ABSTRACT: An "all-embracing" interview with Marco Pannella: his life, the onset and the features of his political vocation, family influences, the liberal experience, his approach to the culture-politics relationship, the examples of Pannunzio (1) and Rossi (2); and then: drugs, the liberal interpretation of socialism, non-violence, the Radical Party, old fascism and new fascism disguised as anti-fascism, the State T.V. of Bernabei, which he considers the most powerful instrument of violence against citizens...
(Interview delivered to Playboy Magazine - January 1975 from "Marco Pannella - Works and Speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)
Playboy - How old are you, Marco?
Pannella - Forty-five. I was born in Teramo, in the Abruzzi, I am a Taurus. My full name is Giacinto Marco, Giacinto like an uncle of mine who was a priest, a rather atypical person in a typical rural family of the South, where the firstborn usually tends to family business, the second becomes a priest, and the others become either chemists or notaries, or find some sort of "position". This uncle of mine became a priest, but he continued to manage our land, in other words he remained the typical head of the family. He was the only member of the family to have any cultural interests. He even published a magazine, an amateurish and provincial newsletter, which I found by chance, and not without emotion, in specialized libraries in Paris and Vienna.
My uncle, Don Giacinto, also did a rather daring thing for his time. When my father, who had chosen to study engineering and had completed his education in Turin and then in Grenoble, returned home to Abruzzi with his French wife (of Swiss origin, from a family of hotelkeepers), a woman who spoke no other language than French and who wore short hair, unlike all the women of the village who wore their hair in a bun and gowns to their ankles, he understood he had to help the young couple to settle down in such a different and difficult milieu; thus, he disengaged the part of land that belonged to my father and gave him his support. It is very likely that I have no anti-clerical animosity for this very fact, because the best person of my family belonged to the clergy; and I have always had excellent friends among priests. I am a lay person, but without interior conflicts or problems.
Playboy - Since when are you in politics? One has the impression that this is all you have ever been doing.
Pannella - In a certain sense, that is a correct impression. I believe already when I was a young boy, I understood there could be no divorce between public life and private life, that the incidents of one's private life become an occasion to make politics and therefore public life. For the first few years I grew up in Teramo and Pescara. I had a normal childhood, surrounded by many women, aunts, farmers, who took care of me, with lots of games and joy. But even in that normality, in that happiness, there were small things of great importance. There was an anti-fascist shoemaker for example, whom we were forbidden to talk to; at the time I was three of four years old. He used to drink, and this was the justification adults used to forbid us from going there, but I could sense that the real reason was his hostility to fascism. My mother spoke French at home, despite the fact that there was always someone telling her she shouldn't, that it was not polite: but French was her mother tongue! I used to play with a
little girl called Adria, my first love, I was about seven or eight. One day she disappeared. She was Jewish, and her family had left the village.
I also spent periods of my childhood in France, with an "instituteur"; both him and his wife adored me; however they used to have terrible fights, and I was always a witness of these scenes; sometimes I championed the husband, other times the wife. I even decided whether I wanted to sleep with the husband or the wife. I remember I always used to wonder why these two people, who were charming separately but could not get along together at all, should continue to live together. Perhaps I was already thinking, in an extremely rudimentary way, about the problem of divorce, unconsciously rejecting the idea that two people were bound together forever just because one day they had decided to get married....Maybe I was also unconsciously rebelling against obligations, supporting the right to be an antifascist, to speak one's language, to rebel against the injustice of racial discrimination.
As you can see these were trifles, and yet they prove something I have always maintained: that private life and public life are a whole. What does "defending one's privacy" mean? I cannot understand where privacy begins and where it ends...
Playboy - As a matter of fact, people accuse you of having no private life.
Pannella - It is always personal and private experience to transform itself into politics and to give you the determination to fight battles. Take the battle for the legalization of abortion, for example; or the one for divorce. Do the people who believe in it, who have believed in it, base themselves on politics or on private experience? I have always maintained that laws should consider all the aspects of a problem, not just the most obvious ones. The truly important things are the ones rooted in your own life. Do you understand what I mean? The more certain incidents strike me as "private", the more I want them to be made public and political. And then: the eternal polemic between love and friendship, what nonsense! To say that you can screw your girlfriend but you can only talk with your friend means dividing your life into two. It makes no sense.
