[The following article appeared in the February 8 issue of La Gauche, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Ré- volutionnaire des Travailleurs (Revolutionary Workers' League), Belgian section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Face of Repression
Last September, the newspaper Lotta Continua stated that there are more political prisoners in Italy today than there were at the height of fascism. The far-left organizations estimate that some 70 percent of their members are either in prison, under preventive detention, or being prosecuted.
Between March 1 and June 6, 1972, a total of 1,272 persons were arrested, sentenced, or indicted for political crimes - participating in demonstrations, strikes, press offenses, distribution of political literature, etc.
In mid-July 1972, the trade unions revealed that 3,340 workers had been indicted since January 1971. Here are some examples of the wave of repression:
• July 1972: forty-five members of Potere Operaio [Workers Power] were indicted for "association with malefactors" and for "subversive and antinational propaganda."
• End of July 1972: 300 members of Lotta Continua arrested; same charges.
• Beginning of August 1972: 217 members of a Marxist-Leninist organization arrested in Turin; same charges.
• End of July 1972 in Cagliari (Sardinia): 146 workers were informed that they were being prosecuted for striking repeatedly over a two-year period.
Italian police have an excellent file system that allows them to administer doses of repression and to prosecute members of any group depending on the exigencies of the moment. The wave of indictments has been accom- 202
panied by spectacular police actions. (On August 10, 1972, for example, 5,166 carabinieri carried out interrogations of 400,000 persons.)
repression is mainly
Now, this aimed at the radical base of the tradeunion movement and at the extraparliamentary far left.
Two names stand out as symbolic of this policy: Pietro Valpreda and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
The 'Anarchist Monster'
Pietro Valpreda was arrested on December 15, 1969, after a bomb exploded in a Milan bank, killing fourteen and wounding dozens. The attack was timely for the regime: The long, hot summer of 1969 and the strike wave that preceded it had triggered an unprecedented radicalization, the effect of which was a series of factory occupations and formation of factory councils.
Immediately, the police investigation of the bombing went after only the left. The year 1970 opened with a series of searches and arrests, followed by a press campaign directed not only against the extraparliamentary left but also against the traditional organizations of the workers' movement (socialist, communist, and trade-union). At the same time, attacks and demonstrations by fascists were on the rise.
Government officials, magistrates, police commissioners, and bourgeois spokesmen all denounced the actions of the allegedly "opposite but complementary extremisms" — the far left's exsupposedly preparing the cesses ground for the far right.
The Italian Communist party seemed to support this view also, since it called for opposing the rise of fascism with the formation of an "antifascist front" oriented toward the rightwing parties. Also, after the bombing, the unions called off a big strike.
It was also the far left alone that tried to prove Valpreda's innocence. In 1970, the Trotskyist publishing house Samona and Savelli published
Etat massacre, the results of a vigorous counterinvestigation. The work named the men whom the Justice Ministry now considers the prime suspects in the Milan bombings: the fascists Freda and Ventura and - the "brains" behind the whole thing-Pino Rauti, leader of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano [MSI- Italian Social Movement] and the Italian far right's liaison with the Greek colonels.
The Witnesses Disappear
It took four years for the Justice Ministry to get around to finding the perpetrators of this provocation that the bureaucratic-police apparatus had so skillfully used against the left. In the meantime, three leading editors of the far-left newspaper Lotta Continua had been convicted of publishing articles on the Valpreda affair without the traditional left parties, Socialist or Communist, coming to their defense.
The police obstinately refused to seek the guilty ones any place but in the far-left organizations. This is especially suspect since both a police spy and a few fascist provocateurs had been operating in the March 22 Circles, the group to which Valpreda belonged.
In the course of the investigation fourteen (14!) witnesses died, most often under mysterious or very improbable circumstances. One of them supposedly threw himself out the window of a hospital; there were several other "suicides." The first examining magistrate to start looking into the far right, Mr. Sinagra from Milan, was indicted in February 1972 for revealing professional secrets. Magistrate Stiz from Trevise, the man who definitively directed the investigation toward the far right, was obliged for several months to carry the results of the investigation on his person.
In May 1972 Commissioner Calabresi, the man responsible for the investigation of what happened to the anarchist Pinelli, was attacked in front of his house. (Pinelli was arrested with Valpreda, but died when he "fell out of the window of police headquarters in Milan.")
'While Handling Explosives'
The red hunt was interrupted by the Feltrinelli affair. This world-renowned far-left publisher had previously been bothered by the police on nit-picking charges. In March 1972 his horribly mangled body was found at the base of an electric-power pylon. The police had their story all prepared: Feltrinelli wanted to launch an urban guerrilla war and was killed while handling explosives with which he was trying to blow up the power line.
A lawyer from Genoa, former Communist party member Carlo Lazagna, was held in custody for five months because his car was found in the vicinity of the power pylon. Then the investigation was quashed; we will soon see why.
In the meantime - coincidentally enough, just before the triennial renewing of collective bargaining for wage contracts-repression against the left was intensified. In the course of the election campaign, responses to fascist provocations served as excuses for innumerable indictments against far-left militants. Sentences were heavy: from several months to several years in prison.
