ABSTRACT: During the 21st Radical Party Congress of 1979 (March 29, 30, 31 and April 1 and 2, - Rome) Marco Pannella (1) resumed one of the subjects which has long been the object of controversies between the radical party and the Italian Left, and in particular the Communist Party: Via Rasella, the historical significance of this episode of the Resistance and its connections, namely with contemporary terrorism. Barely a year before that, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro (2) had caused an earthquake in the parties of the Left. The Communist Party had joined the front of the »hardliners , while the Radical Party (and to a certain extent the Socialist Party, albeit with different tones and nuances) chose instead a line of »dialogue that could allow to explore any possible way to spare the statesman's life. The radical party refused, at any rate, to pay homage to a State which hypocritically proclaimed its inviolable prerogatives precisely at a time in which the signs of its incapacity and of its moral,

political and historical crisis were most evident. In this framework of discussion it was only legitimate to recall the episode of Via Rasella, which occurred at the very beginning of the recent history of the communist history and of the partisan and antifascist resistance. In March 1944, in Via Rasella, in the heart of the Nazi-occupied Rome, a handful of partisans blew up a charge of explosive, killing a column of South Tirol-born SS officers. As we know, the attack triggered a German retaliation, whereby 335 political and ordinary prisoners detained in Regina Coeli were shot and then thrown into deserted pozzolana quarries along the Via Ardeatina. Wasn't that episode an act of terrorism? Doesn't it inevitably constitute a »model for the terrorism and violence that are again ravaging the country forty years later?

Pannella was unmistakably blunt. If terrorism is to be denounced and struck back at, then it is also necessary to denounce the entire history of the »leftist violence as co-responsible for this terrorism. If Curcio (3) is guilty, then the attack of Via Rasella also constitutes a condemnable form of homicidal violence.

»If the youths of the Azione Cattolica are barbarians and murderers - Pannella warned - »Curcio, who is depicted as a sort of modern Saint Gabriel or Saint Michael crushing the devil with his foot and becoming a champion of the struggle against the capitalist dragon (...) then Carla Capponi (4), a gold medal of the Resistance for having placed the bomb in Via Rasella, and Antonello (5) and Amendola (6) and all the others should also remember that bomb. If we have a relation of "intimacy" with the fascist history, we (...) have the same relation with the worst torturers, with my comrades Togliatti (7) and Curdo...".

The Communist Party reacted bitterly to this polemic. On the following day the communist daily newspaper "L'Unità" titled the account of the meeting "Pannella's line: the PCI is the enemy, Curcio is a brother". The radical strategy was also labeled globally "anticommunist". Preceded by this account, on that same morning (1 April) Pannella went to the congress of the Communist Party. The communist congresspeople's anger and indignation broke out, fueled also by aggressive speeches by Amendola and Lama (8). "Pannella's fascist speech is disgraceful. The gold medals of Via Rasella are here among us", cried Amendola. According to Lama, "the party of the partisan brigades headed by Matteotti, Sandro Pertini (9) and Riccardo Lombardi (10) cannot mingle with the party of Pannella". The audience booed the radical leader, who was wearing a blue loden coat at the congress. The following day the press described him with terms such as "vampire" and "Nosferatu".

This book contains the transcriptions of two speeches by Marco Pannella, and the opinions of people who intervened in the debate on Via Rasella, on violence and terrorism.

(»A USELESS SLAUGHTER ? - From Via Rasella to the Fosse Ardeatine - edited by Angiolo Bandinelli and Valter Vecellio - Tullio Pironti, 1982, Naples)

Via Rasella, terrorism, the Left, fascism

by Marco Pannella

Dear comrades,

who is it who said and continues to say that violence rules in the University of Rome and in the other Italian universities, and that the course of democracy is hindered? Who is it who contends that the extremists want to prevent us by all means from holding democratic debates in our schools? Today we are nearing the end of a five-day congress held at the University of Rome, right next to Via dei Volsci and the Students' House. We were protected by no security service, and we clearly proclaimed our irremovable opposition to violence, which was dramatically symbolized in Turin by Adelaide Aglietta (11) sitting among the jury (we who are normally the defendants and the imprisoned) and Curcio and his companions locked up in the defendants' box.

I have no answers for all this.

Yesterday at the communist congress I heard comrade Imbeni (whose language is strongly reminiscent of the '68 revolution) denounce the widespread intolerance even in a democratic and civilized city such as Bologna - a central forum of democracy, the place where the parties of the working class originated and organized themselves. We heard mayor Novelli defend the notorious questionnaire, trying to explain that large-scale delation is just and dutiful, without realizing - as we do - that relying not on the quest for evidence, that violating the democratic guaranties, even if they are the guaranties of the Codice Rocco (12), (and you Novelli are violating them, you who think you can accuse us in the name of the State), that seeking suspicion as an element of truth causes legitimate denunciations to drown into the ocean of large-scale delation. Thus (as for the Moro case), in a climate of widespread delation, people like De Lorenzo and others who occupy positions of power in the republican institutions and prot

ect the masterminds of the strategy of violence and terrorism are give even more freedom to do what General Mengarelli and the procurator Pascoli did on the dead bodies of the three carabinieri killed at Peteano. In other words, create a climate of confusion and avoid the quest for the murderers ("applause").

