Failing to name internal allies of an external enemy depoliticizes struggle into petty disputes

Evidence

In Italy, although a similar connection, both explicit and implicit, did exist between Austria and at least a segment of the intellectuals, the nobles and the landowners, it was not denounced by the Action Party; or at least it was not denounced with the proper energy and in the most practically effective manner, and it did not become a real political issue. It became transformed “curiously” into a question of greater or lesser patriotic dignity, and subsequently gave rise to a trail of acrimonious and sterile polemics which continued even after 1898. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony-to-come — naming who domestic elites actually serve is what turns an enemy alliance into political narrative rather than sectarian squabbling; also parallels the Orientalism toolkit’s point that a movement which refuses to name its own elites’ alliance with the colonizer fragments into moralizing. — connects to: Naming a goal transforms an open-ended grievance struggle into a final objective — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 354