They look at each other. They know that I want to impose on them that very simple, elementary thing which is a telling of events in chronological order. An abacus of time and events. Of rights, and not simply of punishments. With the determination of pig farmers who carry their animals screaming to the abattoir, they are unable to accept it. It is on the basis of a flattening of time and events, and of the negation of differences and evolutions and separations, that this infamous concoction known as the ‘O’ is constructed. Things which ten years ago were lawful are now branded as brigadism and terrorism. The prosecution case is based on nothing more than this ‘it turned into’. And now they impose ‘present’ sets of repression and ‘present’ readings of our actions. As functionaries, Santiapichi and Abbate are too diligent – the forward bastions of reaction – to allow themselves to forget it. They reject my arguments. What I am experiencing here is an internal pain. I am no longer moving in the area of truth, but find myself forced into a game of defence, faced as I am with a hard-line schema of mystification and hatred. This is Russian roulette.
Gentlemen, you cannot do this. This is the fourth transformation of the theorem that I am witnessing. The first version said that I was the head of the Red Brigades and the killer of Moro – you even recognized me in via Fani, with sworn witnesses and an identity parade. However, despite your provocations, that collapsed. Then – in secundis – you invented a truth that was testified to by those gruesome murderers, the likes of Fioroni and Casirati. Then Gentili, Tarsitano and the PCI manipulated the provocation. May shame fall upon them and may the kiss of those bastards poison their blood. The third time, you moved to organize the judicial putsch in Milan, using Barbone. A magistrate who was young and inexperienced sanctioned the operation. He was unable to control the stormy passions of vendetta, and was caught up in a collective paranoia which only ignorance of class struggle and ignorance of the law could permit. So Barbone was let off for the killing of Tobagi, our defender. Then you rewarded him by setting his woman free and by promising him freedom so long as he agreed to invent the existence of an ‘O’ in Milan. Today you have arrived at the fourth transformation of the theorem – the most evil of all, because now you have given up actually trying to prove anything, but you are still determined to push ahead politically, to fulfil the undertaking you made to your corporation. In this trial, all you are seeking to do is to create suspicion. You are seeking to create a material scapegoat. A scapegoat which is not even useful for the future of Italy’s poor democracy, but is merely functional to the survival of your self-standing corporation as judges. Too many mistakes, too much hatred, too much ignorance. This cannot be permitted. This game is too brutal. And yet I am obliged to accept it within the terms in which you impose it: either everything is true, or everything is a lie. This has been the frame of this trial during the past few days. All right, then … let’s say that I built an ‘O’. It was not illegal, it was definitely not, and you cannot strike it down with a law that purports to be democratic. The choice is yours now, between democracy and corporative infamy. (G12 Rebibbia – 31 May–1 June)
Folio 42
Outside things are beginning to move. A big campaign is being mounted in my name, organized by old comrades, but more particularly by people who have simply had enough of the injustices of this state. I have the impression that the train of my freedom is beginning to move – with some difficulty at first, because it’s an old train, a steam train in fact, which chuffs and slips on the tracks and is pulling too much weight, has too many carriages, and is just at the start of its efforts – the same as equality, in fact. (But the new technologies, what values have they produced?) Quite a few people have come to see me in recent days – Félix came, and Gisela too, dear comrades who represent the international experience of communist life. They fill me with hope; they tell me of positive signs. In Germany the Greens are drawing up a conference document to support my candidacy – or so Gisela tells me. Félix tells me about Latin America and the great spread of movements for democracy, happiness and revolution. It is not enough for me that my train simply moves forward – it is the Finland train; what needs to be set in motion is this tactical passage, proud and forward-looking, this message for universality. I look around and I understand the dimensions of this extraordinary adventure of reason. By chance, through the stupidity of the powers of repression, I find myself playing a role which, by myself, I would never have succeeded in taking on. This is their weakness – the fact that they have to build up their enemy. This, of course, until the moment when they decide to kill him. OVRA comes to mind. But then they risk transforming the killed person into a hero. Today, despite these grey presentiments, I am in good humour. I sense that they are the ones caught in the shit of their own contradictions – not me. We shall see. But I see no reason for doubts about the extraordinary adventure that I am living. A breaking of bureaucratic legitimacy. If I end up being elected to Parliament, it will be a big break. Of course there is no way they’ll allow me to get away with it – they won’t leave me free for long. But it will be a clash between two legitimacies – between party-political and democratic legitimacy, between bureaucratic and charismatic legitimacy. In either event it will be a defeat for them – or rather a wound, something to touch them where it hurts. So today I am in good humour. At last. The Finland train is on its way. It has begun its journey. As I look out of the window I see contradictory landscapes, green trees and sterile tundra. But contradiction is the key to life. In a few days I shall be back in court again, facing the deathly inertia of the prosecution and defending myself from its icy kiss. I find that I care less and less about it. I am gambling on freedom, not on the trial. Perspectives are beginning to change. I can look the judges in the eye, perhaps – holding the arrogance of their gaze and destroying it with irony. I shall be able to exorcize the death which their wrinkles and their facial tics extend to me, with an understated smile and a metaphysical irony. I think of love, for sure. I want to make children on the Finland train, in the precariousness of that future life, within the sweetness of a gentle breath – even if it is only a moment – of freedom, in a destiny which is an adventure and a reclaiming of life. Sometimes they accuse me of undervaluing the collective meaning of our experience of struggle and community – but what is more powerfully symbolic than risking one’s life to the utter limit, within a living hope? Go, Finland train, go … That which is singular is collective. Only the desire for communism destroys passivity and solitude. (G12 Rebibbia – 2/3/4/5 June)