Certain comrades of the Communist Party, accustomed to governing themselves through bureaucratic and democratic centralism, when they have been forced to come to terms with the problem of a pluralist administration (as they all call it; we prefer to call it constitutional and democratic administration) of the State, have proven incapable of conceiving the difference between this and the democratic and bureaucratic centralism which has characterized their dissent and their mistakes for thirty years, and have tried to force the culture of democratic and bureaucratic centralism on Parliament and on all moments of the nation's life as a means to seek justice and freedom.

However, this is not possible, if it is true (comrades from Il Manifesto) that the entire history of the Communist Party proves that any dissident is expelled, notwithstanding the apparent good manners. But we cannot afford the luxury of expelling dissent. Hoping to expel despair and its products from the society that generated them and from the State that has fueled them is a terrible deception. We have a a lesson to teach Imbeni and Pecchioli (13) and all those who depict the university as a place in which one can speak no other language but the one the extremists want to impose with violence, and who say that the extremists' only way of expression is that of trying to prevent others from expressing their ideas.

Individual self-management as the prerequisite for the self-management of society

We are in a position to say this because we believe in the principles of authentic self-management. However, dear comrades, individual self-management is the prerequisite for the self-management of the State. If we need an imposed security security service, then we cannot create a democratic order based on consent and participation ("applause"). If we do not know how to laboriously seek the way to control our state of mind, our ways of being different in everyday political life and in the structures of a party, we will never be able to realize the technologies of self-management, which include the need to administer the moment of production through self-management and a radical change in current productive relations.

I am touched by Huguette and the comrades of the PSU who gave me this watch. They have long been prevented from knowing who we really were; the comrades from the PSU ignore, for example, that for many years I lived in Paris when I worked as a correspondent for "Il Giorno". Since the most wonderful things I do occur during the night, I remember at night I used to roam the city writing graffiti on the walls. I wrote GAR, the symbol of the antiterrorist comrades from the PSU during the Algerian war, when dozens and dozens of Arabs were tortured and thrown into the Seine. I spent those might smiling and thinking about my paper, "Il Giorno". The comrades of the PSU were amazed about the fact that an "old man" of 29 could associate with them and risk being caught by the police of the 5th Republic, who were often the accomplices of the OAS. From then on, life with the comrades from the Psu was a rule for me, and I followed their struggle against the Lip with much interest. I knew they had major problems, and that t

heirs was a quest which could never give rise to a model of self-management which could be applied to the world at large.

But there can be no self-management without an applied research, without living out all problems and all conflicts. I remember the dreadful night when the comrades of the Lip quarreled desperately, accusing each other of being traitors. After that I heard nothing about the Lip, and I am grateful to Huguette for reminding me that the self-management of the Lip carries on as a quasi-normal, consolidated reality. It is something which helps inform the French people, and contributes to a different configuration of that productive framework.

But enough with this topic.

I wish to inform you that this morning we spent several millions of our share of public financing to publish an ad on "Il Messaggero" and "Il Tempo" to inform that Radio Radicale will twice broadcast unabridged speeches by Enrico Berlinguer (14), Amendola, Lama and those who accused me of being a fascist. This will allow all Romans (communists, Christian democrats, independents) to know exactly how things are. Also, journalists will be able to judge just who has behaved like a fascist at a moment in which a fiery debate is breaking out on the subject, in these days of radical and communist congress ("applause").

I would also like to thank Bruno Zevi (though I know he will resent this public thanking as usual) for creating Teleroma 56. He will do the same by airing the tapes of the congresses ("applause").

We are now associated to the work and responsibility of Bruno Zevi, and everyone must be given the opportunity to understand the predicament of Enrico Berlinguer and of the comrades of the communist party, to circumscribe the reasons of dissent and the ones of consent. Dialogue is always dramatic when it is real and true (in public life as in private life). However, dialogue should take place not on the basis of denunciations and anathemas, not by telling masses of comrades lies that are worthy of the worst kind of propaganda that are used to prevent people from knowing and judging what the parties (both the radical and the communist one) have the right and the duty to do or not to do.

Pannella: half vampire, half Dracula?

Another remark. Yesterday all the colleagues attending the communist congress saw me - half vampire, half Dracula and half Hamlet - stand up, dramatically alone, clad in a black cloak, pale, as I was being insulted and excommunicated and as the audience cheered! This is what everyone wrote. Read it. Obviously, I am so clever, so demonic (or angel-like, if you prefer) that I knew I would have arrived at the congress precisely when Lama was speaking, and that precisely as I was taking a seat he would have profferred his threats against the socialists and his anathemas against the radicals. I had taken a black cloak with me on purpose to look more dramatic! Almost all newspapers said so. It might seem meaningless, and yet it is significant. In actual fact, the only garment I have been constantly wearing as of January (when I bought it in Trieste to protect myself from a bitter cold wind) is that dark blue loden coat you can see there on the table. I think possibly it's a consequence of the long periods of hunge

r strike, but the fact is I'm often cold and the other evening I was wearing that coat. It is true that civilized people leave their coats at the cloak-room, but really, how could I imagine that a coat would have been used against me as a weapon? (applause). The other evening I realized I was opening a serious and dramatic controversy. I was also aware of the fact that 30 million people will die of starvation this year. Our reaction to this tragedy is only a mild one, owing to a sort of perversion that makes us numb in the face of a mass extermination greater than the Nazi and Stalinist ones combined. We consider it a message from nature simply because it takes place elsewhere, even though the distance that separates us from those 30 million dead is - in geographical terms - no greater than the one between Teramo and Rome when my grandparents were alive. But already then the facts of the two cities were considered common.

