ABSTRACT: An open letter from Marco Pannella to Arrigo Benedetti, managing editor of the Rome daily Paese Sera, regarding the attack on the attorney-at-law and Regional Councillor Franco De Cataldo, a registered Radical and Republican Party member, "guilty" of having defended a number of defendants belonging to the far-right-wing organisation "Avanguardia Nazionale" (National Vanguard). Marco Pannella recalls the " Voltairean" character of the Radicals' action aiming at "not allowing a fascist trial by special courts".

(Open Letter to the director of the Paese Sera - January 1976, from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

Dear Arrigo Benedetti,

I continue to feel that the treacherous and fascist attack perpetrated by your newspaper is also an attack on your editorship, on your presence, on your moral, professional and political stature. I continue to believe this even if the silence of Paese Sera yesterday is intolerable. You know it: never, not even during the height of the Stalinist period, did anyone dare to accuse the Radicals as fascist, whatever their faction or category.

The filthy attack on De Cataldo has a double pretext: the mercenary pen pusher Alfonso Testa knew very well, as did those responsible for employing his sycophantic services, that De Cataldo had only replied for the sake of principle to the lay, Voltairean and ultra-anti-fascist appeal made by the Radical Party and the Lega 13 Maggio (13th of May League) had made to democratic attorneys to not permit a fascist trial by a special court; these gentlemen knew very well that at the moment in which they took De Cataldo as a pretext to attack us, De Cataldo was expelled from the PRI for his alternative lay position and his unwillingness to collaborate with the same people that you, before any of us others, had indelibly marked as the corrupters of the CApital and the palm-greasers of the Republic.

But they had to maintain that in the Region of Latium there was no possibility of a leftist majority. To do it they used the same systems with which the clergy and the Stalinists have always eliminated all dissent, whenever they could, by assassinating its proponents physically or morally.

For too long there has been an "anti-fascist" fascism that is used to support the predators, the peculators and the corrupters who are in power.

But this episode (and you, after so many years of absence from Rome, have probably never noticed it) is nothing but the conclusion of Paese Sera's political line and information policy on the regional and town level that already for many months has been composed of dishonest information, of censorship, of the "abrogation" of the facts and of inconvenient people - of the Radicals above all, of De Cataldo for whom the dishonest reserve their hatred of the honest and the capable.

Within a few months there will be national and local elections. You know that I have not spoken a word of criticism, because of the esteem and basic faith I have in you, about the choices you have made that I consider erroneous just as you now, undoubtedly, consider ours to be. I have accepted the prospect that the Communist press campaign would be cloaked in your prestige and you layicism, without expressing the least reserve - and you know that I am not afraid of disputes even among friends.

But I must tell you that little philo-Petruccian sacristans (Americo Petrucci, DC mayor of Rome, jailed for corruption, ed.), anti-Socialists and anti-Radicals, that represent a too-little known face of Roman corruption that by now infects the entire left, will continue to enjoy backing and protection, if only for the omission of clarifications and counteraction. We will keep our eye on bosses and not on the zealous and foolish servants, on a PCI, in short, that has nothing, nothing, nothing to teach us about liberty, honesty, rigorousness, popular and democratic struggles.

Today all the national press has kept silent about our dispute. It is a sign that I beg you to think about. We are truly becoming, we of the Radical Party and the civil rights movements, the "Fascists", the "Jews", the "perverse".

As in the past. We do not have the right to speak out. If we win the right, as with De Cataldo in the Region of Latium, our words are censored, suffocated, falsified. If - knowing what is lying in wait for us - we preserve our moral strength and ideals and make decisions (which can easily be criticised: but remember, they criticised us even when we were against the "Scelba Law")

[Scelba law on the reconstruction of the Fascist Party, ed.] that we know to be as difficult as they are, in duty, unavoidable, and the filthiest of attacks is directed against us from a newspaper managed by you, we would feel for the first time like packing up and going home.

But we will not. On the contrary, from a certain point of view we must thank Petrucci's errand boy for hitting at us. We have seen that there is neither time nor words to waste. We will reply in public to this attack too and to everything that there is behind it - in two weeks on Sunday at the Teatro Adriano: Adele Faccio, Loris Fortuna, Gianfranco Spadaccia, Franco De Cataldo , Mauro Mellini and I myself.

We hadn't thought of it. We decided on it this morning. As you see, we remain Radicals. Affectionately yours.