Dr. George Tiller

http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/articles/general/516-dr-tillers-murder-fascist-terrorism-and-its-pampered-apologists

Dr. Tiller's Murder: Fascist Terrorism and Its Pampered Apologists

by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice
Statement on behalf of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition

The rampant terrorism and violence against women and health care professionals who dare to provide women's health services took its latest victim when Dr. George Tiller was brutally gunned down in his church on Sunday in Wichita, Kansas.

The government and the corporate media coddle these anti-women terrorists.

In the last 30 years, right-wing bigots have carried out 5,800 reported acts of violence against women's health care providers, including targeted assassination, bombings, arsons, death threats, kidnappings and assaults, according to NARAL.

Hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of women have been assaulted and harassed by the right wing as they tried to see a doctor.

The Fascist Strategy

By targeting and intimidating health care providers, the fascist movement hopes to effectively ban abortion services in the United States. If they were to succeed, not only would it deprive women of their fundamental right to control their own bodies, it would be a health care catastrophe. One out of three women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45, according to Planned Parenthood.

The only question is whether women will be maimed or left to die because they cannot access quality health providers. Dr. Tiller took over his medical practice from his father, a doctor who began performing abortions himself in the 1940s after a patient whom he refused to help died in a back-alley abortion.

Dr. Tiller, like many other health care heroes, kept providing abortion services to women despite the threats. He had been shot previously in both arms; had his office bombed, shot at and frequently vandalized; and he and his patients were routinely threatened, intimidated and attacked.

Dr. Tiller kept providing health care services because, as his family said in a statement, he was “a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.” He was past retirement age, with four children and 10 grandchildren, and he lived under a virtual military siege because of the terrorist threats. But he didn't stop.

It Wasn't Just the Gunman

This assassination is the culmination of a coordinated assault by the right wing. This included the Kansas Attorney General's efforts to prosecute Tiller, the demonization of Dr. Tiller by Bill O'Reilly, who ran dozens of hit pieces targeting him as a "murderer," and by "Operation Rescue," which prominently called him "America's Doctor of Death."

In the aftermath of the murder, amid reports that the killer had worked with them, Operation Rescue scrambled to take down their prominent "Tiller Watch" webpage, apparently sanitizing it, while their founder continued to call Dr. Tiller a "mass murderer” and held a press conference to do so.

The New York Times coverage of the murder was pathetic. On its front page it stated, "Officials offered little insight into the motive, saying that they believed it was 'the act of an isolated individual' but that they were also looking into 'his history, his family, his associates.'"

The decision to question or suggest uncertainty as to the killer’s "motive" reflects an effort to depoliticize and isolate this most violent of political acts and to disconnect the killing from right-wing groups who seek as their goal to deprive women of their rights using assassination as they see fit. Some right-wing groups and leaders have been quick to announce that the killing was not a homicide, but a justifiable act of "salvation."

The mass media has leapt to the defense of many anti-woman, right-wing groups who directly targeted Dr. Tiller by giving their spokespeople more time in the wake of Dr. Tiller's death to express their primary grievance with his murder -- that it might make them look bad.

Fake Terrorism and Real Terrorism

In recent months, Dr. Tiller reported to the FBI that the threats were increasing.

Obviously, stopping real terrorism is not a "priority" for the FBI, which has allocated limitless resources to infiltrate and sabotage lawful political organizing all over the country. The FBI and police have disrupted and spied on progressive organizations that built a powerful anti-war movement in the last years. They have paid agents provocateur to infiltrate and frame up organizations and individuals engaged in dissent.

Nor is any mosque or Muslim community center safe from FBI infiltration and disruption activities. From Southern California to upstate New York, undercover FBI agents are trying to entrap Muslim youth into "terrorist" plots that emanate from the FBI itself.

The U.S. government's use of the terrorist label is used to frame up and imprison Muslims in the United States. Just last week in Dallas, representatives of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) were sentenced to as much as 65 years in prison for the “terrorist” crime of raising money for desperately needed humanitarian relief. HLF had been the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The charity's "crime" was that the humanitarian relief was going to those starving and dying in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. The U.S. government has determined that it is an act of terrorism to get medicine to hospitals and food to children when U.S. foreign policy supports the strangulation of a civilian population for geostrategic reasons.

When Anthrax Threats Were No Big Deal

Yet, when it comes to the right-wing organizations that engage in violence and threats, the FBI and the corporate media are conspicuously mute.

For instance, shortly after the September 11 attacks, letters containing anthrax were sent to media and Senate offices. Hundreds of anthrax threats were also sent to reproductive health clinics, according to the website of NARAL, which states: "Between October 15 and 23, 2001, more than 250 abortion and family planning clinics in 17 states and the District of Columbia received letters purporting to contain anthrax. In each instance, a powdery substance was accompanied by a letter stating, 'You have been exposed to anthrax. We are going to kill all of you.' An additional 270 letters were sent to clinics during the first week of November."

Very few people know about this kind of extreme terrorist intimidation. Can you imagine the reaction of the FBI and the media if anti-war organizers or Arab Americans were linked to anthrax threat letters? There would be screaming headlines and nationwide police sweeps.

