(Quaderni Radicali, June 1980, from "Marco Pannella, Writings and Discourses,1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)
I had expressed my wish and intention to the Radical Party to organise a meeting on Via Rasella immediately after the elections. A meeting that first of all would allow for a better knowledge of the event and those oral "testimonies" that otherwise might be lost forever. And a meeting that might stimulate a political confrontation, a dramatic dialogue that is necessary and desirable. But also a meeting that could nourish the considerations and the debate with a new "fact" rather than to risk having them turn in on themselves, having them remain anchored to the March episode, to the ferocious and violent aggression of the PCI.
It didn't happen that way, and the important debate opened by Quaderni Radicali cannot help feeling the effects.
And this is an opportune point at which to recall with the utmost precision the purpose or the occasion of that by now long-ago action. I have tried to remind the PCI and a regime fearfully unleashed against terrorism and tempted to interpret it arbitrarily or in demonizing terms and to combat it with terrorist means of their own, I have tried I say to recall how, in the history of popular (and thus political) Catholicism and in that of Communist and democratic history, it seemed to me easy to perceive antecedents, misunderstandings, convictions and choices that could help to understand the itinerary of "terrorism" - and to "modify", which is to say, defeat it.
For years, after 1968, I reiterated my views, live over the airwaves, in explicit debate (and,it seemed an isolated, desperate, lost one) with the new prophets and practitioners of the varies kinds of violence, counter-violence, revolutionary violence (whether originating in Il Manifesto (Communist newspaper) or Potere Operaio, in Lotta Continua or the "Unione" (Union of Italian Communists, along with the other fore-mentioned groups all far left wing organisations); but also much earlier with respect to the Algerian war (in which I was even a participant) and then the one in Vietnam. For years I argued and fought against what I considered and called the eternal return to the old nihilism; and I proposed "subjective" readings from the agents of violence who could be helped - I maintained - and from the worlds of Dostoevsky and psychoanalysis, particularly Reichian psychoanalysis.
In the preface to Andrea Valcarenghi's book "Underground a Pugno chiuso" in 1973, or in the book of Appignani in 1976, even without mentioning Via Rasella, I already had in my sights behaviour and attitudes equally inclined to sanctification. Hence, to define Via Rasella as a possibly necessary, but certainly tragic page in the annals of the Resistance; to claim it in all improbability as "ours"; to announce that I considered that we were the first "Fascists" (and not merely "violent" or "Stalinist") seven times a day; to attribute with certainty and almost as if I had the information, suffering and torment to those who had decided on the terrorisitic war action, Carla Capponi (Resistance leader) and others of Via Rasella, "our" comrade - with all this I showed how little I wanted to deceive people either gratuitously, or for immediate practical advantages connected to the elections or the life of the party, with a quarrel about the past, but rather to arm ourselves better in the present against murderou
s "brothers" and "comrades". It was, if anything, primarily an attempt to talk to them; to talk to the daughter-in-law of the PCI in order to reach the ear of the mother-in-law of terrorism (and,why not?, also of organised "Autonomia" (far left wing organisation), the more self-declaredly violent). Nor do I exclude that this in great part
happened. On the other hand, within a few hours, came the PCI's medieval anathema that day by the high priests of the labour union and the party, Lama and Amendola (Luciano Lama Secretary od the Communist labor union CGIL and
Giorgio Amendola Communist deputy) , from the Palace of Congresses, or rather from the Sports Palace, almost the new Coliseum, with ten thousand people on their feet applauding frantically and suffering from collective hallucinations (Pannella-Nosferatu in a black hood rather than a blue "loden"...). The crazed intention of that same Amendola and Trombadori (Antonello Trombadori, PCI deputy) to denounce me to the Public Prosecutor's Office for "calumny of the Armed Forces" does, however, constitute at this point the most illuminating episode of a heretofore pro-terrorist ideological position. Even granting hypothetically that I had "criticized" the action in Via Rasella, Amendola and Trombadori declare that this event, in itself, constituted the "epopee" of the Resistance; not at all - therefore - a tragic necessity, inevitable and contradictory as war and the killing of the "enemy" always is, the objectively innocent common solder, not the minister, the tyrant or the general. But the action was to be un
derstood as an emblem of Justice, a "good action" even in respect to the doubt that echoed in my words about the possibility of a different result - that needed preparation - from the one that was predictable and pre-announced of the Fosse Adreatine. This is less than ever a possible and legitimate error...
This, therefore, is where the question becomes an ever more current and burning issue if we look at a PCI that has been practically inert for thirty years in the face of a Fascist code and is now entirely in favour of the worse than Fascist "Reale" and "Cossiga" laws (anti-terrorist laws). This is where I begin to have my doubts. What was the truth of Via Rasella? Was it decided upon because of the "necessities of the war" or of "the party", as some maintain? Is it true that a large part of the anti-Fascist squads and even of the Communists who were not directly organised by the PCI, and that the official command of the Roman Resistance groups itself was against the idea of a terrorist action and contrary to the comportment of the PCI leaders afterwards? How is it that the subject seems to have remained taboo, that democratic historians have not already dug to the bottom of this question or that public opinion today knows so little about it?
