brain, and to have a ‘real’ existence. When it comes to priority, though, most scientists would be adamant: matter comes first. And this has meant, logically, that our era has become the age of materialism. Matter is what matters. All conclusions about origins and purpose stem from that.

Materialism, though, is precisely what many thoughtful people—philosophers, artists, spiritual seekers, religious leaders—find wanting. And so the origin stories that have come down to us from great thinkers and spiritual leaders all put matter secondary to something else: spirit, soul, mind, ideal forms, consciousness, something immaterial. And, that that something immaterial either is or gives birth to mind. In Genesis, God—the great spiritual, eternal being—creates the universe and all in it, including all the various animals and humans, in seven days. God speaks the Word (or is the word), and it is made flesh, or is clothed in flesh. Thus, the breath of some creator God instills life and order into a previously dead and chaotic mess of something, or nothing. And keeps it going. And the task of beings, especially human beings, is to seek to obey and eventually to reunite with that creator God in a more ideal place, an Afterlife. In eastern traditions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, the theoretical base suggests that some sort of Cosmic Mind has priority. From that big mind emerges the forms that are designed to survive in the material world: cells, bodies, and all that drives them from the beginning, mainly desire for increase and security. The task of the human—built as a vehicle for contemplating all of existence, sometimes imaged as the desire of the creator mind to reflect or contemplate itself—is to come to some sort of realization of what is true and real, above and prior to the material self that is secondary and, in some sense, illusory. As Karen Armstrong puts it in the Great Transformation: “The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self.” It takes most humans several lifetimes to accomplish this; meantime, the imperishable part keeps recycling through life forms (rebirth or reincarnation) over and over. Plato’s image of the cave provides a concrete image for a similar idea. That is, the ideal forms that are primary and eternal for Plato, are not seen by normal beings, who see only reflections—reality reflected by firelight on the wall of a cave. Most humans, that is, see only the physical world, which is changing constantly, and which was created by a demiurge. Though the world he created was based on the eternal forms, it is really only a weak, pale reflection of the true forms. These eternal forms themselves are accessible only to philosophical reason and exalted perception.

It is clear then that two positions are available to us all. Either we consider material existence the be-all and end-all; which is to say that we are born, our brains generate an entity we call mind, we mature, and we die; one shot and that’s the end of it. OR, we are aggregates of some stuff that is really only a pale shadow of a more fundamental reality—a prior and superior mind or soul that we can unite with through the proper rational, behavioral, spiritual, or contemplative practices. Those who subscribe to the first view are sometimes called ‘realists;’ those who subscribe to the second are sometimes called ‘idealists.’ Which are you?

What has given new life to such questions is the emergence, in recent years, of formerly esoteric practices, mostly from the east, coupled with interpretations of scientific developments that appear to provide real-world support for those esoteric views. Consider this quote from a recent book, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind, Robert Nadeau and Menos Kafatos, Oxford U Press: 1999:

If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to higher levels of complexity and if the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system, we can assume that the cosmos is a single significant whole that evinces progressive order in complementary relation to its parts. Given that this whole exists in some sense within all parts, one can then argue that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the ground for all emergent complexity. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain (like all physical phenomena) can be viewed as an emergent property of the whole, it is not unreasonable to conclude, in philosophical terms at least, that the universe is conscious. (p. 197)

What this interpretation leads to—starting from a wholly materialistic view based in the most materialistic of all scientific paradigms, evolution—is the rather idealistic view that the material universe is actually not dead matter at all; it is alive. It is, in some sense that we are still not clear about, conscious. More, that this universal, conscious whole—that which may have given rise to the idea called ‘God’—“exists in some sense within all [its] parts.” Which is to say, in each one of us.

So what are we? Are we truly separate selves going about our daily lives as best we can—which is to stay alive long enough to reproduce our kind in a way that helps them not just survive, but out-compete all other beings? Or are we interconnected manifestations of some incomprehensible whole, some mind that has not only generated us, but which is within each one of us and thus accessible to our self-reflection?

And how can we tell? What would serve as proof of one or the other position? Is there such a thing as proof; or is there simply belief? And what does it matter?

I would suggest that the view one settles on matters profoundly. For what we believe about who or what we are is the basis for all sorts of decisions about how to act—both towards all other humans (not just those in our tribe), and towards the world as a whole. And it is this that will increasingly, I think, become the crucial matter for all of us.

