ABSTRACT: Fear of a Soviet military intervention in Poland as occurred twelve years ago in Prague has been clearly expressed by the highest Polish authorities. In the USSR the centralised, bureaucratic and military power has been strengthened: a threat to humanity. The Western countries today have the same bankrupt attitude as the old League of Nations in the Thirties towards regimes that are possessed by the need of violence and war. The North East like the North West concur in the politics of mad investments in arms and create the extermination through hunger and local wars of tens of millions of people every year.

("L'AVANTI", (1) August 21, 1980)

(We asked Marco Pannella for his opinions on the recent events in Poland. Here is his reply.)

Twelve years ago, in these very hours, the Soviet tanks were making ready to enter Prague. They were already on the move. Against democracy, against Socialism, against so-called national independence, against the self-determination of peoples. In these very hours in Poland, the fear and threat of a similar intervention have been implicitly but clearly expressed by the official statements of the Polish government and party. In the meantime, the totalitarian and violent structure of the USSR has been further strengthened and the logic of oppression, aggression and war dominate its policies: above all its domestic ones, but its international ones as well, as Afghanistan - with its Russian and Afghani dead - indicates.

After more than a quarter of a century since the beginning of de-Stalinisation, Stalinism (not necessarily in the most rudimentary and barbarous forms with which it has been expressed in Russia) is triumphant. The bureaucratic and military power knows no limits and makes no excuses. It is a threat, a threat to humanity.

The hyper-nuclear choice, in the civilian even more than in the military sector, has by now conditioned for decades the development of the industrial, economic and political structures of the Soviet empire, of the Russian North, and solicits the entire world to take that direction.

The so-called free world (including also Bolivia and Chile and the most barbarous alliances in the Third and Fourth Worlds) replies by accepting the blackmail, the model of development that the Soviet folly, its structural, institutional, political and ideological folly is obliged to follow as long as the ruling group remains in power. The more "advanced", "responsible", "democratic" and "tolerant" aspects of the Western countries, of political democracy, carry the same banner, the same ideology and policy of the League of Nations as expressed by Deladier (and Laval) and Chamberlain at Munich: non-resistance to violence and a constant dialogue with the title-holders of governing and production structures that carry within themselves the need and the destiny of war, annihilation, fear of freedom and of peace. Together with the North-East and the North-West, in order to invest insane sums in armaments, they concur in the annual extermination of tens of millions of people from starvation and hundreds of

thousands in "local wars". Yesterday Hitler and Mussolini were fought while ignoring as an ineluctable destiny or marginal factor the extermination camps, nationalistic or imperialistic aggressions, anti-liberal and anti-pacific structures. Today we seem to be responding by joining in the barbarism as well to control things better.

The non-violent fundamentalists, the anti-militarists, the unilateralists, the internationalists and humanist-libertarian Socialists can no longer avoid rejecting all complicity in and tolerance of this policy. On the anniversary of Prague, and in the face of new events in Danzig (after those of the Thirties and Sixties), they denounce by themselves the dangers and realities of this policy.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The official Socialist Party newspaper.