ABSTRACT: Mussolini had a greater sense of law and the rules of the game than the political leaders of the post-Fascist era. The party-power system of imperfect one-party rule and the subversiveness of the extreme right and left which is its mirror image. Parliament, government and parties are the outlaws, undemocratic. There is only the Radical Party as a centre for struggle and a rallying point to prefigure "otherness". A new betrayal by the clergy.

Following this note by Marco Pannella is a comment by Mario Signorino: Marco Pannella, a very high exponent of the post-Risorgimento free-lance journalistic school, but besides that a demi-urge of politics. In this glimpse of political history his judgement of Mussolini may excite scandal and misunderstanding. A point of Croce (1) style idealism. Pannella maintains the idea of the actuality of a regime process that tends to transcend the classical dualism of democracy - dictatorship in a non-traditional way.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI no. 39, September 21, 1983)

If Mussolini had been willing to or imagined the possibility of building his Fascist state with the aim of immediate efficiency and at survival at any price, the convenience of not respecting some of the rules of the game, at the "de facto" and not the legal, official, responsible elimination of his idealistic and political adversaries, he would have been nothing other than any post-liberal and would have not lasted more than five or ten years, leaving behind him a lacuna in memory and in history.

What made him tragically great and victorious over our hopes and humanistic ideals of liberty, justice and political democracy, was his very deep - to the point of perhaps being unconscious - sense of law, of the rules of the game, and of government. In this sense he was and is infinitely closer to the great traditions of the right throughout history, of juridical civilisation, of the certainty of law as the foundation of the social contract - in a word, to a constructive aspect of modern civilisation and to the demands of peoples, of the humble, of the citizens, of anything other than the post-Fascist class of political leaders which is the putrid fruit and also the "strength" of the regime that for forty years has misgoverned and ruined our society.

The party-power system of an imperfect one-party set-up is nothing but the mixture of everything that is worst in our history, in our past. And it is no coincidence that it has taken stock of the situation and in the last ten years has nourished with its own substance the subversiveness of the extreme right and extreme left which are its own, identical mirror image.

Transformism alla Crispi (2), bad Catholic and pontifical subculture, rarely with post-Tridentine dignity and consciously inquisitional or Stalinist, beggarly vitalism and D'Annunzianism (3), pre-Fascist corporativism, all united in one conception, in a cultural anthropology that is literally and historically the same as that expressed by the "laws" of the "Mafia" and of the "Camorra": "material" constitution, "subjective" secretariats... A world, that is, which is necessarily, and in the long run, consciously criminal in the face of the values and the letter of written constitutions and laws. The ruin even of itself, of what is being realised by the post-Fascist imperfect one-party system, united by the P2 (4), by clerical or atheistic Masonry, by the P38, by shoddy cynicism in show-case Mafia boss style, and it is not, nor can anyone take it for, an announcement of the future, the pre-figuration of a new order, the foundation of a new state and social edifice.

The "new" which is being realised by way of the massacre of parliamentary rules, by way of the hoax of "constitutional reforms" which are only intent on sweeping away some political minority susceptible of representing a popular and democratic alternative to their oligarchy, aiming at sweeping away all obstacles to the only irremediable monads, the "parties". This is nothing but the spent and agitated tail lashing of a regime that is already dead.

The Parliament, the government, the parties are "outlaws" - not only the Parliament, the government, the democratic and constitutional parties, but the corrupt and incapable, violent and useless usurpers of legality.

From Almirante [MSI] to Berlinguer [PCI], from Bozzi to Spadolini [PRI], from Lama [labour leader] to Merloni, from Capuzzo to Curcio, from Zanone to Toni Negri of the Sixties or Seventies, the system is one and the same.

Like all facts in this world, like any history made by men, contradictions exist and from them there can grow prospects of conversion, of regeneration, of change, of salvation. But to cultivate them one must have become harder in one's hoping and reasoning than we reasonably can presume to be or to have been until now.

There is nothing else - however - but the Radical Party to constitute a rallying point for struggle, for the creation and pre-figuration of this "other" thing with respect to the cultures of extermination, of war, of violence, of wild, destructive and suicidal profits, of the oppression of individuals by this new Leviathan of power, of stabilised and dominant disorder. It is dramatically, perhaps tragically simple - not simplistic. The betrayal by the clergy is again, in Italy, absolute. So much so that one could think that clergy and traitor are not in our time anything less than synonyms. That is why we are always more non-violent and democratic.

---------

Comment by Mario Signorino

Even if he only dedicates small scraps of free time to his writing, one might consider Marco the last representative of the post-Risorgimento free-lance journalist who, from the first decade after the Unification [of Italy, ed.] until the end of the second World War, has been the critical conscience of Italian politics, drawing from an analysis of the past the keystone, the stimulus or even the pretext for political action. A school of great political moralists, all very different from each other, from the best known Piero Gobetti, to Oriani, to F.S. Merlino to Dorso.

Marco is not a moralist but a "demiurge" of politics; he does not trace his analysis at a desk but sharpens it in the midst of action.

His glimpses of political history, not despite but precisely because they are openly partial, are always illuminating. Sometimes it happens however that he states his case more than he ought in a simplified and one-dimensional way. That is the case of the present note where his judgement on Mussolini may arouse scandal but, above all, incomprehension. To me, for example, it seems hasty and too concerned with showing up by contrast the shoddiness of the present era of a party-power system. As a result the comparison to the past does not help but rather hinders the understanding of an analysis which on the whole remains valid. I think that the summing up of a historical period cannot be made by going against the accounts which remain the basis and proof of a historical judgement.

I believe I see in Marco's evaluation of Mussolini a point of Crocean idealism; and on the other side, moral intolerance of a Salvemini (5) type towards present politics and the stature of its protagonists. The result is that he gives on the one hand an artificially rational coherence to the past. (For example, the theoretical contradiction of attributing a "very deep sense" of the rules of the game and of law, or "the certainty of law as the basis of the social contract" to a dictator and a dictatorship which, if I am not wrong, are the negation of democracy, that is to say, a system of rules of the game which is certain and equal for all. Or the inattentive reference to the fate of the political adversaries, not all of whom - Gobetti, for example, or Giovanni Amendola, Matteotti, Rosselli, etc. were "legally" eliminated but in a rather heavy-handed "de facto" way.) And on the other hand he underestimates, because of the wretchedness of events, the historical force of the on-going process and of its i

nnovative character. In short, he experiences it only as diminished with respect to a past in which alone one recognises historical dignity and greatness (even if in a negative way).

There is this risk for the reader, even if there is none for Marco who has always maintained the reality - not the abstract possibility - of "an Italian way to...", that is, a regime process that tends to transcend in a non-traditional form the classical dualism of democracy-dictatorship.

Mario Signorino

----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Croce - Benedetto Croce (1866 - 1952) Neapolitan philosopher who also held several political offices and constantly defended the liberal ideal.

2) Crispi - Francesco Crispi (1818 - 1901) - Statesman and political mentor of Garibaldi's "dictatorship" in the South.

3) D'Annuzianism - Reference to Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863 - 1938), prominent Italian writer.

4) P2 - The subversive Masonic lodge led by Licio Gelli.

5) Salvemini - Gaetano Salvemini (1873 - 1957), Socialist historian and statesman.