ABSTRACT: Non-violence is the completion of democracy, without which tolerance, laity, illuminism are but pure abstractions. If we want to embody non-violence hope and power, we must be "persons of Law" gathering as a party to ensure a society based on Rights.

(Papers of the convention "Radicals and non-violence: a method, a hope", Rome 29-30 April 1988)

I'm here only to apologize and thank Laura and and all the friends and comrades to whom we owe this initiative. It would have been more serious, as far as I am concerned - and that was what I had decided to do, in fact - to attempt to write something and to send it: but the only thing that I have been able to do was not to take the plane for Catania, come here and leave from here in three quarters of an hour's time, if I manage to catch the plane for Catania.

This is a period in which the lack of non-violence - the way it has been historically embodied in the Radical Party for twenty years now - forces us to make a greater effort, and perhaps a deceptive and useless effort, to pursue, by means of more "classical" instruments of democratic activism, the priorities we are confronted with. In the course of these years, as far as my choices and behaviours are concerned, I have preferred to be wrong within the Party than to be right on my own - and not because I believe that it right that way, on the contrary: anytime I have heard this being said I have objected to it and criticized it.

Since 1978, when I meditated on the necessity to be coherent all the way (and to have the necessary firmness and imagination to be so) with the Statute, with history, with the ambitions and beliefs of the Radical Party, and I felt the the necessity, the aim, the imperative, as it were, to advocate and defend the right to life and the life of Rights (and in October I engaged in a battle against the extermination for hunger in the world...) I have succeeded, we all have succeeded together, up to 1982, to have, apart from strength, a historical reason, an associative reason, and a reason for being thorough and "monothematic" sufficient to be certain of our absolute peculiarity and adequacy as regards the theoretical problems facing political thought, but also the practical ones facing human and civil life in our epoch.

Subsequently, after having been secretary of the Party, I have democratically - if you will grant me this - accepted that which on a theoretical and intellectual level I have never ceased to refuse: and that was we yielded to the following realistic blackmail: "we have to prove that we are capable of solving the problem with laws that we ourselves can create".

I believe non-violence, just as reason and reasonableness, just like Rights, and the power of a civilization based on law and rights, can "anthropologically", so to say, blend into the culture that each and every one of us has assimilated (so that part of this culture -maybe eighty percent or ten percent or twenty percent of it - cannot but scientifically inhabit the conscience of all the living beings...) if not all this would be important but remain marginal even if extremely consistent.

As far as we are concerned, the fact of having said - in an epoch in which man has landed on the Moon and is about to land on Venus and Jupiter, and in which in a span of fifteen or twenty years we acquire more knowledge than we have accumulated in millions of years - that it is possible to make the desert bloom, even in the Sahara or the Sahel, like others do in Israel or Arabia, or how we did at the end of the past century by means of colonial and para-colonial enterprises...is something that needs not to be proved. We had to continue fighting every day for them to provide the technical choices and decisions, because they detained the technical means. After that we provided them, and precise ones, but in the end the Piccoli Law - it goes without saying - after passing through discussion in the Senate and at Parliament was completely altered; and in the mean time we have trapped ourselves, from this point of view, into a national context: the appendix of the Radical Party in Belgium has been deceptive jus

t as we had in fact cultivated it, or how we have resigned ourselves to cultivate it.

That March or April '82 or '83 was, in a certain way, a point of no return; so much so that immediately after I found myself alone, one morning, at the end of a Congress, presenting the decision to close the Party, to cease the activities of the party.

And since then, every six months, we have managed - of course! - to express the "best" that can be expressed, in terms of political-oriented democracy and political democracy: providing without cease proposals, meditations, questionings of ourselves and of others, with further segments of political theory which are probably the best on the market, but that we will probably not have conveyed for "future memory"; because I fear that history, in the sense of history of victories and of winners, will become not a dogma, but something unquestionable and commonly accepted, in the overflow of communications which are typical of our age, by which millions and hundreds of millions of newspaper titles are spilt on us - without the possibility of gaining acquaintance and communicating and metabolizing - in today's social life.

After that, with the "Ghandi/non Ghandi" affair, we continued - of course - as a Party, to be, I think, the only place in the West (and therefore everywhere), in which non-violence has continued to be a proposal and a priority in a non-clerical, non-narcissistic and non-sectarian way: today our Party means this, there is no doubt about it.