Playboy - At a certain point you entered politics....
Pannella - No, no, I have always been in politics, in my own way, and my way has always been the same: concern for other people, dialogue. One day, when I was a student living in Rome (I was slightly ahead at school for my age, because my mother had made me skip two years), I saw "Risorgimento Liberale" at a newsstand. I bought it and found it interesting. It seemed to me that it contained the thing I most cherished: free, intelligent discussion. From that day on, I always bought two copies of "Risorgimento Liberale": one for myself and the other one for my schoolmates, so that they could read it and discuss it, express their objections and their ideas...Thus, together with a couple of other students, I started going to the Liberal Party, in via Frattina, and we gradually took approached the Liberal Left.
We were schoolboys, and we also played soccer and danced with the girls, in other words we had something you call private life, but a private life that corresponded to public life. Because you see, to me dialogue is not just something "spiritual": it also means physical contact, hugging, kissing, having a fight and making love; not just nice ideas. My banner, the Radical Party's banner, was taken from a great poet, Rimbaud: "Le raisonnable dérèglement des sens", the sensible disorderliness of the senses. An "anti-maudit" sentence: Rimbaud had sensed something which cybernetic scientists had sensed from a scientific point of view. The tragedy was reasonableness. The same thing is true for us Radicals.
Playboy - Those schoolboys, therefore, mixed with the adults, they listened to them, tried to understand their discussions, to grasp the essential truths. And in that group, you were probably full of passion and vehemence...
Pannella - Not at all. I was fervent, not burning, an expression that I associate with sombre, introverted things; a voluptuousness in martyrdom. I am an extrovert, I love life, I not troubled or ardent. "Route de braise et non de cendre", as a poet said. Not the flame that burns and leaves useless, sullen ash, but braise, that burns for a long time.
Playboy - Clearly, those boys discussed the ideas of the adults.
Pannella - Occasionally, they were a matter of discussion, yes, but never of polemic. At the time I was already very talkative, and - I believe - I had a certain power of persuasion. Perhaps I exerted this influence on them too. Or maybe they were sufficiently experienced and comprehensive. Or maybe they were just exasperated by the fact that I was capable of discussing without getting angry. On the other hand, neither did they. And after all, I did graduate, didn't I? At the University of Urbino, with the lowest possible mark: 66/110. I chose Urbino because I thought I would have graduated quickly there. I discussed my thesis for three hours, with 11 professors. The subject of my thesis, what a coincidence, was Article n.7 of the Concordat; there was sufficient matter for discussion. As you see, my ideas haven't changed. From the beginning. I am a boring fellow, I repeat the same things, over and over.
Playboy - Is there anything of your childhood you think back to with special pleasure?
Pannella - I remember one thing: a picture on a newspaper. It was an evening paper, called "Il Giornale della Sera". A dimmed picture showed a boy in the act of jumping out of the window, clutching a ballot box. It was me. There was an election at the University, and the fascists were trying to stir trouble. We voted anyway. But the fascists came in, armed with knuckle dusters and other weapons; there were many of them, and they looked dangerous. I took the ballot box and jumped out of the window of the Department of Political Sciences, on the first floor. Below, there were quicklime ovens, surrounded by workers. I managed not to fall into one of them, but I fell just next to one. In the meanwhile, the fascists had come down and were heading toward me, with their weapons and their beastly faces. I had no escape. Then, suddenly, the workers lifted their shovels and started throwing limestone at them. It was a victory of the working class.
Playboy - As all young boys, you probably read a great deal. Tell me about your cultural background: the thinkers of the past or the tendencies of thought that most influenced your political struggle.
Pannella - I don't believe in ideologies, as I don't believe in codified ideologies, contained in bound books and stored in libraries and archives. I don't believe in safe-tight ideologies, to be opened and used as a package one receives at the post office. Each person should create his own ideology with the material he has, casually. It is possible that I built my own ideology also on the basis of the catechism I was taught in school, which was necessarily problematic and which I necessarily challenged.
