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 consideration that by dissolving the MSI one wouldn't dissolve its voters has nothing to do - contrary to what Tartari writes - with the interpretation to be given to the XIIth Transitory Disposition of the Constitution. It was a historic meaning of this disposition and not a juridical one that I brought up when I wrote that while it was justifiable in 1947 to block the reconstitution of the PNF, dissolving 8.7% of the electorate today was not, in our opinion, a thing to be considered. So when our comrades of A.O. (Avanguardia Operaia, a small leftist party, ed.) write that their proposal has nothing to do with disposition XII, "it being merely a new law with which Parliament outlaws the MSI inasmuch as it is a Fascist party", they themselves furnish the reply to the subsequent argument.

"Our proposal obliges Parliament to declare itself, to approve or reject the bill"; and then: "To oblige the DC to declare itself means obliging it to unmask itself", says Tartari.

Now, just because we, contrarily to A.O., do not repudiate parliamentary institutions - and we know them better than they do - we are much more pessimistic towards them. In contrast to a referendum which is inescapable, because when it is called either you go to the polls or Parliament makes substantial changes in the law, a bill of popular petition, even if supported by hundreds of thousands of voters, has excellent chances of not even coming up for debate in Parliament inasmuch as no party supports it. The most that can happen is that the bill is left to wither on the vine or to be thrown out by the Commission of Constitutional Affairs, not without more than good motives, and will not bring about anyone's unmasking.

Unless the DC feels that it must renew its "anti-Fascist" tradition and concurs in approving the bill with the lovely result that it halts its election defeat with the support of old-time Fascist votes and creates the premises - once the class conflict in the country changes - for outlawing one or another of the extra-parliamentary leftist parties. If things do not go quite so far, it is in any case evident that introducing penalties of up to 12 years in prison for crimes of opinion does nothing to contribute to the fight against the crimes of opinion which are presently in force.

Our comrades of A.O. show once again that they cannot distinguish between "freedom of opinion" and "freedom of action" - that is, putting conspiracies into effect.

We have to repeat that the laws in force are more than enough for blocking such a "freedom". The only thing lacking is the will of a large number of judges to apply them, or to apply them without discrimination.

And when I say that the proposal on the MSI objectively goes along with the regime's kind of anti-Fascism - the kind that identifies Fascism today with the MSI and not with the DC - it is pointless to tell me first that this is not true and then turn around and write that the objective "is to unmask its pretended anti-Fascism" which is therefore taken as a point of departure.

"Outlaw the MSI - Death to the DC that protects them" is one of the slogans of this campaign. What we say is that the DC isn't protecting anything at all, because they themselves are the only heirs of the old-time Fascist institutions even if in the evolved forms imposed by the Liberation and the forces of the Italian left.

Tartari is scandalized when I ask who today is able to affirm that the MSI stands to gain by the massacres of Brescia and the Italicus and he replies by asking if we have never heard of the strategy of tension. The fact is that the strategy of tension was useful to the MSI too up until a year ago. Today, with the MSI having lost all credibility, it is only of advantage to the DC, whose regime was always much more at its centre than was the MSI, and perhaps it may be of marginal advantage to the PSDI (Social Democratic Party, ed.). Why then ask for the dissolution of the MSI above all, and not, for example, of the SID (military intelligence agency, ed.)? Thus the DC, after thirty years of stealing public funds, ten years of conspiracies and five years of massacres, hold-ups and kidnappings, today can try to present themselves as the guarantors of pubic order, just because on the left there are those who give credibility to the thesis of left and right wing extremism.

"Killing Fascists Is No Crime!" is one of the most abominable and idiotic slogans that have been shouted in the streets of Italy in the last thirty years.

It is thanks to this idiocy that it was possible to give Marini such a heavy sentence.

If the terms we use are certainly serious ones, we do not use them frivolously but because we owe it to each other to be very clear. We are neither Leninists nor "Communists". The freedoms and the ideals of the great bourgeois and liberal revolutions are not trenches behind which we want to organise their destruction in preparation for a new order, but are unsurpassed and inviolable principles whose constitutional guarantees and whose application must be defended day by day from the assaults of the regime. The only direction in which to defend and increase them is that of constructing a Socialist alternative which can not be realised outside of them. If this means defending a constitutional state from the DC, we want to be its defenders.

If being anti-Fascist means putting those in prison whose ideas are different from ours, than we aren't anti-Fascist.

Giulio Ercolessi

("Notizie Radicali", April 10, 1975)