ABSTRACT: [Transcript of an address delivered during the seminar "The transnational radical party and the new Europe" - Prague 15, 16 and 17 June 1990]. In a long and composite address, Marco Pannella (1) confirms and further investigates some of the theoretic themes of the radical party's praxis. The basis is an uncompromising advocation of "freedom, and therefore of the individual's responsibility". In other words, of political democracy as opposed to the "great" "programmatic" and "political" theses of the European social democracies and liberal democracies, which have all remained dead letter precisely with regard to the countries of "real communism". While the radicals were demonstrating in these countries to protest the Soviet occupation and the "sclerotization" of society, the social and liberal democracies - in other words the "democratic" Europe - concerned themselves with running their business in countries where even social "achievements" were conceded by the establishment instead of being acquire

d ipso facto. The radical ones were "class" initiatives and campaigns, and it is a mistake, Pannella adds, to contend that class struggle no longer exists.

The West has tolerated and encouraged the development of totalitarianism. The same mistake has been committed by the pacifists both in Western and in communist countries, with their position of "indifference" and neutrality vis-à-vis human rights violations. The radical party alone has relentlessly upheld human rights in the East and in the West, and some of its best exponents have even gone to jail for this.

But the decline of communism is no reason to diminish our attention: the risk in the countries of Eastern Europe today is failing to create something new and relying instead on a system of party rule. Above all, the risk is recreating the Europe of 1919, with its lethal forms of nationalism. These forms of nationalism must be overcome, and one of the ways to achieve this is giving the U.N. a "cogent force" capable of intervening and acting as arbiter to settle these controversies.

Regretfully, the only political force that is doing something to achieve these objectives - the radical party - could disappear today. To avert this possibility it would take a totally different information policy, which is missing both in the West and in the rest of the world.

Pannella then addresses some of the most pressing international issues: South Africa, where Mandela's ANC has renounced its initial nonviolence to embrace armed struggle; the Middle East; Tibet; China. Lastly, he tackles the question of prohibition on drugs, which is creating a culture of the death penalty in the world and especially in the U.S. which must be immediately opposed.

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At the beginning of his report, Bettini said that one of the radical party's characteristics is its ability to accelerate the making of choices and decisions for society and the individual which would have taken far too long to make at the slow pace of politics or of the leading culture.

This, I believe, is the central point of our time, which is characterized by an abysmal gap between science and knowledge on the one hand, and political action on the other.

I remember in 1971 Mitterrand (but I'm sure he has forgotten about it) said that in our time the real problem for a leading class (at the time he said for a new socialism, I prefer to say for today's humanism, which is the environmentalist one) was that human beings have acquired more knowledge over the last forty years than in the previous milleniums. While discoveries and the knowledge of the world and of the laws that regulate or deregulate its existence are increasing - and some of them can actually change the life and the planet in a constructive or destructive way - it is a fact that presidential advisers are never selected among the people who are are capable of handling this knowledge or of governing through knowledge.

There is one belief, I think, that lies behind our decision to join the party, whether for a day or for a lifetime: the belief that the problem of freedom - and therefore of the individual's responsibility - is both the aim and the premise for any work of political and social construction.

I couldn't say whether 80%, 90% or 99% of us who have joined the radical party somewhere along the line did so out of belief that political democracy represents the least of evils, in terms of organization of social coexistence, convinced as some of us are that the world already knew the fundamental texts of this political democracy - which had been experienced for decades through culturally Eurocentric generations - and therefore this technology.

I would like to underscore one aspect of the problem. Democracy and political and historical freedom are - or should - also be a technology and a lifestyle. Think technology has strictly technical contents is a huge mistake.

The organization of the law, for example, requires technologies. It is no coincidence that in a world in which the gap between knowledge and power, between knowledge and politics, has reached its highest peak, the study of the law, the presence of law scholars and societies' attention towards the law are subsiding more and more.

The risk we have come to terms with in Western history - and I repeat once again that this has also been the reason for the radical militant aggregation and for many of its campaigns - is that the better the policies (including the best ones, such as the Brandt North-South plan), the less the guarantee that they become laws. In fact, the better they were, the greater the certainty that they would remain pure theory.

