A humanly possible and politically acceptable war: this is the leaden implication of the political majority that votes for rearmament. The triumph of Nazism and the annihilation through hunger of 30 million people every year throughout the world: an international economic order serenely accepted and institutionalised in the northern half of the world, capitalist or Communist.

Wars are useful to the Nazism of today because they guarantee profits for the armaments industry. Anyone today who fights for life knows that he has the duty to rebel against the lie of the independence of nations and governments. Contacts must be made in Lebanon and Israel with those who want to give priority to extermination by hunger in the fight against the neo-Nazi holocaust.

("IL MANIFESTO", September 22, 1982)

("Marco Pannella , secretary of the Radical Party, sent us this article in which he gives the PR's evaluation of the Lebanese situation.")

The infamous war in Lebanon is truly a war. Infamous like all wars without exception. Children, women, the helpless massacred? It is the rule not the exception - not only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in Milan or Dresden, Moscow and Stalingrad, London or Manchester, Hanoi or the Horn of Africa.

A clean war? This is something known only to liars, to irresponsible imbeciles. They are the ones who harbour in their minds or hearts or guts or instincts their own kind of " just war", their own "clean, defensive and not offensive" war. A humanly possible and politically acceptable war is the leaden, infamous implication of those who continue to vote for or allow rearmament budgets to be passed, who earmark the country's resources for arms and the military depriving the unemployed, the pensioners, the homeless, the workers of the quality and dignity of life. Along with them are the arms exporters who, in Italy, are all part of the state or the regime.

The peculiar traits of Nazism are not to be found in war but in peace time. On the contrary, up to now war has been the death of Nazism. Not a few of French officers who tortured, murdered and massacred men, women and children in Indochina and then in Algeria came out of the "anti-fascist" war or had escaped from Buchenwald like Capt. Yves de Saint-Marc. The Russian army perpetrated immense massacres, incommensurable in quantity with those of Boves or Marzabotto. The atrocities of the Spanish Republicans who fought against Franco's Fascist coup were not always lesser than those of their enemies...

Atrocities are always atrocities whether they are committed

by the aggressor or the aggressed (and who ever really considers himself an aggressor?). In general atrocities are committed by those whom one thinks one can still beat and who are enemies; or by those who have been beaten. War knows only assassins and the assassinated. Populations are always the losers, the massacred. Only governments, those who dominate them, can be victors or the defeated.

For many people today, Israel's guilt is principally to be the assassin rather than the assassinated. The merit of the PLO is to be the assassinated rather than the assassin. It is a capital error to think that it is a war between Nazis and anti-Nazis rather than first of all an infamy. To affirm that Israel is Nazi is a way of absolving it from the responsibility for the war (which, I repeat, is necessarily and constitutionally infamous and atrocious) which it is conducting in collusion with its enemies; but it is also a way of "absolving" Nazism, degrading and negating its true and monstrously specific character.

Nazism, the very triumph of Nazism, is instead the extermination of thirty million people a year from hunger through the work of an ideology and a policy that unites the North, both East and West, of applied capitalism or applied Communism.

It is "peaceful", it expresses a certain international, economic, political and cultural "order". It is in practice racist and classist: its victims are "helpless", weak, miserable and "unarmed", quite frequently not even hostile, just as the Jews exterminated in the Thirties were not necessarily hostile.

Every now and then they show us the "escapees", rarely the exterminated or Buchenwald or Mathausen. As in the case of Hitler, so too for the "powerful" who Pertini [Sandro Pertini, the Italian President at the time, ed.] constantly conjures up as responsible for today's situation, the holocaust is nothing but an epiphenomenon, not the thing that one desires in itself, not the goal that one proclaims and for which one requests consensus and support. On the contrary, it is something which one kept hidden at the time and which today one pretends to deplore while planning and reinforcing it, as Spadolini and Craxi teach us.

However atrocious the number of the slaughtered and the assassinated in Lebanon may be, its total does not even reach the level of those who die in one day from starvation. And what Israel, the PLO, and the various Lebanese factions in this period spend on arms would have been enough to save the lives of at least 300,000 people who have died from starvation. But it has assured our arms-export industry immense profits.

Here is another characteristic of today's "Nazism": wars are useful and necessary to it because of the immense profits they make for its governments and industries, just as the economic, cultural, political and governmental ruin of the Third and Fourth Worlds is accomplished by the annihilation of at least 30 million people in a single year.

For various reasons, fortunately, the world's mass media (with the power system they serve and express, but in whose formation and support they also concur) have decided that one must move us and get us moving by "informing" us about the Middle East and, in particular, about Israel's responsibility and misdeeds. Thus on this front too one can hope not to work alone, nor entirely as busybodies if we know how to read the news and fill in the censored parts or the manipulated falsifications.

Thus is born the possibility and the necessity of a commitment on the part of the Radical Party or many of us on this front: Our formal penal accusation against "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 area of Radical Party activity dedicated to this situation constitutes the first assumption of responsibility according to our method of timeliness and substantial responsibilities and initiatives always on the human scale. Not the scale of power. We are doing it and will continue to do it: within the framework of our war against war, against the neo-Nazi holocaust, the campaign for having the Italian Parliament pass the mayors' and Nobel Prize winners' bill, clearer and more convincing. We will go there too bearing witness to our faith in the human and political richness of the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, the Lebanese people. We wil

l appeal to them as to those capable of bestowing, creating life and happiness. Against the holocaust, against fear and hatred, against the death of the enemy as the ultimate horizon of human, individual, popular and national vision.

It will also be a long, difficult, complex action, as are all actions that are worthwhile, that are not mere gestures or narcissistic speculations of parties or individuals. We will have to fight - once again - against the politics of our party-ridden government, squalid, blind, dirty as it is in Rome, Sicily or Brussels.

Some, the majority and for the nonce the winners, have seized almost with joy, with shivers of pleasure, on the Israeli "victories" and the massacre that has allowed and caused - to validate the reasons of the PLO - the claim to decide on the Palestinian people's own policies for them, on their own state; to clear the books on the accounts of other kinds with Israel, to propose again the USA as the only and most responsible factor for the Middle East war and the atrocities that it cannot help bring about, to avoid considering the question of the Syrian, South Yemenite, Iraqi and Iranian "assassins", the regimes of the Persian Gulf sheiks, and the Russian policies. Everyone, as it happens, (except us) is uninterested in any kind of serious democratic and class analysis, in any kind of reading in terms of peace, justice, liberty, progress, civilisation of this affair which is a single affair ranging from Tehran to Tel Aviv, from the mountains where the Kurds are being exterminated to the Sinai desert, fr

om Syria to Lebanon.

The fifteen to twenty thousand dead in Lebanon this year, for the most part Palestinians, must be the last. If Israel will not immediately convert its military offensive into an offensive for peace and justice - and the Israeli democracy does not seem at the time capable of doing this alone - we must keep faith with the duty to interfere, that all those who live and fight for life know to be their own, against the lie of the independence of nations and states. It will thus be necessary to make contact with the Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian forces for "peace" so that they choose the fight against the Nazi holocaust as prior to that of non-violence and democracy.

One must in every possible way sustain the battle.