ABSTRACT: The fundamental characteristic of the RP is identified in its choice to combine the political objectives typical of democracy and liberalism, with the method of Gandhian non-violence. Today, political non-violence constitutes the most advanced and form of lay tolerance which the of a society and a state are based on.

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

If someone wanted to define the "thought" of the Radical Party, in other words to isolate the "chromosome" whose imprint determines the whole scope of its political expression and to discover the essential, basic reason for the Radical phenomenon, its precise scientific purpose as a manifestation worthy of observation whose causes are being studied he should stop to consider the significance of the non-violent option. He should ask himself why a party of strict lay observance and a wholehearted witness of western culture should have chosen to risk the ridiculous, relying on Gandhi's somewhat naive image and adopting it as its symbol.

In this way he would discover that the Radical Party's "stand" which drove people of different political tendencies, but with an identical faith in liberal socialism to unite in the Radical enterprise almost thirty years ago, was to perfect political democracy. Radicals were convinced that this would be possible only if they succeeded in making the culture of non-violence a civilisation of our era; i.e. if they succeeded in affirming the political urgency not to resign themselves to accepting violence to the individual and his natural environment, as a compulsory historical tribute to be paid in the name of civilisation, revolution or progress. To win this bet, they had to interrupt historical continuity with those prevalent trends, whether liberal or socialist, which postulated the duty of taking up arms against the enemy of the country or class, which indissolubly linked the affirmation of justice to the condemnation of the unjust. The best exponents of these cultures were painfully experiencing the

contradiction between the initial, ideal motives of the Revolution brotherhood, equality, freedom and tolerance and the harsh necessity of denying them through armed conflict exalting justified violence and frequently, through terrorism. But people submitted to paying this tribute of blood and this amputation of values, accepting the contradiction of the ideal between means and end as insurmountable, since the only alternative concept was another, yet more violent form of resignation, the passive acceptance of injustice, totalitarianism, and exploitation. Gandhian non-violence, the Radicals' exception to the scandal of the justification of violence in the name of the ideals of "reason" showed the West that it was possible instead to conceive a tougher political encounter, the liberation of a people from the greatest colonial power of the time, without being forced to give up the principles of tolerance and respect for life which are being fought for. Through non-violence, means and ends are reconciled

, the one balancing the other, the former signifying the latter. If the aim is to build a juster society to suit man, the means cannot be the abuse of the individual, or his physical annihilation. This is why Gandhi had to fight not only against the English oppressors, but first and foremost against the intolerance and violence that can be prevalent at any moment amongst the oppressed. For this reason, the overcoming of religious intolerance between Hindus and Muslims had to come before national independence was won. In fact, it is common knowledge that the Indian State would have exploded and shattered as soon as it was liberated if the privileges of caste and class had not first been dismantled, if reconciliation between the two religious communities had not been successful. He even managed to cancel a large-scale demonstration of mass disobedience, a "satyagraha" prepared for months in advance, and to start an expiatory hunger strike when the news arrived that the English soldiers had been massacre

d by their fellow citizens. Indeed, Gandhi did not want to substitute the injustice and violence of an Indian ruling class which grew up in hatred and intolerance, with an identical injustice and violence of which the English colonial powers were proof.

Gandhi did not fight only for the freedom and independence of the Indian people, but also so that the great democratic culture of England, by which he was formed and which he never denied, would not be humiliated or mortified in either South Africa or India.

Indeed, even though Gandhi's non-violence thrived on the religious feeling of the Hindu Indian, it is to some extent inherent in the European and Anglo-Saxon culture, in the works of writers from Leo Tolstoi to David Thoreau and Charles Dickens, capable of evolving a culture of enlightenment, of giving political, civil and historical coherence to the fundamental principles of the French and socialist revolutions while overcoming the mistakes which have brought these and other revolutions to negate their effects through intolerance and violence. Non-violence on the other hand, concentrates on dialogue with society and the individual as the core of social life. Non-violence presupposes that there are no devils, enemies to be slain, only people; and that the worst of these, if attacked with the force of non-violence which is always aggressive, could correspond to that part of oneself which is the best, instead of the worst: "a victory could be defined as such only if everyone is the winner to the same exten

t and nobody the loser", as a famous Buddhist proverb maintains.

However, for many years, Gandhi's non-violence seemed symbolically defeated by a Hindu fanatic's assassination of his leader forty years ago, by the dismembering of India and yet further by the affirmation of the culture of violence and totalitarian regimes which are its most tragic and definitive expressions throughout the world.

It is not as if there were no great personalities or significant large scale and non-violent political actions after Gandhi. At the time when the Radical party was taking shape, Martin Luther King chose non-violent methods for the Black Civil Rights Movement in America. Massive conscientious objection was recorded in France as a protest against the Algerian war, and in the USA against the war in Vietnam. But the Radical Party is the only organised political force which has based its own political action on non-violence not so much in theory as in practice.