The vast programmatic and political, if not ideological and cultural, theses that have been expressed by social democracy or liberal democracy over the past seventy or eight years have all remained pure theory. Human logic has never mastered the logic of things, and owing to this coexistence with a human logic which is incapable of becoming law, behaviour and choice, the logic of things has become a lethal logic.

Thus, the only doubts I have about my own past is that perhaps I haven't been inflexible enough - and God knows I have been - in upholding the absolute superiority of democracy and the need to utterly reject any exception to the principles of political democracy and any attacks on political democracy. And yet, I have long considered myself an extremist in upholding individual rights as well as the rule of law.

This premise is to dispel any doubts about what I will now say. I believe the conflict between the two empires - the American one and the Soviet one - and their subsidies is, to some extent, truly the conflict between good and evil. Clearly, we are talking here about historical good and evil. Any nonviolent individual, any lay person, knows that the notion of good is historical, and that crystalizing what appears to be good at a certain moment of the history of the individual conscience or of the collective historical conscience means corroborating evil, since any good that remains unchanged necessarily becomes an evil today or tomorrow.

Evil is sclerotic situations, situations of sclerotization in the life of the individual and of societies.

Therefore, it is unquestionable that the reasons why we have been symbolically (as well as physically) coming to Czechoslovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland and Hungary as clandestines, to destabilize the existing regimes and orders, now constitute the greatest element of continuity which I intend to respect as Radical Party.

Perhaps it is not sufficiently clear that the official policy of the West, of the social and liberal democracies (with more exceptions perhaps among the liberal democratic individualities than among the social democratic ones) has been one of active support of the totalitarian order in your countries.

We traveled to these countries and got ourselves arrested for material problems. In September 1968 we achieved the miracle - considering that the party counted 300 or 500 members - of demonstrating against the occupation of Czechoslovakia at the same time in Moscow, Sofia or East Berlin and in all countries of the Warsaw Pact that were occupying or supported the occupation of Czechoslovakia. I still remember the text of the flyer I was handing out. I remember there were about 3,000 copies in Bulgarian, and that we handed out 2,600 of them (I want to find that text through the Bulgarian secret police and keep it as a historical document). We wrote the text in Bulgarian on the basis of an interpretation of the Bulgarian constitutional legality. We contended that the Bulgarians were being oppressed, and that being one of the occupying forces in Czechoslovakia or supporting the occupying forces in Czechoslovakia was a breach of the Bulgarian constitution.

Surely the ambassadors of the Western states, the managers of Fiat, Volkswagen, Ford who traveled to these capitals on business trips in those days genuinely believed that the totalitarian order in the Soviet empire was a necessity for the world.

We cannot forget this. If we do we, in the face of the relative scarcity of participation of Czech friends attending this seminar, for example, we should consider ourselves totally defeated.

I am assisted by the recollection and the understanding of why we were practically isolated when we traveled here to carry out those campaigns, obtaining, at best, to be expelled from all the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

We must realize, therefore, that the events that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire probably took place also because of a compulsion to continue the arms race which impoverished, annihilated and paralysed it. The strategy of the military-industrial complex of the Western countries was that of historically unsettling the Soviet empire, forcing it to make ever greater military investments which were in the long run suicidal as well as murderous.

Therefore, when we talk about the models that are being assumed in the era of post-communism in eastern Europe, we need to treasure Bettini's entire report and the entire history of the radical party. I will make myself clearer.

If I say, with a quasi-Manichaean approach, that all the historical good lies in the West and that all the historical evil lies in the Soviet empire (and I obviously did this, fully aware that this is an act of will which does not in the least coincide with the historical reality) and Bettini says that there are some sectors - albeit not many - of the territory and of the environment of the Soviet empire, of the empire of real communism, that are better off than in the other empire, I can only add another piece of evidence: that the major struggles which we radicals have carried out in the Italian society - the campaigns for divorce and abortion - were instead imposed or chosen by the socialist regimes here.

You were not allowed to carry out these battles. Yet they were battled for freedom, for liberation. It is not that we were in favour of divorce or abortion. We simply wanted a better legal regulation of the problems caused by the current culture and society, such as massive clandestine abortion and the de facto disintegration of the families which did not allow to create a new family - except for the richer classes here in the West - other than through divorce.