Touching upon the tragic reality of our country, on the failures of all our generations (from the younger one to the eldest) I knew only too well that I would be violating taboos, that many would have been forced to a cruel but authentic self-examination.

It is necessary to revise the history of violence

However, I would like to recall that yesterday in voicing those accusations and critiques, I constantly used the plural form: I said "we who do these things", "these things that are part of our history". I constantly said "we", not "them". I said "our comrade gold medal of the Resistance Carla Capponi". What should I have said, more than "Carla Capponi", "comrade", "gold medal"? I did not say "Trombadori". I said "Antonello, from the committee for disarmament and peace and against world hunger". And I said Giorgio Amendola, because obviously anyone who is familiar with the history of Giovanni, Giorgio and Pietro Amendola knows this is "our" history as well, not "their" history ("applause"). I chose these names in their peculiarity. But I also said that just like certain extreme priorities are the only thing I can imagine in the face of 30 million dead (inflexibility, the certainty of love, of upholding the natural and civil law) I think that at a moment in which terrorism and violence are bringing a wave of

despair and are the result of a strategy, it is necessary to revise the entire history of violence. But who can think that even one of us, with the ideas we have, being a militant and not an ordinary person, could not have been part of those who not only carried out, but who ordered the attack of Via Rasella? No one here wants to have a clean conscience. Likewise, virginity does not necessarily imply innocence. One thing is innocence (which is something that is acquired) and another thing is virginity, which is something different and useless. It is those who know how to wash them who have clean hands, even if they touch the mud they live in, the mud of the failure of the moments of despair, the mud of the tears and cruelty of the fatal inadequacies of every individual's life.

This is a congress of nonviolent people. A congress, if the communists allow me to say so, in which perhaps not out of sheer masochism, there is a party "leadership" which is still formed, in 1979, by seven tenths of citizens released on bail. These are people who have been to jail for their ideas, and who experience this history of nonviolent campaigns and hunger strikes. Clearly there is something imponderable about these hunger strikes. Surely there are compensations if they are well done, if they are truly done without controversy and if they are simply the expression of a creative will.

Obviously the tissues of our cells burn out quicker during a hunger strike. But this aspect is offset by the incredible reward in terms of love and joy involved in these struggles. Obviously a hunger strike involves a certain degree of self-cannibalism: the body feeds on itself, the cells burn quicker, our hair becomes white sooner. But then, white is also the emblem of strength in the Old Testament, and even with the most prominent painters of the Renaissance ("applause"). Innocence, purity; the anger of innocence was that of Moses. Old age had not yet been affected because it was unsuitable for the productive processes of the industrial society. They cherished the idea of strength and conquest "applause"). They "went" towards innocence and strength; innocence and strength were not "behind" them; they were lost, and they felt the need to be freed from an original sin, failing which one was corrupt from the very first moment, and one's destiny is corruption.

Now that we are forced to come to terms with terrorism, we must think that terrorism is part of our history. Dostoyevski and nihilism are also part of our history. In fact, a terrorist is nothing but a person who most probably experiences also the torment and nocturnal conversations described in Dostojevski's contemporary pages, albeit with a different organization? What does talking about violence mean, but talking first of all about our violent deception which we carry within us, minute by minute? The illusion that in a moment of anger we can obtain something that escapes us when we are afraid. But when we are afraid we have already lost that thing, we have already destroyed it: the woman, the man, the two men, the two women.

Being a libertarian means continuing a relentless quest for this release, not obtaining this release in a bank; what for? No one can live on unearned income. I do not want to gild the pill: I want to define it more precisely. As far as military laws are concerned: how many times have I said, "shame on us, comrades, we are more a left worthy more or Klausewitz than of Marx, we are a military left. "Avant-garde", "strategy", "tactics": all this language has been taken from the military art, and never from a lay language with respect to the military one.

"Military" or "capitalist" organization: Marx and Engels were right!

Marx and Engels had predicted that when capitalism becomes imperialism, when the industrial society reaches its peak, those who want to defend the mechanisms of profit, of plus-value and of the capitalist organization versus socialism would propose the schemes of military organization and military values to society at large as the only alternative to the socialist organization. Marx and Engels were truly right! We must bear in mind that terrorism is part of our history. As followers of nonviolence, we must remember that we need to free ourselves from the ethic of sacrifice - whether our sacrifice of someone else's - , from the ways of blandishing the gods and washing our hands by killing the innocent lamb. We need to disbelieve that there is a sacred war and another war which is not sacred - a lay crusade or not - and that only by slaughtering and annihilating our enemy do we remain free to expand our horizons.

As I said many many years ago, let us remember that if we look at our enemy for a moment as he appears to us, and if we rid ourselves from the habit of seeing demons outside us (demons which are in fact our own projection) then we realize that being there is necessary because we can share conversations and a variety of other beautiful things with our enemy.

