Moro on show?
Leo Abse
Lugola Vecchia Could it be that in some windowless hideout, converted into jail and studio, with whirring cameras directed on to the hapless Moro, a stylish Italian film of his trial by Red Guard judges is now being made? This was the probability put to me recently by Lelio Lagorio, the socialist president of Tuscany's regional government.
Lagorio received me in a handsome room of a sixteenth-century palace overlooking the most elegant square in Florence: from the window I could see the Spedale del Innocenti, the first foundling hospital in Europe, fronted by Brunelleschi's colonnades and crowned, between the arcade arches, with the circular terracotta medallions of Andrea del Robbia each set against a bright blue ground, displaying a joyous babe in swaddling clothes. The humanism of the piazza overflowed into the replies Lagorio gave to me as I questioned him about Italian politics: until we came to talk of Moro's kidnapping. Then, abruptly, he told me he believed Moro has still a chance of being released alive provided that he has confessed his guilt on film to be made available to television. As I recoiled from the extravaganza this distinguished lawyer was presenting to me, he emphasised the obvious precedent. When Matteoti, the socialist leader, was murdered in 1924, the intention was to wrest a confession of fault out of him, and then discredit him by publishing the signed admissions: but the assailants failed and bungled into a slaying. Now the technique would be deployed with Moro ;.and with the admission under interrogation of his crimes against society on every television screen, the man would lose his dignity and
be released with the certainty that his hope of hecoming President or linkman between Communists and Christian Democrats was forever forfeit.
I suppressed my wish to mock at the possible mummery being so detachedly professed by Lagorio: this was in Catholic Italy where, as in Russia, the confession can be loaded with neurotic significances and in a land, too, where the border between fantasy and reality is so often blurred and nowhere more than on the political scene. Suddenly I felt like a character in the film Illustrious Corpses drawn from Scia-scia's anticipatory novel divining the murders of judges that have now taken place in real life. In less prosaic climes than ours, politics can limp but an inch behind art and sometimes imitate it. And is the price Moro must pay to survive to be death in life? Or will he have Matteoti's courage and end dead as a dog?
Although I met many communists, including two well-known membets of the central committee, I met no Eurocommunists in Italy: they exist only in the minds of the Russians, the State Department and, of course, Harold Wilson and David Owen. Precisely because the CPI is a specific Italian phenomenon, it is essentially provincial, regional, and unemancipated from the Church: in these respects, except for the worse, it differs little from the party I knew in 1945 when, as a RAF sergeant, I regularly and clandestinely contributed to the communist daily paper Unita. Then, in the capital, although we all wrote headily about international solidarity, the hardheaded cautious comrades publishing the Milan edition barely concealed their contempt for our woolliness: and now that the conservatives are dominant, all radicalism is suspect, and the egalitarian demands of the French communist party are condemned as wholly opportunist, even as the moderate demands put by the communist trade union leader, Longo, are regarded by the Central Committee as unfortunate aberrations caused by his sojourn in Russia.
Far from having acquired a new European vision, the Italian communists have retreated from Moscow and loathe Paris: the one outside state that fascinates them is • the Vatican. Their theoreticians speak and often look like Jesuit priests, using Gramsci's theory of the passive revolution to justify their own irresolution and total lack of will to fight for full responsibility, a prospect which frightens them. They yearn for the unqualified embrace of the Christian democrats: there is a pathetic impress of adolescent dependence in their . rationalisations. Papa Pope still dominates them. and their rebellions are ' tentative, ambivalent. They have yet to grow up. With the danger that their prime orthodoxies and lack of reformism may provoke the young to violence, the threat to Italian democracy comes from the communists' timidity, not from a communist seizure of power.
Although it is unknown to the House of Commons, the true catalyst of the recent Windscale debate and the further fateful one to come a few weeks hence is Luigi Radicati di Brozolo, one of Italy's leading physicists and deputy director of Pisa's Scuola Normale, the elitist postgraduate institution founded by Napoleon and open only to Italy's meritocracy. Eighteen months ago he had fiercely insisted to me that science could no longer live side by side with democracy. His didacticism shocked me; but the Royal Commission report of Sir John Flowers published a few days after the encounter brought disturbing corroboration of Radicati's view: only the wilfullrblind could deny in a world of marauding terrorists of the Red Guard ilk the incompatibility of a plutonium economy with the civil liberties of a true democracy. Last December with Radicati's jeremiads hovering around me, chance gave me the winning number in the ballot for private members' motions and the opportunity to force a debate, shirked by both front benches, on the Royal Commission report: from that debate came the demand, yielded to by the Government, for Commons participation in the Windscale decision. Meeting Radicati di Brozolo again in the Pisa penthouse flat, overlooking the Arno, of my good friend Antonio Russi, who holds the chair of comparative literature at the Scuola, he returned to his assault. He has a mordant wit, a non-Italian bluntness and an engaging arrogance which I relish, and which probably stems from his slave
owning American grandmother. He frightened me again, this time by his elaboration on the subversion of democracy by the advances in genetic engineering. Russ' waited for a lull in our heated dialogue and then, with affected casualness, produced a letter, never published, which he received from Albert Einstein twenty-five years ago: when visiting Einstein at Princeton university he had given him an etching of the tower of Pisa thinking that, because of the tale of Galileo's experiments from the leaning tower, it would be an acceptable gift. We chastenedly read the foreboding note of thanks. 'I thank you very much for sending me this beautiful etching. The Tower of Pisa is a beautiful symbol of the fact that human beings cannot foresee the social implication of their works. The artist, of course, did not foresee that the weakness of the foundation of the building would bring about the lopsidedness of the tower and by that fact would attract the attention of all humanity. Is this not true also for more abstract creations of man in the sense that their factual social consequences conform only to a little, :extent with the intentions of the creator?
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