Mussolini Make Italy Great Again the Black Shirts
O northward the night of 27 December 2003, five men broke into a huge, empty office complex in Rome, just s of the urban center's main railway station, Roma Termini. A few days before, the men had put up fake fliers, appealing to the public for assist to find a lost blackness cat called "Pound". It was a fashion to avert suspicion equally they surveyed the edifice before breaking in.
Nothing was left to chance: the date, between Christmas and New year, was chosen considering there wouldn't be many people around. Even the name and color of the cat wasn't casual: "Pound" was a nod to the American poet and fascist evangelist Ezra Pound. And black was the colour associated with their hero, Benito Mussolini. They planned to start a radio station from inside their new edifice called Radio Bandiera Nera – "Black Flag Radio".
The human being giving orders that night was Gianluca Iannone. And then 30, he was alpine, burly and curt. With his shaved caput and thick beard, he looked a flake like a Hells Angel. He had "me ne frego" ("I don't care" – the slogan used by Mussolini'south troops) tattooed diagonally across the left side of his neck. Iannone was famous in fascist circles as the lead singer in a rock band called ZZA, and equally the owner of a pub in Rome, the Cutty Sark, which was a coming together signal for Rome's extreme right.
The five men were nervous and excited as they took turns working on the wooden front door with crowbars. The others gathered close past, to watch and to provide encompass. Once the door gave, they piled inside, pushing it shut backside them. What they found was scenic. There was a large entrance hall on the ground floor, a chiliad staircase, even a elevator. At that place were 23 office suites in the seven-storey block. The previous occupier, a government quango, had moved out the twelvemonth before, so the place was freezing and damp. But it was huge, covering thousands of square metres. The cherry on the cake was the terrace: a large, walled roof from which you could see the whole of Rome. The men gathered together up at that place and hugged, feeling that they had planted a flag in the heart of the Italian uppercase – in a gritty neighbourhood, Esquilino, which was home to many African and Asian immigrants. Iannone dubbed their building "the Italian embassy".
That building became the headquarters of a new motility called CasaPound. Over the next 15 years, it would open another 106 centres across Italia. Iannone, who had been in the Italian ground forces for three years, described each new centre as a "territorial reconquest". Considering every centre was self-financing, and considering they claimed to "serve the people", those new centres in turn opened gyms, pubs, bookshops, parachute clubs, diving clubs, motorbike clubs, football game teams, restaurants, nightclubs, tattoo parlours and barbershops. CasaPound suddenly seemed everywhere. But it presented itself every bit something beyond politics: this was "metapolitics", echoing the influential fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who wrote in 1925 that fascism was "before all else a total conception of life".
Until then, fascist revivals had usually been seen, by the Italian mainstream, as nostalgic, uncultured and thuggish. CasaPound was different. It presented itself equally forward-looking, cultured, even inclusive. Iannone had been drawn to fascism in his youth because of a "fascination with the symbols", and now he creatively mixed and matched code words, slogans and symbols from Mussolini'south ventennio" (as his 20-year rule is known), and turned them into 21st-century song lyrics, logos and political positions. In a state in which style and pose are paramount, CasaPound was fascism for hipsters. There were reports of violence, merely that – for young men who felt aimless, sidelined, even emasculated – just added to the attraction. Many flocked to pay their €15 to become members.
By the early 2000s, information technology was no longer taboo for mainstream politicians to speak warmly of Mussolini: admirers of Il Duce had become government ministers, and many fringe, fascist parties were growing in strength – Forza Nuova, Fronte Sociale Nazionale, and various skinhead groups. But where the other fascists seemed like throwbacks to the 1930s, CasaPound focused on contemporary causes and staged creative campaigns: in 2006 they hung 400 mannequins all over Rome, with signs protesting about the city'due south housing crunch. In 2012, CasaPound militants occupied the European Matrimony's role in Rome and dumped sacks of coal outside to protest on behalf of Italian miners. Many of their policies looked surprising: they were against immigration, of course, but on the supposedly "progressive" grounds that the exploitation of immigrant labourers represented a return to slavery.
Most Italians accept been watching CasaPound with a mixture of fascination and warning for 15 years, trying to work out quite what it is. The movement claims it is a democratic and credible variant of fascism, but information technology is accused of encouraging violence and racism. CasaPound militants have repeatedly told me that they're a unifying force for Italy, but many Italians worry that they are merely recreating historical divisions in a society with a profound identity crisis.
