---------

INDEX

NONVIOLENCE, LAY TOLERANCE, LIBERAL REVOLUTION

by Angiolo Bandinelli

PREAMBLE TO THE STATUTE OF THE RADICAL PARTY [149]

NONVIOLENCE AND THE DEMONS OF THE CENTURY

by Marco Pannella [5557]

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1968

by Marco Pannella [112]

ABORTION, 1977 [4390]

OSIJEK, 1991 [6094]

MR HUNGER STRIKE

Interview with Marco Pannella [2605]

DIARY OF A HUNGER STRIKE

by Marco Pannella [5781]

WHERE IS THE VIOLENCE, WHERE IS THE BLACKMAIL?

Interview with Marco Pannella [1027]

THE RIGHT TO IDENTITY AND THE MASS MEDIA

by Marco Pannella [2796]

WE ARE NOT UNARMED

by Marco Pannella [1047]

THE ARSENAL OF NONVIOLENCE

by Marco Pannella [1184]

DETERMENT OR NONVIOLENCE

by Marco Pannella [2597]

PACIFISM, NAZIISM, COMMUNISM

Interview with Marco Pannella [4149]

THANKS, COMRADES AND MURDERERS

by Marco Pannella [4495]

THE NONVIOLENT AND THE VIOLENT

by Marco Pannella [1035]

NONVIOLENCE: THE NEW LAY TOLERANCE

by Marco Pannella [840]

NONVIOLENCE IS ACTIVE

Interview with Marco Pannella [3599]

SO WHAT IS HUNGER?

Interview with Marco Pannella [2594]

1975: APPEAL FOR PLIOUTCH

by Marco Pannella [4491]

1991: APPEAL TO THE SERBS

by Marco Pannella [3820]

CIVIL RIGHTS AND JUS NATURAE

by Angiolo Bandinelli [4434]

KARL POPPER, LIBERAL AND NONVIOLENT

Interview with Marco Pannella [5099]

THE LESSON OF THE CENTURY

Interview with Karl Popper [5114]

NONVIOLENCE: THE RADICAL CHROMOSOME

by Roberto Cicciomessere [704]

The numbers in square brackets refer to the catalogue of the Radical Party Archive in Agorà Telematica. For reasons of space, the texts in this volume have at times been modified slightly. The Radical Party Archive in Agorà contains over 6,000 texts on and by the Radical Party from 1955 up to the present day.

--------------------------------

Bielovar, 13 October 1991

(...) To tell you the truth I will never forgive them for having forced me to kill them. I have read this in a book, and I agree. I am not a hero, I am frightened to death, but I cannot refuse to take part. I can't believe it, but it's true.

Now I recall Budapest and our transnational Radical Party, the battle for the rights of the marginalized, for the legalization of prostitution, for the free market of drugs.

(...) I want you to know that I have always desired a Europe without frontiers, with respect for the rights of the individual, above all. I am not Croatian, but Croatia is my homeland. My family is of Serbian origin, but has been in Croatia for seven or eight generations. I will never renounce my name and my origins. I am sorry that we are fighting against the Serbs but I can't do anything about it. My opinion is that we are fighting against the most backward form of Stalinism. After all, they sent in the tanks, against their own students, last March.

Goodbye, and don't blame me.

Momcilo Vukasinovic

Momcilo Vukasinovic, known as Momo, Serbian, an unemployed writer, joined the Radical Party in 1990. In 1991 he volunteered for Service in the Croatian National Guard. He was killed in Komletinci on 4 December 1991.

This book is dedicated to him.

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NONVIOLENCE, LAY TOLERANCE, LIBERAL REVOLUTION

At the end of the last century a young man come to London from his native India to study Law. In the avant-garde circles of London, he was astonished to hear, together with the terms "Socialism", "libertarianism", "democracy", and so on, the term "nonviolence", which intellectuals were borrowing from Oriental cultures. Shortly afterwards he met Lev Tolstoy, who was reflecting, on the same issues, and the two exchanged ideas, projects, and utopias. From then on, throughout his life, Gandhi attempted to develop is unique network of concepts and values, putting them at the service of the Indian revolution.

Despite difficulties, misunderstandings and even errors - and beyond the contingent language which he used to speak to his fellow countrymen to introduce that unusual term into the vocabulary of modern political culture. Moreover, thanks to him we now understand that "nonviolence" can be the key to a fascinating and highly modern interpretation of liberal Revolution (the French Revolution, and also the American revolution ... ); the only interpretation, in fact, which canrestore full vitality to the ideals with which it captured the imaginations of entire generations.

For two centuries - writes Roberto Cicciomessere - "terrible contradictions have injured the civilization of tolerance and democracy. In the name of the goddess Reason men have killed and carried out massacres, in the name of Nations and Revolutions men have mode war and slaughtered." Only through the full, strict application of the values and the practices of nonviolence - or rather, only through the commitment to translate them politically into concrete forms of behaviour and laws - will the ideals of liberty, of tolerance and democracy that were upheld during the Age of Enlightenment return to splendour and once again convey their enormous, unexplored potential. As Cicciomessere adds, "political nonviolence can now constitute the fullest and most advanced form of lay tolerance."

The texts gathered together in this volume attempt to make explicit this essential point, They are a small selection of the extensive writings that have accompanied thirty years of nonviolent battles by the Radical Party and its leader Marco Pannella: the battles through which the Radical Party has won exceptional social, ideal, and political victories, in Italy (and elsewhere). Their "militant" origin reinforces their ambition, that of being a necessary part of a political "theory" of modern liberalism, of dialogue, tolerance, and democracy.

The issues and the problems raised are enormous. In order to tackle them and try to solve them, however, we now need a new organization of nonviolent battles. A "national" party is no longer sufficient. We now need to create a political force which inspires nonviolent efforts and instruments at a transnational level overcoming narrow national confines and actively confronting those nuclei or drafts of "universal society" being shaped by the United Nations and by the processes of federal integration, in progress or planned, along regional lines (Europe, Western Africa, Latin America, etc.).

This now seems to be the only adequate dimension to deal with the tremendous political, social and environmental issues that face us, at the dawn of the third millennium, as we once again hear the threatening and arrogant march of the demons of violence. Only in a transnational dimension do the otherwise worn-out and useless terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" reacquire force and significance.

It is our hope that this anthology will constitute a first valid "breviary" for those who wish to help to develop such a party, the transnational and transdivisional Radical Party, that is.

Angiolo Bandinelli

Rome, March 1994

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PREAMBLE TO THE STATUTE THE RADICAL PARTY

PROCLAIMS JUSTICE AND LAW POLITICAL OBJECTIVES OF THE RADICAL PARTY, PROCLAIMS THE RESPECT OF JUSTICE AND LAW AS THE INSUPERABLE SOURCE OF THE LEGITIMACY OF THE INSTITUTIONS, PROCLAIMS THE DUTY OF DISOBEDIENCE, NON-COLLABORATION, CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION, THE SUPREME FORMS OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE FOR THE DEFENCE, WITH LIFE, OF LIFE JUSTICE AND LAW.

IT CALLS ITSELF

AND EVERY PERSON WHO WISHES TO HOPE IN LIFE AND IN PEACE, IN JUSTICE AND IN LIBERTY, TO THE STRICT RESPECT AND ACTIVE DEFENCE OF TWO FUNDAMENTAL LAWS: THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN (WITH THE HOPE THAT THE EXPRESSION WILL BE CHANGED TO "RIGHTS OF THE PERSON") AND THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF MAN, AS WELL AS THE CONSTITUTIONS OF STATES WHICH RESPECT THE PRINCIPLES CONTAINED IN THE TWO CHARTERS;

TO THE REFUSAL TO OBEY AND RECOGNIZE THE LEGITIMACY OF THOSE WHO VIOLATE THEM, THOSE WHO FAIL TO APPLY THEM, THOSE WHO REDUCE THEM TO VERBOSE DECLARATIONS, MERELY NON-PEREMPTORY, THAT IS TO NON-LAWS.

IT DECLARES THE COMMANDMENT "DO NOT KILL"

TO HAVE THE VALUE OF A HISTORICALLY ABSOLUTE LAW, WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS, NOT EVEN THAT OF LEGITIMATE DEFENCE.

approved by the 23rd (extraordinary) Congress, Rome 1980

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NONVIOLENCE AND THE DEMONS OF THE CENTURY

by Marco Pannella

A long, complex speech mode during the seminar 'The transnational Radical Party and the new Europe' (Prague, 15-17 June 1990). Marco Pannella examines in depth the theoretical principles of the party, beginning with the intransigent demand for "the liberty and therefore the responsibility of the individual", that is for political democracy.

(...) We came to get ourselves arrested for concrete problems or, in September 1968, we managed quite miraculously, for a party with three or four hundred members, to demonstrate against the occupation of Czechoslovakia at the same time in Moscow, Sofia, East Berlin, in all the countries of the Warsaw Pact which occupied or helped with the occupation of Czechoslovakia. I remember the text of the leaflet I distributed: I remember that we had 3,000 copies in Bulgarian, and we distributed 2,600 of them (I would like to get hold of a copy of the leaflet from the Bulgarian secret police, as a historical document). We wrote in Bulgarian, starting out from an analysis of the Bulgarian constitution, to point out that there was oppression in Bulgaria and that forming part of the occupying forces in Czechoslovakia, or supporting the occupying forces in Czechoslovakia, was anunconstitutional and anticonstitutional act according to the Bulgarian constitution itself.

And yet it is absolutely certain that Western ambassadors and representatives of Fiat, Volkswagen and Ford came on business trips to the Eastern capitals during that time, firmly convinced that the totalitarian regime in the Soviet empire was necessary for the world.

(...) Indifference, identical in cultural terms to that which led in 1938 to the Munich agreements between England and France on one hand an Nazi German and Fascist Italy on the other, emerged once again during the Cold War on the part of Western pacifists. As a party, the party of Gandhian nonviolence, we have never been a pacifist party. Pacifism has over the years produced crimes that still have to be recounted: for many years the French pacifists, the Western pacifists, assumed a neutral position between their own governments and the Nazi and Fascist governments: all they wanted was that their own governments should not rearm, should not react with arms to the violence of the Nazis and the Fascists.

The pacifism of the fifties, of Communist inspiration, was clearly a descendant of that cowardly and irresponsible pacifism; on the other hand those who uphold nonviolence, and we have always upheld nonviolence, attack the roots of violence and manifestations of violence, and are nonviolent because they believe that the weapons of nonviolence are stronger (I could, paradoxically, say. "more violent", but I will stick to "stronger") in the mid and long term than the weapons of violence. Because the weapons of nonviolence are the bare hands, the naked bodies of millions of people, women and men, while the strength of military violence is based on the enslavement of these people in order to send them to die in wars; and the choice of military violence always results in catastrophe. All the legends of this century, the legends that have been powerful in the West, the legends created by the mass media and by posters - Che Guevara, martyrs, heroes - are the product and the outcome of the choice by the West of thes

e forms of opposition against those, for example, of the Buddhist monks. The latter represented the vast majority of populations, and were beaten because the liberal-democratic and social-democratic West has always, during this century, believed in traditional weapons, in a traditional and outdated conception of international relations and of wars of liberation. I am thinking, for example, of Indo-Chinese dictatorship, with Cambodia, Vietnam...

