ABSTRACT: In his preface to Mario Appignani's book "Un ragazzo all'inferno" (1), Marco Pannella denounces the different forms of violence carried out in public and Church-run welfare institutions, in reformatories and in prisons: the exploitation of orphans, the welfare racket, the concentration camps represented by the institutions for minors. Appignani's book is a fresco of a clerical and corrupt Rome, with its description of the vicious circle that leads youngsters belonging to the urban proletariat toward alienation, violence and crime.

(Preface to "Un ragazzo all'inferno", by Mario Appignani, Napoleone - January 1975 from: "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

I think back at the "Braibanti case"...

Five years ago, the 1st Court of Assizes of Rome, presided by Judge Orlando Falco, on request of the Public Prosecutor, Antonio Lojacono (I want to forget neither this story nor these names) sentenced the "philosopher of Fiorenzuola", Aldo Braibanti, to over ten years of prison, charging him with having "brainwashed" a young man, Giovanni Sanfratello. The evidence of such brainwashing was the libertarian and atheist ideas professed by Sanfratello, his choice of being a painter and living with Braibanti, poor and free: the young man was twenty three, was a legal resident in Rome, and independent.. Because he refused to acknowledge that his ideas and his behaviours were the fruit not of a free choice, but, as the Prosecution claimed, of his being reduced to a "slave" by his friend, Sanfratello was seized with violence, with violence he was shut into a mental asylum, with violence he was subjected to appalling medical treatments, with violence he was morally and physically annihilated: he was asked, in brief, t

o return to his family, to honour his parents, to believe in religion and in God, to accuse Braibanti of having induced him to have homosexual intercourse with him. When he was released "on probation" from the mental asylum of Verona by Prof. Trabucchi, Sanfratello was forbidden to read books that had not been published at least before 1870, a homage perhaps to the proclamation of the dogma of the Pope's infallibility.

During the trial, abominable things occurred. In patent violation of the law, in the name of a praxis which was later condemned by a sentence of the Constitutional Court, Judge Antonio Lojacono carefully hindered the carrying out of a formal preliminary investigation, a fact which would have called for the presence and the supervision of another magistrate, kept Braibanti in preventive custody for two years, allowed all the conformist press to lynch him and besmirch his name, violating the secrecy of pre-trial investigation, and during the trial, in which he was of course the Public Prosecutor, pronounced a bill of indictment of an unprecedented terrorist violence. I remember he kept referring to "squalid pallets", to "unnatural practices", to the defence of the youth's innocence and rights, to his being reduced to an "object", to the "subjection" of a human being, Sanfratello, who was guilty, in his opinion, of having refused, barely twenty years old, to live in his clerical and authoritarian family, and to

share its values and behaviour. An inconceivable guilt: only Braibanti, the "communist devil", could be responsible for such abomination...One of the official experts, later turned out to be a professed fascist, continued repeating that the sentence had settled the accounts with the so-called antifascist culture (Braibanti had been a heroic activist during the Resistance, and had been tortured by the Nazis); Judge Falco stated that this settled the accounts with the so-called psychoanalytic culture...

A wave of folly turned justice into violence, and the lynching took place. We had to struggle with all our energies to denounce it, and to later obtain an appeal sentence which succeeded at least in releasing Aldo Braibanti immediately, and above all in doing indirectly justice to Giovanni Sanfratello, or rather, what was left of him, after his "rehabilitation" on the part of the "Catholic", "pure", "manly" and "orderly" Italy, in other words, the Christian Democrat and fascist Italy.

A few years after the trial, I met this "rescued" youth: he was reduced to an object, addicted, at that point, not only to the drugs that had been given to him in mental asylums, to the drugs given to him by his family, by medicine, by class and clerical justice. His story strikes me as being all the more exemplary, axiomatic: society, rushed to his help, has "assisted" him. This "assistance" had turned him into a human wreck, a "thing", a person who was "violent against himself", the least that can happen to a person after having attended the school of established violence. In a few months, Giovanni Sanfratello had intensely lived through a process common to thousands and thousands of youths who depend on the institutions that preach "love", "dedication", "sacrifice", "poverty" and respect for life.

