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)

Not even this time has he renounced his role of provocative protagonist. He presented himself at the Communist Party Congress wrapped in a seedy black cape ("What do you mean cape? It was my blue Loden.") with his usual challenging air. Jean Fabre, Secretary of the PR, kept quiet as he hoisted protest placards. And he, Marco Pannella, has cast the biggest stone. Saturday, March 31. The great hall of Rome University. The Radical Party Congress. Pannella improvises his talk, as usual. He attacks the DC and the Communists, gets mad at the historic compromise (*), asserts that the Communists have no right to condemn terrorism. He bursts out with: "The PCI (Italian Communist Party, ed.) continues to bear as an emblem of the Resistance the Via Rasella (**) episode against young Germans guilty only of wearing a uniform of a different colour".

Touché. The PCI reacts with fury. "He is profaning the

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) The Communist Party's decision to collaborate with the Christian Democrats.

**) A partisan attack on German troops in Rome which led to the

retaliation massacre at the Fosse Adreatine.

Resistance." "L'Unità" (the official Communist daily, ed.) accuses the Radical leader of defending Nazi criminals. Pannella reacts by bringing a law suit. Is it the usual game of provocations? Or is there a "political reason" behind these assertions?

Question: What is the reason for your position?

Answer: To tell the truth, my remarks were not aimed only at Via Rasella. I was making a speech about violence and non-violence: the difference between those who support their government, their class, their country or religion by armed defence, and those who insist that the enemy must be slaughtered. Thus I also brought up other questions of liberal and non-violent juridical culture. The first to be considered was terrorism: I merely maintained that if one wants to try to understand the phenomenon one must go beyond it. We must become aware, that is, that terrorism is a part of our history both left and right. I spoke of nihilists, of Dostoevsky, of the republican Oberdan. (*)

Q: In order to tell us what?

A: That for us the enemy has to be considered an adversary. And as such he is to be met in a lay and non-violent manner. Otherwise, if you accept the logic of war and the state of war

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*) Guglielmo Oberdan - A Nineteenth Century irredentist revolutionary who tried to kill the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and was hanged.

as extenuating circumstances for killing, you forget that there is always a person under the uniform. And we have always maintained that the soldier is someone who is being exploited.

Q: But the bomb in Via Rasella was a war action...

A: Certainly, but a terrorist war action.

Q: Why?

A: Because those who were responsible for it knew perfectly well that if they blew up forty enemy soldiers, the norms of war, which they had proclaimed, provided for a reprisal, for the execution of four hundred innocent people.

Q: You mentioned the name of Salvo D'Acquisto. (*)

A: Right. But I didn't say that it was necessary to behave like him. D'Acquisto, who had no class or political conscience reacted in a certain way. Evidently those who planned the Via Rasella bombing (who had hierarchies and military structures) did not feel obliged to give themselves up.

Q: And the references to Reder and Hess?

A: These were references to a different juridical society that we ought to aspire to. I maintained that to keep anyone at all locked up inside four walls was an anti-juridical illusion. To keep Hess locked up for life in the name of anti-Fascism is and absurdity. He is only an 84-year-old man who has been in prison for forty years. To knock down those walls would be

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*) A Carabiniere who offered himself as a substitute for 22 hostages due to be executed.

anti-Fascism today.

Q: A strange statement.

A: If Hess and Reder are released it means there is no longer any reason to keep the penalty of life in prison.

Q: The question you have raised is not only historical but above all political. And it arouses a suspicion: that there may also be an election directive...

A: We have a right to reply to the PCI. When lies worthy of a Goebbels begin to come out of the Botteghe Oscure (the street where Communist Party headquarters is located, ed.) we have to say that the bureaucrats of the PCI want to deceive their voters. They support Fascist laws, the support the Reale law (special police powers to enforce public order, ed.) - and then they claim to be anti-Fascist? So it is clear that when they accuse us of being against the delegation of the masses and to be too soft on Curcio (founder of the Red Brigades, ed.) I can only reply that, while I do not in the least agree with him, I can understand the choice he has made. Even if it deserves condemnation. But Palmiro Togliatti's (*) choice was much worse - he who for years defended the tortures and the assassinations of Zinoviev, Trotsky and all the comrades by whose sides he had fought for years. At this point the problem is no longer one of Via Rasella nor the betrayal of juridical culture but of millions and millions of

the dead - Communists, workers, peasants, killed by the Stalinists.

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*) A Communist Party National Secretary

Q: Is the PCI Stalinist today? Can the Communists be recuperated?

A: Let us state a premise. Stalinism must be be seen in the historical framework of the period in which it arose. In the USSR, of course, it was associated with Stalin. In the West it was due to a right wing phenomenon (Togliatti who was looking for an agreement with the monarchy and the Church); in short, something hard but corruptible. The truth is elsewhere, however: the anti-Stalinists of the regime have always been happy with a Communist and Stalinist PCI, they have never wanted a Socialist PCI. Now the problem is this: how influential are the Communists? If the democratic centre endures, the mass of the members will submit and only the hundred or so top figures will count. Lama's (*) excommunicating us is of the same kind as Togliatti and the Stalinists. The reflexes of intolerance and authoritarianism remain.

Q: And the historic compromise, your public enemy number one?

A: We are the only ones ever to oppose the DC regime and not being subordinate to them we have fought against the historic compromise (first Togliatti's and then Berlinguer's) (**). I must say that it was a solid relationship that lasted a long time and its protagonists monopolised the roles of head of the

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*) Luciano Lama, chief of the Communist Labour Union CGIL.

**) Enrico Berlinguer, a PCI National Secretary.

"government" and head of the "opposition". What do they want?

That's easy. Together with their subalterns (members of centers and fronts, the centre-left) they aim to reconstruct the juridical and economic structures of corporative and inter-classist state of the PNF (National Fascist Party, ed.)