To come round to speaking as soon as possible about the present-day Radical Party, I have to make a preliminary observation I want to contribute to the debate which has developed here on the word "compagno" (literally "companion", used in Italian for the political sense of comrade"). When almost the entire Italian left was centred on Stalinist positions, and we were fiercely opposed to Stalinism and Communism, we used to say that we didn't want to let the left have exclusive use of the word "compagno", because when you think of its Latin etymology "compagno" is a splendid word: a "compagno" is a person who shares his bread with another person.

(...) "Compagno" cannot be translated as "tovarich", because "tovarich" doesn't have the same root: it has the sense of an exchange, a "partner" (...). Nor can "compagno"' be translated as "comrade", which has a more military root, a room-mate, from the word "camera". I do not use "comrade": the Fascists were called comrades.

(...) So let's make it clear that if we say "compagno", we don't want it translated as "tovarich", it has to be translated etymologically, not politically, because in the period in which "compagni", comrades, and tovarich were the same thing, the value of the word "compagno" was abused for reasons of political standardization...

(...) We are now faced with a tragic scenario: we are witnessing post-Communist choices that are dangerous in terms of liberty and rights, in the short term and not only in the mid term. In Rumania the situation is clear: Ceausescu's heirs are in power; in order to remain in power they assassinated Ceausescu in a manner worthy of Ceausescu himself - we said this immediately, it was quite evident. Those who present themselves as the victorious enemies and adversaries of Ceausescu are Ceausescu's heirs, who murdered their father to take power in accordance with the customs of their family, in which they were well-versed. We have no illusions about what is happening in Czechoslovakia: the political culture of Havel, and I say this with great respect and sympathy, is the culture which twice brought Europe to disaster, with the death of admirable people like Havel himself.

We, and you, are returning to the Europe of 1919. It is not true that the Austro-Hungarian empire fell as a result of its own doings it fell because it was the only pluri-national, pluri-ethnic and pluri-religious power and it was assassinated by a century which assumed, as its own demon, nationalistic romanticism, national romanticism. Everything which came after - Nazism, Fascism, the world war and Communism - is also a consequence of this.

How can it be explained that the Europe of 1919, which after very few years produced Fascism, Nazism, poverty, dictatorships and Communism, was largely a socialdemocratic Europe? Do you believe that the socialdemocratic culture was not to blame? True, the assassins were others, and they were assassinated, but it was on the terrain of their culture that the assassins were able to win, and to win so easily: the social-democratic and liberal-democratic culture of the West decided that things were fine as they were and that on the basis of the new treaties ofVienna and Yalta, peoples had to belong to the same civil and state religion as their sovereigns.

And yet we have seen what the division into national states led to: the abandonment of internationalism, of internationality and transnationality. Think of Spain, or of France, which allowed itself to be defeated by the Nazis in the space of thirty days. Except where continental democracy was social-democratic and monarchic (in Scandinavia, for example), the consequence of the collapse of national states was Communism and Fascism. And now what are we returning to? The national state of Czechoslovakia, the national state of Hungary.

Democracy means overcoming the division between Politics and power, the possibility of translating this into politics. The national state cannot do this; I believe that, if anything, we should propose a Danubian state, because that at least would have some significance, on the territory, on the way things live today.

This is what lies at the base of our European federalist position; we want to bring up the tragic problem of the Second Society of Nations. We've got the UN, but if we don't bring up the problem of the force of law, of Planetary juridical force, if we do not manage - do you see the problems of justice? - if we do not manage to fight to ensure that the resolutions of the "UN" (in inverted commas, because this is no longer the UN) have binding force, the force of law, then we will relive the terrible scenario of the thirties, as we are reliving it in Prague.

To say this in good time is not enough...

(...) A nonviolent party... is a party of people who join together because of a common conviction, a sense of necessity. A nonviolent party is the right response - in terms of theory - to he society of suicidal opulence, because through nonviolent methods and nonviolent living, through happy (not sacrificial) abstention from eating, by provoking the powers and saying "put me in prison if you want, that's how laws will be changed", there is the struggle of the humble, the struggle of those who have no booty in their hands at the end of the day.

(...) I would like, briefly, to look at other issues.

South Africa, above all. The way in which the South African situation is faced is truly dramatic and tragic.

In front of all the members of the European Parliament, I put a question to Mandela: "The fact that the ANC is renouncing violence, which is inscribed in its charters, and not only in its statute, but also in political motions of two months ago - and Mandela calls it "hostilities" - saying that civil war is like a war etc., the passage from violence to nonviolence, the return to the origins of the ANC (which were Gandhian) - is all this a concession you want to make to the adversary or is it necessary for the growth of the ANC, the growth of black government and of the alternative to the government of the blacks?' He didn't reply, because he couldn't reply, because he doesn't see thingsthat way. The official line is: only when we achieve our aim will we renounce hostilities. But you will continue hostilities even when you are in power! This is the position of Fidel, the position proletarian dictatorships.

(...) Mandela decided that it was necessary to fight to liberate the people through the military organization of the resistance, according to the culture of those peoples, and he organized it. He was arrested, and in his trial he upheld the morality of the decision to use military violence, and said that this was necessary.. "You practise apartheid, to free ourselves we must make war...". Now, in any country, in America, in England, in France (let alone in our country, where you had the death penalty), he would have been executed or sentenced to life imprisonment.

The problem of South Africa is that of the black victims, of the 3,000 black victims - the vast majority of whom were killed by other blacks - and many of them were accused of being assassins because they collaborated with the whites or with the Zulu tribe, instead of with the other one.

If these leaders come to power, I fear that South Africa will go the way of much of Africa, because if you go beyond the confines of the white tribe (with its perverse, aberrant policy of apartheid) you find much worse: all the other states are hell, at the level of theory and justice, and at the level of practice and life. We believers in nonviolence and democracy must fear a deterioration to such hell. We must have the freedom and the courage to repeat the axiom of nonviolence: in any war, the generals win and the people die. The decision to seek liberation through violence, if it is taken, leads to the death of millions of people, in general of millions of citizens.

We have rejected and must reject all this.

In the Middle East the situation is equally tragic.

I am accused of being fiercely pro-Israeli, only because I take pains to raise the problem not only of Palestine, but of the whole Middle East. We do not want South Africa to suffer the fate of the rest of Africa, just as we do not want Palestine to suffer the fate of the rest of the Middle East: I am guided by a nonviolent, concrete vision: it doesn't matter to me who dies, it doesn't matter if those who die are enemies - this is not the important thing.

Then there is Tibet.

One year after Tien an Men, the West wants to lift the sanctions on China. All the democrats of the world worry about Mandela and Arafat and their rights, but they don't say a word about Tibet, or Cambodia, or else they say very little and do nothing. There is a risk that the values of the Soviet empire, the massacre of liberties and people will become even more widespread around theworld.

(...) Another example is prohibitionism. Today, things are done in the name of prohibitionism that were once done in the name of Fascism or Communism. In the name of prohibitionism, the United States have allocated funds for new orisons for 300,000 people, and it is only because of budget problems that labour camps are not planned for million of people: they will be filled by the poor, by opponents, by those who are different, not by those who have lawyers and international support. Latin America, Colombia and the other countries have been destroyed by the war on drugs, because it is a real war and they are using, or would like to use, methods more or less like those used in Vietnam.

In the West, there are no campaigns against the death penalty, because thanks to prohibitionism the idea of extending the death, penalty is triumphing in the United States, in the heart a the Western empire. We must begin to demonstrate in Moscow, and continue to demonstrate in Prague, outside the embassies of the Western countries in which the death penalty is practised and people killed; only with the Radical Party, perhaps, can we manage to do this.

(...) Beware, those of you who are younger or further away, or those of you who believe you are more hungry for politics: in the face of these problems we are all equally unarmed. We must arm ourselves, and this means, if possible, forming this Radical Party in the days to come, each of us working some miracle, because otherwise I am convinced that for the most "sapient", the most expert, or the most "intelligent" of us, the only alternative will be to start again from scratch...

-----------------------------------

CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1968

by Marco Pannella (1)

Dear friends,

with some friends in Rome we have decided to begin an extended hunger strike to demand the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia, or at least to support the Czechoslovakians in the current negotiations. We also intend in this way to urge the Italian Communist Party to move to action, so that its positive statements do not become an excuse to take no action, or to restrict itself to high-level action, uncontrollable and extraneous to us, as well as to all the Communist rank and file and to the general public.

Perhaps it will all be over when you receive this letter. If not, we believe that the "Gruppi spontanei" can make a serious contribution to render the Italian support for the cause of the Czechoslovakian people more democratic and concrete.

We hope that you will join this initiative of ours. Do not believe that it is "harmless" and non-political. In terms of effectiveness, should circumstances require it (and we hope they don't), if a hunger strike were conducted at the same time in many cities of Italy, honestly and rigorously, the echo in the Media and in the world of politics could not fail to bewide-reaching, at least in relation to the effort we will have put into it.

Moreover, this initiative would not necessarily take away energy from the work of the "Gruppi". Please let us know your views on the matter. If you decide to join the hunger strike, please contact us immediately by phone or notify us via telegraph.

August 1968

(1) Letter from Marco Pannella to the "Gruppi Spontanei" of cultural and political commitment for the new left. The hunger strike lasted 15 days. The Radicals also organized demonstrations in Sofia , Moscow and East Berlin, during which they were arrested and expelled.

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ABORTION, 1977

(...) On 9 January 1977, the police entered the Italian Centre for Sterilization and Abortion (CISA) clinic in Florence, where abortions were practised with the Karmann method, arresting the director and his assistants and denouncing the 40 women who were in the clinic at the time. On 13 January, the national secretary of the Radical Party, Gianfranco Spadaccia, was arrested at dawn at his home. Spadaccia had assumed political responsibility for the promotion of the CISA and for the running of a clinic in Florence. Warrants of arrest were also placed on Adele Faccio and Emma Bonino, of the CISA, who were in France at the time. On 15 January, demonstrations were held all over Italy for the release of Gianfranco Spadaccia and the other people arrested in Florence. On 18 January an appeal for the immediate release of Spadaccia was signed by leading figures from the world of politics and culture; among them were the poet Eugenio Montale, the writer lgnazio Silone, and many others. On 21 January, in Paris, Marco

Pannella and Adele Faccio announced the opening of more CISA clinics in Italy. From 24 to 26 January, over 7,000 people attended the National Conference on Abortion sponsored by the Radical Party and the Women's liberation Movement. On Sunday 26 January, on the stage of the Adriano Theatre in Rome, police arrested Adele Faccio, who had returned in secret to Italy. In his speech, which preceded the arrest of Adele Faccio, Marco Pannella stated: "our main objective is to ensure the recognition of the right to life and happiness of our comrades and sisters, forced every day to suffer revolting clericalist class violence". "Clandestine abortion is a form of violence which must be terminated, and women alone have the right to administer their own bodies."There is now a clash between two criminal organizations: the Radical Party which uses nonviolent methods to fight for the modification of the liberticide laws of the penal code "that governments, parliaments and parties continue to impose on us thirty years after

the Constitution', and the governments and parliaments that have failed to eliminate Fascist laws which are "against the Constitution and against humanity". "As an exponent of nonviolence who does not intend to impose his ideas on those who do not agree with them, I demand that the violent exponents of the state, those who impose on us their class laws, to which they must give a liberal and republican semblance, respect at least their own legality." Pannella then invited the police officers to proceed with the arrest of Adele Faccio, 'which took place in total silence: 'Adele is not a martyr, she is going to her battle station and she knows that with this the thing she is fighting for have already been obtained... So, are they coming?" (1)

January 1977

(1) Account of the arrest of Adele Faccio, member of the Radical Party and President of the CISA, which took place during a major demonstration in Rome.