Condemning Via Rasella does not mean insulting the Resistance

In this Congress we can only proclaim, not - Lietta Tornabuoni! - as an insult to the Resistance, the right not to believe that we can crucify Curcio simply because he transfers into his Catholic history his ideas on the sacred and just war, the war of Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael and Saint George who crush the demon of capitalism, of evil, and therefore crush the goodness and the duty of the man who wants to honour his faith, the faith he cherishes; we deny Curcio is this, with this origin and with the aspect which the communist party and the socialist party have ordered us to stop seeking in these two years. The quest for truth has been hindered at all levels for fifteen years in order to protect ministers and prime ministers that were blakcmailed or liable to be blackkmailed. And along with Curcio's plans comes the terrorist scheme of the Rosa dei Venti, on which - I'm telling you again and again, Lietta Tornabuoni! - from "L'Unità" to "Il Secolo d'Italia", seven, eight and perhaps ten years after the

facts, no one is speaking out to ask the much denigrated judges what they are doing in that preliminary investigation thanks to which Spiazzi is free, as it is fair that he should be since the terms of preventive custody have expired. Not only is the truth being tampered with, but these people are allowed to continue pursuing the scheme of the Rosa dei Venti with impunity, since the trial will never be held or would never be held were it not for our denunciations.

Is recalling that the young people killed in Via Rasella came from South Tirol insulting the Resistance? It is paying homage to the incomparable tragedy that men who were surely not violent and not cruel decided to commit that act: communists and socialists who knew that people at arms, those who wear a uniform, are brothers ("applause")...

And I say (I did not say so yesterday, but I want to say so now) that I would like to bring flowers on the tombs of those 40 young men, whose name is written nowhere except in our belief that they were not objects (as someone seems to believe) but human beings, men who had mothers, wives, children, men who thought, who had feelings, who kissed. Is this insulting the Resistance? Or is it not rather thinking that that military action should be seen as a unanimous decision? Don't those who cherish the Resistance have the duty to say that Giorgio Amendola, Antonello Trombadori, Carla Capponi and the others of the military command must surely have long hesitated( I hope so, at any rate) to decide whether it was not their duty to do what the poor carabiniere Salvo D'Acquisto did when he surrendered himself to save ten or twenty people? ("applause")

One might object that Trombadori and the others had an awareness of class organization which the carabiniere perhaps lacked. But should this convince us that it was not an atrocious deed to decide to place that bomb to kill those young men, knowing that 400 hostages would have then been killed in retaliation? And should we think the decision not to surrender was an easy one? Is it an insult to the Resistance to say that the 370 victims of the Fosse Ardeatine died so that that there would never again be 400 young men from South Tirol like those that were killed in Via Rasella? Is it insulting to say that those who died at the Fosse Ardeatine are crying out that they want no more victims? ("applause") In our tragic and dramatic attempt to affirm the socialist values, we thought we could affirm them also through the attack of Via Rasella. At the time it was logical to think that. But it is no insult to say that in the future things must be different, that it is an absurdity that people from South Tirol are alr

eady beginning to call us policemen. This is not something that divides humanity; thus is something that places humanity versus barbarianism.

The peasants slaughtered on the Volga, not in Vietnam...

Comrades communists, you have reacted in such a way that we will be forced, notwithstanding the electoral campaign, not to relinquish these subjects, because this is an essential point we need to clarify if we want our discussion on the future of the socialist society and on our way of living together to be different.

Colleagues from "L'Unità", your violence continues. Even today, on your newspaper, there is a headline which is apparently correct (and I can already tell you I have sued "L'Unità") but which reveals the deep sadness of having to rely more on the bourgeois justice than in the capacities and honesty of the communist comrades.

The papers have written that Pannella defends Reder and Hess. It might seem true, but what would someone reading something of this kind think? He would think that on the eve of the electoral campaign, Pannella defends the doings of Hess and Reder in order to win more votes. That headline can mean only this. What I was defending in actual fact was something else. What frightens me most is that I need to explain this to journalists who are well under their eighties and in fact under their forties. We might as well be straightforward: people worse than Hess and Reder, who operated in the respect of your military laws which we consider as entirely barbarian, have been defended. People who slaughter and kill their best comrades with whom they struggled for forty years, have been defended. Some have defended people who have betrayed their friends and sacrificed them to the trials, organized with confessions obtained with systems even worse than those of the Inquisition. These have been forced to be judged like tra

itors in front of their wives and children; some have defended those who chased Trotsky in Mexico to have him killed. Vittorio Vidali, whom I love dearly and who is a great comrade, knows something about it.

How can they say I am defending Reder or that we are all defending him, while you belong to a culture and a feeling according to which all this is old stuff, tragedies of history, painful facts? You who felt so much pity for the peasants of Vietnam who were dying paid no attention to the millions and millions of peasants who were being exterminated on the Volga and the Don. Does saying this mean being a fascist? Does it mean insulting Lietta Tornabuoni who, having read "L'Unità", believed these things and tried to write a tolerant article such as today's, but ultimately wrote that we are insulting the Resistance? As if there were someone at this Congress who could insult the Resistance: "we would do not violence on him, but he would remain alone with his defeat".

Once again: "civil rights" for Reder too

We will insist on this because we must uphold democracy. Personally speaking, I say that any place where a man is kept prisoner forever, until his death, any place where a man is imprisoned for the rest of his life, is a place of barbarianism and fascism, regardless of the prisoner's identity. Comrades from "L'Unità", pay attention to what I am saying: we want to conquer the Bastilles of Hess and Reder as well (I repeat: as well), because if even those two Bastilles were conquered too, there would no longer be a man, anywhere, whom we would have the right to sentence to life imprisonment. You forgot to write this in your articles. I said: "for Reder too". When I said this I was defending us, not him, because history is always made of prisons. We need to conquer all the Bastilles before they are emptied by death. We should organize a debate on television...But what should we discuss - to create problems for Curcio - but this? This is what we should discuss, but not with your tone - Antonello Trombadori - whic

h is the tone of despair, and not with your tone - Giorgio Amendola - which is the tone of a person who feels remorse, who does not want to talk and is afraid. We should say: I was there and I consider it a glory and an honour. I was fourteen at the time, and I can't say this. But I would like to be able to say I was one of you, murderers for love of their own country, murderers who were forced to be such by having accepted the logic of war which we all accepted, with very few exceptions. Except for Capitini, Calogero (15), the lay intellectuals. Except for the solitary teachings of us, solitary followers of a pacifist, internationalist, nonviolent socialism, the one that in the past provided a heritage that was sacrificed to real socialism, the one that triumphed in the fields and factories of Europe with free love, with "peace for all", with disarmament, with the will to foster no army.

