WE AND THE FASCISTS

From the face-to-face debate on TV between Giorgio Almirante and Marco Pannella

(1978)

(...)

Almirante - (...) And finally, there is the accommodation of customs, of vices. I detest demagoguery in the social field, the kind that is mostly advanced by the Socialists, and even more by the Communists; but I am afraid of the demagoguery that confuses freedom with libertarian ideas, that favours the worst instincts of man, of every man...

Pannella - Why don't you come out and speak of homosexuality and drugs?

Almirante - That's what I am alluding to, that above all, drugs above all.

Pannella - And homosexuality, where do you put that? Because that is another keystone of male-chauvinism...
Almirante - That worries me too, if you will excuse me. To tell the truth it disgusts me a bit, if I may express my own ideas, not as the leader of the MSI-DN. It is an entirely personal feeling that has nothing to do with politics. This libertarianism...

Pannella - And the next thing they end up in concentration camps!

Almirante - ...which promotes the basest instincts of men, which debilitates our youth, which takes the backbone out of most young people, which then leads to violence, because violence is what it's about: this inciting to libertarianism is the worst kind of violence like the proclamation of atheism. It is unlikely that a proclaimed atheist can also be a humanitarian by the side of the suffering and the dying. These positions are suspicious to my mind and make me fear that they are radically pro-Communist, in the worst sense of the word when I speak of Communism.

Pannella - Personally when one speaks of pro-Communism - if by pro-Communism you mean deep friendship, the sign of desiring companionship and connection with the great mass of workers who in good faith have always entrusted their hopes of justice and liberation for themselves and others to the Communist message...

Almirante - Poor wretches!

Pannella - ...I am always proud to be considered pro-Communist. Whereas I have also noticed that, historically your anti-Communism on the other hand has always been a pretext, not to strike at the Communist leadership, because you made the Ribbentrop-Stalin pact...

Almirante - Made? So your back to Fascism as a style!

Pannella - I am speaking of a certain cultural tradition. No, excuse me, I am not offering insults...

Almirante - Insults? I am not in the least offended...

Pannella - I am simply speaking of a cultural tradition. In general all the perpetrators of massacres - and you are not among them - never respected those who were different, whether homosexuals, Fascists or Jews.

Almirante - You have to go back as far as Ribbentrop...

Pannella - May I go on? You are always elegant and never interrupt, but today you are interrupting a lot!...

Almirante - My apologies.

Pannella - So I only wanted to say that people feel history in their bones. You speak of violence. And I say that your road up till now - this worries me - is a road that has turned your boys into the assassinated and assassins.

Almirante - No, the assassinated.

Pannella - Assassinated and assassins. If you refuse to admit this you will not make a contribution to truth. Just as other violent positions growing out of Socialist hopes and sometimes from Catholic ones have created assassins and the assassinated, so too have there been many, very many, in the ranks of the so-called left. Hence it is on this issue, the programme of violence, that we are facing each other. We say that there is a new Buchenwald, Almirante, a new Mathausen of 40 million people who are being exterminated by hunger every day throughout the world. We want to accept this task as those did who accepted the Nazi Buchenwald.

Almirante - And in Italy, in Italy there is already...

Pannella - That was the old story. What did they say during the 30's? When people said "watch out, Hitler and Mussolini mean war, extermination, Buchenwald" everybody answered: "Mind your own business". We repeat again that where 40 million of innocent people die massacred, exterminated, it is the international political set-up that prepares their deaths, because it desecrates them as it desecrates those at home. And go tell your kids that life is sacred when you do nothing to save 40 million elsewhere.
At this point I must tell you that soon - very soon - we will have the possibility if you like on a private television channel - it can be anyone at all - to question each other for two or three hours, to get to know each other better. Because my premise is that your road is a road of death - today, not thirty years ago. All positions aiming to restore the death penalty, the Second Republic - which you know will never happen because it can only be brought about by the PCI, the DC or by a coup; so which do you choose? - are pure demagoguery, a jump ahead.
You talk of the Carabinieri. It is the Carabinieri generals you talk of, but not of the Carabinieri of Peteano (killed in an auto bombing, ed.) They are the kids of the MSI, of the Fronte del Gioventù (Youth Front, ed.) who know...

Almirante: - No, no.

Pannella: - We will talk about that when...

Almirante: - That is something you really cannot say. You are running the risk of a law suit, and you are going to get one! I'm sorry...

Pannella: - And you know, Almirante, that I will fight for the authorisation to proceed because I want to answer for the things I say. Just as I can say that in all the massacres, in Milan, etc. the judges found evidence of connivance with the secret services, and you were always among the connivers. So let us remember, in terms of moral conduct too - and I am finishing, Almirante - that a caress is a non-violent act, wherever and by whomever it is given; it is an act of happiness and respect of others. And a violent act, wherever and by whomever it is given, is contrarily an act of death.

(...)

From: "WE AND THE FASCISTS. The radicals' libertarian antifascism", edited by Valter Vecellio, preface by Giuseppe Rippa - Quaderni Radicali/1, November 1980