ABSTRACT: The ten reasons why Radical anti-militarism is opposed to the pacifism of the PCI.

(Supplement to NOTIZIE RADICAL no.33, September 3, 1982)

"What we think and what we do to oppose Soviet militarism"

We Radicals are anti Soviet. That is to say, we denounce the growing danger of the USSR's military and expansionist policy. Our opposition to this policy is clear and constant: in the spring of 1982 we held non-violent demonstrations against extermination by hunger if the capitals of Eastern Europe (Moscow, Prague, East Berlin, Budapest, Sophia, Bucharest) where the non-violent militants were stopped and arrested and expelled, which aroused a considerable comment in the international information media.

We have mobilised in Parliament and throughout the country (the Radicals have recently constituted a Committee For Human Rights In Eastern European Countries which carries out significant activities and publishes a monthly review entitled "Confrontation With The East") to guarantee the implementation of the Helsinki Agreement and the affirmation of basic rights in Communist countries. We carry on a fight to prevent the "pacifist" action from being exclusively anti-American, but directed at affirming the values held by the Western democracies: values of life rather than death, of human and not military advancement. In this sense we are convinced that the confrontation with Communist regimes cannot be based on the mad armaments spiral "which reinforces the worst tendencies of power in the East and West", but on intense competition for human rights. Just because we are against any succumbing to "Realpolitik" with regard to Moscow, we believe that the task of the democracies is that of favouring the liberal

isation of the Eastern European systems with the legal methods sanctioned by the Treaty of Helsinki. The others, in short, want many missiles and no "Solidarnosc"; we want to strengthen "Solidarnosc" and begin the dismantling of the missiles.

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"What is it that the Radicals object to in the "peace movement"? Is it perhaps the "unilateralism" denounced by the Socialists? Or a kind of "usurpation" by a solitary and unopposed monopoly of Italian pacifism? Neither the one nor the other. On the contrary, it is the opposite of these for which we reprove the PCI, which dominates this "movement", and its other subaltern mob of supporters, as well as those who do not have the strength to promote even the most timid alternative to it. This "movement", in fact, does not have either the incisiveness to fight our own militarism (as it does not fight against the Muscovite variety), or the capacity to rally a union of various forces to flank or even to replace (the idea does not frighten us at all) the role which the Radical Party has played (even if as a minority) for twenty years as the only anti-militarist force in Italy.

Here are the things we do not like about the Italian "peace movement":

1) It is not a movement at all but a direct emanation of the parties. It is reduced to being, in the worst tradition of the left, a kind of "inter-group" which appoints itself the representative of the "people", whereas precisely this presumption plus the strict control of the party block any possibility of contributions from the citizens.

2) It fights for no objectives. It is "for peace" in a general way, but aside from calling huge assemblies, it is incapable of promoting specific campaigns or actions. If by chance such things should come up for discussion, the sage Communist leadership tones them down little by little until they have brought them back to the level of "the most general commitment to peace".

3) There has been a deliberate lack of opposition to the doubling (in two years) of Italy's military expenditures. The demonstration convened for March 31, 1982 by the (joint) October 24 Committee was first sabotaged and then formally abandoned by the PCI who dragged the FGCI (1) and the ARCI (2) in their wake.

All of that is meant as cover for the fact that the Communists have not presented any amendments to reduce military expenditures. Peace yes, but the workers of the war industry (and also its bosses one of whose main interlocutors the PCI aims to be) must continue to export arms to South Africa, Argentina, Iraq, and anyone may add to the list from his own knowledge.

4) The way it tries to satisfy everyone. As long as all hypocrisy is allowed (for example: saying it is "inopportune" rather that "wrong" to install Euromissiles at Comiso, and the failure to present amendments in Parliament to cut funds for NATO infrastructures, among which those of Comiso, while at the same time publicly displaying a long face in Sicily), the PCI can satisfy the pro-Soviet feelings of a great part of its membership by loud shouting in the squares while confirming at the same time the policy of re-arming NATO at the top political levels.

5) The confirmation of an unacceptable concept of "distension" in international relations that does not take into account the highly serious danger of the Soviet Union's militarism and thus is not capable of seeing the pacifism of Western Europe as a precious tool for fighting this policy on the basis of the Helsinki Treaty and not Yalta.

6) The inability to go from pacifism to anti-militarism: if there is not a rigorous analysis of the role of military organisations in our times, there cannot be an adequate reply to Jaruzelski (and the squares were empty from December 13 onwards) nor to the mad belligerency and nationalism that is spreading (and the squares remained silent as the new wars broke out).

7) The lay parties lack of consistency and the insufficient capacity to divulge the facts of war and peace; the lack of will to give public opinion an antidote to the poisons of the dominant propaganda.

8) One is still completely under the siren spell of the "negotiations" conception of general, world-wide and universal "disarmament" or nothing. Despite several important new ideas, the concept of unilateralism remains a kind of unconfessable sin though by now it has been embraced even by some of the most tenacious exponents of arms control who had formerly insisted on its implausibility.

9) The diffidence towards the arsenal of conscience, towards the organised forms of civil disobedience and towards conscientious objection, individually and collectively, to the practice of killing.

10) Finally and above all, the myopia of a Eurocentric concept of pacifism, incapable of grasping the urgent priority of the North-South division, incapable of seeing that the major and most terrible of wars is extermination by malnutrition and hunger."

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The Frightful International Process of Rearmament

The race for more and better armaments has no limits. It has been undeniably demonstrated that formidable power and financial interests are leading the human community along a road of no return with a process that, little by little, is becoming almost uncontrollable. The major stages of this process are: world-wide military expenditures that have reached the threshold of one million billion lire a year; the stockpiling of 60,000 nuclear warheads, equal to a destructive potential well beyond one million times that of the Hiroshima atom bomb; the unprecedented spread of arms production and sales; the acquisition by numerous countries (prevalently by dictatorial or authoritarian regimes in the Third World) of the technology and material for the construction of the atom bomb; the growing and decisive influence of power centres and military and military-industrial structures in all parts of the world.

The seriousness of this process has grown through phenomena that are too often ignored or underestimated: by the fact that military doctrines and the political-strategic options are increasingly determined by the development and testing of new arms systems, and not vice-versa; by the endless complication created by the existing military and atomic structures which are increasing rather than diminishing the probability of a war set off by accident or by a misunderstanding of the adversary's intentions; by the production and deployment of arms of a kind that are impossible to verify or control; in particular, by the conception of military scenarios and hypotheses that imply the acceptability of atomic war and the possibility of a "victory" by one side or the other, even after a generalised exchange of nuclear strikes.

The deviation of immense financial, technical-scientific, environmental and human resources from progressive activities which protect existence and the quality of life, and the employment of these in the construction of instruments of death, is creating the conditions for an inevitable explosion of armed conflict of a tragic scope beyond anything that mankind has known until now, which allows for and favours the holocaust by malnutrition and hunger of hundreds of millions of people. ----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) FGCI - Federazione Giovanile Communista Italiana (Italian Communist Youth Federation).

2) ARCI - Associazione Recreativa Culturale Italiana (Italian Association for Recreation and Culture).