In France and in Italy there are groups of non-violent people, who from a certain point of view, have a perfect and extremely useful production, important also from the point of view of a reassurance and of a self-analysis, not of history but of their gestures, intellectual or not; we have a comrade, a life-time comrade such as Pietro Pinna, who is ideologically willing to live forever or almost forever - and I wish him that - to see if there is a tiny bit more space, a millimetre perhaps, for activities of this kind in the life of Society...if there are fifty ot thirty or seventy people more who have contributed in words or acts to the cause of non-violence: saying "yesterday we were 530, today we are 5370 with such an un-Ghandian-like contempt for the concrete subjectivity of the masses, for the thousands and hundreds of millions, which is typical of all those who have chosen, consciously or not, to live like religious aristocracies, political and civil aristocracies, or aristocracies of thought; and then

unfortunately turn out to be mere oligarchies, and the living evidence of the sterility of that which we proclaim to be salvation.

Well then...do let's use all this flourishing of popularization work on Ghandi (there is some every day, everywhere, especially in Italy, starting from our Congress...). It seems that Ghandi will soon become as fashionable as Nietzsche; perhaps we will have a thriving of weak thoughts, of fascinations, etc...also because, in part, if you look at Ghandi, Tolstoji or Nietzsche from the point of view that we call existential, and therefore from the point of view of problems concerning morals, love and sex (from "The sonata to Kreutzer" up to...Baghwan, nowadays) you will find the same sort of concern, and often the same sort of answers: and it is therefore understandable that Ghandi and Nietzsche are cherished: not so much for that which they have created, in terms of failures and achievements, but for the most private values that can be abstracted from their lives.

The "severe" Ghandi, the Ghandi of sex problems, the Ghandi who sews his own garments, who spins...the Ghandi of the niece, of the other, similar problems: all these fundamentalist aspirations have been marginal, almost unimportant; they have undoubtedly been evocative, because they always respond to problems of a mankind which - confronted with the problems of love, sex and existence - which it will fortunately continue to have until its torment will exist, will always have its partiality (because the honour of the individual, of the human being, his his destiny to be incomplete, and not that of fulfilling the myth of divine completeness, which is reached by means of sexual intercourse and other things). The essential fact of non-violence has been the continuing of the culture of the century which produced illuminism, the fact of having given political, historical and civil coherence to the initial reasons of the French Revolution and of every other revolution, that not by chance then turn into its contrary

: reason becoming a goddess, holocausts, sacrifices, death as a cure for life, one's own life and the life of others...

What I feel to be important is that Ghandi and non-violence are the most advanced, most important affirmation of the...I apologize for the interruption, but Angiolo Bandinelli came in and he always pushes me to do nasty things. For example, we Italians, more than we Europeans, during the years in which the most famous philosopher was Gentile and his actualism, that is the revaluation of the Act, the purity of the Act, etc...Ghandi's answer was the highest, the greatest, the unique answer: it suggested the extreme importance of the gesture and the means, also as regards the aim - whereas in the actualism of Kant, in the European idealisms up to Gentile (they are coming yp again, in a different way) there has been on the contrary the absolute equivalence of the gesture with the act and with the absoluteness of being: with anti-historicisms that are restricting and exaggerated.

To start going towards the airport...(interruption: "Take the following plane..."). No, because there is an engagement which must be respected: punctuality! I was saying: I was absolutely convinced and still am, of that which I now talked about, and it's too bad for me... because analogies are valid as analogies and examples as examples; I often evoke colours, atmospheres of the season, of the landscape; and many people quickly grab a piece or another, of this evocation, and then I have to deal with a rush, and an impatience, and behaviours that make me responsible of courseness and therefore of vulgarity and inadequacies: but I have always stressed the fact that the Radical-nonviolent does not always imply Radical-democrat (it would betray itself and remain sterile from a historical point of view...). The Radical-democratic excludes the Radical-nonviolent. Not willingly: on the contrary! The question is not that of a supplement of conscience...because if there were anything to provide with a supplement, thi

s would do...it would be slightly less "ornate", slightly less protected, but anyhow...

