ABSTRACT: Spring-Summer of 1974. At the initiative of Catholic-integralist groups and with the full support of the Christian Democratic Party and of the Catholic Church, a referendum is held on 12 and 13 May to abrogate the Fortuna-Baslini bill on divorce, which had been passed in 1970 thanks to the mobilization of the Radical party and of the Italian League for Divorce (LID). The Radicals and the LID were the only ones, among the lay parties, to carry out a battle to hold the referendum, countering all the attempts of agreements among the parties aimed at avoiding it. Only the radicals affirmed their belief in a victory of the pro-divorce front, and the referendum was ultimately won by the pro-divorce front with 60% of votes. However, both the Radical Party and the LID were completely excluded from the participation in the electoral programs of the State TV and from the campaign of the lay front. The victory of the Radical Party's campaign and political position, therefore, could result in the cancellation

of the Radical Party's political position. Marco Pannella undertakes a long fast to urge the State TV to grant "reparative" TV space to the Radical Party and to the LID, to urge Parliament to examine the parliamentary bill on abortion and generally to win back a political citizenship for the Radicals. It is, more generally, a campaign for the right to information and for the repsect of the republican legality.

On the pages of "Il Mondo" (1), Marco Pannella opens a polemic with the lay and leftist sectors which have always aimed at destroying the Radical Party. These proclaim to be antifascists, but they are the fascists of today, they are the representatives of the new fascism which seizes the political rights of depoliticized masses, disintegrated by consumerism, to the advantage of powerful minorities. The reasonableness of the Radical "insanity of freedom"; the heavy responsibility of the Republicans in defending, at all times, the interests of the regime versus the radical policy, from the ENI (2) scandal to the battle on divorce.

(Il Mondo - August 1974 from "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982).

Among those who have been zealously trying hard to destroy us over the past ten years, a small group of former would-be radicals stands out, who have gone rotten by serving and taking advantage of the regime, and a handful of arrogant political commissioners who vegetate like parasites close to the high ranks of the Communist Party. Both are on a permanent service of repression against the Radical Party and the lay and libertarian movements which support it in the major civil rights campaigns. Thus, despite the fact that it is summer, these watchdogs of the regime growl the fiercer the more our nonviolent action succeeds, today, in unveiling the violence of the regime, and in proposing itself to the country for judgement. Miserable staffs of command, twisted like snakes around the prey, they rumble with their rattles: but at this point we are immune to this poison. The day of reckoning has come. It will be rough play, but fair and, as far as we are concerned, based only on truth.

These antifascists are the fascists of today, the only true and - if unmasked - mortally dangerous fascists. We accuse them of misuse and betrayal of the antifascism they refer to. From this point of view, Pasolini (3) is right: today's antifascism contrasts with yesterday's fascism, not with fascism, of which, on the contrary, it ensures the continuity, with a subordinate role toward the Christian Democratic Party (former PNF). Every true fascism needs a group of hired killers and askari, people like Farinacci (4) and Dumini, Almirante (5) or Degli Occhi; and it needs another, respectable, cultivated, bourgeois group of persons, little matters whether followers of Gentile (6) or of Rocco (7), the important thing is that it be corporative, accomodationist and antipopular. I have said and written this before: we of the Left cannot consider fascism as mere rowdy or Nazi violence; we need to acknowledge that from a historical viewpoint, republicans or socialists, unionists or populists, an ambiguous relation ha

s often linked us to its manifestation: an intimacy which repeats itself today, more dangerous than yesterday. It is both useless and pitiful to exorcize fascism by re-inventing a convenient deontology, using our laicism for a Manichean and terrorist view of the political differences, sticking the yellow star of the Jews on the miserable palaeofascist remains, on poor frustrated and ignorant simpletons, or on "common" delinquents (which in fact are always political products).

According to a radical and genuine "antifascist", even the fascists, and in fact the fascists above all, have a right to the respect of their ideas and of their mistakes. We need only to disarm them as they try to kill, without becoming similar to them by using them as alibis for a suicidal transformation. Fascism means violence against the democratic laws and the rights of the people, it means discrimination and corporative and oligarchic organization, hate and contempt for any organized minority which represents or threatens to represent the majority of citizens in their constitutional aspirations and needs, or for large majorities of them united to defend fundamental rights and to urge liberal, lay and libertarian reforms which represent an emancipation for all.

