Subject: (4) from THE RADICALS AND NONVIOLENCE
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WE ARE NOT UNARMED
by Marco Pannella
[...] Those who think that supporters of nonviolence are inert and unarmed
are mistaken. There is one thing, at least, which unites exponents of
political nonviolence and violence: both believe that the historical and
social situation in which they live requires them to give "life" -
literally - to their hopes and their ideals, to believe that their life is
on the line and to draw the consequences.
There is a sort of integrity which unites them. But the former believe that
the means prefigure and determine the ends; and being libertarians and
Socialists, life for them is sacred, above all that of their enemies; the
latter believe that the ends justify the means, and take to the same field
as their adversaries, raising the banner of murder and of just and sacred
wars.
The very ideology which presides over the life of our state, based on
Fascist and inconstitutional laws upheld by the anti-Fascists who have been
in power for thirty years, leads to the choice of the "armed party",
terrorism, as the principal interlocutor. The press and the RAI-TV make
them the political antagonists and the protagonists of political news
reports. On the other hand they censure, suffocate and disfigure those who
are nonviolent, who believe in referendums, who are constitutional, who
move among the people and represent majority aggregations.
As exponents of nonviolence, every day we denounce the murderous violence
of a government which is responsible for the strategy of massacres and the
massacre of legality.
We are brought to trial and sentenced. But as exponents of nonviolence we
know that the choice of the so-called "armed party" is not only murderous
at the level of theoretical claims and of practice, but is also suicidal if
and when it really forms part of the hopes of the left and is not the
expression of national and international secret services.
March 1978