Thus, on June 13, 1972, two members of Potere Operaio got five months in jail on charges of "inciting to overthrow the state." More than ever, it is the laws of the fascist 1931 penal code (still in force) that are being applied, and in a typically fascist manner. It is in this atmosphere that the fascist leader Almirante was able to call for "physical confliet with the communists" and in this atmosphere that the attacks by fascist goons cost the life of Mario Lupo, a member of Lotta Continua who was stabbed to death in Parma on August 25, 1972.
The Minister of the Interior Covers Up ... And Protects
Thus, the Valpreda affair supplied the kickoff for a huge campaign of antiworker and anticommunist repression that went so far as to hit even the Socialist party, a member of the government coalition. It is easy to see who profited by the crime. But today, we also know who organized it and who carried it out. Not the "anarchist monster" Valpreda (that's what the police commissioner called him) and his comrades Borghese and February 26, 1973
ALMIRANTE: Calls for physical attacks on the Communists.
Gargamelli (who were finally freed in December 1972 after three years preventive detention), but rather the fascists — "citizens above suspicion" like Freda, Ventura, and Rauti. (Rauti, because of parliamentary immunity, is still on the loose.)
These fascist terrorists had already been spotted before the Milan massacre occurred by the Padua chief commissioner Juliano, who was seeking the perpetrators of a bombing attack in that city. But suddenly, the main prosecution witness was killed. As for Commissioner Juliano, he was brought to trial!
The Valpreda investigation came off in the same manner. Reports denouncing the fascists as responsible "disappeared" in the files of the "political branch" of the Milan or Rome police stations or in the "secret affairs" archives of the Ministry of the Interior. It was the same with the evidence. In short, it was strictly Z, Italian-style, which is all the more understandable when one considers the many dealings the Italian far right has with the Athens regime.
While all this was going on, the Italian far left was waging a campaign around the case of Valpreda and his friends, and the militancy of the working class was on the rise. And there is nothing like an atmosphere of popular mobilization and proletarian militancy for giving the magistrates a little backbone and making them independent of the regime. In the end, the actions of a few honest magistrates enabled them to reveal the plot. On charges of stealing and destroying evidence that would have allowed for immediate identification of those responsible for the Milan massacre, three high officials were indicted: Bonaventura Provenza, head of the political branch of the Rome police; Antonio Allegra, head of the political branch of the Milan police (he was the one in charge of the "investigation" of Feltrinelli's death); and Elvio Cartenacci, former director of the bureau of "secret affairs" in the Ministry of the Interior.
Watchdogs and Armed Bands:
Same Struggle
So it is at the summit that the guilty ones are found. The bourgeois state apparatus, led by the minister of the interior, covered for, protected, and encouraged fascist terrorists. And, just to show that the collusion between the watchdogs and armed bands of capital is still continuing, the two magistrates who compiled the investigation have been penalized. Judge Stiz was transferred to civil affairs; Judge Firsconaro has been retired for "administrative reasons."
All this has been scarcely mentioned in the bourgeois press. Le Monde, always so faithful to complete objectivity, thought it had to lace its report on the freeing of the "anarchist dancer" [Valpreda is a dancer] with a nuanced version of the theory of "opposite extremisms" (there's the objectivity!). Then it was forced to publish a letter from the far-left newspaper Il Manifesto informing its readers that the Valpreda affair had become the Italian Dreyfus case. (The Manifesto group symbolically ran Valpreda as a candidate in the last elections; this was supported by the Italian section of the Fourth International.)
Against the Fascist Beast and the Armed Bands of Capital:
Workers' Self-Defense
Still, only a corner of the veil has been lifted so far. The ties between the state apparatus and fascist and criminal gangs are innumerable. Thus, the Italian parliament appointed an anti-Mafia commission; they all resigned - except one, and he is specifically an agent of the "honorable society" whose connections with the Italian Christian Democrats are well known. The MSI is able to stage its provocation with impunity under the zealous protection of the police and counting on its parliamentary supporters, like General De Lorenzo, former commander of the carabinieri (and once implicated in a conspiracy of SIFAR, the military intelligence)
and Admiral Birinobres, formerly a high commander of NATO.
The Italian working class must react to the mass-based fascist terror, to the systematic provocations, to the witch-hunt and police repression. Last October's show of force in the fascist fief Reggio de Calabre, when 50,000 metalworkers marched, and the following nationwide strike, were a step forward in becoming conscious of this need. The vanguard organizations must contribute to the mobilization of the working class and to the organization of workers' self-defense, without bothering about a fake "legality."
give up their studies and report for military service. On February 14, police broke up meetings on the campus of the polytechnic institute, arresting dozens of students. Eleven were scheduled to go to trial on February 17.
The February 16 student action that was attacked by the police began as a rally against the draft law and in defense of the eleven indicted students. It started at the University of Athens Law School. When the students were confronted by a large contingent of armed police, they occupied two floors of the university building and held a five-hour-long rally inside. The New York Times reported that the main slogans chanted were "Fascism will not pass," "Down with the decree," and not pass, vown with me decree, and "Freedom for the eleven."