I think of crime news and law reports, which correspond, and it is no chance, to political crimes, I think of the flood of robberies and beatings, of young criminals, of the youths living in suburbia, who have become the labourers of the State massacres on trains, in public squares, in banks; I think of the youths that hang out in the gyms of Rome learning karate, those who crowd the parish movie theatres and the suburban cinemas to watch "chaste",

"manly" and violent movies; I think of the re-emerging campaigns for death penalty and life imprisonment carried out by "conformist", "truly Catholic" newspapers, that preach a strong and austere education and law; of the carabinieri, who watch over the institution of marriage, the life of fetuses, the morality of children, the figure of the mother, the dignity of the Homeland and of the armed forces...

When I think of all this I find an answer in this novel, "Un ragazzo all'inferno", by Mario Appignani. And the answer is that hell and the devil really exist, they are among us, as the Pope claims. Now I recognize he has much more authority than anyone else in this field. The only point where Pope Paul is wrong, is when he thinks that this devil and this hell are eternal.

For example, a man once came down from the cross on which the priests and the powerful of his time had nailed him, and he defeated them. That was only the beginning, for we are continuing that battle. A population of believers in values other than money, violence and power, of believers in justice, proved that on the 12th and 13th of May.

The question now is to locate and destroy the temples markets, the ghettoes where the poor are kept prisoners. We must free ourselves urgently, or this vile chaos of violence will triumph once again for generations, will flood the corrupt capital and the whole infected nation.

Will they tell me I am exaggerating, as usual? People should read this book then, and bear in mind that the story it tells is the story of thousands of young people, men and women.

Where are the strong-voiced men who sentenced Aldo Braibanti? Where are they today, faced to this daily and secular carnage, carried out in the name of the law, the Church and the Republic? Where are the Catholics and the judges loyal to the State and to the law, where are the newspapers that cheered Judge Orlando Falco's sentence, where are the pedagogues, the theologians, guardians of sperm in the name of the right to life, the guardians of this Church in the name of religion, of this State in the name of law and order?

Where are the laws, with their priests, their judges, their scientists, their men?

Are they next to Sister Pagliuca (2), like Minister De Mita (3)? Who didn't know what was going on, like the carabinieri, the bishop, the doctors, the judge, the mayor, the parson, the national and municipal service for the assistance of mothers and children, like the prefecture, like the social, religious, moral and civil "workers"?

But there are more characters in this story: there is also a prince or a marquis who lives at a stone's throw from the "Cardinal Tisserant Institution". A fourteen year old boy has run away from the institution, torn by jealousy and grief, feeling "betrayed" because the "father", the priest, the friend, the lover he had found there has turned out to be everyone's. The aristocrat welcomes him evangelically at his table, he invites him to be his guest for dinner, amid waiters in livery and silver chandeliers, he feeds him, listens to him, gives him 10,000 Lire, and, having done his "good deed", he instructs his driver to take him back to the institute on board his Mercedes, back to his destiny of victim of violence, to his role of permanent social misfit.

In conclusion, the aristocrat has done little for him. But are we certain that this young proletarian would have been welcomed differently, had he knocked at the door of the luxurious ideological homes of our ardent and pure revolutionary movements? We must acknowledge it (and not just because we radicals are once again the only ones to have a touch of conscience faced to that carnage called "Roman youth assistance"): in twenty year's time, the Roman Left, with all its courage and force, hasn't behaved much differently from that aristocrat. Here, in this book, other people host our fugitive youngsters: they live in luxurious penthouses, they occupy positions of responsibility, they are at the top of the social pyramid, they like to wear women's lingerie, and they pay to obtain, on a mercenary and capitalist basis, that which the "social workers", the "teachers", the "directors", the authorities in other words, are accustomed to obtaining with the most direct and systematic violence of the "charitable instit

utions", of the "welfare institutions", of the institutions for moral, religious, patriotic and laborious "education" provided at the State's and at citizens' expense.

Am I exaggerating once again? People like Carlo Casalegno, vice-editor and adviser of La Stampa, who accuses us of profound anti-clericalism, of political irresponsibility, of conducting a ruinous hate campaign, will surely say so, at the first occasion.

