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)

Almirante - As an aspiring showman I thank friend Jacobelli, and I believe there are three of us, because you too, no doubt...

Jacobelli - I, no, I am not in the least!

Pannella - Jacobelli is an aspiring impresario.

Almirante - I confirm that it is I who have invited the Hon. Mr. Pannella and I thank him for having accepted. We are not here, as some newspapers have written, to challenge or fight each other. We are here as two free men, in the name of two free parties, that are very far apart in their views. I would say that we were actually at the antipodes. But perhaps for that very reason we will be able to speak openly. The government is in crisis and this cycle is dedicated to the crisis. So then, I think we ought to clarify what kind of opposition we want and what kind the others are making.

In my opinion there are at this time four kinds of opposition: there is his majesty's opposition represented by the Communist Party, an opposition which conditions and compromising at the same time. There is the "constructive" opposition, in quotation marks, represented by the Liberals and Social Democrats; "constructive" in quotation marks and thus - without quotation marks - useless or impotent. There is an assured opposition within the regime and that is the Radical opposition. There is a very certain opposition against the regime and outside of it, and that is the opposition that I have the honour to interpret.

For a first, rapid judgement of the opposition in the regime: when I say, my dear Pannella, that your opposition is in the regime, I mean that it is boring because it repeats all of the subjects of the First Republic that came out of the Resistance, all of them old hat and all of them bankrupt, or pretexts, or convenient; all of them with anti-Fascism written on their foreheads, that kind of anti-Fascism that you so often criticise but which in substance, or in form, above all, you share in practice - without social content, without a programme, with just a general push to the left. That is the Radicals' position as it looks to me.

Pannella - First of all, if you allow me, Jacobelli, I want to say that I do not much appreciate this story of the "government as a show" because - and this is not meant to reprove you - it is a "qualunquista" (*) attitude. In reality politics generally provides us with a pretty bad show. But everything which is public is a spectacle - a person standing in the window is a spectacle. The question is whether it is a good or a bad

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) Qualunquista - a common term in Italian political parlance indicating indifference to and mistrust of political parties and the party system in general.

show. It is a question of whether this show is more like

vaudeville, or commedia dell'arte, or if by chance, as always happens in politics, it is a dramatic play in which everyone must

be aware that it depends on him as well as all the others if this play is to end in tragedy or whether it sometimes can end with the continuation of life and of the drama.

I am perfectly well aware of the dramatic character of our debate, because in a democracy a debate is a high altar of democracy and, I must add, a question of duty. I know very well what kind of speculations will start tomorrow and that is what I am here for, to offer some traitors to anti-Fascism a chance and out of fidelity to true anti-Fascism, to keep faith with myself, with Ernesto Rossi, Terracini, the Rosselli brothers, Gobetti; to keep faith with the Resistance against Fascism and during Fascism, the resistance of intransigent men, of men who in some cases were murdered and killed by those who did not respect the differences of others. It is the Resistance in the name of an anti-Fascist society, in which Fascism above all must have its full rights respected. And I am here to desecrate, as an anti-Fascist, this taboo against Fascists, which turns the diverse into the perverse, even if he is a deputy of the Republic, even if he is in our Parliament. Whenever Italian citizens, in their free convict

ions - however mistaken from my point of view - make someone into a Member of Parliament, we have the duty, if we do not believe in turning to weapons, if we do not believe in demonizing others, of using the democratic tool of speech and trying to release an element of truth into our daily lives.

This is what anti-Fascism once was. To tell the truth, Almirante, I say that you were part of the bad pseudo anti-Fascist show because for many years you were really in agreement with the others on all basic issues. Communists, Christian Democrats, Socialists - none of them wanted to touch your Rocco code (the Fascist era's penal code, ed.) and you were in agreement. They were in agreement in not wanting to touch the filthy military codes promulgated in 1941 by his majesty the King of Italy and Albania and Emperor of Ethiopia, Victor Emanuel III and Cavaliere Benito Mussolini, the Duce of Fascism etc. Everyone in agreement, Communists, Socialists, by way of the soap operas. On divorce you were in agreement with the regime. Now my time is running out. I will take this up again later.

Almirante - I can understand the worries of the Hon. Mr. Pannella finding himself faced with someone he considers a Fascist. Having a discussion for the first time, on television, with a Fascist! My dear Pannella, I release you from all worries, all taboos...

Pannella - It is no prerogative of yours, it is that of the people, Almirante. You cannot relieve me of worries.

Almirante - But the people absolve you at this moment, because I am not here as a Fascist, nor to represent Fascism, let alone as author of the Rocco code...

