The long
read
The fascist
movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream
Italy’s
CasaPound has been central to normalising fascism again in the country of its
birth. Now they’re trying to enter parliament. By Tobias Jones
Thu 22 Feb
2018 06.00 GMT
On the
night of 27 December 2003, five men broke into a huge, empty office complex in
Rome, just south of the city’s main railway station, Roma Termini. A few days
earlier, the men had put up fake fliers, appealing to the public for help to
find a lost black cat called “Pound”. It was a way to avoid suspicion as they
surveyed the building before breaking in.
Nothing was
left to chance: the date, between Christmas and New Year, was chosen because
there wouldn’t be many people around. Even the name and colour 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 building
called Radio Bandiera Nera – “Black Flag Radio”.
The man
giving orders that night was Gianluca Iannone. Then 30, he was tall, burly and
brusque. With his shaved head and thick beard, he looked a bit like a Hells
Angel. He had “me ne frego” (“I don’t care” – the slogan used by Mussolini’s
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 as
the owner of a pub in Rome, the Cutty Sark, which was a meeting point 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 by, to watch and to provide
cover. Once the door gave, they piled inside, pushing it shut behind them. What
they found was breathtaking. There was a large entrance hall on the ground
floor, a grand staircase, even a lift. There were 23 office suites in the
seven-storey block. The previous occupier, a government quango, had moved out
the year 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 there and hugged, feeling that they had planted a flag in the
centre of the Italian capital – 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 movement called CasaPound. Over the
next 15 years, it would open another 106 centres across Italy. Iannone, who had
been in the Italian army for three years, described each new centre as a
“territorial reconquest”. Because every centre was self-financing, and because
they claimed to “serve the people”, those new centres in turn opened gyms,
pubs, bookshops, parachute clubs, diving clubs, motorbike clubs, football
teams, restaurants, nightclubs, tattoo parlours and barbershops. CasaPound
suddenly seemed everywhere. But it presented itself as 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 as 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’s
ventennio” (as his 20-year rule is known), and turned them into 21st-century
song lyrics, logos and political positions. In a country in which style and
pose are paramount, CasaPound was fascism for hipsters. There were reports of
violence, but that – for young men who felt aimless, sidelined, even
emasculated – only added to the attraction. Many flocked to pay their €15 to
become members.
By the
early 2000s, it 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’s housing crisis. In 2012, CasaPound militants
occupied the European Union’s office 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 have been watching CasaPound with a mixture of fascination and alarm
for 15 years, trying to work out quite what it is. The movement claims it is a
democratic and credible variant of fascism, but it 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 now being posed with urgency, because it is aspiring to
enter parliament next month. On 4 March, Italians will go to the polls in a
general election in which centre-right and far-right parties are expected to
triumph. CasaPound’s own electoral chances are slim: although in the past they
have received nearly 10% of the vote in certain constituencies, they will need
at least 3% 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 movement’s obsolescence, but of its
success. For 15 years, CasaPound has been like the yeast in the far-right dough
– the ingredient that makes everything around it rise.
CasaPound
germinated in the late 1990s as a sort of Mussolini-admiring drinking club.
Every Monday night, 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,
but a lifelong rightwing militant. “We were situationists trying to wake people
up”, Di Stefano says, looking back, “bohemian artists based on models like Obey
Giant [Shepard Fairey] and Banksy”.
In 1997,
Iannone, Di Stefano and their mates had put up 10,000 stickers all over Rome:
above eyeless faces, with barcoded foreheads and demented smiles, were just
three unexplained words: Zeta Zero Alfa. It was the name of a punk rock band
Iannone had decided to launch, its name hinting at both the American rock
legends ZZ Top and at the notion that the world needed to go back to the
beginning, back to the “alfa”.
Zetazeroalfa
became, in the late 90s and early 2000s, an evangelising force for fascism.
Touring all over Italy, the band 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 pace” (“I love this proud people / that doesn’t know peace”).