But every now and then, this man has other enemies apart from the Radicals. Before slandering us, as he did a few days ago, Casalegno took action against others. I think it was in 1969. One of the most civilized, human, democratic facts that the Italian press reported in these last years had occurred. Gathered at a convention, the directors of the Italian penitentiaries had decided to commit government to ensure that the prison reform, which had it had pledged to develop twenty years earlier, would soon have become reality. Their line of thought was extremely clear. In Parliament, in the press, in political parties, everywhere, people acknowledged the fact that the Italian prisons were a universe of violence and a crime-generating factor. In such conditions, prison directors were increasingly forced to represent and uphold not law, justice and the "rehabilitation" of prisoners, but the exact contrary. These directors therefore denounced the risk of a revolt, which later broke out with dramatic results. They

therefore appealed to the Justice Minister, stating that they would cease all activities until the Minister gave them the guarantees they requested, and that they would "occupy" the Cabinet of His Excellency Reale or Gonella (I can't remember which one, but it makes no difference). At this point, Casalegno intervened, with the tone of an official Court moralist, or of a Pope of laicism and democracy in Italy. He denounced them as criminals: what sort of a demonstration of discipline were they giving the State? And what about their loyalty to the State?

Together with the directors of the prisons, who find themselves increasingly paralysed, representatives and guardians of a base violence which is confirmed also by Mario Appignani's novel, we are still waiting for that "reform"...

The duty to disobey when obedience implies the betrayal of the fundamental laws and of the rights of the individual is folly, not politics, for this leader of the lay, democratic and anti-fascist press, a collector, through his newspaper, of signatures and petitions against whores, transvestites, homosexuals, male prostitutes and night rowdies. But also an important guardian (and this is the meaning of this apparent digression) of those institutions which mass-produce thousands and thousands of low-class "whores", "homosexuals" who are not Prime Ministers, not directors and educators of institutions, not refined, cultivated and distinguished "artists" as he is, not violent individuals as the class corruptors, but men and women forced to suffer the violence of prostitution, "transvestites" who cannot afford to pay youngsters escaped from the prison or the "religious" or "lay" charitable institution for a night to be "spectators" of their otherwise innocent manias and desires.

But he is also a great politician, because for twenty years he has been condemning any request for a rapid enforcement of the Constitution which is not declamatory or the fruit of pure, aggressive and instrumental protest: because for twenty years he has been upholding the "established order", that is, the chaos which we are all spectators of, and which would have been obvious for any person who wanted to prevent the infernal "order" in which "society" (in other words, these laws and these legislators, these governments and these parties, this regime and the clients of this regime) produces thousands of children each year.

Lastly, the story also features a wealthy manufacturer. He is the "father", or the stepfather of this whole story. A frequent patron of brothels, he buys the "virtue" of the daughter of the brothel's owner. This is the beginning of the story of Mario Appignani: the manufacturer obviously made no use of the vulgar contraceptives available at the time, and Mario obviously had an unquestionable "right" to his life. After that, the manufacturer took care of his money, while the Republic took care of his son.

Having talked about a "father", we should also talk about a mother, whom this society honours and protects, as we all know, dedicating her a day in the month of May. Mario Appignani discovers the existence of his mother, her name and address when he is 18. He is eager to meet her. But he doesn't find her: she is in a hospital, where Mario has already been when he was 12 and attempted to commit suicide. He finds her there. She is a worn-out woman, annihilated by life, but she is not there for herself. She is there to take care of her daughter, a 14 year-old girl, Mario's sister, whom he ignored the existence of. She was hospitalized after attempting to commit suicide.

Mario, why did you come to the Radical Party to me to ask me to write this preface? You know as well as I do: I am incapable of writing it, I am delaying the book's release, I have been trying to scribble a few pages in very little time, at night, hoping to be in time and to be useful to someone. These have been the worst days of this year, which is already dramatic and difficult. I had postponed every other engagement, neglected every other duty. Why then this block, this incapacity, this sufferance?

