TELEKS-LUBLJANA - December 1987

ABSTRACT: In an interview with Jasna Kobe of the Lubljana daily Teleks, Marco Pannella deals with the main issues of Radical initiatives - the anti-clerical and anti-militarist struggles, the fight for justice and against the prohibition of drugs. The commitment to a trans-national party and the polemics surrounding Toni Negri (1) and Cicciolina (2).

(RADIKALNE NOVOSTI edited by MARINO BUSCHADIN and SANDRO OTTONI with the collaboration of MASSIMO LENSI, FULVIO ROGANTIN, PAOLA SAIN JAN VANEK, ANDREA TAMBURI - TRIESTE, January 1, 1989)

QUESTIONS:

1) Mr. Pannella, as is fitting for a good meal, I would like to begin with an appetiser. So if you are agreeable, I would like to ask you about the beginnings of the Radical Party and what it was that led to its establishment.

2) Now I will get to the first course. The specialties of your political programme have always been your struggles, from divorce to nuclear energy. The only somewhat rancid dish may have been Toni Negri. What do you have to say about him?

3) Your party has chosen the crucial moment when Italian ships are leaving for the Persian Gulf to give battle to "good" Mr. Muccioli (3). Could this mean that pacifism has been put into quarantine?

4) In your opinion, if your work in the European Community should include Yugoslavia wanting to become a member, what chance is there that this could happen?

5) What do you think of Enzo Tortora's (4) television programme?

6) Do you think the Goria (5) government is at all valid in the present Italian political context?

7) Do you consider yourself the most Machiavellian of Italian politicians?

8) The Pope has imposed a black-out for all observing Catholics on sex as a material for study in the schools. What do you think about that?

9) And now, for dessert, the last question. Do you think that Cicciolina is, politically speaking, your creation? And if so, is it possible that you have loosened the paternal reigns a bit, or is the emancipation of the honourable deputy merely a temporary politico-sexual euphoria?

Thank you. Respectfully,

Jasna Kobe

ANSWERS:

1) In Italy right after the war, the democratic anti-Fascist factions and forces of European culture and constitutional, politically democratic states were suffocated and pushed aside by the great clash of two "churches" - the Christian Democratic and the Communist-Stalinist ones - among the principal representatives of the two empires at odds: the Soviet Russian one and the Western American one.

We were leftist liberals, democrats, libertarian Socialists, "extremists" of both greater social justice, of anti-totalitarianism and of the great values of tolerance. Among other attempts, there was in 1955 the one to establish a "Radical Party" that would be free of the subaltern politics of power accepted as their destiny by others. After about a decade of wandering in the desert, discouragement and abandonment, events finally proved us right. If one day someone should write the history of Italy from 1965 until today as it really happened, they will be able to offer documentary proof that ever since then we have been the strongest force for progress, reform, and democracy to be an outlet for social majorities oppressed by the sterile party-power system on the issues fundamental for law, for life and the quality of life in our country.

2) Toni Negri's "escape" was the exercising of an inalienable right on the part of a citizen who had already had to spend more than five years in prison of the most ferocious and inhuman kind without the right to a trial, persecuted with unjustified arrest warrants used as a pretext to keep him in prison where he risked remaining another twelve years before being sentenced definitively.

Thus he exercised "the right to escape" even if this was not and could not be an act of non-violent struggle in exemplary Radical style. Toni Negri is the typical expression of a kind of intellectual, often base on the civil and human level, who cultivates irrationality and violence. Despite his inability to defend himself, despite the fact that he aided and abetted the campaign to lynch him, despite his being at large, even the Appeals Court could only embarrassedly hang on him an unconvincing conviction as the moral accomplice in a robbery that ended in the killing of a policeman... A conviction of thirty years in prison has already been reduced to little more than ten, and it is not impossible that the Court of Cassation will annul even this sentence. But that is not the problem. Thanks to the scandal caused by our decision to make him a candidate and have him elected, a decision that we declared in advance was going to cost us one fourth of our electorate, we succeeded in making Italy and the world

know the aberrations of the special laws imposed by the PCI [Communists] and the DC [Christian Democrats], subversive and authoritarian forces within the state. Not only did Amnesty International take our side but even President Reagan officially denounced the degradation of certain Italian judicial procedures. Thus within a few months the maximum of preventive custody was reduced from 12 to 6 years, and the self-criticism of all the other parties got its start... That was what brought us on November 9 the crushing victory in the referendum on the civil responsibility of magistrates, which we were primarily the ones to think up and organise, despite the massive rallying of the press to the side of the corporation of judges...

3) For twenty years we have been fighting against prohibition which makes drugs (like alcohol in the Twenties and Thirties in America) the most gigantic criminal business in the world, something unprecedented, and which is becoming a factor in national and international power that organises and promotes the trafficking, production and use of weapons of war throughout the world.

In 1975 - in line with our Gandhian and non-violent methods - I even had myself arrested in order to oblige Parliament to take some steps in the right direction, something which they finally did, but which very soon revealed themselves to be inadequate.

This Mr. Muccioli, who has become a kind of great guru for the Italian power-holders and bourgeoisie for "rehabilitating" drug addicts through a multi-milliard entrepreneurial action, has himself gone to the attack: we had not even mentioned him. For us he is not a point of reference, either for good or for bad, in the fight against a scourge that knows no equal, provoked by the law and by the Mafia that has an absolute need of this law. He is merely an expert and an entrepreneur in assistance to the mutilated and invalids wounded and destroyed by the war being waged.

