AS PRELUDE TO RED STRIKES
1-FRR AR A.
Luigi Ansaloni, a 30 year-old agricultural labourer, who lives with his wife and child at Pieve di Cento, in the Emilian Plain, is on the danger list at the local hospital with two litres of mud in his stomach.
A few days ago he and 25 other members of the ACL1 (Italian ACTU) Cooperative Movement went to work, seeding, on the Cooperative's land a mile or two from the village.
In the afternoon a crowd of 3,000, predominantly women, were gathered by the local office of the Communst Trade Movement, the Camera del ',avow, to persuade the 26 to stop work.
There was no strike or any general labour disturbance, but Communists in the provinces of Ferrara, Modena and Bologna have recently received orders that " reactionary," that is to say non-Communist, cooperatives must at all costs be broken before harvest time when what threatens to be the most ferocious strike in the post-war history of Emilia is planned by the Communists to begin.
The methods of persuasion resulted in an attempt to drown Luigi Ansaloni in the mud of a deep ditch, after he had been knocked unconscious by a blow on the head with a spade.
Each of his 25 companions was injured in varying degrees by the " persuasive " three thousand.
One of the three thousand was injured also-and as a result of this latter, the Communist 7 rade Union movement called a local 24-hour general strike " as a sign of protest against the inhuman provocation offered by the members of ACLI."
This is not the first event of its kind in the pre-strike agitations.
Priest beseiged
The parish priest of a village in the commune of Sasso Marconi, Bologna. was beseiged in his house for two days and nights by a great crowd, again predominantly of women, who threatened his life because he had found work for members of ACLI on a neighbouring estate.
Small landowners have been attacked for giving work to members of ACI.I.
An attempt was made at San Ciiovanni in Persiceto, Bologna, by some 200 members of the Communist Trade Union movement to lynch two members of ACLI working for the cooperative DECIMA. The Communists were dispersed by the police using tear gas, but not before the two ACL1 members had been badly beaten up.
The violence of the Communists is at present concentrated against the ACLI members in the province of Bologna because it is here that ACLI is most vigorously pushing ahead with an experiment of cooperative agriculture.