I had read your story in the few, scanty and terrible pages of your interview on Panorama. It was to be the last week of our long struggle, of this summer's hunger strike, while I was promoting demonstrations, debates, occupations, and we were all at the limit of our forces. But I too was certain that something would have happened, wihtout us intervening: I trusted that the 600,000 readers would protest, indignant, scandalized, offended, frightened, incredulous, furious; and that the accused would defend themselves, attacking you, suing Lamberto Sechi, Dragosei and yourself; that the municipal, provincial, regional councillors of Rome and of Latium, that the "Christians" and "socialists", the "liberals" and "republicans" would have summoned committees of inquiry, would have presented interrogations, would have checked these "welfare institutions" out and would have sought legal and political responsibilities as well as remedies against this incredible, terrible reality, had it proven true; that the Prosecuti

on Office of the Republic and the "judges" would have opened inquiries, would have at least carried out "preliminary acts" to ascertain the "truth"; that some "Christian for socialism" or perhaps even the Vicar of the Vicar of Christ, Cardinal Poletti, torn between faith and "revolutionary" struggle, would have found some time to tackle the problem.

Instead, you were right: not one of them moved a finger. You insist. I will try shouting out, to force them to listen.

You say that the Rome of Paul VI and of Giovanni Leone (4) resembles Sodom, Gomorrah and Babilon; you say that Herod himself is in Rome today, asking: "Sinite pargulos venire ad me". The massacre of innocents, on the other hand, is not just the one you describe, the one you experienced and are still experiencing. The demons that you quite rightly denounce as your torturers, are damned souls of this inferno themselves, they too are the necessary victims of a system and of a regime that bear worldly and modern names.

Because you see, Santo Spirito here is the name of a bank. Santa Maria della Pietà, San Giovanni Battista and about half of the names of saints in the calendar are names that mean violence, exploitation and perversion; while the values of republic, justice, humanity, love, education, purity, charity, law and democracy are in the state you describe with such dramatic vividness. For years, in the Radical party where you found other companions like you, destined to be massacred by rage and revolt, we too were alone in conducting the campaign against the ONMI (5) and the clerical pillage of the institutions for "education" and "rehabilitation", which resulted in the arrest of the mayor of Rome, Amerigo Petrucci, and in a gust of truth. At the time, we chose to be your companions against the powerful and the "politicians", to champion the thousands and thousands of youths whom we did not know and who did not know us. For this reason we consider it right, at this stage, to continue our struggle together.

Maurizio, the boy who dies at page 196 of this book, reveals to a friend, a few days before dying: "I realize that all my life I have been nothing but a miserable sperm in a sea of shit". Mario Appignani adds: "I think these words suit me too". Someone might object to the book's syntax. But I prefer to concentrate on other things: for example, stating that Maurizio has been murdered, and that the same attempt was carried out against Mario, and that the flagrancy of the crime is still in progress.

What are you waiting for to proceed, Mr. Prosecutor of the Republic of Rome, Nicola Amato, my former friend and university companion? In these last days, you have found time enough to issue 44 arrest warrants against 44 youngsters, 42 of which are minors, guilty only of having rebelled against the demons of their inferno, and to transfer them to the places where the moral, cultural, physical violence will be more scientific; where they will attend a compulsive crash course in crime. On a winter night, ten years ago, at Acuto, in the province of Frosinone, on a terrace of the Istituto delle Suore di San Giovanni Battista, an eight-year old boy, wearing a singlet and underpants, is shivering and trying hard not to die. His name is Francesco. Mario is also sent out on the terrace as a punishment. They two boys huddle together; but the warmth of friendship can warm him up for an hour only. Then Sister Filomena calls Mario back in: his punishment is finished. The following day, "everyone" looks for Francesco. He

is not in his bed. His pants, his shirt, his shoes are there, but he is nowhere to be seen. No one knows where he is; no one looks for him. A year later, while digging the soil, an old gardener discovers the corpse of a boy wrapped in a sheet. The police and the judges arrive. But no one knows anything, no one seems to remember Francesco. Those who do remember are afraid, and keep silent. Nicola Amato, my friend, do me a favour: find some time, look for the family name of that boy, Francesco, whom no one remembers. Disinter him. You can find out the truth. And once you have done that, I want to be elected municipal councillor for one day, if necessary, just to make sure that a square in Rome is dedicated to his memory, the closest possible to Saint Peter's Square.

