ABSTRACT: The following articles make reports and evaluations of the direct, non-violent actions organised by the Radical Party on April 19, 1982 in Moscow, Prague, East Berlin, Sophia, Bucharest and Budapest, in which tens of thousands of Radicals took part coming from various European countries. The idea, which was formed soon after Gen. Jaruzelski's coup d'etat, is based on the denunciation of the objective convergence of policy between East and West against the South all over the world. Radical internationalism starts directly with a denunciation of the lack of cultural and political ideals and identity in the face of the great economic and political choices to be made in an era of change. This is a situation similar to that of the Thirties when the democracies became dictatorships of the masses, when the new communication and cultural media became ignoble and dreadfully powerful lackeys, and when hopes were crushed: all of them, those of Gentile, Peguy, Durruti, Zaniboni. Today, faced with the extermina
tion of millions of people by hunger and misery, one can not remain inert. Life, peace, truth are created with life, peace and truth; if other roads are taken, the end can only be, as was Franco's Spain yesterday, a new Vietnam. The Radicals' weapons: militant and non-violent action. The Radicals' demands in the countries of "true Socialism" is that of yesterday's Socialists: life, bread, peace.
NOTIZIE RADICALI No.6, May 28, 1982
Once again the picture is very clear. Faced with the urgent, the great economic and political choices, the choice of ideals and identity, to be made in this era of change, it seems that there are no answers, no cultural and political force among those who share power and impotence, capable of furnishing them. Not only in Europe, but in the entire world. We have seen this situation before. Never has there been a real opportunity as in the Twenties and Thirties, such energy and capacity to change things: the availability of media offering such wide possibilities for communication among people and cultures; the profound renewal that is traversing all forms and all levels of the processes of knowledge; the participation of every social stratum in the development of this possible renewal; the new democracies, the new states. It was necessary and urgent to find new ways of investing these precious assets; it was urgent to find new choices of renewal, capable and precise indications for the course to be taken
by these forces.
The choices that were made contained only the seeds of destruction. The democracies became dictatorships of the masses in which the communications media became ignobly servile and dreadfully powerful. The hopes, even the best of them, were trampled into death and despair. All of them from Gentile to Peguy, from Durruti to Zaniboni, acted in expectation of seeing theri ideas defeated. And the few who still found the strength to resist did so by offering their hopes along with their bodies to massacre.
Today as well, faced with the extermination of thousands of people every day through starvation, through our economic and political choices, faced with the dozens of wars that, from the South Pole to the gateways of Europe, kill Italians and Englishmen and Argentinians; faced with this massacre of life and peace equal only to the massacre of truth by the great communication media, we must not remain inert. It is not possible; it is a question of the survival of us all. Survival therefore must not be entrusted to methods which we have already seen sink into waters among the blackest in our history. This must be said with the greatest respect for the consistency with which, however suicidal, our comrades of the International Brigades, for example, or those of Via Rasella (1) killed and let themselves be killed. Our choices are and shall be different ones.
Peace, life, truth are constructed with the tools of peace, life and truth. If other roads are taken they lead to Franco's Spain or to the Vietnam of today. No one can indicate other, different possibilities.
Militant and non-violent action are our weapons. Today more than ever it is important not to give way facing, as we are, a dramatic situation where the powerful of the earth, with their mad choices of rearmament, or even worse, false negotiations for balanced disarmament, are pushing us into situations like Poland, Afghanistan, Salvador.
Faced with the choices, the great political, economic choices and ideals that must be made, one must furnish different instructions capable of creating and governing hopes and progress so that we do not give way, armed as we are with the non-violent weapons of civil disobedience and direct non-violent actions; offering our bodies (rather than the corpse of the next fellow) in support of our ideas and the hopes of all; capable of an internationalism that consists in being rigorously active wherever necessary with actions for peace. With the strength we derive from all of this, we Radicals, pacifists and idealists with our heads in the clouds - the one and only group different from those who chatter about this kind of missile or that kind of solidarity - have gone to demand of the "true Socialists" the rights of yesterday's Socialists: Life, bread and peace.
We have shared their prisons in which they cannot confine their own hopes. We have shared their bread - like the bread of truth and of information - not only with those who have received our message, but also with our own prison guards. We have furnished a militant base for the new Radical international for whom the fight against extermination from hunger in the world is the high point of struggle. The picture is then once again very clear, as it ought to be. ---------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) A street in Rome that was scene of an Italian partisan attack on German troops during World War II. The price paid for this was a ferocious reprisal at the Fosse Adreatine where the Germans massacred 335 hostages - 10 for each German soldier who had been killed.
