SUMMARY: Marco Pannella is on hunger strike for 90 days to urge Rai-Tv to broadcast a 15-minutes program devoted to the LID and another one to Dom Franzoni; to urge the President of the Republic, Giovanni Leone, to receive a PR delegation; to urge the Italian Parliament to guarantee the regular-time discussion on the abortion bill and on the right to vote for people who have reached age 18; to urge the owners of the daily newspaper Il Messaggero to guarantee the respect of the democratic and secular positions of its editors. With the publishing of an article on "Il Corriere della Sera" as an "open forum" contribution [text no. 1356], Pier Paolo Pasolini cracks the heavy silence around the radical initiative. Maurizio Ferrara [text no. 1606], Giuseppe Prezzolini [text no. 1607], Adolfo Battaglia [text no. 3455] and Giovanni Spadolini [text no. 3453] subsequently reply to Pasolini and Pier Paolo Pasolini again responds with the following article.

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, June 26,1974)

I was very disappointed in reading the official answer to my piece about Pannella by Maurizio Ferrara (1). The entire criticism conducted by Ferrara, who respresents the PCI against me, was based upon nothing else than a single phrase in my article ( Corriere della Sera , June 10, 1974); phrase literally interpreted and naively simplified: The victory of "no" is actually a defeat...but, from a certain point of view, even for Berlinguer (2) and the Communist Party .

Even a child would have realized the relativity of such a statement: the word defeat referred to the DC ant the Vatican sounds in its full, literal and objective meaning; the same word addressing the PCI reveals a dramatically complex and subtle meaning. Even a child would have realized what a big paradox could be the identification of such two defeats within these two very different realities. However, it is a matter of fact that the PCI has been defeated too, and this is something that should not have been mentioned. If someone were to mention this, he should not receive attention in anyway. He should have been abolished, as Pannella says.

Whoever had the first necessity to abolish me - deleting from any possibile reality, although simbolic, the word defeat as addressed to the PCI (this was the heavy task burdening Maurizio Ferrara) - was "a priori" unable to understand anything else I could say: because, as lawyers know very well, one must completely discredit the witness, without mercy, in order to put his witnessing at fault.

That's why Maurizio Ferrara was absolutely unable to understand my assertions; his inability is not due to roughness, mis-information, and narrow-mindedness, as a malicious or annoyed reader could soon be drawn to believe.

Apart from the issue in question (the defeat ), where Ferrara uses remarks that perfectly fit in (the impressive and crucial support of the PCI, ecc.) - in an unbalanced way, because I believed these statements so correct to not repeat them without the risk of insulting the intelligence of our readers - any other thing I said in my crazy writings has been interpreted by Ferrara as a grotesque distortion, an unfairly reduction. Or better, we reached the lynching. Yes, you are lynching a person when you say he defines vulgar eight or nine millions of communists, when insted he defines vulgar the official politics of the ruling oligarchies. You are lynching a person when you ascribe to him the statement that DC and PCI are equal in their power , shabbily summarizing a concept so much more complicated and dramatic. You are lynching a person when you ascribe to him the assertion that Fumagalli has the right to access the Tv , where such a statement (not referred to access the Tv , but in an infinitely m

ore liberal meaning, the civil rights ) is included in the speech that I was reporting, given by someone else (Pannella, who, however, was speaking referring only to a general principle). You are lynching a person when you take one of his ideas and reduce it as you please, then unveil it as an easy target for public irony or contempt; such a thing Ferrara manages to do with my ideas (of course not new, but of course very intense) about what fascism and anti-fascim mean today, if related to the massive, hard, huge consumer ideology, that is, the unconscious but real ideology of masses, although its values are felt only at the existential level.

Regarding this point, most probably Ferrara did not understand the problem, in its cerebral sense. In the same way he did not realize the sense of my words about the homogeneous acculturing (which I was referring to exclusively when thinking to young people and to the peculiar and real cultures in the country). These are questions that, if not well understood, seem quite silly. Thus I feel laughed at with arguments originated excusively in the mind of who is laughing at me (by a man of power, this is the menacing point, by someone who represents eight or nine millions voters).

