AUT: (fwd) New book: The Judge and the Historian

[pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Wright)]

>Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 10:39:30 -0400
>From: Chuck0 <chuck@xxxxxx>
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>To: AnarchyAreWe <anarchy-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: New book: The Judge and the Historian
>Sender: owner-librarians@xxxxxx
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>Status: RO
>
>Just received the following review copy in the mail today from Verso:
>
>The Judge and the Historian: marginal notes on a late-twentieth-century
>miscarriage of justice by Carlo Ginzburg and translated by Anthony
>Shugaar. (Verso, August 1999, harback, $22, 211pp.)
>
>It deals with late 20th century show trials of Italian anarchists.
>
>"December 12, 1969 _ the highpoint of Italy's 'Hot Autumn'--the country
>is rocked by strikes, demonstrations and an insurgent
>extra-parliamentary left. A bomb explodes in the Agricultural Bank in
>Milan: sixteen people are killed. Anarchist railwayman Giuseppe Pinelli
>is taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli
>(later immortalised in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an
>Anarchist) plummets to his death from the window of police commissioner
>Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claim suicide, the left accuses
>them of murder. May 17, 1972--Luigi Calabresi is killed with two
>revolver shots in front of his home. Lotta Continua, the far-left paper,
>applauds this act of proletarian justice. Right-wing extremists are
>suspected but no one is convicted. July 19, 1988--Leonardo Marino,
>ex-Fiat worker, former armed robber and member of Lotta Continua, gives
>himself up to the police, claiming responsibility for the murder of
>Calabresi. Then starts a judicial enquiry in which Marino implicates the
>leadership of Lotta Continua, including Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi
>and Giorgio Piotresetafani, in the affair. Taking its revenge for
>humiliation in the 1960s, the Italian state imprisons the leftists and
>drags them through a series of dubious court cases. In Accidental
>Imprisonment of a Communist, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his
>work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to
>dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this
>late-twentieth-century political show-trial. Carefully exposing the
>twists and turns of the various trials, Ginzburg also takes the
>opportunity to reflect more generally on the similarities and
>differences between the roles of the historian and the judge. Standing
>in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the
>Dreyfus trial at the end of the last century, Ginzburg's book
>demonstrates the continuing potency of intellectual rigour and passion
>against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of this century.
>"
>
>Chuck0




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