Coddling Right Wing Terrorists

But in 2007, in Washington, D.C., when a man showed up at an immigrant rights rally, covertly carrying a map of the demonstration area with sight lines drawn on it, with a cache of weapons including a converted fully automatic M1-Carbine and apparent plans to massacre participants, you probably never heard about it. Why? Because the man, Tyler Froatz, was a right-wing vigilante bent on attacking immigrants and their supporters.

Froatz, who organized with the Free Republic and acted as a spokesman for the Minuteman, stalked a May Day demonstration in 2007. He was arrested after he was confronted by a courageous young woman working as an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition. She was then assaulted by him when she objected to the racist signs he was posting depicting the graphic slaughter of immigrants, including pregnant women and children.

In addition to the weapons Froatz brought with him, in his apartment was found a large arsenal of rifles, handguns, ammunition, a Molotov cocktail, a hand grenade and a 100,000-volt taser gun.

So is Froatz in the special terrorist prisons in Terre Haute or Marion? No. He was released to the custody of his parents in Connecticut and thereafter allowed to plead to a minor weapons charge. The U.S. Attorney’s Office never charged him with any terrorism-related offense or hate-crimes offense. And today, members of Froatz’s group, the Free Republic, celebrated this latest cold-blooded terrorist murder of Dr. Tiller in their postings.

More than Bullet-Proof Vests and Federal Marshals: A New Strategy is Needed

The murder of Dr. Tiller is a misogynist attack against all women. It is also the foreseeable outcome of a climate of bigotry and vilification fostered by the right wing, normalized by the media and the U.S. government.

A political calculus has been made by the government as to what will be deemed terrorism: what political acts will be crushed and what political violence will be supported or tolerated. As it stands, there is no mobilized effective counter to this fascist violence and the threat that it poses. It’s time for a new strategy and a new challenge.

There must be a multi-faceted mobilization of women themselves and of all those men who stand with us against anti-woman bigotry.

Nikita Kalin

http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/state/293-russian-anarchist-anti-fascist-murdered-request-for-support.html

Russian anarchist anti-fascist murdered

Sunday, 04 March 2012 

On the 9th of February at 6:30am in area of the institute "FIAN", a janitor found the body of Nikita Kalin, born 1991. At 8:00am police arrived, and at 11:00am, police contacted the mother of the murder victim. Nikita was from a simple working class family and never hide his anti-fascist and anarchist views. According to his mother, Nikita was stabbed 61 times and his ribs fractured multiple times, as well as having head wounds as well. No property was stolen. Currently a murder suspect has been arrested and the blood of Nikita was found on their clothes

It is obvious that Nikita was attacked by a group. The police also told the mother off the record that the detained suspect is a National Socialist activist and that he refuses to name any other co-conspirators. Despite the brutality of the murder the investigation has still not questioned the mother of Nikita, or his friend who was the last person who saw him alive. Due to this we suspect that there will be an attempt to cover the case, as often happens in Russia. The accused has already hired a lawyer

We suspect that the investigation is working in interests of the arrested,
and thus support is necessary. At this point, a human rights organisation has provided a lawyer, but funds are still needed for funeral costs.

[…]

Carlos Javier Palomino

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/dec2007/spai-d08.shtml

Spain: 16-year-old murdered by fascist

By Vicky Short

8 December 2007

Violent social and political conflicts have exploded in Spain’s main towns, following the passing of the Law of Historical Memory by the Spanish Congress last month. The Law officially condemns the mass executions and other crimes carried out during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the military dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975) that followed The conflicts have already claimed several victims, one fatal, and provoked pitched battles between police and anti-fascist demonstrators. Several youth have been stabbed by neo-Nazi and racist thugs, and beaten up and imprisoned by the police.

One of the first confrontations took place in the Madrid Underground on Sunday November 11. Sixteen-year-old Carlos Javier Palomino died on the spot in the station of Legazpi after being stabbed in the heart. Another 19-year-old male received a stab wound to the chest, which caused his lung to collapse. He was taken in critical condition to hospital. Another youth was shot in the eye later by police Others sustained lesser injuries.

The young people were travelling in a group with the intention of stopping a demonstration organised by the ultra-right-wing party “Democracia Nacional” in Usera, a working class district where many immigrants live. The demonstration was extremely provocative, called under slogans such as “Against anti-Spanish racism” and “Against immigration.” It had been authorised by the Madrid government and was protected by hundreds of policemen. The fascist Frente Nacional (National Front) later held another protest against immigrants, with the slogan “For your security and that of your family.”

After the stabbing, 24-year-old Josué Estébanez de la Hija, an Army soldier serving in the King’s Immemorial Regiment, was pursued and caught outside the Underground station. After being treated in hospital, he was taken into custody, suspected of carrying out the fatal stabbing of Carlos Javier Palomino. The soldier, of reported Nazi leanings, was travelling in the same train in order to take part in the Usera racist demonstration.

Since the death of Palomino, several demonstrations have been organised to protest his killing all over Spain. Most of them have ended in battles with riot police, who have been out in force. One demonstration in Caceres on November 22 ended in a further stabbing by a Nazi supporter of an anti-fascist youth, who is gravely ill in hospital. Many more youngsters have been badly hurt, either by fascist thugs or the riot police in further demonstrations.

The anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrations have coincided with numerous rallies organised by extreme right-wing groups, including the fascist Falange Española. There were rallies honouring the dictator Francisco Franco on the anniversary of his death on November 20, 1975, and also the founder of the fascist movement, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. These included a demonstration that marched from Madrid to the Valle de los Caidos (the Valley of the Fallen), the monument built inside a mountain near Madrid by the slave labour of Franco’s republican prisoners, where Franco and Primo de Rivera’s tombs occupy the place of honour. With their stiff-armed salutes and cries of “Viva España!,” the fascists gathered outside the tomb of the late dictator in advance of the implementation of the law. There were chants of “Reds no, Reds no!” and (Socialist Party Prime Minister) “Zapatero—you son of a bitch!”

Many of those in attendance said they would defy the new law. Jorge Espinos, a 21-year-old economics student, does not believe the government has the will to defy the fascists. “We will come regardless.... I am here because I am Spanish, and Catholic, to honour the memory of our Caudillo, the purest sword in Europe,” before adding: “My grandfather killed 156 reds with his machine gun in Galicia in 1936, and then went off to eat seafood.”

The most violent battles between anti-fascist demonstrators and the riot police occurred in front of the Falange headquarters, in Reyes Catolicos Street in Madrid, when dozens of demonstrators attempted to protest outside the nearby cathedral where a memorial to Franco was taking place. Many youth were hurt. The number of injured was kept down because the young people erected barricades to stop the advance of the police.

Many videos depicting the attacks by police on protests can be found on the front pages of Spanish daily newspapers. The youth taking part in these anti-fascist demonstrations are being dubbed in the media as “redskins,” “okupa” (squatters), “punks” and “ ‘truly violent’ anarchists.” Dozens of them have been arrested and beaten up.

“Elvira,” a reader of El Pais, the daily paper closest to the governing Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), commented on November 21, “I cannot understand why, in this supposed democracy...a mass is allowed [to be celebrated] in honour to the biggest assassin that Spain has had, Franco. That the singing of the Cara al Sol [the fascist hymn] is permitted. And that people who are demonstrating against these acts and against the assassination of our comrade Carlos are detained, stopped and attacked. I disagree. The freedom of speech is a right.”

Calls to ban demonstrations have been heeded by local governments that have prohibited some anti-fascist demonstrations, while openly racist and fascist ones are allowed and protected by police. Their argument is that the demonstrations against immigrants and working people are being called by legal political parties that have to be allowed their freedom of speech. Despite the ban on counter-demonstrations, these have gone ahead in the face of a massive police presence. Coshes and rubber bullets have been used on the demonstrators.

Students all over Spain have also organised demonstrations in protest at the murder of Palomino, as well as regional general strikes. Again, police have used brute force against them.

Some demonstrators n the Madrid district of Prosperidad carried political placards reading, “Aznar, Acebes and Fraga [the right-wing opposition Popular Party leaders], their fascism is catching” and “PP, refuge for fascists?” They were forced to withdraw them by the organisers. The PP was founded after the death of Franco as a parliamentary vehicle for former Falangists. Manuel Fraga, who had been a minister under Franco, was one of the founders of the party. José Maria Aznar was the PP Prime Minister in the last administration, and Angel Acebes is the party’s current general secretary.

The Catholic Church has been in the forefront of defying the provisions of the new law, and organised several pro-Franco acts. It has celebrated masses all over the country, including at the Valley of the Fallen, where a rally was also staged in contravention of the legal prohibition of events there. By staging nominally “religious acts” such as masses for the soul of the dictator Franco and the founder of the Falange Espanola, the Church and its supporters have encouraged and in many cases organised extreme right-wing forces.

Björn Söderberg

http://libcom.org/library/sac-activist-murdered-fascists

SAC Activist Murdered by Fascists

Björn Söderberg, a veteran union activist in the Swedish syndicalist union, Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation, SAC, was murdered by fascists on the evening of October the 12th. Söderberg, in his forties, was shot three times outside his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Sätra. One shot was directly through the head.

He had recently played a crucial role in exposing a well-known fascist, Robert Vesterlund, at his workplace in southern Stockholm. The fascist had won the confidence of his work-mates and had been elected as the local union steward. Upon being exposed however, the fascist was removed from his union position and later left the union. In subsequent newspaper articles Vesterlund was quoted as saying "It's time to get tough." Since then, Vesterlund kept close tabs on Söderberg, amongst other things obtaining his passport photo (by law, a public document in Sweden).

Vesterlund's fascist career began in the youth organisation of the fascist parliamentary party Sverigedemokraterna (the Sweden Democrats). He recently joined the notoriously violent Swedish nazi group, Ariska Broderskapet (Aryan Brotherhood). Vesterlund was also involved, though never questioned by the police, in a car-bombing incident in June 1999, in which an anti-fascist journalist and his eight-year-old son were badly injured.

The police have arrested three fascists suspected in connection with Söderberg’s murder.

The SAC held demonstrations across Sweden in memory of Söderberg and against fascist violence on Saturday the 23rd of October. The same day, fascists bombed the SAC-owned house Joe Hill Gården in Gävle. As well as being the offices of the local federation of SAC, the house has great symbolic value as the birth place of Joe Hill. (Joe Hill left Sweden and emigrated to the United States where he earned a name for himself within the ranks of American syndicalist union IWW-Industrial Workers of the World). No one was killed, but parts of the house were demolished.

