ABSTRACT: A collection of documents on the radicals' libertarian antifascism: to recognize fascism means to understand what it has been and above all what it can be. Apparent antifascism too often hides a complicity with those who represented the true continuity with fascism, the reprise of laws and methods typical of that regime. (" WE AND THE FASCISTS", The radicals' libertarian antifascism, edited by Valter Vecellio, preface by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980)

On a combination of theories one can construct a school and a kind of propaganda; on a combination of values one can construct a culture, a civilisation, a new type of co-existence among men.

(I. Silone - Uscita di sicurezza)

I remember when I was fourteen years old. I did not manage to work out a clear explanation for myself of what had been historically the Fascist phenomenon in Italy. I was anxious to know the and understand the political aspects, but my school, the old Barnabite institute, only offered an ascetic atmosphere while the official rhetoric was full of a verbose and commemorative anti-Fascism. Even the heroic Resistance could not resolve my perplexities about what Fascism had represented and I could not understand why in the face of a process of disintegration and decomposition, of violence and exhaustion, there had not been some kind of reaction. In short, why had the country adhered to Fascism? I had no historical points of reference and the press was on no help to me in this. Nor did I succeed in giving a logical sense to these reflections.

My encounter with Gobetti was coincidental. (Piero Gobetti, 1901-1926, ideologist of Liberal Socialism who fled to France because of Fascist persecution, ed.) In that mine that is in Via Port'Alba in Naples, I found three old books in the Pironti Bookshop. Three volumes yellowed and decrepit despite the fact that they had never been opened. Piero Gobetti Editions, Turin: a true little treasure I was to find later; among these "The Liberal Revolution - An Essay On The Political Struggle In Italy". That encounter was important in my life and my cultural formation. A real and true revelation, an unhoped-for intuition.

What is the use of all this in a preface to a collection of articles and writings whose aim is to gather together the first rudimentary tools for understanding the meaning of the libertarian anti-Fascism that animates our Radical militants?

"The correct political ideas are certainly not innate. We are strongly conditioned by the printed page and the use of the word Fascism itself must be revised. To hear it as it is used in the electoral campaigns makes our ears ring. One must try to eliminate from the start these false ideas about Fascism, these blinders that could keep us from identifying it". (André Glucksmann/ "Fascismo: il vecchio e il nuovo" Feltrinelli.)

This is what identifying Fascism means. Fascism does not rain down on us from heaven, it is not something innate to or characteristic of certain countries. The concrete experience that one has today of Fascism is too scalding an issue to be found in an old curiosity shop or in ancient history. Fascism is an article that is being manufactured in our time, our epoch, in the wars that surround us.

* * *

In spite of that, there is a misunderstanding when one speaks of Fascism to designate events and tendencies occurring since the end of the Second World War. One exorcises a moment in history, one identifies Fascism with Mussolilni and Hitler, one constructs magical rituals around it. And by thus getting panicky about past Fascism, one prepares the way for future Fascism in one's blindness and impotence. To recognise Fascism means to understand that which was and that which will be. It also means to understand, as Marco Pannella never tires of repeating, that there is a Fascist in each of us, in each of our behaviour.

Fascism is not the story of a coup d'etat that succeeded for a series of fortuitous circumstances; it is a war, the continuation of politics by other means, the perpetuation of reactionary policies, composed of repressive laws that are maintained such as our codes, (the Rocco penal code that this year will celebrate its inglorious fiftieth anniversary) (1) and of laws that kill liberty, that are reproduced by the " democratic and republican state, by the "anti-Fascist" political forces.

Fascism today is the national and international economic systems that are founded on the slaughtering of millions of people, of children, men and women killed by a conscious program of extermination aimed at nourishing and keeping alive mad economic policies, the waste of resources, war-loving and hyper-nuclear choices, of rearmament and terror.

* * *

When I found the text of Gaetano Salvemini's (2) "Lezioni di Harvard sulle origini del fascismo in Italia" in my hands, I did not yet understand the enormous importance his ideas had had on the fight against fascism and all its forms.