That "CasaPound question" is at present being posed with urgency, considering it is aspiring to enter parliament next month. On 4 March, Italians will go to the polls in a general election in which eye-right and far-correct parties are expected to triumph. CasaPound's own electoral chances are slim: although in the past they take received nearly 10% of the vote in sure constituencies, they volition need at least three% of all votes nationwide to gain any parliamentary seats, which seems almost inconceivable. Still, the proliferation and growth of rival far-right parties is not a sign of the motion's obsolescence, simply of its success. For xv years, CasaPound has been like the yeast in the far-right dough – the ingredient that makes everything effectually it rise.
C asaPound germinated in the tardily 1990s as a sort of Mussolini-admiring drinking club. Every Monday nighttime, a dozen men would meet in the Cutty Sark and "plan what next," as one recalled. It was there that Iannone met the man who would become his deputy, Simone Di Stefano. Di Stefano was two years younger and quieter, simply a lifelong rightwing militant. "We were situationists trying to wake people upwards", Di Stefano says, looking back, "bohemian artists based on models like Obey Behemothic [Shepard Fairey] and Banksy".
In 1997, Iannone, Di Stefano and their mates had put up ten,000 stickers all over Rome: in a higher place eyeless faces, with barcoded foreheads and demented smiles, were simply three unexplained words: Zeta Naught Alfa. Information technology was the name of a punk rock band Iannone had decided to launch, its proper name hinting at both the American rock legends ZZ Top and at the notion that the world needed to get back to the kickoff, back to the "alfa".
Zetazeroalfa became, in the late 90s and early 2000s, an evangelising force for fascism. Touring all over Italy, the ring sang raucous punk-rock songs with lyrics such as "nel dubbio, mena" ("if in doubt, beat up") or "amo questo mio popolo fiero / che non conosce footstep" ("I love this proud people / that doesn't know peace"). In those early days, Iannone had about 100 hardcore fans, who doubled as roadies, coiffure, security and salesmen. The group sold as many T-shirts as they did CDs, with lines such as Picchia il vip ("beat out upward the VIP") and Accademia della sassaiola ("academy of stone-throwing"). The vocal that became a crowd favourite was Cinghiamattanza, significant "death by belt": at all the gigs it became a ritual for fans to take off their belts and leather each other.
In those years, Iannone was more rock star than blackshirt. His informal movement was more almost music than manifestos. CasaPound's in-house lawyer, Domenico Di Tullio, was once the bassist and vocaliser in a far-correct ring called Malabestia, "evil beast". He was introduced to CasaPound when Iannone was teaching Thai battle in a gym. "CasaPound has always been," Di Tullio said, "halfway betwixt politics and stone'n'roll." Iannone was a canny entrepreneur: he co-founded a right-wing music label chosen "Rupe Tarpeia" – the name of the Roman rock from which traitors were thrown to their deaths.
Iannone – who was obsessed with Chuck Palahniuk'southward Fight Society – had been arrested a few times for assail, once for beating up an off-duty carabiniere at Predappio, the burying shrine of Mussolini, because he was "drunk and being stupid". Revisionist historians and rightwing politicians in the 1990s worked difficult to rehabilitate Mussolini: expressing admiration for him was no longer considered heretical, but a sign of courageous thinking. Mussolini's regime was airbrushed as benign – "he never killed anybody" said Silvio Berlusconi, who became prime minister for the offset time in 1994 – and depicted as superior to the corruption and chaos of the avowedly anti-fascist Outset Commonwealth that lasted from 1948 until 1992. Berlusconi and his far-right allies scorned the traditional anti-fascist celebrations of 25 Apr, the date of Italians' liberation from Nazi fascism.
A canny politician, Berlusconi wasn't setting this calendar but following it. He knew it was a vote-winner. Buildings all over Italy, just particularly in the south, even so behave the faded letters of the discussion "DUCE". There are many monuments, and fifty-fifty a mountain, that still comport his name. A country that doesn't renounce its past equally much as blot it, Italy was, past the plough of the millennium, more prepare to include Mussolini's grandchildren in the trunk politic.
In July 2002 the militants who had gathered around Gianluca Iannone and ZZA occupied their first building, an abandoned school north of Rome. Occupations had always been a form of protest past the far left in Italy: many squats had become "social centres" and were tacitly tolerated by law and politicians. At present the far correct was trying the tactic. Iannone called the occupied schoolhouse Casa Montag, afterward the protagonist of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag.