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OSIJEK, 1991

(...) On the night of 31 December 1991, the parliamentarians Marco Pannella, Roberto Cicciomessere, Alessandro Tessari, Lorenzo Strik Lievers, the members of the Federal Council of the Radical Party Olivier Dupuis, Lucio BertS and Josip Pinesic, unarmed, joined the Croatian defence forces at three points along the battle lines. Some of them will also reach the stations of the international brigade, whose commander, Eduardo, is a member of the Radical Party in Budapest. Renato Fiorelli, a member of the city council of Gorizia and a trained nurse, will offer his services to the military hospital of Osiiek, which has so far been one of the main targets of the Serbian artillery. Marco Pannella, in his role as European deputy, has met the European Community observers currently in Osijek.

Tomorrow, 1 January, Marco Pannella will proceed to Nova Gradiska, which is currently undergoing violent bomb attacks. (1)

I am wearing the uniform of the Croatian army, as a material and symbolic action, as a political and civil action, because the fight for the right to life and the life of rights, of all of us, Serbians, Albanians, Macedonians, Italians, Germans, French, Russians or English, of we Europeans, of the inhabitants of the world, now hangs on the good use of this uniform. As does the ideal and the hope for democracy and peace. I am grateful and fraternally proud of this, evidently an act of faith and a desire to honour us for that which the Radical Party of transnational and transdivisional nonviolence stands for and is attempting to build in the society of today.

If we are strong enough, a system of "brigades of nonviolence" will begin to form from this initiative, the embryo of the force of international justice for the safeguard of the rights of individuals and peoples in the world.

As a representative of the European people and the European Parliament, with my Radical colleagues deputies and activists, I am here against the return in Europe of the shameful conduct of the 1930s, when cynicism and pseudo-democratic leaders, then as now, allowed the affirmation of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, and the spread of wars and massacres. For the uniform I am wearing today, it is my duty to give testimony to our presence as Croatians, Europeans, and also soldiers.

I do so wishing the women and men of Serbia, in all the republics, wherever they may live, and all their families, a year of liberty, democracy, peace, tolerance, happiness and good health.

We respond with love and hope to those who would see them as aggressors, oppressed, assassins or victims of assassination. From the trenches in which we are spending the night and the days to come, we are fighting and will continue to fight for them, too, despite the torture we are suffering, of which they are instruments against their will.

(...) The exponents of nonviolence, the anti-militarists, the democratic federalists, the Europeans, the internationalists, the people of good will of the transnational and transdivisional Radical Party, claim the honour, the pain and the joy of being on this front for a free Croatia, a free Serbia, a free Kosovo, a free Macedonia, a free Bosnia-Hercegovina, a free Europe. Where there is liberty and democracy, there will be peace and tolerance, justice and fraternity. (2)

(1) Press release announcing the initiative.

(2) Declaration-appeal by Marco Pannella.

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MR HUNGER STRIKE

Interview with Marco Pannella

(...) When was your first hunger strike?

"In 1968, against the tanks in Prague."

How long was your longest hunger strike?

"Sixty-two days."

When?

"In the summer of 1974."

How much weight did you lose?

"Thirty-two kilos."

You are accused of hunger striking Italian-style, or rather Roman-style, with cappuccinos and cream cakes. More of a diet than a hunger strike.

"A diet is also a form of hunger strike. And what are 180 calories compared to the 3,500 we need? In any case the last few hunger strikes have been total."

(...) Is there a connection between a political hunger striker and someone who doesn't eat because he has no food?

"Yes, with the terrible difference between liberty and a dreadful imposition."

Isn't there a touch of victimism in your hunger strikes?

"No. When I'm on a hunger strike I shave twice a day and wearclean round-necked jumpers."

If your hunger strikes weren't talked about so much, would you continue going on them?

"I do it so that people will talk about our ideas and not about my hunger strikes. About our ideas and those of others."

(...) How many times have you been stopped?

"Endless times."

And arrested?

"Once in Bulgaria, at the time of the tanks in Prague. And once three years ago, because of drugs."

Taken to court?

"At least fifty times."

And found guilty?

"As a final sentence, once."

So you're a Party out on bail?

"Absolutely!"

Who are your political friends?

"All lay, libertarian, humanist Socialists."

And your enemies?

"Personally, nobody"

And not personally?

"You tell me."

Without you, would there have been a referendum on divorce?

"Without us, no."

Who funds you?

"We fund ourselves."

Do you get financial support from abroad?

"Yes, from our members abroad."

How do you survive financially?

"As a freelance journalist and writer."

How much do you spend a month?

"40,000 lire on rent, 30,000 on cigarettes."

(...) What would you do if the Radicals, a minority by choice, became a majority?

"We would form a wider libertarian and Socialist body. But we Radicals already represent a majority."

Do you like appearing on TV?

"At this price, no."

(...) What sort of society do you want?

"A free, Socialist, humanist, Voltairian society. A society without violence, neither public nor private."

In the name of nonviolence, you threaten to commit suicide every day, by going on hunger strikes to the bitter end. Isn't this a form of violence?

"No, because we are reacting every time to an assassination attempt on us and on our ideas."

You have been defined as an "unarmed prophet", as Machiavelli defined Savonarola. Aren't you afraid of suffering the same fate as the Dominican monk?

"No. There's a bit of Savonarola in us, a bit of the "Prince", a bit of Machiavelli, but we are new."

October 1977

--------------------------

DIARY OF A HUNGER STRIKE

by Marco Pannella

From 1 October to 8 November 1972, Marco Pannella and other activists carried out a collective hunger strike for the release by Christmas of Pietro Valpreda and the conscientious objectors. Valpreda, an anarchist, was on trial for the terrorist attack carried out in Milan in 1969, when a bomb killed many people and initiated a long period of violence; the conscientious objectors had not obtained the low for which they had been fighting for years. The hunger strikers were asking parliament to commit itself to "debates and votes on conscientious objection" and to "the reform of a provision of the penal code" to allow 'the immediate release of Pietro Valpreda" and the others on trial. The President of the Chamber of Deputies, the Socialist Sandro Pertini, and the President of the Senate, the Christian Democrat Amintore Fanfani (who had just received the Lenin Prize for ecology in Moscow), intervened to ensure that the two Chambers could vote on the laws.

1 October

I am at the Anarchic Congress in Rimini. I get a phone call, in the Arengario room from Roberto (1): at Peschiera (Italian military prison, editor's note) the comrades have begun the hunger strike; so they too agree, and from the prison they assure their militant contribution to the struggle. Our decision now becomes executive. In Rome, twenty-three people are about to begin; this time, Angiolo and Gianfranco, Aloisio and Ennio, Graziana and Lucia, Vincenzo and Enzo (2), doctors, teachers, journalists, hippies young and old, and feminists, we're a in it. It will

be more difficult than in the past, I think. Yesterday evening, before I set out, I got a letter from Pietro Valpreda, from the hospital, rather desperate and furious [...].

11 October

Tomorrow I'm going to a trial in Milan. On the 8th the comrades in Reggio Emilia had organized an outdoor meeting. It was Sunday morning and there were a lot of people there. We distributed a lot of material, postcards to send to parliamentarians, groups, parties, and various presidents. I feel well enough. Compared to previous hunger strikes, I'm being more careful to take vitamins regularly: I'm a bit afraid because of the problems I've had with my eyes in the past. Six comrades have had to give up, four of them because of collapses. Lots of people are now coming to the Pantheon (a famous square in Rome, editor's note). We are collecting about 20,000 lire a day, so we can print more postcards and documents, which are beginning to arrive in Parliament. We've sent every deputy a personal letter tounderline the modest nature of our demands: all we're asking is that parliament should set a calendar of proceedings for debates and votes on conscientious objection and on the reform of a provision of the penal cod

e which would allow the immediate release of Valpreda, Gargamelli, and Borghese (3). We're not entering upon the subject of white papers: we only want to guarantee for Parliament, as well as for ourselves, an end to this tragicomic situation - for twenty-five years parliament hasn't voted on a law which the Constitution requires, and for seventeen years objectors have been sentenced and imprisoned (...)

20 October

The Secretary General of the Senate has sent us a long telegram announcing that on 25 October the white paper on conscientious objection will be assigned to the Defence Committee. Roberto, who has got another arrest warrant on his head, is once again the focus of all the initiatives.

Alberto (4), too, is now absconding: he hasn't answered his call-up for the second time. I am travelling around a lot and I am exhausted, and frightened by the silence of the media. "L'Espresso", "Il Mondo", "L'Avanti" and "La Voce Repubblicana" haven't said a word, it doesn't concern them. If we win, they'll no doubt write moralistic and worthy things about the importance and seriousness of the law on objection, or the reform of the penal code. But for now, despite our requests, not a word about these objectors [...].

23 October

We met up, two evenings ago. I was in crisis, undecided. Alberto, who has received a petition of support from France with about two thousand signatures collected by our anti-militarist, nonviolent comrades, seems to be calm. At this point he says, we simply have to face the situation ahead. Our demands are considered by everybody to be right, and modest. The comrades in prison are more and more numerous, and more and more persecuted, an example of the Fascist violence of the state. So let's change tactics: the hunger strike will continue to the extreme consequences. Those who understand nonviolence, true nonviolence, with the patrimony of debates and political force that now inspires it, cannot fail to see that Alberto is right. To give up now would mean discrediting this civil and serious form of struggle, the most effective for those fighting power from below, and would mean throwing in the towel as Parliament cannot refuse to recognize that we are right without betraying itself.

2 November

We are in Turin, at the Radical Party Congress We are in the basement of Palazzo Carignano, lent to us by the Cultural Union. About a hundred people perched on the stairs, sitting on tables and on the floor. The debate is very slow and serious. Not a cough or a whisper. Everyone speaks in the awareness that we have a rare, awesome, exceptional responsibility. As I hear this silence and these words I am deeply moved. Suddenly, from somewhere very near, there comes the sound of Albinoni, then Mozart. Rehearsals for a concert tomorrow evening. One after the other, without interrupting each other, speeches are made by people I have known for twenty years

and friends whose faces I first saw only a few hours ago.

It is a difficult, painful moment. Unconsciously, with their affection, and a so with their intelligence, they put Alberto and me on trial, in a dialogue which once again, in this incredible party, wipes out the division between public life and private life. Then, slowly, from passionate debate, a new series of immediate initiatives are decided. The number of people on extended hunger strike increases from the original twenty to sixty, then eighty. The appeal launched, after my trip to Paris and the press conference organized by Jean-Marie Muller, by Nenni, Montale, Silone, Aragon, the Nobel Prize winners Bohl, Jacob and Kastier (well-known figures from France and Italy, editor's note), Cardinals Lercaro and Alfrink and many other prestigious figures, has now been joined by the Protestant Churches, parishes and religious communities.

3 November

The party congress opened with a collective fast by all the participants and the allocation of the money saved (over 300,000 lire) to the fight for conscientious objection [...]. We are all skin and bone (...).

Alberto has lost 12 kilos, I have lost 19. We are both skin and bone. We know that we are burning up cells that will never re-form, although at the moment it's impossible to tell the extent of the damage. I know, from previous experience, that your hair starts to fall out, and your teeth an your eyesight suffer, as well as your memory and various other things.

In the afternoon they tell us that Fanfani has agreed to see us on the 7th. Long telegrams have been arriving in the last few days from the Secretary General of the Senate, with everything except what matters. If the Defence Committee decides on time, Fanfani says he will put two bills to parliament, even before 3 November, for debate and approval. This is a lot, but we are asking for final dates, even a long way off, as long as they are certain; not starting dates.

