ABSTRACT: Taking an article by Elena Croce (1) published in »Prospettiva Settanta [»Prospects for the Seventies , ed.], Marco Pannella delivers a strong rebuke to the representatives of european and Italian lay culture, the "anti-Fascists" and "anti-Communists" who have always shown their indifference to the violations of human rights in the world, and who have never accepted the call to solidarity made by the Latin American democratic and liberation movements, thus allowing the imperialist power of the multinationals to impose - "wreaking havoc primarily on the legalities of the United States itself" - "the most fierce defence of wild profits on the State Department and the CIA". With the alibi of anti-Communism they covered over the worst crimes against humanity, always on the behalf of the powerful. But it is also a hard criticism against that left which is incapable of mobilising if the victims are not Spanish, Chilean or Vietnamese. One must offer opposition to "the lack of interest (or the interest?)

which is being more and more shown by the managers of Italian culture and power towards freedom, the lives of the minorities and the representatives of the democratic and class majorities who are oppressed in the Stalinist countries of ferocious state capitalism, authoritarian and anti-Socialist collectivism". He concludes by urging mobilisation for a test case, that of the Russian mathematician Ploutsh, sentenced to seven years in prison for crimes of opinion and closed up in an insane asylum.

(PROSPETTIVE SETTANTA, October - December 1975)

I am writing to you after having read the editorial »With Regard To The Unity Of European Culture that appeared in the last issue of your review. I don't think I am mistaken: that was written by Elena Croce.

When I arrived in Rome at the beginning of the Sixties, the non-violent monks of the national and civil opposition in South Vietnam, the buddhists whose sacrifice and whose struggle imposed more than any other the reality of the conflict on the international conscience, found no one to give them heed.

Communist propaganda made some use of them, and our noble lay and republican culture totally suffocated and ridiculed them politically. Our leaders at the time did not even notice it - Republicans, Social Democrats, etc. (lay parties, in short), high priests of the American party-church in Italy, accomplices of the far right wing as well as of the U.S. national reality, eulogists of the invasion of Suez and neutral spectators of the massacres and tortures perpetrated by the Europeans and the French in Algeria, steadfast "Atlantic" allies of Turks, Greeks and Portuguese.

I remember those monks, those men of letters, those students asking wherever had the Europe gone to, towards which they had run so confidently, Christian Europe, the Europe of tolerance, the Europe of Voltaire, someone added... Many of them are dead or will keep silent forever by now; they were also killed by their illusions. The lack of European solidarity, Europe's refusal to lend an ear killed a political and historical alternative of certain value for all of Asia, for all of us. But who in the world ever took to heart the appeal of the APRA and the other democratic liberation movements of Latin America, and that of San Domingo's President Bosch? And who, as long as he was still alive, heard, among our preachers of liberty and justice, of (at that time) "anti-Communist" and "anti-Fascist" intransigence, the ingenuous, dramatic, courageous, ancient appeal of the Chilean patriot, the bourgeois Mason and Socialist, the non-violent Salvador Allende?

Wherever the imperialist and capitalist power of the multinationals, wreaking havoc primarily on the legalities of the United States itself imposed during all these years and decades the most fierce defence of wild profits on the State Department and the CIA, raising the American flag on the ruins of civilisation and humanity, the political trustees of European lay culture, its Italian trustees, never saw, never heard, never judged anything.

It is honest and necessary to take on the responsibility of naming and naming again these potentates. They are the very ones whom we by now know to be equally insensible and alien to all the fights for civil rights in our country until they win their battles. The very same who in the name of Atlantic civilisation and European culture, of Guicciardini (2) and Machiavelli (3), of Realpolitik, of reasons of state and of party, found it normal and unimportant to receive Ciombè (4) in Rome, fresh from the assassination of Lumumba. And they still find normal that the Quirinal Palace (5), the Farnesina (6), the Holy Father, receive in solemn audience that grotesque butcher Amin Dada, the President of Uganda, who arrived a few days ago with a packet of dollars to purchase arms and policemen in Italy.

But Elena Croce is right, for these people, for the people who count, for those who claim to be its official representatives and accredited trustees, European culture no longer exists, it is a non-culture. This servility towards the far-right imperialist and capitalist international is no longer even a political choice, however infamous, as it may appear. It is a vacuum, a void. Which others, unfortunately, fill up with their interests.

