ABSTRACT: The radical nonviolence is political nonviolence; it is the force of the truth, and therefore dialogue and capacity to convince. This is why the radical nonviolent action has always based itself on information; the problem today is precisely that of finding a communication with the citizens, who are increasingly discouraged, careless and ill-disposed toward politics. With the radical party's slogan "for the life of rights and the right to life", the author proposes a transparty radical party which must struggle, in Italy, against indirect violence in the field of information and for the life of Rights, and a transnational radical party which must struggle, in the world, against direct violences and for the right to life.

(Papers of the convention "The radicals and nonviolence: a method, a hope", Rome 20-30 April 1988)

I will apologize a priori for the fact that I'll leave immediately after my speech, as I have to go to Naples to attend a demonstration on justice, and for the fact that mine will be no more than sparse considerations. During the discussion on Stalin, I was impressed by the fact that there is this biographic element in the account of Beria's sudden arrest. Beria was the executor of Stalinist terror; he was arrested during a top meeting by some courageous officers and was taken to a barrack. There, he was the person who best represented cynicism, and the organized violence of the Soviet regime, started a hunger strike and continued it for twelve days, asking to be informed of his condition and his fate. I believe this is a sufficiently significant and enlightening example. It is true that Gandhi says that there is a nonviolence of the weak and a nonviolence of the strong, meaning that nonviolence should not be a weapon doomed to defeat or to witness a condition of defeat, but should arise from a condition of

great awareness and moral strength, and that it should be aimed to solving conflicts in positive terms. Nonetheless, it is also true that when a person who is the greatest expression of an authoritarian power finds himself naked, unarmed, he has only that possibility of expression and initiative; and that, in the face of a new establishment which he can hardly interpret and identify, he has this impulse and takes this initiative.

In all these years, I think we have learnt that for us radicals, nonviolence is a complicated, vast and - if we want to use this expression - sophisticated weapon, in the sense that it should be used with intelligence and timeliness, and that it is something radically different from what most people think, who perceive nonviolence as a fact bearing on interior morality and which should be kept inside, or even as the projection of a mystic idea or of abstract theories.

The radical party's history teaches us that the radical nonviolence is political nonviolence, in other words, not just a set of instruments, but a way of conceiving life, democracy, fundamental liberties; above all, for us political nonviolence is the fundamental idea according to which citizens know they can change things, they can solve them, they can "count".

Therefore, nonviolence and democracy go together. After all, the true vehicle - if we want to speak in terms of instruments - we have always confronted ourselves with and which represented the premise, the basis for radical politics and the radical nonviolent action, is the problem of information: the idea according to which in order to defeat violence we need to act without violence and we need to talk, that nonviolence is first of all dialogue in expression (which is the title of this Satyagraha Association), ultimately remains an internal projection.

Satyagraha is the force of the truth, and therefore nonviolence means first of all dialogue, capacity to convince; nonviolence calls for the need to communicate.

It is no chance that all the radical campaigns have had to come to terms with this: the fact that it was possible to get in touch with the citizens and explain to them that it was possible to change the things that were wrong through civil disobedience, i.e. using laws which are overridden in the conscience of citizens in order to override them also in the legislation; or refusing to obey unfair laws and taking on the burden of this disobedience. The various means, the various moments, the various actions have always come to terms with the problem of information, i.e. the need to find a communication with the citizens. I think this is our greatest problem today.

We live in an Italian context, and we have to confront a Society which is unquestionable experiencing on the one hand a crisis of values and on the other a mechanism of generalized corruption; this - we have to face it - is our greatest problem: the fact that there is scarce confidence toward politics and therefore scarce credibility in apparently bizarre actions such as many of the typical nonviolent demonstrations could be; because, ultimately, "politics is another thing"...And this radical difference is all the more evident in the nonviolent action, in the nonviolent expression, because today we are coming to terms with a society which is increasingly consumerist, distracted, discouraged, careless and scarcely open to politics because it is confronted with a politics which is occupation of the power.

I remember an interview which Pannella (1) granted this newspaper at the end of the seventies, where he said that the radicals' challenge...pity I don't have it with me, I would have liked to quote it...where he says that the radicals' challenge is that of saying that we want to do in politics the same things we consider good and just in our lives, in our beliefs, whereas we have always been told that politics was something else, that politics is business, that politics is compromises, and that is has nothing to do with ideas, with beliefs, with the hopes to change, with honesty, with cleanliness.