It was the first of many occasions in which CasaPound would derange ideological expectations. Most people read Bradbury's novel as a critique of an anti-intellectual, totalitarian state, but for the CasaPounders it represented their own oppression past the forces of anti-fascism in Italian politics, who they regarded as metaphorical book-burners. Anticipating the rhetoric of the alt-right, CasaPound claimed to exist a space "where contend is free".
Inside 18 months, though, Iannone's men had upgraded and moved to the very centre of Rome, occupying the huge edifice in Esquilino. Their aim in 2003 wasn't political in whatsoever parliamentary sense: the militants wanted to live cheaply together, to create a space for their ideals and, most of all, to make a statement.
In the vestibule of their new abode, CasaPounders painted a hundred or so surnames in garish colours, suggesting the ideological lineage of their motion. Many were obvious – Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, Nietzsche, the writer and proto-fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola – but many more were bizarre or wishful: Homer, Plato, Dante, Kerouac and fifty-fifty cartoon characters such as Captain Harlock and Corto Maltese. All were men.
The movement never hid its admiration for Benito Mussolini. Photos and slogans of Il Duce were put up. Every believer was referred to as a "camerata" (the fascist version of "comrade") and exchanged the old-fashioned "legionary" handshake, grasping each other'southward forearm rather than the hand. Higher up the door on the outside of the building, in biscuit, fake-marble, "CASAPOVND" appeared.
W hat made CasaPound unique was its game of fume-and-mirrors with a fascinated Italian media. Both Di Stefano and Iannone were very media-savvy: Di Stefano was a graphic artist, and Iannone, after the ground forces, had worked as a director'southward assistant on Unomattina, a breakfast show on RAI, the state broadcaster. They promoted CasaPound via prank calls to newspapers, the invasion of Boob tube studios, the frenetic production of posters and stickers, the organisation of debates and the occasional human activity of violence.
They also began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again, such as the renationalisation of Italia's banking, communications, health, transport and free energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of Mussolini'due south politics, focusing on his "social doctrines" regarding housing, unions, sanitation and a minimum wage. CasaPound accepted that the racial laws of 1938 (which introduced antisemitism and deportation) were "errors"; the move claimed to exist "opposed to whatever course of discrimination based on racial or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination".
CasaPound's concentration on housing too appealed to voters of the old left. Its logo was a turtle (an creature that always has a roof over its head) and Ezra Pound's name was used in part considering he had railed, in his poem Canto XLV, against rent (considered usury) and rapacious landlords. One of the first things CasaPound did in its occupied edifice was to hang sheets from the windows protesting against rent hikes and evictions – in 2009, there were an average of 25 evictions in Rome every day. They campaigned for a "social mortgage", in which rental payments would finer become mortgage payments, turning the tenant into a homeowner. Within months, they had given shelter to dozens of homeless families, as well as to many camerati down on their luck.
CasaPound presented itself every bit the house of the ideologically homeless too. Iannone said it offered "a infinite of freedom, where anyone who has something to say and tin can't say it elsewhere volition e'er find political asylum". It adopted a pose of being not a part of the debate, but the receptacle of it. It reminded some of Mussolini's line that "fascism is the church of all the heresies".
Iannone was always a proponent of activeness. He knew fascism had always grown through taking the initiative: he spoke frequently nigh the proto-fascist arditi ("daring ones"), a squad of volunteers fighting under D'Annunzio, who seized the town of Fiume afterward the first world war in an attempt to resolve a edge dispute between Italia and what was and so Yugoslavia. Iannone knew that Mussolini had launched his first fascist manifesto from an occupied edifice in the piazza of San Sepolcro in Milan. Only even here, in activeness, CasaPound was borrowing leftwing dress: imitating the strategy of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, information technology aimed for what Gramsci had chosen "cultural hegemony" by infiltrating the cultural and leisure activities of everyday Italians.
So CasaPound began doing outreach on an unprecedented scale: in 2006 a student movement called Blocco Studentesco was started. A fascist women's movement, Tempo di Essere Madri ("fourth dimension to be a female parent"), was founded by Iannone's wife. A pseudo-environmental group, La Foresta Che Avanza, began in club to put "the regime into nature". (Before this month, 200 volunteers from La Foresta gathered to repair the huge tribute to Mussolini – the discussion DUX, written with pino trees – on a mountainside in Antrodoco.) The media – whether intrigued, anxious or excited – reported on every initiative: as Di Stefano told me, "everything CasaPound did became news".