Folio 43
I find myself this evening writing up five days of court examination – from Monday to Friday, from 6 June to 10 June, continuously, without a break, day after day. And I have a psycho-somatic reaction: a terrible toothache. I am thinking about these days of incredible tension. Things have come to a crunch over the question of dissociation. These people associate the term with some kind of evil intent. That’s why they keep pressing that particular button: ‘So’, they say, ‘you tell us that you don’t agree with terrorism. So now tell us some people’s names, and tell us everything you know about terrorism. Otherwise we shall think that your behaviour is opportunistic and simply designed to reduce your sentence.’ They will never understand. Is it better to leave them to boil in their own greasy broth? No. I counter them point by point. I try to launch a discussion. Who knows if they understood anything I was saying. In reality what I would like to say is the following:
For me, dissociation does not mean withdrawing from something, but arriving at a point where my actions are in accord with my thoughts. For me dissociation has meant above all dissociating myself from what you judges wanted me to be. A breaking of the image you have constructed and imposed on me and my comrades and on the movement. Dissociation is not a betrayal of terrorism (impossible for me). Rather it is a claiming, it is an attack on your theorems and on your stupid and odious schemes of criminalization. I hate terrorism because I love life – because in my view that terrorism bears the same
symbolic and homicidal image of life as you judges have. Signor presidente, with Savasta you found yourself on the same symbolic common ground as you say you have found yourself (or perhaps you actually have – I did not check on this) with the general span of common criminality. With this latter you have something in common culturally, by sharing the same bourgeois sense of decorum; with Savasta, by sharing the same view of power. You are on an equal footing with one as well as with the other, in a dialectic of similarities. Punishment has to be a restoration – repaying the harm done, mediating it through the law, dialectically, within a whole set of homologous values. It does not surprise me that you like Hegel. His anger, the incommunicability of language, you discover all this when you come face to face with difference. Then you go into tilt! Then your wrinkles become set into your face. The very physique du rôle changes – it functions only in a homogeneity of values: money and power. Revolution is a bulldog snapping at your leg, and the movement is a toad in your belly. Good sense does not understand. But good sense today is depraved, it is tied to the meanings of power – of a power and of a state that are degraded and corrupt. This court represents them. Under this representation, good sense goes crazy and authority falls into decadence. As my Spinoza says:
For if the ruler of the state runs drunk or naked with harlots through the streets, acts on the stage, openly violates or holds in contempt those laws that he himself has enacted, it is no more possible for him to preserve the dignity of sovereignty than for something to be or not be at the same time. [Spinoza, Political Treatise, translated by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company 2002), Chapter 4, p. 697]
Has not this metaphysical paradox been challenged, perhaps? As regards the problem of dissociation, here for sure the virginity of truth has been violated. There, signor presidente, I watch as you read these words – who knows, maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow a cell search here in prison will carry off this notebook and give you the privilege of being its only reader – I watch you reading it, smiling arrogantly as you read. I am firm in my opinion that there are no limits to the idiot complacency of the present ruling class. But at least let us set aside vulgarity of the intellect, and let us seek the pleasure of reason.
Let us try to find a common language, in order to communicate – even if it is only to supplicate. In short: not with the dirty eroticism characteristic of the sexual habits of the discreet bourgeoisie – but with a desire that embodies love, removes the clothing from reality and hunts out the truth. Try to come close to those infinite points (since they are infinite and widely spread, it should be possible to catch one or two of them) on which desires of life and desires for renewal separate themselves from the vices of your world. And try to understand the love and fullness of the needs for innovation that pulse within revolt. Dissociation … for heaven’s sake, you too should dissociate yourself – from the intrigue in which you have become enmeshed.
Probably you might even find it satisfying. You and I are divided by life and death – my search for identity is life; your requirement that I repent and become a spy is death. I don’t know what power it is that imposes this on you, but it is, for sure, a power that keeps company with prostitutes. Good night, signor presidente.
Obviously that kind of talk is never going to be allowed. This evening, however, thinking back over the court examinations of the past week, this is the only way of summing up the whole business that I can find. The serious stuff, about dissociation, I already wrote some time ago, from inside the special prison, in conditions so fearsome that I really don’t want to recall them: I paid too high a price for them down there … close to death. But there is no point in repeating them to the president of this court with his gross insensibility, which is so functional to the project of power. (G12 Rebibbia – 6/7/8/9/10 June)
PS It is worth recalling instead my article ‘Terrorism? Nein, danke!’ published in Il Manifesto on 23 March 1981.
