Italy: fascist bomb attack on left-wing paper
[LRCI Milan. 2 January 2001]
The last week before Xmas was a tense one in Italy. It started off with an unexploded bomb found on the roof of the cathedral in Milan, and finished with an explosion in the offices of the left wing newspaper Il Manifesto in Rome.
According to the Milanese police, the first bomb was claimed by 'anarchists'. It has been suggested that it was a far left response to the visit of Haider and his reception in Rome by the pope. Whether or not this is true is anybody's guess.
The planter of the Rome bomb was more easily identified, once, that is, the rubble was removed from his face. His name is Andrea Insabato, a member of the neo-Fascist organisation Forza Nuova, and founder of Rinascita Cristiana, a catholic offshoot of the former.
He brought a kilo of gunpowder to the offices of Il Manifesto but connected it to a fuse which was too short. The bomb went off while he was planting it and he was lucky to escape with his life.
The far right is growing in Italy, and its racist and homophobic ideas are getting no small amount of space on the airwaves. These ideas have been given legitimation by reformist politicians who think that the best way to challenge them is to take them on board as part of their own programme.
Walter Veltroni, present leader of the Democratic left, has denounced the 'horrors of communism' while his party has called for reconciliation with Mussolini's blackshirts of the Republic of Salò.
Veltroni also attacked last week's 5,000 strong demonstration in Rome against the visit of Haider, accusing it of acts of violence because it defended itself against the police.
This was the same police who recently defended a Forza Nuova demonstration against left wing demonstrators. It was the same police that violently assaulted passengers on the anti-capitalist train to Nice while contemporaneously denying them their democratic right to cross the Italo-French border.
Veltroni said that the campaign against Haider should be left to the 'political' sphere. But the political campaign he has in mind does not contrast Haider or his Italian supporters in the Lombardy League or Forza Nuova (with whom the Lombardy League is in leagues).
On the contrary, his party has just this week voted a law which allows for the finger-printing of 'illegal' immigrants so that once deported they can be more easily identified when they try coming back.
No doubt Veltroni will have considered centre-left leader Franceso Rutelli's recent statement on Chinese immigrants to have been an excellent piece of propaganda against Haider, Forza Nuova, and the League: Rutelli said that the Chinese were particularly good at evading immigration control because "to us they all look the same" and can therefore easily pass their ID cards to one another.
Il Manifesto certainly contrasts this capitulation and on immigration and anti-gay bigotry is a breath of fresh air. It remains an important point of reference for left-wing sympathisers and militants seeking sharp responses to the xenophobic campaign conducted by the right, echoed and made law by reformist politicians and regurgitated as 'objective' reporting by journalists.
The fact that Il Manifesto has always given support to the centre-left governments which have betrayed immigrants does not detract from the effectiveness of its anti-racist campaign.
Our solidarity goes to workers and journalists of Il Manifesto, and we can only be thankful that it was their attempted murderer, and not them, who was physically hurt. But even though it has the subtitle of 'Communist daily', Il Manifesto is not a communist paper. It betrays a postmodernist bent and is ideologically quite close to the politics of Rifondazione Comunista.
Its key thinkers reject the Leninist form of organisation while eulogising the fragmentary and making a political virtue out of their own disarming and cosmic pessimism. Even this morning, when it is still recovering from the shock of the fascist attack, Il Manifesto was informing readers that "The left's dream of changing the world perhaps doesn't exist anymore".
Insabato's act of fascist terror strikes not just at Il Manifesto but at a prostrate left of which Il Manifesto is an integral part.
