As George Wald would have put it «we find ourselves in front of a generation which is not at all sure of having a future»;
since the future, as Spender affirms is «like a buried time bomb, but which lets its ticking be heard in the present».
To the question we have so often heard: who are those who are part of this generation?,
we are tempted to reply: Those who hear the ticking.
(Hannah Arendt, On Violence. Harvest Books New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970)

Introduction

Pacifism, till the second half of the Sixties, was – as Amoreno Martellini would have it – «a false question»: the political movements, associations and their leaders, never posed any real threat to the government of any country, not even to the Italian ones, and neither did they ever represent any obstacle to the military institutions.

In Italy, during the twenty years following WW II, pacifism was never able to even gather together any significant political consensus regarding the themes of its main battles, just think, for example, of educating to peace or of the expenditure for armaments[1]. All this, notwithstanding that the theme of peace was receiving great amounts of attention in those years by political parties as well as by their newspapers who used it to its fullest for their own propaganda needs. Actually, in Italy there was never any join between the political parties and the pacifist movements. In this context, the individual gestures of some nonviolent elements and conscientious objectors who brought the repudiation of war to extremes were to have a greater and more profound influence on cultural change which took place in Italy than the vast and multi-faceted world of associations and movements.

Starting from the second half of the Sixties, upon the stimulus of student revolt, and later, of the radical politicisation of the young generations, the themes of peace and nonviolence changed in substance and increased their grip on a society that was fast becoming secularized when compared to the parties forced to run after the youth on these topics.

The Vietnam War represented, as will be said later, a decisive watershed which signalled the measure of the generational sprain that had come about in society but also within the very same world of pacifism. Up to that time, the action of the pacifist movements had prevalently been inspired by the fear of nuclear catastrophe, with the Vietnam War, instead, to the fear of the bomb other themes came together, such as the crushing underfoot of the weak by the strong, the Third World, imperialism and especially the violence of war in itself, the violence of every war.

This brief journey through Italian pacifism, however, will try to read the phenomenon moving from a particular, and maybe also extravagant, observatory, that observatory of the beat generation, the Provos and capelloni (long-haired hippies), or better still, a small youth sub-culture which with its magazine “Mondo Beat”[2] contributed to a great degree to lay the foundations for that which will be the explosion of the Protest movements of 1968.

Precisely these youths, indeed, which the Italian press of the time scornfully referred to as “capelloni”, “zazzeruti” or “barbudos” and their magazines – from the already alluded “Mondo Beat” to “S”, from “Urlo Beat” to “Pianeta Fresco” – were one of the reasons for, and, at the same time, one of the multiple consequences of profound changes which took place throughout Italian civil society as well as in Italian mass culture between the start of the economic miracle and the explosion of the student revolt at the end of the Sixties. These changes radically overcame and influenced all of society and they went through the world of pacifist associationism, its power of involving, organisational methodology, its models, its reference values as well as its leadership. The first radical and most important transformation regards the generational element: it had been basically men and women who had gone over the threshold of their fiftieth year, and in some cases of their sixtieth year, to animate the pacifist movement in Italy of the 1940s and 1950s: think of Father Primo Mazzolari and the socialist, Umberto Calosso – who, together with the Christian Democrat Igino Giordani, had signed the first Bill for the legal recognition of the conscientious objector at the end of the 1940s; of Aldo Capitini who, when on 24^th September 1961 organised the first Peace March between Perugia and Assisi, was 62 and of Edmondo Marcucci, his right-hand man, who at the beginning of the 1960s was 61 and so on[3]. In the period immediately following WW II, moreover, and throughout the 1950s, conscientious objection had had the main aim of reaffirming the primacy of the individual’s conscience upon the laws of the State. Throughout the course of the 1960s, the ideas of nonviolence and the culture of peace began, as already hinted at, to be declined in a very different way compared to the past: thanks to the explosion of the phenomenon of Third-Worldism and to the attention with which militants of the parliamentary or extraparliamentary left and Catholic youth began to look at the “last ones”, the struggles for conscientious objection steadfastly linked to the request for a civil service that was an alternative to military service, or to put it in the terms of those times, for a “useful period of time” opposed to the “wasted time” of military service. In Italy, the requirement for the right of conscientious objection arrogantly emerged between the years 1966 and 1967: at the centre of it all, however, there were no longer isolated cases of objectors rather some dozens of men of around twenty or thereabouts, epiphenomena of a whole generation of men and women  who, at their backs supported their choices with public parades of solidarity and sensitization. Pacifism, fear of the atomic bomb as well as the struggle for the conscientious objector very soon linked up with the anti-authoritarian protests originating from groups preceding 1968 and by whom this was then fed. The most evident result of this coming together was radicalization and massification of pacifism and nonviolence, which from the thesis for an elitist sector of adults, transformed into a mass youth culture phenomenon which was capable of  penetrating into fields – like the Catholic one – that up to then has shown themselves to be impermeable to this type of stimuli.

