Bologna Bombing

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NO nice nrotect fascists in Roiton 1978 MVU....

The Public Order Act, now: as in 1936, serves as an obstacle to such a mobilisation-and : thus, even while banning their West Bromwich march, has assisted the work of the Front.

Socialist Press supporters are urged to participate in the mobilisations on August 17 designed to counter the diverted NF march. At the same time the fight must be intensified to:

*Defeat fascist violence! Build workers' defence squads!

*Unite the workers' movement in mass struggles to bring down the Tories!

The fascist outrage that killed 76 people in Bologna rail station on August 2 has once again brought to light the collaboration of sections of the Italian state with the extreme right wing and the relationship of the fascist terror campaign to the needs of the Italian ruling class.

•The bombings started in 1969 as a response to the wave of strikes and occupations launched byaltalian workers.

Their aim was to lay the right climate of terror for a possible military coup, and to frighten the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into open collaboration with the Christian Democrats to forestall such a coup.

The first bomb which killed 16 people in Milan in 1969 was at first blamed on anarchists.

Smuggled out

Only when the evidence unearthed by the press became impossible to deny was the guilt of the fascists admitted; and by that time the Italian secret service had smuggled those responsible out of the country.

The involvement of NATO has since become an open secret.

The campaign was a success to the extent that the PCI entered into what was in effect an alliance with the Christian Democrats against the Italian working class.

They supported not only a whole series of austerity measures but also a widespread attack on democratic rights.

Indiscriminate phone tapping, house searches and arrests became a normal part of Italian life.

The renewed series of bombing recently seem to suggest that sections of the Italian ruling class are not satisfied with those concessions, and want powers to smash the mass organisations of the working class.

The Bologna bombing shows the contempt with which these sections and their fascist agents view the Cossiga government.

The government has just pressed the courts to send three members of the NAR, a small fascist group, for trial, accused of blowing up the Italian express in 1976.

By the latest bombings the NAR and its backers are declar•ing their readiness to dispense with parliamentary democracy itself.

As in 1969 the role of the Italian state forces glimmers through the news reports.

The member of the NAR arrested in Nice last week and suspected of taking part in the bombing, had knowingly been allowed to live unmolested France, although he had already been sentenced to four years jail in Italy for the reconstruction of a fascist party'.

Rumour

A careful rumour even had been spread that he been had killed in a plane crash!

The bombing must also be intended to illustrate the impotence of the PCI. The choice of working class victims going on holiday from Bologna, a PCI stronghold, could not be more provocative.

Yet the response of the PCI was predictable. They issued more calls for strengthening of the state apparatus-the very apparatus which is itself implicated in the fascist bombings.

But the growing disillusionment with the PCI's policies is shown by the fact that the families of the vast majority of the victims refused to take part in the official funeral arranged by the PCI.

Several thousand supporters of the revolutionary left also demonstrated during • the funeral against the PCI's class collaboration.

But the strength of the neofascists and their backers lies precisely in the absence of any coherent programme or party of the revolutionary left.

They know that the PCI, with its policy of historic compromise is incapable of challenging the bourgeois state, with its tendency during this period of crisis to develop towards outright police repression.

Protest strike

But the Italian ruling class still has to actually smash the mass organisations of the working class to overcome its present crisis-organisations which responded once again with a solid protest striké against the Bologna bombing.

And that is a more difficult matter than just exposing the impotence of its present leaders.

The post this week brought a much appreciated