Pertini, who we've rather ungenerously been bombarding with appeals and criticism, phones from Nice. He is furious, it seems, as well as pained and worried. No-one had ever told him we intended to ask him to see us: we had been assured by parliamentarians and other journalists that they had passed on our request. He asks repeatedly about our health, and suggeststhat he could break off his short holiday in Nice to meet us halfway, tomorrow, even in Genoa. Tomorrow we'll join him in Nice: the party congress finishes at four in the morning. At seven we set off.

4 November

At twelve we see Pertini arrive beneath the porticoes of the Galeries Lafayette, his pipe lit, wearing a beige pullover and fustian trousers. The sun is shining, but I feel a storm in the air. He looks at us, as if to make sure we can stand up to a talking-to, and starts off by saying that I've got to give up using these methods: two years ago, on divorce, not convinced by some of his opinions and advice, I sent him an open letter which he still remembers word for word. This time, together with Alberto, I sent him and Fanfani a pretty strong letter. To some extent he is right. We enter a caffè. For a couple of hours we analyze the situation. Pertini tells us about his hunger strikes in prison, the things he did right here, in Nice, where he invested his capital in a radio station and worked as a bricklayer. He talks to us frankly and exhaustively about the laws we are interested in. In the end the situation is clear. We don't ask him for any commitments, which would be unfair to expect, and which he would un

doubtedly refuse to make. We now know that if the Senate doesn't waste too much time, the Chamber of Deputies will almost certainly have finished the job by Christmas. As he says goodbye, Pertini hesitates for a moment. He looks at Alberto, so young, so determined, but also so tired. The old comrade is moved, gives him a warm embrace, and heads off. We go back to Turin, paralysed by the Motor Show and the Juventus-Torino match: at the anti-militarist congress, another thirty comrades have joined the hunger strike.

7 November

(...) We have to keep going for one more day. We will clearly have to see Senator Garavelli (the chairman of the relevant parliamentary committee, editor's note) to be certain that we've achieved our objectives.

At twelve Pertini calls us to see him again. It seems he has already contacted the presidents of the parliamentary groups, the government, and the ministers concerned. Previously he had told us we could hold out hope, now he assures us that our hopes have come true. I'm going home. It's late. After thirty-seven days, I'll make myself a nice broth with butter and Parmesan cheese. As long as Alberto carries on till tomorrow, that's enough. Then I'll explain to him.

8 November

Senator Garavelli has decided to respect the autonomy of the Committee. From 16 November, if the members of the committee have a lot to talk about, they'll have all the time they want. Garavelli, who as a good Social-Democrat recalls that Umberto Calosso (5) and his party comrades have always promoted bills on conscientious objection, says he will "convene the committee day and night, including Saturdays, up to the vote".

So we've done it. Because we have a number of solutions for Valpreda, too. Either he'll be released with a government decree by 10 November, or with a law by 15 December.

On the way out, I tell Alberto that I've already broken my hunger strike and congratulate him [...].

(1) Roberto Cicciomessere: former secretary of the Radical Party, conscientious objector.

(2) Angiolo, Gianfranco, Aloisio, Graziana, Lucia, Vincenzo, Enzo: Radical activists.

(3) Garamelli, Borghese: on trial with Valpreda for the terrorist attack.

(4) Alberto Gardin. activist, conscientious objector.

(5) Umberto Calosso: writer, Socialist, exiled under Fascism.

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WHERE IS THE VIOLENCE, WHERE IS THE BLACKMAIL?

Interview with Marco Pannella

According to some people, your hunger strikes are just acts of masochism which are in conflict with your declarations of love for life and in general of "happy, struggle for Socialism.

I have an answer which I've been giving for some time, as you might imagine but which I have continued to develop: the difference between risking life and risking death. I am convinced that people die because they have lost interest in life. Those who refuse to see life cut off, on the other hand, because they see hope rather than castration and resignation, can risk losing it: it happens. But if they win, they live much better and much more than other people. I would add that risking your own life without risking that of others is another step forward (even those who commit suicide somehow know they are putting other people in danger). let's take an example, another step ahead, because in these matters we move forward by taking steps in the dark. Who were really putting their lives at risk in Italy in 1937-38 (that is, in Italy under Fascism, editor's note)? Those who had understood the logic of dictatorship and therefore knew that "war was near", and engaged in a dangerous battle to try to avoid millions o

f deaths; or those who were afraid of the short-term risk and ended up dying later, together with millions of others?

Masochism? There is masochism when there is suffering, when there is awareness of pain. But my experience, and that of all my comrades, is that a hunger strike does not cause suffering, at most it causes discomfort. Some people, however, ruling out masochism, talk of a self-destructive tendency. Well, anything is possible, even dying of happiness. But I know that even if I were different I33

couldn't feel better than I do today, and I could easily feel less well, physically, like most of the people who suffer forced hardship. And let's not forget that our hunger strikes are always collective initiatives, experiences of political growth.

Finally, there is another no less important factor: this method is successful, it works: and it is in line with our political belief in libertarianism and nonviolence. We maintain, in fact, that if the struggle for Socialism is violent, it prefigures a movement and therefore a society organized in a violent, authoritarian manner.

And yet you have been accused of practising blackmail with your hunger strikes, that is of doing violence to others. We do not fast to protest or suffer, but to reach an objective. In general the objective concerns the morality of others, not our own; through our hunger strikes we do not ask for precedence to be given to a particular bill, but that laws that others have imposed or proposed should be implemented. Let me explain more clearly: we do not try to impose our principles or our beliefs, we demand the minimum, we demand, that is, that the government of the city respect its own laws, we demand the restoration of the violated rules of democracy. In reality it is the only answer we can give, beyond destruction, to a city which betrays its own laws So where is the violence, where is the blackmail?

How do you explain the fact that these methods are not practised by the masses?

Because we are a non-conformist, absolutely minority element compared to the values prevalent today. But it's not true that they are not, in principle, methods that can be practised by the masses; it depends on the development of certain processes. Workers' strikes can be considered the first great example of nonviolent mass protest, because they take place when the workers discover that it is more reductive to lay down tools than to destroy machines or kill the factory-owner.

Starting out from hunger strikes, we have come to nonviolence in general: another choice for which the Radicals are criticized.

Much less so now than in the past, just as another ridiculous accusation is no longer heard, that is that these methods are not "virile"... But let's make one thing clear: why do these critics - let's call them violent - always lose? (...) They lose because they resort to opportunist, activistic tactics; because they represent rebellion pure and simple, the mob, before it becomes the proletariat, if it is true that the proletariat is the nonviolent mob.

What lies behind the difference in methods between the Radicals and the other left-wing forces? They believe in "power"; we, on the other hand, aim for the "weakening of power", that is of the violence of the institutions. A process that can only reach completion over history, not through the violent destruction of power, as the anarchists believe. Our position, then, is anti-centralizing, anti-Jacobin, against short cuts, thoughadmittedly with all the risks of Jacobin exploitation. This is what we mean by libertarian, the weakening of power as the result of the growth of class and of Socialism, not a postponement to the moment power is assumed.

It is, therefore, a different way of going about politics, of living, of undertaking struggle.

So you claim that nonviolent methods are a Socialist practice, a winning practice, a claim you would not make for the traditional methods of the left.

What do the forms of struggle that we call traditional communicate to the outside world? Molotov cocktails communicate violence, and even if we know they don't do any harm, they can justify the fact that the police respond with guns. Demonstrations that block the streets don't annoy Agnelli (1), but the workers. And why should they have a positive reaction? Are they lacking in class conscience? No, they are conscious of their rights, and if they say "go to hell" it's the right reaction.

Marching in columns through the streets is the occupation of the city, a military parade, possession. There are thousands of people, there is the exaltation of crowds, of aggression, power which asserts itself over others because it is strong and violent. And what do the people watching feel? The thrill of the red flags, true, but this is the same as what they feel at military parades. Apart from that I can't see any sense in demonstrations. But walking in single file on the pavement, at the edge of the road, with a signboard each (and you are in charge of yourself, whereas at demonstrations you don't even communicate with your companions), means writing a long, legible story. At the anti-militarist marches, the police told us to walk in single file past the Military Sanctuary of Redipuglia; and we agreed; a procession of three hundred signboards, people passed and read them. A person on hunger strike is saying "You are making fun of me, I am unarmed and I can do nothing but demonstrate and denounce this".

May 1976

(1) The Chairman of Fiat.

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THE RIGHT TO IDENTITY AND THE MASS MEDIA

by Marco Pannella

[...] If democracy presupposes, at least to some extent, faith in the method of dialogue, debate and drama, it always also presupposes - in the agora - a sort of stage performance: between opposition and government, between majority and minority. Not necessarily a tragedy. In this I do not feel all the appeal of the "different', as in the area ranging from Fortini to Pasolini (1). There, for them, the dimension of existence, and also of democratic and civil existence, is tragic; for me it is dramatic, therefore with different denouements, which might not be thelethal, fatal denouements of a necessarily negative destiny. If democracy is this, or presupposes this, I think it is easier to understand what we Radicals mean when, having stated that for us the "perverse" does not exist and that we do not intend to restore it in politics, we have long repeated that within any "perversion" it is diversity that should be seized if we want to overcome the idea of the "perverse" (according to the common morality, or com

mon sense). And so, if we take pride in doing this, we clearly cannot restore the concept of perversion, of the perverse, in politics; demonology, if you like, or demonological subjectivity, or demonological iconography. We have tried to underline the treatment of the "perverse" (perverse for other people), of the "different", of the true minority under "anti-Fascism". I would also point out that a minority, if it is such, is such above all at the level of language or forms of thought and expression. A minority is such also in the sense - if you like - of cultural anthropology, otherwise it remains within the majority of the system, within its historical perspectives; different in chronicle, but the same in the perspective of history, beyond an extremely circumscribed epoch. From this point of view, for twenty years or more we have been trying every day to provide a different reading from that of the post-Fascist parties.

(...) So let us say it: it is true! Nonviolent organization, with its method of programmatic civil disobedience, with its Socratic method of Fully accepting the logic of the law, to reveal its iniquity before those who are presumed to be the creators of the law of the future, this method of ours has shown that it has great political force. We can allow ourselves to say it: we are unique, to the left of the worshippers of the state, to the left of the Jacobins of a certain type, to the left of those who are violent by judicious choice, that is those who are violent only because they have to save a programme, to save "planning". Who really believes that millions of peasants were killed through famine and deportation, along the Volga and the Don, only because of Stalin, or because the Communist bureaucracy was Stalinist or Leninist?

(...) A man like Aldo Moro (2) does not die because he is assassinated at a particular moment. The man Moro dies - it is true - for us, above all for us Radicals rather than for himself, we who know the value of that which has a body, we who fear the mistaken dialectics of absolute forms of spiritualism on one hand and absolute forms of materialism on the other. We know that death is worth nothing, that sacrifice is worth nothing. However, when a man has chosen public dialogue, he has a public function, when he has chosen to give himself, he has expected (or had the conceit, perhaps) to hope to be able to give his own body, that of Aldo Moro, to his own ideas... And so I said: don't you see it's you who are killing him! Don't you see that Moro can watch TV and hear Pellegrino and Ferrara, those hethought were close to him, his pupils, his clients, the men in his court, all of them saying: "You're no longer yourself, you're worse than a little boy in the hands of the Nazis who at least had the courage to say

nothing, at most they got a signature out of him: you write page after page every day; you're worthless, you're a worm, you no longer represent anything..."