Moreover, this ethical straying and this new declination of the conscientious objector were the cause and symptom for yet another process of transformation that, during this time, was interesting a stronghold of 20^th-century culture and that is, the concept of the motherland. Up till WW II, wrote Fabrizio Lilli in “Il Corriere della Sera” in 1966, «l’amore di patria non rientrava neanche nella categoria dei sentimenti, era la voce d’un decalogo morale né più né meno che l’onestà o il rispetto per la proprietà altrui» (love of the motherland didn’t even fall into the category of the feelings, it was the entry of a moral decalogue, no more and no less than honesty and respect for others’ property). Many intellectuals, according to the journalist, had made a «holy cause» out of “unlove” for the motherland: they praised, defended and understood love of the Russian motherland for Russians, of the Vietnamese motherland for the Vietnamese, of the Cuban one for the Cubans, and so on, but they seemed unable to bear the borders within which they lived. «Si direbbe» (One could say) concluded Lilli, a faithful interpreter of the climate and divisions due to the Cold War, «che anche l’amore sia soggetto agli imperativi della moda» (that even love is subject to the imperatives of fashion)[4].

Concomitantly, beat youngsters and capelloni from the pages of the “Mondo Beat” magazine, initiated their battle against the war, against all war without any distinction of a political hue, making their war cry the refusal of the uniform and the army.

I DON’T WANT A FLAG FOR MY BODY – wrote Gianni De Martino in “Mondo Beat” – I DON’T WANT TO LEARN HOW TO USE A RIFLE. I DON’T WANT TO TAKE PART IN THE LOGIC OF DESTRUCTION. Let us fill the drawers of the generals with chalk. We will exhibit them in the wax works museum as monsters of stupidity. IN SPIRITS CONSERVED ARE THEIR BRAINS AND WE FREE MEN ON THE STREETS OF THE WORLD[5].

In the common imaginary world of the young protagonists of this time, beat generation and not just them, moreover, also the still warm and live memory of the Holocaust and Auschwitz played a determining and diriment role which acted «like a powerful incitement to battle against injustices and oppressions» of the age: imperialism, colonialism and authoritarianism. The memory of the Nazi crimes, the comparison of these with the colonial violence (carried out by France in Algeria, for example, or by the U.S. in Vietnam) fed the anti-Fascism of the protest groups, at the start, and the student movement later. About gas chambers and crematorium spoke, provocatively, “Mondo Beat” in June 1967 following the evacuation of a camp site of capelloni in Milan[6]. «We are all Jews» the French youth who had come out onto the streets cried following the expulsion of their leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, at the behest of general Charles De Gaulle in 1968. While in Holland, the Provos were protesting against the wedding of Princess Beatrix to Claus Von Amsberg, a former Nazi, who, in 1944, had worn the uniform of the notorious Death’s Head unit of the SS[7], in Germany, even though it was not mentioned in the official speech, the memory of Auschwitz constituted an engine to student protest: a new generation, albeit with a thousand limitations and ambiguities, called for the bill of the previous generation for that which happened during Nazism and for the evident links that the new Bonn administration kept with the Third Reich. The youth revolt of the 1960s contributed, as Enzo Traverso would have said, to lay the basis for the moulding of a new historical consciousness as well as to feed the debate concerning “the past with does not want to pass”, upon which much discourse was undertaken in Germany since the 1980s[8].

That generation of the second half of the 1960s in Europe and the United States was – or else also “a generation of cosmopolitans without roots”[9] – that which did not spare itself in the fight against the war and for the recognition and enlarging of civil rights and which, even if in a contradictory way, was moved by a strong idealist stimulus and by an almost fever-like attention for social matters[10].

Let’s take things in order.

Italy and the rest of the world in the 1960s

As we have already hinted at, 1966 and 1967 represented «the educational novel» for all those youths who in a short time would have given rise to the occupation of the universities in 1968[11]. Indeed, in Italy like in the rest of the western countries, the youth affirmed themselves as political actors totally. In the great outlying areas of Italian metropolises the “beat” phenomenon made its appearance constituting one of the first forms, surely among the most original, of «collective subject on the move» and of generational rebellion in our country[12].