In this sense I would like to add that ours have been democractic class struggles. When we think of class struggles or class confrontations, we should not commit the historical mistake of believing that class struggle began with Leninism. The very concept of Third State (or Fourth state today) was deeply rooted as a constitutive element both in the French Revolution and in the bourgeois revolution.

Today the risk is saying indiscriminately that classes, social classes do not exist as bearers of values. This is not true. In the West there is a Third State of people who have become proletarians, i.e. people who lack any power. There is the problem of power and of the rights with respect to the power of the State, to the Leviathan of the State - and this is a global problem.

And now that the most monstrous aspect of this century in Europe (more monstrous even of Nazism, in terms of dimensions and length) - real communism - has been defeated, we should not forget that it is still oppressing hundreds of millions or billions of people all over the world. The monstrosities that are inherent in the Chinese history and in Chinese communism, for example, should not be underestimated.

In fact, in China there has been no 20th congress comparable to that of the Soviet communist party, where Krushev chose to reveal the truth. But clearly the battle we have won in Europe is a battle that needs to be waged throughout the world to avoid what I said above. Had there been any help, any deliberate, clear help on the part of the West and of social democracy to the democrats, to the citizens and the peoples of the Soviet empire, what happened now would probably have happened twenty years ago.

The indifference, comparable in cultural terms to the one that lead in 1938 to the agreements of Munich between England and France and Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, is the same shown during the cold war by the pacifist West. As a party, as the party of Gandhian nonviolence, we have never ever been a pacifist party. Pacifism has produced crimes in history that need yet to be fully revealed. The French pacifists, the Western pacifists, have long since taken a neutral position vis-à-vis fascism and Nazism between their own governments and the Nazi and fascist governments. All they wanted was prevent their governments from rearming and prevent an armed reaction to the violences of the Nazis and fascists.

The communist-oriented pacifism of the fifties is evidently a by-product of this vile and irresponsible pacifism. The nonviolent individual - and we have always been nonviolent - attacks instead the roots of violence and of the demonstrations of violence, and is nonviolent because he believes that the weapons of nonviolence are stronger and paradoxically more violent, in the medium and long run, than the weapons of violence. The weapons of nonviolence are the bare hands and the bare bodies of billions of people, men and women, whereas the power of military violence is based on reducing these people to slaves, sending them to be killed in wars. Ultimately the military violent choice always translates into a catastrophe. All the myths of this century, all the myths which have been extremely strong in the West - Che Guevara, the martyrs, the heroes - are the result of the West's choice to favour these forms of violent opposition rather than the peaceful opposition of the Buddhist monks, for example, who represe

nted the vast majority of the populations of that area and that was crushed because the liberal democratic and social democratic West has always believed in the use of traditional weapons, in a traditional concept of international relations and of the wars of liberation. I am thinking, namely, about the dictatorship in Indochina, Cambodia and Vietnam today.

Allow me a premise. I want to tell the younger comrades - young as comrades - that I intend to participate in a debate opened yesterday evening on the subject of the term 'comrade'. While the entire left in Italy was in practice pro-Stalin, and we were fiercely anti-Stalinist and anti-communists in this sense, we said we did not want to leave even the word 'comrade' to that left, because in the Latin etymology comrade is a beautiful word, it means a person who shares bread with another person.

Therefore - and I thank Paolo Vigevano (2) for reminding me - we said we did not want to leave the monopoly of this word to these opponents. Time proved we were right.

Comrade cannot be translated into 'tovarich', because it does not have the same roots. In fact, it means partner, it acquires a business-like meaning. Likewise, it cannot be translated into 'camarade', which has a more military origin. Also, there is the fact that the fascists called each other 'camarade'.

We are tolerant with regard to this. Personally speaking, the first time I was allowed to appear on television, I used the word "comrades", "friends", "brothers and sisters". In other words, I used all the historical names to indicate a person who has a positive relation of dialogue and common struggles.