In those early days, Iannone had about 100 hardcore fans, who doubled as
roadies, crew, security and salesmen. The group sold as many T-shirts as they
did CDs, with lines such as Picchia il vip (“beat up the VIP”) and Accademia
della sassaiola (“academy of stone-throwing”). The song that became a crowd
favourite was Cinghiamattanza, meaning “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 about music than manifestos. CasaPound’s in-house lawyer, Domenico Di
Tullio, was once the bassist and vocalist in a far-right band called
Malabestia, “evil beast”. He was introduced to CasaPound when Iannone was
teaching Thai boxing in a gym. “CasaPound has always been,” Di Tullio said,
“halfway between politics and rock’n’roll.” Iannone was a canny entrepreneur:
he co-founded a right-wing music label called “Rupe Tarpeia” – the name of the
Roman rock from which traitors were thrown to their deaths.
Iannone –
who was obsessed with Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – had been arrested a few
times for assault, once for beating up an off-duty carabiniere at Predappio,
the burial shrine of Mussolini, because he was “drunk and being stupid”.
Revisionist historians and rightwing politicians in the 1990s worked hard 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 first time in 1994 – and depicted as superior to the
corruption and chaos of the avowedly anti-fascist First Republic that lasted
from 1948 until 1992. Berlusconi and his far-right allies scorned the
traditional anti-fascist celebrations of 25 April, the date of Italians’
liberation from Nazi fascism.
A canny
politician, Berlusconi wasn’t setting this agenda but following it. He knew it
was a vote-winner. Buildings all over Italy, but especially in the south, still
bear the faded letters of the word “DUCE”. There are many monuments, and even a
mountain, that still bear his name. A country that doesn’t renounce its past as
much as absorb it, Italy was, by the turn of the millennium, more than ready to
include Mussolini’s grandchildren in the body 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 by the far left in Italy: many squats had become “social
centres” and were tacitly tolerated by police and politicians. Now the far
right was trying the tactic. Iannone called the occupied school Casa Montag,
after the protagonist of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag.
It was the
first of many occasions in which CasaPound would confound 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 by 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 be a space “where debate is free”.
Within 18
months, though, Iannone’s men had upgraded and moved to the very centre of
Rome, occupying the huge building in Esquilino. Their aim in 2003 wasn’t
political in any 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
entrance hall of their new home, CasaPounders painted a hundred or so surnames
in garish colours, suggesting the ideological lineage of their movement. 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 even
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 “camerato” (the
fascist version of “comrade”) and exchanged the old-fashioned “legionary”
handshake, grasping each other’s forearm rather than the hand. Above the door
on the outside of the building, in beige, faux-marble, “CASAPOVND” appeared.
What made
CasaPound unique was its game of smoke-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 army, had worked as a director’s
assistant on Unomattina, a breakfast show on RAI, the state broadcaster. They
promoted CasaPound via prank calls to newspapers, the invasion of TV studios,
the frenetic production of posters and stickers, the organisation of debates
and the occasional act of violence.
They also
began pushing for policies the left had given up hope of ever hearing again,
such as the renationalisation of Italy’s banking, communications, health,
transport and energy sectors. They cited the most progressive aspects of
Mussolini’s 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
movement claimed to be “opposed to any form of discrimination based on racial
or religious criteria, or on sexual inclination”.
CasaPound’s
concentration on housing also appealed to voters of the old left. Its logo was
a turtle (an animal that always has a roof over its head) and Ezra Pound’s name
was used in part because 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 building 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 effectively 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 as the house of the ideologically homeless too. Iannone said
it offered “a space of liberty, where anyone who has something to say and can’t
say it elsewhere will always 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 action. He knew fascism had always grown through taking
the initiative: he spoke frequently about the proto-fascist arditi (“daring
ones”), a squad of volunteers fighting under D’Annunzio, who seized the town of
Fiume after the first world war in an attempt to resolve a border dispute
between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia. Iannone knew that Mussolini had
launched his first fascist manifesto from an occupied building in the piazza of
San Sepolcro in Milan. But even here, in action, CasaPound was borrowing
leftwing clothes: imitating the strategy of the Italian Marxist philosopher
Antonio Gramsci, it aimed for what Gramsci had called “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 (“time to be a mother”), was founded by Iannone’s wife. A
pseudo-environmental group, La Foresta Che Avanza, began in order to put “the
regime into nature”. (Earlier this month, 200 volunteers from La Foresta
gathered to repair the huge tribute to Mussolini – the word DUX, written with
pine 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, high centre”). It namechecked improbable influences, such
as Che Guevara and the great anarchist singer-songwriters Rino Gaetano and
Fabrizio De André.
