It is with great sorrow that we learned yesterday, April 26th, that Giulietto Chiesa has passed away. One of the most remarkable European intellectuals – activists of our times, deeply enshrined in the “Leninist” tradition of action before anything else, even if he would not claim it, Giulietto participated in the Delphi initiative which was born out of the Delphi Conference in 2015. It was from this center of the ancient World that he delivered a passionate warning on the danger of a new world war and an equally passionate appeal to stop both the coming war and NATO.
Giullietto believed strongly that the “extremist”, Neocon forces inside the Western establishment had no other choice than war in order to try to keep the dominant position of the West confronted with the challenge of the rising Russia, BRIICS and China. This is why he wanted to create a front of all forces in Europe, Leftist or Right-wing, provided they agree to fight against the war and NATO. His predictions seemed very much to come true with the rise of nuclear tensions with Korea, the dismantling of the arms control treaties, the tensions with China and in the Middle East. Even if we did not always agree about the nature of the forces behind Trump and their real agenda.
Giulietto Chiesa was a leader of the Italian Communist Youth before becoming Moscow correspondent for Unita, the newspaper of the PCI, during perestroika. He worked for twenty years for “L’Unità” and “La Stampa” in Moscow. Also a correspondent in Moscow at that time, I still remember the shock he caused his Soviet TV guests when he told them, during one program, that he had not met any Communist in the USSR.
He also worked with all major Italian television channels, from the TG1 to TG3 and TG5 and, as a political analyst, for major Russian television channels. He was the only Italian journalist to be repeatedly mentioned in the autobiography of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he had repeatedly interviewed. He wrote a blog for “Il Fatto Quotidiano” and he had his own blog http://www.megachip.info/ . He was the founder and director of Pandoratv.it web tv. An expert in international politics and communications scholar, he founded the political-cultural movement “Alternativa”. Among his credits there are some best-sellers such as “Endless War”, “Superclan” (with Marcello Villari), “Barack Obush” (with Pino Cabras) and the movie “Zero, an inquiry into 9/11”. His latest book was “Putinophobia”. One of the initiators of the Sofia Club and of the Delphi Initiative, he was also an MEP between 2004 and 2009. We hope we will have again the opportunity to return to the work and life of this remarkable personality.
Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