The old, rotten culture that cultivates power; the adoration of the totem of institutional violence as the necessary road of progress and civilisation is, in a word, the prevailing "culture" among the bourgeois intellectuals and their disciples as well as among our ruling class. The meagre success of Julien Benda's (7) prophetic denunciation of the clerics' betrayal is certainly not coincidental nor, I believe, due to some inherent quality in his message.

For a few decades they have been able to cheat at the game: anti-Communism with its thousands and thousands of daily opportunities for justification, for intervention, for scandal, allowed and obliged their lordships to shout the word "freedom" ("of culture" as they sometimes hastened to explain), the declarations on human rights, scrounged from the rubbish bin of their behaviour. The above-mentioned high priests of the laity, inevitably in the company of such as Cardinal Ottaviani (8), Leo Longanesi (9), Giorgio Almirante (10), but with a different, initial legitimacy, have in a word outlived themselves thanks to Stalin and Togliatti-style (11) Stalinism, uncontrolled and dogmatic, faithful and cynical. All of them equally good European bourgeois, but in reality provincial and subaltern contemporaries of Foster Dulles (12) and Vittorio Valletta (13). Their clients and their inferiors either remain attached to these yesterday's roles and hole-up in Montanelli's (14) little fortress like that Rosario R

omeo who said "yes" to Gabrio Lombardi (15) and Amintore Fanfani (16) or try to find their equivalents and - ministers or under-secretaries of the DC, editorial writers for Piero Ottone (17) or Arrigo Levi (18) - they confirm themselves as anti-Socialists and anti-Radicals, as pro-clergy and now pro-Communist, in the service of two masters. Not even in Russia anymore do they dare push their "love of freedom" to such lengths.

Did I write "of two masters"? No. Elena Croce is still right: of one only, of power for power's sake. Thus, today, in place of the Buddhist monks, of the liberals of the Maghreb countries, of Latin America, of libertarian Socialists, liberals, the laity, anti-authoritarians, anti-Stalinists, Italian Radicals, of conscientious objectors against the monopoly of the American party and the opposition Soviet one, more than any others, more than the Spaniards and the Chileans, we encounter and recognise the literary Russians of exile and imprisonment, of the internal opposition of writers and scientists. Behind whom the only horizon we succeed in seeing is the immense, infinite, necessary theory of workers and people who remain nameless, but to whom we must one day give an identity and, at least, a decent burial. Known only to their assassins.

Elena Croce, we repeat, is right in her solitude and, perhaps also because of her solitude which she neither wanted nor chose but with so much humility and strength she assumed and preferred to the promiscuity of the regime's "culture" industry, managed on behalf of such as Cefis, (19) Agnelli, (20) Fanfani, La Malfa, (21) Berlinguer, (22) by Ottone and Levi and Casalegno, (23) by the Rizzolis (24) or the Fratelli Fabbri.(24)

The Sinyovskis and Solzhenitsyns find no one to applaud them except the "Fascists" and the Montanelli clique, nothing, that is, because there is only this nothing in the "democratic" power of official Europe, and of Rome above all. Less than ever do they now find those "Atlantic anti-Communists" and pro-Europeans, liquidators of political Europe, parasites of a cultural Europe from which they have learned and taken nothing but the vices, the provincialisms, the servility and the treacheries.

Now we see him: he who has lived prostrate before the reasons of state and of party, and for this alone has sometimes and only manifested "anti-Communism", can do nothing now except keep silent. After the contracts and dealings of Italian state and private capitalism with Eastern Europe, after Helsinki and its treaties, as useful as they are sinister, after June 15 [elections, ed.] and the open-centre-left regional governments, he will at best be able to look on them as possible merchandise for barter, as weapons in the blackmail of the new power games among new accomplices.

This is the reason why I am not yet sure that I can share entirely the criticisms, however rigorous and convincing they may be, that are made here against the Russian men of letters. Perhaps there's is indeed nothing but pride: but if it were justifiable self-respect instead? Perhaps they too have truly been blinded: but why not wait to be certain until there is something for them to see? There are also - and they are many - rationalist and Marxist scientists, other forces of national and militant dissent. No. One must offer opposition to "the lack of interest (or the interest?) which is being more and more shown by the managers of Italian culture and power towards freedom, the lives of the minorities and the representatives of the democratic and class majorities who are oppressed in the Stalinist countries of ferocious state capitalism, of authoritarian and anti-Socialist collectivism".

With the tools of her trade, Elena Croce gives us two short pages, almost commonplace, repetitive, unassuming. And yet as far as I am concerned, I know no more convincing denunciation, dense and conclusive regarding an intolerable reality, nor any more profound explanation.