What I'd like to know from Maurizio Ferrara, with no inherent reservations and no mean criticism, is why the communists believe erroneous - like concisely Ferrara states, as it were the Pope's opinion - the request for the eight referendums.

Everything I said regarding the unconscious and real ideology of consumistic edonism with its effects of flattening out all the masses in their behavior and physical language so that their political and conscious decision do not fit with their existential choices anymore; everything I said regarding the violent, repressive, terrifying acculturation of centers of power and the following disappearance of old cultures, pecular and real (along with their values) - had been said, already? And even more well defined (a fact which definitively reassures)? Or better, have sociologists ever held International meetings about these issues? Let's see what Ferrarotti kindly holds against me ( Paese Sera , July 15, 1974) in order to put me to silence and to non-existence. Precisely those names that so nicely seem to be enough for Ferrarotti, those names ( melting pot !) and the International places where those names are referred to, clearly show that the Italian problem has never been even remotely faced. This is th

e point I am dealing with. Because I am experiencing it. And I am not playing two different tables (life and sociology) for otherwise my sociological ignorance would not have that nice innocence to which Ferrarotti himself refers to.

Therefore I believe I could reasonably assert (as the Anglo-Saxon sociologists say) that the Italian problem has no other equivalent within the capitalist world. No country has ever featured so vast a number of peculiar and real cultures, all these little native countries , so great a quantity of dialect worlds: no nation, I say, where there has been such an overwhelming development . In other big countries there occured already tremendous acculturing phases, to which the consumption, being the final and definitive one, overlaps, following a certain logical process. The United States,as well, are a culturally great compound (working classes poured in chaotically from every part in the world) but in an uprising way, and,as to say, molecular: not in the geo-political way as it happened in Italy.Therefore, the Italian problem has never really been discussed. Or, if it has, nobody ever realized it. The easy-going nominalism of sociologists seems to be confined within their own circle. I live inside these t

hings, figuring out as I can the way to name them. Of course, if I try to describe the ugly appearance of an entire new generation that has paid its unbalance to a stupid and atrocious development, trying to describe it using expression like this young people or this worker , I am not beeing understood - due to the fact that professional sociologists and politicians do not personally care about this young people or this worker at all. Instead, for me, these are the only things that matter.

Also some young left extremist has misunderstood my words (I received some letters, although very delighting, from Milan and Bergamo). It should be, however, extremely clear. I have condemned the identification of opposed extremisms since 13-14 December 1969 (3). Taking Saragat (4) as the official initiator of such an identification, I also condemned him quite solemnly (in my poem Patmos, written the day after the slaughter of Milan and published in Nuovi argomenti - no.16, October-December1969). It is not that the antifascist and fascist extremists are identifying themselves in that way. Moreover, the very few thousand of young fascist extremists are actually the State forces: I stated it several times, and very clearly.

The most unpleasant writing that brought confusion into a discussion that could have been useful for all, was by Giorgio Bocca (5). First of all, my friend made personal statements to re-shape, for his own pleasure, an episode of my biography. If a student crowd, as he states in an inaccurate and therefore false report, assaulted me in 1968, then he should have interceded in my behalf to courageously defend me, just because during that period he himself was saying that I was the best among the intellectuals ! How easily did he change his mind, our dear friend! It was enough for him that my popularity went down, at least apparently. Bocca's logic is based upon a very suspicious pragmatism. The result being that, while I chat, he is working hard. With a rudeness that in Ferrara is understandable or explicable, but it cannot be in Bocca, for no reason at all; he took literally, (probably due to an extremely simplified oral report by a colleague, since it's seems impossible he could have read me) the identifica

tion between fascists and anti-fascists (in the above mentioned sense) and the qualification as fascist of the new potentially anti-fascist government. Bocca has reduced those concepts to a blasphemous target, starting his own lynching. I am here shrieking like a solitary eagle and in the meantime he works, with humility and perseverance. Currently he's working on a report about fascism: report which I regard as a boring and ill-conceived project. I can now add, a boring, ill-mannered and even cheated on project. Infact, in the same issue of Il Giorno (July 7, 1974) where he is assaulting me, we can find the second chapter of such a report , whose main part is literally copied from the book "Da Valpreda (6) pi¥ quattro" by Magistratura democratica (foreword by Giuseppe Branca, Nuova Italia Publisher), without any quotation, of course. Every zeal always hides something that is unclear: along with the antifascist zeal.

