ABSTRACT: During the Second World War, Giorgio Almirante, who would afterwards be Secretary of the Movimento Sociale Italiano

(the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement), in the 70's and 80's practically up until his death, was a high functionary of the Republic of Saḷ (the republic established by the Italian Fascists in Saḷ in north Italy as the Allied forces advanced)- a past known to all and which did not prevent him from participating in post-war political life and being elected to Parliament ever since 1946. These precedents of his - and in particular a proclamation condemning partisans to the firing squad - became the matter of a campaign waged from the end of 1971 through 1972 by some of the extra-parliamentarian left, the paladins of "militant anti-fascism".

(Notizie Radicali, January 1972, from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses", Gammalibri, January 1982)

We confess that this story of the Almirante "proclamation" irks us and doesn't interest us in the least. It denotes a climate and methods that do not appeal to us in general and that in our opinion do not serve either in the fight against fascism or for political democracy. Almirante was a high functionary, which is to say a political exponent, of the Republic of Saḷ. The Republic of Saḷ is the name Mussolini and the Fascists gave

themselves when they chose to collaborate with the Germans and the Nazis against the legal government and all those who fought for the defeat of Hitler and to cancel the filthy and inhuman Nazi regime from the concrete political struggle. This decision made them morally, and sometimes materially, the assassins of partisans and of defenceless populations or ones that sometimes rebelled for the sake of ideals of liberty, justice, and simple humanity. They ended up as the accomplices of the hyenas of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. The oldest among us knew them at times under torture and as the persecutors and murderers of their comrades.

This, objectively speaking, is what the republicans of Saḷ mean to us. They were for the most part young men. It is not possible to believe that their that they were consciously and knowingly murderers and that it was their choice to be such. Anyone at that time with a minimum of culture and information knew very well that the war was irremediably lost for Hitler and his Italian "Quislings". Whoever lacked either one or the other, victim rather than hangman, was not necessarily in bad faith; whoever was provided with both and was twenty years old, was neces-sarily in good faith. When they tell me that the editor of L'Espresso, Livio Zanetti, twenty years old, was a lieutenant of the RSI and fought against the partisans, I reply that I don't know if this is true; but if it is true, I hope that he can in the future (and today as well) say and do what he believes to be right. And if today he believes in liberty and democracy (as I know he does), that he will display the same courage and the same rigor that he

showed then for the cause and the values that were his. Of which I am not always sure.

This much I can easily say to the sole degree that I am not only disposed to defend, but respect the duty to defend, above all the fascists and MSI members of today from lynching and the hunting down of the past in odious "ad hominem" polemics. And even the Christian Democrats whom I love even less. And that is saying a lot.

I confess that I am not even interested in trying to discover if the not yet twenty-year-old Almirante was then in good or in bad faith. If I were to judge by what he is today, by his way of being as I have it before me, I would say that he was probably a cynical and vulgar opportunist that had made wrong calculations and bet on the wrong horse. But if it is true, as I think it is, that he signed and had posted the proclamation that is attributed to him, I still remain indifferent. In this he is right. If there are partisans in the country or in Parliament who were fighting at that time, people who were victims of this fact, it is impro-cable that the democratic and anti-fascist parties knew nothing of it before now. It is the late arrival of their burning zeal that makes one suspicious.

And then, what is it that they hold against him? Nothing surely that needs in my opinion to be proved, but that which for any Saḷ republican of less than twenty or so years seems to me to be certain until the contrary is proved: That is his full moral

and legal responsibility when it takes on the shape of that past.

And is it not enough? Was it necessary to reach 1971 to make it an issue of daily political polemics? And his comrades? Do you think they were different? And our comrades of today who at that time made that choice? And are you sure that they were the best leaders of the Fascist Monarchy? That Badoglio and Graziani (gerals who favored surrendering to the American troops) were made of different stuff? And the cowardly king better than the dictator of the Saḷ Republic? Or Fanfani or Leone or Moro (leaders of the Christian Democrats) better than a moderate Red Brigadier? But is that just, is it a lay position, is it tolerant (in the best, the Voltairean sense of the word?). Does it show a civic sense to play politics today to the tune of memories and of hatred? Is it acceptable or is it not rather intolerable for the laity to charge a political adversary with moral reproof and thus the will to annihilate? And if it is not theoretically admissible nor just but still humanly comprehensible, why divert the revo

lution , the rage, the disdain towards the nefarious acts of yesterday? In order to better protect the dialogue with today's regime?

To be sure, it is really form the sewers that, we know, that many of the far right-wing thugs today have been dragged up. But from which sewers? Those of thirty years ago or today's ones? And where are they? Where are they formed, where do they live out their tragedy these lumpen-proletarians of today? These fanatics, cynics, desperate youths; these disgusted ones who can be bought, and bought by whom?

