ABSTRACT: Marco Pannella's comment on the not-guilty verdict in the trial of the far-right wing organisation "Ordine Nuovo" [New Order] accused of "reconstituting the Fascist Party". The "anti-Fascist" furore of the Italian left is the alibi to cover their essential continuity with Fascism and those forces which for thirty years have permitted Fascist laws to remain in force in Italy and which in recent years they have even worsened. (Comment on the sentence in the trial of Ordine Nuovo ... from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

The parties, labour unions, mayors and press organs that are now screaming like beasts in pain against the not-guilty verdict for reconstituting the Fascist Party in the trial of 113 individuals (among whom many killers, thugs, henchmen or proteges of the Italian or foreign secret services). These are the same parties and union organisations that for at least twenty years have found it perfectly normal for the -Italian Republic to be tied down to Fascist laws and ordinances, from the Rocco penal code to the military codes to the Concordat, and who worsen them and use them today as a tool of government for the persecution of militants and democratic citizens, for social repression and the pretence of "defending public order".

These parties, these union organisations, these convenient bureaucratic associations of ex-combatants and veterans are the same ones which kept silent or exulted yesterday over the surprise attack of the Constitutional Court stricking at everything that had been achieved by the Constitution only for the sake of defending the worst, most barbarous, ignoble and violent of Fascist laws against popular condemnation.

Such as these rise up, exemplary heroes or bullies of the regime, against the court which probably took three days to reach conclusions which by now even the regime's cultural and historical notions are reaching: that Concutelli and his likes can have nothing in common with such as Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco (the greatest "republican" jurist and legislator of

this Constitutional Court and our ineffable Parliaments), or with Victor Emanuel III and Benito Mussolini.

"Si parva licet..." The heirs of those who managed to kill liberty, justice, democracy, a constitutional state and, finally, all of Italy for more than twenty years are not the impossible "reconstructors" of Fascism (after 33 years!) but rather, if at all, such as Paolo Rossi, Aldo Moro, Amintore Fanfani, and no one else. And if any of these were in the remote past, for a few years, and not more than 33 years ago, in this too they follow tradition: seven years before coming to power Benito Mussolini was also one of the most prestigious and beloved of Socialist leaders. The Duminis (killers of Matteotti) and the Concutellis can, in fact, live and operate anywhere and at any time. No better than they were the party and secret police agents who tortured, murdered, and exterminated millions upon millions of workers and peasants, Communists and Socialists, anarchists and democrats, in the contemporary world.

As once before with Avanguardia Nazionale (1), today with Ordine Nuovo there is an attempt to impose on the republic the Fascist use of Fascist laws on the excuse of the "anti-Fascist" persecution of "Fascists". In this case there was an involvement in grotesque and unworthy trials, during which there was a risk of making martyrs of criminals who one doesn't often dare to prosecute and condemn for the crimes they have actually committed, not rarely on direct commission from high levels of the regime.

These laws then, with the pretext of some fraudulent trials, serve to justify real mass trials of class militants, democrats and true anti-Fascists. That is why I will not join in the regime's attempt to lynch the court that has subtracted ideological excuses and civil dignity from people who do not merit them, as well as having probably absolved a few really innocent citizens. In our penal codes there is the offence of criminal conspiracy (even if neither the examining judge nor the Constitutional Court gave any signs of knowing it in the case of the "Lockheed trial" (2)); delinquents too are those who execute criminal acts, neither more nor less than the people above suspicion who have used them and protect them. For these offences one is condemned.

Let us be spared the charlatanism of trials for the reconstitution of the National Fascist Party brought by those who have consecrated its laws and imposed them on Italy for 33 years, whereas Fascism itself managed to maintain them for far less time; or by those who only saw "floating mines" and "lacerations" in the Constitutional referendums for the abrogation of real, living Fascism in the laws and in our governors.

On the part of anti-Fascists therefore let there be an end to the crocodile tears, the laments and imprecations, and instead the immediate beginning to the referendum to abrogate the infamous "Reale law" (3) - the law, that is, which lives on the political boundaries of Fascism, of the license to kill, the necessary preparatory act to bringing about arrest on suspicion and the other juridical aberrations carrying the seal of Cossiga and Bonifacio on behalf of the "six parties of the constitutional range" (4).

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Avanguardia Nazionale - a far-right wing group.

2) The Lockheed trial - regarded a kick-backs scandal for the purchase of Lockheed Hercules aircraft.

3) The Reale law, imposed during the Red Brigades era, severely limited personal liberties on the excuse of fighting terrorism.

4) The so-called parties of the constitutional range were the ones that participated in drafting the Italian Constitution after World War II and the fall of Fascism.