Ernesto Rossi (3) wrote: "...When Mussolini chased the opposition out of Parliament, dissolved the parties, gagged the press, instituted negotiated borders and created the special courts, Salvemini was the first to give the revolutionary watchword: our duty was no longer to obey the law but to break it. Against all metaphysical formulations about the meaning of revolution that were only of help to those who wanted to get on with their lives without a lot of annoyance, Salvemini made it immediately clear that by revolution he meant getting rid of Mussolini and his accomplices".

It was thanks to Salvemini and Rosselli (4), Ernesto Rossi and Ignazio Silone that the clouds surrounding my understanding of Fascism began to clear up. And the "betrayal of the clerics" appeared to me in a new light. That betrayal that seemed incredible to me expressed itself intensely as a constant factor of our culture. The most significant documents of that shameful surrender were then and still remain a terrible accusation against all the Italian "intelligentsia" and allow us to understand better the affairs of our times ("...they allow us", Ernesto Rossi wrote, "to admire the acrobatic agility of many who after the war leaped from the Fascist trapeze onto the Republican one, keeping their positions as the editors of newspapers, university professors, members of Parliament, judges, directors of the public administration, the banks and industry...").

This is where the continuity lies and the Radicals' political analysis sinks its roots precisely into this element. The priests, the big industrialists, the high bureaucratic ranks, all held together by a Christian Democratic Party that, camouflaged, is the natural continuation of the Fascist regime (with its codes, the larger part of its leadership, its summit-oriented and centralised power, its control of the information media, of the banks, of the public agencies, and with its Concordat).

* * *

Radical-Fascists, radical-"qualunquisti" (5): "... The shadow of D'Annunzio weighs on the assembly ("we are immodest in our objectives, our hopes, our loves") but also the spectres of much more dangerous haranguers of mobs " (in L'Unità, April 1, 1979, in reference to an in interview with Marco Pannella). Why such malice towards the Radicals? Why such refusal of any kind of dialogue on the part of the top Communists?

The left and violence, the left and liberty, the left and Fascism, the left and totalitarianism, the left and true Socialism... All of these questions have urgent need of a reply. Now it is necessary for the left to shed its myths, its harmonious, anthropocentric vision of the world, so Hobbesian in its absoluteness. The truth is that the left must learn to live outside of what was and is the common sphere of Leninism and Social Democracy: the appeal to the state as a protector, the state that has no scruples about confiscating social experiences to its own advantage and that works as best as it can today, with the complicity of the historical left in a consociational vision, to neutralise or repress the demands for liberty and liberation that civil society makes wherever there is a clear contradiction with consolidated corporative interests.

* * *

The modern totalitarian state disposes of enormously more effective methods than did past absolutist regimes for brain-washing and imposing obedience on dissenters.

"In the totalitarian state" wrote Ernesto Rossi, "the " enemy of the proletariat ", the " counterrevolutionary ", the " antinationalist " are marked men: they know that in every movement they make, every thought they think, they are being continually spied on by the janitor, by their acquaintances. They know that they cannot get accurate information on what is happening in the country or in the world. They do not even know if in their own city there are those who think as they do who would like to join them to do something about it. The police, the army, the judiciary are all parts of a gigantic mechanism that can crush them at any moment without anyone knowing about it, as a mill crushes a grain of wheat".

The Radical effort is one that history has marked as a losing effort up to now. The attempt to give substance to a liberal and libertarian hope for Socialism which lost out during Fascism with Gobetti and Rosselli, during the Resistance with " Giustizia e Libertà " (6), has lost out after the war with the Partito d'Azione (Action Party, ed.) and the libertarian components of Socialism, the liberal left. It is an attempt that has no chance to survive without being the living body of real hopes, the need of human and social liberation, a deep and free love, but above all non-violence and the struggle against war.

Rome, October 27, 1980 Giuseppe Rippa

Translator's notes

1) Alfredo Rocco (1875 -1935), the designer of the Fascist penal code.

2) Gaetano Salvemini (1873 - 1957) Socialist historian and politician.

3) Ernesto Rossi (1897 -1967) One of the founders of the Radical Party.

4) Carlo Rosselli (1899 -1937) A politician assassinated by Italian Fascist hirelings in France.

5) "Qualunquisti" - those with an attitude of distrust towards the political party system and the parties which are considered to be all much of a piece.

6) "Justice and Liberty ", an anti-Fascist movement founded in 1929 by Italian exiles in Paris.