Look at their eyes. Their hatred says it all. They are a mere flash, not the continuity of the revolutionary process. They will never get aboard the Finland train. Be careful, they’ve got guns. They can go fuck themselves! Meanwhile, like a good Jew, while Pannella is jumping up and down spouting his usual pacifist nonsense, I bend down and pick up the coins – a few thousand lire, which should provide the price of a decent pizza this evening. (Rome – 11 September)
Folio 92
In Rome today, waiting for the final round. Very heavy pressure from the press, total provocations, a complete scandal. They are gnawing at my image like a pack of rats. I find it hard to fathom how much of what I have represented in the past few months will remain in the collective imaginary. Maybe nothing. Maybe it will all disappear very fast. I am very tired. I have been working too hard. Maybe after four years in prison my re-entry into the world could have been organized more cautiously. But what else could I have done? It was important to play this moment of opportunity, to use it to the hilt, to place the problems of a political resolution on the table of the institutional negotiations. I think I have kept my promise, without sparing myself. As they used to say in the old days: my conscience is at ease with itself. More than this I could not have done. Now it’s up to other people to do the talking. If they let me move forward I shall move forward. And if not …
Another discussion with Rossana today. I have the impression that the possibilities of the confrontation have been exhausted. How can one hope to create anything positive out of hopes for justice and struggles on the one hand, sickness and institutions on the other? Some people regard the need for a relation with the institutions in the same way a doctor might envisage his relationship with a fatal illness. An unequal battle which nevertheless has to be fought. Pessimism of the intellect. I can only respect people who see things this way. However, this is not the way to get a grip on the world. There is a point in this process of disease where, vice-versa, the sickness is the one that gets hold of you and clouds your brain. Personally I prefer alcohol, and drunkenness, and delirium – the scream of the Furies to the lament of the Fates. Death is not any less distant – the ghosts of my nighttime dreams, which return to haunt me during the day, speak only of that. Here, in my forehead, between the eyes, I have a black and painful hole. My spirit becomes strained in trying to understand why so much pain. And I think I am also experiencing this strain in my relationships with people – too much uncertainty, maybe ambiguity, intensity of concentration and a frightening rigidity in understanding. In reality, as the institutional deadline creeps gradually closer and I have this foreboding of unavoidable disaster – I understand at this point that the material conditions of this political operation of mine, and of this institutional existence of mine, are poised on absolute precariousness. You cannot build on precariousness. On the other hand, freedom – my freedom and that of the comrades – has to be built. During these two months I have lived moments of struggle and the expression of a desire for politics that are irreducible to this institutional mediation. To the same extent that the latter is irreducible to the former. And so? The sickness is beyond curing, and at this stage there is also a risk that it will turn infectious. (Rome – 12 September)
Folio 93
Here, in the Radical Party group in Montecitorio, ever since I arrived they have obliged me to use a room with no windows. Completely panelled in wood. I work in artificial light all day long. It is here that I see people and do interviews, in a continuous and undifferentiated night-time meeting. I hate this room. At night I go a couple of hundred metres down the road, to a studio flat in a building in Campo Marzio. There is a folding bed – which I open with enormous difficulty; and that is where I sleep my nights. I hate this room, so pompous in its furnishings and dirty in its décor.
Has the debate in the House started yet? No, not yet. It seems, however, that the heads of the political parties intend to prolong it for a whole week. Oh well! It seems that I have a very large number of enemies. I live between these two loathsome rooms like being trapped in a den. My energy is destroyed in an impossible defence. Like a hunted animal, caught by its hunters now, in a trap from which it feels it can’t free itself. I remain, however, a fighting animal. Comrades arrive from the south. They tell me about the resumption of organizing work and the building of new social centres – this is happening a little bit everywhere. For the freedom of the comrades in prison, for peace, for proletarian recomposition – this is what they talk about.