We were there, I remember, when the first letter arrived: I felt contempt and anger towards Trombadori (3) and the others, who looked aghast and said: "They might as well kill him, he's already dead; after writing this he's finished. He no longer exists." And I ran up to write a statement: never as in this moment, with this letter, has the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro shown his human and political potential, even to those of us who had not understood him; and if he is released, as he must be, for the first time we understand and believe that he is probably better qualified, after this experience, to become the President of the Republic.

October 1979

(1) Franco Fortini, Pierpaolo Pasolini: Italian writers.

(2) Aldo Moro: the Italian Prime Minister, was kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigade in 1978. During his imprisonment, he wrote a number of letters to his party (the Christian Democratic Party) and to his political friends; those who received the letters, and the parties in power, in general denied their authenticity, or claimed that they had been dictated by Moro's jailers.

(3) Pellegrino, Ferrara, Trombadori: university professors, exponents of Italian culture.

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WE ARE NOT UNARMED

by Marco Pannella

(...) Those who think that supporters of nonviolence are inert and unarmed are mistaken. There is one thing, at least, which unites exponents of political nonviolence and violence: both believe that the historical and social situation in which they live requires them to give "life" - literally - to their hopes and their ideals, to believe that their life is on the line and to draw the consequences.

There is a sort of integrity which unites them. But the former believe that the means prefigure and determine the ends; and being libertarians and socialists, life for them is sacred, above all that of their enemies; the latter believe that the ends justify the means, and take to the same field as their adversaries, raising the banner of murder and of just and sacred wars.

The very ideology which presides over the life of our state, based on Fascist and unconstitutional laws upheld by the anti-Fascists who have been in power for thirty years, leads to the choice of the "armed party", terrorism, as the principalinterlocutor. The press and the RAI-TV make them the political antagonists and the protagonists of political news reports. On the other hand they censure, suffocate and disfigure those who are nonviolent, who believe in referendums, who are constitutional, who move among the people and represent majority aggregations.

As exponents of nonviolence, every day we denounce the murderous violence of a government which is responsible for the strategy of massacres and the massacre of legality.

We are brought to trial and sentenced. But as exponents of nonviolence we know that the choice of the so-called "armed party" is not only murderous at the level of theoretical claims and of practice, but is also suicidal if and when it really forms part of the hopes of the left and is not the expression of national and international secret services.

March 1978

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THE ARSENAL OF NONVIOLENCE

by Marco Pannella

(...) Why on earth should the worker's strike be a democratic, legal, and effective weapon, and not for example the taxpayer's refusal to pay taxes, the consumer's refusal 'to make purchases, the refusal to pay for public or private services that are not accessible or not provided, the citizen's refusal to vote, or general strikes by a community whose independence and existence is threatened?

The refusal to pay the whole fare for a journey, the whole rent, the local taxes because the "City" does not provide essential services, the taxes corresponding to the budget for "national defence", which serves to be spied on, discriminated against, and murdered, is all this a crime? Probably. Then take us to court, one by one. Despite the judicial system of the regime, it will be a chance to seek the truth and the responsibility for these situations. The arsenal of nonviolence has barely been explored. The scientific use of bourgeois legality exposes its fundamental contradiction: that between ideals which only the proletarian or proletarianized "third state" can now gather and uphold, and the power which the interclass bourgeois parties exercise as turn-coats, in the opposite direction, in order to protect it.

Disobeying unjust orders, violating unconstitutional law as a provocation, raising conscientious objections to requests for morally intolerable behaviour, administrating freely and responsibly the social, economic and political areas in which we live, and imagining a nonviolent, lay, libertarian society, Socialist in methods and means: so far these have been the weapons of defence and attack of the Radical minorities.

September 1974

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DETERMENT OR NONVIOLENCE?

by Marco Pannella

(...) In Europe and elsewhere, we are now seeing authoritative studies and reflections on the problem of a nonviolent populardefence as an alternative strategy to the grotesque and non-existent "military defence" of minor national states; not only those, for example, of the respected French general Paris de la BollardiSre (1) but also of study groups belonging to the "military multinationals", as we might call them. So it's not just a matter of repeating the story or legend about someone brandishing the cross (or nowadays the Radical and Socialist symbols) who paralyses and disarms the barbarians at the frontiers, but of a theoretical reflection, an alternative form of defence and a political struggle that chooses paths leading to the salvation of territories, of the populations which inhabit them, in short for the defence of life. In the final analysis, the chances of survival of a country unarmed at military level but armed with structures, strategies, and tactics of nonviolent popular defence are greater

than those of countries which currently have marginal and subaltern weapons and armies, devoid of real deterrents to annihilate the adversary, but a useful or necessary tactical target in international conflicts between the great powers; it is no coincidence that between the threat powers there are now only forms of indirect conflict, that is of the tactical massacre of the peripheral parts of the "empire".

(...) At immediate level, the nonviolent response always seems to be "evangelical" or losing. Even in conflictual interpersonal relations, the father who strikes his son, or the lover who strikes his beloved, initially seems to win but ultimately loses both the son and the beloved, or a positive relationship with them. The same goes for national and international politics, where the use of internal and external violence is a sign of the inability to use other arms. It would be interesting to analyze this subject in more detail: for twenty years the Radicals have watched the crises and the disappearance of waves of the "violent left", considered by its adversaries to be more dangerous each time. Every two years, they disappear and we grow in the awareness of the people. But then military experts know that, in Russia and Spain, Napoleon was not defeated so much by the strength of armies as by the strength of states and populations which succeeded in using nature and time against the genius and power of the Emp

eror...

March 1978

(1) The famous French general who resigned in the sixties to protest against the defence policy of the French government.

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PACIFISM, NAZIISM, COMMUNISM...

Interview with Marco Pannella

(...) Why, in your congress speeches, do you criticize pacifism so much?

So that young people understand, and old people remember, and westop deceiving them: in this century pacifism has had catastrophic effects, related to those of Naziism and Communism. If Communism and Naziism are outlawed, pacifism deserves to accompany them.

What about support for disarmism, anti-militarism, nonviolence?

They can't be compared to pacifism. The line that stretches from Gandhi to Bertrand Russell, from luther King to Aldo Capitini (1), must finally organize itself in the world. The Radical Party has planned this and begun to carry it out, in Italy and around the world. It is a reasonable undertaking. To allow yourself to be defeated is madness.

The fact remains that, with war, the very idea of nonviolence has been defeated...

No, and nor has the political force of nonviolence, seeing that it has never existed in an organized way with a political strategy for the present. Nonviolence and political democracy must live almost as synonyms. For a century there have been no wars between democracies, justice and liberty are the principal guarantee. And pacifism, in the course of history, has always ignored this.

February 1991

(1) Aldo Capitini: an Italian theorist of nonviolence and follower of Gandhi.

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THANKS, COMRADES AND MURDERERS

by Marco Pannella

(...) In truth, we owe most gratitude to Vincenzo Andraous and Giuseppe Piromalli (1). The former serving life for three murders committed in prison, where he had gone for much lesser crimes; the latter the "alleged' boss of a "family" of the 'ndrangheta", with five life sentences already confirmed or on their way. It is to these two comrades, in fact, and to a few others, that we owe the "scandal" we are experiencing, the continuing. possibility that a closure already decreed and almost implemented by the violence, the discrimination and the boycott of the partycracy, thanks to the absence of rules and the treachery of much of the judiciary, will be avoided and overturned.

Without the immediate decision to offer the Radical Party their enrolment and their declaration of support for its survival; without the hypocritical and violent reactions caused by their decision, consequently allowing many others to find out about the situation and to take the same responsibility and make the same choice, the Party Congress would have been different and this struggle would probably never have been imagined.

These lines are dedicated to them. In order that they should know how much strength they have in them, how much strength everyone has in them, how sacrilegious and cruel it is to extinguish life, how no-one is "perverse", only "different", and how it is possible in a second to overturn the meaning of life, our ownlife and that of others. May they know that I hope, from the depth of my heart and my intelligence, that they will always remain, if not comrades of a Party which may very soon no longer exist, then comrades in love and nonviolence.

May they compare the "value" - for themselves and for others, for those they love and for everyone - of the murders and the acts of violence (however motivated and "necessitated") that they have committed or helped to commit, with the value of the two letters they sent, one day, to Via di Torre Argentina.

December 1986

(1) Vincenzo Andraous and Giuseppe Piromalli: both serving life sentences for murder, joined the Radical Party on the occasion of the extraordinary membership campaign of 1986/7.

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THE NONVIOLENT AND THE VIOLENT

by Marco Pannella

(...) let's be clear about it: in the past, every time someone in the party as gone on a hunger strike, it was because he or she was forced to do so by the lack of a wider, more collective commitment on the part of other comrades. We have been forced to do so when the matter of the survival of the party required it, or when some of our essential political battles and objectives would otherwise have been threatened.

It Is not only parties that die: ideas die, too, or can die, despite what the prevalent cultural rhetoric maintains. It is not true that "if a comrade fails and for every comrade who fails ten others rise up, and the idea which he incarnated...". I believe, on the contrary, that history is made up of assassinations of ideas, through the assassination of the collective body of political organizations as well as the assassination of individuals. Every time we have turned to this form of struggle - which we have defined as the extreme weapon of struggle for the exponent of nonviolence - it was because we had to face up to problems concerning the existence and the survival of the party, the meaning and therefore the legitimacy of its presence.

(...) I am not moralistic about nonviolence. In fact I believe that those who are nearest to us in political and existential terms, if and when we manage to be genuinely nonviolent, are the violent and not others. Why? Because those who choose nonviolence choose the illegality of civil disobedience: they choose to "give life" to the refusal of unjust laws: they put themselves on the line; they do violence, through their nonviolence, to the obligatory mechanism that the state seeks to propose. They break plates every day. They break something more delicate than shop windows or armoury gates, above all if they manage to propose the objectives and provide the means and instruments of nonviolent struggle to the general public. So exponents of violence havealmost everything essential in common with us, except the schizophrenia of each person. But then you con also be nonviolent because of schizophrenia or paranoia.

It is said that exponents of nonviolence, when for example they go on hunger strike, agree to do violence to themselves, but exponents of violence also have to do violence to themselves in order to do violence, because they believe it is necessary to respond with organized violence to the violence of the institutions. The closeness is dramatic: exponents of nonviolence, when they see the failure of their theories and their practice, are not driven to choose renouncement, resignation and inertia as an alternative, but - out of desperation - the recourse to violence. in the same way, exponents of violence, if they are able to free themselves of the burden of totalitarian cultural mystification that favours violence, because in ideological terms the violence of the revolutionary is legitimated by the dominant ideology (the idea that it is not possible to respond to violence with violence belongs to the dominant mass ideology, to the bourgeois ideology), if they are able to reflect on the defeats of their own me

thods and struggles, they can understand that the greatest weapon of revolutionary force is now the illegality and the radical diversity of nonviolent provocation and action.

(...) I repeat once more. Gandhi has nothing or very little to do with our nonviolence. Oriental "traditions" don't enter into it. If anything, it is Gandhi who grafted Western methods of liberation onto his own battles for liberation. The mob ceases to be the mob, and becomes the proletariat, when it discovers the apparently gestural, nonviolent method of laying down tools and halting production rather than killing the owner of the ironworks, or the manager, and burning down the factory.