Pannella - Fascism is a big thing: you do not represent it.

Almirante - I advise you that I did not declare the war, nor did I fight it by myself, and so these historical responsibilities weigh upon an entirely different group of leaders of that time. I am here as the leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano - Destra Nazionale and as an Italian deputy. And I am here as the only deputy and secretary of a party who can openly state, without fear of contradiction, that he is against the regime and outside the regime, not because of having been excluded from it by means of the ridiculous formulas of the various constitutional acts - God help us! - but because I, perhaps presumptuously, but decisively and courageously, stand opposed to this fake and deceitful regime which has been a fiasco and admits to having been a fiasco every day in the persons of its representatives, you included.

It is not true that I am working for the regime's battles. I am working against the regime's battles in all senses: the codes, the so-called freedom-killing laws. O.K. Just try to fight against the Scelba law (outlawing the reconstitution of Fascist party, ed.), which exists. Why don't you ask for a referendum to abrogate the Scelba law and not only those articles of the Rocco code which remain in force and limit freedoms - I think they are the ones concerned with defamation. I am much in favour of abrogating those articles, even if I do not like certain kinds of defamation against the Armed Forces, and the Carabinieri in particular, which these days are printed in newspapers, possibly near to your heart, and I condemn them. But I condemn them morally. It is of no importance if they are condemned in court or not.

The thing that divides us is precisely our differing anti-regime attitudes, because we want to move towards the real needs of Italians, which are internal security, social security, and international security. Italy is a country that lives with fear. In my opinion drastic norms are needed, not modest decrees, which you have jettisoned and we have jettisoned for opposite reasons: you consider them too repressive and we consider them neither effectively discouraging nor repressive at all.

No, what is needed is that the laws in force, Fascist - O.K., you have left the Fascist laws in force, the consolidation act of public security - should be immediately and rigidly enforced: death sentences, one hundred thousand death sentences. Yes, I have the courage to say it, not as a Fascist, nor as an ex-Fascist, but as head of the MSI-DN, as an Italian deputy and also a European one. The next time round I will speak of other problems, social ones, morals and customs, which interest me greatly.

Pannella - I have not called you a Fascist. I believe Fascism to be a great and tragic page in our history that beat us down tragically and brought disaster to Europe and all the world...

Almirante - We are at war again...

Pannella - ... so I don't call you a Fascist because I don't think you merit the name, because that great and terrible nobility - terrible - that factor, I repeat, of great, tragic force that defeated us... you cannot represent this. Perhaps the continuation of the Fascist state, which was a matter of power, was taken on by the anti-Fascists who came after, those who in reality shut Terracini's mouth and indicted Ernesto Rossi when he polemized against the regime, the great anti-Fascism during Fascism. The anti-Fascists have prevailed who were in Moscow to assassinate as many Communists as the Fascist Party ever did, here, in Italy, and perhaps more. But this is not the question.

What I am interested in saying is something else: it is - I repeat - something that regards the structure of the state, the new Fascism, the kind of great an terrible dignity, is once again bringing the country to disaster...

Almirante - The Communist and Christian Democratic kind.

Pannella - The ostensibly anti-Fascist kind that daily denies the great impulses and great hopes of a free and thus anti-Fascist society. And you know that in regard to this I have no need of being reassured by you or by anyone else. I answer to my conscience just as all my Radical comrades do. Every time a boy, a "Fascist" in quotes boy, is assassinated, every time, before '68 (*) and whenever, you know what the Radical attitude has been. You know how often we have risen up against the

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*) The year of student and worker rebellions.

discrimination practised against you...

Almirante - The last time, I didn't notice, because you were the only ones not to speak in the Chamber, in that very noble session dedicated to the assassination of our poor Angelo Mancia, a messenger, just a kid...

Pannella - I don't know, that day, you know, I wasn't there. I only know that on the evening before your group leader went to congratulate comrade Mimmo Pinto on our attitude. Perhaps you should have the intellectual generosity with yourself to recognise that, at some price perhaps, ever since we have taken seats in the Chamber of Deputies (you got in in '48) the problems of excommunications, of the perverse, of violence have been brought up by us.

Almirante - I will remind you of the Scelba law for your referendums...

Pannella - Is there anything else you would like to remind me of? My memory is excellent, and in my excellent memory there is the refusal - for example - the disgrace of calling you a gunman. It is a disgrace in the sense that it does not even interest me when you have been responsible for 36 years, and still are today, of a path of violence in which your party - it is no personal problem, neither for you nor for me - up until a few years ago, with the Pesentis, the Cefis's, (*) with all the ---------------------------------------------------------------

*) Carlo Pesenti, a cement industrialist and Eugenio Cefis, president of the state hydrocarbons agency ENI.

power - the Montecatini and the Edison companies and so on - with the generals and the chiefs of staff who, when they should have been gotten rid of were brought back...

