As has been suggested, in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, lay persons, journalists, and academics began to speak of “neofascism” to identify those small groups of individuals, formerly National Socialists or Fascists, who had survived the carnage of the con- flict and who continued to identify, in some sense or other, with their past loyalties. Given the propaganda conveniences afforded by the practice, we have seen that it had become standard, in the course of the Second World War, simply to refer to both National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy as “fascist.”1 The manifest differences between the two movements and
regimes notwithstanding, the practice continued after the war. As a result, in the years immediately following the Second World War, any individuals and their political activities that could be directly or indirectly associated with either Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy were spoken of as representing a generic “neofascism” – a characterization that generally meant little more than that the individuals and/or groups involved showed some real or pre- sumed sympathy for the Nazism and/or Fascism of their respective nation’s past. In general, the term was applied to such individuals and the disjointed, fragmentary and transient associations in which they collected themselves.2
Little concern was devoted to the coherence, integrity, or fascist quality of their individual or collective belief systems. They were all simply neofascists, indelibly identified by their individual histories and connected by the most casual of associations.
In the years immediately following the termination of the war, there were any number of such small groups, usually composed of survivors of the Nazi 1See the discussion in Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995),
pp. 157–9.
2One of the better accounts of all the “neofascists” discovered by connecting them through the
most transient of connections is that of Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker
Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, NY: Automedia, 1999).
and Fascist armed forces and/or political formations. In Italy, for exam- ple, there was the Proletarian Union of Giuseppe Albano, which organized some of the youthful legionnaires of Mussolini’s Social Republic of Sal `o who remained after the bloodletting that marked the end of the war in northern Italy.
Literally dozens of such minuscule groups arose in Italy during the first years after the end of the war. There was LUPA, the Patriotic Unifying League of Anti-Communists, for instance, and the National Fusionist Party, which carried the well-remembered initials PNF – Partito nazionale fascista. There was SAM, the Squadre di azione Mussolini – the Action Squads of Mus- solini. Thousands of survivors of the Fascist period sought, among them- selves, community and expression. Around them, all the small organizations proliferated.3
Such groups were almost uniformly identified as “neofascist.” Their mem- bership was composed largely of persons who shared a history of association with Fascist organizations during the war. Their fascist bona fides, by and large, were established by their biographies. Their individual histories were directly associated with historic Fascism. They had been members of the Fascist party or had served the Fascist government. Should there have been others that did not so qualify, they almost invariably were the children of those who had been members or who had so served.
There was not an overwhelming number of such persons. The war had been so catastrophically lost, and the costs so astronomically high, that most Italians sought to distance themselves from Fascism and all its memories. The general response was to attempt to reconstruct the semblance of a life amid the mountains of ruins that every day reminded Italians of the material and spiritual costs of the Fascist adventure.
In that environment, there were other groups, dissident in some signifi- cant sense or other, that did not identify themselves with either the victors or Mussolini’s Fascism, and that, in fact, may have denied any such affilia- tion – and yet were still to be spoken of as “neofascist.” One such group, as an illustrative case, was Guglielmo Giannini’s Uomo Qualunque, a polit- ical association intended to provide sanctuary for “the common man” – to protect him from the exploitation of professional politicians who, the
qualunquisti claimed, used every and any opportunity to wring taxes and
compliance from the subject masses.
In the story of the search for neofascism, the Giannini case is interesting for a number of reasons. In the first place, Giannini had antifascist cre- dentials. He had been an antifascist before the fall of the regime. More- over, he was dispositionally antipolitical. He was disdainful of professional politicians and his principal political thrust was to “free” the “little man” 3See the discussion in Mario Giovana, Le nuove camicie nere (Turin: Edizioni dell’Albero,
from the tax burdens and collectivistic exactions that he felt typified all and every government. Among the disordered collection of ideas he enter- tained, there was an irreducible surd of anarchism and individualism that had absolutely nothing to do with Fascism in any sense of the term. Gian- nini, in fact, was an advocate of the “minimalist state” of traditional liber- alism. For the qualunquisti, the state was the enemy, and it was the desire of the followers of Giannini that the state make its presence felt as little as possible.4
This was so evident at the time that Giannini had no reticence in mak- ing public overtures to Benedetto Croce to assume a leadership role in the party.5Croce had been a spokesperson for antifascist intellectuals since the
mid-1920s. Giannini fully expected Croce to participate in his movement since, by the time the movement had become a political force, it was unmis- takable that the qualunquisti identified themselves with ninteenth-century liberal economic and political thought.6They were conservatives of the old
school.