I believe this is the essence of the real problem. Ultimately, the radical party adopted this slogan, a single slogan but divided into two parts: "for the life of rights and the right to life"; our conflict and our "internal" battle, in this Italy we live in, is essentially the battle for the life of Rights, in other words, the battle for safe rules, and therefore for credibility of democracy, possibility of a political confrontation, information for the citizens and consequent possibility of a real change: democracy, exchange of ideas, conflict, and ultimately not a final synthesis, but a final choice. This is democracy in our conception, this is where political nonviolence plays its role; therefore, according to me, the priority in Italy, for a party such as ours, is that of having a clean Society, an ideally uncorrupted society, or at least a society in which it is possible to do such things, where citizens can listen to a voice which engages in politics in the same way as it declares to do so, and which

experiences the political confrontation the way it says it experiences it.

According to me, the struggle for the life of rights, i.e. the certainty of the law, is the difficulty for the nonviolent political action of being listened, of being believed, of mobilizing: a huge difficulty we have, and which is proven precisely by this, by the non-credibility of politics, by the fact that some view the radicals as odd animals in a bazaar....someone thinks we're acting, someone thinks we're serious, generally speaking people do acknowledge a certain difference and honesty (this is a generalized fact, I believe), but in some this translates into a negative opinion on our oddness, on our excesses, etc. But if we have to look at the radical party as the party of democracy par excellence, in our country, then it is a party which is necessarily a transparty, it is the party that chooses to practice political nonviolence in its various expressions, it is the party of cleanliness, of honesty, of truth.

The party of the right to life and vice versa, but at the same time the party which is most present on the international scene, the party which makes a transnational choice. Why am I saying this? Because in my opinion, we have experienced a moment of complete identification of the nonviolent radical party, of the preamble of the statute, with the campaign against starvation: that was the highest moment, in which the life to right, the assertion of the political, legislative, informative, awareness-raising means enabling it represented the priority.

The radical party made of democrats and believers of nonviolence, of libertarians, the party which upholds the right to life is that party which struggles against indirect violence - to use a classical distinction used in the texts on nonviolence. This is a definition used by Galtung, if I'm not mistaken: direct violence is the violence which produces physical, visible violence...killing, torture, imprisonment, material deprivation of freedom, havoc, extermination, war; indirect or structural violence is the violence that ensues from the lack of democracy, the violence of abuse, economic violence, juridical violence, the lack of the certainty of the Law. The nonviolent, democratic, transparty, Italian radical party is the radical party which should struggle first of all against indirect violence, in the field of information, of the lack of rules.

I don't think there is a "radical-democratic" party and a "radical-nonviolent" party: there is a radical party which cannot be separated from these common, combined, internal characteristics.

The radical party makes sense only if it is the party of democrats (as that electoral alliance created in 1958 was called) and it is the party of people who believe in nonviolence, in other words, of those citizens who believe that the end does not justify the means, but that the means foreshadow the end: in Gandhi's words, the seed contains the tree and the flower that will grow, and the flower of nonviolence cannot grow from a violent seed.

The transnational nonviolent and democratic radical party is the party which struggles for the right to life, against the terrible direct violences which exist in the world: torture, imprisonment, havoc, murder; this is the greatest priority, and I'm thinking in particular of the action in favour of human rights.

A few days ago I was in Central America, and I was impressed when the janitor of the Italian embassy in Guatemala city told me about the Easter festivities. "We were all together, the whole family - he said - it was wonderful, we ate and drank all night through". After describing all this for a while, he added "unfortunately, that idiot of my nephew drowned in the river". You understand? The accident had marred the party. This is to say that the problem of the value of life is a an extremely important problem in the world. And this party, which launches (not like Amnesty International, which is already an important thing, with its letters, its vigilance, its juridical initiative for the control of human rights) a direct transnational action for the safeguard of life, of the value of life, and for the assertion of a life that counts, which is worth as much as it is in Piazza Montecitorio (2)...where, during the demonstrations, we ask not to be tossed around by Sella the policeman, who usually takes us away on

his van, and we complain when he twists our arm...instead of the kid who drowns in Guatemala, but he's one of the ten children, or the child who dies in Africa, no one will know about him, because he's one of the 40.000 children who die every day: a Hiroshima every other day, as we said.

