Piccolo Tigre: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 102-106

 Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are the laziest conspiracy theories. Obviously, they are immoral theories seeking to demonize an entire group of people. I just want to add this additional pejorative to it.

Webster, in her discussion of the Italian revolutionaries (secretly on the payroll of the Illuminati) adds this, “but it was not in the band of dissolute young Italians he gathered around him, but in his Jewish allies, that Nubius found his principal support.”

When she writes “Jewish allies” we should hear a “dun dun duuuuun,” in our heads. The reader of this book doesn’t need more explanation, just mentioning the word “Jewish” is enough for her intended audience to think, “of course.” Yet, let’s re-examine what she’s claiming. Her target here is the Carbonari, the Italian group that would fight for a unified Italy. Apparently, this is a goal that the Jewish underground also wants.

Her source for this allegation comes from a Joseph de Maistre, a counter-enlightenment thinker and advocate of a monarchical system of government that the people would not be allowed to question. He was a proto-fascist’s proto-fascist. The Jews were his scapegoat because of his vitriolic Catholicism and I would hazard to guess the time he spent in the Russian court of the Tsar Alexander I, who was also not a friend to the Russian Jewish population.

This story isn’t just bad, it’s also ridiculous. The role of a person named Piccolo Tigre comes into Webster’s story. Piccolo Tigre translates as “the Little Tiger” and I’m not sure if this is a veiled reference to Caterina Sforza, the Tiger of Forli, who opposed Pope Alexander VI; but Webster cannot tell us who this person really is, only that he was accused of relaying messages and money from the Carbonari to the Haute Vente, which was a group of French liberals opposed to autocratic control in Napolean’s France.

We then get a long excerpt from one of these letter of Piccolo Tigre and I’m skipping the whole thing because it’s completely unsourced. I’m not pulling excerpts but I will say that it reads like the Protocols in its recommendations. By which I mean that it’s supposed to be a person advocating for the type of liberalism that the Illuminati represent but the language being used is derogatory. I will confess that the language of the letter could be confused by Webster’s translation of it. So, perhaps, we are missing some legitimacy in her copy.

We are now thrust into the Industrial Revolution in the most clunky transition outside of one of my lectures. She ends the section concerning Piccolo Tigre and the Jews promising to examine the ground by which the Illuminati was going to demoralize Europe and accomplish their purpose. I thought that’s what we had been doing this entire time. However, we’re going to jump from Napoleonic Europe to the Europe of Dickens and Marx.

What I do like about Webster’s writing is that she is able to point out real problems, “It is of the utmost importance to realize that the people at this period were suffering from very real grievances.”

Yes, of course. This is one of those things where we question our own opinions because they seem to ally with very bad or very stupid people. She even gives a tip of the hat to Socialist writings of this era, though she doesn’t think it necessary to repeat their words here, who point out these grievances. She thinks that a Lord Shaftesbury is going to have a better account of these problems, but since she’s not going to get into this debate neither will I.

Webster is going to begin her argument by citing Marx as to who is responsible for these grievances. She quotes a long passage from the Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engles point out that the bourgeoise are like locusts who devour all things for their own gain, they destroy the natural bonds between people, drowned sentimentality, and reduced human actions to calculations of exchange value. Ok, we’re on target so far; she then ends her long quotation with this (she’s quoting Marx and Engles), “It has, in one word, replaced an exploitation veiled by religions and political illusions by exploitation open, unashamed, direct, and brutal.”

She then concludes, “Thus in the opinion of the leading prophet of modern Socialist thought, it was the destruction of feudalism that led to the enslavement of the proletariat. Exaggerated as this indictment of the bourgeoise may be, there is a certain degree of truth in Marx’s theory.”

Webster, friend, can I ask you a question: did you read the quote you just wrote in your book?

Marx was saying that the proletariat was already enslaved, it was just that their slavery was (in the words of the quotation she provided) veiled by religion and politics. God anointed the king who anointed the duke who is the lord over the Serf. When the Serf rebels, he rebels not just against the person who owns the farm, but the king and god himself.

Webster reminds me of the 1997 animated movie Anastasia. The movie opens with Russian peasants oppressed by the new Communist government nostalgically longing for the return of the old aristocracy and circulating rumors about who survived the massacre of the Romanovs. That movie completely ignores the oppression and misery of the Russian peasantry under the Tsars.

The difference between the situation of the Serf and the working poor in Industrial France is that one could complain without fear of sinning against god and the state. Webster talks about the “traditional instincts of benevolence” of the French aristocrats and how they supported the average dress maker—which, sure, but they didn’t support anyone when famine starved the people. Webster is working the current misery of the working class against the rose-tinted myth of life in a fairy tale feudal system.

This complete ignorance of the theme of Marx and the purpose of Socialism has to be purposeful. I don’t care if you, the reader of this blog, agree with Socialism or not; but at least get it right rather than resort to this kind of story-telling.