ABSTRACT: At the International Conference on AIDS in Florence last June, Luigi Cerina, a member of the Radical Party and Chairman of the Italian Association of HIV-Carriers, pronounced the following words: "I am making this accusation in the name of a right to life and a life of rights, to quote the motto of my party, the Radical Party, the transnational and transdivisional party."

(The Party New, n.2, July 1991)

Those who will die, often murdered, by the state or by superstition, can already be calculated in the tens of millions before the end of a decade that is also the end of a millennium. Because of an irrational hatred of much of the spectrum of human sexuality, not to mention overt or covert racism, the fight against AIDS in Africa and parts of the Far East has been fought half-heartedly without the necessary urgency and energy when it comes to furnishing information on sex and hygiene to the afflicted populations as well as, pratically, furnishing them with urgently needed contraceptives.

Much of this malign negligence is conducted in the name of the salvation of the soul, where the ideal of chastity or of indiscriminate procreation takes precedence over the survival of the human species.

The large majority of Italians who are sero-positive or have AIDS are Catholic. This makes it doubly painful for us, even scandalous when the Roman Catholic Church is the great engine that drives so many states to uphold the policies of death.

In the same way, we condemn the prohibitionist ideology everywhere - religious or secular - as being equally deadly to us all. Unfortunately, it has been adopted by the United Nations and by too many of its members.

But when this fierce ideology is replaced by sanity and good will, as in Amsterdam, less than 8% of drug addicts contract the virus.

Wherever prohibition has been enforced, particularly in Italy, up to 70% of drug addicts are sero-positive or already have AIDS. Nine out of ten of those of us who die have, in effect, been murdered. So, we will die, gentlemen. We are dying, gentlemen. And not only because of a fearsome virus but because of an ideology, a pseudo-morality, a jumble of criminal, totalitarian and blind attitudes. Ignorance and malice are vastly increasing death from AIDS.

We accuse those pseudo-liberal governors who practise what is in effect genocide of the poor in the ghettos of the North American cities, in the favelas and the Bidonvilles of Latin America and the Third World, in much the same casual way that we waste public funds and neglect public services in countries like Italy itself.

We accuse homophobic sexism in many parts of our so-called democratic first world, so like that of those totalitarian states which have systematically denounced homosexual acts as being perverse or ill.

By condemning sexuality which is outside marriage and not for the purpose of procreation to infamy and clandestinity, and by condemning drug addiction while cheerfully condoning poverty, the virus is given its non-congenital, epidemic, demonic power...

This explains our "j'accuse". A "j'accuse" in the name of simple common sense, not to mention of reason, morality, and order, of the right to life and a life of rights (as the Radical Party's motto states, my party, transnational and trans-party), in the name of love, of respect for others, of the inseparable principles of liberty and responsibility, of the necessary knowledge to enable one to choose and act well for the good of one's self and others.

We want to live, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends.

We must, meanwhile, live celebrating life, not merely surviving, and not existing in fear and resignation in the face of a terrible death that would not be inevitable if there were knowledge and good will.

We want the people who are sero-positive or afflicted with AIDS to be guaranteed the right to participate in decisions that directly concern them - otherwise even medical progress will be slow and ineffectual.