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)

After everyone jumping to their feet in ritual indignation for the Bologna bombing (*), here we all are seated again holding a salon, as Lukacs would say, on the edge of the abyss. One discusses if vengeance should prevail over justice, hatred over reason, the strong state over the one that guarantees rights and freedoms. Everyone is agreed on who perpetrated the slaughter: it was them, the "rightists" the "black shirts", maybe even the fearsome Roman branch of the NAR (**). And this is the point at which terrible, disquieting questions arise: and if the NAR or someone on their behalf was only hired to perpetrate the massacre, if they had only sold their services, in short, if they were practising piece-work killing? And if behind them were the same ones as before, those who ordered the Piazza Fontana and Italicus (bombings), (***) as unknown today as they were twelve years ago? -----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

*) A terrorist bombing of the Bologna train station whose perpetrators were never identified.

**) Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari or Revolutionary Armed Nucleuses.

***) Two other terrorist bombings in Milan's Piazza Fontana and of the luxury train Italicus.

These are the questions we put to Salvatore Sechi, professor of Contemporary History at the Universities of Bologna and Venice, a contributor to the most important Italian newspapers, the author of various books, the most recent of which ("La pelle di zigrino", Cappelli publishers, 325 pp.) has only been out a few weeks and is a careful and unorthodox analysis of the Italian Communist Party's (PCI) history and policies.

Question: Well then, Prof. Sechi, is this a new Piazza Fontana or a new brand of terrorism?

Sechi: First of all one must not insist on interpretations claiming it to be the criminal insanity of a few individuals nor the theory of a single brain but running a diversified network - that is, Craxi's "grand old man". Rather, terrorism arises from the political and social constitution of our country. And paradoxical as it may seem, it expresses a demand of politics, of the state and even of democracy. If we do not understand this we will never be able to dry up the stream, that is the water in which it lives and is nourished.

Q: But the terrorists of both left and right are said to have quite different goals than the things you mention...

S: I think that when the politicians reduce their reason for being to a kind of homework (democracy = Resistance = constitution)... well then, they are committing suicide. A democracy whose only legitimation has become pure self-defence actually needs to create certainties about its own past: that is why it keeps up a tired harping on the ideology, already a dead issue, of its own origins. In reality it is simply afraid of completely confronting the conflicts that are caused by a changing society. The point of departure is something quite different: to ask oneself why the social matrix is a common cause of both right-wing and left-wing extremism.

Q: Give us the answer yourself.

S: First of all, we note a difference: left-wing terrorism is selective and strikes at "the heart of the state" by means of individual symbols (judges, political leaders, journalists...) while right-wing terrorism strikes at the mass of people such as in the case of Bologna and counts on massacres. But the aim of both types is the same: to produce a mass reaction that it will bring on a hard-lining government that will in turn create another opposing mass movement for its destruction.

Q: These days many authoritative voices have been raised asking for at least a few tools typical of the state with an iron fist such as the death penalty...

S: I would say that the man in the street is in favour of certain requests. And this is the proof that the terrorists' "need for a state" makes use of the "government's inadequacies" which the citizens feel. There has in fact been a kind of forking out, a scissors shape between the substantial changes occurring in the "real country" with regard to culture, the conception of work and democracy, and the leopard-spot changes - that is the hit-and-miss and mostly unessential kind that have occurred in the political-institution system, the "legal country".

Q: Who has filled this vacuum?

S: Right-wing terrorism did up until '74 and subsequently it was left-wing terrorism. Both tried to make it impossible for these lacerations to heal by shedding blood. If they still have not reached the objective it is because the law and order forces (at least in part), the judiciary and the workers' movement have known how to resist.

Q: But the national unity governments supported by both the DC and the PCI, haven't they coincided with the greatest terrorist activity?

S: Yes. And this is because those days you are alluding to could not be an efficient reply to the crisis in relations between collective and institutional movements. Postponements, delaying tactics, compromise have won the day. More generally, the party system has considered itself the only channel of representation of the thousands of social subjects (workers, women, students, outsiders, homosexuals) who emerged after '68. And so it is precisely those to give silent or mass cover to terrorist manoeuvres who feel excluded and badly represented by our political system which is mainly dominated by the protection of party and union interests.

Q: Then you believe that, above all, large-scale reforms are

needed to defeat the politics of violence?

S: We need to reconstruct the political struggle on a basis of great programs of transformation (which also means reform of the executive) in such a way that every force re-acquires its own identity and independence. And when I speak of forces I do not only mean the parties. The new "social forces" in fact rightly demand the prerogative of participating and decision-making in a manner not subordinate to party secretaries. The reports on the voters as registered party members show, in fact, that they are a slender minority and so their all-embracing demands cannot be sustained.

Q: And in the meantime, while we dedicate ourselves to these transformations, the others shoot and plant bombs...

S: It is necessary that the preventive and repressive machinery of the state really works. Special laws have been approved, emergency measures, figures that have never been seen before such as "the Queen's witnesses" Peci and Fioroni, that permit us to identify and strike at the puppets and puppeteers of terrorism if we really want to. For ten years the theorists and often the perpetrators of violence have been known to the secret services, the judiciary and the police. The NAR, the BR (Red Brigades, ed.) and "Autonomia (Operaia)" (*) are not "moles" but individuals who openly foster the ideology of armed battle, insurrection, and subversive designs in pamphlets, periodicals and newspapers. Is it thinkable that the "competent" authorities have not placed agents there "to keep informed (on the situation) from the inside"? What security measures where then adopted? The inefficiency of the state organisations on such delicate terrain - is there not the danger today of their being a cover for complicity and re

ticence if not the real and true sanctuaries of terrorism?

Q: Therefore only a strong government can model our democracy?

S: As the Weimar Republic showed, democracy dies when high levels of authoritarianism are injected into its organism. But when, as in Italy today, there is no political democracy capable of governing the conflicts (and not only to wipe them out or squeeze them hard as instead often happens), there is a lack of authority (that is, decisional power even on the cellular level: in the neighbourhoods, the schools, the factories), this is transformed into a reactionary demand - that is, the aggressive need of a strong government.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

*) Autonomia Operaia was a far-left "workers" movement accused of collaborating with terrorists in 1979.

(Interview by Mino Guerrini, "Giornale di Sicilia", August 6, 1980)