If we held a televised debate on this, perhaps we would discuss with those who, in their despair, bound by their orthodoxy to certain major churches of our history, say that an enemy should be fought against, and that violence should be fought with further violence.

This major debate is necessary - Diego Novelli! - in Turin (if Pietro Ingrao (16) will allow me) for a participated and associative democracy that ultimately dates back to the time of the porters, when porters were almost public officials in the thirties ("applause"). It's odd that precisely those comrades who saw the injustice of fascism can harbour illusions on mass delation, i.e. on the possibility to obtain justice through the mass. Precisely those comrades who played the card of the janitor because usually they went and spied on those they disliked, not on serious revolutionaries who, as such, raised no suspicions and did not look like criminals or terrorists ("applause").

Talking about Curcio involves talking about Togliatti

I am not discussing with extremists nor, if there are any (and there are, like Curcio) with the comrades murderers and suicides. The other day I did not say Mara Cagol. I said Mara. I ask these people if the life we want to build for ourselves is that of the hundreds of people who are in prison or the life of Mara. In other words, a life made of the death of the comrade-hero. This is what the capitalist holograph that convinced all of us to fight reminds me of: death was so beautiful in the drawings of Beltrame on "La Domenica del Corriere"! De André was the first to use the radio to induce a reflection, to say that those two enemies were made to love each other. Those were two men, but they were equally made to love each other, to caress each other instead of holding hands when they had both killed each other ("applause").

We will carry on, because the discussion on Curcio involves a discussion on Togliatti. Thus, we cannot but hold this discussion. Imagine that debate on TV: everyone would be there, including those who talk about "those murderers communists and partisans who should have surrendered in Rome".

But we will win over them, we can convince them that they are wrong. We can defeat the rightwing of our country, because we are talking also to those who have misleading ideas about the order of justice and who believe that a general can be a good minister for defense or that a banker can be a good minister of finance because this is what they have always been taught.

We can go tell them the best laws have their limits, that we need to give money to save those people, that a conscientious objector is someone who struggles for them too. But, you see, debates such as this will never take place.

Let's try to be clear: we are not angry at you, but at your employers. Yesterday a worker told me that when I attack them they feel offended. I answered, "I'm sorry. It's the same when I attack Agnelli and the Fiat workers get offended. In actual fact they're happy ("applause"). We repeat that Grasso and Barbato, with the current TV structures, are destabilizers, and that their terrorism against the democratic will is such that if there were three places available in the Italian prisons and I were to decide whether to give them to Curcio, Vallanzasca and Concutelli (who kill one thousand democrats) or Grasso, Barbato and the other who contribute to killing democracy, I would jail the latter, in spite of the fact that I am a libertarian who justifies preventive custody only as a means of social prevention ("applause"). This is not to be abusive, but because I believe this is the truth.

You may have noticed that we have been given some space by the Catholic networks these days. In 1948 people like Ernesto Rossi (17), Salvemini (18), Einaudi, Calosso and even the anarchists from Massa and Carrara apparently (according to the terms we have been given) chose capitalism and America vs. the popular front of Togliatti and Nenni (19). In fact, they apparently chose not only the Christian Democratic Party, but even the Church who proclaimed a new saint every other day in that period with a fetishism and temporal manipulation of religion which killed any religious feeling and the principles it should uphold. But why did they make that choice?

When attacking the arrogance of the power of the DC, one often forgets the war in which for years the readers of "L'Unità" have been duped on historically true facts and the way in which communist representatives lied on TV on the subject of the Reale law to deceive the communist comrades. No fascist, not even an official one, has the courage to tell these lies. But these people seize the truth, they slaughter democracy and socialism, and not just the self-managed socialism but the democratic one too. This is why we must carry on with this process. My impression is, comrades, that the communist party will try to involve its leaders in this electoral campaign out of fear for its rank-and-file, to allow the Catholic networks to keep maximum silence and discrimination against us as well as to reduce televised pre-election debates as much as possible. This is because the methods of organization of consensus of the Christian Democratic party are both based on the silence on the accusations we are voicing, but on

a variety of other, far more complex mechanisms. The communist party and the other working class parties will mobilize instead because they fear a debate on the Reale bill, on Via Rasella and on Togliatti, because discussing the past also means discussing the future. One comrade quite rightly remarked that it is always wrong to have idols, because each idol inevitably brings with it the destiny of becoming a broken idol. And hearts break on broken idols ("applause").