I take a long hard look at this place in which I find myself. Italian democracy is, unfortunately, nothing more than a gang of criminals. Here the incompatibility, in a period of crisis, between capitalist development and democratic government becomes caricatural: crooks, thieves, businessmen with their hands in the public till, mafiosi – the scene is like something out of the Threepenny Opera. What can I say to the comrades who come to see me, except ‘Take a look around you – what is to be done?’ We are in need of something different. We need to rebuild movement and power. We have to strip of all its credibility this corpse-like institutionality and pull people out of their passivity. They need to speak out and tell their truth and their needs! The work is long, but at least this time we know where we are trying to reach – if power is this perversion, we have to build a different power. And now the news has just arrived that the party begins tomorrow. (Rome – 13 September)
Folio 94
Today I read this document in Parliament:
Madam Speaker and honourable members, in what follows I am turning to you to call for the ‘authorization to proceed’ regarding the trials against me which are currently under way and which all arise out of that single complex of trials known as the ‘7 April case’; and, on the other hand, to ask you to reject the call for authorization to proceed to my arrest for the trials involved in that case. Inevitably I will have to summarize for you, extremely briefly, the history of this trial and of the four years and five months that have elapsed since the whole thing began.
The first phase began when I was arrested in Padova on 7 April 1979, on the charge of being the head of the Red Brigades and of other armed groups hierarchically and functionally linked to the Red Brigades, and of having taken part materially in (a) the kidnapping, (b) the so-called negotiations and (c) the killing of the Hon. Aldo Moro. Within a short time the charge was extended so as to include a charge of armed insurrection against the powers of the state, and the trial was taken on by the Rome magistracy.
Honourable colleagues, I know what the kidnapping of Aldo Moro represented for this House and for the institutions of the state, and I fully understand the high drama of that period and your emotions at the time. At the same time, however, I have to ask you to understand what those accusations meant for myself, who was innocent of them.
Then came a second phase. On 21 December 1979 and during the early months of 1980, the accusation that I was the leader of the Red Brigades and that I had taken part in the killing of Moro collapsed. It was replaced by a series of other charges, related to the part played by myself in the organization known as Potere Operaio in the period 1968–73 and to my involvement in the birth of that diffuse phenomenon of social opposition which was known as ‘autonomia operaia’ [‘workers’ autonomy’] in, and exclusively in, the period 1973–5.
In other words, the context of the charges against me was completely changed, but it retained its pharaonic extension into charges of armed insurrection against the powers of the state.
During the course of 1980, precisely in the period of the collapse of the accusation that I was part of the Red Brigades, I was the subject of about twenty further arrest warrants and notifications of investigation for a total of seventeen despicable murders, including that of my friend Judge Alessandrini.
On 30 March 1980 a third phase began. The authorization was issued for me to be sent for trial. Nothing remained of any of the preceding charges, either the ones related to the Moro case or those that had emerged i
n the second phase of the proceedings against me. However, various elements of the initial theorem remained in place, on the basis of an alleged unity between all the subversive forces in existence at that time and of an organizational continuity which the prosecution claimed to have existed between the movement of ’68 and the autonomist social movements of the ’70s.
On this basis the accusation of armed insurrection against the powers of the state still stood. As regards specific facts – or so-called facts – in the document which sent me for trial, we saw the collapse of the charge related to the odious killing of one of my dearest friends, Carlo Saronio. But other specific facts remained, for which I was accused solely by virtue of being the presumed head of a non-existent and completely undefined organization: the famous ‘O’, a responsibility which I have always denied, and which I am certain that I can refute in the course of the trials for which I myself am requesting the authorization that they be restarted.
In the light of the relative fragility and continuously shifting nature of the charges in terms of specific facts, and, on the other hand, in the face of the solid and permanent nature of the accusation of armed insurrection, it seemed to me, and to a broad swathe of public opinion, that the continued application of the charge of armed insurrection had more to do with political responsibilities than with material responsibilities and that the ‘7 April case’ was a political trial – driven, promoted, conducted and guided by political motives. This feeling was confirmed by statements made by not inconsiderable sections of the magistracy itself, who had analysed the 7 April case and had (belatedly) admitted that it was based only on a political intuition. I should say that this is also the substance of the report drawn up by the Hon. De Luca, which identifies the procedural irregularities that underpinned the theorem and multiplied even as it was being constructed – except that the report then went on to say that they were irrelevant and reproposed the political and prejudicial notion of the unity of the whole subversive project, an accusation which not even the final charges of today have been able to sustain.