In January 1966, thousands of the almost four million Italian youths between sixteen and twenty-two, amidst the amazement and disapproval of their teachers and parents let their hair grow and wore beat clothes. The soundtrack to the birth of the phenomenon of our capelloni were the songs of the numerous bands which came into being at this time, based upon the Anglo-Saxon bands. It was beat music which «echo[ed], high and well distinguished from the chorus of adults» to amplify «the voice of the new generations which, without intermediaries and without apprehension any more, indicate[d] their own existential priorities»[13]: the need to live with their peers far from bourgeois respectability and from family authoritarianism and to experiment new forms of communication without having to feel trodden underfoot by taboo and traditional values. Rockes, I Corvi, I Nomadi, Francesco Guccini, L’Equipe 84, New Dada and many others, added to the musical context of Italy, besides long hair, jeans,  extravagant clothing, even themes concerning social revolt: the existential unease of the youth condition, the need in believing «in a new world and in a hope that was just born», opposition to war and pacifism, – Guccini in 1965 writing “Dio è morto” (God is dead) imagined a «revolt without arms» – the youth’s intolerance of their parents and the world of adults. In beat songs, the anti-militarism dismissed love themes, pacifism, the protest against the war in Vietnam, and fear of the atomic bomb substituted the heart/love duo[14].

In this context, the slogan, coined by the philosopher, Bertrand Russel,  Make love, not war, which was spreading like wildfire throughout all the West, slotted perfectly onto the Italian context. Just to make circulation of the message of the aging philosopher easier, there was the escalation of the American intervention in Vietnam which made the world fear, as Antonio Gambino wrote in “L’Espresso” that it was going Slowly but surely towards total war[15]. Throughout the course of 1967 and 1968, indeed, besides the contestations relating to teaching syllabi and private life, many marches promoted were organised to protest against the war in Vietnam[16].

This year – wrote Ferruccio Parri – Father Christmas brings the gift of ashes and coal. If we are not already at the prologue of the third, and final, world war, our peoples will ask themselves tomorrow why is it that to save democracy was it necessary to sow, with such ruthlessness, massacres and ruins: why a great people had been able to let itself be led by a short-sighted government, along a path that was so highly pernicious for the very same future of its international influence[17].

Vietnam may be viewed as the true catalyst of western youth revolt and 1967, in particular, may be considered “the year of Vietnam”[18]. In Italy, as throughout the world, many marches took place one after the other, many student assemblies, torchlight processions, factory sit-ins, protest vigils in front of US consulates, the burning of American flags to the cry of “Yankee go home” in protest of the war. While Noam Chomsky, in the magazine “New York Review of Books” wrote: «we have to take illegal measures to oppose an indecent government», and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Martin Luther King, in the month of April of that same year in New York, openly opposed the war and defined it «the real enemy of the poor». In the Declaration of Independence form the war in Vietnam he polemically said that in that conflict there was the paradox of an entire nation: the United States said they were engaged in a war of freedom for the Vietnam people when the blacks of America, in Harlem just like as in Georgia, had absolutely no rights[19].

The war in Vietnam, moreover, contributed to opening up «the path to new, and unpredictable […] consciousness»[20] and to «ample collective rethinking» which were maturing and involving the world of youth, intertwining agitation born in “places” culturally very far-off: from post-Council Catholicism, inspired by Pacem in terris (1963) to the American underground[21].Thanks also to Vatican II – an event which it is not possible to leave out of consideration and of vital importance to understand the lift-off of the profound processes of cultural and social regeneration of the 1960s –, the opposition to that war saw, side-by-side with one another, both young people belonging to formations of the new political Left and young Catholics or conscientious objectors who fought, for example, in the Christian Movement for peace, in the international Movement for reconciliation, inspired by the experience of Aldo Capitini or Danilo  Dolci, but also in the youth ranks of the Christian Democrats[22]. Many young Catholics ascribed the value of revolutionary commitment to nonviolence, to opposition to the war and to imperialism and to the struggle for conscientious objection. A revolutionary commitment which made them extraordinarily similar in language and political action with their peers grouped on diametrically opposing ideological positions, throughout Italy and the rest of the world[23]. «The communist who struggles sincerely for justice in a world that is profoundly unjust», was read in the “Rinnovamento” in January 1968, «it is also a brother, ultimately enthused by an inspiration which comes from Christ: “Blessed are the hungry and those who are thirsty for justice”»[24].

