Foreign News: The Red Black Book

For Italy’s Reds, September is festa month, a time for rousing party parties, where fun is mixed with the serious business of renovating Communist dogma and replenishing Communist coffers. Piazzas and parks throughout Italy echoed last week with the sounds of lively local Communist festas. The biggest blowout of all, attended by the party’s biggest Red wigs, was to be held in Florence’s gracious old Cascine park. But Florence’s stoutly anti-Communist police chief did not fall into the fun-loving spirit. Last week he abruptly withdrew the party’s permit to congregate in the park.

Seething over this latest example of the Christian Democrats’ new determination to harass the enemy by every legal means, the Communists called a one-day citywide strike in Florence. And at a merry festa in Ravenna, Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti was so mad he let his fangs show. Usually he talks a sweetly reasonable line; last week he gloated over the death of EDC, hailed the armistice in Indo-China and boiled with indignation at the banning of the festa in Florence.

“Let me say with all firmness that this is one of those things that will go down in our ‘Book of Things Not Forgotten,’ ” he cried. “We kept a list of such things during Fascism and eventually the day came when we were able to settle accounts. Our great objective is to restore liberty among our people. But if in order to do this, it is necessary to curb the freedom of some, we are prepared to deny freedom to those who serve reaction.”