Maurizio, Francesco, Mario...How many are there? All the squares of Italy would not be enough to commemorate them. And I will suggest erecting a monument to the "Unknown Boy". Because the Unknown Soldier of 1914 has ceased dying on the battle field, and is no longer being killed on the Carso (6) but here in Rome, among us. He is serving his Homeland here, on the field; and his "service" starts with his birth and ends with his premature death. This monument too must be close to the Campidoglio (7), the municipality, the Vicariate, the ONMI, the DC.

There was a twelve year old boy, in another "charitable" institution. One day older companions raped him. Then, with the others, they beat up a boy who had "spied" on them, who had in vain sought for protection and advice from the "director" of the institution. The boy is terrified: he knows he cannot remain there. The only solution is to slash his wrists, because that way he will be taken to the hospital. There they send him to a "mental asylum": he is treated with cold showers, straitjacket and drugs, State and class drugs to maintain "order". Once "recovered", freedom takes the shape of Sister Diletta Pagliuca. Mario Appignani has not lost his memory. He remembers everything about the institute, the mental asylums, names and addresses. He writes them down. All the electro-shock treatments he has been forced to suffer at the Santa Maria della Pietà have not wiped his memory out, nor have the insulin and the other State drugs. Listen, Nicola Amato; or rather, read. Listen and read, Mr. Prosecutor of the Rep

ublic of Rome, Mr. Siotto. And don't just read the pages that describe the rebellion of the 44 youngsters arrested the other day. If possible, skip them altogether. Otherwise I might be held responsible for 44 more arrest warrants: there is no prescription, for the moment, and at least one of those youths is alive and is out on probation.

If ever, read Appignani's description of the juvenile prison of Rebibbia, of the neglect of official duty of its director. Read about Prof. Della Rovere, the "doctor" of Regina Coeli (8), where he carries out the scientific and horrible tortures of Santa Maria della Pietà, out of pure revenge. Do you need evidence? Look for it. That is your job, if you believe in the law and in your duty to uphold not only "order" and its legal detainees, but also the weak and the defenceless. Read these pages: they will at least give you a clue. I exchanged no more than a couple of sentences with Appignani. Yet I know, as you do, that his book has a ring of truth. It occurs here and there in the book, that the author cannot resist the impulse to settle some accounts. Some of his accusations are perhaps not necessary; other accusations, we sense it, he omits for personal reasons. But we know, you and I, that Appignani is no mythomaniac, and that he is not lying.

On the other hand, you know us Radicals. We know we will not give up on this matter. We realize that this time, many of the accused will not remain silent; that they will react legally, and that our position is not an easy one. It is possible, and even very likely, that you will ask for our conviction instead of theirs. But these trials, if necessary, are quite welcome. We will nail the clerical, discriminatory, criminogenic, murderous institutions to their responsibilities, which the regime nourishes and depicts as a place for safety, education, charity and welfare.

It will be a trial to hell. One of its moments, but not the most important one: because nothing can accomplish it except a decisive, political, silent attack on the part of the democratic masses and its organizations.

From the cradle to the coffin, the system has been devised perfectly. Its political pattern is void of contradictions; it is clear and often well known. The baby is born from a poor mother in a poor family. Misery is often an unwise adviser, if it is not supervised and controlled. I ignore today's figures: but in 1963 the State allotted about 300 Lire a day to a needy mother to raise her child, and an average of 3,000 Lire a day to the clerical institutions for the same purpose. Under the Christian Democrat regime, billions and billions of Lire have been allotted to "religious orders", to "educational" or "charitable" institutions, to five thousand "institutions", fostering the compulsive expulsion from their families of thousands of children and youngsters, and their "internment" in suitable premises, which turned out to be penitentiaries. A gigantic and base undergovernment ensured the regime a position of immense importance in this field. Issued from the State, the local governments, the ONMI, the welfare

and health institutions, contracts for poor children, expelled from their natural milieu and soon reduced to physical or mental sickness came to represent a huge clerical and Christian Democrat racket.