There was plenty of ideological contortionism. In 2007, CasaPound started describing itself not as fascist, but as estremo centro alto (the name of a ZZA song, which means "extreme, loftier centre"). It namechecked improbable influences, such as Che Guevara and the neat anarchist vocalizer-songwriters Rino Gaetano and Fabrizio De André.
That obfuscation was a continuation of what Italian fascism, contrary to stereotype, had often done. Mussolini one time said: "We don't believe in dogmatic programmes … nosotros allow ourselves the luxury of existence aristocratic and democratic, conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legals and illegals". Mussolini'south totalitarianism often implied not fierce clarity, but slipperiness. "Mussolini did non have a philosophy," Umberto Eco once wrote. "He had simply rhetoric."
To political scientists, this creative, eccentric force from the political extremities was captivating. Betwixt 2006 and 2014, dozens of books were published on the move – some by CasaPound'due south friends, but others past academic presses in Italy and abroad. The latter fretted about the sinister implications of Mussolini's favourite slogan: libro eastward moschetto – fascista perfetto (the rhyme boasting that "book and musket" make the "perfect fascist"). How important, people wondered, was that "musket"? CasaPound sometimes relished its tearing reputation, and was sometimes angered by it. It proudly called its occupations and stunts examples of guerrilla tactics, merely other times their tone was softer: they were just atti goliardici, "bohemian acts".
That paradoxical mental attitude towards violence was encapsulated in the huge red letters painted on a central wall of CasaPound's HQ: "Santa Teppa" – Holy Mob. It was the phrase Mussolini one time used to describe his blackshirts. CasaPound militants say that they're constantly under attack from leftwing "social centres" and anti-fascists. When you become to know them, though, the position is slightly different. "We're not a violent arrangement," ane militant told me, "simply we're not non-vehement either."
T he trigger-happy fighting between Italia's partisans and fascists from 1943 to 1945 – sometimes called the country's civil war – continued sporadically later the end of the 2nd globe war. Merely ever since 1952, when a police force was passed that criminalised efforts to resuscitate Mussolini'southward fascist party, Italian fascists have seen themselves as the victims, rather than the instigators, of state repression. In reality, however, there was no Italian equivalent of Germany'due south denazification: throughout the postwar period, one far-right political party – the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) – kept live the flame of Mussolini, at its height in 1972 winning 9% or 2.7m votes. Various radical splinter groups emerged from within the MSI – the most notorious being Pino Rauti'due south Ordine Nuovo, which was involved in the bombing of a bank in 1969 that killed 17 civilians.
That atrocity was the showtime of a menstruation known equally "the years of pb": in the 1970s, far-right and far-left groups fought, shot, bombed and kidnapped not only each other, but also the public and representatives of the state. Both sides used the rhetoric of the 1940s, recalling the heroism or disloyalty of the fascists and anti-fascists from three decades earlier.
But amid the violence of the 1970s, at that place were attempts to tap into the "softer" side of the far-correct, with festivals where music, graphic blueprint, history and ecology were discussed. They were chosen "Hobbit camps", since JRR Tolkien had long been a hero for Italian neo-fascists, who liked to quote Bilbo Baggins' line that "deep roots don't freeze". There was a popular leftwing slur that fascists belonged in the "sewers", and and so a mag called La Voce della Fogna ("The Vocalism of the Sewer") was launched by unapologetics.
The neo-fascist motility that near influenced CasaPound, Terza Posizione, was founded in 1978. Information technology claimed to refuse both capitalism and communism, and – similar CasaPound – tried to revive Mussolini'due south social policies. (Iannone has its symbol tattooed on the heart finger of his left hand. His deputy, Simone Di Stefano, spent a year in London working with one of the Terza Posizione founders in the 1990s.)
In the same year, ii young militants were shot outside the offices of the MSI in Acca Larentia in Rome. That evening, when a journalist allegedly disrespected the victims by flicking a cigarette butt in a pool of blood, a anarchism began in which a third fellow was killed past a policeman. Other deaths followed that initial bloodshed: the father of 1 of the young men killed committed suicide. On the first anniversary of Acca Larentia, another militant was killed by police force.
