ABSTRACT: In Turin, a city militarized and paralysed by fear, the trial against the founding fathers of the Red Brigades cannot begin because the members of the jury, threatened by the terrorists, refuse the mandate one after the other. Adelaide Aglietta, secretary of the Radical Party, who has been drawn by lot, accepts to be part of the jury, making it possible, with her example, to hold the trial. In this statement, Marco Pannella announces that the radicals are "armed with nonviolence, and nothing else", and that therefore they cannot tolerate to be "protected" by the minister of the interior who is responsible for the massacre of 12 May and of the assassination of Giorgiana Masi.

(Statement released when Adelaide Aglietta was selected as member of the jury in the trial in Turin against the Red Brigades - March 1978 from "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

Those who think the nonviolent individuals are defenceless and unarmed are wrong. There is at least one thing that deeply unites nonviolent militants and violent politicians: both believe that the historical and social situation in which they live calls for them to enact their hopes and their ideals, to question in any case their existence and to draw the consequences of this.

There is a sort of integrity that binds them. But the former believe the means foreshadow and determine the ends; and being libertarians and socialists, for them life - and especially the life of their enemies - is sacred. The latter believe that the ends justify the means, they use the same means as their opponents, and they too raise the flag of just and sacred murder and war.

The same ideology which presides the life of our State, ruled with fascist and unconstitutional laws for the will of the antifascists who have been in power for thirty years, causes the "armed party", terrorism, to be chosen as a privileged interlocutor. The press and the RAI make these people into the political antagonists and the protagonists of the political life. They censor, suffocate, fiercely attack those who believe in nonviolence, in the referendum, in the constitution who move amid the people and represent majority aggregations of them.

As nonviolent militants, every day we denounce the murderous violence of an authority which already has to its credit the strategy of terrorism and the destruction of the legality.

We are tried and convicted, but as advocates of nonviolence we know that the choice of the so-called "armed party" is not only murderous in terms of theoretic proclamation and praxis,but it is also suicidal when it truly partakes in the hopes of the Left and is not also the subjective expression of national and international parallel services.

In such conditions, we believe the trial of Turin against the Red Brigades should be held. The spiral of fear should be interrupted, once and for all.

Clearly, there are new dangers. But in fact they are but the new aspect of old realities, which have always accompanied our radical battles. With the occasion we wish to tell the minister of the interior, Cossiga (1), responsible for the massacre of Piazza Navona and for the murder of Giorgiana Masi, that we will not accept to be "protected" by his services.

We are armed with nonviolence, and nothing else. Those who want to attack us may do so: all they risk is being an indirect "State executioner".

Translator's notes

(1) Francesco Cossiga (1928): Italian politician. Minister of the Interior (1976-78) and Prime Minister (1979-80), currently President of the Republic.