Power does not merely conceal the truth. It manufactures narratives, assigns heroes and villains, and turns carefully selected versions of history into accepted fact.In six provocative investigations, Piero Laporta examines people and events whose public image has been distorted by political influence, propaganda, institutional silence, and judicial omissions.The journey begins with Saul Alinsky and the unexpected relationship between his methods of community organizing, the Catholic world, Jacques Maritain, Paul VI, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. It then turns to Willi Münzenberg, the Communist master of indirect propaganda who taught Moscow how to speak through seemingly independent intellectuals, artists, committees, and publications.Hidden propaganda is the poison that corrupts everyone's conscience while we believe we are being told the truth.Münzenberg taught people how to concoct this poison. Laporta is the first Italian author to openly hold Münzenberg accountable for the misdeeds of communism.Laporta next investigates the "Togliattization" of Italy: the gradual penetration of Communist methods, networks, and language into the institutions of the Italian Republic, long after the formal disappearance of the Italian Communist Party.The fourth inquiry revisits the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the end of the dollar's convertibility into gold, the Yom Kippur War, the oil crisis, and the birth of the petrodollar order. Was the economic upheaval of the 1970s simply the result of war and market forces-or did it serve a broader redistribution of international power?The final chapters move into the darker territory of Cold War Italy. The deployment of cruise missiles at Comiso is examined alongside Mafia interests, public contracts, Soviet strategy, and the murders of Pio La Torre, Piersanti Mattarella, and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. The book concludes with Licio Gelli, head of the clandestine P2 lodge: a man connected to American political circles, Vatican finance, South American regimes, and an intelligence lead identifying him as a possible Soviet asset-yet never subjected to the full investigation such a record demanded.Drawing on parliamentary reports, archival material, judicial records, historical studies, and contemporary sources, Laporta distinguishes documented facts from omissions and inference. He challenges comfortable explanations and asks the question running through every chapter:Who benefited from the story we were told?This is not a reassuring book. It is an invitation to reconsider modern history without deference to official myths-and to look behind the narratives through which Power protects itself.
