The Spectre of
Hate, Racism and
Xenophobia
Is Poisoning the
Italian Communist
Party
W hen I came home from Vietnam in
August, 1968, I knew then and
there something terribly wrong had
taken hold of the United States of America—
that which I would never have dreamt about
before especially during my four years
studying philosophy and artillery, safe and
chaste, in Towers of Ivory ten hours by train
or car from New York City, at the foothills of
the Allegheny Mountains. For the time of
my brainwashing, no one hinted to me that I
would have found, in Vietnam, half the
troops drunk, drugged and intolerant. That I
would have found my worst enemy wearing
the same uniform I did. That I would have
found myself being harassed by an infantry
captain from Louisiana because I read the
The New York Times subscription (ALL THE
NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT, ONLY!) my
sister had sent to me to the battlefield near
Cambodia for my twenty-third birthday.
After a week in Vietnam I had understood
why there existed a Hippie Movement.
There had to have been one!
It took a long time before I could verbalize
my Vietnam experiences. Not because I
was in shock. Or suffering from some
newly-discovered
“syndrome.” No! I just could not run into—
in
the State of Florida—enough people who
wanted to be honest about Vietnam with
me. Worst of all were the Vietnam veterans
themselves. Most of them had cocooned
their psyches either in hate and revenge or
the heaviness of silence. I had to happen
upon a place to put my thoughts in order. A
place far away from the United States of
America.
It was not Karl Marx so much as it was my
desire to determine whether or not the “bad
guys” were really anymore worse than us,
the “good guys,” that had goaded me on to
become eventually a Marxist-Leninist
commiserator. A mitigated Marxist to be
precise! Because so many insipid incidents
had befallen me during my two years of
active duty in the United States Army, I
came to the conclusion that dust had been
thrown in my eyes during my youth and my
university residence. I was looking for
something, someone to trust in. I had lost
hope in almost everything. I felt I had to
begin all over again. Even the Roman
Catholic institute of higher learning I had
attended had itself been subsidized by the
United States’ government to allow it to
train some of us (Reserve Officers’ Training
Corps) to be converted into artillery officers
—redlegs. The Friary that housed the
Franciscan monks had been called “The
Hilton,” and whisky and wine bottles filled to
the brim the dumpsters outside the
government-supported “playpen” for
chubby, brown-clad priests (10% pedophilic;
100% draft-dodging) who frolicked in their
ecclesiastical “tax heaven” thanks to a
military force bound, in a short time, to
carpet-bomb to death millions of innocent
Asiatic people. I realized then that in the
United States, overflowing with the military-
industrial complex, I would never feel free to
say what I wanted to express about
Vietnam.
But there was that still more important,
crucial factor. Jean-Paul Sartre, my “spiritual
father,” and Bertrand Russell, my
“intellectual father,” had been so
passionately, so outspokenly repulsed by
the Vietnam conflict, I could not myself think
to wane away the seriousness of the matter.
Their presence on a world tribunal,
chronicling the atrocities committed by
United States’ military personnel and their
allies in Vietnam, stunned me. I felt
depressed—to say the least. The
philosophers made me not forget even
though millions in the United States
continue to try to do so still today while I am
writing this essay.
For a long time, I did not seek to protest;
rather, I had hoped the people of the United
States would come to their senses and quit
mesmerizing the Vietnam tragedy into
oblivion. That was wishful thinking on my
part which distanced me farther from the
place of my birth. I was downright
frustrated with Northamericans’ in-vain
attempts to make out of Vietnam something
that it was not: a lost but just cause.
M
y first flirt (1981) with the hammer
and sickle bloomed in Caracas,
Venezuela. One day, I showed up at
the Soviet embassy brandishing a bouquet
of red roses, toting my manuscript, The
Hippie Lieutenant, and dressed in the Hart,
Schafter & Marx suit I had worn at the
Ministerio de Informacion y Turismo where I
had shuffled around cranky, haughty women
journalists from Time and The Washington
Post, “ladies” who had accompanied Mrs.
Carter on her whirlwind Southamerican tour,
and in which I had re-written the drafted
speeches of then-President Carlos Andrés
Pérez. At the front door of the embassy, I
sucked in a deep breath, hoped Central
Stupidity Agency surveillance cameras were
focused on me, gave the United States’
Department of State The Finger, about-
faced, then rang the bell. I had the
sensation that I was making history. And I
was. My history! For the first time in my life
I was not making history for someone else!
It was beautiful. (To do is to be: Sartre; To
be is to do: Camus; Do be
do be do: Sinatra.)
Soviet embassy personnel were both very
cordial and very curious. I was told I could
not see the ambassador. Alexander Borisov,
a journalist, came to welcome me and speak
to me. We spoke in both English and
Spanish. He, too, was very kind and
friendly. (Later, I met Alexander’s wife,
Natalia, and their daughter, Iliana.) I told
Alexander that I wanted to publish my
manuscript in the Soviet Union. He said he
would like to read it. I gave him the copy.
In return, he gave me many books in English
that included works by Marx, Lenin, and
other communist literary and political
notables. I read them all enthusiastically in
six weeks’ time.
After months of meetings and Soviet cultural
events and gifts of reading materials, I was
asked to write some articles about Vietnam
for Venezuela’s communist newspaper. I
said I would prefer that any of my articles be
published in Pravda! An interview with the
vice-director of the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics’ biggest publishing organization,
who had stopped to visit with me on his way