In this context, from the United States to Great Britain, from France to our own country, the cases of conscientious objectors became more and more frequent: ever more young people refused to wear the military uniform. In the US, in particular, the protest was taking on more striking proportions, day by day: according to “Mondo Beat”, a good 40,000 young Americans, in 1967, took refuge in Canada to avoid the 5-year sentence for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Among these thousands of young people-dissidents-objectors, according to the Milan “capelloni”, the case of conscientious objector, Cassius Clay, stood out, his was not the last one to do so, but certainly the most clamorous in the history of the conscientious objectors of the war in Vietnam[25].

This episode demonstrated, according to “Mondo Beat”, that in America a «revolution of consciences» was spreading which brought the young generations to condemn any type of war, «with the implicit refusal of the justification of right or holy, since war is always unjust and is never holy»[26].

At the State Central Archive, in the file dedicated precisely to this theme, there is an enormous volume of material: fliers, Police Prefect reports, posters, newspaper articles which from 1967 to 1970 testify to just how central was the struggle for achieving this right among the youth of the 1960s[27]. The first case of conscientious objector who emerged from anonymity was that of Piero Pinna, the “pacifist”. He, condemned in 1949, had decided to object after having participated in a conference of Aldo Capitini. In his objector declaration, he had affirmed that his was not a refusal to serve the motherland, rather it was simply the refusal to kill: in the case of war, indeed, Pinna had requested to be sent not to fight but to defuse mines[28]. During the 1950s are other cases of objection but the most renowned were, perhaps, those of the Catholics, Giuseppe Gozzini in 1962 and Fabrizio Fabbrini in 1964. The latter, assistant of Roman Law at the University of Rome, in order to show that the objection was anything but an act of cowardice, refused the uniform a few days before being dismissed, writing to his commander that every good Catholic has the duty to commit himself to reach peace «in every way and at all levels»[29]. He was condemned on 24^th February 1966 to one year, 11 months and 10 days of custody.

Obedience is no longer a virtue

It was precisely at the objection of Fabbrini that the military chaplains of Tuscany pronounced their opinions from the pages of the “Nazione”, against whoever, advancing reasons of conscience or faith, refused to place himself at the nation’s disposal, «considering the so-called “conscientious objection” an insult to the motherland and to its fallen men which foreign to the Christian commandment of love» would represent nothing more than an «espressione di viltà expression of cowardice»[30].

The letter published in the Florentine newspaper opened up a bitter dispute between military chaplains and a parish priest, Father Lorenzo Milani, author, together with his pupils of Barbiana, of a book destined to become the manifesto of the Italian student movement Lettera ad una professoressa[31].

The priest wrote the Risposta ai cappellani militari, published on 23^rd February 1965 in “Rinascita”, in an article with the meaningful title of I preti e la guerra. The article, signed by Luca Pavolini, cost the priest and the journalist a denouncement for illegal apology of crime, submitted by a group of former Florentine soldiers. Harsh and straightforward, the parish priest was with the young conscientious objectors who were paying «their heroic Christian coherence» with gaol[32].

Don Milani, in his impassioned response, sustained that the task of the chaplains should be to educate soldiers to conscientious objection and not to obedience. When faced with the horror which was but «the daily bread of every war», the parish priest, writing to the judges during the trial to justify his absence in the debate in that he was gravely ill[33], stated:

A priest who wrongs a prisoner is always wrong. So much more if he wrongs he who is in prison for an ideal. […] On a wall of our school, there are the words “I care” written in big letters. It is the indestructible motto of the best of American youth. «I do care, it is close to my heart». It is the exact opposite of the Fascist one «I do not care» […]. Obedience is no longer a virtue. To have the courage to tell the youth that they are all sovereigns, for this reason obedience is no longer a virtue, but it is the most subtle of temptations, that they shall not believe to use it as shield to cover themselves in front of men or God, that it is necessary that each one of them feels to be the only responsible for everything[34]. 

The case caused much stir and the whole thing, besides giving origin to a lively debate of very ardent tones in dailies between intellectuals of differing political positions, contributed to give a certain degree of visibility to the struggles for conscientious objectors[35] and to all those Italian youths who were convinced that a «capellone today is better than a general tomorrow»[36].