The fact is that Giannini was an “afascist,” a nonfascist who con- ceived the appeal to “antifascism” of postwar politicians – who had them- selves been Fascists for two decades – as little other than a strategem for extorting benefits from their inert constituencies. Giannini ridiculed those who had discovered their antifascism only after Fascism’s defeat – and he deplored those who used the charge of “fascist sympathies” to abuse their fellows.
At the time there were many, both former Fascists and nonfascists alike, who felt that Giannini accurately characterized the prevailing circumstances in Italy immediately following the end of the Second World War. Some for- mer Fascists did join his association, – but far more joined the Communist Party and still more joined the Christian Democrats.7Moreover, while some
industrialists who had formerly been Fascist8contributed funds to Giannini’s
4One can find nothing specifically “Fascist” about Giannini’s political opinions. Even in the
summary accounts made available in the discussions of “neofascism,” one finds nothing. See, for example, Roberto Chiarini, “The ‘Movimento Sociale Italiano’: A Historical Profile,” in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson, and Michalina Vaughan (eds.), Neo-fascism in Europe (New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 23–6. See the brief discussion in A. James Gregor, Phoenix:
Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), pp. 12–13.
5Angelo Del Boca and Mario Giovana, Fascism Today: A World Survey (New York: Pantheon,
1969), p. 129.
6See Mario Tedeschi, Fascisti dopo Mussolini (Rome: L’Arnia, 1950), pp. 150–1.
7Many books are available listing the names of many Fascists, often prominent during the years
of the regime, who joined either the Communist Party or the Christian Democrats immedi- ately after the end of the Second World War. See, for example, the book written anonymously,
Camerata dove sei? (Rome: B&C, 1976); see G. Silvano Spinetti, Venti’anni dopo: Ricomin- ciare da zero (Rome: Edizioni di “Solidarismo,” 1964), chap. 6.
8One must ask oneself how many industrialists of any importance had not been Fascists during
efforts, many more wealthy individuals, with an equal history of affiliation with Mussolini’s regime, contributed to all the other parties, including the Communists. One is at a loss as to what all that might mean in terms of identifying “neofascists.”
Very little of Giannini’s political program was Fascist in any determi- nate sense. He called Italians to labor in their own self-interest – to restore the nation’s ruined economy. In defense of a market-governed economy, he advocated that tax benefits be extended to attract foreign capital investment and technology transfers. He made an emphatic defense of profit incen- tives and market influences and rejected state interference in the general economy.
That was sufficient for most commentators to identify him as a “rightist.” In the conceptual language of postwar Italy, with the liberation from Fascism identified in large measure with communist partisans, to be “rightist” was to be Fascist. Although Fascism had consistently violated the rights of private property, divested industrialists of control over their own institutions, and sought to dominate all Italians through totalitarian controls,9the tendency
to identify anyone who pretends to defend private property as a generic fascist surfaced immediately after the termination of the Second World War and, lamentably, was never again to be entirely abandoned.
One need only reflect on just some of the consequences of such an intellec- tual disposition. Any individual, group, or political party that chose to defend private property or a market-governed economy would be, ipso facto, fas- cist. Almost every political party in the Western world, other than those com- posed entirely of doctrinaire antiproperty and antimarket Marxists, would immediately become a candidate “neofascism.” Other than that, all that was really necessary to qualify for just such status was to behave in what was spoken of as “typically Fascist style”10– whatever that was taken to
mean.
In fact, Mussolini’s Fascism was never “rightist” in the sense of having offered an unqualified defense of private property. The extension of pro- tection to private property and the employment of market modalities in their developmental programs were always contingent on Fascist purpose – and continued only so long as such employments satisfied those purposes. There was never any intrinsic relationship between Fascism and the defense of property or the commitment to the commodity market. To imagine that Mussolini was a defender of capitalism, and somehow a “tool” of industrial barons, may well have been a constant feature of Marxist conviction, but, as has been indicated, is a claim for which there is no persuasive evidence. To 9 See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political
Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), and Italian Fascism and Devel- opmental Dictatorship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chaps. 5, 6.
this day, some Marxists have continued to pretend that such was the case, but few knowledgeable social analysts still entertain the notion.11
The cognitive and classificatory issue of whether Fascism was the White Guard of capitalism or a “right-wing extremism” did not really arise in the earliest reflections on the rise of neofascism in the immediate postwar years. It really was not necessary. Identifying neofascists did not require the availability of a suitable social science definition. Former Fascists simply organized themselves in political associations that were clearly philofascist: The Movimento sociale italiano, the MSI – the Italian Social Movement – was principal among them.
