By Marco Pannella

ABSTRACT: The eyes of the world are on Lebanon, on Beirut, on the horrendous war in the Middle East. THe rule of war is infamy. Just wars are known only to liars, to the irresponsible, to imbeciles. The particular characteristics of Nazism were peace-time, not war-time ones. And so far Nazism was killed in the war. Today's Nazism is the extermination by starvation of thirty million people due to an ideology and a policy that finds the North united, East and West, capitalist and Socialist countries. It is a "peaceful" Nazism; it is a kind of economic, political, and cultural "order": racist and classist. Its victims are defenceless, weak, miserable, unarmed, not necessarily hostile, just as the Jews were not necessarily hostile during the Thirties. Another characteristic of today's Nazism: it has need of war because war provides its States and industries with immense profits. Today the international mass media "inform"

us about the Middle East and in particular about the misdeeds of the Israelis. This gives rise to the possibility of a commitment from the Radical Party, or from many Radicals, on this front too. We should not delude ourselves: the first front - even for Lebanon, even for the Palestinian people - the first front is that of "the living for development", that of the proposals of the Mayors, of the Nobel Prize Winners, of the Bishops, which, however, the Italian Parliament has buried.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI NO.10, July 15, 1982)

The infamous war in Lebanon is a war. Infamous as are all wars, without exception. Children, women, the helpless massacred? This is the rule, not the exception: not only at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but in Milan or Dresden, Moscow or Stalingrad, London or Manchester, Hanoi or the Horn of Africa. A just war? Such is known only to liars, to the irresponsible, to imbeciles. Only to those who have reserved in their minds or hearts, in their guts or their instincts, their own "just war", their own "clean" war "defensive" and not "offensive". Humanly possible wars, politically acceptable, is the infamous, leaden implication of those who continue to approve military budgets that earmark a country's resources for arms and armies, detracting from the quality and dignity of life of the unemployed, the pensioners, the homeless, the workers. Besides the arms exporters who in Italy are all part of the State or of the regime (among the politicians all except the Radicals).

The peculiar characteristics on Nazism were peace-time, not war-time ones. And, on the contrary, so far Nazism was killed in the war. Not a few of the French officers who tortured, assassinated and had massacred men, women, and children in Indo-China and then in Algeria were formed in the "anti-Fascist" war or escaped from from Buchenwald like Captain Yves de Saint-Marc.

The Russian army perpetrated massacres, quantitatively incommensurable with those of Boves or Marzabotto. Among the Spanish Republicans who fought against Franco's Fascist coup the atrocities were not always lesser than those of their enemies...

The atrocities are such, whether they are on the part of the aggressor or of the aggressed (and who ever considers himself in fact to be an aggressor?). In general "atrocities" are the ones of those who it is considered can still be beaten and who are the enemy; or those that have been beaten. War knows none other than the murderers and the murdered. The populace is always the one that loses, that is slaughtered. Only the governments, which is to say those who dominate them, who can win or lose. For many people, Israel's guilt today is that of murdering rather than being murdered. The merit of the OLP is to be murdered rather than to murder. If it be a clash between Nazis and anti-Nazis, even before being an infamy, it is a capital error. To say that the Israelis are Nazis is a way of absolving them of the responsibility of the war (I repeat: necessarily, by its very nature, infamous and atrocious) that it is conducting in agreement with its enemies; but it is also a way of "absolving" Nazism, degrading

and negating its effective, monstrous distinctiveness.

Nazi, the triumph of Nazism, is rather the extermination through starvation of thirty million a year by way of an ideology and a policy that unites the North, whether East or West, capitalist or Communist.

It is "peaceful". It is a certain international, economic, political and cultural "order". It is in effect racist and classist: its victims are the defenceless, the weak, the miserable, the "unarmed"; not rarely they are "not even hostile", just as the Jews exterminated in the Thirties were not necessarily hostile. Occasionally they show us the survivors, never the massacred as they do for Buchenwald and Mathausen. Like Hitler, so the "powerful" today, whom Pertini (1) continually evokes as the responsible ones, consider the holocaust a secondary effect, not in itself desired, not an objective to be proclaimed and for which to ask for consensus and support. But on the contrary, something to be kept hidden, which today one pretends to deprecate at the same time one is forging and reinforcing it. Spadolini and Craxi docent.