According to “Panorama” in 1967, Italy, one of the few western nations, together with Franco’s Spain, the Portugal of Salazar and the Greece with its generals, not to have yet solved the issue of the conscientious objector, recorded 158 youths failing to report for military service, many of whom are Jehovah’s Witnesses (generally of modest social extraction), Catholics and pacifists (mostly university graduates with a good level of personal culture), all adding up to 209 trials. The punishment for objectors was very harsh. Youth who refused to wear the uniform and to report for military service, were sentenced to prison for disobedience in keeping with article 173 of the Peace Military Penal Code and ended up in the military prison in Gaeta[37]. Notwithstanding this, for many youths, civil disobedience started to become perceived as a moral duty and transformed itself into the one tool useful for peacefully opposing laws and norms that were regarded as being unjust.

Andrea Valcarenghi, a young Provo of the Milan Onda Verde, locked up in the prison of Gaeta precisely because he was an objector «non per fede religiosa, né per spirito anarchico, ma per motivi politici e per senso morale» (not because of religious faith, nor  because of an anarchical tendency, but for political reasons and out of a moral sense), in a letter published in the last issue of “Mondo Beat”, affirmed that the need to protest and struggle against a society «based upon violence and coercion» had pushed many young people to be inspired by revolutionary pacifist movements as well as making their own «pacifism active resisting the violence» which was systematically imposed upon them.

Our commitment – concluded Valcarenghi – today brings us against the law, but with the exact aim of conquering  a new right: the right to conscientious objection. The day when every and any young person will be able to refuse military service, an initial step will be taken along the long pathway which our country, like others, have to go through towards the refusal of bloc politics, towards disarmament[38]. 

And thus while these youth “spoilsports” «took the responsibility» for their actions «upon themselves», ironizing on the difficulties they would face – «Gaeta», wrote Gianni De Martino in “Mondo Beat”; «it is a health resort in our thoughts» – many still «deal[t] with the Provos like layabouts, like wretches, without ideals and without motherland»[39]. The “Corriere della Sera”, for example, stood out for its attitude of closure towards the requests of change, proposed by many youth sectors demonstrating and mirroring the incapability of a great proportion of Italian society in understanding the radical nature of certain choices. Alfredo Todisco, a columnist on the Milan daily, in an article dedicated to youth anti-militarism offers us the possibility to, not just, concretely understand the contempt masked in gentle irony with which a certain part of public opinion regarded these youths but also the attempt to reduce everything to acts of bravado typical of listless students, for whom any excuse was a good one for a holiday. Todisco, being convinced that the slogan «Make love, not war» was clearly a symptom of mental weakness which was roaring throughout the 1960s «crossing swords with the virile ideals of their fathers», concluded his article affirming:

We are not at all in favour of war and we are great devotees of love. The ideal of pacifism, in an age where a new war might mean the end of the world, it is truly sacrosanct. […] The suspicion that it is used for squabbling torments us. […] What practical meaning can a motto like «Make love, not war» have? Well, let’s suppose that it is established here. And then, if, while we are making love, the Chinese – just for the sake of it – make war on us? We’ll end up in captivity where even the animals, as we know, lose the rut. If, to make love there needs to be two at least, to make love and not war there needs to be all of us[40]. 

The capelloni, among the most wary readers of that which they ironically called “Il Corriere della Serva” (TN -  transl: the carrier of the ‘servant’ – my italics), imagining the satisfaction of the thinkers and the village bumpkins of half of Italy at the reading of such article, did not let the occasion slip away and responded thus from the pages of “Mondo Beat”, addressing those

Men of “virile ideals”, as Mr Todisco calls them, which with their sex believed to have astonished the world, and who, between one sexual performance and another, succeeded for good or for ill, to make war as well. And that Mr Todisco, sexually speaking, belongs to their category is evident, if it is true that at the conclusion of  his article dogmatizes ‘…to make love, there needs to be two at least’. Come on, Mr Todisco, be more modest: you can also do it by yourself[41]. 

Even if everything was done to denigrate and ridicule those who had accepted the habitus of the anti-conformist and pacifist protestor, this youth and not only, who in November 1966 did not hesitate to rush, with their dishevelled locks and their eccentric clothes, to a Florence which had been devastated by the flood and mud, they held nothing back and committed themselves nonstop to the approval of a law on the conscientious objector. Far-sighted, Benelux reconsidering events which had characterized 1966, wrote in “Paese Sera”: «it has been the year of the young, of the capelloni, of the Provos, of the miniskirts. […] Maybe we’re mistaken, but 1967 as well as the rest of the century will have to deal with them»[42].

After a long parliamentary process as well as various ups and downs, law N° 230 given over to the New norms concerning conscientious objectors will be approved on 8^th July 1998[43].