Acca Larentia seemed proof, to fascists, that they were sitting ducks. Some renounced extremism birthday, simply others simply took it further. A far-right terrorist arrangement, NAR (the "nuclei of armed revolutionaries") was founded and took part in various killings and the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980, in which 85 people died. Equally a state crackdown on the far-correct began, the three founders of Terza Posizione fled abroad and the leaders of NAR were either killed or imprisoned.
For a generation, through the 1980s and early on 1990s,fascism seemed finished. Merely when Silvio Berlusconi burst into politics looking for anti-communist allies, he identified the MSI as his platonic political partner. The party renamed itself the National Alliance, and became the second-largest component in Berlusconi's ruling middle-right coalition in 1994. The wind had changed completely: many of the militants on the far-right in the 1970s – old hands from the MSI – were now in regime. In 1999 the iii founders of Terza Posizione returned from exile.
That was the context in which CasaPound, in the early 2000s, outset began to flourish: it was full of marginalised men who had grown up in the wilderness years of the 80s and early 90s. They were convinced that fascists had been mistreated and killed by "communist hatred and servants of the state", as a plaque memorialising the murders at Acca Larentia put it.
Simply in fact, their bread was buttered on both sides: they presented themselves as underdogs, but their ideological fathers were at present at the very top of Italian political ability. They could claim to be the victims of repressive laws banning the revival of fascism, merely because those laws were never enforced, they could proselytise with impunity.
By 2005, CasaPound was toying with electoral politics. One its militants stood for election in Lazio on the electoral list of one of Berlusconi'southward chiffonier ministers, who had been a printing officer of the MSI. From 2006 until 2008 CasaPound joined another offshoot of the MSI, the "Tricolour Flame". Neither brotherhood produced any seats in parliament, only both afforded more publicity and "respectability" to the slow-moving but determined "turtle".
In 2008, Gianni Alemanno, who had been imprisoned as a far-correct militant, became mayor of Rome. He looked on CasaPound's occupations with a decidedly indulgent eye – and that same year CasaPound occupied some other building: an abandoned railway station near the Stadio Olimpico. Called Area 19 (1919 was the year Mussolini announced the beginning fascist manifesto), information technology became a gym by twenty-four hours and nightclub by dark.
Meanwhile immature CasaPound heavies enjoyed public shows of force. In 2009, Blocco Studentesco – CasaPound's youth movement – came to Rome'south cardinal square, Piazza Navona, armed with truncheons painted with the Italian tricolor. They found a use for them on leftwing students. When one TV programme criticised Blocco Studentesco, its offices were "occupied" by CasaPound militants.
On 13 December 2011, Gianluca Casseri, a CasaPound sympathiser in Tuscany, left home with a Magnum 357 in his bag. He was a taciturn loner, fifty years one-time, rotund with brusque, grey pilus, only had constitute a home in CasaPound: he had held a launch for his fantasy novel – The Keys of Chaos – at the local club.
On that Dec morning, Casseri had a plan to shoot every bit many immigrants every bit possible. He went to a square in Florence and, at 12.30pm, killed two Senegalese men, Samb Modou and Diop Mor. He shot another human, Moustapha Dieng, in the dorsum and pharynx and then got in his blue VW Polo and drove off. Just over 2 hours later, Casseri was at the city's primal market, where he shot ii more men, Sougou Mor and Mbenghe Cheike, who survived the attack. He then turned his gun on himself in the market'south hole-and-corner carpark.
After Casseri's murders, CasaPound's leaders were invited on to national boob tube to face the allegation that they were fomenting violence. In a special programme virtually the killings, the former president of the Rai TV channel accused Iannone of having "ideologically armed" the killer. Ezra Pound'due south daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, began a legal action (which she eventually lost) to stop CasaPound using and sullying her male parent'south name. "They distort his ideas", she said, "they're violent. [My begetter] wanted an encounter between civilisations."
It was true that CasaPound's language and imagery was relentlessly antagonistic. In its Rome bookshop – "Atomic number 26 Head" – you tin can buy posters of insurgents from far-flung ceremonious wars with automatic weapons wearing ZZA T-shirts. They speak about "trincerocrazia", an "-ocracy" for people who take done their time in the trenches. The vanquish of their turtle logo also has a armed forces significant: information technology represents the testuggine, the carapace of shields used past the Roman army. All of this makes the movement edgy and incomparably testosteronic: 87% of the movement's Facebook supporters are male and 62% are between 16 and xxx.