The hunt for activity warrants, for assignments, for "hospitalizations" soon becomes a frenzy activity, essential and irremissible for the great, average and small "investors" of the field. "Children" are worth gold, for those who "take care" of them, providing it is not the mother. Instead of creating adequate and rational public structures, instead of training specialized personnel, the State subsidizes this indecent speculation. Investing with such criteria, it is inevitable to omit any form of control, and to hinder any reform of the field. Hundreds of thousands of people are now living of this activity.

Hundreds of thousands of electors, men and women, thousands of "centres" of power, of influence, of lobbying, of corruption, require and obtain their "children". Each time a reform is attempted, the Church intervenes, if necessary, in defence of the existing situation, solemnly claiming its primate, its rights and its duties concerning the education and assistance of childhood. When the Roman magistracy is invested by judicial denunciations and the public opinion is alerted by the Radical party's political campaigns, Pope Paul VI visits the Campidoglio, and appealing with particular and solemn benevolence to the Mayor, Amerigo Petrucci, he underlines the duty of the State to refrain from replacing the ecclesiastic and clerical organization in this "mission" and in this social service.

The Left seems to be paralysed for a long time, and even an accomplice. The incessant journalistic, scientific, humanitarian "denunciations" find no adequate political outlet. The radicals are accused of being anticlerical and unrealistic, are isolated and censored. The social ill extends, gets worse; it becomes a plague. In Rome even the extraparliamentary groups ignore the problem for a long time. And yet, from the expanding, overpopulated and miserable suburbia, from the shantytowns and from every other area of the immense periphery, thousands of children like Mario Appignani are sent to hell each day.

And, together with those like Mario Appignani, every other "child" necessary to the regime, to the system: the "elderly", the "handicapped", the "ill", the "mentally ill", are sent to the same places, for the same purposes.

These are the things we knew; against these things we struggled, we accepted isolation and attacks from all parts. And yet, as I said, reading this book I was filled with despair, thinking of all the things we did not succeed in preventing, the things we have not been able to create in adequate time.

As far as I can remember, this is the first time I feel this way; for about ten days after having read the book I sort of threw in the sponge. I refused any company whatsoever. There are moments in life in which intelligence means grief and desolation. Reading Appignani's book once again, my mind was flooded by invectives, remarks, projects, polemics; in the beginning I confided I would have been able to help him with a good, concise, orderly preface. A good political text, for once. But things turned out differently.

But there is something I still want to say. People should read this book; we must make it circulate. It is a militant duty, but a duty also toward the people like us who struggle for a more humane future. It is, I believe, a valuable class weapon. It is an appendix to Elsa Morante's "La Storia", written by one of it's proletarian characters, a man who is not a writer, who doesn't want to die and see the people he loves die, who is perhaps no longer alone because he has been capable of telling this story.

Mario's novel is tremendously true, and it has moments of intense beauty; it is a Roman fresco of the Catholic, capitalist and republican Rome.

The voice of a person "assisted" by heaven and by its representatives on earth, by the State and by its "democratic" managers. They seized him when he was five years old, to teach him a single, harsh lesson: violence, violence and more violence. Nuns and priests, "educators" and "teachers", "police forces" and judges, physicians and directors, all united, coherent and efficient. With tortures such as kneeling on rocks, violent sodomy, savage and group beatings, straitjackets, hunger and cold, sexual "caresses" inside police cars, electro-shock to punish him of simulating illness, weeks and weeks of isolation in prison, reduced to an object, a sexual object in the hands of the inmates, charged with maintaining "order" because they are more violent, because they are murderers, against a mass of petty thieves and innocents; there are nothing but exceptions confirming the rule.

Thousands of youngsters, in this very moment, are going through this "experience", are receiving this "education", guilty of having been given birth as a homage toward the Humanae Vitae, guilty of having survived, unlike the fetuses thrown in the garbage, their brothers are sisters, the fruit of mass and discriminatory clandestine abortion; guilty of belonging to the proletariat and not to the bourgeoisie. But there is something that Mario and all those like him cannot grasp: the fact that the world they hate, populated by people like Sister Pagliuca and Celestini, Sister Filomena, is also a world of victims.