When we say 'comrade', we do not want this to be translated into 'tovarich'. It will have to be translated etymologically and not politically, because at the time in which 'comrades', 'camarades' and 'tovarich' all meant the same thing, the word 'comrade' was distorted for reasons of political homologation.

As I was saying, I thought it was important to start from this fact. In the face of the gap between science and politics, between knowledge and power, in the face of the historical events we have experienced, we distinguished ourselves by another feature, which is odd and unique in the West. The radical party, strong only of a few hundred militants and which managed nonetheless to carry out major reforms in Italy which affected the general political alliances, represented the only example of a party whose militants had been imprisoned while living in countries of supposed political democracy.

These include Roberto Cicciomessere (3), who was jailed for three or four months for conscientious objection, Olivier Dupuis (4), who three months ago completed eleven months of prison for conscientious objection, Emma Bonino (5), who was detained for short periods, Adele Faccio (6) who campaigned for abortion with Emma and Adelaide (7) and spent three months in prison.

Gianfranco Spadaccia is the first and only secretary of a 'democratic' party in Italy and possibly in Western Europe, (including the heads of the movements not represented in parliament and excluding the terrorist ones), the only secretary of a democratic, nonviolent Western party to have spent one or two months in prison.

The odd thing was that we lived in a supposed political democracy, whereas you lived in totalitarian countries. The radical party was radically nonviolent, and yet it is a party of people who have spent time in jail, albeit for brief periods.

One thing you should know is that of the 3,600 current members of your (our) party, there are some 100 convicts, and among these the worst kind of criminals. Some of the most monstrous criminals have joined our party as the party of the right to life and the life of rights. They have realized the importance of the life of legality through the personal need to be guarantied in their right to live, in their right to life.

This is a reality which is ignored. This leads us to the core of the problem: this is the world of the empire which is victorious by culture, which we have contributed with our bodies and souls to make victorious, because we knew that this conflict meant the victory of one empire over the other, and we could not dream about achieving politically our victory on the two empires combined.

Remember the congress of Budapest. It seems such a long time ago, because when we decided to hold the congress in Yugoslavia and then in Hungary there was the Iron Curtain. Everyone said it was an impossible enterprise. It's incredible: fourteen months have elapsed. The radical party has undergone countless changes in the meanwhile. So many things have happened that we forget that we organized a congress in a country of popular democracy in which all anti-communist forces of the place deemed it impossible that the government would authorize a non-communist congress.

In fact, when we convinced the government to organize it, the Hungarian anti-communists were almost sorry. They were suspicious of the fact that we had made it.

At the time we said the Iron Curtain had fallen. Everyone else denied it, so much that even we thought the Berlin Wall would have resisted for years more.

Today we have to say that the reasons for which we went to prison in the West are the same for which we came here to carry out small actions of testimony, the opposite of what the empire of the West was doing here, also in the periods of cold war. The West's imperial policy has always consisted in leaving untouched the stability of the regimes of the communist order, and to win strategically or neutralize, discourage and try to prevail over it elsewhere. The West's policy was not anti-communist in order to uphold the rights of the victims of the communist order. It was anti-communist simply because it feared that the communist order of the empire could conquer more space in the world and help destabilize its regimes. The sole aim of the West and of the so-called liberal democrats and social democrats was preventing the Soviet empire and the communists from toppling their power in their empire with the help of the state-empire.

We have to realize that there has never been any intention to uphold the rights of the men and women of the Soviet empire. This is social democracy. On the other hand, during the civil war in Spain, the popular front and the most authoritative representative of the European socialists, Léon Blum, were ruling in France. And yet, France did not move a finger when Germany and the fascists invaded Spain to ensure the fascist takeover of that republican and democratic state. It kept a neutral stance. The Soviets instead took a clear stance: either a fascist Spain or a Stalinist Spain. That was the logic at the time.

During the cold war, the logic was waging indirect wars through the Third World. Personally speaking, I quarreled bitterly in 1951 (I was twenty-one) with the President of the International Students' Union.

I accused the Union of letting the students of the Third World be killed, because any time there was a period of dialogue between East and West, they let the students of the Third World be arrested and killed by their regimes, without protesting. Any time the conflicts resumed, instead, they gave a helping hand and incited the students to rebellion.