I can say that the important things for me have been four or five aphorisms by Nietzsche on good and evil, Gozzano, and the Sonata to Kreuzer. An issue of "Esprit", of year 1947, which I read in Modane while I was waiting for the train. The "History of the Baroque Age" by Benedetto Croce. And a poet, St.John Perse, whom everyone finds difficult because he uses too many terms; he should be read as an encyclopedia. And Thomas Mann, the poet of the bourgeoisie. My schoolmates used to read Marx, they could quote the fourth or fifth answer to Feuerbach by heart. As for me, I never read Marx, but I took whatever I needed from him. As a boy I read the great Russian novels; I has some difficulty with patronymics, but in fact I did excellently because there is no need for a plot in classic novels. But I can say my main source of culture were newspapers, because newspapers reported ideas that were not published elsewhere, owing to their position perhaps, that is, abstracted from the present. It's important to read a w
eekly, a newspaper, because you take ideas that grow inside you, that become your own personality. I used to read "Il Mondo" and "Risorgimento Liberale".
Playboy - Can you remember a particularly happy and important period of your life?
Pannella - All years are beautiful. This last one, for example, which was to be the year of the Radical Party's political assassination, is on the contrary the year of its victory, the year of the referendum on divorce. But every year is beautiful, because every year is dense of events, rallies, "happenings", individual and collective actions, words, gestures, singing and dancing, without pauses, because stopping would mean returning to the past. Each year is beautiful, because I am happy of what I'm doing, happy to go on hunger strikes and being called a would-be Gandhi, happy of signing the documents of the extraparliamentary groups, which I never believed in but who nonetheless have a right to have their own newspapers, to defend conscientious objectors, even when they are idiotic fascists, to scream, to lose my voice and my health, I am even happy that feminists accuse me of being an anti-feminist...
Playboy - Accuse you, the "champion of women", of anti-feminism?
Pannella - Yes, after I struggled to obtain abortion, they considered me a nuisance, because they felt I had robbed them of their own themes, battles and topics, which they consider their exclusive property...They still view me as a representative of the male sex, the "male" who uses women pretending to defend them, a prevaricator. Clearly, not all feminists are like that, only some of them are, the ones who have male chauvinist residues. Let's say these women are feminists who make mistakes. Women, on the other hand, never make mistakes. A demonstration of this was the fact that they signed for the referendum, and it is unquestionable that even those who knew nothing about women's liberation and were even hostile to it, signed for divorce.
Playboy - Do you agree on all women's claims?
Pannella - I agree on all the claims of all minorities. Thus, I struggle for women's liberation the same way as I support the "Fuori" and anyone who wants to express his ideas and who feels oppressed; our party is therefore a refuge for marriage outlaws, conscientious objectors, feminists, freaks, abortionists, vegetarians, nudists, in other words, "jailbirds" of all kinds. All minorities must be protected, and none has priority over another one. I also defend a person who has been put to prison because he is a fascist, because I disapprove of labels; the only thing I want to defend is a minority subjected to the oppression of a powerful majority. And I defended the extraparliamentarian minorities more than once, and this despite their excesses, knowing that they considered me an outsider, with utopian ideas, a bourgeois. One thing I cannot accept are minorities in positions of power, because they immediately start using violence: for me, as for any radical, any weapon is a fascist weapon, as any army and in
stitutionalization of violence, no matter whom it is directed against.
Playboy - You also defend drugs, "grass".
Pannella - Personally speaking, I have no interest in pot. I have my own pot, which is nicotine. Inside my body, there is a highway of nicotine and tar, the vehicle for all the self-destruction, the evasion, the guilt feelings and the solitary pleasure my death instinct dictates. But I find it perfectly acceptable for a person to smoke a less harmful grass, if he likes it, and to refuse to pay too much money for it. My "grass" has always been my greatest expense. I struggle to defend grass and the people who smoke it as I struggle against that mess which is called Order, but I consider it a mistake to consider grass a positive thing in itself.
Playboy - You say you acknowledge no ideological origins; but surely you acknowledge some teachers, surely there are some politicians, Italian or foreigners, whom you learnt something from...
Pannella - I acknowledge no teachers because I have had no teachers, and the people who have been important for me had no intention of being teachers to me. Two lives determined my life. The lives of two people who are dead; one of them died when it was suitable for him to die, because he had no hope and believed he had failed; the other one died in a wrong moment, when many of his forecasts were coming true. I'm talking about Mario Pannunzio and Ernesto Rossi.