The depoliticization of the masses and the seizure of the democratic political rights on the part of strong or less strong minorities to exert them as a privilege within the political caste is another fascist practice, which the requirements of the capitalist and contemporary profit, having ridden itself of its initial puritan and Calvinist contradictions, rediscovers, reproposes and reimposes in a more violent, rampant and treacherous way, which is only apparently more tolerable. The new fascism seems to have discovered that the most qualifying moment of an individual's life is the central nervous system more than his muscles or bowels, and it therefore adjusts its violence. Its torture lies not in the administration of castor oil and private beatings, but in commercials, in the artificial creation of needs that turn us into slaves, and not in "means" that make us freer, as well as in attempted or successful coups in Chile, Greece, in Europe and in the Atlantic. It must depoliticize us, disintegrate us, ato

mize us, personally and socially, in order to make us into consumers: consumers of cars or make-up, of sexism or of ideologies, of shows or food, it matters little. The important things is that we become that way, in a logic of frenzy consumption, of squandering of ourselves and of other people, of grim and frustrating pleasure, never of joy and hope, because contain the orderly disorder of life and of creation.

Leonardo Sciascia is mistaken when he suspects us Radicals of God knows what flagellant and mystic fear of progress, of well-being, of wealth; he is mistaken when he thinks he can perceive in us, in our motivations and in the signals we try to convey a sort of penitential and ascetic practice which is no doubt worthy of respect but which applies perhaps to Danilo Dolci (8) and Giovanni Franzoni, not to us. Rather, we are beset by other models which might recall the "clerici vagantes" or the despairing emphasis of Villon or Rimbaud, or the function of the minstrels, as a good-natured gentleman like Tomaso Grossi (9) perceived already in his time, and which Dario Fo (10) recreates and reproposes today. Or we can be better understood in the moral and historical background of Dickens (and in the ideological and existential one of Engels), Balzac and Elsa Morante (11). We are obviously the sons and cousins of Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp, and of Dostoyevski's Idiot; we are the contemporaries of the severe, arid and

essential forecasts contained in the stories of Leonardo Sciascia (12) and, before him, of Elio Vittorini (13). How could it be otherwise?

I will take this occasion for a rectification. The interview-conversation with Pier Paolo Pasolini contains an amusing and symptomatic distraction. Talking about the artificial creation of the need to consume, of the antihumanistic requirements of a certain type of capitalism, and of this regime of ours, which coexist in such a perfect symbiosis, I repeated something which I have often been saying lately: that Rimbaud, even better than Marx, expressed a brilliant intuition, a modern political program in a single line, where he proposes "un raisonnable dérèglement de tous les sens". And I underlined that the brilliancy lies in that "reasonable", in this reasonable deregulation of all senses" which would otherwise sound like the stale and stupid receipt of any post-Ginsberg banal or romantic "maudit".

If they want to reduce us to machines, machines of violence and of destruction or self-destruction, of constant and frenzy consumption, of grotesquely pseudohedonist solitude, to maintain the social mechanism based on the prevalence of profit as a value, to depoliticize us and make us indifferent and irresponsible vis-à-vis their "power", then the folly lies in the fact of not realizing the perfect totality of their proposal and of their policy, and in not giving literally "substance" to our collective, personal, ideal and practical response.

It is precisely in the name of a sound and possible epicurism that we fear the dissoluteness, the dissolution which they propose to us with the most lethal of ideological, political, consumerist, biochemical drugs, which are massively introduced on the market.

This is why I said that the "cyberniticians more than any other" can understand that the "reasonableness" is our banner. In Pier Paolo's abstract and article, on the contrary, it came out (comprehensively and in a way that amused me, so much that this "contrary" ultimately represented a positive and accurate "significant") that the "irreasonableness is the Radicals' banner". Also, the expression "we are the madmen of freedom", which Sciascia misunderstood, was a provocative answer against the constant accusation of utopian insanity which is being directed against us for years. If we are insane, then hurray for Elsa Morante and her wonderful, unshakable, forever living "pazzariello". But the pertinent answer has already been provided by Moravia (14), who comments Sciascia's article on "L'Espresso" (15): it seems that no one more than us knows and practices the discipline of pragmatism and of true political realism, of the explicit and popular political project; no one more than us embodies objectives which ev

eryone can judge each time, with a praxis which is clearly motivated by a general passion for justice and freedom, by just and free persons or by persons why try to be such with humbleness and difficulty, but which is based on the support to objective and tragically betrayed needs of the people which we are and which expresses us.

This is problem, my dear Sciascia: that we are not by choice or vocation the objects of political interpretation, but political actors and protagonists by choice and praxis since at least ten and perhaps even twenty years, and a true, new party, more alternative and engaged in battles than other ones (provided there are "other ones").