Information technology'due south a motility that is tight, compact and united. When you're among the militants inside that shell, the disdain for the outside world is near cultish. The separation between insider and outsider is clear and loyalty is total: "I do whatever Gianluca [Iannone] tells me to", one female militant has said. The motion has published a political and historical glossary for all novice militants, so they always know what to say.
Iannone himself is forcefully charismatic and physically imposing – tall, tattooed and gravel-voiced – and perhaps even bears a slight resemblance to Mussolini. It's easy to run across why lost youngsters might exist desperate to please (and scared to displease) him. "He'south a very pure leader", Di Stefano told me, with evident admiration, as we took a walk with his two chihuahuas – called "Punk" and "Stone".
B y 2013, ambitious leadership was what a lot of Italians were longing for. The country was facing an unprecedented crunch of confidence. In 2010 youth unemployment was at almost 30%, and would rise to over 40% past 2015. That year, Italy's national statistics office suggested that nigh 5 million Italians were living in "absolute poverty". The degradation in certain suburbs – the lack of rubbish collections was just the nearly visible instance – suggested that the Italian state was, in places, almost entirely absent. The success of the populist Five Star Movement – coming from nowhere to win 25.55% of the vote in the 2013 elections – showed the Italian electorate would respond to a party that was angry and anti-institution. (The fathers of two of the leading lights of the Five Star Motion, Luigi Di Maio and Alessandro Di Battista, were both in the MSI.)
By then CasaPound was becoming known far beyond Italy. The lift in its Rome HQ was covered by stickers with the logos of far-right pilgrims from across the globe. CasaPound had always voraciously consumed foreign trends and repackaged them for an Italian audience: it had captivated the anticapitalist ideas of France's Nouvelle Droite ("new right") movement, and congenital friendships with members of Hellenic republic's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Now French visitors started talking nigh a 2012 book past Renaud Camus called The Great Replacement: information technology spoke of the idea that native Europeans would soon be completely sidelined and substituted by waves of immigrants. It was a theory that had defenseless on in the Usa. This was the root of the "identitarian" doctrine, which claimed that globalisation had created a homogeneous culture with no distinct national or cultural identities. Truthful pluralism – "ethnopluralism" – would hateful racial separation.
These ideas famously influenced both Steve Bannon at Breitbart and the American white supremacist leader Richard Spencer – but they also percolated into the thinking of CasaPound'southward cultural attache, Adriano Scianca. Scianca, who lives in Umbria, is the editor of CasaPound'south magazine, Primato Nazionale (which has a circulation, they say, of 25,000). In 2016 he published a volume called The Sacred Identity: "The cancellation of a people from the confront of the earth," he wrote, "is factually the number one [aim] in the diary of all the global oligarchs." It sounds silly, but these ideas soon made their way into mainstream newspapers – and very quickly racial separation became official CasaPound policy.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, CasaPound leaders organised rallies against asylum centres that were due to open. They formed a movement, with Matteo Salvini's Northern League (a formerly separatist move which was, by then, purely nationalist) called Sovereignty: "Italians First" was the slogan. All over Italy – from Gorizia to Milan, from Vicenza to Genoa – every fourth dimension a vacant building was converted into an asylum heart, CasaPound members would brand friends among the locals opposing the centres, distributing food parcels, clearing rubbish, and offering strategies and strong-arms. (CasaPound argued that because a proportion of immigrants had arrived illegally, their opposition was about legality rather than race.)
Simone Di Stefano is CasaPound's politico and its near prominent candidate in next calendar week's elections. With his neat, salt-and-pepper hair and trim beard, he looks like whatsoever other moderate politician. Just his problem is at present the opposite of his rhetoric: it'due south non that the Italian establishment excludes the far-correct from politics, but that there are now so many far right parties, CasaPound seems simply 1 amongst many. Di Stefano is, therefore, distinguishing himself past campaigning to leave the European Spousal relationship and urging a military intervention in Libya to halt the period of migrants: "Nosotros accept to resolve the problem of Africa," he told me.