Pannunzio represented morality, not moralism, his inflexibility was the thing I liked most about him, his stylistic rigour too, when he preached us to follow Flaubert. His indifference toward power is his most important heritage. He was a politician, if by politician we mean a man who leaves a mark in his time. And how many politicians have really left a mark in time? People say: Mattei (3), Vanoni (4). Vanoni and Mattei may have created something from a material point of view, but in fact all Enrico Mattei, the demiurge of the fifties, has left, is the "realpolitik" of corruption; and what Vanoni left is a couple of good solutions in the field of political control. But nothing that really left a mark, like Pannunzio and Rossi, their friends and companions, who are never considered real politicians.
Playboy - Do you really consider Ernesto Rossi a politician?
Pannella - Certainly. With his gaiety, his love for life, Rossi had foreseen everything: State corporativism, the State giving profits to the private sector. With all his innocence, he had sensed an imminent historical defeat.
Playboy - They had little in common, apparently at least ...
Pannella - They were two bourgeois, with a quality which is rare in bourgeois people: indifference toward money. Because they didn't need money. They wouldn't have known how to spend it. Consumerism was something far removed from them ...
Playboy - You said they were "bourgeois". Some people call you a bourgeois disparagingly.
Pannella - They don't consider the bourgeois as I do, that is, a person who is inspired and who enacts the great ideals of the French Revolution. Yes, I am a bourgeois, and proud to be one.
Playboy - They say that if you were a mystic, hoards of people would follow you, praying.
Pannella - True. But I'm not. And I don't like to sway the crowd, but convince it. What I'm interested in is dialogue. Dialogue, that is: to know each other and to acknowledge each other.
Playboy - They also say you often overact.
Pannella - Of course. When I'm talking at a rally, when I concentrate on two or three faces amid the crowd of people, I know I'm acting. And so-called "humble" people understand me more than politically-aware people. But I believe in culture, not in nature. Rousseau's myth of the Good Savage makes me laugh. As to the clarity, the purity, the innocence of children, that too is a lie. What about the clarity, the purity, the innocence of Michelangelo's patriarch? Nature is an ambiguous condition.
Playboy - Do you have time to think about your own life?
Pannella - Very little, to be honest. My problem is finding a moment of solitude. My house is always full of people, who just come in and use my things. Very seldom do I sleep alone. Politicians, on the contrary, are always alone. You see them coming out of Parliament, they have a quick bite to eat and then go to a movie, waiting to go to bed. They are alone, sad, unhappy with life, incapable of talking because they are incapable of paying attention, because they are sure they are on the right side, sure that they are better than other people, sure that the country, not them, is immature. At times, I would like some solitude, and not just to go to the movies. On the other hand I don't really need to think about my life. I'm happy with it. I love life, I love the pleasures that life and people can give. I could use some time for myself to read more; I have little time, so I just read for ten, fifteen minutes, I go over the same things, and quote them to ten, a hundred, a thousand people: always the same thing
s, a bit like a lady showing the same jewels. But these texts have become a part of me, they have become my flesh and my blood, which I now give to other people.
Of course, I would like to read other books. But when? And yet, if there is a person who desperately needs to see me, a friend who's staying in Rome only for a couple of hours, I always manage to settle my engagements so that I can see that person, even if it seemed impossible to fit him in, and I always manage to find those few minutes I need. This is something that makes me feel good, it gives me the impression I have some control over my life.
Playboy - Can it be that no one, no political militant, has ever taught you anything?
Pannella - I really wouldn't know who to mention. Riccardo Lombardi (5) of course was an eternal lesson. La Malfa (6) perhaps, in a few circumstances. I was close to La Malfa, he showed benevolence toward me, despite his reputation of being a solitary man. But this fascinating modern-time Crispi (7) deceived me. What did La Malfa achieve? Liberalization in exchanges, they say. And after that? Has anything really changed with the liberalization of exchanges? Everything is as it was. A political action means something that leaves a mark, that determines development, growth. Also, consider his indifference toward the problems of civil rights, his constant and undivided attention to economic facts. In the end, he just kept offering the same, minor solutions over and over again.
Playboy - Not only La Malfa, as you say, is indifferent toward the problem of civil rights. Other problems are equally urgent: social problems for example. Do you see any correspondence between civil rights and social claims? Aren't you afraid that by giving priority to the first ones you are creating an unsettling unpopularity for yourself and your party?