Almirante - Poor Di Lorenzo!

Pannella - Poor everyone who always voted MSI thinking it was a great opposition party. After 36 years that you have been in Parliament they can draw their conclusions. After the five years we have been in Parliament, perhaps these people can arrive at a mature opinion in talking to themselves, talking about Radical anti-Fascism, the kind that respects the identity and the history of everyone, except for the penal code, which...

Almirante - Well then, if you allow me, let's get back to the real problems, to what the real country wants to know from us, I think, this evening. I spoke of the need of internal security, now I will speak of social security: bread for Italians. You fight nobly, humanely against hunger in the world. I beg of you to look at Italy. There are quarters of Naples that I have visited, that I would say I visit daily. There are quarters of Bari, there are quarters of Reggio Calabria, there are quarters of Messina, there is Belice... Africa is here in our country!

Pannella - Lauro (*) in his time would already have been able to tell you about Naples and Ciccio Franco about Calabria.

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*) Achille Lauro - monarchist, mayor of Naples and the founder of the shipping line which bears his name.

**) Di Lorenzo - head of the Carabinieri implicated in coup plans in 1964.

Almirante - Ciccio Franco fought nobly in the Reggio Calabria uprising... (*)

Pannella - Lauro could have told you how he was elected on the MSI lists.

Almirante - ... then, poor man, he left along with all the others that tried to make something different out of the Movimento Sociale Italiano. We are in the vanguard socially, my dear Pannella, and we concern ourselves with our country's affairs. We would like the budget to be changed, but not to earmark thousands of billions for famine relief throughout the world, but to earmark thousands of billions for famine in Italy. I call you on this because we believe, cordially and courteously, that this is the current function of a party that really wants to take a stance against a regime that has forgotten about the real problems of our country, including and above all on the social level. And there is another need: the need for international security that is beginning to worry many Italians.

We agreed with the battle against Osimo. (**) It wasn't and

isn't only a social battle, it is also a great battle of

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*) Calabria - A dispute over which city, Reggio Calabria or Catanzaro should be the capital of the Region of Calabria.

**) The Treaty of Osimo signed in 1975 settled a territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia that had been going on since the end of World War II.

political commitment. We agreed now in Europe that the EEC-Yugoslavia Pact should be concluded, but that pact also includes Osimo and we are fighting for this for reasons which by now have to do with secure national borders. Let us try not to forget that and fall into a false pacifism. Let us try to bet on

security. Only then will you have the right, my dear Pannella, to be considered truly in the opposition, the opposition to this regime, this system which you say you condemn, as we condemn it. But it seems to me that you are being too condescending, too accommodating.

And finally, there is the accommodation of customs, of vices. I detest demagoguery in the social field, the kind that is mostly advanced by the Socialists, and even more by the Communists; but I am afraid of the demagoguery that confuses freedom with libertarian ideas, that favours the worst instincts of man, of every man...

Pannella - Why don't you come out and speak of homosexuality and drugs?

Almirante - That's what I am alluding to, that above all, drugs above all.

Pannella - And homosexuality, where do you put that? Because that is another keystone of male-chauvinism...

Almirante - That worries me too, if you will excuse me. To tell the truth it disgusts me a bit, if I may express my own ideas, not as the leader of the MSI-DN. It is an entirely personal feeling that has nothing to do with politics. This libertarianism...

Pannella - And the next thing they end up in concentration camps!

Almirante - ...which promotes the basest instincts of men, which debilitates our youth, which takes the backbone out of most young people, which then leads to violence, because violence is what it's about: this inciting to libertarianism is the worst kind of violence like the proclamation of atheism. It is unlikely that a proclaimed atheist can also be a humanitarian by the side of the suffering and the dying. These positions are suspicious to my mind and make me fear that they are radically pro-Communist, in the worst sense of the word when I speak of Communism.

Pannella - Personally when one speaks of pro-Communism - if by pro-Communism you mean deep friendship, the sign of desiring companionship and connection with the great mass of workers who in good faith have always entrusted their hopes of justice and liberation for themselves and others to the Communist message...

Almirante - Poor wretches!

Pannella - ...I am always proud to be considered pro-Communist. Whereas I have also noticed that, historically your anti-Communism on the other hand has always been a pretext, not to strike at the Communist leadership, because you made the Ribbentrop-Stalin pact...