Honourable colleagues, I am not asking you to declare that I am innocent. I am only asking that, in your role as members of this House, you do not accept the positions of those who have pre-judged the issue.
So the 7 April case is a political trial. Unlike many defenders of civil rights, I fully understand how the state and its normal juridical powers should have the option of embarking on political trials at times of major threats to constitutional order. But at the same time I do not accept a situation in which this function is concealed behind a formalistic hypocrisy. I refuse the fact of having to defend myself against charges of another kind and in another place. When things become political, I affirm my right to discuss them politically.
Furthermore, I would remind you that, when political trials become a function of the state itself, there is a very strong danger of a degradation of the institutions; when everything is subsumed under a logic of ‘you are either with us or against us’, some of the fundamental rules of democratic legitimation inevitably collapse.
Now, when behind all this talk of major threats to the institutions party-political interests are also concealed which attempt to subordinate a very high and delicate function of the state to contingent political ends – and at this moment of particular peril they start setting in motion dubious compromises and coalitions – then, honourable colleagues, it seems to me that the problem becomes extremely serious.
All this, therefore, has to be opened up to debate and discussion. Not only because I am here as a representative of the people, and hence I exercise the function of representing a significant sector of public opinion in this country, but also, honourable colleagues, because the nature of the thing you are judging cannot possibly be eliminated from the judgement you are called upon to express.
So: I have been charged with political and moral responsibility for the social struggles which took place in Italy during the 1970s. I do not deny these responsibilities, and this is what we have to discuss here. I simply want to offer my contribution.
Of what political and moral responsibilities do I feel myself to be guilty? Certainly not of having maintained, defended or directed terrorist activities, associations or groups. I have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. In fact I have always fought against terrorism, in a manner that has been linear, coherent and continuous, both in prison and outside. I accept, however, the responsibility of having taken part – through my writings and thoughts – in the movement of social transformation which developed in Italy throughout the ’70s, on the side of the exploited classes. These were movements for the transformation of life and of the relations of production. From 1968 onwards, albeit for a brief period, they pitted a social majority against an institutional minority. These movements gave expression to a concrete utopia of changing consciousness and of changing political relationships; subsequently they also developed into the mass hard-line positions and violence which characterized the movements of antagonism in the years of crisis.
The passions that were nurtured at that time by great masses of workers, women and young people were not abstract passions – they were concrete needs. Needs for freedom, for community, for wages, for housing, for culture, and for a different quality of life and social relations. We believed that the crisis could be resolved without any institutional compromise. That this did not happen is demonstrated by recent history and, not superficially, by the very physiognomy of this Parliament. We believed that alternative spaces of freedom and new forms of popular participation could be built.
These problems have not been removed through repression, and indeed their resolution remains incumbent on this Parliament. Our hopes could not be realized. Certainly, in the clash with the blind forces of reaction – often, too often, these were lurking within the actual structures of the state, and demonstrably within various corporative and party bureaucracies – the movement and its desire for transformation can be presented as elements subversive of the institutions. I do not deny it – but in this crisis of ours, and within this troubled relationship between society and its institutions, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, as they say.
On the other hand, it is absurd to create vicious circles within which the clash between people’s desire for change and the institutions’ urgent need to control such movements creates moments of exclusion and criminalization – of repression pure and simple. The events of 7 April 1979, following on the shameful initiative by the procurator in Padova, which was then picked up and amplified by the procurator in Rome, have created a dramatic situation. The claim that the autonomy movement was the same thing as the forces of terrorism – which lived alongside it, certainly not without mutual contaminations, but parasitically, on the basis of organizational traditions, ideological driving forces and strategies which were in no sense unifiable – has created a dramatic situation for many social subjects, both individual and collective. Every possibility of internal political mediation within the movement was removed; all possibility of political representation was denied. The alternatives were all too easily at hand. Some people went into drugs, as an individual solution (the terrible death toll from drug usage is rarely if ever cited). Or they went into retreat – the withdrawal of an entire generation into voluntary exile from the political life of the country. Or the organization of desperation led to the creation of scattered groupings, engaged in the murderous and destructive activity of terrorism.
Diary of an Escape Page 25