The two protagonists: the Communist Party and the Radical Party

This means rekindling a debate, and my impression is precisely that if we defend the rights of the communist party and of all the others in this electoral campaign, the two protagonists of this campaign will be within the Italian left, as in the past for the referendums. If there were any truth, the two protagonists would be the communist party and the radical party, with their opposed theses. One thesis based, once again, on the illusion of industrialization, of the construction of a State capable of resisting the capitalist system, capable of killing the truth (if not the lives of millions and million of peasants) in order to then build socialism; and our thesis, more solid today thanks to what has happened in the world which has proven that the things that have been acquired through the slaughter (ordered by Togliatti) of millions of comrades and peasants, is not socialism, but the State of the current Soviet Union, the one that along with the U.S. spends 400,000 billion for arms because it needs it ("app

lause").

We said the left is giving answers to the problems of freedom. It will be a harsh struggle. We will be unrecognizable, as Pasolini advocated, not because we do not want to be recognized, but because the lies which the colleagues from "L'Unità" and from the state television and radio are forced to tell will make us irrecognizable (the lies of today, of yesterday and of tomorrow).

All this will force people to consider us monsters, blasphemous, detractors of socialism and of the Resistance.

They will try to win by annihilating our identity, since for the moment we still have no cause to believe - but we probably are - we are the possible target of the so-called Red brigades and of those who control them. We ignore who controls them. We know it is not Curcio ("applause"). We know - and we accept it and want no escorts and will not change our life-style - that in this society it often seems that the destiny of the followers of nonviolence is being murdered, like Gandhi, like Luther King or Pino Pinelli (20), our anarchist comrade, he too a follower of nonviolence ("applause").

These people should know that if we say that Via Rasella is an episode that belongs to our history - and as our history we want to revisit it, overcome it and draw lessons from it - and we refuse it - the history of those who fight against the leadership of the communist party too often like Ugo Spagnoli on TV and like you, dear colleague, who wrote your article in such a way that it was possible to say that Pannella and the radicals defend Reder and Hess.

Goebbels-style methods in the campaigns organized by "L'Unità"!

This is false. You are responsible for a campaign in pure Goebbels style and of Stalinist origin. It's not because you are armed with other weapons that you can free yourselves from the responsibilities of what can happen.

In Rome, in the city of the Fosse Ardeatine, someone has the courage to say that at the radical congress Marco Pannella insulted the Resistance and praised the Nazis and the Nazi victims. Those who say that they worked in the Resistance, if they then arm the hands and not just the spirit of people who are fed up with the failure of the hopes of the Resistance, well those people can shoot...

What we are telling the communist comrades is that they are making a mistake. We accuse them of terrible past responsibilities, and as we do so we say that we share those responsibilities together. In January I received hundreds of letters from all over the country. They were letters from people whose handwriting revealed that they were "genuine" people, often illiterate people.

In these letters they told me I was worse than a Nazi, that I was a butcher of unborn babies. I realized many things thanks to these letters. I thought about Benelli and Pope Paul VI; these men who should be the representatives of love and peace, and who believed no doubt that they were upholding life, faith and charity, and who didn't realize that they were arming someone's hands. If I were truly a Catholic who believes in the Pope and in Benelli, who announces that in the coming years for our fault there will be more lives murdered than during World War II - and this is what Cardinal Benelli said in one of his homilies - if I were a simple person and believed in Paul, who taught before dying that the devil exists in this world; if I knew millions and millions of people were about to be slaughtered, the most defenseless, those who have not even been born, and if I wanted to pay homage to my faith, what would stop me from killing that infamous and diabolical life that concentrates in itself all the strength

and capacity to kill other human lives? In other words, the life of Pannella? All at once I stopped receiving letters. This quest for my and their rigour was enough; it was enough for me to recall in late January the living children (those 17 million children) and mercy and doubt visited that class of fanatics. Perhaps it is no longer there that a hand can turn out those who "curse life". Comrades communists, we will engage in a harsh battle, but be careful: those whom you murdered and tortured you murdered and tortured especially when you asked them to curse the truth, recognizing the soundness of the accusations for which they were sentenced to death.

You say we followers of nonviolence have insulted the Resistance. You said it during a political debate. You are free to say so. Comrades radicals, I accept this challenge to be carried out in Radio Radicale, in television because personally I mean to answer to the lies I am accused of, the hopes of socialism and of the non-military humanity, in the non-military, non-centralist bureaucratuc humanity of any stage in the socialist revolution, and therefore in the life of those men and women who cherish this socialist hope. That is all, comrades ("applause").

Yesterday someone said I was reciting sermons. Perhaps. I have a deep respect for religion and religious feeling. I have a little less respect for confessions and their organizations.

I would like to tell Gigi De Marchi (21) that he is mistaken. I would like to tell him with all the militant fraternity we share. I urge an intervention to save at least a fee hundred thousand of the millions of people who are about to be slaughtered. I have been saying this for too long for you, Gigi, to doubt it.

In the same way as energy saving is the prime resources of energy, for life the prime resource is population saving. But one cannot say everything at the same time. When you have to talk against the Warsaw Pact you talk about this. Later you will intervene against the Atlantic Treaty. There is unity in your history. There must be no unity in your way of exposing things. This is not even possible. Therefore, when you are in front of a radical, it is clear that with his history, his existence and his face he is telling you it is insane to give birth to 90% of lives who are not asking to be born only to systematically murder them the following day with hunger and poverty.

We must not be impotent clerics on the issues of life and development

Clearly, if we save a million people, this will represent a problem for next year, because there will be more people to feed aside of the ones regularly born. You can you think I don't realize this, Gigi? The problem is another one. Rather than continue to repeat your reasons as you have been doing, I want to base myself on facts, and on the basis of these expose my and your reasons. Otherwise one becomes a cleric of Reichian truth - and you know to what extent I believe in it - clerics of truth on population control and on the problems of development in the world. Clerics who ultimately celebrate these truths when the establishment allows them to to the point of becoming unarmed and the instrument of the establishment instead of its element of crisis.

