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)

The collecting of signatures for a popularly sponsored law to outlaw the MSI is the action this week that has most engaged the attention of leftists groups outside of Parliament as well as many prestigious names within government institutions, beginning with the Rome section of "Magistratura Democratica" (a magistrate's union, ed.).

We are decidedly against this action and consider it wrong, useless and distracting.

There was a precise reason for blocking the reconstitution of the PNF (Mussolini's National Fascist Party, ed.) in 1947. Only ten years earlier the majority of Italians had supported it and in 1947 the future balance of forces among the parties was not yet clear and consolidated. It was possible to prevent the constitution of the MSI when the fundamental battle of the "radicals" of that time was to extirpate the great essential ganglia of the Fascist regime, to punish the members of its hierarchy who were only a hair's breadth away from being absolved by the Supreme Court of Appeals after April 18, and, above all, when no party seemed as yet to have picked up the remaining pieces of the Fascist inheritance and reinforce them: when the DC

had not yet constructed its regime.

In the 27 years that have passed since then the DC has reorganised, within the form and the limits possible, a party that retains Fascist laws and a large part of Fascist leaders. It retains along with them the interclassist and corporative aptitude, the consensus, the "separate" bodies, the public agencies, the banking system, the information media and the regime of the Concordat that Fascism had created, perfecting and adapting them to the new industrial state, to the minimum exigencies of Europeanisation - all within the limits that the large democratic forces and the large mass of the people had and do render insurmountable.

What the DC created was what the constituents wanted to prevent with the XIIth Transitory Disposition of the Constitution. Today's extra-parliamentary groups want to use that norm not for its intended purpose, which was to prevent the reconstitution of the PNF, but to dissolve a party that at the last elections won a little less than three million votes or 8.7%

of the electorate.

At this point it is our duty to be extremely clear. As libertarians we maintain that if a party were to be created and present itself in the elections whose purpose was to promote indiscriminate murder, this party should have every right to promote and manifest its ideas and to collect votes up to the point when it decided to put them into practice. Then and only then would we have the right to block and repress such actions and not their promotion. Our ordinary laws today, if there were the will to apply them, would be sufficient to repress in the most drastic way all violence by squads and subversion of democratic institutions. But it is the regime which doesn't want to apply them and which keeps democratic or merely honest judges from doing so, as the events of recent years have amply demonstrated. Or else they are applied by right-wing judges against the left and not against the Fascists. But today the regime is not called MSI, it is called DC. To continue to affirm that the real danger or the majo

r one is Almirante, who at most is being "protected" by the DC or whom the DC is not fighting consistently enough, means objectively to live in that realm of regime-style anti-Fascism which expresses itself in unified undertakings with the DC.

To assert that MSI adherents are largely responsible for the massacres perpetrated in recent years is not only an insufficient reason for outlawing a political force that expresses the will of a certain number of voters whom it would be mad to consider collectively responsible for those acts; it is also inexact. Not only because it would be the same as saying that the man who actually killed Matteotti (1) was more responsible for his death than the Mussolini regime, but because the killers themselves, the very perpetrators of the massacres and the episodes of the

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Translator's Notes

1) Giacomo Matteotti - Socialist leader and anti-Fascist murdered by Fascists squads in 1924.

strategy of tensions this year, are more closely connected to the regime and its top DC leaders than they are to the MSI - connected by way of the regime's separate and special corps and

its trusted agents who head them. Freda, Rauti and Giannettini can be sacrificed and sent to prison - it would be harder to do as much to Miceli (2) - but the trials are suspended or moved to a higher court or blocked not when the responsibility of such repressed and psychopathic paleo-Fascists (3) emerges but when the press or the investigations of democratic judges brings to the fore the true responsibility of Henke, of Restivo, of Rumor, of Tanassi.(4)

Even before the investigations led to the incrimination of Fascists, the Italian left had understood who was really responsible for Piazza Fontana because they understood who stood to gain by it. Who today can assert that the MSI gained by the

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2) Freda - A Fascist accused of the bombing massacre in Milan's Piazza Fontana; Pino Rauti - A MSI leader; Giannettini - a secret service agent; Miceli - a chief of the Italian secret service.