What I mean to say is that as early as in the fifties, it was evident how cynical the conflict between East and West was. Especially on the part of the East, which was all intent on supporting the bourgeois military dictatorships in the Third World, thinking that these could give better guaranties of revolt against the democratic regimes and ideology, and then used the revolutionary students or the democratic students as cannon fodder.

I do not agree with Bettini when he says the students of the Third World who were educated in Moscow and especially in Prague, generally in economics, later grew into an interesting leading class. Back in their countries, they totally ignored that political democracy was something other than a deceitful superstructure and an obstacle in the way of the realization of the morality of economics and of the class choices, and have always cooperated with the slaughterers or have turned into slaughterers themselves.

They have not had the teaching of democracy - with concepts such as slowness of the democratic reform, critical consent, etc - and have usually played primary roles in the tragedy underway in the Third World.

But back to us: the Budapest congress represented the historical intelligence and the physical life of the radicals, the life of people who had dealt all their life with prisons, with political imprisonment (but is there such thing?) in the East and with prisons and lunatic asylums in the West. People who have carried out so many campaigns for the imprisoned, for those who have no right to marry, to stop dozens of millions of women in the West from being slaughtered by massive clandestine abortions, who defended sexual minorities, turning this into an element of scandal, but at the same time affirming everyone's right to a different sexuality, including the nonviolence and dialogue of these values in sexual and physical terms, as an element of major opposition against one of the most terrible forms of repression of societies and not only of States.

In Budapest we came to believe that the post-communist choices, which we knew at that point to be a question of months, risked being problems of real democracy, of party power, undemocratic choices instead of socially, politically and historically democratic ones.

We now face a tragic scenario: we are witnessing post-communist choices that are dangerous in terms of freedom and legality, in the short run as well as in the medium and long run.

In Rumania the situation is all too evident. The heirs of Ceaucescu are in power. In order to remain in power they have murdered Ceaucescu with his own methods. It was so evident that we said so at once. Those who now claim to be the opponents and victorious enemies of Ceaucescu are in fact his heirs. They are the children who have killed the father to get his legacy, according to a well-established family pattern.

We harbour no hopes on what is happening in Czechoslovakia. President Havel's political culture, notwithstanding our immense respect, is the same culture that has twice lead Europe to disaster and admirable people like Havel to be assassinated.

We and you are reconstructing the Europe of 1919. It is not true that the Austro-Hungarian empire died out by its own dissolution; it died because it was the single multinational, multiethnic, multireligious European reality, and it was assassinated by a century which has embraced the national and nationalist romanticism. All that followed - Nazism, fascism, world war and communism - are the consequence of this too.

Why on earth was the Europe of 1919, which after a handful of years produced fascism and Nazism, poverty, dictatorships or communism, a largely socialdemocratic Europe? Do you think there were no responsibilities? Obviously the murderers were the others, and they were been the murdered. But it is on the field of their culture that the murderers have been able to win, and win so easily; the social democratic and liberal democratic culture of the West has decided to sit on the status quo. It has decided that on the basis of the new treaties of Vienna and Yalta, people must belong to the same civil and national religion as their sovereigns.

We know what this division by national states, what the relinquishment of internationalism, internationality and transnationality have caused; we need only think of Spain and France, which the Nazis conquered in thirty days. Except in places where continental democracy was socialdemocratic and monarchic (Scandinavia, for example), the collapse of the national states has lead either to communism or to fascism.

And what are we building now? The Czech national state, the Hungarian national state.

Democracy to us means overcoming the gap between politics and power. It means the opportunity to translate this into politics. The national state cannot achieve this. If anything, we should propose the Danubian state, in the sense of the Agency of the Danube, because then it would make sense, on the territory, on the way in which things are today.

But this is what underlies our European federalist position: we want to raise the tragic problem of the Second Society of Nations. We have the United Nations, but if we do not pose the problem of the force of the law, of the global juridical force, if do not struggle to make the decisions of the U.N. cogent, if we do not remember the terrible scenario of the '30s, and we are living it in Prague ...

