("Quaderni Radicali" no. 2, March 1978)

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.

On the same day in which the Rome magistrates announced their decision in the trial of Ordine Nuovo (*) Marco Pannella wrote the following lines in heat and haste and he sent them to "Lotta Continua" asking the comrades of this (Communist, ed.) daily to publish them in one way or another, possibly as a letter to the editor. After a few hours, when it was learned that LC was not going to publish them, Pannella left a few copies in the press room of Montecitorio (Chamber of Deputies, ed.). Not one line of this declaration was picked up by any newspaper at all.

Although only marginal, this episode is symptomatic of certain persistent errors and delays even in a situation of great progress and growing interest in Lotta Continua. Why was this article censured? Because of a kind of "paternalism" on the part of the comrades towards... they know very well towards whom...? And because for years no chance has been lost to render the battle of the left constantly more rigorous, and so one is not rarely exposed to lynching attempts by conformists on the left and the far left? Pannella has told us that, certainly, if he

had had the possibility of expressing himself more calmly and amply on that episode, he would probably have tried to make that article more precise which, as it stood, was necessarily summary and hence inadequate and open to misunderstandings.

But what sense is there in a "dialogue" which can only be opened in sterilised "cultural" moments and not in those possibly agitated "political" ones in the midst of actions?

(" WE AND THE FASCISTS", The radicals' libertarian antifascism, edited by Valter Vecellio, preface by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980)

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) A far-right Fascist group put on trial for trying to reconstitute the National Fascist Party.

* * *

Parties and labour unions, mayors and the press are now screaming like wild beasts because 113 defendants (among them assassins, thugs, the protected helpers of national and international secret services) have been found not guilty of the crime of reconstituting the Fascist Party. These are the same parties and unions that for twenty years have found it normal for the Italian Republic to be tied to Fascist laws and ordinances from the Rocco penal code to the military codes and the Concordat and whose effects are worsened and today are used as instruments of government to persecute democratic activists and citizens, for social repression and the claim to "defend public order".

These parties, these union organisations, these bureaucratic organisations, these convenient veterans organisations are the same ones that were either silent or openly exultant over the surprise blow delivered by the Constitutional Court against whatever the Constitution had accomplished just as long as it could help defend against popular indignation the worst, most barbarous, ignoble and violent Fascist laws.

Now these same elements rise up - exemplary heroes or bullys of the regime - against a court which probably took three days to arrive at conclusions by now becoming known even to the history and culture of the regime: that Concutelli (a neo-Fascist, ed.) and his like have not and cannot have anything in common with the likes of Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco (*) (the most important "republican" jurist and legislator of this Constitutional Court and our ineffable Parliaments ) or with the likes of Victor Emanuel III and Benito Mussolini.

If one may say so... The Paolo Rossis, the Aldo Moros, the Amintore Fanfanis (**) , if anyone, are the heirs of those who managed to kill liberty, justice, democracy, the constitutional state and finally all of Italy for over twenty years, (and not the impossible "reconstitutors" - after 33 years!). And if any of these for a year or two in the remote past, but not more than 33 years ago, were anti-Fascists, in this too they follow tradition:

seven years before taking power, Benito Mussolini was also one of

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*) Prominent Fascists under Mussolini. Gentile was a philosopher, Rocco drew up the regime's penal code.

**) Aldo Moro, Amintore Fanfani - DC leaders who were also prime ministers.

the most prestigious and beloved of Socialist leaders. The Duminis (Matteotti's assassins) (*) and the Concutellis can in fact live and operate where and when they like. Not any better than them where the party and secret police agents who tortured, massacred and exterminated millions and millions of workers and peasants, Communists and Socialists, anarchists and democrats in the contemporary world.

As was tried in the past with Avanguardia Nazionale, so today with Ordine Nuovo there has been an attempt to impose the Fascist use of Fascist laws with the excuse of an "anti-Fascist" prosecution of "Fascists". And so there has been an involvement in grotesque and unworthy trials during the course of which there has been the risk of making martyrs of delinquents whom one rarely dares to try and condemn for the misdeeds that they have really committed, often enough on direct commission from high spheres in the regime.

These laws, on the pretext of some fraudulent trial, then serve to legitimise real mass trials against democratic and class militants who are truly anti-Fascist.

For these reasons I will not join in the regime's attempts to lynch the court which has deprived people who do not merit them of ideological alibis and civil dignity, as well as having

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*) Giacomo Matteotti - A Socialist reformer whose death at the hands of the Fascists in 1924 provoked a strike in Parliament.

absolved some people who are probably entirely innocent. Our penal code contains laws against conspiracy to commit crimes (even though neither the inquest nor the Constitutional Court showed any knowledge of this fact in the Lockheed "trial"). (*)

And the manovalanza nera is a crime neither more nor less than the ones committed by those above suspicion who used and protected them. Let them be punished for these crimes.

Let us be spared the charlatanism of trials for the reconstitution of the National Fascist Party by those who have legitimised its laws and imposed them on Italy for 33 years - which is much longer than the Fascists themselves managed to do - or by those who saw nothing other than "floating mines" and "injuries" in the constitutional referendums to abrogate real, live Fascism of the laws and of our governors.

Let the anti-Fascists put an end to the indecent spectacle of crocodile tears, laments and imprecations and begin at once with the campaign for the victory of the referendum to abrogate the infamous Reale law (public order, ed.) - the law, that is, which is on the political borderline of Fascism and which is a necessary step towards arrest on suspicion and other juridical aberrations signed by Cossiga and Bonifaci o on behalf of the "six parties" of the "constitutional range" (**).

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*) A scandal involving big names in the regime who took pay-offs in return for government purchases of Lockheed aircraft.

**) The parties that took part in drawing up the present Italian Constitution.