American naval planes swooped low over the workers' strongholds in Turin, Milan and the other maior industrial cities. Eleven war ships were despatched to Naples to Join a great naval armada patroling italy s coastal waters. It was the spring of 1948. President Harry S Truman had just authorised 'full use of political, economic, and if necessary military power' to prevent a "Communist take-over'.
In France and Italy, Communist Parties wit ruling crass parues. new role was to help the capitalists in post-war reconstruction on the basis of bourgeois order.
Italian workers had instituted workers self-management through "Red Factories" even under Nazi occupation. In both coun of hundreds of thousands, while the official national armies were in disarray. Disarming the workers, policing strikes and getting workers to accept austerity and discipline - the Stalinists repaid the capitalists in full.
It was not until May 1947 that the capitalists in both countries felt strong enough to dispense with their services and kick them out. The Stalinists went quietly.
But in the April 1948 elections in Italy, the Communist Party made a renewed bid for governmental office with the Socialist rart. yu me communist take over u Czechoslovakia only a few weeks old, this was the signal for a mighty campaign of coercion by the US, in alliance with the Christian Democrats and the Vatican.
No absolution The Pope announced that he had instructed the clergy to refuse absolution to those who voted Communist. The Christian Democrat regime headed by de Gasperi paraded thousands of troops heavily armed with US-made weapons. Fascist gangs swarmed on the streets, attwere kidnapped and assassinated.
The strategy of the White House was to pressure Italian voters into reiecting the workers partes and backing capiransm. Ine us s gross national product was about half of the world's total. It had money to spare. The massive Economic Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) was introduced to contain and roll back Communism in EurODe.
Marshall himself, as US Secretary of state, declared that all aid would be cur off to Italy if its people choose to vote into power a government in which the dominant political force would be a party whose hostility to this program has been frequently enunciated...
Italy was also the first playground of the newly formed CIA. Harry Rositzke, a former CIA official, wrote in the January 1975 issue of Foreign Affairs that in 1948 the National Security Couneil dave Stalin and Truman-carved up Europe between them after Yalta tional warfare operations".....
the corrers or une bourgeois parnes. A on the restoration of the territory of ment was elected or wur now ue evu day when once again they are faced with the prospect sphere. the CIA the responsibility for "political, psychological, economic, and unconvenFour million dollars were poured into the same time, a month before the elec- Strategy tions were due to take place, Washington promised that it would look favourably Trieste and the return of some of Italy's African conquests if a right-wing governThe result was that the Christian Dem- ea working class. ocrats swept to victory with 48 per cent of the vote. It was this victory which paed the way for nearly 30 years of undis puted dominance of the bourgeois ruling bloc by the Christian Democrats, putting of having to rely on a coalition with the Communist Party to maintain capitalist ures necessary to prevent sabotage of the economy - up to and including the nationalisation of all foreign trade and control over exports of capital - be implemented. Some joke The PCI discounts the relation ship of the Christian Democracy the most powerful sections of th
GE Italy/Spain 7