March 1977

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NONVIOLENCE: THE NEW LAY TOLERANCE

by Marco Pannella

(...) The "rigorous" Gandhi, the Gandhi of problems with sex, the Gandhi who sews his own tunic, who makes his own cloth... with the problem of his niece, and similar matters: all these fundamentalist aspirations were marginal, extremely marginal; they are undoubtedly fascinating, because they continue to correspond to problems of mankind which, as long as it exists, will fortunately continue to suffer torment in the face of the problems of love, sex, and life, because the honour of the individual is his fate of incompleteness, and not that of satisfying the myth of divine completeness, which is reached - through sexual union or other things... But the essential aspect of nonviolence has been the prosecution of the culture of the Enlightenment, the bestowing of political, civil and historical coherence on the initial motives of the French Revolution, andof every other revolution, which have always - and it is no coincidence - turned into the opposite of themselves: Reason becoming a goddess, holocausts, sacr

ifices, death as a cure for life, one's own and that of others.

(...) The other day I was reading, in a nonviolent journal, that what is missing in Italy compared to America and India is a 'leader'. This is the explanation I found in the nonviolent journal... the Americans had Martin Luther King, the Indians had Gandhi... They had obviously looked at photos of Gandhi and King, and expected to find King and Gandhi here, too: and every so often they have found some vague resemblance, but then, no... ; there wasn't the thinness, and then there wasn't death! Above all, however, there weren't all these other things, there weren't all the errors of inadequate nonviolence that Gandhi made, with 30,000 or 40,000 people dying in the space of a few days as a result of this error: there wasn't the sense of how dramatic everything in creation is. How many errors Gandhi caused, in terms of life and death! (Cicciolina is nothing by comparison! (1)).The political combination of this ideal (without adequate safeguard, despite the drama of Pakistan) with that of national independence...

with the illusion (this, too, completely Western) of the national state: the national state is by definition an anti-national state, because it reduces to "one" that which cannot be "one" in any land: because only at the level of small areas or small tribes is there ethnic or national or linguistic unanimity, whether in Africa or here.

(...) So what I tell myself is always this: when we want to give life to nonviolent hope, to nonviolent strength and drama, then, more than ever, we will have to be women, men, persons of law, persons of Justice, and join together on this path, [...] united not so much as a communion of Saints who feel a communion of sentiments, but as a party, as the "plaintiff' that brings a nonviolent action to guarantee a Society of Justice and, therefore, a different state, with these rules. I believe I have a history, which as long as it is "my" history (if the singular still exists) is the history of this conviction; at least it seems to me to be crystal clear: Gandhi and nonviolence are the completion without which the Enlightenment and laicism are a mere abstraction, an unfinished piece, fine in itself but a piece and not a complete work, a sonata and nothing more.

(1) Ilona Staller: pornostar, elected to Parliament from 1987 to 1992 on the Radical Party ticket.

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NONVIOLENCE IS ACTIVE

interview with Marco Pannella

(...) Political nonviolence now constitutes the most advanced and integral form of "lay tolerance", on which the civilization of a society or a state is founded, if it is translated into laws and into the conduct of those in power, as well as of the opposition. For two hundred years or so, after the bourgeois revolution, terrible contradictions have injured the civilization of tolerance and democracy In the name of the goddess Reason, menhave killed ant carried out massacres, in the name of Nations and Revolutions men have made war and slaughtered, and it has also been thought that tolerance and violence could and should co-exist, when violence became state violence or "revolutionary" violence. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has, over the centuries, been subject to, and in certain periods has committed, atrocious massacres and violence. In the Stalinist trials, the "Inquisition' can clearly be seen (1).

Nonviolence places the person and dialogue at the centre of social life, like Socrates, not only like Gandhi. Nonviolence presupposes the fact that there are no demons, but only people: and that the worst person, if attacked with the force of nonviolence, which unlike the apparent meekness of pacifism is always "aggressive" can correspond with the best part of himself...

True political nonviolence, for example, has nothing to do with certain forms of hunger strike, like those of the IRA prisoners. If we do not want nonviolence to be a form of violence, we need to use its extreme forms, such as the hunger strike, only to ask the government to put into effect that which it has promised and which the law itself requires...

However, tolerance, lay civilization, must tremble in fear at a state and laws which aim to impose moral and ethical values; the law must only guarantee that no individual and collective morality should develop at the expense of others and do violence to them.

Interview by Milovan Erkic of the Belgrade newspaper "Politcki Svet"

November 1988

(1) The Catholic tribunal established in the 13th century for the discovery and suppression of heresy and the punishment of heretics.

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SO WHAT IS HUNGER?

Interview with Marco Pannella

Tell the truth, Marco, aren't you a bit ashamed of going on yet another cappuccino-based hunger strike after the-IRA prisoners have carried on to the bitter end?

To the bitter end of their folly as terrorists and soldiers... However, I can't accept the tone of the question, or the question itself. It's not a matter of shame or pride. What I do know is that the great exponents of nonviolence, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, didn't die of hunger but of bullet wounds, bullets fired by guns and by the press. They risked life against death, not death against life.

But what about the IRA hunger strikers...

We respect them for their motives, not for their sacrifice. They accept and practise political killings, as members of a clandestine army. For the cause, if they can no longer kill other people, they kill themselves. Out of their military discipline, for independence, for whatever...

Their actions are dark and tragic, hymns of death as the instrument of victory over others. But also proof...

Of what?

Until a few years ago the exponents of violence mocked nonviolence and hunger strikes as the expressions of cowardly souls. Now they realise that nonviolence can be an effective and powerful weapon. An extreme choice .when violence turns out to be useless. But in reality they use nonviolent weapons in a violent manner: in this way they continue to have to die and to have to kill.

What is the proof of a hunger strike?

Hunger strikers have only one evident incontrovertible proof: photos. And another less evident but equally or even more scientific proof: medical tests and diagnoses. We have always published our medical reports. But not the press. As for photos, I beg you to publish some. I repeat: if the seriousness of nonviolent hunger strikes is measured by death, then Gandhi and Martin Luther King were not serious, not nonviolent. The truth is that a hunger strike means burning up cells and accelerating the ageing process of all the organs, starting with the brain. Each day of a hunger strike, the eyes, the hair, the teeth and all the organs "live" much more than one day. And the longer you go on, the more this process speeds up. And then there are various types of hunger strike, all equally serious: prisoners, Gandhi himself, Danilo Dolci (1), generally stayed in bed, saving as much energy as possible. We, on the other hand, redouble our efforts: we do not save energy and we do not grow weak in bed. We work hard to ach

ieve the objectives that we set ourselves, which always consist in demanding that the state respects its own laws, not in imposing our will.

And if we drink two or three cappuccinos, it doesn't take long to do the sums: 40 calories of milk and 100 calories of sugar. If you consider the energy we use up, we're more than even. So why do we drink cappuccinos? We try to make sure that the first organ to be affected is not the brain, which has most need of sugar. To avoid the risk of becoming "non-dead", objects with the mere semblance of life: dead and ignored. Right to the end, if possible, we want to be aware of what we are doing, to carry on or to stop. And we want to resist in our struggle as best and for as long as possible.

Apart from sugar, do you take anything else?

Vitamins, mineral salts, I've already said so...

So what sort of hunger strike is it?

A nonviolent hunger strike is not suicide. For us it is not a sort of holocaust, like for the Irish.

We stop eating, but we don't stop looking after our lives and our bodies in every way possible. Everything which is not food, which is not calories, which does not give you the energy, minerals, vitamins, especially water, which helps the body to resist... it is right and proper to take all this.

Gandhi took salt. We try and hope to resist in order to defeat the violence against which we are literally "giving life", as well as words, writings, dialogue, struggle, activity, organization, and also preaching. Our battles presuppose and nourish hope, not desperation...

What sort of hope?

Of convincing, not winning. But not convincing other people to accept our ideas. Not at all. In general we ask the state to respect its own laws. Our battles for civil rights, for divorce and abortion, were carried out by challenging parliament. We have always fought to ensure the respect of laws and regulations that already exist, like the parliamentary regulation that required a debate on abortion within 40 or 80 days, or a year. In short, for us it was a question of demanding what is due, for them of respecting the rules.

August 1981

(1) Danilo Dolci: An Italian scholar who went on a number of hunger strikes to fight the Mafia in Sicily.

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1975: APPEAL FOR PLIOUTCH

by Marco Pannella

(...) I When they came to Rome at the beginning of the sixties, the nonviolent monks in the national and civil opposition of South Vietnam, the Buddhists whose sacrifice and struggle brought the conflict to international attention, found no-one ready to listen to them. They were used a bit for Communist propaganda, and totally ignored and derided by our noble Republican lay culture. Our long-time leaders, the Republicans and the Social Democrats, didn't even notice. Nor did the pontiffs of the American Church Party in Italy, codefendants of the far right as they were, even compared to the climate in the USA, enthusiastic supporters of the Suez invasion (1) and neutral observers of the European and French massacres and torture in Algeria, steadfast "Atlantic" allies of the Turks, the Greeks and the Portuguese.

I remember those monks and men of letters asking us what had happened to the Europe they had turned to with confident faith, the Christian Europe, the Europe of tolerance, the Europe of Voltaire, as some of them added...Many of them died, and are now silent forever; they died a partly of their illusion. The lack of solidarity in Europe, the lack of listeners in Europe, killed a political and historical alternative that was of undoubted value for the whole of Asia, for all of us.

But then who, over the decades, had responded to the appeal of the APRA (1) and the other democratic liberation movements in Latin America, then the appeal of President Bosch in San Domingo? And, while he was still alive, who among the preachers of liberty and justice, of "anti-Communist" and "anti-Fascist" intransigence (at the time), heard the ingenuous, dramatic, courageous, ancient cry of the Chilean patriot, the bourgeois Mason and Socialist, the nonviolent Salvador Allende.

Wherever the imperialist and capitalist power of the multinationals has gone in the last few decades, walking all over US law and imposing their ruthless defence of profit on the Department of State and the CIA, raising the American flag on the rubble of civilizations and humanity, the political leaders of European and Italian lay culture have never seen, never heard, never pronounced judgement.

(...) And the USSR? Are Sinjawski and Solzhenitsyn defended, understood or helped? No. They are now among us, with those of us they find. And with who else, if not? Sakharov? His wife among us, with those of us they find. And with who else, if not? Sakharov? His wife even managed to get herself treated by Italian doctors. And she speaks a lot...

And the mathematician Plioutch? Sentenced to seven years for crimes of opinion, for more than three years they have been annihilating him day after day in an asylum for the treatment of political deviation.

For more than a year, two thousand mathematicians from all over the world have been trying, with every possible method, letters, pleas, respectful requests for a pardon, and press campaigns, to save his life, to obtain a pardon and the right to exile for him and his family. He is an example, a test case. But he is also a person, like each of those who have been shot dead in Madrid.

(...) So let's save Plioutch. let's work every day, with public initiatives and statements, so that a fitting campaign, humble but confident, can save this victim from his state, even though he is not Spanish, Chilean or Vietnamese. But Russian, Soviet... that is, European.

The violation of the rights of man proclaimed in San Francisco is patently obvious. The violation of the Helsinki treaty, too, and of the European Convention.

Our government must intervene in some way, concretely and immediately. Agnelli and Cefis, Berlinguer (3) and above all RAI-TV, the-state channel, with debates listened to and watchedby large audiences. Otherwise, in the face of history, it will be difficult to meet the tragic and murderous gaze of the Francos and the Pinochets, as well as the lifeless gaze of our ministers, anti-Communists and crypto-Communists, anti-clericalists and crypto-clericalists, anti-Fascists and crypto-Fascists.