That
obfuscation was a continuation of what Italian fascism, contrary to stereotype,
had often done. Mussolini once said: “We don’t believe in dogmatic programmes …
we allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocratic and democratic,
conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legals and
illegals”. Mussolini’s totalitarianism often implied not fierce clarity, but
slipperiness. “Mussolini did not have a philosophy,” Umberto Eco once wrote.
“He had only rhetoric.”
To
political scientists, this creative, eccentric force from the political
extremities was captivating. Between 2006 and 2014, dozens of books were
published on the movement – some by CasaPound’s friends, but others by academic
presses in Italy and abroad. The latter fretted about the sinister implications
of Mussolini’s favourite slogan: libro e 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
violent reputation, and was sometimes angered by it. It proudly called its
occupations and stunts examples of guerrilla tactics, but other times their
tone was softer: they were just atti goliardici, “bohemian acts”.
That
paradoxical 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 once used to describe his blackshirts. CasaPound militants
say that they’re constantly under attack from leftwing “social centres” and
anti-fascists. When you get to know them, though, the position is slightly
different. “We’re not a violent organisation,” one militant told me, “but we’re
not non-violent either.”
The fierce
fighting between Italy’s partisans and fascists from 1943 to 1945 – sometimes
called the country’s civil war – continued sporadically after the end of the
second world war. But ever since 1952, when a law was passed that criminalised
efforts to resuscitate Mussolini’s 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’s denazification:
throughout the postwar period, one far-right political party – the Movimento Sociale
Italiano (MSI) – kept alive 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’s Ordine Nuovo, which was
involved in the bombing of a bank in 1969 that killed 17 civilians.
That
atrocity was the beginning of a period known as “the years of lead”: 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, there were attempts to tap into the “softer” side of
the far-right, with festivals where music, graphic design, history and ecology
were discussed. They were called “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 so a magazine called La Voce della Fogna (“The
Voice of the Sewer”) was launched by unapologetics.
The
neo-fascist movement that most influenced CasaPound, Terza Posizione, was founded
in 1978. It claimed to reject both capitalism and communism, and – like
CasaPound – tried to revive Mussolini’s social policies. (Iannone has its
symbol tattooed on the middle 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, two 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 riot began in which
a third young man was killed by a policeman. Other deaths followed that initial
bloodshed: the father of one of the young men killed committed suicide. On the
first anniversary of Acca Larentia, another militant was killed by police.
Acca
Larentia seemed proof, to fascists, that they were sitting ducks. Some
renounced extremism altogether, but others simply took it further. A far-right
terrorist organisation, 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. As a state crackdown on the far-right 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 1990s,fascism seemed finished. But when
Silvio Berlusconi burst into politics looking for anti-communist allies, he
identified the MSI as his ideal political partner. The party renamed itself the
National Alliance, and became the second-largest component in Berlusconi’s
ruling centre-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 government. In 1999 the three founders of Terza Posizione returned from
exile.
That was
the context in which CasaPound, in the early 2000s, first 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.
But in
fact, their bread was buttered on both sides: they presented themselves as
underdogs, but their ideological fathers were now at the very top of Italian
political power. They could claim to be the victims of repressive laws banning
the revival of fascism, but 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’s cabinet
ministers, who had been a press officer of the MSI. From 2006 until 2008
CasaPound joined another offshoot of the MSI, the “Tricolour Flame”. Neither
alliance produced any seats in parliament, but both afforded more publicity and
“respectability” to the slow-moving but determined “turtle”.
