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)

The Bologna judges don't like to hear talk of a government-inspired massacre. Neither did judges Cudillo and Occorsio, who began the inquiry into Piazza Fontana, (*) like to hear about a government-inspired massacre, but that is exactly what it was. That's what it so clearly was, that once the material perpetrators were identified, and the intermediaries, great care was taken not to discover those at the top who ordered the job done. And the Parliament, in its untouchable autonomy, and the opposition in its unquenchable thirst for truth and justice took great pains not to open a public debate on the fact that government officials, prefects, police chiefs, judges, and ministers in varying degrees, but quite consciously, participated in a massacre of Italian citizens.

With such skeletons in the closet, it would be better if the Bologna judges did not take the trenchant and disdainful tones they do in pronouncing the only valid hypothesis they recognise:

"An attack on the state". The world we live in, let them well remember, is full of crimes as well as of surprises. Not even the

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*) The train station in Bologna, as previously Piazza Fontana in Milan, where the scenes of terrorist bombings in which many innocent bystanders were killed. The perpetrators were never brought to justice nor full light thrown on the facts.

journalist Valerio Ochetto, a likeable man, believes in the government-inspired attack and ironically contrasts our ideas with those of "Le Monde", which also does not believe in the government-inspired attack. Yes, I mean "Le Monde", the French daily that comes out every afternoon to enable provincials in the First, Second and Third Worlds to show their fellow citizens that their taste in reading is "raffiné", cosmopolitan and authoritative.

A book has come out on "Le Monde" that Ochetto perhaps should read. It tells of the very authoritative manipulating the authoritative paper has indulged in on behalf of the Quai des Orfévres and other French potentates. However, the issue that "Le Monde" dedicated to our terrorism was remarkable, particularly the contribution of the only Italian expert, one of this newspaper's professional assistants who in Italy was a reporter of union news and now resides in Paris. His unquestionably concise thesis was that there is terrorism in Italy because there is and because it wants to make it known that there is.

Joking aside, one could speak seriously about, or better, repeat, why it is we speak of government-inspired attacks, why we reject attributing the attacks to the Fascists, to the crazies or to demons. When one says that our civilisation is a metropolitan one, characterised by service industries and computerisation, and extremely strong at the same time that it is fragile, one says something obvious that sociologists, economists and politicians have all written about. But obviousness does not justify us in losing our sense of proportion or common sense.

To say that our civilisation is fragile does not mean that one fine day any schizoid, or fanatic, or depressed or manic personality can paralyse it and knock it out just because he feels like it. The fanatics and the maniacs can, as individuals, threaten to jump from the Colosseum, or take office workers hostage as happened in Milan's Via Santa Sofia, or even hijack an airplane; but they cannot, by themselves, constitute the likes of an organisation without which a Bologna massacre would be unthinkable and impossible to commit.

And to say the word organisation is already enough to consign the crazies, or the fanatics or the maniacs to the minor roles of the material perpetrators: like one Bertoli who threw a bomb into a crowd in a way that recalled Calabresi (*) in front of the Milan police headquarters; one of those curious crazies, you know, who are guests in an Israeli kibbutz for several months, then given a passport, lodged in Italy and taken to the scene of their crazy crime, after which nothing more is heard of them.

To get to the point: to commit a massacre such as the one in Bologna, one would have needed the help of someone who could get such a powerful explosive out of the best-guarded military arsenals, who could procure the timers and other sophisticated

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*) Calabresi - an assassinated police commissioner.

devices, who could have made a study of the place in which the blast would have the maximum effect and who could have arranged hide-outs for all these people in Italy and abroad.

At this point one could say: But an organisation like that could be independent of the secret services, could be a right-wing organisation aiming at the restoration of Fascism. It's fine to be anti-Fascist, its all right to use anti-Fascism for one's own ends, but to want to believe and make others believe that the Fascists - or whatever right-wing extremists you like - are perfect fools is another aspect of Italian provincialism and conformity.

To suppose that a group of reactionaries, by themselves, will commit such massacres in the hope of bringing about the victory of a military coup that doesn't exist, an authoritarian right-wing that doesn't exist, and an anti-democratic public opinion that doesn't exist - this seems truly excessive. However fanatical and maniacal they may be, they must surely have noticed and realised during the last ten years that Italy is not Bolivia nor even Greece, that people are tired of party power but not of democracy, tired of a false pluralism but not of liberty, of inept and indecisive governments, but not of governments that govern.

Well then? Well, we say then that the prime movers are in the government, that this is terrorism as a surrogate for politics, just as there are helpers of the imperial powers.

If anyone who has a better idea, let him present it.

("La Repubblica", August 13, 1980)