Almirante - Made? So your back to Fascism as a style!

Pannella - I am speaking of a certain cultural tradition. No, excuse me, I am not offering insults...

Almirante - Insults? I am not in the least offended...

Pannella - I am simply speaking of a cultural tradition. In general all the perpetrators of massacres - and you are not among them - never respected those who were different, whether homosexuals, Fascists or Jews.

Almirante - You have to go back as far as Ribbentrop...

Pannella - May I go on? You are always elegant and never interrupt, but today you are interrupting a lot!...

Almirante - My apologies.

Pannella - So I only wanted to say that people feel history in their bones. You speak of violence. And I say that your road up till now - this worries me - is a road that has turned your boys into the assassinated and assassins.

Almirante - No, the assassinated.

Pannella - Assassinated and assassins. If you refuse to admit this you will not make a contribution to truth. Just as other violent positions growing out of Socialist hopes and sometimes from Catholic ones have created assassins and the assassinated, so too have there been many, very many, in the ranks of the so-called left. Hence it is on this issue, the programme of violence, that we are facing each other. We say that there is a new Buchenwald, Almirante, a new Mathausen of 40 million people who are being exterminated by hunger every day throughout the world. We want to accept this task as those did who accepted the Nazi Buchenwald.

Almirante - And in Italy, in Italy there is already...

Pannella - That was the old story. What did they say during the 30's? When people said "watch out, Hitler and Mussolini mean war, extermination, Buchenwald" everybody answered: "Mind your own business". We repeat again that where 40 million of innocent people die massacred, exterminated, it is the international political set-up that prepares their deaths, because it desecrates them as it desecrates those at home. And go tell your kids that life is sacred when you do nothing to save 40 million elsewhere.

At this point I must tell you that soon - very soon - we will have the possibility if you like on a private television channel - it can be anyone at all - to question each other for two or three hours, to get to know each other better. Because my premise is that your road is a road of death - today, not thirty years ago. All positions aiming to restore the death penalty, the Second Republic - which you know will never happen because it can only be brought about by the PCI, the DC or by a coup; so which do you choose? - are pure demagoguery, a jump ahead.

You talk of the Carabinieri. It is the Carabinieri generals

you talk of, but not of the Carabinieri of Peteano (killed in an auto bombing, ed.) They are the kids of the MSI, of the Fronte del Gioventù (Youth Front, ed.) who know...

Almirante: - No, no.

Pannella: - We will talk about that when...

Almirante: - That is something you really cannot say. You are running the risk of a law suit, and you are going to get one! I'm sorry...

Pannella: - And you know, Almirante, that I will fight for the authorisation to proceed because I want to answer for the things I say. Just as I can say that in all the massacres, in Milan, etc. the judges found evidence of connivance with the secret services, and you were always among the connivers. So let us remember, in terms of moral conduct too - and I am finishing, Almirante - that a caress is a non-violent act, wherever and by whomever it is given; it is an act of happiness and respect of others. And a violent act, wherever and by whomever it is given, is contrarily an act of death. At this point I must say that I invite you to a three-hour debate, elsewhere and very soon. While the audience is watching the end of this debate of ours, I invite Romans to watch Teleroma 56 where I will go on talking. You come too if you can; for my part I will continue to talk about this encounter and other things. I would also like to say that I hope that all the Italians who have listened to us, Almirante, on wh

atever political side, will help celebrate the hope for life at Easter and that all Italians will be ready to sign our referendums petition: it is the only concrete act being made against the regime.

Almirante: - I will end by saying that I certainly accept any invitations to future debates from friend Pannella anywhere at all. And I want to end by sending an affectionate greeting to all Italian victims of violence, victims of violence...

Pannella: - It is your duty to do so!...

Almirante: - ...starting with the Carabinieri, with the policemen, the soldiers and the youth of whatever political side. Allow me to remind you that we are statistically - and this is not a record that I am happy about - the worst hit, because twenty three of our youths have been assassinated in recent years. And I do not say by whom or on whose behalf. I say by the regime, against which for this reason too I will speak and fight in the name of real peace among Italians, peace with security, through security, with all my strength:

Pannella: - I hope you will have a change of heart and will do it in the future. You have not done it in the past.

Almirante: - I have always done it.

Jacobelli: - Enough. Here ends the face-to-face debate between the Hon. Mr. Almirante and the Hon. Mr. Pannella. As the moderator I cannot express political judgements on the merits of the broadcast. I can, however, as impresario of these broadcasts - in Pannella's phrase - express my hope, and interpreting the hope of the public, that the Parliamentary Commission will make these two-party debates more and more frequent. Good evening.