Pannella - There is a close correspondence between civil rights and social claims. The battle for divorce was a battle against discriminatory divorce, the battle for abortion was a battle against discriminatory abortion. Each unsolved civil problem leads to social ills, and solving them means fighting and winning over injustice. Also, our problems reveal our real nature. If Fanfani (8) rejects a certain article in favour of the workers, it is possible that he will find an excuse for himself: the cost of living bonus, relations with the factory owner, things like that; if he says no to the referendum, what is his alibi? Exposed in such way, he will have no more weapons, or at least less of them.
Playboy - Which forces are, in your opinion, most hostile toward your battles, apart from political parties?
Pannella - Clearly, the corporative-clerical forces. This is obvious. And the "laypeople of the regime", that is, those who use their laity to grab a slice of regime, and such are many exponents of culture, most political leaders and members of parliaments; not unlike the Christian Democrats, even if with peculiar differences.
Playboy - Even the left-wing forces called you a muddling minority, fundamentally hostile toward parliamentary interests.
Pannella - Not just that! They even called us slaves to Fanfani, and even worse, if possible. The truth is that they were afraid of us. They were afraid of us until the referendum. And they attacked us with cunning, with a scientific accurateness which even the Christian Democrats lack, because the DC is open to contradictions, the PCI isn't.
As for me, if I understand socialism today, I owe it to the classic democratic and liberal ideals. Socialism is fine for me, so are the liberals, the libertarians and even the Marxists. What I don't like is Marxism-Leninism, the Marxist-Leninist culture, which has inexorably become a petit-bourgeois culture, with a strong tendency toward repression. The feature common to all Italian leaders is the conviction of having the responsibility to act for the well-being of the population, that population which, behind all the nice talk, is simply considered a bunch of morons, and to be convinced of this means to eliminate any competitor. But we are experiencing a period of détente with the communists, for the moment. On the other hand, some of them have been quite close to us radicals: Umberto Terracini (9) and Fausto Gullo, for example.
Playboy - The radicals are becoming popular. Riccardo Lombardi says this popularity can become dangerous. He says their audience is appealing to all those parties who hope to obtain the votes that could potentially go to the radical Party.
Pannella - If there is any danger, it concerns the others, if they try to use the radicals' popularity dishonestly. People are born sons of bitch; but if they try to prove they aren't for ten years, but in fact are, then do those who go with him also become sons of bitch? The radicals rarely move from their positions, and all the more now that they are strong and self-assured. The risk, if there is one, is for the others.
Playboy - Do you think you have a mission to carry out? And do you believe people generally should have a mission?
Pannella - I don't believe in missions, as I don't believe in destiny, in predetermination, in vocations and all this bullshit. What I hate most is the idea of sacrifice.
Playboy - What about fasting?
Pannella - Fasting! Fasting is not a pleasant thing, I agree, and I must say I usually eat plentifully. However, fasting is the only weapon available to those who are a minority and reject the idea of violence; I therefore choose this weapon, and since it is the only weapon I can use, I am happy. Arrigo Benedetti (10) once depicted me as a thin, pale man, talking with the dead. On the contrary: I live in the public streets, I am full of vitality. The spirit of sacrifice, the ethic, and the label of sacrifice are not my cup of tea. I loathe all this, and heroic struggle and catharsis: I want to live and to be happy, and I want my companion to live and to be happy; I therefore feel horrified by his sacrifice. The duty of a militant is to be alive and happy, not to be a dead hero.
Playboy - What are the things you believe in, and what are the things you don't believe in?
Pannella - First of all, I don't believe in power. I believe in people. My movement, the radical party, is proposing all these referendums. We are confident in our success. We are sure to obtain 80% of favourable votes, we are sure that each person will be glad and eager to sign a certain number of referendums rather than just one. 80% of people agree with us completely, but they are not the institutions, and this is the origin of this terrible dichotomy. But we will struggle, confiding in victory. Our strength relies in the fact that we express what we call people's common opinion. I believe in the words that are pronounced and listened in schools, in the streets, in the squares, in private homes, whereas I don't believe in invective, as I don't believe in holy texts and in ideologies.
Playboy - People discuss a lot about you. Some love you, others hate you. Your very name is enough for people to cry of anger and annoyance...