The demonstrations were, with a few exceptions, organised by the Swedish syndicalists, though other groups such as the large reformist unions, bolsheviks and other leftist organisations gave their support. Demonstrations ranged from 20,000 people in Stockholm, 6000 in Gothenburg, 3000 in Malmö, down to the hundreds in small towns like Borås and Luleå. In all, 25 cities and towns throughout the country saw demos. The Syndicalist Youth federation, SUF, criticised attempts in certain places to tone down the political content of the protests as going "directly against the views held by Björn Söderberg, in whose memory they were holding the manifestation, and against the principles of syndicalism!" The SUF added, "The fascists of Sweden understand that the Swedish syndicalists and workers movement as a whole are the only threat they have to take on seriously."

The most brutal fascists are involved in the NSF (National Socialist Front) and Combat 18. Sweden is also one of the largest exporters of "white power" music. The murder comes against a background of increasing fascist attacks on both anti-fascists and the police. However, according to AntiFascistisk Aktion, "the Swedish State continues to portray anti-fascists and extra-parliamentary activists as "public enemies no.1", while remaining docile in the face of repeated fascist violence." They draw the logical conclusion: "we shall be forced to defend ourselves. The best defence is a good offence."

Carlo Rosselli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rosselli

Carlo Rosselli

Carlo Rosselli (16 November 1899 – 9 June 1937) was an Italian political leader, journalist, historian and anti-fascist activist, first in Italy then abroad. He developed a theory of reformist, non-Marxist Socialism inspired by the British Labour movement, that he described as "liberal Socialism". Rosselli founded the anti-fascist militant movement Giustizia e Libertà.[1] Rosselli personally took part in combat in the Spanish Civil War where he served on the Republican side.[2]

Life

Birth, war and studies

Rosselli was born in Rome to a wealthy Tuscan Jewish family. His mother, Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, had been active in republican politics and thought and had participated in the unification of Italy. In 1903 he was taken to Florence with his mother and siblings. During the First World War he joined the Italian armed forces and fought in the alpine campaign, rising to the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, thanks to his brother Nello, he studied in Florence with Gaetano Salvemini, who was to be from then a constant companion of both the Rosselli brothers. It was in this period that he became a socialist, sympathetic to the reformist ideas of Filippo Turati, in contrast to that revolutionary thinking of Giacinto Menotti Serrati. In 1921 he graduated with a degree in political sciences from the University of Florence with a thesis titled: "sindacalismo" (Syndicalism). Later he undertook a law degree that he would pursue in Turinand Milan, where he met Luigi Einaudi and Piero Gobetti.

He graduated in 1923 from the university of Siena. For some weeks he visited London where he studied the workings of the British Labour Party: the English Labour movement would deeply influence him.

The rise of Fascism

An active supporter of the Partito Socialista Unitario of Turati, Matteotti and Treves, he began writing for "Critica Sociale", a review edited by Turati. After the murder of Matteotti, Rosselli pushed for a more active opposition to Fascism. With the help of Ernesto Rossi and Gaetano Salvemini he founded the clandestine publication "Non mollare". During the following months, fascist violence towards the left became increasingly severe. Ernesto Rossi left the country for France, followed by Salvemini. In February 1926 fellow activist Piero Gobetti was assassinated in Paris by a Fascist hit squad. Still in Italy, Rosselli and Pietro Nenni founded the review "Quarto Stato", which was banned after a few months.

Later in 1926, he organized with Sandro Pertini and Ferruccio Parri the escape of Turati to France. While Pertini followed Turati to France, Parri and Rosselli were captured and convicted for their roles in Turati's escape and sentenced to a period of confinement on the island of Lipari (1927). It is then that Rosselli began to write his most famous work, "Liberal Socialism". In July 1929 he escaped to Tunisia, from where he travelled to France, and the community of Italian antifascists including Emilio Lussu and Francesco Fausto Nitti. Nitti later portrayed Rosselli's adventurous escape in the book Le nostre prigioni e la nostra evasione (Our Prisons and Our Escape) in an Italian edition in 1946 (the 1929 English first edition was titled Escape).

Exile in Paris: Giustizia e Libertà

In 1929, with Lussu, Nitti, and a Parisian circle of refugees which had formed around Salvemini, Rosselli helped found the anti-fascist movement "Giustizia e Libertà". GL various numbers of the review and the notebooks omonimi (with cadence weekly magazine and salary) and was active in the organization of various spectacular actions, notable among which was the flight over Milan di Bassanesi (1930). In 1930 he published, in French, "Socialisme Libéral".

The book was at once a passionate critique of Marxism, a creative synthesis of the democratic socialist revisionism (Bernstein, Turati and Treves) and of classical Italian Liberalism (Francisco Saverio Merlino and Gaetano Salvemini). But it contained also a shattering attack on the Stalinism of the Third International, which had, with the derisive formula of "socialfascism", lumped together social democracy, bourgeois liberalism and fascism. It was not surprising, therefore, when one of the most important Italian Communists, Togliatti, defined "liberal Socialism" "libellous anti-socialism" and Rosselli "a reactionary ideologue who has nothing to do with the working class".