In the sixties, when in the East and South of the world nothing seemed to be able to counteract the relentless power and expansion of Soviet totalitarianism, when first democratic Europe, and then democratic America, seemed humiliated in the first place by the options of their own ruling classes and then by the affirmation of the national and socialist revolutions in Africa and Vietnam, when in the West crowds of students and working men were waving Mao's little red book and singing the praises of Che Guevara, a sparse group of Radicals went against the stream and began to experiment with political non-violence in Italy.

It was a group which originated in a tradition and a political experience of classical Radical liberalism, but which, even in dialogue and when encountering other experiences pacificist and antimilitarist, of the new European and American left, maintained it was indispensable to harmonise the methods and objectives typical of political democracy with those of non-violence. The "discovery" from which the Radicals started, in terms of theory and concrete practice, and which they gradually deepened and refined over the years, is that non-violence itself inspired by absolute respect for the individual, starting with the opponent paved the way for full, unreserved affirmation of that state of rights, without which democracy and freedom are illusions: while all the "violent ways" to conquer a state of rights, democracy and socialism, always contain elements which in themselves negate and invalidate the pursuit of the objective.

The Radical Party has always wanted to show that violence does not pay and that with the force of dialogue it is possible not only to win but also to convince the adversary. The first challenge was against the pretext of the Italian State which imposed the indissolubility of marriage by law. While a large proportion of the left, particularly that "revolutionary" extra parliamentary left which emerged from the events of 1968, ignored this battle for the introduction of divorce in the name of the imminent revolution which was to abolish the family, marriage and every other bourgeois bastion, for the first time hundreds of thousands of people mostly elderly, who for years had been refounding new "illegal" families were to learn that it was possible to demonstrate for their own rights even without throwing stones, or clashing with the police. They came to know the effectiveness of the non-violent action of hunger strikes and dialogue. They managed to intervene in legislative processes and succeeded, in cleri

cal Italy, in forming a parliamentary majority which approved the laws on divorce.

Then came the turn of abortion: the clash was harsher and for the first time in Italy the actions of mass disobedience were attempted. Abortion was in fact forbidden, and millions of women were forced to stoop to the lowest and most dangerous procedures to interrupt pregnancy, risking their own lives in the hands of dishonest doctors or obstetricians who used medieval methods.

Through the CISA Federation, The Radical Party was able to publicly organise a lot of clinics where with all the proper medical facilities, abortion was practised. Hundreds of thousands of women were challenging the law, forcing a dramatic reality into the open which everybody shied away from, and which even the "progressist" political forces refused to face for cynical electoral motives. What Gandhi called the non-violence of the strong, passive resistance methodically calculated to avoid becoming complicity with the opponent the "Satyagraha" (i.e. "sat" = truth, "agraha" = firmness) revealed itself in a western country as an individual and collective way to assume the responsibility for publicly violating the law and suffering the consequences. But it is not a breach in the law to negate the very lack of laws: on the contrary, it is the refusal of hypocrisy, of a "non-law", to affirm justice instead. Actually, in Italy, the prohibition of abortion which it is absolutely impossible to apply, is not a

pplied. The State does not really make any effort to suppress abortion. It is content to proclaim its illegality, while the practice of abortion is widely tolerated, it is "free", but only on the infamous and degrading condition that it remains clandestine. The Radicals are disobeying a law reduced to a "non-law" in order to obtain proper laws, proper legislation, the only way possible if the dignity of the individual is to be respected: a law which leaves the decision for maternity to the woman's free responsibility.

Examining the motives of Radical non-violence more closely, Pierpaolo Pasolini understood that obedience to a superior value is inherent in every example of civil disobedience, which is the premise for future obedience to a just law. In every act of conscientious objection to unjust laws, there is an affirmation of awareness.

The battle was already won at the very moment when the authorities and the police intervened to halt all Radical leadership: the open clash between the defenceless force of the conscience and responsibility and the obtuse, irresponsible force of a power which when it has given up trying to apply its own laws, turns savagely on precisely those who in the name of justice, demand the modification of laws which the State cannot and will not apply. A few months later, the Italian Parliament approved the law which permits the interruption of pregnancy within the public structure.

But the "force of truth", in order to be explicit and to be visible, must be known. Briefly, non-violence is an effective alternative to violence only if people are aware of the motives for the protest. Only when people are in a position to be able to judge them, can they express their agreement or their disagreement.

If information has not been made available, the desperate choice of violence, terrorism, or the symbolic assassination of the "enemy" becomes a tragically persuasive temptation.

Thus the greater non-violent solidity of the Radical Party is expressed in the defence of citizens' rights to "know in order to judge". Political democracy, the only system to allow forces representing antagonistic interests to assume power without bloodshed, without the use of physical violence, becomes pure make-believe the instant when the chance for citizens to exercise their own sovereignty, in other words, to make a choice, is taken away from them. In fact, they have been denied the chance to know and judge the opposition's reasoning, and have also been denied the same possibility to really choose by voting between the alternative government proposals. Today the totally invasive dimension of the means of communication, enable limited groups to wield enormous power: to literally cancel the truth or tamper with it according to their whim. Consequently, for the Radical Party, democracy and the right to information are synonymous. The former cannot exist without effectively exercising the latter, an

d viceversa; the latter is only conceivable within a state of rights. The ultimate weapons of non-violence, firstly the hunger strike, and next, going without drinking anything at all, are not used by the Radical Party to impose their own truths, but to exact respect for the truth on which the opponent himself claims his laws are based. The truth which in all countries sanctions the freedom of the press and access to unabridged information, advantages which the West claims show its own structural difference from totalitarian regimes.