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, hundreds of thousands in the streets of Rome alone, have entered the lists these days to fight in their own way against an old mummified general in power, making him even the gift of death which he ought to have prayed for his God to give him. Five new assassins were enough to give him that tragic fame which he had earned at one time by exterminating hundreds of thousands of opponents. If violence were not always also necessarily stupid, all he needed would have been a few more days of patience, a couple of trials such as the ones held in Italy in the Court of Cassation and the military courts every day, in order to uphold the manifest injustice of the criticisms hurled against him.

For many this would also have been a martyrdom and an example of justice: in contrast to thirty five soldiers executed by the opposition in only one year, in contrast to the record established by a prime minister being sent to Heaven by an attack without even a single death on the other side, what a balance of equity and moderation Franco would have been able to claim! If the death penalty is allowed, in fact, if torture is practised everywhere without protests or opposition, what an injustice it is against this old, "honest" Catholic and nationalist general.

But everyone is concerned with him. In fact, it was about time. His enemies are defended just for being his enemies: it doesn't matter much what they do, have done, the legality, the justice of the methods they use against this exterminator of Spaniards. Franco, in short, is finished.

And the USSR? Are Sinyovski and Solzhenitsyn being defended, understood, helped? No. By now they are among us, among those of us they can manage to find. And with whom else could they be? Sakharov? But his wife even has managed in being cured by Italian doctors. And she talks so much...

And the mathematician Ploutsch? Sentenced to seven years for crimes of opinion, for more than three years they have been annihilating him, day after day, in an insane asylum specialised in the cure of political deviations. For more than a year two thousand mathematicians from all over the world have used every means - pleas, letters, requests for pardon, a few press campaigns - in the attempt to save his life, win a pardon and the right to exile for him and his family. His is a case, an example: but he is also a person, like each of those shot in Madrid.

That one should allow Elena Croce's article to remain without political and collective ethicalness, without the consequences which intelligence demands if it has any self-respect, would be true to our custom, to that of our "culture", the real one if not the one proclaimed and abused as an alibi by our dearest friends. Instead I propose that we debate this obligatory issue with a different and more rigorous method. First of all, let us save Ploutsch. Let us work every day, with public actions and declarations, so that an adequate campaign, humble but confident, may rip this victim too from the clutches of the powerful, even if he is not Spanish, Chilean or Vietnamese... but Russian, Soviet, European in short.

The violation of human rights proclaimed in San Francisco is unmistakable. As are the violations even of the Treaty of Helsinki; as are those of the European Convention too.

Our government must intervene in one way or another, but concretely and at once. So must Agnelli and Cefis, Berlinguer and Vecchietti (25) too. Ottone and Levi and more than all others, in an adequate way, with high-rating debates among the public, the RAI-TV [Italian State Radio/TV, ed.]. Otherwise, in the face of history, it will be difficult to withstand even the tragic and homicidal gaze of Franco and Pinochet and their ilk, or the dead gaze of the ministers - anti-Communist/crypto-Communist, anti-clerical/crypto-clerical, anti-Fascist/crypto-Fascist - who govern us.

Rome, October 1975

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Elena Croce - Writer and essayist, daughter of the famous Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce.

2) Guicciardini, Francesco - (Florence 1483 - Arcetri 1540) A historian, political writer and diplomat in the service of two Medici popes, he fell into disgrace with the Medicis and retired from public life. Among his main works are a »History of Italy and his »Memoirs that display lucidity, realism and pessimism.

3) Machiavelli, Niccolò - (Florence 1469 -1527) Statesman, writer, political philosopher. He is one of the greatest figures of the Italian Renaissance whose name has become a by-word for political cunning mainly due to the "rules of the game" described in his most famous work »The Prince (1513) because he there separated the realities of governing from ethical and religious dogmas. He is considered the father of modern political thought. His stage comedy »La Mandragola (1518) is still often produced.

4) Ciòmbe, Moïse - (1919-1969) Zaïrian statesman, chief of the would-be Katanga secessionists (1960-62), he was responsible for the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, was accused of being a traitor and imprisoned in Algeria.

5) Quirinal Palace - The official residence of the president of the Italian Republic.

6) Farnesina - The seat of the Italian Foreign Ministry.

7) Benda, Julien - (1867 - 1956) French philosopher and man of letters, criticised Bergsonian philosophy and irrational cultural tendencies. Best known for his work »The Betrayal Of The Clerics .