In 2008,
Gianni Alemanno, who had been imprisoned as a far-right militant, became mayor
of Rome. He looked on CasaPound’s occupations with a decidedly indulgent eye –
and that same year CasaPound occupied another building: an abandoned railway
station near the Stadio Olimpico. Called Area 19 (1919 was the year Mussolini
announced the first fascist manifesto), it became a gym by day and nightclub by
night.
Meanwhile
young CasaPound heavies enjoyed public shows of force. In 2009, Blocco
Studentesco – CasaPound’s youth movement – came to Rome’s central 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, 50 years old, rotund
with short, grey hair, but had found a home in CasaPound: he had held a launch
for his fantasy novel – The Keys of Chaos – at the local club.
On that
December morning, Casseri had a plan to shoot as many immigrants as possible.
He went to a square in Florence and, at 12.30pm, killed two Senegalese men,
Samb Modou and Diop Mor. He shot another man, Moustapha Dieng, in the back and
throat and then got in his blue VW Polo and drove off. Just over two hours
later, Casseri was at the city’s central market, where he shot two more men,
Sougou Mor and Mbenghe Cheike, who survived the attack. He then turned his gun
on himself in the market’s underground carpark.
After
Casseri’s murders, CasaPound’s leaders were invited on to national television
to face the accusation that they were fomenting violence. In a special
programme about the killings, the former president of the Rai TV channel accused
Iannone of having “ideologically armed” the killer. Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary
de Rachewiltz, began a legal action (which she eventually lost) to stop
CasaPound using and sullying her father’s name. “They distort his ideas”, she
said, “they’re violent. [My father] wanted an encounter between civilisations.”
It was true
that CasaPound’s language and imagery was relentlessly combative. In its Rome
bookshop – “Iron Head” – you can buy posters of insurgents from far-flung civil
wars with automatic weapons wearing ZZA T-shirts. They speak about
“trincerocrazia”, an “-ocracy” for people who have done their time in the
trenches. The shell of their turtle logo also has a military meaning: it
represents the testuggine, the carapace of shields used by the Roman army. All
of this makes the movement edgy and decidedly testosteronic: 87% of the
movement’s Facebook supporters are male and 62% are between 16 and 30.
It’s a
movement that is tight, compact and united. When you’re among the militants
inside that shell, the disdain for the outside world is almost 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
movement 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 see why lost youngsters might be desperate to please (and scared to
displease) him. “He’s a very pure leader”, Di Stefano told me, with evident
admiration, as we took a walk with his two chihuahuas – called “Punk” and
“Rock”.
By 2013,
aggressive leadership was what a lot of Italians were longing for. The country
was facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence. In 2010 youth unemployment
was at almost 30%, and would rise to over 40% by 2015. That year, Italy’s
national statistics office suggested that almost 5 million Italians were living
in “absolute poverty”. The degradation in certain suburbs – the lack of rubbish
collections was just the most visible example – 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-establishment. (The fathers of two of the leading lights of the
Five Star Movement, 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 absorbed the anticapitalist ideas of France’s
Nouvelle Droite (“new right”) movement, and built friendships with members of
Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Now French visitors started talking about a 2012
book by Renaud Camus called The Great Replacement: it spoke of the idea that
native Europeans would soon be completely sidelined and substituted by waves of
immigrants. It was a theory that had caught on in the US. This was the root of
the “identitarian” doctrine, which claimed that globalisation had created a
homogeneous culture with no distinct national or cultural identities. True
pluralism – “ethnopluralism” – would mean 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’s cultural attache, Adriano Scianca. Scianca, who lives in Umbria,
is the editor of CasaPound’s magazine, Primato Nazionale (which has a
circulation, they say, of 25,000). In 2016 he published a book called The
Sacred Identity: “The cancellation of a people from the face 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 movement 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 time a vacant building was converted into
an asylum centre, CasaPound members would make 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 political leader and its most prominent candidate in
next week’s elections. With his neat, salt-and-pepper hair and trim beard, he
looks like any other moderate politician. But his problem is now the opposite
of his rhetoric: it’s not that the Italian establishment excludes the far-right
from politics, but that there are now so many far right parties, CasaPound seems
just one among many. Di Stefano is, therefore, distinguishing himself by
campaigning to leave the European Union and urging a military intervention in
Libya to halt the flow of migrants: “We have to resolve the problem of Africa,”
he told me.