Terrorism? Nein, danke!
Since the events of Trani many comrades have told me that we – my comrades and I – were right to dissociate ourselves from the Red Brigades initiative in this struggle and in the D’Urso case. But these same comrades add that: (a) this dissociation was an individual operation, which does not address the problem of the other thousands of comrades in prison; (b) this dissociation does not produce political effects capable of going beyond itself, and therefore it runs the risk of not opening perspectives; (c) this dissociation is an ambiguous operation because, both in its form and in its method, it can be instrumentalized by power.
Criticisms and reservations of this kind are not only coming from prison. The condemnation of the Red Brigades’ behaviour at Trani is almost unanimous in prisons, or at least represents the majority view. Criticism is also coming, particularly harshly, from outside the prison, from quarters where solidarity with the comrades in prison demands a unified approach, and, first of all, over and above any criticism, it demands a focused attack on the nature of the repression. Since, in the events of Trani, power has revealed a bestial face, going beyond all limits, it’s on this that the whole debate has to focus. It is very doubtful that a similar attitude will be taken by the comrades in prison, even though some of them may appreciate our motives. Myself in particular. In the circumstances in which the dissociation has taken place, I personally believe that I must have run the full gamut of the problems and emotions which communist militants would have experienced in the 1930s, in dissociating themselves from Stalinism and from blackmail arguments about unity. What I mean here is the emotions and problems – obviously this has nothing to do with Stalin. What people need to appreciate here is the fact, felt by many comrades and particularly by those outside prison, of the seriousness of dissociating oneself from the struggle while it is actually under way, while people are still under enemy fire, while people are still in pain from the wounds received – whereas the first task is to resist, and unity is taken as the supreme value – so that, in a classical sense, being scabs is an ontological fact, and not something ideological or abstract.
Why do I claim dissociation?
So, why do I claim dissociation? Why do I reject the accusations of those outside prison? Why do I insist on listening, answering, and persuading my comrades in prison along the line that the – effective – limits of simple dissociation can be overcome and are organizable in a general direction of liberation? I do so for a number of fundamental reasons, which I permit myself to submit for discussion herewith.
1. Because working-class and proletarian struggles, in their mass aspect, are far from being suppressed or on the decline in Italy and Europe. The armed line of class struggle, in the unilaterality of its discourse and in the acceleration of its project, has not only been effectively defeated, but also logically discarded by a movement of struggles which does not see necessity and rigour of consequences in armed struggle. Terrorismus? Nein, danke. Certainly there do exist war-orientated residues in the movement as a whole, but by now they are wholly extraneous to the dynamic of political reproduction of the present generations and to the expansion of the communist movement. From this point of view, the Red Brigades initiative will continue to be what it was at Trani: purely and simply an instrumentalization of a real movement of protest, a continuous, murderous overdetermination of the movements of struggle. Today, in organizing the struggle, we have to exclude from the outset the possibility of the Red Brigades or other ‘combatant communist organizations’ (OCC) involving themselves in the struggle. To exclude overdetermination is a precondition of struggle. Political assassination is, today, an assassination of the struggles. The autonomous reproduction of the communist movement excludes this distortion spontaneously: the distortion needs to be excluded consciously and politically.
To destroy the image of civil war
2. The image of civil war was not imposed by the Red Brigades or by the other ‘OCC’ but was constructed and used exclusively, solely and unilaterally by power. In exchange for a death or t
wo – of people who were soon replaced, anyway – power constructed the general conditions of a recession of the struggles, a reduction of political spaces, and a weakening of the strength of the class movement. What was horrible to see was the support offered by the forces of the ‘Left’ to power’s project. Never has it been so clear that the destruction of the ideology, image and scenario of civil war is a fundamental precondition for a reopening of class struggle and for the reconquering of political spaces. The strength of the proletarian movement is ready to deploy itself into the expression of a political programme. The struggle is political. Who, in the classics and in the history of the working-class movement, has ever upheld the fable that – given conditions such as those that apply in Italy – withdrawal from armed struggle, and therefore the resumption of political struggle, is a betrayal or a desertion? Only fanatics or imbeciles, like those people from API in Trani prison, who are particularly resourceful in the instrumental mystification of theory and history, can sustain this – or perhaps, even worse, believe it. Proletarian political struggle has to destroy the image of war. It has to chase back, into a black and terrible past, the feeling of desperation, the frenzy of murder, the obtuseness of combatant logic. Today political struggle comes to occupy pride of place, being, once again, fully tied to the mass struggle, to its possibilities and its powerful efficacity. Today mass political struggle is a means made possible by the growth of the new class composition and made mandatory by the force of its material needs. Subjective behaviours and the drive towards centraliz ation need to be mediated within the levels of political class recomposition. The mediation is not imposed by the enemy, but by the development of the communist programme. Today it is opportunist, infantile, stupid and suicidal for anyone to refuse the mediation geared to the mass practice of the programme. Immediatism of objectives is nostalgic and now belongs only to the state-effected simulation of civil war.
Diary of an Escape Page 12