Obviously, there is more to say about this. Later.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Obama Administration is Dead

The just-announced compromise between President Obama and gloating Republicans seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the Obama Administration. This guy, to put it simply, seems to have no stomach for a fight at all. Like some modern anti-hero, when the going gets rough, he caves. So today, as he’s been hinting all along, he announced that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for all Americans, including those making over $250,000/year or even $1 million a year (as Senator Schumer proposed.) No, Obama ate the whole poisoned meal, and tried to defend it to outraged colleagues. More than that, he added a couple of new wrinkles. First, he proposed to provide a year’s drop of 2% in the FICA or Social Security taxes that all Americans pay (progressives have proposed making wealthy Americans pay more by extending the amount of income subject to SS taxes, but Obama, predictably, went the other way). While Obama claims that this will put more money in the hands of working Americans (and it will, short term), other progressives have pointed out that it makes a start in a direction favored by the most rabid reactionaries, who have been trying to get rid of Social Security for 80 years. That is, by reducing the amount going into the Social Security Trust Fund (already raided for years by mainly Republican presidents to finance their shitty wars), the President’s action will add to the pressure to bankrupt Social Security to the point where it will be abandoned as too costly. After all, Americans need their military-industrial complex. But there’s another element to the plan as well, again a major cave-in to slavering Republicans and their millionaire constituency. The hated estate tax would be lowered, on estates worth more than $5 million, to 35%. Democrats, Obama’s party, wanted to make the tax 45% on all estates over $3.5 million (still a lowering from the 55% it had been), but again, the Republican plan won.

Sort of makes you wonder if perhaps Obama isn’t a closet Republican, doesn’t it?

Whatever he is—and it certainly is not progressive—it now seems clear that he has decided that his only hope for winning in 2012 is to follow Bill Clinton’s example, and turn to the right after a mid-tern ‘shellacking’. It is a bitter pill for progressives to swallow after the euphoria that greeted his election. It is also, unless I miss my guess, the death knell for his administration. Because the one thing Americans despise more than a loser is a president so weak he can’t even muster the courage to use his bully pulpit to fight for what he believes in. Instead, at every turn, Obama has caved in to conservative forces—whether it’s on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Health Care “reform”, or taxes on the rich. Perhaps he long ago concluded that as a black man, he had to present himself as a non-threatening, non-combative intellectual. But he’s done that, and it has backfired every time. According to Republican rhetoric, he’s a socialist, a communist, a Muslim and a Nazi all rolled into one. Why he thinks he can somehow ingratiate himself with them and their constituency now is a mystery no one seems able to solve. The only thing that appears certain to me, again, is that it—plus his continuing cowardice in confronting his enemies—will condemn him to one term. Given the lack of backbone he’s displayed thus far (and sadly, he has tons of company among his Democratic comrades in Congress), perhaps that’s a good thing.

Lawrence DiStasi

Wikileaks: An Inside Job?

The news has been alive with alarms about the catastrophe that could result from the latest Wikileaks revelations—over 250,000 cables from the U.S. State Department that could compromise U.S. diplomacy and diplomatic relations for years. Hilary Clinton expressed grave concern about the damage not only to the United States but to the world. The Justice Department announced it would be doing all in its power to prosecute those responsible—chiefly, it seems, Private Bradley Manning, now in custody as the lead, and only suspect in the investigation.

But the real hysteria has centered on those two remaining members of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ Iran and North Korea. Of course, it’s understandable that pooh bahs would be alarmed about North Korea, what with its two recent attacks on the South ratcheting up fears of a renewed all-out war (hard to believe that there has never really been an end to the 1950s Korea “conflict,” isn’t it). Still, the major alarums and trial balloons have concerned Iran. In England’s Guardian, the Nov. 28 headline read: “Saudi Arabia urges US attack on Iran to Stop Nuclear Programme.” The very first sentence adds that “other Arab allies have agitated for military action against Tehran.” These “other allies” include such democratic stalwarts as Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt. All see Iran as a “threat”, as “evil,” or as a “snake.” “Cut off the head of the snake,” Saudi King Abdullah is quoted as urging.