With regard to our ships which have left for the Persian Gulf, we were among the first to oppose it, more for the uselessness of this measure than for because it was really - as the spur-of-the-moment pacifists of the traditional left asserted - an imperialist war action.

4) Our commitment to becoming a trans-national party with registered members and militants in the USSR and Poland, in Israel or in Burkina Faso, in Brazil or in the USA, as well as in the European Community, has the goal of creating a true United States of Europe (as there is a United States of America), and of making this Community admit Yugoslavia as a full member. We have been saying officially for a decade: militant Radicals have often come to inform the maximum number of Yugoslav citizens of this conviction of ours.

The national independence of Italy, Germany, or of any country in the world today, appears to us all to be an illusion if not a swindle. The technological and ecological revolutions cannot be guaranteed within the bounds of any one national state. Neither can the fight against inflation, against unemployment, poverty, against the illusions of authoritarianism and the cult of "efficiency" of any type, nor the external or internal defence of our territories, our countries. This is what we have shown to be our thought under the pressure coming from peoples and democracy, individual and civil rights, in the twelve countries of the European Community. The Radical Party is convinced that this also applies to Yugoslavia and has the duty and right to say it, to defend this point of view and this ideal turn of events. But the decision, in any case, must rest with both the EEC and Yugoslavia.

We are concerning ourselves primarily with convincing the EEC and we have good hopes of doing so if Yugoslavia also agrees. There is no time to be lost. Too much has been lost already...

5) I have no television and I almost never watch it. I only study the data relating to its news services which are neither democratic nor legal but conditioned by the party-power system and mendacious if we judge from a "Western" point of view. If we were to judge from an "Eastern", Soviet viewpoint, of course our judgement would be a different one...

6) It is a government that offers the worst, not the best, of the parties that take compose it. It is not even Goria's fault. It is a feeble government. But without our contribution and that of our green comrades - forgetting that we Radicals are where the five referendums on justice and energy [i.e. the anti-nuclear stance, ed.] originate which brought in 21 million "yes" votes (while the "no" votes were less than 4 million) and the only big civil reforms actuated in Italy... without this contribution even Craxi by now would be able to govern the country adequately.

7) I would be - in that case - the dumbest, thinking that I was the cagiest.

8) That the Pope understands nothing about sex. And it is quite right, even lovely, that it should be so.

9) Our colleague and comrade Ilona Staller (2) was elected thanks above all to the frenetic promotion she was given during the elections by some of our most powerful adversaries such as the director of that veritable "sfascist" (6) party which is the "great newspaper" »La Repubblica (7). If the national and international press goes wild every time Cicciolina shows them a tit, the problem is not with the tit and its owner but with those who so easily go wild. Ilona is not a chaste diva but a porno diva. And so what? Do they prefer the cannon merchants, the environment destroyers, the corrupt and impotent politicians? Let them help themselves. Cicciolina cannot and does not want to hurt anyone. She is in agreement with the essentials of our thinking. Does she commercialise sex? Of course she does. This has been done since the world began and it is better that it should be done openly than in dark secret. Certainly if we voted in the only truly democratic way, with the Anglo-American system, her candidacy wo

uld never have arisen except, perhaps, as a fun and inconclusive expression of folklore.

And we, including Ilona... we are for American-style elections. What about you?

----------------------------------------------------------------TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Negri, Toni - (Padua 1933) Italian far-leftist philosopher and writer, revolutionary and workers' champion, he was found guilty of ordering the assassination of a certain engineer Saronio. Nominated as a candidate on the Radical ticket (on the condition that he refuse parliamentary immunity and stand trial) he was elected deputy in 1983. But he left Italy surreptitiously and found exile in France where he still resides.

2) Cicciolina - Stage name of porno artist Ilona Staller, Hungarian (Budapest 1951), elected to Parliament in 1987 on the Radical lists.

3) Muccioli, Vincenzo - Promoter, administrator and "boss" of the St. Patrignano Community, one of the most important Italian undertakings for the rehabilitation of drug addicts. The community is held up as a model by the drug prohibition faction and enjoys considerable protection and financing, etc. The showpiece of the Italian prohibitionist coalition, it strongly supported the Hon. Mr. Craxi at the time when he presented his bill.

4) Enzo Tortora - (Genoa 1928 - Milan 1988) Journalist and famous television MC, arrested for drug pushing on the basis of declarations made by "penitent" Camorra members. The Radical Party mobilised public opinion with a campaign denouncing the violation of the law by the Neapolitan judges who had incriminated Tortora, and in general of abusing the use of the "penitents". This campaign culminated in the referendum for making judges civilly responsible for their actions. (The referendum, held on November 8-9, 1987, resulted in 80% of the voters being in favour of making judges civilly responsible.) Elected to the European Parliament in 1984 on the Radical ticket, Tortora underwent a famous trial in which he was convicted, only to be acquitted on appeal. This acquittal was upheld by the Court of Cassation. The Tortora affair became the symbol of the Radicals' most important campaign for the reform of justice.

5) Goria, Giovanni - DC exponent and prime minister of a short-lived government.

6) "sfascist" - An untranslatable play on words. The word "Fascist" preceded by an "s" forms the word "sfasciare" meaning to wreck, break up, disrupt. Here the two ideas of being Fascist and wrecking are combined and attributed to the newspaper in question.

7) »La Repubblica - A popular and influential Rome daily.