I am referring to the nuns, for example. Having left their homes as young girls, they too come from poor, humble families, filled with their mystic enthusiasm and their dream of living in monasteries amid hope and prayer, later becoming the slaves of the industry of profit on orphaned children, the ill, the elderly. With no education and no suitable cultural background, they are assigned to work in mental asylums and in the other concentration camps. Faced with these "possessed" persons, who would need the help of an exorcist more than anything else, faced with the sufferance and the needs of the ill, their existence must be appalling. In fact, the nuns have to be recruited in the different Keralas (9) of Italy: Abruzzi, Sicily or Veneto are no longer enough. But can order be maintained when there are hundreds of children and elderly people, and a constant flow of patients?

Is it possible to imagine anything but a constant sexual harassment in this unisexual universe, and a sexuality other than homosexuality, both for the "director" and his subjects? Torturers and tortured represent a difficult aspect of this prison universe.

Only a rational policy envisaging the creation of political structures, of open communities and institutes, only a democratic, lay use of State funds can represent a plausible, probable alternative. In other words, only class clash and a political, social struggle.

It is an urgent goal to be achieved, against the capitalist-clerical mystification and the suicidal lack of attention of the "Left" and of the lay: a goal that implies different levels of clash, from referendum initiatives such as those for the abrogation of the Concordat, to daily demonstrative actions of intervention aimed at reinstating legality where this has been violated: and I would like to invite the book's readers to establish direct contacts with the Radical Party and with the different civil rights movements for this purpose.

In the mean time, we will wait for those like Antonino Lojacono, the crusaders of family, of childhood, of the duty of procreation at all costs, of the civilizing mission of Rome and the Church, to deal with their own demons, their own hell, instead of morbidly identifying it with all that is different from them. We will wait for the "law" to act. At the same time we wish to say that we will allow no one to turn Mario Appignani into a new Giovanni Sanfratello. This is not the solution, for the simple reason that we will not allow it. Instead, we will deal with the 44 youngsters against whom Judge Amato issued 44 arrest warrants. Their trial must represent a moment of truth and of struggle, of morality and of social and political liberation. Radical lawyers are offering their legal assistance free. We will particularly see to it that honesty of information is ensured. We will impose the truth, because whatever it may be, there is an extreme and urgent need for it today.

But we would be nothing but well-wishing protesters if we did not take concrete indications of action from this book, an adequate form of commitment, a precise, possible and binding objective.

The battle to abolish the welfare concentration camps must be unleashed. The judgment on the political forces and social organizations of Rome must be based on the positions they will assume on the matter. Administrative elections are to be held shortly. No candidate must be allowed to present himself as a democrat and even less as a "socialist" if he doesn't take a clear-cut commitment to rob this clerical "piovra" (10) of the regime of the possibility of continuing this carnage of humanity and civilization. I hope that the Roman companions of the Radical Party and of the federate and human rights leagues and movements will give absolute priority to this battle. The cartels, the direct non-violent actions, demonstrations, the organization of new intervention and pressure groups must immediately converge toward this objective.

But this is something that concerns everyone, all movements and all popular, lay, democratic forces. We hope that the radicals will not be left alone in the task.

Translator's notes

(1) "A boy in hell".

(2) Sister Pagliuca: a nun involved in the exploitation of minors.

(3) Ciriaco De Mita: Christian Democrat leader.

(4) Giovanni Leone: Christian Democrat Head of Government (71-78); President of the Republic (71-78), resigned following several scandals.

(5) ONMI: National Institute for maternity and infancy.

(6) Carso: a region of Italy in the Eastern Alps. During World War I, it was the scene of carnages.

(7) Campidoglio: one of the seven hills of Rome, seat of the city's local government.

(8) Regina Coeli: one of the prisons of Rome.

(9) Kerala: India's most densely populated State, with a high percentage of illiteracy.

(10) Piovra: literally means octopus. It is the name given to the mafia, for its countless tentacles. The "clerical piovra" Pannella mentions is the mafia of the Church.