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)

There is today an archeological kind of anti-Fascism which serves as a good pretext for obtaining a license for true anti-Fascism. It is an easy kind of anti-Fascism whose target is an archaic Fascism that no longer exists and never will exist again. Let us take as a point of departure Naldini's recent film "Fascist". Well then, this film which has posed the problem of the relationship between a leader and a mob has demonstrated that both the leader Mussolini, and that mob are nothing but two archeological figures. A leader such as he would be absolutely inconceivable today, not just because of the futility and irrationality of what he says, but because he would simply not find any credibility or sphere of action in the modern world. Television would be enough to negate him, to destroy him politically. The techniques of that leader were effective from a platform, in an assembly, faced with a sea of people. It would absolutely not work on a screen.

This is not simply a superficial, purely technical observation: it is a symbol of the total change in our way of being and communicating with each other. And the same for the crowd, for that sea of people. It is enough to lay eyes on those faces for a moment to realise that the crowd there no longer exists, that it is dead and buried, that it is ancestral. This is enough to make us understand that this kind of Fascism cannot come back again. That is why a good part of today's anti-Fascism, or what is called anti-Fascism, is either ingenuous, or stupid, or a pretext in bad faith. Why fight or pretend to fight a buried corpse, an archeological remain that cannot scare anyone? In short, it is an anti-Fascism that is entirely convenient and restful.

I believe deeply that the true Fascism is what the sociologists have much too good-naturedly called the "consumer society". This definition seems innocuous, purely indicative. Yet the truth is other. If one observes reality well, and if above all one knows how to read the objects, the landscape, the urbanistic structures, and even more, men, one sees that the results of this carefree consumer society are the results of a dictatorship, real and true Fascism. In Naldini's film we have seen pictures of young men in uniform... With a difference, however. In those days when the young men took off their uniforms and set out for home, for their villages and fields, they again became Italians of fifty or a hundred years earlier, before Fascism.

Fascism, in reality had made fools, lackeys of them, and it may have also partly convinced them, but it had not seriously touched their true nature, the depth of their souls, their way of being. This new Fascism on the other hand has profoundly changed young people, has touched their inner nature, given them other feelings, other ways of thinking and living, other cultural models. They have not been superficially denatured as in Mussolini's time when it was a kind of pose, but they have been truly denatured, their souls have been stolen and transformed. Which means that this consumer society is a dictatorial society. In short, if the word Fascism refers to an overbearing exercise of power, then in the consumer society Fascism has been completely achieved.

The neo-Fascists have played a marginal role. That is why I have said that to reduce anti-Fascism to a struggle against those people is a swindle. For me the problem is much more complex, but also very clear. The real Fascism, I have said and repeat, is the consumer society, and the Christian Democrats have become, without realising it themselves, today's authentic Fascists. In these circumstances the "official" Fascists are nothing but the continuation of archeological Fascism, and as such are not to be taken seriously. From this point of view Almirante, (*) although he may have tried to bring himself up to date, is just as ridiculous as Mussolini. What is a more real danger today are the young Fascists from the neo-Nazi fringe who today only count on a few thousand fanatics but who tomorrow could become an army.

In my opinion Italy is going through a period analogous to what happened in Germany at the dawn of Nazism. In Italy too one sees the levelling and the abandonment of the old, traditional

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*) Giorgio Almirante, the Secretary of the neo-Fascist MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano).

peasant values, regional and characteristic, which was the humus on which Nazi Germany grew. There is an enormous mass of people who find themselves in a state of flux, in a state where values are imponderable, but which has not yet acquired the new ones generated by industrialisation. The people is becoming lower middle class, but is not yet either the one or the other. For me the nucleus of the Nazi army was just this hybrid mass, this was the human material which in Germany produced the Nazis. And it is this very risk that Italy is running.

With regard to the fall of Fascism, first of all there is a contingent psychological fact. The victory and the enthusiasm for it, the renewal of hope, the sense of freedom regained and of a whole way of being new had made people better after the liberation. Yes, better, purely and simply.

But then there is the other more real fact: the Fascism of that time, experienced by the people who were anti-Fascist and who had gone through twenty years of war and the Resistance, was all things told a better Fascism than today's kind. Twenty years of that old Fascism did not, I think, ever create as many victims as today's Fascism has done. Horrible things like the massacres of Milan, Brescia and Bologna (*) had never happened in those

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*) All terrorist bomb attacks on the civilian population.

twenty years. There was the Matteotti (*) killing, true, and there were other victims on both sides, but the aggressive arrogance, the violence, the nastiness, the inhumanity, the glacial coldness of the crimes committed from December 12, 1969 onwards had never been seen in Italy. That is why there is more hatred in the air, more scandal, less capacity for forgiveness... Only that this hatred - sometimes in good faith and other times in perfectly bad faith - is directed at the wrong target, at the archeological Fascists rather than at the real power holders.

Let's take the Fascist lead. I have an idea, perhaps a bit novelistic but I believe it is correct, of the way things work. The plot is this: the men in power, and I could perhaps even name names without fear of being very wrong - in any case, several of the men who have been governing us for thirty years - first were in charge of the strategy of tension against the Communists. Then, once the worries about subversion in '68 and of an immediate danger from the Communists were over, the same identical persons put into action the anti-Fascist strategy of tension. The terrorist attacks were thus all perpetrated by the same people. First they perpetrated the Piazza Fontana massacre and accused left-wing extremists, then they perpetrated the

Brescia and Bologna massacres and blamed the Fascists in the

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*) Giacomo Matteotti, an anti-Fascist Socialist leader kidnapped and killed by Fascist squads in 1924.

hasty and desperate attempt to reconstruct that virginal anti-Fascism that they so badly needed after the referendum and the referendum campaign to continue controlling the power situation as if nothing had happened.

With regard to the episodes on intolerance that you have recalled, I would not call them intolerance exactly. Or at least it is not intolerance typical of the consumer society. In reality they are cases of ideological terrorism. Unfortunately the left are presently living in an atmosphere of terrorism that began in '68 and continues until today. I would not say that a leftist professor who, corrupted by a certain leftist chauvinism won't give a diploma to a rightist student, is intolerant. I think he is terrified. Or a terrorist. But this kind of ideological terrorism has only a formal relationship to Fascism. Both the one and the other are terrorists, it is true. But beneath the schemata of these sometimes identical forms, one must recognise profoundly different realities. Otherwise one will inevitably champion the theory of the "opposing extremisms" or "Stalinism equals Fascism".

But I have called these episodes of terrorism and not intolerance because, according to me, true intolerance is that of the consumer society, of permissiveness conceded from above, desired by those above, which is the truest, worst, most insidious, the coldest and most ruthless form of intolerance. Because it is intolerance masquerading as tolerance, because it is not real, because it can be revoked whenever the power holders feel the need. Because it is the true Fascism from which then comes the Fascism of manners: useless, hypocritical and basically welcome to the regime.