Saying so in time is not enough. If we had come today to a an occupied and oppressed Czechoslovakia and had handed out four thousand flyers saying these things, I think these flyers would have then been handed out, read out to friends and family, and perhaps forty thousand Czechoslovaks would have pondered an up-to-date political proposal. We left instead, because the concept of the transition from the Soviet empire to the Western empire fell, because quite rightly - and understandably - the problem here was especially that of freedom from the oppressor. With the exception of the radical party, no one has ever explained that the goal is conquering democracy for oneself and for others, not switching to the other empire.

But today there are other pressing issues.

One concerns the radical party. Here we are, members of parliament from the socialdemocratic party, the green party and the Arcobaleno group, European federalists, to testimony that we are transpartisan. There are perhaps forty or fifty Czechoslovak comrades (or friends, or brothers and sisters). We need to ask ourselves something.

We tried to answer that question through the Budapest congress and also through our federal councils. In Budapest we said the reality of mass communications in the global village of the Western system prevents the real cultural thought and the opposition and minority forces to carry out any propaganda, obtaining results which were once obtained only thanks to dictatorships.

Albeit with different means, this surge in information, this proliferation of newspapers, television, books published by the millions, all this fulfils the needs of the dictatorships, of the less scientific dictatorships such as fascism. Fascism needed to prevent people from knowing too many things, and obtained this result in a certain way. The radical party doesn't even have twenty members in France, for example. Our Kabul is Paris, and it should be abolished. In Moscow we have a few hundred militants, and here in Prague too. But in order to become thousands, these hundreds of militants need information and forms of communion we are incapable of achieving.

If we don't succeed in keeping the subject radical party alive - so far the only 3500-strong political subject whose members include proletarians, convicts, murderers (yes, murderers, not people who want to murder but people who have already murdered), bourgeois, members of Parliament, previous offenders, heterosexuals, bisexuals, homosexuals, drug addicts - and if we fail to grow in number, then I think this will mean an irreparable loss.

Associations of jurists, Trilaterals or other types of organizations can be created, of course. But I think they would remain closed forms of aggregations, something that lives in the centres of power and not [...]

We are in a difficult situation. When we pose the question of our presence in Italy as Italians, the problem is that there are moments in which belonging to the radical party is an individual need, an inevitable choice. Our party was strong as long as this was the essence of our being together. Now more often than not we are together in the name of the past, or because we have been members of parliament or senators or politicians or because we share a heritage of ideals that have been morally, ideally, civilly and in certain cases even institutionally successful.

A nonviolent party - and this brings us to the other point - is a party of people who get together because they are happy to get together, because they believe in it, because they feel the need for it. A nonviolent individual is the correct answer - theoretically - to the society of suicidal wealth, because our nonviolent techniques, our nonviolent lifestyle, our happy, non-sacrificial abstention from food, our provoking the establishment and saying "I was there too, put me in jail, this is how we will change the law", constituted the struggle of the humble, of those who will end up with no booty at day's end.

But all this is also technology. In other words, it is also a technique, a way of living, a way of organizing ourselves, a way of arming ourselves not "against" but "for" the things that make us happy, that make us hope. But in order to do this, we must quite simply solve the material problem of where to meet, where to write each other letters and translate them.

It is true that have in common the capacity to carry out gestures that speak out, that are communication, and this is typical of nonviolence and of the nonviolent technique. But the reality is that the Budapest congress made us realize that today we inmates, we proletarians, we victims, we deputies, we unemployed, were to place ourselves in the condition of contributing to the leading classes.

The conclusion of the Budapest congress, addressed to the leading classes of Eastern Europe (Havel and the others) was, "we need to apply nonviolence", because they can give us the belief and the understanding of the transparty and transnational structure, and therefore give a contribution to life, since even the powerful will soon have to face their own impotence.

This can make them humble, instead of making them angry or afraid. If we reconstruct the nations, the national parliaments, the national laws, the national reforms, if we think we can create a society based on the rule of law, making this liberal and human revolution by creating the Hungarian, then Czech, then Slovakian social democratic or liberal party, then the divorce between environmental knowledge and the policy based on the territory, on the safeguard of the planet, but also the safeguard of the Danube or the safeguard of the people in these cities, then all this heritage could be lost forever.