If Ferrara and Bocca have misunderstood what I said, quickly reducing it to an orrendous semplification, Prezzolini realized exactly the opposite. Pannella scandal consists in fighting for every minoritiy - not simply Dom Franzoni (7), but also muslims, buddhists, even fascists and even the same enemies of the time (Prezzolini included). Therefore, using cheap irony, Prezzolini challenges Pannella to do something that Pannella is actually doing, perfectly based on a formal principle of democracy that Prezzolini is not able to understand. In the same way as he has not realized that the country where he has lived for 32 years is not the sovereignty of democracy but of pragmatism. By referring to this pragmatism Prezzolini (with my great satisfaction: a nemesis) contrasts Bocca.

The last one (for now) is the Republican Adolfo Battaglia, who calls me a clown only because I am a literate intellectual. I don't know if this assertion comes from the "Scelbian" (8) political scene or the sociological one (Schumpeter, Kernhauser, Mannheim, Hoffer, von Mises, De Juvenel, Shils, Veblen ecc.): supposedly, it is the typical Italian moralism, where a clown automatically becomes the scapegoat , thus re-establishing the truth (of course, unintentionally).

I apologize to my readers for having dragged them into this labyrinth of unhappy conscience , within this frantumation of a discourse that could have been complete and civic.

Translator's notes:

(1) FERRARA MAURIZIO. (Rome 1921). Brother of the above, exponent of the Italian Communist Party, deputy, etc. Author of an appraising biography of Palmiro Togliatti.

(2) BERLINGUER ENRICO. (Sassari 1922 - Padua 1984). Italian politician. Deputy since 1968, secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1979 to his death, after the crisis and the assassination of Allende he became an advocate of the "historical compromise", which produced, between 1976 and 1979, the so-called "majority of no no-confidence", the greatest achievement of Togliatti's strategy for an organic agreement with the Christian Democratic Party. Architect of the project of creating the so-called "Eurocommunism", an attempt to project in the West a reformism which would not entirely deny the communist experience.

(3) on 12 December 1969, in Piazza Fontana in Milan, inside the "Banca deel'Agricoltura", terrorist bombs were made to explode which killed 16 people. Simultaneously, other bombs exploded in Rome. At first scribed to the communist extremists and then to neo-fascist groups, the attempt sparked a long series of trials, which lead nowhere. Symbol of the so-called "strategy of tension" which meant to plunge Italy in a condition of perpetual crisis and prevent any shift of power to the left.

(4) SARAGAT GIUSEPPE. (Turin 1898 - Rome 1988). Socialist, exiled in Austria during fascism. Minister during the first Bonomi cabinet of 1944, president of the Constituent Assembly in 1946. In 1947 headed the schism of the right wing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), founding the PSLI (Socialist Party of Italian Workers), then PSDI (Italian Social Democratic Party). Vice Prime Minister and President of the Republic from 1964 to 1971.

(5) BOCCA GIORGIO. (Cuneo 1920). Italian journalist, writes for "La Repubblica", author of books and biographies, including a biography of Togliatti.

(6) VALPREDA PIETRO. (1933). Dancer, anarchist activist, was charged (together with his companions) for the 1969 terrorist attack at the Banca dell'Agricoltura in Milan, where 17 peole were killed. After several trials, he was found not guilty.

(7) FRANZONI GIOVANNI. Former abbey of the basilica of S.Paolo fuori le Mura, participated in the ecclesial renewal after the Second Vatican Council. After leaving the order he joined the communist party.

(8) SCELBIAN, from SCELBA MARIO, Minister of Interior (1947-53 and 1960-62) who wrote a bill to prevent further establishment of the fascist party.