back to Moscow after a Southamerican tour,
failed to yield results. I was invited to tour
the U.S.S.R. as a guest. I was told, by
telephone, that The Hippie Lieutenant might
offend Ronald Reagan who was fresh in
office at the White House. (I have never
believed that my book could have offended
Ronald Reagan; but, I would have given my
right arm for it to have done so!)
From that time on, I went it alone without
embassy pals, signed up for a Russian
course at the Centro de Amigos de la
Cultura y Ciencias de la U.R.S.S., and wished
the Cyrillic alphabet would not drive me
looney. Every Saturday, on my way up
Avenida Los Mangos to the Centro, I took in
the aromas of the splendid plants, flowers
and trees doting the elegant La Florida
residential zone where I lived in a rented
room; sipped on my café con leche; and,
reflected on my state of being: no country,
no money, no ideology. It was one of the
happiest times of my life. Truly Henry
Millerish.
At the Centro I pawed a bit—I think—at what
it means to be a communist, and I must
admit that in this fraternity of all races, all
ages, I enjoyed one of the most beautiful of
comings-together I have ever known.
Everyone was very friendly. The people
were distinctly open; they were not
chauvinistic. They were internationalists.
Worldly-orientated. They mused in terms of
a propinquity, and everyone had a right to
be part of that group. All beings on Earth
were accepted for whom they were—not to
what they belonged. This sat well with me.
(Much more catholic than the Roman
Catholic Church.) I just knew I was
welcomed in the company of my comrades,
and I have never again embraced such a
human tie in harmony with itself and others.
For a few months, I rode high in the
beautiful balloon of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, way up there in the air,
chasing my dream across the sky, where the
world’s a nicer place to be. I could fly! I
could fly!! I could fly!!!
T
here is no politics in Italy. There is
economy. The most revered Holy
Picture in Italy is the dollar. St. George
Washington. Italy is turned on by what it
can earn, and it transfigures itself—as Marx
argued—through technical and economic
changes in methods of production. Always
struggling to be the world’s sixth economic
powerhouse (imagine how poor the rest of
the world is!), the Boot kicks and stomps to
open capitalism’s secret doors, and it
invokes the spent, treadmill-like rhetoric of a
politicized Roman Catholic Church whose
miracles are made to look more ridiculous
every day in light of the awe-inspiring
discoveries of Science. For every inch the
world progresses to achieve a better place
ever more in keeping with the idea of a just
and prosperous environment for all, Italy
stiffens up, reacts contrariwise, and digs
deeper and deeper its trenches of rancor,
bigotry and chauvinism. It is no wonder,
therefore, that Italy is an anomaly—
capitalistically speaking—because it is “rich”
while it lags behind, technologically and
economically, other industrialized nations.
Italy wants to play it safe. Here is a right-
wing conservative’s paradise. It is in no
hurry to change, and confuses the Present
by clinging on to the Past. The economic
game—“trick” if you will—in Italy is to invest
in the Past and present it to a make-believe
Future! This would be a very intelligent way
to survive with European Union monetary
homogeneousness—becoming more and
more a ghastly nightmare for Italy—if, as
Italians believe, there exists no Future!
T
hat there are forty to fifty Italian
political parties in existence at any
given time, startles every democrat—
but not one Italian. Leaders of these feudal-
like entities talk and talk and talk politics,
but connive as brokers dividing up the
Italian pecuniary pie—for themselves and
their clientele. There has never been a
consensus decided upon by these economic
paladins and their constituencies. The
reason is simple: they are always back-
stabbing each other, in their “democratic”
charades, to get a bigger piece of that
cream-filled—for them—Italian political pie.
Italian “politicians” fake that they are
democratically inclined—they call for
elections so often just to prove it! Italians
are always voting their brains out! But, the
methods—these means to ends—are often
far from being Jeffersonian. Their idea of
democracy is a government in which small
groups exercise control for corrupt and
selfish purposes. (As I write [July, 1997] this
sentence, seven hundred doctors, in the
Milano area, are under police investigation
for bilking what is assumed to be one billion
dollars from government health agencies.
The money is said to be in Swiss bank
accounts, naturally.) Italian government is a
bureaucratic, Kafkaesque malaise that
serves its fat-cat oligarchy and tortures its
legions of “democrats.” Italy resembles
more a caudillismo venezuelano than it does
a government in which the supreme power
is vested in the people and exercised by
them. Italy is Caracasing.
W
hen I settled (1 May 1983) in Italy’s
most “communist” region, Toscana
(Tuscany), I was immediately
impressed with the large number of
recreational, club-like bars and cafés that
were canopied with the hammer and sickle
of the Partito Comunista Italiano, and I tried,
casually, to affiliate myself with some of
them because they offered me a cheaply-
priced cappuccino and a chance to read the
party’s newspaper, l’Unità, for free. I spoke
little Italian at the beginning, and mostly
looked at newspaper pictures and, most
importantly, the faces of my Italian
“comrades” who viewed me with
indifference or scorn once they pinned down
that I came from the United States of
America. (Tut! Tut!! Tut!!!)
I gradually came to understand, to speak, to
communicate, to learn. It took years to get
where I could comprehend well enough and
delve deeper, then deeper, to try to get to
the soul of Europe’s most prodigious
communist group—save, at that time, the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself.
And this is what I learned: At the entrance
to each Italian “communist” circolo there is
a sign which declares, in no uncertain terms,
that the club is reserved for members only.