No, the problem here is that the radical-democrat, with his sensitivity to that which it implies, is inadequate: is not enough. The Radical-nonviolent is enough. But, of course, if he has been such: if it can be proved, later on, that he has been one; nobody can say "I am".

At any rate, the transnational Radical Party, the Radical Party which will force even non Radicals not to find in the Radical Party the alibi not to commit themselves, or commit themselves only if daddy and mummy allow them to or ask them to, in everyday political democratic life, this party continues, I believe, to make wise theoretical decisions. I always say that for me "theory" is that which was thought in Athens - that is, the procession, the necessary succession of ideas - or else it is like the theory of the ants. If by theory an accomplished thought is meant, or a system of thought, then it is obvious that the radical party doesn't work, isn't enough.

I apologize: I always catch myself repeating that which cannot be fulfilled but which I perceive to belong to the range of possibilities of our being Radicals; but, of course, I am sufficiently convinced - and in this the Latin maxim could apply, Catholic and theological, "outside of the Church there is no salvation" - which for those who believe in the great power, both of conservation of life and of revolution of life, in the sweet, continuous meaning of the word "revolution" (until it has been seized, in the last two centuries, by a certain kind of political lexicon - you remember?, "revolution" is something that revolves around itself or around a point - and there is nothing more anti-revolutionary than that which the word revolution meant before it was taken from the realm of science, where it had been created), all this can live in our epoch through the history of the Radical party and not of other parties; as for the rest, no, we will have other things (and maybe they will increase): the worshippers o

f purity and style...

The other day I was reading on a non-violence newspaper that that which Italy lacked, in comparison to America and India, was "a "Leader". Well then, this is the explanation given by the non-violence newspaper...in the U.S. there was Martin Luther King, in India Ghandi...obviously these people had looked at Ghandi's picture and King's picture and were expecting to find a Ghandi or a King here too: and every now and then they have even found some vague resemblance, but then..no...; the thinness wasn't there, the death, above all, wasn't there! You see, it was these things especially that were lacking, the mistakes of non-violence inadequacy which Ghandi committed were not there, by which 30 or 40,000 people died within a couple of days: there wasn't the sense of how tragical all that is creation is...; but how many mistakes (so many more than Cicciolina!) Ghandi caused from a historical point of view in terms of life and death. The political combination if this ideal with not enough safeguard (even though dee

ply feeling the problem of Pakistan) with that of national independence.. with the illusion, typical of the West, of the national State: the national state is an anti-national state as such, because it reduces to one that which cannot be reduced to "one" in any territory: because only on the level of small territories and of small tribes do we have ethnical or national and linguistic unanimity, be it in Africa or here.

Therefore they are orphans: Pietro Pinna and the other activists are orphans of someone who has proved capable of being pure, of respecting canons, and therefore...has not succeeded. But, and I repeat it, they are orphans above all because they have no culture of law; and a culture of life which is not a culture of law, a culture of non-violence which is not also a culture of law, a culture which does not involve a Torà, the Law, with the possibility of enacting it and changing it, inspired by Socrates or Voltaire or us...I do not believe that such a culture is capable of existing. Reason for which these people suggest problems of mere disobedience; this thing, for example, that the associative reason of non-violence is fiscal obedience...we did it twenty years ago, on the arms expenditure, even if it was difficult because at the time we only had two or three teachers, one or two journalists, while we were forty...

This is why (Well, I really have to go now, as you can see I would like to stay and I'm already late) there is an important task to be accomplished, and I thank you for doing it: I belive that with this we are on the right road of theory. The recommendation for myself is always the same: if we want to support non-violence hope, force and drama, then we must be men and women, "persons" of Law, persons of Right, and stay together on this path (not as our fellow human beings, because our fellow human beings are "different", those that do not feel, at that moment, the same non-violent urge); united non so much as a communion of saints sharing a communion of feeling, but as a party, as "the part" which is established in a non-violence manner to ensure a society based on Rights; and therefore a different society, cherishing these values.

I think I have a story, which, until it remains "my" story (if the singular still makes sense) is the story of this belief; at any rate it appears to me of a clear evidence: that Ghandi and non-violence are the behaviour without which illuminism, laity are but mere abstractions, beautiful as such but a piece and not a work, a sonata and not a symphony.

I would like to thank you and wish you a good continuation.