Giustizia e Libertà joined the Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana (The Italian Anti-Fascist Concentration), a union of all the non-communist anti-fascist forces (republican, socialist, nationalist) trying to promote and to coordinate expatriate actions to fight fascism in Italy. They also first published the "Giustizia e Libertà Journals".

After the advent of Nazism in Germany (1933), the paper began to call for insurgency, revolutionary action, and military action in order to stop the Italian and German regimes before they plunge Europe into a tragic war. Spain, they wrote, seems the destiny of all fascist states.

The Spanish civil war

In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War erupted as the fascist-monarchical led army attempted a coup d'état against the republican government of the Popular Front. Rosselli helped lead the Italian anti-fascist supporters of the republican forces, criticizing the neutrality policy of France and Britain, especially as Italy and Germany sent arms and troops in support of the rebels. In August, Rosselli and the GL organized its own brigades of volunteers to support the Spanish Republic.

With Camillo Berneri, Rosselli headed the Matteotti Battalion, a mixed volunteer unit of anarchist, liberal, socialist and communist Italians. The unit was sent to the Aragon front, and participated in a victory against Francoist forces in the Battle of Monte Pelato. Speaking on Barcelona Radio in November, Rosselli made famous the slogan: "Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia" ("Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy").

After falling ill, Rosselli was sent back to Paris, from where he led support for the anti-fascist cause, and proposed an even broader 'popular front' while still remaining critical of the Communist Party of Spain and the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. In 1937, Berneri was killed by Communist forces during a purge of anarchists in Barcelona. With the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Giustizia e Libertà partisans were forced to flee back to France.

Murder

In June 1937 Carlo Rosselli and his brother visited the French resort town of Bagnoles-de-l'Orne. On 9 June the two were killed by a group of "cagoulards", militants of the "Cagoule", a French fascist group,[3][4][5] probably on the orders of Mussolini.[6]

Thought

Carlo Rosselli only published a single book, "Liberal Socialism", in his life. This work marked Rosselli out as a heretic in the Italian left of his time (for which Karl Marx's Das Kapital, variously interpreted, was still the bible). Undoubtedly the influence of the British labour movement, which he knew well, is visible. As a result of the electoral successes of the Labour Party, Rosselli was convinced that the 'norms' of liberal democracy were essential, not only in building Socialism, but also for its concrete realization. This stands in contrast to Leninist tactics, in which these rules, once power is taken, must be set aside. This 'Rossellian' synthesis is that "[parliamentary] liberalism is the method, Socialism is the aim".

The Marxist-Leninist idea of revolution founded on the dictatorship of the proletariat (which he felt, as in the Russian case, was synonymous with the dictatorship of a single party) he rejected in favour of a revolution that—as famously put in the GL program—is a coherent system of structural reforms aimed at the construction of a Socialism; that does not limit, but indeed exalts, freedom of personality and of association. Writing in his final years, Rosselli became more radical in his libertarian positions, defending the social organization of the CNT-FAI he had seen in Anarchist Catalonia and Barcelona during the civil war, and informed by the rise of Nazi Germany.

References

^ Spencer Di Scala. Italian socialism: between politics and history. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Pp. 87.

^ Spencer Di Scala. Italian socialism: between politics and history. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Pp. 87.

^ Stanislao G. Pugliese Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli, Journal of Contemporary History, 32 (1997), pp. 305-319

^ M. Agronsky, Foreign Affairs 17 391 (1938)

^ Rose, Peter Isaac (2005). The Dispossessed: An Anatomy Of Exile. University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 138-139. ISBN 1-55849-466-9

^ Pugliese, Stanislao G. (July 1997). "Death in Exile: The Assassination of Carlo Rosselli". Journal of Contemporary History 32 (3): 305–319. doi:10.1177/002200949703200302.

Works

Carlo Rosselli, Liberal Socialism. Edited by Nadia Urbinati. Translated by William McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994).

Giacomo Matteotti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Matteotti

Giacomo Matteotti; 22 May 1885 – 10 June 1924) was an Italian socialist politician. On 30 May 1924, he openly spoke in the Italian Parliament alleging the Fascists committed fraud in the recently held elections, and denounced the violence they used to gain votes. Eleven days later he was kidnapped and killed by Fascists.

Political career

Matteotti was born a son of a wealthy family, in Fratta Polesine, Province of Rovigo in Veneto.

A graduate in law from the University of Bologna and from early on an activist in the socialist movement and the Italian Socialist Party, he opposed Italy's entry into World War I (and was interned in Sicily during the conflict for this reason).

He was elected deputy three times: in 1919, 1921 and 1924.

As a follower of Filippo Turati, Matteotti became the leader of the United Socialist Party in the Italian Chamber of Deputies after the scission of the Socialist Party. He openly spoke out against Fascism and Benito Mussolini, and for a time was leader of the opposition to the National Fascist Party (PNF). Since 1921 he denounced fascist violence in a pamphlet titled Inchiesta socialista sulle gesta dei fascisti in Italia (Socialist enquiry on the deeds of the fascists in Italy).

