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| Marco Rizzo (left). On the right, Iacopi with Matteo Salvini. Photo: lariscossa.com |
Being a communist is "an incurable disease". This is what Emilio Iacopi, a local representative of Matteo Salvini's Northern League (Lega Nord) and a former sergeant of Italian police, wrote during an anti-communist rant on social media.
According to La Riscossa, organ of the Communist Party, Italy (Partito Comunista), the General Secretary of the Communist Party Marco Rizzo responded to the hideous remarks of Iacopi. More specifically he wrote on Twitter:
"This guy says that being a communist would be "an incurable desease". I think that, instead, the internet is the childhood disease of cowards. Behind the keyboard they are all lions... The only good thing: They create respect for the communists".
The communist leader continued with a more in-depth evaluation of the Northern League's anti-communist positions. We translate from La Riscossa:
"For years we have witnessed a scientific attack on communism, its history and achievements. Today a member of the League makes low-level accusations against the communists. However, this case cannot be traced just to a simple delusional statement by a local exponent of the party, but is part of a broader strategy of the League to attack the communist movement: on one hand, we recall the attempt - which our party has always vehemenly opposed - by some municipalities to ban the communist ideology; on the other hand the alleged equivalence of the (two) "opposite extremes" (we recall the words of Matteo Salvini on the April 25 celebrations as a derby between fascists and communists) only as a strong opposition to anti-fascism and, at the same time, League's relations with far-right organizations, such as the explicit support received from CasaPound in favor of Mario Borghezio in 2014 and the collaboration with "Sovereignty" (a list also linked to Casa Pound) from which the League received open support".
(For those who don't know, CasaPound is an openly neo-fascist party which had close political ties with the Greek neo-Nazi criminal Golden Dawn party).
As Marco Rizzo points out, the anti-communist campaign is not carried out only by the right-wing parties, but by the bourgeois forces in general, both in national and international level.
"This strategy - writes Rizzo - is not actually carried out only by the right, but it is strongly encouraged by the historical revisionism promoted by the European Union: examples of this are the statements of the former President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani who argued that the EU was responsible for tha fall of nazism and communism, or the 2005 European Parliament resolution which equated fascism and communism and which was also supported by the current secretary of the Democratic Party, Nicola Zingaretti".
The Communist Party leader also underlined that "countering communism is useful for all these parties to pave the way for reactionary plans and anti-people policies. This is why the spectre of communism still afflicts those who act for the interests of the few".