October 1975

(1) In 1956 Anglo-French forces landed at Suez against Egypt, which had closed the Suez Canal.

(2) One of the South American liberation movements.

(3) Gianni Agnelli, Chairman of FIAT. Eugenio Cefis, Chairman of ENI; Enrico Berlinguer, Secretary of the Italian communist Party.

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1991: APPEAL TO THE SERBS

by Marco Pannella

Dear Serbian friends,

we know, and we repeat it at every opportunity with the greatest conviction and passion, that you are the main victims of the policy that the Belgrade regime and much of the world have turned into war, violence, intolerance, and anti-democracy. Not only because of the death of thousands of young men in the army - Serbs, Macedonians, Bosnians, Montenegrins - but because they die, suffer, cry, and hate their own lives while they are forced to lay waste to lands populated by their brothers and sisters, to kill them, to force them into an exodus that recalls the darkest pages of the history of this century.

We know that dissenters in Serbia risk being lynched as traitors, that the unbridled demagogy inspires fear and hatred, for the moment turned to invented outside "enemies", but that it risks becoming a terrible catastrophe for the civil life of Serbia itself.

We know that the yearning for democracy of the women and men of Serbia, the same as our own and that of most of the world, is now ignored and derided. The 'Serbian' demand for guarantees for the Serbian minorities in the other republics, guarantees which are denied in your country to Albanian, Croatian, and any other minority, is the expression of a violent, aggressive and intolerant vision which will inevitably also emerge with increasing force within the normal political, cultural and social life of your country.

Democracy and Europe, in this way, have once more become the enemies of the Belgrade government, as they were during the worst periods of the Communist dictatorship, beginning with the period before the split between Tito and the USSR.

The threat of war as an increasingly vast, cruel form of blackmail is the weapon of cowards and barbarians, of whatever colour. Now as in the past.

The Radical Party has been among you for many years, clandestinely, to affirm its fraternity with those oppressed by a dictatorship that is inevitably incompatible with tolerance, democracy, with a Europe of liberty and justice, of nonviolence and peace.

Now - in accordance with the teachings of Gandhi - the Radical Party chooses to be by the side of peoples subjected to war, by the side of the violence of the victims against the violence of the aggressors. For this reason, some of us will serve on the front, unarmed, with the defenders of the cities and the people of Croatia, inspired by solidarity and by love of life and rights, including -those of the people who are forced to kill and use violence in your name.

Like you, we hope and fight for a Serbia great in civilization, democracy, tolerance, culture, justice, and the respect for others, a European Serbia, confederated with the other free peoples of the former Yugoslavia, associated to the European Union.

Long live the democratic Serbian people, long live political democracy, long live federate and pacific Europe, long live friendship and fraternity in liberty, in the democratic and European interdependence of Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Austrians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Bosnians, Voivodians, Kosovians...

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CIVIL RIGHTS AND JUS NATURAE

by Angiolo Bandinelli

(...) In a recent essay (2), the philosopher and political scientist Norberto Bobbio stated that "in terms of the rights of man, the serious problem in our times is not to found them but to protect them. The problem we are faced with is not philosophical, but juridical, and in a wider sense political". Why? Because, Bobbio stressed, the problem of foundation "was solved with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948." That declaration is held up by the only proof "with which a system of values con be considered humanly founded and therefore recognized: and that proof is general consensus about its validity."

Such universalism is not rooted in an eternal original or "rational" nature of man, but only, as Bobbio points out, in a "slow conquest" over history. It is not, however, an abstract conquest that remains in the limbo of transcendental principles. That declaration has been followed by others which have reinforced it and widened its jurisdiction, weaving it into a system of values, and now of behaviours, in a wide range of sectors, from work to infancy, up to - and this is not a casual reference - the "Convention for the Prevention and Repression of Genocide" approved by the General Assembly on 9 December 1958. And upon these declarations there has unfolded a spectacular fan of struggles and advances which form an impressive part of the history of the liberation of peoples, of classes as of individuals, in the post-war period. And it is no coincidence that, together with the crisis within states, within the State, we are now witnessing a deep crisis in those international and supranational bodies, beginning w

ith the United Nations, whose existence initiated the dialogue between men that made possible the definition of those principles as the objectives of a possible progress. The crisis is caused the irrepressible return of dangerous and backward nationalist egoism, which threatens to waste a patrimony of important certainties and hopes for the growth of justice and of the rights of man; to render grotesque the memory of the Nuremberg trials, which sentenced those responsible for Nazi crimes; to destroy the United Nations Organization, and to reduce relations between states to the most primitive bellum contra omnes.

December 1992

(1) Angiolo Bandinelli: among the founders of the Radical Party. Secretary of the Party in 1970, 1972 and 1973, and a former deputy. He has edited many Radical publications, from "Prova radicale" to the Radical Newsletter.

(2) Norberto Bobbio: "Il problema della guerra e le vie della pace", il Mulino, 1979.

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KARL POPPER, LIBERAL AND NONVIOLENT

by Marco Pannella

(...) We have come to the end of the century, and to the time for reckoning. One man who is as old as the century is Karl Popper (1), whose main work, "Open Society and its Enemies", remained unpublished in Italy for almost 50 years, until 1974.

Five years ago I read Popper's apology for the Anglo-Saxon majority electoral system. I have also discovered that this ultra-liberal is also a passionate student of nonviolence and of Gandhi. I remember, on the contrary, the shock I felt when Ralph Dahrendorf (2) told me frankly that he had never thought there was a distinction between nonviolence and pacifism.

The reading of pacifism is univocal, and the consequences are evident: the catastrophes and the horrors of the century which have weighed tragically in favour of dictators and against the oppressed; to the advantage of the militarist totalitarian states and against the democracies in the process of rearmament; it was an influential psychological factor in the Munich policy, and in the aversion to the West. It has been the vehicle of Messianic and irenical attitudes. Gandhi was quite different. In an article by Gandhi, I found the statement that violence for a just cause is more praiseworthy than a cowardly adherence to injustice.

(1) Karl Popper: an eminent exponent of contemporary liberal thought.

(2) Ralph Dahrendorf: political scientist, former director of the-London School of Economics.

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THE LESSON OF THE CENTURY

Interview with Karl Popper

[...] The first point is peace. (...) This is the first point on the list and it requires the cooperation of all parties. And it should no longer be considered an ideological point. Then we have to halt the population explosion. This, the second point on the list, it is a vital point for the whole world. All this talk about the problem of the environment is pointless if we don't address the real question, the terrifying growth in the world population. This is the cause of the destruction of the environment [...] On this fundamental point, too, everyone should co-operate without ideological distinctions. The third point is education. And here, too, I believe we need a programme on which everyone can co-operate (...). The state of law consists above all in the elimination of violence. I cannot, on the basis of law, throw punches at another person. The liberty of my punches is limited by the right of the other person to defend his nose. When we allow the general aversion to violence to be demolished and elimina

ted, we sabotage the state of law and the general agreement on the basis of which violence must be avoided. In this way we sabotage our own civilization (...). The state of law requires nonviolence, which is its fundamental core. The more we neglect the duty to teach nonviolence, the more we will have to extend the state of law, that is provisions and laws in the fields of publishing, television, the mass media. It is a very simple principle. And the idea is always the same: maximize the freedom of each person within the limits of the freedom of others. If we carry on as we are doing now, on the other hand, we will soon find ourselves living in a society in which murder will be our daily bread.

We now know the fundamental priorities that you would like to see drawn up at the top of the political agenda. And these are points - peace, an end to the population explosion, education in nonviolence - which require the co-operation of everyone. In your opinion, are these proposals right-wing or left-wing?

Neither right-wing nor left-wing. These priorities indicate something that should take of the distinction between right-wing and left-wing. That is, we must not consider what factors are necessary for the achievement of these objectives [...]. In short, we should get rid of this horrible party system, on the basis of which our representatives in parliament are first of all dependent on a party, and only after that can use their brains for the good of the people the represent. It is my opinion that this system must be replaced and that we must return, if possible, to a State in which those elected enter parliament and say: I am your representative and I don't belong to any party. I believe that the collapse of Marxism offers a chance to proceed in this direction. As for the priorities I have indicated, I hope that some party, it doesn't matter which, will accept them and declare that it has accepted them. In this way, other parties would be encouraged to accept them and a new situation would be created.

We know your concept of democratic interventionism, and now we know your priorities. On this basis, what type of model do you believe to be most suited to our times?

A good political model is essentially that of democracy, of a democracy which does not aim to assume cultural leadership. In other words, it is now a matter of working for peace and for the other points I have indicated, but the fundamental characteristic of democracy must be that people are culturally free, not directed from above. Which is not simple [...]. Our world is threatened by irresponsible education. I believe we must react on this point, and once we have managed to achieve responsible education we will be able to return to the days when violence was a rare event [...].

But how can we organize political action to achieve the objectives you have set out? With what resources? How can we gather the consensus of the people around these priorities? This is the traditional objection to liberalism: it is too weak to overcome the forces of the opposition, to overcome the passions, interests and convictions of the opposition.

This the traditional objection, and I will meet it with the traditional liberal answer: we must oppose violence. [...].

One of the most serious causes of violence at the moment seems to be nationalism. How do you view the growing aspirations to form independent states, in Europe too? Is it a danger of a regression in civilization and of war, or is it a right of peoples who are united by language, race or religion to have their own state?

The essential question is that in such a densely populated world all these outbreaks of nationalism must be considered as dangerous. It is a danger that concerns the state of law. We have, first of all, to say something which, as far as I know, is not given sufficient consideration in the European debate on nationality, and which alone contains the whole political question of nationality: the fact that minorities must be protected. The very idea of a nation-state is impossible to achieve if this principle is not accepted.

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NONVIOLENCE: THE RADICAL CHROMOSOME

by Roberto Cicciomessere

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 - in its precise scientific meaning, as a manifestation worthy of observation, whose causes are studied - he should first consider the significance of the nonviolent option. He should ask himself why a part of strict lay observance and a testimony of Western culture should have chosen to risk ridicule by adopting Gandhi's somewhat naive image as its symbol.In this way he would discover that the "stake" in the Radical Party's "challenge", 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. The Radicals were convinced that this would be possible only if they succeeded in making the culture of nonviolence part of the civili

zation of our era; that is, if they succeeded in affirming the political need not to resign themselves to accepting violence to the individual, to society, to the state, and to the natural environment, as a compulsory historical tribute to be paid in the name of civilization, revolution or progress.

To win this challenge, 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 country or class, which 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 - those of fraternity, equality, liberty and tolerance - and the harsh necessity of denying them through armed conflict, through the exaltation of just violence, and frequently through terrorism. But people resigned themselves to paying this tribute of blood and this amputation of values, accepting the contradiction between means and ends as insurmountable, since the only conceivable alternative seemed to be another form of resignation, even more violent: the passive acceptance of injustice, totalitarianism, and exploitation.

The reconciliation of means and ends

Gandhian nonviolence, the radical exception to the scandal of the justification of violence in the name of the ideals of reason", showed the West that it was possible to conceive of the most violent political conflict, 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. In nonviolence, means and ends are reconciled, matching each other, the former prefiguring the latter. If the aim is to build a juster society, on a human scale, the means cannot be the abuse of the individual, or his physical annihilation. For this reason Gandhi had to fight not-only against the English oppressors, but first and foremost against the intolerance and -violence that always threatens to prevail among the oppressed. For this reason the overcoming of religious intolerance between Hindus and Muslims had to come before national independence was won. He was aware, in fact, 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 massdisobedience, a "satyagraha" planned months in advance, and to start an expiatory hunger strike when the news arrived that the English soldiers had been massacred by his fellow citizens. Gandhi, in fact, did not want to replace the injustice and violence of the English colonisers with the identical injustice and violence of an indian ruling class which grew up in hatred and intolerance.

