Greetings to everyone, to the Popolo Viola , to the Red Diary Movement, to all the Movements here today, to all the men, women, young people and workers whom are here to fight this new battle.

A new battle yet the same battle which saw us united here last year, on December 5^th when we shouted out our anger, our desire to live in a free country. A country able to guarantee a future for our children, a country in which the fresh wind of freedom blows to sweep away the stink of moral compromise and corruption which continues to ooze from the crater of power, a caste who has adopted this murky system and turned it into its moral law.

Not much has changed since then. We continue to slide deeper and deeper into a never ending pit of social despair.

Sure, a few freedom threatening laws which were about to be approved have been blocked. Surely we cannot attribute this small victory to our political opposition whom, apart from a few feeble voices crying out in the desert, seems to have disappeared. Opposition appears to be more interested and busy in disputes over whom is to cover prestigious positions within a dead army.

Those laws were barred because of the power struggle taking place inside the government's political majority. It is only because someone in the majority, after many years, has decided to try to mend his ways by opposing the man who was yes voted to govern this country by our citizens, but, who's only interest right from the beginning was to defend himself and his business by avoiding those judiciary trials for which he is destroying the principles of our Constitution. In order to protect his personal interest he has built walls, shields and stumbling blocks of all shapes and sizes.

This is what is happening. There is an attempt taking place, a successful attempt, to subvert our constitutional values. This is why I believe Antonio Di Pietro is right when: during the latest voting session in which political parties were called to express their approval as to the president's political program he uses the word “rape” to describe this sad reality.

The term is appropriate but not sufficient because we are not merely looking at one rapist, but of a gang of rapists, a group rape.

Justice is being raped, our education system is being raped, our right to study, our right to work is being raped, the principle which says we are all the same in front of the law, the principle of separation of State powers, our Constitution is being raped.

For years we have been watching a snake charmer, an illusionist whose tricks could be worthy of one of the best comedy shows if they weren't such a tragic reality.

How else could we define the promise to complete work on the Salerno – Reggio Calabria high way, a construction sight which has been open for decades and whose only purpose is to continue financing camorra and ndrangheta through new contract work?

How can one promise to provide the final project of the Messina bridge within a year, a bridge between the camorra and the ndrangheta, a bridge between two regions who completely lack any type of infrastructure, whose only benefit from the project revolves around construction work contracts necessary to build a bridge which would once again be controlled by organized crime?

How can we accept without laughing, or better yet crying, the words of a man who claims to have saved the world by convincing Obama to allocate funds to american banks in order to save them from bankruptcy, when such a plan did not contribute to save the world at all, at best it saved a caste of bankers?

How can this man truly believe that people are going to buy his stories when his bad reputation is sadly renowned worldwide, a reputation which has discredited our nation before the eyes of an entire international community?

How can we accept this from someone who practically bent over backward in front of Libyan dictator Gheddafi, another petty despot with whom he shares the responsibility of hundreds of desperate immigrants ' drownings in the Strait of Sicily or of others who died during forced marches across the Libyan desert following a desperate attempt to escape from hunger and oppression?

The common sentiment of solidarity which characterized our people has also been raped and destroyed.

This man, the same person who defined our Constitution an ensemble of old and useless rules, a book from hell for those who are called to rule the country, a series of compromises rooted in communist ideals, this man had the gull to cite Pietro Calamandrei, one of the fathers of our Constitution.

We cannot accept that Pietro Calmandrei's name, the author of some of the most beautiful pages of our Constitution be pronounced by someone who mocks and insults his work everyday and whom unfortunately is hardly ever contested by those who should be the gatekeepers of our Constitutional laws.

A man whose government lives thanks to a party who considers our national flag offensive and is trying to fill our classrooms with symbols of their own political party as opposed to the symbols of our State.

Nonetheless this last year has not been a complete failure. Perhaps the wish I expressed when we last saw each other, my wish for our president to receive what is in his rights, a just trial, will soon come true.

A few brave Magistrates from Palermo, Caltanissetta and Florence are cutting through the thick, black veil which up until this day has covered those who are truly responsible for the 1992/1993 massacres. Their investigations are bringing to light the plans and schemes which gave birth to the massacres. The blood spilled in those years constitutes the foundations of this wretched, tumorous second republic.

Perhaps the moment is near when, following Beta, Alfa will also be granted a just trial. After Author 1, Author 2 will also be judged. Considering we already have a Convicted 2 for mafia association maybe his mate, Caesar, the number 1will soon be identified by the same prefix.

The same mate who stood by his side when Beta declared Mangano a hero. They stood together and declared a mafioso serial killer like Vittorio Mangano a hero. They turned the code of silence and brutality into heroism thus making it difficult for us to use the same term for our “heroes”, for Paolo Borsellino, for Giovanni Falcone, for Francesca, for Agostino, Emanuela, Vincenzo, Walter and many other true heroes and martyrs who died serving their country and whom too often were killed by parts of a State gone astray.

In order to remind this man that we demand he disappear from the political scene of our country, to show him the faces of the real heroes and martyrs of our nation, to remind him of the meaning of the word Resistance, a term he would love to erase from the face of the earth, to refresh his memory as to the origins of our Constitution, the one he is shredding to pieces, it seems more than appropriate to use the words of the man whom our president disgraced by pronouncing his very name: Pietro Calamndrei.

On March the 7th 1947 during a Constituent Assembly session, Pietro Calamandrei spoke of the martyrs of the Resistance. The words he pronounced then seem to have been written for our martyrs, for all the men and women who gave their lives for Justice and Freedom in our day and age. Here is what he said:

“They died without rhetoric, with simplicity, as though dying was part of their daily trade, a necessary task which would once again render freedom and dignity to Italy. They reserved the most difficult part of this chore for themselves, the chore of dying, of testifying, through Resistance and death their faith in Justice. Our task is one hundred times simpler: we are called to translate into clear, stable and honest laws the dream of a truer, right and more human society. A society based on the solidarity of a commune united in overcoming pain”, Paolo Borsellino's dream, our dream, “ Our martyrs ask very little of us. WE CANNOT BETRAY THEM”.

RESISTANCE, RESISTANCE, RESISTANCE.

Salvatore Borsellino

Italian version

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