However atrocious the massacre in Lebanon is, it does not in its totality reach the level of death from starvation in a single day. And the cost of the arms used by Israel, the OLP, and the various Lebanese factions in this period would have been enough to save the lives of at least 300,000 people who, instead, have starved to death. But it has brought immense profits to our military-industrial arms exporters. This is another trait of current "Nazism": wars are useful and necessary to it because of the enormous profits it brings its states and industries, just as the economic, cultural and political ruin of the Third and Fourth Worlds is assured by the death of at least 30 million people in one year.

For more than one reason, fortunately, the mass media of the entire world (with the power system they serve and express, but also contribute to forming and sustaining) have decided they must move us to action and pity by "informing" us on the Middle East, and in particular on the responsibilities and misdeeds of the Israelis. So, on this front too one can operate not in isolation, nor entirely as busybodies, if one knows how read between the lines and fill in the gaps of censorship or manipulated and falsified information.

This gives rise to the possibility and the need of a commitment from our party, or from many of us, on this front: our formal penal accusation of "Major" Saad Haddad and his accomplices (Israeli and Lebanese); our decision to organise militant Radical actions in Lebanon and Israel in the coming weeks; the demand for Sharon's resignation. This same room for Party action devoted to this reality constitutes the first assumption of responsibility according to our method which is that of punctual and substantial responsibility and of initiatives always tailored to the measure of men. Not of the powerful.

We will do this. We are doing it in the framework of our war against war, our war against the neo-Nazi holocaust, of the campaign, clearer and more convincing, for the Italian Parliament to approve the proposed laws of the Nobel Prize winners and the [Italian] mayors.

We will go there too, thus testifying to our faith in the human and political richness of the Israeli, the Palestinian, the Lebanese people. Appealing also in their names to those who can create happiness and life. Against the holocaust, against fear and hatred, against the death of the enemy as the farthest horizon visible to a man, a people, a nation.

It will be, too, a long, difficult, complex enterprise, like all things that are worthwhile, that are not empty gestures or narcissistic speculations of a party or an individual. We will have to fight - yet again - the politics of our party system, squalid, blind, dirty in Rome as in Sicily or in Brussels.

Some - the larger and victorious part for now - have greeted the Israeli "victories" almost with happiness, deliriously, along with the massacre that has permitted and caused - to gain a hearing for the reasons of the PLO - the claim of the Palestinian people to make their own political decisions and their own state - in order to settle accounts of a different nature with Israel; to propose again the USA as the country with the greatest responsibility for the Middle East war and the atrocities that it cannot help but lead to; to avoid reflections on the Syrian, South Yemenite, Iraqi and Iranian "assassins" and on the regimes of the Gulf sheiks or Russian policies.

No one (except us) as it happens, is uninterested in making any kind of serious democratic or class analyses, any interpretation in terms of peace, justice, liberty, progress and civilisation of this affair, which is a single problem reaching from Tehran to Tel Aviv, from the mountains where the Kurds are being slaughtered to the Sinai, Syrian and Lebanese deserts.

The fifteen to twenty thousand who died in Lebanon this year, most of them Palestinians, must be the last. If Israel does not immediately change its military offensive into an offensive for peace and justice (and the Israeli democracy does not seem capable today of accomplishing this alone), we must keep faith with the duty to intervene, which everyone knows to be his who lives and fights for his life, against the lie of national independence and of states. We will then have to make contact with the Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian forces of peace so that they make the fight against the Nazi holocaust and for non-violence and democracy their priority choice. In any case it will be necessary to help and support this struggle. With our Nobel Prize friends, with Food and Disarmament, with all those who have in recent years shown that they really want peace and life. Therefore I feel certain. Above all our comrades reassure me, our new Radical comrades most of all, those of the 1982 Party.

So then, we will accomplish this as well: and we will have to be up to the job comrades, sisters and brothers, friends and ex Party comrades (whom I welcome back!). But it is evident, it is certain, we must not delude ourselves: the first front, for Lebanon too, is the front of "the living for development", the one of the "three million lives this year", and of the proposal of the [Italian] mayors, the Nobel Prize Winners, the Bishops which has been buried by the Italian government, the majority coalition parties (and also the other parties).

The [Radical] Party Congress in Bologna October 27 will have to face difficult and dramatic and splendid responsibilities. ----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Alessandro Pertini (1896 - 1986) Socialist statesman and President of the Italian Republic from 1978 until his death.