These ideas
are not likely to appeal to many Italian voters – but CasaPound’s job is
already done. It has been essential to the normalisation of fascism. At the end
of 2017, Il Tempo newspaper announced Benito Mussolini as its “person of the
year”. It wasn’t being facetious: Il Duce barged into the news agenda every
week last year. A few weeks ago, even a leftwing politician in Florence said
that “nobody in this country has done more than Mussolini”. Today, 73 years
after 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-defence, but their definition of self-defence is extremely elastic. Luca
Marsella, a top colonel in the movement, once said to 14-year-old
schoolchildren who were protesting against a new CasaPound centre: “I’ll cut
your throats like 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 last year, in Viterbo, two militants,
Jacopo Polidori and Michele Santini, beat up 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 across the peninsula –
and there are so many incidents that you can barely see the boot of Italy.
Then,
earlier this 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 just the bloodshed (he injured
six people, but all survived), but that it all seemed unsurprising in the
current climate. Traini’s inspiration was old-fashioned fascism: he had the
“Wolfsangel” rune (used by both Nazis and Italy’s Terza Posizione) on his
forehead. He gave a Roman salute at the monument to Italy’s war dead.
But in the
aftermath of his shooting, mainstream politicians on the so-called centre-right
blamed immigration, not Traini. Berlusconi, who has embraced the far right as
he attempts to engineer another election win, spoke of a “social bomb” created
by foreigners. Italy, he said, needs to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants.
On Sunday 7
January this year, CasaPound organised a mass rally in Rome to mark the 40th
anniversary of the Acca Larentia killings. Four or five thousand people turned
up, many wearing similar clothes: bomber jackets and black beanies, military
fatigues or drainpipe jeans. There were 50 men in red CasaPound bibs, the
security detail, shepherding the troops. Not everyone was a CasaPound militant,
but the other groups all fell in behind Gianluca Iannone and Simone di Stefano.
This, it was clear, was their show.
Gianluca Iannone at the 7 January CasaPound
rally in Rome.
Gianluca Iannone at the 7 January CasaPound
rally in Rome. Photograph: Stefano Montesi - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
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They walked
the 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 up by 20
foot batons, saying “honour to the fallen camerati”. There was a police escort
in case it kicked off, but the only tension was from honking drivers, fed up of
waiting an hour for the river of humans to pass.
At the end
of the march, CasaPound security guards lined up the troops in the courtyard
where their three camerati fell. On the road either side, the rest of the
marchers gathered. A voice called all the camerati to attention. In one split
second, 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
straight-arm salute: “Presenti!” they shouted. The noise was so loud that a car
alarm went off, and dogs started to bark. The ritual was repeated twice more,
then the voice barked “at ease”, and the troops dispersed, heading home in the
cold January night.
In 15
years, CasaPound has grown so large that its initial ambition – to be accepted
into the theatre of “open debate” – is now obsolete. Instead, its leaders now
talk of eradicating anti-fascism entirely. Having once presented itself as
playful, it is now deadly serious: “I’ll be a fascist as long as anti-fascists
exist”, Iannone says. Fascism, he enthuses, was “the greatest revolution in the
world, the completion of the Risorgimento [Italian unification]”. Mussolini’s
regime was “the most beautiful moment of this nation”. When you ask him if the
anti-fascists aren’t also, as the national anthem says, brothers of Italy, he
stares out from under his heavy eyelids: “Cain and Abel,” he says, “were
brothers.”
