ABSTRACT: "Andropov can even decide to make sudden changes in the foreign, social or military policy of the USSR - wrote Marco Pannella in 1983 - without institutional opposition, without the citizens being able to approve or disapprove". Almost a prophecy: Gorbachev after a few years is activating "perestrojka" and "glasnost". But yesterday like today, everybody underestimates the strength and the advantages of totalitarian regimes in dealing with governments that are more or less democratic. The mistakes of pacifist movements which are always defeated because they are incapable of proposing a new model for security.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

On October 22, in all of Europe, there will be a day of mobilisation against the installation of missiles and in such a way for peace and disarmament.

Already in West Germany, Heinrich Böll, Günther Grass, the pastor Niemoller, the whole of the "grünen" (Greens) movement, important sectors of the Social Democrat Party and the Unions are committed to making sure that mobilisation of people and public opinion will be unprecedented. (It is also I believe interesting to note that on September 1, I noticed in Brussels that the Belgian, French, Dutch, and German television, as well as British radio, have all broadcast information since the beginning of the campaign, and the rendezvous on October 22 is to be during peak listening hours).

In Holland, Belgium, Denmark as well as Bonn, the evangelical Churches will provide religious attention and material support, giving further prestige to the campaign.

"Comiso" is becoming a European banner, for the most suggestive and symbolic ground for the encounter, and the hope which gives it life. In Italy, the PCI, PDUP, and DP, the archipelago of grassroots Christians, of the "left-wing independents" the apolitical pacificists, the nonRadical (non-violents, in the whole "sociological" world of the left) together with the traditional and prestigious corollary of intellectuals and artists which in each generation renew their support, will certainly give life to powerful demonstrations, such as have not been seen for decades.

Everywhere the USA and the USSR are being asked to conclude adequate and immediate agreements in Geneva, on controlled common nuclear disarmament, and national governments are being requested to postpone the installation of nuclear missiles.

Successes will be won but what will be their calibre and their significance?

Meanwhile, Andropov is making proposals and hypotheses which western governments and NATO judge interesting and positive.

He is undoubtedly doing so because the western "response" of installing USA missiles has worked: as he himself has shown.

He has probably done so too to arm us better, we "pacificists", against our own governments and the policies they support.

No thank you. Andropov knows that in democracy the people count or can count, that parliamentary democracy cannot ignore mass feeling and that the information of the western mass-media, although tampered with and untruthful as it often is, is such that it is nevertheless possible to use it as a vehicle directly or indirectly for its own reasons and proposals.

Besides, Andropov can without too much effort, manipulate the USSR to proceed in its foreign, military, and social policy in tactical and even strategic leaps and bounds.

Military spending, controlled as it is by the military, can soar dizzily or diminish at the expense of social spending, unless it is tempered by opposition from institutions, or unless the masses of workers and citizens are able to approve, disapprove or demonstrate.

In structural terms, the USSR represents an immense empire in our times, which responds to the same logic as in Nazi Germany, and when compared with more or less democratic governments, has the enormous immediate advantages of dictatorial governments.

It is true, very true that if pacifist battles only destabilise the countries of North-West Europe, and block the defence policy without proposing a more valid and stronger alternative; if they limit themselves to negative wars, if they bind their own mass campaigns to 'no' and legitimate sacrosanct fear, if they oppose the epiphenomenon (the "nuclear") and not the phenomenon (the "military", the "armies" as the basis of the only possible defence), this policy is a loser and irresponsible, in the literal sense of the word: i.e. not a "policy" but a reaction in itself prepolitical, neuter and not neutral, perfectly usable and instrumental.

Even on the "moral" level there is a doubt: its Eurocentrism, its character (reserved for the "rich" peoples, its mobilisation first and foremost "in toto" and in fact exclusively against the danger of extermination by nuclear wars, ignoring totally if not on the level of the marginal slogans and those of instrumental moralism, the extermination operated by food wars, or by traditional, non-nuclear wars, in the whole of Africa, in a large part of Latin America, in the Middle and Far East, not doing anything, anything at all concrete to save tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people in a decade, but offering pacificism in return, dawdling, and for the space of a triumphantly cyclic morning, one more time, another instance of the policy and culture of death, which enhances and specifically helps the most "fascist", totalitarian and barbaric forces of the industrial North; in other words, the very forces which are oppressing precisely their own peoples, also deny political democracy both in theory an

d in law and these are themselves the expression of a military and armed organisation of the whole of society, of the production of social life. The danger of the annihilation of humanity is not being championed, there is no fight for peace and for life, if the battle is not fought in an alternative, definitive way against the barbarities and immense power of real communism, which has produced in entire nations what nazism carried out in a few monstrous concentration camps.