The same applies to the fear of the charisma. Hold it. First of all, I believe all the comrades have this problem are the real victims of Pannella, because those who feel the need to say that Pannella should have been contradicted are the ones who have the problem. The comrades are free not to have the problem of having said yes or no. It is you who have problems with me, with my charisma or non-charisma.

The insult is that the radicals are brainwashed. This is the problem of mass psychodynamics. However, our being lay gives us a guarantee: laicism makes a clear separation between the judgment of the sentence and the sentence of violence. The lay person knows that judging is dutiful, because a judgment is no longer a sentence and in fact is something which should be given as a cooperation; it is no longer an announcement of death. For a lay person - Antonello Trombadori, Amendola, etc - a judgment is not a sentence.

For a libertarian lay person a sentence must be armed with the truth, not with the sword of the so-called justice of the state or of the party. Then there is charisma. That is another problem of the socialist society. There is a comrade who who is enriched by the trust of the others, privileged by silence, by the request to surpass himself a little more each time, to meditate. At this point, I am so to say the collective voice: in this psychodynamics we are the collective voice; a certain silence creates the words of those who talk, so much that is there is a slight noise, whose who talk will utter other words, will be unable to concentrate. In a certain sense it is a mystery, as everything which is theatre. I have always said that democracy means agorà; dialogue, sidewalks, etcetera. I said it and repeated it and am convinced of it. It is the human dimension. I want neither solar energy of a certain type nor nuclear energy because I want to recover the collective dimension, freedom, self-management; the hum

an dimension in which it is possible to talk at one's regional or municipal congress and not give a damn about the national one, because progressively the nation will represent nothing. This is the direction we must take. A comrade was telling me I am not patronizing because I do not fear the fact of winning and becoming the majority; I was glad to hear that, because the worst thing is precisely a person who is stronger and recognizes that the others are weaker and lets go, "understands" the, does not oppose them. This would be have a patronizing approach. But thanks to Gigi De Marchi, we have for too long reflected on Reichian mediation, on the risk of a being a "mass". But there is a difference, comrades: we have grown in terms of quantity and quality; and so much! Each of us, through the accusations he was being addressed, has experiences researches, words, attempts and thoughts that contributed to making our identity real, strong and insuppressible. This is an assembly, a "church" of real people, more th

an elsewhere. Clearly, there remain elements of "mass", of repression in each of us, that translates itself into a need for power, as for anyone who has no power or has limited power. Surely there is a certain amount of pleasure in talking to you, not just about love, in being together; surely there is a certain degree of pollution, which is also power; the problem is what we are suppressing and what we are fostering in our being together.

I believe, comrades, that we are suppressing the violence which is inside us, and that therefore socialism is making some progress. ("long applause")

("Address of April 2, QR n. 5-6")

Notice: the author has not revised this transcription

Translator's notes

(1) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

(2) MORO ALDO. (Maglie 1916 - Rome 1978). Italian politician. Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party (1959-65), mastermind of the Centre-Left policy. Several times minister as of 1956, Prime Minister (1963-68, 1974-76) president of the Christian Democratic Party as of 1956, he favoured the participation of the Communist Party (PCI) in the government, outlining the hypothesis of a so-called "third stage" (after those of "centrism" and "centre-left") of the political system. He was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 16 March 1978 in Rome and found dead on 9 May of the same year.

(3) CURCIO RENATO. (1941). Charismatic founder and leader of the terrorist group known as Red Brigades. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

(4) CAPPONI CARLA. Communist exponent of the Resistance, took active part in the attempt of Via Rasella, where several German soldiers died, causing a German retaliation in which 300 hundred Italians died, shot at the Fosse Ardeatine.

(5) TROMBADORI ANTONELLO. Roman communist exponent, member of Parliament, essayist and writer.

(6) AMENDOLA GIORGIO. (Rome 1907 - 1980). One of the founders of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), long considered the heir of Togliatti. Architect of the agreement with the "sound productive forces", he was head of the party's reformist, pragmatist wing. Member of Parliament for many years. Author of a series of remarkable autobiographical works.

(7) TOGLIATTI PALMIRO. (Genua 1893 - Yalta 1964). In Turin he cooperated with A. Gramsci, among the founders of the Italian Communist Party, which he was secretary of from 1927 until his death. Exiled in Russia, he was member of the secretariat of the Comintern, and played an important role in Spain during the civil war. Back in Italy in 1944, he launched a "national" policy based on the fact of voting the Lateran pacts, clashing with the lay forces of the country. Member of government from 1944 to 1947, also as minister. After the elections of 1948, he monopolized the opposition's role, but he also favoured a "dialogue" with the Christian Democracy and the Catholic world, without ever breaking with the Vatican. His project of an "Italian way to socialism" did not achieve its fundamental objective, and on the contrary lead to a stalemate in the political system, preventing the Left from acquiring any "alternation" in power from the Christian Democratic Party.

(8) LAMA LUCIANO. (Gambettola, Forlì 1921). Communist, secretary of the CGIL as of 1970, then member of parliament and deputy president of the Chamber. Exponent of the right-wing current (the so-called "miglioristi").