But let us get back to the fascist/antifascist plague-spreaders, whose digestion, liver and sleep has been so badly disturbed these days by our fast. The other day one of these intervened in the super-manipulated debate on the "Pannella case", which Piero Ottone opened and - as far as I know - closed on the "Corriere della Sera" (16). To say the truth, given that to this moment I haven't received the faintest invitation to give my own opinion on this "case" (which strikes me as excessive), the affair basically consist in a pseudo-debate on the 'thing' Pannella", on the "thing" which I should be reduced to being, a sort of inert stone which, in this case, seems to have the chief purpose of stoning Pasolini. One of these gentlemen is a republican member of Parliament, or rather, the vice president of the Republican Party. Who he is is irrelevant: vulgarity is nameless, in its essence it is pure anonymity. I will read it once again. He gently calls me "Marco"; he writes about my "dear" existence: "...It would b

e unfair to reproach him for the countless mistakes, the countless exasperated, excessive things which he says and sometimes does". Now, he continues, we should make an effort to understand what it it is he would like to do, this Marco, which he is unable to communicate: "Apart from anything else, it is the only way to contribute to getting him out of the terrible mess in which he has plunged himself". Understanding what there is of valid in this attitude "whereby Marco objectively qualifies himself, regardless of the many and varying political positions which he has assumed in thirty years' time". I am 44 and three months old.

But let us go on. Obviously, violence can be an "dramatically necessary affirmation...in a moment of absolute oppression". But here and now? "The nonviolent action could become a form of true moral violence...threatening to commit suicide for starvation to obtain the right to have access to the T.V....means pressing for a consent which is not political but merciful". Thus, Pannella gives "a contribution to the further disintegration of the democratic life, which is the equivalent and the contrary of the fascist "qualunquismo" which theorizes putrefied parties and an incapable democracy...".

In the end, it is understandable why this "friend" intervenes so solicitously in the "debate". Thanks to Arrigo Benedetti (17), to Guido Calogero (18), and the to Pasolini, after a couple of months of fasting, people finally know that I live and exist, together with my radical companions; the abrogation is temporarily interrupted, and no longer thanks only to the single liberality of "Il Mondo". This is what he cannot accept. He is worried, not for me, nor for himself. Because he lacks the courage to attack Benedetti and Calogero, he opens fire on Pier Paolo: "Marco Pannella's greatest risk is being swallowed, consumed by the fashion of the new court literates, by the enthusiasm and by the ignis fatuus which momentarily surrounds him, and which will die out as soon as a new fashion arises".

I have started fasting again, I feel terribly sick. For ten years, the censorship and the disinformation of the State TV, the violations of the legality denounced in the past weeks by the Constitutional Court have drawn a sort of democratic legitimation and a guaranty of unpunishability from the censorial and fascist practices of "L'Unità" (19) and "La Voce Repubblicana" (20).

Every day, each of us, willing or unwilling, foreshadows, with his behaviours, the type of society which he is effectively contributing to build. The overwhelming violence against the minorities, against dissent, against the misfits, against the unwelcome majorities; the betrayal of the democratic and republican ideals and realities in the practice of information and politics which characterize the political situation today are also a republican and communist product, and not in small proportions at that.

This explains our contrasts, the unrelenting battle which has been waged against us by the leadership of the Communist Party and of the Republican Party. This explains the billions which the regime has always allowed to be given fraudulently by the ENI, by the other oil companies, by the refining companies, by the illegal funds of Bernabei's publicity to certain lay representatives of the Christian Democratic, corporative, class discriminating and clerical morality, the latter constantly complaining, foretelling catastrophes, siding, in moments of danger, with the authority, with its violence, its corruption, its illegality.

The Procurator's office of the Court of Appeal of Rome has, in its archives, the evidence of a political campaign carried out in 1965 by the Radical Party against the methods of the ENI and of Mattei (21), which lasted more than a year amid the complete official silence of all the parties. It was a terrifying documentation; We tried every system, from the judicial one to the political one, from the marches to the rallies, from the appeals to the press conferences to the foreign journalists, from the distribution of leaflets to the publication of manifestos.

Billions to the fascists, to the republicans, billions to the communists, billions to destroy Felice Ippolito, billions to cover everything with silence, billions for the PSIUP (22)....As far back as then, we denounced the corporative and therefore structurally fascist function of the Christian democratic public finance, the corruption of the political life, the cancellation and destruction of the freedom of press. We involved labour unions and personalities, from Malagodi (23) to Lama (24). No one dared to move. Pope Paolo VI intervened to cover a number of scandals. There is documentary evidence of all this, we repeat it. Will we be finally allowed a trial forcing the judiciary to reconsider that dossier which has since been pigeon-holed?