To believe that Almirante, who was not even a danger for the poor accountant Arturo Michelini, is today the adversary to defeat; that he is responsible for or the main support of thuggery or the turn towards authoritarianism is a simply ridiculous notion.

Who pays the MSI? Who pays the underbrush of thuggery and provocation of these people? Who constitutes the structural basis for more dangerous and organised designs if not the national and international secret services, the parallel police forces that prosper under the Christian Democratic regime? Is it our army that produces fascists, or fascists who produce our army? Has an example not been furnished by our chiefs of state who for years have celebrated Republic Day with such as Di Lorenzo, Aloia, Birindelli, and Allavena by their sides in the place of honor? And what an example!

And who today has turned public assistance, the health service into that filthy concentration camp of which Minister Mariotti used to love speaking as long as he had voice and the hope of becoming a "Socialist" minister in the government? Who has always corrupted our institutions and our public life?

Who supported the MSI squads in Rome for two decades if not the Vatican real estate interests who had them as allies and clients?

And who has tenaciously blocked putting the Constitution into effect in order to leave the Fascist Code alive thus modelling our order along the lines of a police state? And who for twenty years, for the life of an entire generation, has constituted itself a regime, conspiring and making havoc of our institutions, of democratic processes, of civil life, and has perverted the Parliament, making it ridiculous, relieving it of all real power?

Who today is the creature and the instigator of the will and the interests of the "bosses", public and private? Who has created scepticism, disdain, nausea and rebellion among the "good people", among the young? Is the group of the powerful and the heads of the regime Christian Democratic or is it paleo-fascist?

Who has destroyed the public schools quantitatively and qualitatively? Who has tried to impose again the delirious, authori-

tarian and repressive visions of the obscurantist clerical counter-reformation on our customs, families and schools?

Ought we to say the servants or not rather the masters? Ought we to believe that the crowds of petit bourgeois, of young people

run into the squares to applaud Almirante because they are really not in favour of the "promised" democracy, or not rather because they are mobilising against the "Christian" Democracy that they have been given in its place? And if they are making a mistake, isn't it our fault? Our fault if they don't understand that there is no real alternative between Fascist-clergy and Democratic-clergy but support and complicity and dependence and only different but converging functions? Is it not first of all the fault of who believed and still believes that it is necessary and possible to divert to the past the disdain, the rebellion, the desperate need for change that is rising against such as De Mita, Misasi, Forlani, Colmobo, Andreotti, Rumor, and their "loyal" and "correct" interlocutors and adversaries?

And in the end, is it true or not, that in the South two waves towards the extreme right have already shown that in any case only after the banks of the clerical, class- and corporate- directed DC and the power of the clergy have broken down, only then does the possibility open up for the left to acquire masses of adherents from the lumpen proletariat? One can say that the electoral strength and in part the political strength of the left in the South was formed only after the wave of indifference inspired by Achille Lauro ( a political monarchist,ed.). Do you really think that the Ciccio Francos (agitator of the MSI) who may be elected by the lumpen proletariat will have the power together with the MSI to meet the needs of the small people, the frustrated; to overcome the explosive class contradictions

that today have been created in numerous social and economic sectors of our country?

It is certainly easier to believe, correctly, that the "Fascist Revolutions" are to be understood as a defeat for the reactionary and class-directed interests in our country, than to await any kind of democratic attitudes from our lumpen proletariat as long as they are governed by such as De Mita in Avellino, Misasi in Calabria, Gioia and Lima in Palermo (all Christian Democratic leaders), just as, on a different level, in Rome the middle classes are organised by the Vatican-clerical machine of Petrucci and Andreotti.

We have said that we reject, on the basis of the conventions of the laity, any kind of lynching and any method that tries to impose a "moral" aspect on political battles. We understand that there is a risk for us in this that can become a reality and for which we can be reproved. But we can in all conscience state that the battles of the Radicals - whether the one we conducted against Petrucci and the OMNI (National Maternity Assistence) in Rome, or the one against the Pope and the CEI (Conference of Italian Bishops) for divorce - have always taken the facts for their point of departure, present facts and situations that, now and in the past, urged us to make modifications and to strike where moral and material "massacres" were and are taking place, knowing - as we have stated several times - that the only way to defend oneself from the victims is to strike at the powerful who do the persecuting while they are doing it.

To note that anti-fascism is used to oppose bands of hired assassins, thugs, papal mercenaries, who, better fed and armed, acquire a certain boldness; or to put on the stands and on the democratic masses who answer the call, the likes of Darida, De Mita, Misasi (Christian Democrats) and the most powerful and responsible men of this regime; or to qualify as anti-fascist and as "constitutional" the forces of a political class that day by day for more than a quarter of a century has betrayed and struck at the Constitution, the hopes of the Resistance, the very essence of anti-fascism; this has seemed to us in urgent need of being stated; this, to be frank, appalls and revolts us.