• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 942 0

fourth-floor window in Milan’s police headquarters, three days after the bombing, which was considerably longer than the police were legally entitled to detain him. Some maintain that he was killed by the police, although an official inquest cleared the investigating officer and held that Pinelli had brought about his own end by accidentally falling after he had suffered a mysterious funny turn (malore attivo). The ballet dancer was held on remand for three years, and then jailed for a further fifteen years, for a crime he probably did not commit. Attempts to prosecute members of the neo-Fascist Ordine Nuovo for the bombing routinely floundered, as have repeated efforts to reveal the role of Sifar, or Italian military intelligence, and maybe the CIA, in an atrocity which when blamed on ‘anarchists’ was intended to refashion Italian democracy in a more authoritarian direction.

The hardline ordonovisti regarded themselves as keepers of the Fascist flame and the revolutionary conscience of the extreme right at a time when Arturo Michelini and his successor Giorgio Almirante, leaders of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), were taking the party into mainstream Italian politics so as better to realise their antidemocratic objectives. This strategy, which had its analogue on the extreme left, resulted in the creation of several neo-Fascist splinter groups, committed to the destabilisation of Italy through the kind of political violence practised and theorised by the revolutionary left around the world. They pursued a ‘strategy of tension’, mainly through indiscriminate terrorist bombings, such as the attack on the Milanese bank, which they hoped would provoke a response from the extreme left, thereby necessitating the formation of an authoritarian state. Insofar as these groups, which sailed under a bewildering and shifting range of flags of convenience, had any intellectually coherent objectives, these were derived from the ideologue Julius Evola, until his death in 1974 a living link with Mussolini’s tawdry Salo Republic and Hitler’s Third Reich, and author of The Cult of Blood and Revolt against the Modern World.

These mutations in the neo-Fascist camp had their counterparts on the anti-democratic far left, their historical memory haunted by the collapse of their political forebears under the assault of Fascism earlier in the twentieth century. The occasional bombing aside, the threat of ‘neo-Fascism’ was a serviceable left-wing moral panic analogous to how the right had historically sought to exploit middle-class fears of Bolshevism. The putative revival of Fascism was the necessary lifeblood of an ‘anti-Fascism’ whose most heroic memory was the belated spasm of armed resistance after 1943 when Allied armies coursed northwards through the peninsula. Since the wartime resistance was dominated by the left, its admirers could further claim that a far-reaching social revolution had allegedly been betrayed by the forces of Catholic conservatism that the Allies helped impose on the post-war democratic Italian Republic. Covert CIA funding and the vast parish network combined to keep the Christian Democrats in power for over forty years.

Neo-Fascist violence became a pretext for the first rather eccentric left-wing terrorist assault on Italian democracy. On 26 March 1972 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the multi-millionaire friend of Fidel Castro and publisher of Boris Pasternak, blew himself up while planting a bomb beneath a high-voltage electric pylon, having earlier gone underground with his Partisan Action Groups, the name echoing the wartime movement and so reflecting the elderly composition of its membership.1 Feltrinelli’s idiosyncratic trajectory, from ownership of the publishing house Mondadori to terrorist bomber, signified much wider disenchantment on the undemocratic left with the reformist course pursued by Enrico Berlinguer, the Sardinian aristocrat who led the Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI. This resulted in the 1973 ‘historic compromise’, an attempt to reconcile Communist collectivism with the left Christian