Murder

He was murdered on 10 June 1924, after the publication of his book The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination and two fierce and lengthy speeches in the Chamber of Deputies denouncing Fascism.[1]

During a kidnap attempt, he was bundled into a car and stabbed several times with a carpenter's file as he was struggling to escape. His corpse was found near Riano, 20 miles from Rome, on 16 August 1924, after an extensive search.

Five men (Amerigo Dumini - a prominent member of the Fascist secret police, the Ceka, Giuseppe Viola, Albino Volpi, Augusto Malacria and Amleto Poveromo) were arrested a few days after the kidnapping. Only three (Dumini, Volpi and Poveromo) were convicted and shortly after released under amnesty by King Victor Emmanuel III; one, Filippo Panzeri, escaped before the arrests of his accomplices.

Before the trial against the murderers, the High Court of the Senate started a trial against general Emilio De Bono, commander of the MVSN, but he was discharged.

After the Second World War, in 1947, the trial against Francesco Giunta, Cesare Rossi, Dumini, Viola, Poveromo, Malacria, Filippelli and Panzeri was re-opened. Dumini, Viola and Poveromo were sentenced to life imprisonment.

In none of these three trials was evidence found of Mussolini's involvement.[2]

Mussolini's alleged involvement

The involvement of Mussolini in the assassination is much debated.

Historians suggest some different theories. The main biographer of Mussolini, Renzo De Felice, was convinced that the Duce was innocent. Even Aurelio Lepre and Emilio Gentile thought that Mussolini did not want the death of Matteotti.

The former socialist and anti-fascist journalist Carlo Silvestri in 1924 was a harsh accuser of Mussolini; later, when he joined Italian Social Republic, he affirmed that Mussolini showed him Matteotti Case's papers,[3] and eventually he changed his mind.[4] Silvestri became a strong defender of Mussolini's innocence in Matteotti's murder, and suggested that the socialist was killed by a plot, in order both to damage Mussolini's attempt to raise a leftist government (with the participation of Socialists and Popolari) and to cover some scandals in which the Crown (with the American oil company Sinclair Oil) was involved.

De Felice argued that maybe Mussolini himself was a political victim of a plot, and almost surely he was damaged by the crisis that followed the murder. Many fascists left the Party, and his government was about to collapse. Moreover, his secret attempt to bring Socialists and Populars into a new reformist government was ruined.

On the other hand, other historians of the time, including Justin Pollard and Denis Mack Smith, thought Mussolini was probably aware of the assassination plot but that it was ordered and organized by someone else.

Mauro Canali suggests that Mussolini probably did order the murder, as Matteotti uncovered and wanted to make public incriminating documents proving that Mussolini and his associates sold to an American oil company—Sinclair Oil—exclusive rights to all

Italian oil reserves.[5]

Consequences of the murder

The death of Matteotti sparked widespread criticism of Fascism. A general strike was threatened in retaliation.

Since Mussolini's government did not collapse and the King refused to dismiss him, all the anti-fascists (except for the Communist Party of Italy) started to abandon the Chamber of Deputies. They retired on the "Aventine Mount", like ancient Roman plebeians. They thought to force the Crown to act against Mussolini, but on the contrary this strengthened Mussolini. After a few weeks of confusion, Mussolini gained a favourable vote by the Senate of the Kingdom, and tried to defuse the tension with a speech.

Despite pressure from the opposition, Victor Emmanuel III refused to dismiss Mussolini, since the Government was supported by a large majority of the Chamber of Deputies and almost all the Senate of the Kingdom. Moreover, he feared that compelling Mussolini to resign could be considered a coup d'état, that eventually could lead to a civil war between the Army and the Blackshirts.[6]

But during the Summer, the trial against Matteotti's alleged murders and the discovery of the corpse of Matteotti once again spread rage against Mussolini: newspapers launched fierce attacks on him and the fascist movement.

On September the 13th, a right-wing fascist deputy, Armando Casalini, was killed on a tramway as retaliation to Matteotti's murder by the anti-fascist Giovanni Corvi.

During the Autumn of 1924, the extremist-wing of the Fascist Party threatened Mussolini with a coup, and dealt with him on the night of San Silvestro of 1924. Mussolini devised a counter-manoeuvre, and on the 3rd of January 1925 he pronounced in a famous speech,[7] both attacking anti-fascists and confirming that he, and only he, was the leader of Fascism. He challenged the anti-fascists to prosecute him, and claimed proudly that Fascism was the "superb passion of the best youth of Italy" and grimly that "all the violence" was his responsibility, because he had created the climate of violence. Mussolini concluded with a menace: Italy needs stability and Fascism would assure stability to Italy in any manner necessary.

This speech is considered the very beginning of the dictatorship in Italy.

Works

1924 The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, (1969)

Excerpt from Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia"

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/books/homagetocatalonia-01.htm

Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
1938


IN THE Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:

‘Italiano?’

I answered in my bad Spanish: ‘No, Inglés. Y tú?’

‘Italiano.’

As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory. With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war—the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.

Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air—raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies.

Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

All this time I was at the Lenin Barracks, ostensibly in training for the front. When I joined the militia I had been told that I should be sent to the front the next day, but in fact I had to wait while a fresh centuria was got ready. The workers’ militias, hurriedly raised by the trade unions at the beginning of the war, had not yet been organized on an ordinary army basis. The units of command were the ‘section’, of about thirty men, the centuria, of about a hundred men, and the ‘column’, which in practice meant any large number of men. The Lenin Barracks was a block of splendid stone buildings with a riding-school and enormous cobbled courtyards; it had been a cavalry barracks and had been captured during the July fighting. My centuria slept in one of the stables, under the stone mangers where the names of the cavalry chargers were still inscribed. All the horses had been seized and sent to the front, but the whole place still smelt of horse-piss and rotten oats. I was at the barracks about a week. Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs—I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding-school. There were perhaps a thousand men at the barracks, and a score or so of women, apart from the militiamen’s wives who did the cooking. There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in time of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however. The militiamen had to be kept out of the riding-school while the women were drilling there because they laughed at the women and put them off. A few months earlier no one would have seen anything comic in a woman handling a gun.

The whole barracks was in the state of filth and chaos to which the militia reduced every building they occupied and which seems to be one of the by-products of revolution. In every comer you came upon piles of smashed furniture, broken saddles, brass cavalry-helmets, empty sabre-scabbards, and decaying food. There was frightful wastage of food, especially bread. From my barrack-room alone a basketful of bread was thrown away at every meal—a disgraceful thing when the civilian population was short of it. We ate at long trestle-tables out of permanently greasy tin pannikins, and drank out of a dreadful thing called a porron. A porron is a sort of glass bottle with a pointed spout from which a thin jet of wine spurts out whenever you tip it up; you can thus drink from a distance, without touching it with your lips, and it can be passed from hand to hand. I went on strike and demanded a drinking-cup as soon as I saw a porron in use. To my eye the things were altogether too like bed-bottles, especially when they were filled with white wine.

By degrees they were issuing the recruits with uniforms, and because this was Spain everything was issued piecemeal, so that it was never quite certain who had received what, and various of the things we most needed, such as belts and cartridge-boxes, were not issued till the last moment, when the train was actually waiting to take us to the front.

I have spoken of the militia ‘uniform’, which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps a ‘multiform’ would be the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in any two cases. Practically everyone in the army wore corduroy knee-breeches, but there the uniformity ended. Some wore puttees, others corduroy gaiters, others leather leggings or high boots. Everyone wore a zipper jacket, but some of the jackets were of leather, others of wool and of every conceivable colour. The kinds of cap were about as numerous as their wearers. It was usual to adorn the front of your cap with a party badge, and in addition nearly every man wore a red or red and black handkerchief round his throat. A militia column at that time was an extraordinary-looking rabble. But the clothes had to be issued as this or that factory rushed them out, and they were not bad clothes considering the circumstances. The shirts and socks were wretched cotton things, however, quite useless against cold. I hate to think of what the militiamen must have gone through in the earlier months before anything was organized. I remember coming upon a newspaper of only about two months earlier in which one of the P.O.U.M. leaders, after a visit to the front, said that he would try to see to it that “every militiaman had a blanket’. A phrase to make you shudder if you have ever slept in a trench.

On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ‘instruction’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardour but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. The lieutenant who instructed us was a stout, fresh-faced, pleasant young man who had previously been a Regular Army officer, and still looked like one, with his smart carriage and spick-and-span uniform. Curiously enough he was a sincere and ardent Socialist. Even more than the men themselves he insisted upon complete social equality between all ranks. I remember his pained surprise when an ignorant recruit addressed him as ‘Senor’. ‘What! Senor? Who is that calling me Senor? Are we not all comrades?’ I doubt whether it made his job any easier. Meanwhile the raw recruits were getting no military training that could be of the slightest use to them. I had been told that foreigners were not obliged to attend ‘instruction’ (the Spaniards, I noticed, had a pathetic belief that all foreigners knew more of military matters than themselves), but naturally I turned out with the others. I was very anxious to learn how to use a machine-gun; it was a weapon I had never had a chance to handle. To my dismay I found that we were taught nothing about the use of weapons. The so-called instruction was simply parade-ground drill of the most antiquated, stupid kind; right turn, left turn, about turn, marching at attention in column of threes and all the rest of that useless nonsense which I had learned when I was fifteen years old. It was an extraordinary form for the training of a guerilla army to take. Obviously if you have only a few days in which to train a soldier, you must teach him the things he will most need; how to take cover, how to advance across open ground, how to mount guards and build a parapet—above all, how to use his weapons. Yet this mob of eager children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb. At the time I did not grasp that this was because there were no weapons to be had. In the P.O.U.M. militia the shortage of rifles was so desperate that fresh troops reaching the front always had to take their rifles from the troops they relieved in the line. In the whole of the Lenin Barracks there were, I believe, no rifles except those used by the sentries.

After a few days, though still a complete rabble by any ordinary standard, we were considered fit to be seen in public, and in the mornings we were marched out to the public gardens on the hill beyond the Plaza de Espana. This was the common drill-ground of all the party militias, besides the Carabineros and the first contingents of the newly formed Popular Army. Up in the public gardens it was a strange and heartening sight.