The drama of our time, the tragedy which is in full swing, (not just imminent) results from a "world order" where democratic regimes and not just NATO, at their summit, on the one hand make an effort to defend or to conquer the maximum right of exploitation and domination of the third and fourth world (and its space), against the natural and obligatory expansion of the Soviet block, to defend themselves from the insidious subversion with which this block threatens metropolitan States or those conquered or protected, while on the other hand, simultaneously defending the stability of Soviet dictatorial and military industrial power within its own States. In this encounter, ever more dramatically, the West needs to ensure the maximum "internal order", the maximum efficiency, militarisation of the society of century-old democratic tradition, real "stabilisation". In this way for transnational military industrial forces, not only for NATO but also for the food multinationals or those that control the sources

of traditional or "nuclear" energy, more and more frequently the true necessary and vitally urgent war is that which is "internal" against democratic "disorder"...

Between the forces in power that want to circumscribe hostility and "bloodshed at the moment of conflict or military defence", parties, States and the left-wing "masses", pacifists who choose to ignore or underestimate (when they are in fact unchecked) the barbaric leviathan, structure and ideology of the USSR and its empire, and do not take charge of combating it and overcoming it, there is a link of opposition and dialectic unity: they are the double face of suicide, and of freedom and peace.

War and violence are a natural effect, they are a reality like illness for the democratic countries, but they are physiological, a health condition, in countries run by totalitarian and antidemocratic systems. To fight a responsible, political battle, strenuously but reasonably against the disease of the West which is becoming deadly, implies total dedication, here and now, against the USSR and against every system based on totalitarian barbarity, for the liberation of peoples who are victims of true communism or of military fascist regimes which the USA, NATO and the USSR are supporting and causing to proliferate throughout the world.

It is imperative then that little by little the "democratic" States convert their tremendous suicidal weapons, (as ideological as they are technological) into weapons suitable for the destabilisation and annihilation of "Communist" regimes, just as yesterday Nazi regimes were annihilated. How?

We have been talking, we have been trying to make ourselves understood (some of us) for at least twenty years. It is rare that our speeches in Parliament, at Congresses or elections do not touch on this topic. There is no space here to repeat such arguments. I limit myself here to recording that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy did not fear the weapons of countries infinitely richer and potentially stronger than they, so much as they did "Radio London" and the duplicated pamphlets of several thousand militants of Justice and Freedom.

These are, perfunctorily recalled, the reflections and convictions for which with so much difficulty but also tenacity and passion, we are warning our pacifist brothers and sisters in the world, democrats, and the political and institutional forces, and not only those which are Italian, of the risks which the various "Comisos", the various "22 Octobers", may become only traps, or grounds for defeat for common hopes and desires, and for legitimate, healthy, worries and fears.

It is no coincidence that over twenty years, and in 1983 more than in any other year, our pacifism of political non-violents and democratic, intransigent Radicalism, with its institutional victories, with its marches of dozens and dozens of thousands of disorganised people, its non-violent action, its hunger and thirst strikes, experiences only censorship on the mass-media, or information without comparison with that which apparently polemical is reserved for those who are "antinuclear" and "anti missile".

It is no coincidence that the extermination in progress, through starvation and war and the battles which have been and are on the point of countering it, of putting a stop to it, of fighting it, in their timeliness and their total positive concreteness, a proposition rather than a protest, have come to be politically ignored or suffered as fatalities, while the dispute and the debate on the danger of extermination are fully accepted politically. Are we therefore against the struggles taking place within Comiso, against the demonstrations of October 22?

This is no joking matter. Let us leave these subjects to the stupid, vulgar and angry denigration of the second-hand, last-minute pacifists. Among the wounded, among those arrested at Comiso there are more Radicals than the total number of other party members.

To these Radical comrades who are there because they know that the Radical Party alone covers the other fighting positions deserted by the rest, our thanks for their intelligence, for their rigour, for their choice.

The readers of these pages are invited to join and to support, to constitute with us, this extraordinary Party of hope and of life, in the course of the days and hours to come.