In 1974, after Marco Pannella's 70 day hunger strike, Italian state television, which until then had denied citizens the possibility of being informed about the Radicals' role and motives in their battle to introduce divorce, had to grant many hours of broadcasting information and debates at the Italian League for Divorce in order to make amends for the censorship it had imposed.

But non-violence is not a rigid scheme to be applied with liturgical obsession. It is a method, certainly with its own strict laws, but which must be tailored to fit historic reality and the concrete subjectivity of the spokesmen. It must therefore discover new forms of dialogue and new ways of expressing itself when the violence of the fourth power becomes more sophisticated. Actually today information on the opposition is no longer denied, but it is manipulated to deform their image and therefore their whole political identity. This is what happened to the Radical Party in Italy, at the time when, in 1978, it promoted several referendums for the abrogation of the special police laws which abolish "habeus corpus" and the other laws to safeguard the accused, on which the electors were called to vote. The Radical Party was not denied access to the Italian state television, but could broadcast only for a few minutes, and on the least popular channels. In the meantime, during the news broadcasts, absolut

ely all the other parties affirmed without contradiction, that the Radicals wanted to encourage terrorism and weaken the police's capacity to repress crime. This is the lie that continued undisturbed to be affirmed as truth. To accept to speak in these conditions could have meant becoming accomplices to the violence perpetrated against the truth. This is why the Radicals decided to communicate through silence, and in the few minutes allowed for their electoral campaign, they wore gags and remained silent before the television cameras, before millions of astonished telespectators. The disarming simplicity of the message was stronger than shouting, swearing or cursing. It was not however, a gesture of rebellion which expressed desperation and impotence before immediate bullying. On the contrary it was the expression of the strength of those who are not resigned to accepting violence.

It was an example, a demonstration that to effectively fend off overwhelming oppression, stones are useless, the composure of silence is enough, just as in workmen's quarrels it is enough to cross one's arms. Indeed, shouting gets lost among all the other cries of desperate society. On the other hand, that silence, that gag became fixed in the collective memory as an omnipresent doubt of the "the truth of the state".

A ghastlier silence shrouded the most unbearable tribute that the opulent society had opted to pay, in the name of the "iron laws of progress and commerce": 30 million exterminated by starvation every year in the South. It does not matter whether societies are capitalist or communist, whether they are revolutionary or conservative, they all agree; for different reasons, to accept that inevitably, in the year 2000, millions of human lives will be sacrificed simply because of the lack of food. We are at the heart of the non-violent challenge, the commitment of those who as Radicals have declared as their own imperative, the very reason for their political existence, their refusal to be resigned to letting even a single human life be sacrificed for the sake of "superior" interests. Undertaking this battle, coming to blows with violence and the denial of that primordial right in the contemporary world the right to live, the Radical Party Congress adopted a preamble to its Statutes which solemnly declares the

unbreakable link between justice, non-violence and the right to life.

"The Radical Party affirms the preamble "proclaims justice, just laws and even the political laws of the Radical Party. In this respect, it proclaims the insuperable source of legitimacy provided by the institutions; it proclaims the duty to disobedience, to non-collaboration, to conscientious objection, to the supreme forms of non-violent warfare for the defence, with life, of life, justice, and the law...It declares that it endows the imperative of "do not kill" with the value of absolute law, without exception, not even in legitimate defence. The Radical "Satyagraha" against extermination by hunger, with the objective of "saving millions of lives immediately" lasted for five years. Laws providing substantial funds destined not to the general development of the area but to saving those who are about to die, were approved in two European countries. The debate on undervelopment emerged from the limited sector of the specialised Agencies, to become the object of attention for the political classes an

d the vaster public opinion. But the objective of a large-scale mobilisation of the international community for the "defence of life and for the life of rights", has been missing up to now. Awareness that safeguarding the lives of the immense multitudes in the South coincides with the defence of the original motives of the State of rights has not become the culture of our time.

Thus we learn what we already know: all this cannot come to pass within the political and historical framework of national states and the present national institutions.

In order for the political culture of non-violence to be the harbinger of Laws and Justice, so that a culture of life which is not a culture of justice, and does not aspire to creating or modifying the law, might perhaps produce martyrs but not actors, in history.

Today, in order for Justice and Laws to exist, in order to be recognised and respected they must be either transnational and supranational; or be caught up within the mechanism of effective political and economic interdependence among the regions of the world, or quite simply they do not exist. The transnational Party in the development of "Radical thought" is the necessary implement of political non-violence.