![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
CasaPound Italia (CPI) is an Italian extreme-right movement. It has its headquarters in Rome but the movement has branches in other northern and southern cities. Members of CPI define themselves as ‘Fascists of the Third Millennium’. Bulli’s article focuses on the mix of cultural imaginaries that the organization offers to its members and sympathizers as well as for public consumption. The movement is able to function at different levels of political mobilization—and to recruit members by presenting a targeted set of incentives designed to engage them politically—which include various forms of cultural identification. All these levels are linked by a common idealized subjectivity that brings together classic elements of historic Fascism, including cultural references to the ‘speed of action’ typical of Futurism, with an overcoming of the party-centred post-Fascist Italian political subculture. Bulli’s article emphasizes CPI’s strategic construction of a multifaceted cultural imaginary in which language, communication and codes of conduct play a role comparable to values and ideology.
Notes
1 Heiko Koch, Casa Pound Italia: Mussolinis Erben (Münster: Unrast Verlag 2013).
2 The research for this article was conducted by the author together with Matteo Albanese, Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio. For their principal results, see Matteo Albanese, Giorgia Bulli, Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio, Fascisti di un altro millennio? Crisi e partecipazione in CasaPound Italia (Acireale-Rome: Bonanno Editore 2014).
3 Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. from the Italian by Allan Cameron (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 1996); Cristopher Cochrane, Left and Right: The Small World of Political Ideas (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015).
4 Uwe Backes, Political Extremes: A Conceptual History from Antiquity to the Present (London and New York: Routledge 2010), 168–73.
5 Marco Tarchi, Italia populista: Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo (Bologna: il Mulino 2015).
6 Francesco Germinario, Da Salò al governo: Immaginario e cultura politica della destra italiana (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri 2005).
7 Piero Ignazi, Postfascisti? Dal Movimento Sociale Italiano ad Alleanza Nazionale (Bologna: il Mulino 1994).
8 Jan Schedler, ‘Übernahme von Ästhetik und Aktionsformen der radikalen Linken—Zur Verortung der “Autonomen Nationalisten” im extrem rechten Strategiespektrum’, in Stephan Braun, Alexander Geisler and Martin Gerster (eds), Strategien der extremen Rechten: Hintergründe—Analysen—Antworten (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Wissenschaften 2009), 332–57.
9 Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2018).
10 Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa, ‘Extreme right images of radical authenticity: multimodal aesthetics of history, nature, and gender roles in social media’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, vol. 4, no. 3, 2017, 252–81.
11 Martin Reisigl, ‘Analyzing political rhetoric’, in Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski (eds), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008), 96–120.
12 On symbols in politics, see Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1985).
13 ‘La Storia’, available on the CasaPound Italia website at www.casapounditalia.org/la-storia (viewed 24 May 2019). All translations from Italian, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
14 Christian Salmon, Storytelling: La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits (Paris: La Découverte 2007).
15 Monica Cioli, Il fascismo e la ‘sua’ arte: Dottrina e istituzioni tra futurismo e Novecento (Florence: Olschki 2011).
16 Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2006).
17 ‘Chi siamo’, available on the Circolo Futurista website at www.circolofuturista.org/?page_id=4 (viewed 27 April 2019).
18 Marco Tarchi, La rivoluzione impossibile: Dai Campi Hobbit alla nuova Destra (Florence: Vallecchi 2010).
19 Christian Dornbusch and Jan Raabe, ‘Jahre RechtsRock: Vom Skinhead-Rock zur Alltagskultur’, in Christian Dornbusch and Jan Raabe (eds), RechtsRock: Bestandsaufnahmen und Gegenstrategien (Münster: Unrast Verlag 2002), 19–51.
20 Adriano Scianca, Riprendersi Tutto: Le parole di CasaPound: 40 concetti per una rivoluzione in atto (Cusano Milanino: Società editrice Barbarossa 2011).
21 ‘Cosa vuol dire Zeta Zero Alfa?’, 11 February 2015, available on the band’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=256445364911&story_fbid=10152738112629912 (viewed 28 April 2019). This Facebook page (with nearly 50,000 likes) contains a longer description of the meaning of the ZZA acronym, which brings together philosophical, physical, esoteric and military elements of the meaning of ‘zeta’ (Z), ‘zero’ (0) and ‘alfa’ (A).
22 In fact, as mentioned above, CPI emerged from a schism in the extreme-right MS-FT.
23 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘La nuova religione della velocità’, L’Italia Futurista, no. 1, June 1916.
24 These are the closing two sentences of CasaPound’s narrative of its history, ‘La Storia’, available on its website at www.casapounditalia.org/la-storia (viewed 24 May 2019). The second is an Italian translation of a line from ‘Easter, 1916’ by William Butler Yeats.
25 ‘Retake Everything! (a interview [sic] with CasaPound)’, 15 December 2011, available on the Open Revolt website at https://openrevolt.info/2011/12/15/casa-pound (viewed 27 April 2019). The interview is in English; the word ‘aesthetic’ begins with the letter ‘E’ in Italian.
26 Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, ‘La dottrina del fascismo’ (part of the entry on ‘Fascismo’), in Enciclopedia Italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, 1st edn, vol. 14 (Rome: Istituto Giovanni Trecanni 1932), 847–51; English translation from Stephen Eric Bronner (ed.), Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, 2nd edn (New York and London: Routledge 2006), 219.
27 Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (Florence: Vallecchi 1925); English translation from Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works, ed. and trans. from the Italian by A. James Gregor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 2002), 72.
28 Scianca, Riprendersi Tutto.
29 Domenico Di Tullio, Centri sociali di destra: Occupazioni e culture non conformi (Rome: Castelvecchi 2006).
30 Hans Pruijt, ‘The logic of urban squatting’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 37, no. 1, 2013, 19–45.