Since they started to call us anticlericals, anticommunists, antimilitarists, antiauthoritarians, because we were becoming prohibited. Already then Dodo Battaglia and Maurizio Ferrara stood out among the others in attacking us, in lynching us, in propagandizing the most fascist of behaviours against us, to abolish us with censorship, or to mention us with the sole purpose of slandering us, But those are also years dense with battles, with qualifying episodes, which will deserve further discussions. For the first time in the history of these twenty years, we succeeded in triggering the constitutional mechanism of impeachment against two ministers, Preti and Valsecchi, for the affair of the "Vatican tax". Once again, the Republicans kept silent and covered the regime: the Chamber did not vote the impeachment. During two years, we launched a campaign against the ONMI (25) scandal which lead to the arrest of Mayor Petrucci; "La Voce Repubblicana" remained silent to the end, with its councillors of Rome wo remain

ed faithful to the end to the Christian Democratic Party and to its methods. The censorship was total. On the eve of the first, decisive vote on divorce on the part of the Chamber Constitutional Affairs Committee, major Republican exponents went to Renato Ballardini, the then president of the Committee, to urge him to wipe everything out by asserting the unconstitutionality of divorce for concordat marriages; they accused of being insane, with this new story, which could split the country and the "Centre-Left". Once again we received nothing but silence or attacks. I was at Ernesto Rossi's (26) house when I received a furious telephone call from the Republicans. "L'Astrolabio" and "L'Espresso"" were starting to denounce with accuracy and clarity of elements the conspiracies of De Lorenzo and of the DC. "You are insane, now you are provoking the army, which, in our country, is a ridiculous threat..." On Radical Agency, since 1965, we had started to denounce the links between State industry, the military, sec

ret services, fascist and Christian Democratic milieus. We held antimilitarist conventions and marches. For this purpose we traveled from Milan to Bergamo, from Brescia to Verona and Vicenza, cities which we had identified (in 1967!) as the purulent centre of the clerical-fascist and military threat. Every year, for days and days, with stubbornness. We underwent the first of our hundreds of trials for crimes of opinion. "La Voce" continued either to ignore us or to attack us as irresponsible fools; "L'Unità" did the same.

Reale, the then minister of Justice, signed hundreds of authorizations to undertake proceeding for public defamation. Because we were lay, because we were isolated, they continued to attribute to us the directorship of hundreds of opposition newspapers, which we disagreed with. Even worse, we did not exist except to risk ironies and prison. We sought for better, more effective weapons. We fasted: thanks to us, in a couple of weeks' time, with an extraordinary procedure, the presidency of the Chamber and of the Senate officially guarantied the conclusion of the debates on divorce which had been blocked. We fasted: in fifty days' time, we obtained the passage of bills which according to unanimous forecasts could not have been passed before six months or a year; the bill on conscientious objection and the bill for Valpreda. Three hundred companions came out of the penitentiaries where everyone had forgotten them and abandoned them.

We occupied the State TV and managed to cause the anti-divorce front, the republicans and the socialists, Christian democrats and communists, to speak on the taboo subject, taboo for all but us: divorce. Do we need to mention the unanimous resolve of all lay parties to abrogate in Parliament the "Fortuna bill", with our only opposition, with the purpose of avoiding the referendum? Or the dissolution of the Chambers to avoid this lay victory and enable the clerical-fascist electoral victory of 1972?

Shall we ask ourselves what we have done and been capable of doing for the institutions, for the law, for the Republic, for the confidence and the participation of the people in "politics", and compare it to that which the republicans, the liberals, the "official" socialdemocrats have been capable of doing?

Speak of the Republic based on embezzlement, on electoral fraud?

Compare that which we succeeded in obtaining, in ensuring for the Italian democracy, with our methods, our utopia and our realism?

Should we really expect "absolute oppression", as Battaglia advocates, to fight to the bitter end against the violence which is once again about to prevail, for years and years, to provide a mere and desperate prepolitical moral testimony?

Or should we risk our lives now, to avoid the legality and the republic from crumbling away, until we are in time? Should we have accepted the violences, should be have passively waited for the sentence of the Constitutional Court, which are official charges of "fascism" against the political class, but which in itself do not restore the violated legality?

But these republicans (and today we answered them, because they have been the most zealous in trying to suffocate us) never stop surprising us. There are no limits.

Is the issue of abortion exploding now, thanks to the collective fast and the global year-long battle which we have conducted on the subject?

Let us listen to and meditate on the splendid comment which another republican parliamentarian, formerly a radical, gives on the opinion poll conducted by "Panorama" (27): "I will think twice before pronouncing the word "abortion" in my constituency..."