8) Cardinal Ottaviani - A highly conservative member of the Curia.

9) Longanesi, Leo - (1905-1957) Writer, painter, publisher. Founded various periodicals, of which the best known is »Il Borghese (1950), often going against the current, and the publishing house which bears his name.

10) Almirante, Giorgio - (Salsomaggiore 1914 - Rome 1988) Secretary from 1969 to 1987 of the MSI [Movimento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement], the right-wing party that considers itself the heir of Fascism.

11) Togliatti, Palmiro - (Genoa 1893 - Yalta 1964) A collaborator in Turin of Antonio Gramsci and one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party of which he was Secretary from 1927 until his death. Exiled in Russia he was a member of the Comintern's Secretariat and played an important part in the Spanish Civil War. Returned to Italy in 1944 and started off a "national" policy beginning with the voting on the Lateran Pacts in which he clashed with the country's lay forces. Took a role in the government from 1944 to 1947 including a post as a minister. After the 1948 elections he monopolised the role of the opposition but also made dialogue with the Christian Democrats and the Catholic spheres his number one priority and he never broke with the Vatican. His project of "a national road to Socialism" did not succeed in its main objective and, on the contrary, led to the stalemate in the political system by keeping the left from obtaining a system of "alternating governments" with the Christian Democrats.

12) Dulles, John Foster - (1888-1959) American Secretary of State under the Eisenhower administration (1953-59), he was a adamant promoter of the cold war.

13) Valletta, Vittorio - (1883-1967) FIAT's president from 1946, he was made Senator for life in 1966.

14) Montanelli, Indro - (Fucecchio 1909) Italian journalist and writer. Famous for his letters from Hungary in 1956. After many years working with »Il Corriere della Sera he disagreed with its policies and left in 1974 to found »Il Giornale Nuovo whose respected managing editor he has been ever since. Has written successful books.

15) Lombardi, Gabrio - A Catholic conservative active in the fight against divorce.

16) Fanfani, Amintore - (Arezzo 1908) Italian statesman and professor of economic history, he is one of the most prominent figures in the Christian Democratic Party whose secretary he has been twice: from 1954 to 1959 and from 1973 to 1975, giving it strongly corporative traits through the use of public industry to steer economic development. He has been prime minister three times (1958-59, 1960-62, 1982-83) as well as foreign minister more than once and Speaker of the Senate from 1958 to 1973 and 1976 to 1982.

17) Ottone, Piero - (Genoa 1924) Journalist, managing editor of »Corriere della Sera from 1972 to 1977.

18) Levi, Arrigo - (Modena 1926) Journalist, managing editor of »La Stampa from 1973 to 1978, and prominent television personality.

19) Cefis, Eugenio - (1921) President of ENI (Ente nazionale per gli idrocarburi - National Agency for Hydrocarbons) and the large chemical industry Montedison (1971 - 1977). A leading figure in Italy's economic reconstruction, favoured by his petroleum and methane gas policies, he used unorthodox methods of power and corruption to obtain his ends.

20) Agnelli, Gianni (Giovanni) - (1921) President of the FIAT automobile industry, he has also been head of Confindustria, the association of Italian industrialists, and was named Senator for life in 1991 by Italian President Francesco Cossiga.

21) La Malfa, Ugo - (Palermo 1903 - Rome 1979) Italian statesman, one of the founders of the Partito d'azione (Action Party) in 1942, he later joined the Republican Party (1948) and changed its physiognomy in the attempt to make of it the modern liberal party connected to the forces of production. He was the party secretary from 1965 to 1975 and then its president. He has held several ministerial posts and has been vice prime minister (1974 - 1976). He was one of the fathers of commercial liberalisation after the war.

22) Berlinguer, Enrico (Sassari 1922 - Padua 1984) - Italian politician. Deputy from 1968. Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1974 until his death. After the crisis and assassination of Allende he fathered the "historic compromise" that brought about the so-called "abstention-from-no-confidence majority", the apex of Togliatti's strategy for an organic agreement with the Christian Democrats. It was his project to bring about so-called "Eurocommunism", an attempt at Western reform which would not entirely reject the Communist experience.

23) Casalegno, Vittorio - A writer killed by the Red Brigades.

24) The Rizzolis and the Fratelli Fabbri - Two important publishing houses.

25) Vecchietti, Tullio - Italian statesman, Socialist who went over to the PSDUP (Social Democratic Party of Proletarian Unity) of which he has also been Secretary.