(9) PERTINI SANDRO. (Stella 1896 - Rome 1990). Italian politician. Socialist, was imprisoned and exiled during the fascist regime.. From 1943 to 1945 he participated in the Resistance. Secretary of the Socialist Party, deputy, president of the Chamber (1968-1976), President of the Republic (1978-1985).

(10) LOMBARDI RICCARDO. (Regalbuto 1901 - 1984). Italian politician. Among the founders of the Partito d'Azione, later joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which he became president of in 1980.

(11) AGLIETTA ADELAIDE. (Turin 1940). Currently President of the Green Group at the European Parliament. Former member of the Italian Parliament, Secretary of the radical Party in 1977 and in 1978, year in which she was chosen to be part of the popular jury at the trial in Turin against the Red Brigades and Renato Curcio. Promoter of the Turin-based CISA (Information Centre on Abortion and Sterilization).

(12) ROCCO ALFREDO. (Naples 1875 - Rome 1935). Jurist and politician.

At first a radical, then joined the nationalists who then merged with the fascist party. Minister of Justice from 1925 to 1932, author of the penal code and of the codes of criminal procedure, issued between 1930 and 1931. Despite the strong fascist inspiration, the two codes have remained intact for many years even after the fall of fascism, and have only very recently been replaced by more modern Codes. A figure of extraordinary importance in the institutional history of contemporary Italy.

(13) PECCHIOLI UGO. (Turin 1925). Senator, exponent of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Minister of the Interior in the shadow Cabinet. For a long period in charge of the issues relative to domestic politics, pointed out by the radicals as the responsible for many obscure affairs connected to the years of terrorism.

(14) BERLINGUER ENRICO. (Sassari 1922 - Padua 1984). Italian politician. Deputy since 1968, secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1979 to his death, after the crisis and the assassination of Allende he became an advocate of the "historical compromise", which produced, between 1976 and 1979, the so-called "majority of no no-confidence", the greatest achievement of Togliatti's strategy for an organic agreement with the Christian Democratic Party. Architect of the project of creating the so-called "Eurocommunism", an attempt to project in the West a reformism which would not entirely deny the communist experience.

(15) CALOGERO GUIDO. (Rome 1904 - 1986). Italian philosopher. Developed a moral philosophy characterized by a strong ethical and civil commitment, based on the "principle of dialogue". Author of "Lezioni di filosofia" (1946-47), "Logo e dialogo" (1950) and of several articles on the weekly "Il Mondo". Among the founders of the Radical Party.

(16) INGRAO PIETRO. (Lenola 1915). For many years chief exponent of the Italian Communist Party. After militating in the fascist university organizations, leader of the party's "Left", open to the so-called "dialogue with the Catholics" and to a grass roots conception of politics, perceived as struggle of the "masses" against capitalist exploitation on a world scale. President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1976 to 1979, at the time of the "compromesso storico" and of "national unity".

(17) ROSSI ERNESTO. (Caserta 1897 - Rome 1967). Italian journalist and politician. Leader of "Giustizia e Libertà", in 1930 he was arrested by the fascist regime and remained in prison or exiled until the end of the war. Author, together with Spinelli, of the "Manifesto di Ventotene", and leader of the European Federalist Movement and of the battle for a united Europe. Among the founders of the Radical Party. Essayist and journalist, from "Il Mondo" he promoted vehement campaigns against clerical interference in the political life, against economic trusts, industrial and agrarian protectionism, private and public concentrations of power, etc. His articles were collected in famous books ("I padroni del vapore", etc). After the dissolution of the Radical Party in 1962, and the consequent split from the editor of "Il Mondo", M.Pannunzio, he founded "L'Astrolabio", whence he continued his polemics. In his last years he joined the "new" radical party, with which in 1967 he launched the "Anticlerical Year".

(18) SALVEMINI GAETANO. (Molfetta 1873 - Sorrento 1957). Italian historian and politician. Socialist since 1893, he founded the weekly "L'Unità", which soon became an important seat of debates. In 1925 in Florence, together with the Rosselli brothers, he founded the clandestine antifascist publication "Non mollare". Subsequently he fled abroad (to the U.S.), where he promoted antifascist information campaigns.

(19) NENNI PIETRO. (Faenza 1891 - 1980). Italian politician. At first republican, as of 1921 socialist. Editor of the party's newspaper, "L'Avanti!", exiled in France, in 1930 he masterminded the reunification of the socialist movements, and in 1934 the pact of unity of action with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Secretary of the PSI in 1943 and from 1949 to 1964, deputy Prime Minister (1945), and Foreign Minister (1946-47). He organized the organic agreement with the PCI, and suffered the electoral defeat of 1948. Lenin Prize for Peace, he gradually took an independent position, and in the '60s struggled for a government of centre-left with the DC (Christian Democratic Party); with the centre-left he was deputy Prime Minister (1963-68) and foreign minister (1968-69). Senator for life in 1970.

(20) PINELLI GIUSEPPE. Italian anarchist. Accused of the attempt on the Banca dell'Agricoltura in Milan, he died mysteriously, falling from a window of the Prefecture of Milan while he was being questioned (1969). The police commissioner Luigi Calabresi, who was killed in a terrorist attempt as a revenge of Pinelli's death, was accused of being the real responsible for his death.

(21) DE MARCHI LUIGI. Writer, sociologist, one of the first to study the problems of sex in Italy. Translated the works of W. Reich, established and managed for a long period the A.I.E.D., Italian Association for Demographic Education.