I continue to fast to the bitter end. These madmen of the "Realpolitik", like yesterday's fascists, are inexorable advancing toward the catastrophe, dragging the entire country, the people, with them. There is not a minute to waste to save them.

Translator's notes

(1) Il Mondo: political, financial and cultural weekly magazine established in Rome in 1949 by Mario Pannunzio with lay and democratic characters. Ceased in 1966, it was refounded by A. Benedetti in 1969.

(2) ENI: National Hydrocarbon Corporation.

(3) Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975): Italian writer and film director. Author of verse, novels on the underprivileged in Rome, "Ragazzi di Vita" (1955) Una vita violenta (1959), theatre texts, essays. In his films he described the miserable life in the peripheral neighbourhoods around Rome: "Accattone" (1961), "Mamma Roma" (1962), "La ricotta" (1963). He also provided an interpretation of the Gospel with "Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964).

(4) Roberto Farinacci (1892-1945): organizer of the fascist actions squads of Cremona, secretary of the PNF (1925-26), he represented the most extremist wing of fascism. He was shot by the partisans.

(5) Giorgio Almirante (1914-1988): Secretary of the MSI from 1969 to 1987.

(6) Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944): philosopher. After having collaborated with Croce at "La Critica", he joined the fascist party in 1923; minister of education from 1922 to 1924, he started a far-reaching reform of the school system. Advocate of a return to Hegel's idealism, Gentile proposed a reform of Hegel's dialectic, maintaining that only thinking as an act is dialectic and development. The basis of every education is self-education; any educational technique applied from the outside is secondary. "La riforma della dialettica hegeliana" (1913), "Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro" (1916), "Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere" (1917-22).

(7) Alfredo Rocco (1875-1935): Italian jurist and politician, minister of Justice from '25 to '32, author of the penal codes and codes of penal procedure issued between 1930 and 1931, which were congenial to the ideological, political and economic demands of fascism.

(8) Danilo Dolci (1924): Italian sociologist.

(9) Tommaso Grossi (1790-1853): Romantic novelist and poet. Author of the historical novel "Marco Visconti" (1834).

(10) Dario Fo (1926): Italian stage actor.

(11) Elsa Morante (1912-1985): Italian writer. "Menzogna e sortilegio" (1948), "L'isola di Arturo" (1957), "La Storia" (1974).

(12) Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1990): Italian writer. He denounced the plagues of the Italian and Sicilian society. "Le parrocchie di Regalpetra" (1956); "Il giorno della civetta" (1961), "Todo modo" (1974).

(13) Elio Vittorini (1908-1966): Italian writer. Collaborated at "Solaria", and introduced American fiction in Italy with the anthology "Americana" (1942). His works of fiction include "Il garofano rosso" (1933-34), "Uomini e no" (1945), "Il Sempione strizza l'occhia al Frejus" (1947).

(14) Alberto Moravia (1907-1991): Italian writer. "Gli indifferenti" (1929), "La ciociara" (1957) "La noia" (1960).

(15) L'Espresso: Italian political, cultural and financial weekly magazine established in Rome in 1955.

(16) Il Corriere della Sera: Italian daily newspaper established in Milan in 1876.

(17) Arrigo Benedetti (1910-1976): Italian journalist, editor of "L'Europeo" (1945-54), "L'Espresso" (1955-63), "Il Mondo" (1969-72).

(18) Guido Calogero (1904-1986): Italian philosopher. Developed a philosophy of praxis characterized by a strong ethical and civil commitment, based on the "principle of dialogue". "Lezioni di filosofia" (1946-47), "Logo e dialogo" (1950).

(19) L'Unità: daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party established in Turin in 1924.

(20) La Voce Repubblicana: daily newspaper of the Italian Republican Party established in 1921.

(21) Enrico Mattei (1906-1962): Italian entrepreneur. Developed oil researches in the Po Valley. President of the ENI (1953), he sought for direct agreements with the oil-producing countries of the Middle East and with the U.S.S.R. He died in a plane accident.

(22) PSIUP: Italian Socialist Party for the Union of All Workers.

(23) Giovanni Malagodi (1904-1989): Italian politician, national secretary of the Liberal Party (1954-72).

(24) Luciano Lama (1921): Communist, Secretary-General of the CGIL labour union since 1970.

(25) ONMI: National Organization for the Improvement of Southern Italy.

(26) Ernesto Rossi (1897-1967): Italian journalist and politician.

Leader of Giustizia e Libertà (1929), he was arrested in 1930 for his antifascist activity. After the was he promoted the European Federalist Movement and was one of the founders of the Radical Party. His best known work is "I padroni del vapore" (1955).

(27) Panorama: Italian political, cultural and financial magazine established in Milan in 1962.