The party of the right to life should be perceived as the party of direct action; perhaps I'm forcing it, but we need to establish priorities, after all. I remember the slogan of the march from Perugia to Assisi, "it's up to each person to do something".

It was a beautiful and precise slogan, because there's a lot of nonviolence on paper, and nice theories too, but the radical party's force has always consisted in this imperative: it is up to each of us to do something. Because if a person says he's nonviolent and then accepts to carry out his military service and even ride on a Tornado, if he says he's nonviolent but then he works in a weapon factory, or cooperates actively in some violent, anti-dialogic activity, then I believe this is a concrete problem.

The radical party's history is all made of choices: this should be the occasion for a reflexion.

In the great difficulty of the social context of our country and of its evolution with regard to the crisis of credibility of politics and the difficulty of a militant presence which we all have to face: the radical party in Italy, a transparty, a party of the life of rights, a party which struggles against the demonstrations of the violence of the establishment, which we have learned how to identify, denounce and oppose. A Radical Party present abroad (abroad as a transnational, not a national expression), a party which is the equivalent of Amnesty International in the field of the right to life, the direct action for the habeas corpus, for the safeguard of the value of human life: to explain to people, possibly on an international scale, which are the values for which we are struggling.

These could be the two possible directions, two concrete fields of identification of the radical party's nonviolent policy. My hope is that our meeting will have as a consequence the possibility of a perfection, of a reflexion also on the techniques of nonviolent action: a reflexion on the evolution of things throughout the years, and on their possible evolution in the future.

This would represent a very useful contribution to an initiative which I consider already very commendable, and of which I hope many radical comrades will read the Papers with the due attention. The initiative is appropriate and important: in the coming weeks we will try to develop it on specific themes, focussing on one or the other issue which can ensue from a discussion such as this. I apologize for the scrapiness, and thank you all.

Translator's notes

(1) PANNELLA MARCO. Pannella Giacinto, known as Marco. (Teramo 1930). Currently President of the Radical Party's Federal Council, which he is one of the founders of. At twenty national university representative of the Liberal Party, at twenty-two President of the UGI, the union of lay university students, at twenty-three President of the UNURI, national union of Italian university students. At twenty-four he advocates, in the context of the students' movement and of the Liberal party, the foundation of the new radical party, which arises in 1954 following the confluence of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he is correspondent for "Il Giorno" in Paris, where he established contacts with the Algerian resistance. Back in Italy, he commits himself to the reconstruction of the radical Party, dissolved by its leadership following the advent of the centre-left. Under his indisputable leadership, the party succeeds in

promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working for the introduction of divorce, conscientious objection, important reforms of family law, etc, in Italy. He struggles for the abrogation of the Concordat between Church and State. Arrested in Sofia in 1968 as he is demonstrating in defence of Czechoslovakia, which has been invaded by Stalin. He opens the party to the newly-born homosexual organizations (FUORI), promotes the formation of the first environmentalist groups. The new radical party organizes difficult campaigns, proposing several referendums (about twenty throughout the years) for the moralization of the country and of politics, against public funds to the parties, against nuclear plants, etc., but in particular for a deep renewal of the administration of justice. Because of these battles, all carried out with strictly nonviolent methods according to the Gandhian model - but Pannella's Gandhi is neither a mystic nor an ideologue; rather, an intransigent and yet flexible politician - h

e has been through trials which he has for the most part won. As of 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is always elected at the Chamber of Deputies, twice at the Senate, twice at the European Parliament. Several times candidates and local councillor in Rome, Naples, Trieste, Catania, where he carried out exemplary and demonstrative campaigns and initiatives. Whenever necessary, he has resorted to the weapon of the hunger strike, not only in Italy but also in Europe, in particular during the major campaign against world hunger, for which he mobilized one hundred Nobel laureates and preeminent personalities in the fields of science and culture in order to obtain a radical change in the management of the funds allotted to developing countries. On 30 September 1981 he obtains at the European parliament the passage of a resolution in this sense, and after it several other similar laws in the Italian and Belgian Parliament. In January 1987 he runs for President of the European Parliament, obtaini

ng 61 votes. Currently, as the radical party has pledged to no longer compete with its own lists in national elections, he is striving for the creation of a "transnational" cross-party, in view of a federal development of the United States of Europe and with the objective of promoting civil rights throughout the world.

(2) MONTECITORIO. Square in Rome, seat of the Chamber of Deputies. In a wider sense it Indicates the Chamber itself.