3) Paleo-Fascists - A term common in Italian political parlance referring to a marginal and politically not very significant type of Fascist gripped by nostalgia for the good old days.

4) Henke - The head of the intelligence service during the time of the bombing massacres; Restivo, Rumor and Tanassi, all prominent DC figures.

massacres of Brescia and the Italicus? (5) In reality the true

two-fold beneficiary today as yesterday is the Christian Democratic regime: it is always when the regime is in crisis or attempting a comeback that the bombs start exploding. And if the bombs do not suffice, there are the kidnappings, the hold-ups, the prison escapes of the regime's brigadiers (referring to the Red Brigade terrorists, ed.).

The MSI certainly does not profit by these massacres which by now are being attributed to paleo-Fascists rather than to the regime which is at least objectively and incontrovertibly responsible for them. What profits the MSI is the killing of its own members, new martyrs, the ban on holding assemblies and demonstrations, the refusal of journalists to hold political debates on TV with Almirante ("They defame me 364 days a year and when they have the opportunity to accuse me face to face with my crimes they won't do so"), whereas no one has ever refused to hold dialogue with Fanfani or Rumor. The DC profits by clashes between the Fascists and leftist militants which is the only way of proving their theory of opposing extremists.

This kind of anti-Fascism turns the MSI into a party of martyrs instead of pitiful and cynical reactionaries and it turns

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5) Bombings that took place in the city of Brescia and on the luxury train Italicus.

the DC into a moderate party instead of being the true Fascists. And the DC could even possibly vote for the law proposed by the extra-parliamentarians, because then the three million Fascist votes would only go to block their haemorrhaging.

In reality there are very deep reasons - and structural ones, comrades of the extra-parliamentary left - that have brought about three million Fascist votes after thirty years of the Christian Democratic regime, and there is no law which can annul them.

The bill to outlaw the MSI is a proposal - with all due respect for our very worthy comrades who have supported it - that is objectively Fascist and reactionary; it is a provision that confirms an authoritarian and repressive concept of the state which is at the antipodes of the Constitutional one; it allows for every form of abuse (who is going to establish whether the owner of a piece of property is or is not fronting for the MSI?); it violates sacred and fundamental principles of freedom of expression, of association, of promulgation, of the press and of parliamentary representation itself.

Where will we find the nerve to continue to insist that freedom of expression is not limited by the need to protect the armed forces, the government or the president of the republic if we must assert that even the XIIth Transitory Disposition imposes such limits? The bill provides for imprisonment of 5 to 12 years for the promoters and 1 to 5 years for those participating in the reorganisation of the MSI and organisations connected to it "under any form, capacity or name"; from 1 to 8 years for instigation to commit such offences, for six months to 5 years for "praising" the MSI (which is a bigger penalty than the one foreseen by the Rocco code for contempt); demands the obligatory warrant for arrest for all of these offences. To provide and demand penalties of this kind for offences of opinion means objectively to behave like Fascists. The only thing still lacking is the formation of a Special Court for the defence of the state.

This is a very grave error even for those who do not share our conviction that a Socialist society can only be constructed by respecting the principles of liberal democracy, tolerance and non-violence. Once principles have been affirmed such as those in this bill, when the conditions of social conflict in the country will have to change, there will be no hesitation as there has been no hesitation in the past in utilising against the left these unconstitutional and repressive laws and provisions. Our comrades of LC (Lotta Continua, a small leftist party, ed.) ought to understand something about this since they have already been accused of crimes by the Florence District Attorney's Office on the grounds of the Scelba (6) law. The choice, in the end, is simple: the promoters of this initiative feel it is more useful to strike out against the parody of yesterday's Fascism rather than to use our referendums to strike at the real tools of repression created by yesterday's Fascism and being used by today's re

gime.

Giulio Ercolessi

("Notizie Radicali", March 21, 1975)

6) The law outlawing reconstitution of the National Fascist Party.