We said the party is experiencing a moment of dire crisis, with an extraordinary albeit legal management decided by the congress. We lack the means to pply our ordinary management, and we lack the means because we lack members. We had harboured the highly reasonable hope that in Italy, which counts about 8,000 municipalities, one communist per municipality would have joined the party in January or February. According to our calculations, if 8,000 of the 1,400,000 members of the Italian communist party had joined the radical party, we would have had the money and the necessary energies to carry out massive propaganda in the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia and throughout the East, in order to place the leading classes and the citizens in the condition to make this choice.

We had set a limit of 10,000 members by March and 50,000 by 1990 - the necessary technical condition to ensure the survival of the radical party for 1991 and after that.

Since this rigour and intellectual generosity failed, the major project for a reform of the Italian communist party, failing the any coherence and generosity (which is the only necessary force in certain moments) it is likely that we will fail unless you can make a miracle in Russia, Hungary and elsewhere. This is the situation, therefore. We are here and it is as if we had gone to France or Great Britain. From these premises we must draw individual consequences for each of us.

I would like to briefly touch on other issues.

First of all South Africa. The way in which the South African situation is being handled is truly dramatic and tragic.

In front of all the parliamentarians I asked Mandela whether the ANC's renouncing of violence, which is laid down both in its charters and and in its political resolutions until two months ago - which Mandela calls hostilities - its comparing civil war to war, its transition from violence to nonviolence, returning to the ANC's origins (which were Gandhian), were a concession to their opponent or a necessary step for the growth of the ANC, and a move to pave the way to a government of blacks.

Mandela didn't even answer. He couldn't have, because he has different views. The official thesis is, only after we have obtained the right to vote will we cease hostilities. But hostilities are enacted also when a party is in power! This is Castro's thesis, the thesis of all proletarian dictatorships. Therefore, a nonviolent interpretation meant facing the problem of the choices, of the alternatives.

We had more communist heroes and martyrs of fascism than any other political formation. Once released, 70% of the heroes and martyrs who had been in prison then embraced Stalinism. In other words, they chose to side with one of the blocs.

Has Mandela become a symbol of freedom throughout the world simply because he spent 27 years in prison? We have all struggled to obtain his release, but let us not forget that in the states of western democracy he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment or death.

Mandela had decided it was necessary to struggle to free his people through a military organization of the resistance, according to those people's culture, and he had organized this. He was arrested and during his trial he insisted on the morality of choosing a military and violent means of struggle. He said it was necessary to make war to stop apartheid.

In any country - the U.S., Great Britain, Italy, France, not to mention your contry where there is the death penalty - Mandela would have been executed or sentenced to life imprisonment.

The problem of South Africa is the same problem we raise about the 3,000 black victims, most of whom killed by other blacks. A great number of these have been accused of being murderers because they cooperated with the whites or with the Zulu tribe rather than with another.

If this leading class comes into power, I fear a historical Africanization also of South Africa, because the situation is even worse beyond the borders of the area of influence of the white tribe and its aberrant 'solution' of apartheid. All the other states are living in worse conditions, in terms also of theory and rule of law. That type of situation is something we should fear as advocated of nonviolents and as democrats. We need to have the courage and the freedom to pronounce the axiom of nonviolence: in any war, generals win and people die.

Whenever a violent solution is chosen, this generates millions of victims, generally peasants.

It is a vicious circle we must interrupt.

Another regretful thing is taking place in the Middle East.

I am accused of being fiercely pro-Israel simply because I take pains to raise the problem on the whole of the Middle East and not on Palestine alone. I don't want South Africa to become like the rest of Africa. Likewise I don't want Palestine to become like the rest of the Middle East. I am driven by a nonviolent, pragmatic vision whereby a person who dies is a person who dies, regardless of whether he is an enemy. That is not the point.

Also, there is the question of Tibet.

A year after the massacre of Tien An Men square, the West wants to lift sanctions against China. Democrats worldwide are deeply concerned about Mandela or Arafat and about their rights, but no one seems to remember Tibet or Cambodia.

The risk is ending up with a world in which the renewed values of the Soviet empire - stamping down on individual freedom - will become ever more widespread.