That is, it is not reserved for members only!
—if you want to go into the front room and
spend some of that most repugnant of
capitalistic quiddities: legal tender. If you
are a citizen of the United States, Tunisia,
Albania—even Senegal—you can enter if
you pay out. If you are a Senegalese who
has slept under a bridge all night in freezing
weather, you can come in and buy a
cappuccino. If you stop buying and want to
stay warm in that front room, you will not be
asked to leave, you will be asked to buy
more! If club members talk to you—and
they just might sometimes—they will not
ask you your name and welcome you; they
will ask you from where you come. Then
they will refer to you as an “americano,
marocchino, albanese, or senegalese.” You
will not be invited to join their club. If you
want to go to the bathroom, you must ask
for the key. If you sit and “nurse” your
cappuccino, no club member will come to
you, sit next to you, speak to you. You will
feel just as any Afroamerican does in an all-
White Mississippian golf club which has
been obliged by federal law to accept
his/her membership, his/her presence.
If you have the courage to ask for the key to
the bathroom, or are too embarrassed to
urinate in the cold street after you have
imbibed your cappuccino, you can enter the
inner sanctum (back room) where the
circolo’s only dirty bathroom (“W. C.”) is.
And here you will light upon the heart and
soul of Italian “communism,” the members
of the Rifondazione Comunista party—that
special interest group which remained
“faithful” to Marx and Engels and Lenin
when the old Partito Comunista Italiano
broke ranks to form a “new left.” (There had
never been an “old left.” Just parole, parole,
parole about it.)
The back room is a cloud of cigarette and
cigar (toscani, naturally!) smoke, and the
stench
(windows are sealed shut in winter) is
incredible. Men—not one woman—are
huddled over tables playing cards, reading
the party’s house organ. No one is
discussing. They are shouting, screaming.
They sound frustrated, desperate. The
waiter brings more red wine. One bellows
louder than the other, and he says he is
being cheated. You cannot see one man
under the age of fifty. In some circoli there
might be upwards of two-hundred men
howling en masse. They want Rifondazione
Comunista to get a higher pension for
them; they want Rifondazione Comunista to
keep the government from lowering their
pensions. They moo about high inflation.
They croak about Italy’s hopeless health
care system. They whine about the long
lines at city halls. When they lose their
hand, they bang on the tables. They
stridulate for another glass of wine. They go
to discharge urine and stand before the
urinal in a puddle of yellow gook, dejected
and wrathful.
Two or three times a year, these men sober
up enough to rise to the occasion. They go
to the kitchen and borrow their wives’ pots
and pans, put on their red shirts, their red
and yellow scarves with the hammer and
sickle, put a whistle between their teeth,
and go into the street to yowl some more for
more money. They rarely obtain it.
Medicine prices augment. Food prices
magnify. Fuel prices thicken. Telephone and
electricity bills greaten. More wine. More
nicotine. They salute their comrades from
World War II “glory days.” Old
“communists” limp home to their wine
bottles. Overhasty and forfeited, they
promise their grandson or granddaughter—if
they have one—that they will go to church
to bear witness to his or her First Holy
Communion. Their wives—if they have one
—call them imbecilli when they come home.
What would Marx say? A betrayal? Are they
crazy? Was it not Marx and Engels who,
horrified by the unrestrained capitalism of
their time when rampant exploitation and
oppression were the kismet of the working
class, were animated to fight for justice and
equality in a pitiless society? What would
Marx say seeing these broken, pathetic,
bigoted Italian “communists” impoverished,
spiritless, and irredeemable? What would
Marx say of one capitalist guru’s (John
Kenneth Galbraith) short, pithy statement:
“We must comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfortable.”? What would Marx say
about these absurdities?
Fausto Bertinotti, Rifondazione Comunista’s
clever and level-headed leader would
naturally respond for Marx with absolutely
brilliant rejoinders and counterstatements,
and Italian television cameras would be sure
to propagandise Fausto’s charm and
percipience. After all, Italy is a democracy—
I repeat: d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y—and is even
ever grand enough to accept a minority
party’s frivolities and capricci. Fausto is
prudent, explicit. A great spokesperson and
a genius at interpretation. A politicalized
professor. But, Fausto is not a politician. He
is an Italian politician. He is cautious to
protect his piece of the pie. He does not
seek unanimity. He holds his cards close to
his chest. He is conservative. He is against
progress. He is not a communist. Jesuits
call him pragmatic and intelligent. Fausto is
not a believer, but he is not an atheist!
(Wants his cake and eat it, too!) He was
married in a Roman Catholic Church! Reads
St. Paul. He is just another breakneck pawn
in the Italian economic disaster. A
simpatico one, however. Fausto, stop hiding
behind those Karl Marx and Che Guevara
tee-shirts! Reflect on this: Italy, according
to French philosopher André Glucksmann, is
the mirror of Europe. He trumpets:
“Italians, you are the best of buffoons in a
continent without an iota of common
sense!”
For it to survive, Italy needs a good dose of
courage and the will of all its citizens to
reflect a good while on their motives and
aspirations. When the Italian political
system becomes a serious, responsible
institution set to serve the interests of its
citizenry and not those of its now
counterfeit, self-satisfied, heavy-weighted,
oligarchic clique, progress may become a
reality. Fausto Bertinotti is one of the few in
Italian politics sufficiently talented and
sensitive to spark the debate, with the
individuals he represents, to help upend
Italy. That he does not do so is tragic for all
of us.

