We reproduce here the statement "Response to a Vile Slander" that our comrades of the Internationalist Communist Tendency in Italy, the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista), have made after having suffered a campaign of slanders against their members.

We want to express our solidarity with them, the organization and the whole Internationalist Communist Tendency. The statement speaks for itself and we don’t develop our denunciation of these kinds of behaviours of secret manoeuvers, gossip and slanders.

As says the BC statement, when individuals’ behaviours are to be criticized, they have to “ be made public, exposed to the light of day ” with “ evidence ” so that the accused militants and the organization can respond and defend themselves. Besides, faced with manouvers and manipulations made in silence, wherever they come from, the best response and defense – the very one that the workers’ movement has always utilized – is to make public these wrongdoings. Thus, they lose great part of their efficacy: once the individuals who are responsible for these actions – whether they are directly or indirectly related with the police, or psychologically ill – are unmasked and cannot act anymore, or only act minimally, their actions lose a great part of their power of nuisance.

The IGCL supports the comrades who suffer this smear campaign because these acts are contrary to the proletarian method.

Solidarity with the ICT, Battaglia Comunista and its members !

The IGCL, April 19th.

Statement of the Internationalist Communist Party
(Battaglia Comunista)

We have decided to denounce a very serious and disgusting campaign carried out by some former militants of our Party.

Their scheme has been to circulate disparaging rumours about some of our members, particularly the most prominent comrades. They have spared us nothing in their senseless accusations: fear, cowardice, betrayal, opportunism of individuals, up to accusations of links with forces of the bourgeois state. These slanders were circulated among militants of other communist organisations, in the ’movement’ and even in the international relations of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (TCI).

It has been a real smear campaign, studiously systematic, characterised by two ’methodological criteria’:

1. The vile allegations have never been made public, exposed to the light of day. Knowing that they lie, the defamers preferred the more subtle and murky method of whispered gossip.
2. They have never produced a shred of evidence. But since those who make accusations have the burden of producing evidence, the very absence of concrete evidence is evidence of the iniquity of these individuals and their manoeuvres. It is also significant to note that these vile calumnies only appeared after these elements left the organisation. It now seems that, after having left our organisation, some of these ex-comrades hateful attacks against the Internationalist Communist Party (and against all the ICT) has become their main focus of their politics, if not their lives.

It is, in short, the politics of the clique which we have always despised: instead of confirming the validity of their own practice in the real world they prefer - in the absence of anything deeper – to give themselves legitimacy by throwing mud on us and on our militants, motivated by continuing grudges and their own political and human misery.

In the history of our Party a thing just as bad had its counterpart – in a much more serious form – only during the Second World War, when internationalist militants were targeted by Togliatti’s thugs, who justified their campaign of persecution right up to assassination, by accusing us of being ’in the service of the Gestapo.’

This our denunciation, publicly and in the light of day, of a manoeuvre that bears all the signs of a political provocation in order to create suspicion, and to create difficulties for – if not to sabotage – our political work.

The Internationalist Communist Party rejects by all means possible even this slander from those who prefer to swim in the murky sea of provocation rather than clarify their political intentions, and as always we will continue our work for the construction of the revolutionary and communist alternative to this system and for the construction of the revolutionary class party.

The militants of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista)

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Translated as an act of solidarity with our Italian comrades by the Communist Workers’ Organisation