These ideas are not likely to appeal to many Italian voters – only CasaPound'southward task is already done. It has been essential to the normalisation of fascism. At the cease of 2017, Il Tempo newspaper announced Benito Mussolini equally its "person of the year". Information technology wasn't being facetious: Il Duce barged into the news agenda every week final year. A few weeks ago, even a leftwing politician in Florence said that "nobody in this country has done more than than Mussolini". Today, 73 years subsequently his death, he is more admired than traditional Italian heroes such as Giuseppes Garibaldi and Mazzini.
CasaPound has also been a participant in an escalating political conflict in which violence – both verbal and physical – has become commonplace. When you speak to CasaPound militants, they're quick to say they only commit violence in self-defense force, simply their definition of self-defence is extremely elastic. Luca Marsella, a peak colonel in the move, once said to fourteen-year-erstwhile schoolchildren who were protesting against a new CasaPound centre: "I'll cut your throats similar dogs, I'll kill all of you." Another militant was convicted of beating up leftwing activists in Rome in 2011 when they were putting up posters. Another activist, Giovanni Battista Ceniti, was involved in a murder, though – as Iannone pointed out – he had already been expelled from CasaPound for "intellectual laziness". In February concluding year, in Viterbo, two militants, Jacopo Polidori and Michele Santini, beat upwards a man who had dared to post an ironic comment about CasaPound on Facebook. A leftwing site has compiled an interactive map of episodes of reported fascist violence beyond the peninsula – and there are and then many incidents that y'all can barely see the boot of Italy.
Then, before this calendar month, a man who had previously stood for election with the far-right Northern League, and had ties to CasaPound, went on a two-hour shooting rampage in the town of Macerata. Luca Traini fired his Glock pistol at anyone with black skin. What was shocking wasn't but the bloodshed (he injured half-dozen people, but all survived), but that it all seemed unsurprising in the current climate. Traini's inspiration was erstwhile-fashioned fascism: he had the "Wolfsangel" rune (used past both Nazis and Italia's Terza Posizione) on his forehead. He gave a Roman salute at the monument to Italia's war dead.
Simply in the backwash of his shooting, mainstream politicians on the so-called centre-correct blamed clearing, not Traini. Berlusconi, who has embraced the far right equally he attempts to engineer another ballot win, spoke of a "social flop" created by foreigners. Italy, he said, needs to acquit 600,000 illegal immigrants.
O n Sunday vii January this twelvemonth, CasaPound organised a mass rally in Rome to mark the 40th anniversary of the Acca Larentia killings. Four or five grand people turned up, many wearing similar clothes: bomber jackets and black beanies, military fatigues or drainpipe jeans. At that place were 50 men in red CasaPound bibs, the security detail, shepherding the troops. Non everyone was a CasaPound militant, simply the other groups all fell in behind Gianluca Iannone and Simone di Stefano. This, it was clear, was their show.
They walked the one-half-mile to the site of the killings in silence. "We're here, and always will be" was the implicit message. In front was a huge banner, held upward by 20 foot batons, saying "laurels to the fallen camerati". In that location was a law escort in example it kicked off, but the merely tension was from honking drivers, fed up of waiting an 60 minutes for the river of humans to pass.
At the cease of the march, CasaPound security guards lined upwards the troops in the courtyard where their iii camerati fell. On the road either side, the rest of the marchers gathered. A voice called all the camerati to attending. In one divide 2d, hands dropped to sides, and feet were pulled together. "Per tutti i camerati caduti", a voice barked. All the men raised their right arms in a directly-arm salute: "Presenti!" they shouted. The noise was so loud that a car alarm went off, and dogs started to bawl. The ritual was repeated twice more, then the voice barked "at ease", and the troops dispersed, heading home in the common cold January night.
In 15 years, CasaPound has grown so large that its initial ambition – to be accepted into the theatre of "open up argue" – is at present obsolete. Instead, its leaders now talk of eradicating anti-fascism entirely. Having once presented itself as playful, it is now deadly serious: "I'll exist a fascist every bit long as anti-fascists exist", Iannone says. Fascism, he enthuses, was "the greatest revolution in the globe, the completion of the Risorgimento [Italian unification]". Mussolini's regime was "the nearly beautiful moment of this nation". When y'all ask him if the anti-fascists aren't besides, as the national anthem says, brothers of Italy, he stares out from under his heavy eyelids: "Cain and Abel," he says, "were brothers."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/22/casapound-italy-mussolini-fascism-mainstream