Down every path and alley-way, amid the formal flower-beds, squads and companies of men marched stiffly to and fro, throwing out their chests and trying desperately to look like soldiers. All of them were unarmed and none completely in uniform, though on most of them the militia uniform was breaking out in patches here and there. The procedure was always very much the same. For three hours we strutted to and fro (the Spanish marching step is very short and rapid), then we halted, broke the ranks, and flocked thirstily to a little grocer’s shop which was half-way down the hill and was doing a roaring trade in cheap wine. Everyone was very friendly to me. As an Englishman I was something of a curiosity, and the Carabinero officers made much of me and stood me drinks. Meanwhile, whenever I could get our lieutenant into a corner, I was clamouring to be instructed in the use of a machine-gun. I used to drag my Hugo’s dictionary out of my pocket and start on him in my villainous Spanish:

‘To sé manejar fusil. Mo sé manejar ametralladora. Quiero apprender ametralladora. Quándo vamos apprender ametralladora?’

The answer was always a harassed smile and a promise that there should be machine-gun instruction mañana. Needless to saymañana never came. Several days passed and the recruits learned to march in step and spring to attention almost smartly, but if they knew which end of a rifle the bullet came out of, that was all they knew. One day an armed Carabinero strolled up to us when we were halting and allowed us to examine his rifle. It turned out that in the whole of my section no one except myself even knew how to load the rifle, much less how to take aim.

All this time I was having the usual struggles with the Spanish language. Apart from myself there was only one Englishman at the barracks, and nobody even among the officers spoke a word of French. Things were not made easier for me by the fact that when my companions spoke to one another they generally spoke in Catalan. The only way I could get along was to carry everywhere a small dictionary which I whipped out of my pocket in moments of crisis. But I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain! Within a day or two there was a score of militiamen who called me by my Christian name, showed me the ropes, and overwhelmed me with hospitality. I am not writing a book of propaganda and I do not want to idealize the P.O.U.M. militia. The whole militia—system had serious faults, and the men themselves were a mixed lot, for by this time voluntary recruitment was falling off and many of the best men were already at the front or dead. There was always among us a certain percentage who were completely useless. Boys of fifteen were being brought up for enlistment by their parents, quite openly for the sake of the ten pesetas a day which was the militiaman’s wage; also for the sake of the bread which the militia received in plenty and could smuggle home to their parents. But I defy anyone to be thrown as I was among the Spanish working class—I ought perhaps to say the Catalan working class, for apart from a few Aragonese and Andalusians I mixed only with Catalans—and not be struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity. A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing.

If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances. Some of the journalists and other foreigners who travelled in Spain during the war have declared that in secret the Spaniards were bitterly jealous of foreign aid. All I can say is that I never observed anything of the kind. I remember that a few days before I left the barracks a group of men returned on leave from the front. They were talking excitedly about their experiences and were full of enthusiasm for some French troops who had been next to them at Huesca. The French were very brave, they said; adding enthusiastically: ‘Más valientes que nosotros’—‘Braver than we are!’ Of course I demurred, whereupon they explained that the French knew more of the art of war—were more expert with bombs, machine-guns, and so forth. Yet the remark was significant. An Englishman would cut his hand off sooner than say a thing like that.

Every foreigner who served in the militia spent his first few weeks in learning to love the Spaniards and in being exasperated by certain of their characteristics. In the front line my own exasperation sometimes reached the pitch of fury. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana—‘tomorrow’ (literally, ‘the morning’). Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana. This is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it. In Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As a general rule things happen too late, but just occasionally—just so that you shan’t even be able to depend on their happening late—they happen too early. A train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half past seven. Such things can be a little trying. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.

After endless rumours, mañanas, and delays we were suddenly ordered to the front at two hours’ notice, when much of our equipment was still unissued. There were terrible tumults in the quartermaster’s store; in the end numbers of men had to leave without their full equipment. The barracks had promptly filled with women who seemed to have sprung up from the ground and were helping their men-folk to roll their blankets and pack their kit-bags. It was rather humiliating that I had to be shown how to put on my new leather cartridge-boxes by a Spanish girl, the wife of Williams, the other English militiaman. She was a gentle, dark-eyed, intensely feminine creature who looked as though her life—work was to rock a cradle, but who as a matter of fact had fought bravely in the street-battles of July. At this time she was carrying a baby which was born just ten months after the outbreak of war and had perhaps been begotten behind a barricade.

The train was due to leave at eight, and it was about ten past eight when the harassed, sweating officers managed to marshal us in the barrack square. I remember very vividly the torchlit scene—the uproar and excitement, the red flags flapping in the torchlight, the massed ranks of militiamen with their knapsacks on their backs and their rolled blankets worn bandolier-wise across the shoulder; and the shouting and the clatter of boots and tin pannikins, and then a tremendous and finally successful hissing for silence; and then some political commissar standing beneath a huge rolling red banner and making us a speech in Catalan. Finally they marched us to the station, taking the longest route, three or four miles, so as to show us to the whole town. In the Ramblas they halted us while a borrowed band played some revolutionary tune or other. Once again the conquering-hero stuff—shouting and enthusiasm, red flags and red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging the pavement to have a look at us, women waving from the windows.

How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight with men that there was barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the last moment Williams’s wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle of wine and a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea. The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour. 

[…]