31 Koch, Casa Pound Italia, 25.
32 See Andrea Palladino and Andrea Tornago, ‘I camerati abusivi di CasaPound: parenti e amici vivona gratis nel centro di Roma’, L’Espresso, 1 March 2018.
33 ‘Il Simbolo’, available on the CasaPound Italia website at www.casapounditalia.org/il-simbolo (viewed 24 May 2019).
34 Alessandro Cosmelli and Marco Mathieu, OltreNero: Nuovi fascisti italiani (Rome: Contrasto 2009).
35 Lina Khatib, quoted in Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream, 34.
36 Benito Mussolini, concluding speech to the Fascist Congress, 22 June 1925, quoted in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1997), 89.
37 Guido Caldiron, La destra sociale: Da Salò a Tremonti (Rome: Manifestolibri 2009).
38 Quoted in ‘Internet: Debutta “Radio Bandiera Nera”, la web-radio delle “OSA”’, 4 September 2007, available on the adnKronnos website at www1.adnkronos.com/Archivio/AdnAgenzia/2007/09/04/Cronaca/INTERNET-DEBUTTA-RADIO-BANDIERA-NERA-LA-WEB-RADIO-DELLE-OSA_140916.php (viewed 28 April 2019).
39 CPI’s repeated refrain for the 2018 elections was ‘CasaPound, the only useful vote’.
40 Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2007).
41 Antonis A. Ellinas, The Media and the Far Right in Western Europe: Playing the Nationalist Card (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2010).
42 Angela Gennaro, ‘Casapound, Formigli nella sede romana’ (video), Il Fatto Quotidiano, 4 October 2017, available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxQfvt-NK7g (viewed 30 April 2019).
43 Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio, ‘Discourse and practice of violence in the Italian extreme right: frames, symbols, and identity-building in CasaPound Italia’, International Journal of Conflict and Violence, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014, 154–70.
44 Questa è CasaPound Italia? (CPI brochure), 2016, 19, available online via DocDroid at www.docdroid.net/iEyLzrj/brochurechisiamo.pdf.html#page=19 (viewed 30 April 2019).
45 Legal proceedings followed; on 10 June 2017, the verdicts were announced, with the conviction of eighteen people (fifteen belonging to CPI and three to leftist organizations).
46 Davide di Stefano, ‘A dieci anni dagli scontri di piazza Navona: Come andò (e cosa è rimasto)’, Il Prima Nazionale (online), available at www.ilprimatonazionale.it/senza-categoria/a-dieci-anni-dagli-scontri-di-piazza-navona-come-ando-e-cosa-e-rimasto-95588 (viewed 30 April 2019).
47 For the CPI, sport is the incarnation of an agonistic interpretation of the world. This vision is based on action, team spirit and hierarchical principles, physical and internal training. It represents technique becoming style, the search for one’s self and victory over the lazy and awkward part in each of us; it represents combat, courage and challenge. See ‘Sport’, in Questa è CasaPound Italia? (CPI brochure), 2016, 15, available online via DocDroid at www.docdroid.net/iEyLzrj/brochurechisiamo.pdf.html#page=15 (viewed 30 April 2019).
48 On the feeling of belonging developed by CPI, see Daniele Di Nunzio and Emilio Toscano, Dentro e fuori Casapound: Capire il fascismo del Terzo Millennio (Rome: Armando Editore 2011).
49 Castelli Gattinara and Froio, ‘Discourse and practice of violence in the Italian extreme right’, 158.
50 Anna Castriota and Matthew Feldman, ‘“Fascism for the Third Millennium”: an overview of language and ideology in Italy’s CasaPound movement’, in Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson, Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far Right since 1945 (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag 2014), 223–46 (231–2).
51 ‘Chi siamo?’, available on the Solidarité-Identités website at www.solid-onlus.org/home (viewed 30 April 2019).
52 On the talk show Piazzapulita broadcast on channel LA7 on 3 November 2014, the journalist Corrado Formigli asked CPI’s Simone Di Stefano whether he was a Fascist and he replied simply, ‘Yes, absolutely’: for a transcript of the programme (see minute 23:50), see Massimo Galante, ‘Piazzapulita, puntata 3 novembre 2014’, available on the PolisBlog website at www.polisblog.it/post/269092/piazzapulita-3-novembre-2014-diretta-ospiti-de-magistris (viewed 9 May 2019).
53 Albanese, Bulli, Castelli Gattinara and Froio, Fascisti di un altro millennio?, 134.
54 Interview quoted in ibid., 40.
55 ‘Una Nazione: programma politico 2018 CasaPound Italia’, available online via DocDroid at www.docdroid.net/Bg8qGdw/programma-casapound-2018.pdf; the English translation, ‘CasaPound Italia platform’, is available on the CasaPound Italia website at www.casapounditalia.org/who-we-are (viewed 24 May 2019).
56 Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Caterina Froio and Matteo Albanese, ‘The appeal of neo-fascism in times of crisis: the experience of CasaPound Italia’, Fascism, vol. 2, no. 2, 2013, 234–58.
57 Scianca, Riprendersi Tutto, 207.
58 Ibid., 200.
59 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Italian Fascism and the aesthetics of the “Third Way”’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1996, 293–316.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Giorgia Bulli
Giorgia Bulli is a Lecturer in Political Communication and Discourse Analysis in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence. She has published work on the subject of right-wing parties and movements, including (with Matteo Albanese, Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio) Fascisti di un altro Millennio? Crisi e partecipazione in CasaPound Italia (Bonanno 2014), and ‘Anti-Islamism and beyond: Pegida’ (Mondi migranti, 2017). Email: [email protected]