All this was, of course, real music to the Israelis. As prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was quoted by the Washington Post on Monday Nov. 29, "More and more states, governments and leaders in the Middle East and the wider region and the world believe this is the fundamental threat." Netanyahu went on to expose what he called the “gap” between what Arab leaders say privately and publicly, their public “script” alleging that the “greatest threat is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” while “in reality, leaders understand that this narrative is bankrupt. There is a new understanding,” i.e. the malignancy of a nuclear Iran.

And of course, the American media ran with this as the major story of the Wikileaks revelations. Both the PBS News Hour, with its pundits seriously discussing how bad the Iranian situation is, how unstable its leader, how worried the Arab states are about threats to their own regimes from a rising Iran; and Charlie Rose, where other pundits reviewed the “real” threat of a nuclear Iran (still, by the way, without even a hint of a nuclear weapon, though that no longer matters to the alarmists), and the “consensus” in the Arab states about this (the consensus of the Arab monarchies, at least, most of whom quietly sided with Israel against the Palestinians in the original war in 1948; though Hosni Mubarak of Egypt only jumped on the “throw Palestine to the wolves” bandwagon much later, to maintain U.S. aid and save his dictatorial ass increasingly threatened by popular revolt); in both arenas the ‘experts’ shook their heads gravely as they observed that the time is getting short for someone—Israel or the Obama administration—to do something. And the something was clear to all: someone has to bomb Iran’s still peaceful nuclear facilities.

It was amazing really. Out of 250,000 cables released or soon to be released, the big story was Iran: bomb bomb bomb Iran. No wonder Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, scornfully dismissed the leaks as U.S. propaganda. But even that was taken as a sign that the man is as totally divorced from reality as his unstable nation.

Until, that is, on November 30, we heard from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Speaking on KPFA’s “Letters to Washington” show, Wilkerson had some fascinating things to say about Wikileak’s latest revelations. First, he said that all the worry about the leaks threatening U.S. diplomatic relations was a “tempest in a teapot.” Diplomats, according to Wilkerson, know that harsh words often get said in private, that governments all try to spy on each other, and that everyone understands the game. What he was really concerned about, he said, was the lack of capability, not to mention supervision of the alleged leaker, Pvt. Bradley Manning. “I have serious difficulty,” the Colonel said, “accepting the fact that this private downloaded what appears to be over a million documents and then gave them to others…Where was his chain of command when he was doing this? when he was downloading thousands of documents?” And then the Colonel came to the real nub of it:

This looks increasingly like (and I’m not a conspiracy theorist) someone is either jumping on top of this, opportunistically, to take advantage of it, or perhaps they were involved in it all along. And why is the information contained in these latest leaks in particular so proof positive of so many things that the United States, or certain parts of the United States, are trying to get across to the public—not least of which is Israel’s threatened position, that an existential threat exists to Israel and Iran is that threat. ‘Look how perilous, look how dangerous this situation is.’ That comes out of these leaks. (emphasis added)

Remember: this is not some ‘expert’ who may or may not have a private agenda with regard to the leaks or the substance of the leaks; nor, as he says, a conspiracy theorist. This is an army colonel, former chief of staff to the previous Secretary of State. This is a man who knows how Washington works, how diplomacy works, how the world of statecraft works. And his chief concern is not the alleged “damage” to the nation’s diplomacy posed by the leaks; it is the twin questions: 1) how did the United States allow this to happen? and 2) was someone taking the opportunity (either by leaping on what was leaked, or actually facilitating the leaks in the first place) to plant disinformation to affirm things they want affirmed?

And what do they want to affirm? It appears that the main objective is to provide further ammunition undergirding the administration’s—driven mainly by Israel and its U.S. lobbies—position that Iran constitutes the greatest threat to world peace since the Soviets, and the increasing justification for a military mission to take that threat out. As Zeid Rifai, the president of the Jordanian senate is quoted as telling a US official: “Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won’t matter.” Or, as Major General Amos Yadlin, Israel’s military intelligence chief, warned last year: “Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on 11 September 2001.”

I have to admit, it never crossed my mind that the Wikileaks cables could be part of a disinformation campaign. Perhaps it takes someone with inside knowledge of how such things work, like Colonel Wilkerson, to get it. But there it is. And my guess is that increasingly, especially as Obama is further harried by Republican zealots howling for his head, the refrain is going to get louder: Bomb Iran now, or suffer another 9/11.

Will the American public go for it? Normally I’d say no. But given what they’ve swallowed recently, and given the fear in this nation, can anyone be sure?

Lawrence DiStasi