Fausto Bertinotti, do be do be do! Come on.

Loosen up. Come to Firenze, and let us visit
a Rifondazione Comunista circolo together.
Leave your bodyguards and armed car in
Roma. Forget about those beautiful Roman
restaurants and their fantastic wines. Come
here and eat a pannino with one slice of
ham on it and drink a glass of cheap wine
with me. Let us teach our comrades that all
men are created equal. That they can be
friends with an americano or a senegalese
or an albanese or even a marocchino! That
they should ask what they can do for their
country, and not what their country can do
for them. That they can clean the W.C.
That all men are endowed with certain
inalienable rights, and that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That they do not have to drink rich red wine
and play cards to pass their time. And, let’s
get them to open circoli windows!

Fausto, you must stem the tragedy

unfolding within Rifondazione Comunista’s
ranks. Hundreds of thousands of your
members are over sixty-five years of age.
Forty percent of Italian families have one
child! Rifondazione Comunista risks going
out of business. You must open the
Rifondazione Comunista doors to all races,
to all ages. Your party cannot remain the
domain of red-faced sycophants, bent on
hate, racism and xexophobia, if it is to
prosper and spread beyond the limits of its
self-imposed pettiness.

Do be do be do!

Written 1 July 1997

And

Revised 18 June 2001

By

Anthony St. John