Pannella - Those who love me are simply answering my own love for them. Those who hate me, express nothing but the normal hate for all those who are "different", the same form of hate that is directed against homosexuals, who bother no one, women who try to escape their tradition of secular oppression, the poor. There is another sort of "freaks" like this, whom people hate: people who believe in freedom.
Playboy - You have become personally very famous, among other things, after you appeared on TV. You have succeeded in waking people up, in getting them actively involved. Everyone witnessed your battle, and everyone wondered: will he make it? TV had "hosted" people who are even more of a nuisance that you are. You were lucky, a unique case or almost...but has something changed in your life after you managed to "penetrate" the sanctuary of the mass media?
Pannella - Yes, of course; people recognize me in the streets, on the train, everywhere. I receive hundreds of letters, mostly from young people, but not only: sometimes it's whole families, three generations, who write, asking me to continue my struggle, offering their friendship. They ask me if they can do anything. They feel excluded. Our culture accustoms us to feeling useless, irreparably alone and unique in our highest hopes. I haven't had much time, in these last months, to answer all these letters, but I intend to do so.
In the mean time, with conviction and a lot of confidence, I ask people to join the radical Party, even if they have never joined a party, or rather, even the more so in this case: or if they are members of a party and want to remain members of other organizations. This is the number of our current account: via di Torre Argentina 18, current account number 1/47750 to the order of the Radical Party. Only with a stronger Radical Party can the "12 May league" and every other organized movement achieve its goals. Even the renewal of the traditional Left, in all its components, from the communist one to the republican, the socialist and the liberal one, necessarily passes through the unitary and libertarian initiative of the Radical Party.
Playboy - On TV, in debates, every time a person speaks from a platform of any sort, they ask you to talk about fascism, of today's fascism...These are the things politicians are normally asked. But apart from any label, what is fascism? and who must be considered a fascist today, at least according to Marco Pannella and his supporters?
Pannella - The exponents of the Movimento Sociale (11) are nothing but paleofascists. It's something I'm not interested in. To me the real fascists today are the Christian Democrats, the heralds of the discriminating authoritarian message, as fascism was in the past. I agree with my friend Pasolini (12), when he maintains that there is no difference between Mussolini's "gerarchi" and today's; on the contrary. And all the talk our political leaders devote to anti-fascism, all this is just an attempt to drain people's emotion and indignation and to direct it against fascism, but in fact it hides - clumsily enough - the attempt to divert the attention from themselves, in order to present themselves as democrats. There is no rupture between Mussolini's Italy and the Italy of democratic fascism; Mussolini bear-chested in the Pontine marshes (13) (as I said in a debate on Nico Naldini's film "Fascista"), is a more likeable character than Paolo Bonomi (14), who has been acting as a dictator for thirty years in our
country as the head of the farmers corporation.
Playboy - You say different things from those politicians usually say. In such a confused and contradictory situation, your answer is by no means elusive, Byzantine; perhaps this is deliberate. You speak very clearly.
Pannella - Yes, but in Italy, many parts deliberately pursue an operation of digression. It is foolish to attack Almirante (15) and his followers; to rekindle hate against the twenty-year-olds who joined the Repubblica Sociale Italiana; but it is not just foolish; it serves the purpose of asserting oneself as a slave to the authority and to fascism, which lives and thrives today in our country under the Christian Democrat banner. If we have any resentment and anger, we must direct it against the real, historical successors of State fascism. This is what we radicals are doing.
Playboy - In this moment, you can legitimately feel a winner. You have fought and defeated the enemy, skillfully applying the well-tested technique of challenge. And this increases your collection of medals: the battle for the referendum, the battle against the monopoly and the excessive power of television, which ended up with the resignation of Bernabei (16), on the eve of your protest march...
Pannella - It was clear, at this stage, that this person was to leave the State TV. Either resigning, or being kicked out by government. After the sentence of the Constitutional Court, which confirmed the fact that the State TV was acting in an illegal way, violating the rights of citizens, Bernabei could do nothing else but leave. Bernabei, the highest exponent of misinformation, the person who more than anyone else embodied violence against citizens...Because violence, and physical violence does not only mean striking the human being in his body, but in his spirit, submerging him with false or biased news, slowly depriving him of his faculty of thought, therefore modifying his very nature. Yes, we have reaped a few successes. And we owe this to our determination, to our capacity to start all over again, without letting ourselves be put down by defeats, refusing to just survive, and wanting to live...We owe this to our confidence, to our hope.