What is hiding behind the almost unanimous reactions of the "leftist" or "democratic" press that are guilty of such painful mendacity?
One needs to know more, and not only with regard to Via Rasella, but also, for example, with regard to the "ditches" in Trieste and Julia (sites of other massacres) as the consequences of dreadful, entirely murderous behaviour on the part of foreign directors of the PCI, especially Togliatti (first secretary of the PCI), in those years of the Stalinist massacres (worse, if possible than those of terrorists because not committed by Dostoevskian nihilists and obsessed people) that might be due to currently active PCI directors or who today are curiously defended (with violence and lies) by those who command the PCI.
It is necessary to evaluate better too, how much noble and dutiful solidarity has fallen due to non-Communists for particularly grave and symptomatic complicities, complicities that are the present, if they exist, and not the past.
In short, it is time that the Resistance were honoured with the truth, defended in history, in the truth, the grandiose and tragic truth that was its own. In this way -it seems to me - one could better decipher the "mystery" of an "anti-fascist Resistance" leadership that historically became the heirs of the Fascist structures, and not rarely of Fascist political and constitutional culture, and that has and is constantly wreaking more carnage on the republican Constitution.
The year that has passed since the clash over Via Rasella has brought and continues to bring in new elements to feed my doubts that there are highly "unobjective" correspondences and practical meeting points between the terrorists of today and the great "murderers" and terrorists of yesterday.
I wonder if with these considerations I have put to flight the doubts, or made the certainties more dubious in the prompt, singular, and richly intelligent mind of Ernesto Galli Della Loggia ( a nournalist).
I don't in fact think that his criticisms are of little account. If it is well founded, I will share it. If non-violence should become an ideology or a Utopia, I will repudiate it with him and fear it.
It will no longer be me speaking, but the arteriosclerosis of my fifty years of age, if I have as much as given the impression of sharing the "progressive", neo- or proto- positivistic position of certain European leftists besides the Italian; the "celestial peacemakers" (or animal ones: "Qui veut etre ange est bete", says Pascal) even when they were dear friends and who fell,not by chance, from the frying pan of the CEI into the fire of some other slightly squalid church on the outskirts.
I don't believe in "virtue" or the things that they generally concern themselves with. Non-violence, like liberty, like love (will you grant me this, Galli Della Loggia?) is, in fact, for me a possible choice, a possible creation, dialogical in any case, which is to say social, collective. Thus it is a question of a way of being, of a form: political and not moral. I have always accepted as equally "moral" and "legitimate", if different, all positions based on what for me are historically non-values, or values contrary to mine: authority as against liberty, even war and violence as against dialogue and peace. We all have, because of the generations we belong to, that bit of the historical and that bit of the Hegelian in us that should make us immune to
certain dangers which Galli Della Loggia, on the other hand, seems able to discern as characteristic of my actions. Or, if you prefer, the help of the canonical catechism of the "dia-mat", or "historical materialism".
Nor, I confess, am I interested in the end of human history as a result of having achieved non-violent, or libertarian, or socialist perfection, any more than I am convinced by its opposite: the pseudo-realistic pessimism of the keepers of the mysteries of "real-politik" and of pseudo-historic justifications.
I too, like Galli Della Loggia, am diffident of irenisms and Utopianisms; but also in the name of the values of Utopia and of happiness for those who consciously and for rational historical reasons consider that these can be pursued and achieved, prefigured and lived by themselves and others. Is this enough to warrant a rebuke for seeking new contradictions, vital and alive, rather than being buried with others under the putrid and putrid-making ones of our official culture, that of the State, the "Party", the Church, the various Brigades and terrorists?
I have also always feared the much-touted, civil sense of humour as well as irony. But when I read Federico Stame I am at times sorry that he lacks the slightest trace of it. "Caesarism"? Is then a little sign enough, that can be mistaken for the weary retreat of a social esthete, for political voyeurism, with the use or the desire for power, of any power at all without which "Caesarism", or "Bonapartism", or "Mussolinism", or "De Gaullism", but also "Ciceruacchism" are not even nameable?
I am sorry, Stame. But if someone has an existential need to live or die like Brutus, I am not going to be the one to give him the chance.
Claudio Martelli (Socialist leader) , writing in Mondo Operaio (Socialist periodical), and having to hunt down the temptations that were endangering me and our "politics", evoked those of Don Giovanni penetrating into nuptial beds and consciences as well as into parliaments and parties by means of audio-visual materials, thus monstrously mixing love with politics and politics with love. I confess that this fantasy of his seems to me at least more evocative and less improbable. If I were not immune to any kind of "Sturm und Drang", to all romantic impressions; if I were not so radically non-violent and interested in the contiguity of love and life rather than love and death, I would say that the only tragedy to be expected of me would be precisely of a "personal" nature.
But I don't think that's the way it is. I leave to Fortini the cult of tragedy, reserving for myself the drama of dialogue and life. Also in "politics".