The characteristic of being the only party of nonviolence applies to defend individual rights, the rights of the prisoners, the rights of minorities - rights for which there is mass mobilization. But it also represents the only key to interpret the events of history today in order to avoid repeating the Western cynicism whose aim for thirty years has been that of stabilizing the communist dictatorships in the countries assigned to those dictatorships by the treaty of Yalta.

Another example is prohibition. The things that were done in the name of fascism or communism are being done today in the name of prohibition. In the name of prohibition, the United States has added 300,000 more jail beds, and only budget problems are preventing the creation of major working camps for millions of people. These are to contain the poor, the opponents and the minorities, clearly not the people who can afford good lawyers or who enjoy the support of the international public opinion.

Latin America, Colombia and the other countries are ravaged by war, a physical war in which the methods used are more or less the same as in Vietnam.

No campaigns are carried out today in the West against capital punishment because prohibition has buttressed the idea of extending the death penalty. We need to stage demonstrations in Moscow, or in Prague, in front of the Western embassies where the death penalty is being applied and where people are being murdered. Technically this can be done only with the Radical Party.

But how many will we be? What type of demonstrations, what type of life will we be leading in a couple of weeks from now, considering that there are 3,000 members instead of 30,000? I think this depends on our individual responsibility.

Let me tell all of you who are perhaps younger or consider yourselves newcomers in politics that we are all equally disarmed in the face of these problems. We need to arm ourselves, and arming ourselves means building this party in the next few days, each making an individual miracle. If we fail, the only option will be starting again from scratch, and this applies both to newcomers and veterans.

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 he was elected 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 merge of prestigious intellectuals and minor democratic political groups. He is active in the party, except for a period (1960-1963) in which he works as 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 pa

rty succeeds in promoting (and winning) relevant civil rights battles, working hard 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 while flex

ible politician - he has been through trials which he has for the most part won. Since 1976, year in which he first runs for Parliament, he is constantly 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 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 Pa

rliament, obtaining 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) VIGEVANO PAOLO. Former Treasurer of the Radical Party.

(3) CICCIOMESSERE ROBERTO. (Bolzano 1948). Radical deputy belonging to the European Federalist Group. Conscientious objector, arrested and convicted; following his initiative, in 1972 this civil right was recognized in Italy. In 1970 treasurer of the Radical party, which he was also secretary of in 1971 and 1984. In 1969 secretary of the LID (Italian League for Divorce), member of the European Parliament from 1984 to 1989. Architect and organizer of "AGORA' telematica", multilingual computer communications system.

(4) DUPUIS OLIVIER. (1958). Belgian conscientious objector, surrendered himself to the Belgian justice system and served an 11-month sentence in the prison of Saint Gilles. Worked at the French-speaking edition of "Radical News". Organized and participated in nonviolent and antitotalitarian demonstrations in the countries of Eastern Europe, and was for this reason expelled from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Currently coordinates the party's activities in Rumania and Hungary. Works at the project on the "New Party".

(5) BONINO EMMA. (Bra 1948). President of the Radical Party, former member of the European Parliament, as of 1976 member of the Italian Parliament. Among the promoters of the CISA (Information Centre on Sterilization and Abortion) and active militant in the campaign against clandestine abortion. She was tried and acquitted in Florence. Participated in the conduction, on a national and international scale, of the campaign on World Hunger. Among the founding members of "Food and Disarmament International", promoted the circulation of the Manifesto of Nobel Laureates.

(6) FACCIO ADELE. (Pontebba 1920). Spearhead of pro-abortion campaigns. For the assertion of this right she was imprisoned but acquitted. President of the Radical Party in 1975-'76, radical deputy in 1976, 1979, 1983. Animal rights activist and environmentalist, promoter of the "Verdi Arcobaleno" ticket, on which she ran at the elections for the European Parliament in 1989.

(7) AGLIETTA ADELAIDE. (Turin 1940). Currently President of the Green Group at the European Parliament. Former member of the Italian Parliament, Secretary of the radical Party in 1977 and in 1978, year in which she was chosen to be part of the popular jury at the trial in Turin against the Red Brigades and Renato Curcio. Promoter of the Turin-based CISA (Information Centre on Abortion and Sterilization).