Playboy - If you were to tack of your life, if one evening, after midnight, the correspondent of a major foreign newspaper asked you: "Marco, in thirty seconds time, tell me what's going on in Italy"...Would you answer, and what would you answer?
Pannella - It's always difficult to trace an outline, because reality changes incessantly. People frequently ask me, especially abroad, what's happening of so terrible in Italy, or what happened to this country who seemed destined to accomplish an "economic miracle"..I answer that all the things that are happening could have been foreseen, that they were inevitable, considering the sort of leadership we have, that resembles the one of Mussolini's time. With the only difference that we are an industrial country today, whereas at the time we were an agricultural country. But there is one thing that justifies a certain optimism: the leading class is starting to have doubts about itself for the first time, and to talk about its errors.
Translator's notes
(1) Mario Pannunzio (1910-1968): Editor of the magazine "Risorgimento Liberale" (1943-47) and of the weekly magazine "Il Mondo" (1949-66).
(2) Ernesto Rossi (1897-1967): Italian Politician. Antifascist, leader of "Giustizia e libertà" (1929), he was arrested in 1930. He promoted the European federalist movement and was one of the founders of the Radical Party.
(3) Enrico Mattei (1906-1962): Italian entrepreneur. President of ENI (National Hydrocarbon Corporation) (1953), he pursued direct agreements with the oil producing countries of the Middle East and with the USSR: He died in an airplane crash.
(4) Ezio Vanoni (1903-1956): Italian politician. Minister of Finance (1948-54) and of Budget (1954-56), he promoted the 1951 tax reform (which introduced, among others, the annual income tax return) and a Bill for the development of employment and income (Vanoni Bill), which was never implemented.
(5) Riccardo Lombardi (1901-84): One of the founders of the "Partito d'Azione"; after the war, he joined the Socialist Party, which he presided in 1980.
(6) Ugo La Malfa (1903-1979): Italian politician. One of the founders of the "Partito d'Azione" (1942), he then joined the Italian Republican Party (48), of which he was Secretary (65-75) and President. Minister of Transport (45), of Foreign Trade (46, 51-53), of Budget (62-63), of Treasury (73-74), Vice Prime Minister (74-76).
(7) Francesco Crispi (1818-1901): Italian politician. A follower of Mazzini, he took part in the 1848 Sicilian revolution, and in 1860 he was the political strategist of Garibaldi's "dictatorship" in Southern Italy. Member of Parliament for the Left as of 1861, in 1864 he joined the monarchy and was Minister of Interior under Depretis (1877-78). Prime Minister (1887-91); 1893-96), he showed authoritative and nationalist tendencies; he repressed the socialist movement and masterminded the Triple Alliance and the colonial expansion in Ethiopia. He resigned after the defeat at Adua (1896).
(8) Amintore Fanfani (1908): Italian politician. Secretary of the Christian Democrat Party (1954-59; 73-75), Prime Minister (1958-59; 60-62; 62-63; 82-83), Foreign Minister (64-65; 65-68), President of the Senate (68-73; 76-82).
(9) Umberto Terracini (1895-1983): Italian politician. One of the founders of the Italian Communist Party; imprisoned under fascism (1926-43). From 1947 to 1948 he presided the constituent assembly.
(10) Arrigo Benedetti (1910-1976): Italian journalist. Editor of "L'Europeo" (1945-54), "L'Espresso" (1955-63), "Il Mondo" (1969-72).
(11) Movimento Sociale Italiano: Party founded in 1946 by former fascists.
(12) Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975): Italian writer and director. Member of the Radical Party. Author of novels, play and essays.
(13) Pontine Marshes: area South of Rome, in the Latium region. Under Mussolini it was reclaimed and transformed into an agricultural area. The fascist propaganda showed pictures of Mussolini bare-chested at work with a shovel, as the symbol of industriousness.
(14) Paolo Bonomi (1910): Italian politician. Christian Democrat, the founder of the National Confederation of Italian Farmers.
(15) Giorgio Almirante (1914-1988): Secretary of the Movimento Sociale Italiano as of 1969.
(16) Bernabei: Director of RAI (Italian TV and Broadcasting Corporation).