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

Indeed, even though Gandhi's nonviolence was inspired by the religious sentiment of the Hindu culture, it is to some extent inherent in the European and Anglo-Saxon culture, from Lev Tolstoy to David Thoreau and Charles Dickens. Its main aspiration was to form a universal political movement capable of' continuing the culture of the Enlightenment, of giving political, civil and historical coherence to the fundamental principles of the French and Socialist Revolutions, and of overcoming the mistakes which led them, like other revolutions, to negate their effects through intolerance and violence.

Nonviolence: the most advanced form of lay tolerance

Radical "thought' is based entirely on this intuition: political nonviolence can now constitute the most advanced and integral form of "lay tolerance", on which the civilization of a democratic society or state should be founded. And this can happen only if nonviolence is translated into laws and into the conduct of those in power, as well as of the opposition. For two hundred years or so, after the bourgeois revolution, terrible contradictions have injured the civilization of tolerance and democracy. In the name of the goddess Reason, men have killed and carried out massacres, in the name of Nations and Revolutions men have made war and slaughtered. It has also been thought that tolerance and violence could and should co-exist, when violence became state violence or "revolutionary" violence.

Nonviolence, on the other hand, places the person and dialogue at the centre of social life. Nonviolence presupposes the fact that there are no demons, no enemies to be slain, but only people: and that the worst person, if attacked with the force of nonviolence, which is always "initiative", can correspond with the best part of himself, instead of with the worst: "a victory can be defined as such only if everyone is the winner to an equal extent and nobody the loser", as a famous Buddhist maxim maintains. However, for many years, Gandhi's nonviolence seemed symbolically defeated by his assassination, forty years ago, at the hands of a Hindu fanatic, by the dismembering of India, and even more so by the affirmation of the culture of violence and of totalitarian regimes, which are its most tragic and complete manifestation throughout the world.It is not that after Gandhi there haven't been any great personalities or important political actions, even on mass scale, of a nonviolent character. At the time when th

e Radical Party was developing in Italy, Martin Luther King chose nonviolent methods-for the Black Civil Rights Movement in America. Thousands of people chose conscientious objection 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 organized political force which has based its political action on nonviolence, not in ideological terms but in terms of the theory of "procedure". In the sixties, when in the East and South of the world nothing seemed to be able to oppose the relentless power and expansion of Soviet totalitarianism, when first democratic Europe and then democratic America seemed humiliated by the affirmation of national and Socialist revolutions in Africa and Vietnam - and later by the decisions of their leaders - when in the West crowds of students and workers 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 nonviolence in Italy.

For the full affirmation of the state of rights

It was a group which originated in a tradition and a political experience of classical liberalism and radicalism, but which - even in dialogue and confrontation with other pacifist and anti-militarist forces, with the new European and American left - maintained that it was indispensable to combine the methods and objectives of political democracy with those of nonviolence. 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 nonviolence itself - inspired by absolute respect of the individual, starting with the adversary-interlocutor - is the main road to the full, unreserved affirmation of the state of rights, without which democracy and freedom are illusions: while all the "violent roads" to the conquest of the state of rights, democracy and Socialism, always contain elements which in themselves negate and invalidate the achievement of the objective.

The Radical Party aimed 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 Italian State's imposition, by law, of the indissolubility of marriage. While a large proportion of the left, particularly that "revolutionary' extra-parliamentary left which emerged after 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 older, "separated" people who for years had beenforming 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 nonviolent actions, of hunger strikes and dialogue. They managed to intervene in legislative processes and succeeded, in clerical Italy, in forming a par

liamentary majority which finally approved the laws on divorce.

Satyagraha, nonviolence of the strong

Then came the turn of abortion: the clash was tougher and for the first time in Italy actions of mass disobedience were attempted. Abortion was in fact forbidden, and millions of women were forced to stoop to the most humiliating and dangerous procedures to terminate pregnancy, risking their lives in the hands of dishonest doctors or obstetricians who used medieval methods. Through the federated CISA organization (Italian Centre for Sterilization and Abortion), the Radical Party was able to publicly organise clinics where abortion was practised with all the proper medical facilities. Hundreds and thousands of women challenged the law, forcing into the open a dramatic reality which everybody shied away from, and which even the "progressist" political forces refused to face for cynical electoral motives. What Gandhi called the nonviolence of the strong, passive resistance armed with a method that allowed it not to become the accomplice of the opponent- the "Satyagraha" (that is, "sat" = truth, "agraha" = firmn

ess) - finally 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 that negates the very idea of law: on the contrary, it is the refusal of a "non-law", to affirm justice. In ltaly like everywhere else, the prohibition of abortion - which is absolutely impossible to apply - was not applied. The State did not really make any effort to suppress abortion. It was to proclaim its illegality, while the practice of abortion was widely tolerated; it was "free", but only on the infamous and degrading condition that it remained clandestine. The Radicals disobeyed a law that had been 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.

Civil disobedience

Examining the motives of radical nonviolence more closely, the great writer and director Pierpaolo Pasolini understood that obedience to a superior value is inherent in every example of civil disobedience, and is the premise for future obedience to a just law. In every act of conscientious objection to unjust laws, there is an affirmation of conscience.

The battle was already won at the very moment when the authorities and the police intervened to arrest the entireRadical executive for complicity in the practice of abortion: the open clash between the defenceless force of conscience and responsibility and the obtuse, irresponsible force of a government which, when it had given up trying to apply its own laws, turned savagely on those who in the name of justice demanded the modification of laws which the State could not and would not apply. A few months later, the Italian Parliament approved the law which permits the termination of pregnancy in public hospitals.

"To know in order to be able to judge"

But the 'force of truth', in order to be explicit and visible, must be known. Nonviolence is only an effective alternative to violence 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 is not available, the desperate choice of violence, terrorism, or the symbolic assassination of the "enemy', becomes a tragically persuasive temptation. Thus the greater nonviolent resolution of the Radical Party is expressed in the defence of the citizen's right "to know in order to be able to judge". Political democracy - the only system that allows forces representing opposing interests to assume power without bloodshed, without the use of the physical violence - becomes pure fiction as soon as the chance for citizens to exercise their own sovereignty, that is to choose, is taken away from them. If they have been denied the chance to know and judge the opposition's reasons, they have also bee

n denied the chance to really choose by voting between alternative proposals for government. Today the invasive and totalizing dimension of the media allows small groups to exercise an enormous

power: to cancel the truth, literally, or to modify it at their will.

Consequently, for the Radical Party, democracy and the right to information are synonymous. The former cannot exist without the effective exercise of the latter, and vice versa; the latter is only conceivable within a state of rights. The extreme weapon of nonviolence - first the hunger strike, and then not drinking - are not used by the Radical Party to impose their own truths, but to exact respect for that which the opponent claims to be his law. That is, the law which in all democratic countries sanctions the freedom of the press and completeness of information: things which the West rightly exhibits to show its structural difference from totalitarian regimes.

In 1974, after Marco Pannella had been on hunger strike for 70 days, the Italian state television, which until then had denied citizens information about the role and the motives of the Radicals in the battle to introduce divorce, had to grant many hours of broadcasting information and debates to the Italian league for Divorce, in order to make amends for the censorshipit had imposed.

The right to image and identity

Nonviolence, however, is not a rigid scheme to be applied with liturgical obsession. It is a method, certainly with its own strict laws, which must be made to suit the historical context and the concrete subjectivity of protagonists and interlocutors. It must therefore discover new forms of dialogue and new ways of expressing itself when the violence of the Fourth Power (the media) becomes more sophisticated. Today, in fact, information about opposition movements is no longer denied, but is manipulated to deform their image and therefore their very political identity. This is what happened to the Radical Party in Italy when, in 1978, it promoted several referendums for the abrogation of the special police laws which abolished "habeas 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 at "off-peak" times. On the news shows, in the meantime, the o

ther parties affirmed without contradiction that the Radicals wanted to encourage terrorism and weaken the police's capacity to repress crime. A lie that was affirmed as the truth.

To agree to speak in these conditions would have meant becoming accomplices to the violence perpetrated against the truth. For this reason the Radicals decided to communicate through silence, and in the few minutes granted by the state TV during the election campaign, they wore gags and remained silent before the television cameras, before millions of astonished viewers. 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 in the face of abuse. On the contrary it was the expression of the strength of those who are not resigned to violence. It was proof that to effectively fend off overwhelming oppression, stones are useless; the composure of silence is enough, just as it was enough to lay down tools in the workers' struggles of the 19th century. Shouts, in fact, get lost among all the other cries of desperation in society. On the other hand, that silence, those gags became fixed in the co

llective memory as an ever-present doubt in the face of "the truth of the state".

A more terrible silence now covered up the most unbearable tribute that the opulent society has chosen to pay in the name of the "iron laws of progress and commerce': 30 million famine victims every year in the South of the world.

Capitalist or Communist, revolutionary or conservative, societies all accept, for different reasons, that in the year 2000 millions of human lives will be sacrificed simply due to lack of food. Wewere at the heart of the nonviolent challenge, the commitment of those who, as Radicals, have declared as their own imperative, as the very reason for their political existence, the refusal to be resigned to letting even a single human life be sacrificed for the sake of "higher" interests.

The duty of disobedience

In undertaking this battle, in facing up to the level of violence and the denial of the right to life in the contemporary world, at the 1989 Congress in Rome the Radical Party adopted a preambule to its Statute which solemnly declares the unbreakable link between justice, nonviolence and the right to life. "The Radical Party proclaims justice and law, also political objectives of the Radical Party. It proclaims the respect of justice and law as insuperable source of the legitimacy of the institutions; it proclaims the duty to disobedience, to non-collaboration, to conscientious objection, the supreme forms of nonviolent struggle for the defence, with life, of life, justice, and law... It declares the commandment "do not kill" - to have the value of a historically absolute law, without exceptions, not even that of legitimate defence."

The Radical "Satyagraha" against famine, with the objective of "saving millions of lives immediately", lasted five years. laws providing substantial funds, destined not to development in general but to saving those who were about to die, were approved in two European countries. The debate on underdevelopment emerged from the limited sector of the specialized Agencies, to become the object of attention of politicians and the general public. But the objective of a large-scale mobilization of the international community for the "defence of life and for the life of rights', has so far not been achieved. The 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 knew: all this could not and cannot come to pass within the political and historical framework of national states and the present national institutions. Because the political culture of nonviolence presupposes law and Justice, because a culture of life which is not a culture of justice, and does not aspire to creating or modifying the law, may perhaps produce martyrs, but not actors in history.

In order for Justice and Law to exist, in order to be recognised and respected, they must now be either transnational and supranational, or be part of the mechanism of effective theoretical and economic interdependence among regions of the world. Otherwise, they do not exist.

The transnational Party, in the development of "Radical thought", is now the necessary instrument of political nonviolence.

April 1989

(1) Roberto Cicciomessere: Italian deputy for many years, member of the European Parliament. After his arrest as a conscientious objector, in 1972 the Italian government recognized the right to conscientious objection to military service. Former Secretary of the Radical Party and Organizational Secretary of the Italian League for Divorce. He set up and directs the "Agorà telematica" communication network.