In the mid 1970s, the French, Italian, and Spanish communist parties feigned a break with Moscow and launched their own “independent” form of liberal “Eurocommunism.” While remaining faithful Soviet lackeys, Eurocommunist leaders such as George Marchais, Enrico Berlinguer, and Santiago Carillo publicly criticized the Kremlin over human rights issues and denounced communist terrorist groups — but only as a ploy to gain legitimacy and extend communist influence through democratic means. It has worked magnificently, allowing open “moderate” communists to gain political power throughout Italy.
Many of these Italian politicians have had close relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc intelligence services for decades and have long been suspected as KGB/FSB assets. This is no small thing, since Italy is a member of NATO and these officials have access to much secret and classified military and security information. And, like Prime Minister Romano Prodi (pictured), many of them have also served in high positions in the European Union and have played key roles in the EU’s development toward a Soviet-style Marxist collective.
Prodi’s left-wing Olive Tree coalition government boasts current and “former” communists, such as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, who was secretary of the Italian Federation of Young Communists in the 1970s, then a top member of the Italian Communist Party, and now head of the Democrats of the Left, an offshoot of the Communist Party; Minister of Social Solidarity Paolo Ferrero, a leader of the Communist Refoundation Party; and Economic Minister Pier Luigi Bersani and Labor Minister Livia Turco, both former members of the Italian Communist Party, now with the Democrats of the Left. Not to mention radical Marxists in the Prodi cabinet such as Emma Bonino, Giuliano Amato, Fabio Mussi, Francesco Rutelli, and Alessandro Bianchi.
Then there is Italy’s current president, Giorgio Napolitano, Prodi’s partner in power. Napolitano became a member of the hard-core inner circle of the Italian Communist Party after World War II. He even went so far as to march in lockstep with Moscow’s Party line when the Soviet Army marched into Hungary in 1956. Napolitano defended the brutal invasion and denounced the heroic Hungarian freedom fighters as “thugs” and “despicable agents provocateur.” He would later claim that this “mistake” on his part had caused him “grievous self-critical torment.” But apparently not grievous enough torment to convert from his Marxist ways; he is a member of one of the branches of the “reformed” Communist Party, the Democrats of the Left.
Photo of Prime Minister Romano Prodi: AP Images
