By Marco Pannella

ABSTRACT: The errors of others are our weakness, nor our strength. The continuity from the Fascist to the post-Fascist era and the forty-year-long violation of the Constitution. Democratic, Christian and Socialist aspirations are still Utopian on the threshold of the year 2000. The triumph of knowledge and science and the schizophrenic barbarization of politics and the world's cultural and economic systems. The error of Henri De Lubac - the new cardinal - in the pages of "The Drama of Atheistic Humanism". The sanctification of all forms of power: the Leviathan. Democratic humility appears as folly or illusion; that which the Radicals have tries to do and have often succeeded in doing. The Party compares itself with the world horizons and inner horizons of each individual. Politics must be conscious of limitations, time-spans, places and circumstances. The goal of "immediately saving three million lives" in today's context. (NOTIZIE RADICALI no. 3, January 20, 1983)

To contemplate the disaster, to feel satisfaction in the negative results achieved by all the leaders without any exception, to dream about how different Italy would be if only they had listened to us, to remember our reasonings, the warnings, the timely proposals we advanced, or even just to compare ourselves to others and pat ourselves on the back (which, alas, is so easy!) - all of this is very tempting but even more damaging.

And if all this were the case, as in great part it is the case, the only thing to do is get from it a greater sense of the urgent need of our succeeding and to feel how shabby it would be to have had a useless recognition of the possible and the necessary. We are helped by our method, our rules: we have united to achieve several precise goals, whatever the road may have been that has brought each of us in contact with the others, and whatever may be the one - farther off - towards which each of us is heading or to which he may be led.

We should not deceive ourselves: the errors of the others are our weakness, not our strength. The base, losing quality of the politics of our adversaries "debilitates, does not support" our own. This is confirmed today, for example, on the hundredth anniversary of Benito Mussolini's birth, in which the regime is faced with an almost frightening historical summing up no longer distorted by instrumental passions: the historical summing up of the Fascist and post-Fascist eras is the summing up of a single epoch, divided up by the break in continuity caused by the Liberation and the conceiving of the anti-Fascist Constitution, which was instantly betrayed and violated - a violation that has lasted forty years.

The long political aspiration - democratic, Socialist, Christian and liberal - will have thus dramatically traversed the whole century - underground or attached like a futilely ambitious banner - only to arrive at the dawn of the 21st Century exhausted but still marked with Utopian features. The established disorder - on the national and international level - is today so barbarous and frightful for anyone who has acquired a minimum of respect and conscientiousness towards a juridical and humanistic civilisation capable of creating the doubt that Fascism and Nazism have been defeated as regimes only to better impose their values and culture on the whole planet.

To be afraid of recognising the immense, decisive force of grim and enthralling Fascism, the cultural dominion it exerts over the leaders of the "republican" post-Fascist state, its need of death and violence, of suppressing freedom and justice, means becoming subaltern to it, irremediably so, just as much as are its most direct, grotesque, descendants and imitators.

This Twentieth Century will have been on the one hand the century in which science and knowledge triumphed; and on the other hand that of the schizophrenic barbarization of the world's political, cultural and economic systems.

Henri de Lubac (named cardinal by a most fortunate decision of the Pope last week) led into error the intuition that made pregnant, grave and prophetic the pages of his book "Le drame de l'humanisme atée" for those of us who read it right after the war. Although it is clear today that this is the century of an infinite tragedy whereas it might have been one of infinite richness for the world, this is not because of humanism having detached itself from religiosity (although all true humanism has and does constitute the apex of human religiosity), but because of the triumph of a culture and thus of a ruling class in the world which is profoundly "one" despite all its contradictions: "one" in its sanctification of all forms of power, of Leviathan, whether it be the state ("ethical"!), the party, the army, the church; and one in its ideological empire for the sake of which all in unison have sacrificed and are sacrificing individuals and societies themselves on behalf of "projects" for society, for revoluti

on, for restoration... The lay and Christian law of irrepressible respect for (the "sanctity" of) the individual's life and conscience, of his fundamental human and civil rights has been and is being still swept away by the long, persistent storm of irrationality and the various kinds of romanticism which have won out over the supporters of order based on liberty, tolerance, dialogue - in a word, political democracy or constitutional state, or of humanistic and humanitarian non-violence.

Fascism, Nazism, Communism "in practice", power systems and those of multinational power based on worship of the law of the jungle that have undermined and driven mad even states founded on premises and laws of the highest civility are today dominant and yet on the edge of ruin. If we measure the possibilities of people and against their ways of organising themselves politically, people of good will who have the power of reasoning, of trust in reason, of hope, whether they are in Warsaw or in Rome, in Moscow or in Washington, democratic humility certainly appears to be folly or at best illusion.

And yet, in the darkest moments of individual lives or of history, I think there is nothing else for us, no other possible power, but to take deep stock of our consciences, but to seek to know what is the wise attitude in a specific situation, and to live morally and responsibly with our choices and actions in respect of the rules of life and behaviour which are given to us. Personally as well as politically. This is what we as Radicals have attempted to do, and not infrequently we have succeeded.

We have reached the point, united along this road, of comparing ourselves, as a party too, with the very essence of the problems of this our world and its wider horizons; the most inner ones of each of us. The politics of life and the quality of life, life the politics of law and human and civil rights, has today become the explicit reason for our very existence. And there are no politics, possible and necessary, which merit the name unless they are armed with a consciousness of their limits, of their time-spans, their places and their circumstances. There are no politics which are not transformed into law and aware of having first of all to operate today for today, but - also - to prefigure or at least strongly condition the future as well. There are no politics which are not strongly aware that the most ambitious historical aspirations must take their substance from the needle's eye of today and from works that are made to their measure. But it is also necessary to well understand that their is a time

for everything, that the same goal achieved in a different moment is a different thing, that the very thing that was "good" yesterday often is "worse" or "bad" for today.

The three million at least of the living who are among those condemned to death "today" from hunger and misery by the politics of today and "in the framework of today's reality", surely would also constitute a powerful declaration "too" of peace for everyone throughout the world. In another context, not far off, it might become the last great good action in a world destined in any case to destruction. And it may be that the success of the political institutional and non-violent fight does not appear much different to seize from the politics of waste, rearmament and corruption a minimum for social pensions that would be less anguishing and unworthy, and seize it "today", in the coming weeks or instead in coming years.

These objectives are possible. If the Party, if the loonies of reasonableness, democracy, humility and also of love will grow during these days, these objectives will become probable in the next few weeks.

Isn't it worthwhile trying? Isn't it worthwhile our trying it? Everyone knows what it will cost us not to try. On the other hand what it could cost us to try, one really cannot understand. For this too we have hope - and try to be the hope.