The founders and the original members of the MSI were almost all sur- vivors of the Fascist Italian Social Republic (RSI). The Social Republic was the product of that unfortunate political effort undertaken by Mussolini – after the collapse of his regime in July 1943, and his rescue by German special operations forces in September – to continue in what was by that time clearly a lost cause. Those Italians who collected around the RSI were not all Fascists by conviction. Many had responded because they were con- vinced that the nation’s honor was at stake. Italy, having committed itself to the Axis powers, had obliged itself not to sue for a separate peace. Many including some nonfascists, felt that Italians were honor-bound to respect the commitment.12Those nonfascist participants in the RSI were essentially apo-
litical and sought little more than to defend the nation’s honor. Other than the afascists, there were socialists of a variety of persuasions who became involved in the RSI, and saw in its ideological postures the potential realiza- tion of their economic, social, and political convictions. Among the nonfas- cists were also traditional political liberals such as Vittorio Rolandi Ricci.13
None of them identified with Fascism as an ideological or institutional system.
Fascism had a distinctive ideological and political profile, some of the prin- cipal features of which were captured in the Program Manifesto of Verona, the provisional constitution of the Social Republic.14 The Program Mani-
festo did not stand alone. It was the culmination of more than two decades of doctrinal elaboration by some of Fascism’s finest intellects.15Not all the
11 See the interesting comments by Franc¸ois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea
of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
pp. 177–81.
12See the account of the personalities involved in the RSI in Fabio Andriola (ed.), Uomini e
scelte della RSI: I protagonisti della Repubblica di Mussolini (Foggia: Bastogi, 2000).
13See, for example, the case of the socialist Carlo Silvestri, in Gloria Gabrielli, “Carlo Silvestri,”
in ibid., pp. 115–28, and the case of the liberal Vittorio Rolandi Ricci, ibid., pp. 209–15.
14 See “The Program Manifesto of the Fascist Republican Party,” in A. James Gregor, The Ideol-
ogy of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), Appendix B,
pp. 387–91.
participants, nor all the survivors of the Social Republic of Sal `o, knew or understood any of that.
With the defeat of Fascism, those followers who survived, both those who had been prominent during the history of the regime as well as those of lesser rank, were turned out into a world dominated by antifascist partisans – communist and liberal. During the first days of “liberation,” thousands upon thousands of disarmed Fascists were massacred in a paroxysm of vengeance – the product of a civil war that had seen unspeakable brutality exercised by participants on all sides.
Immediately following the end of the war, many survivors of the RSI were forced into hiding in the effort to escape the postwar violence and the threat of prison. Finally, after the amnesty of 1946, some began to draw together, to provide each other comradeship and afford succourance. Many were very young men, barely in their twenties. Few had any comprehen- sion of what had, and what was, transpiring. They knew only that they had fought, some for years, for the grandeur of an Italy to which they had returned to find in ruins. Many of them had little if any comprehension of what Fascism had been as an ideology. Most had only known a wartime Fascism that, in alliance with Nazi Germany, had taken on emphatically alien features.
Most of those who had served the Fascist regime in the military simply accepted defeat and returned home to take up their private lives as best they could. Only a small number of survivors sought to react, to punish those who, in their judgment, had “betrayed” the Motherland, who had conspired with the enemy, and who, in the course of a sanguinary civil war, were responsible for the death of their friends and comrades.
They were the individuals who made up the membership of the plethora of small groups that sprang up in the years immediately following the end of the war. Some of those groups were composed of fanatics prepared to employ senseless violence against anyone or anything they associated with antifascism. Some groups were animated by the distracted conviction that all that was necessary to restore the defunct Fascist regime was street violence that would destabilize Italian democracy and attract the masses who had never really abandoned Mussolini.
Almost all these groupuscules made only transient appearance in the years following the war. Only the MSI was to prove itself a durable contender for political power in the Italy that emerged after 1945. As a political association composed of those who harkened back to the Fascism of Mussolini, the MSI was, by definition, neofascist.
It was neofascist precisely because it provided an institutional home for those Italians nostalgic for the days of Fascist rule. In the Italy of the years after the Second World War, there were not many of them. In the decades following the conclusion of the war, the MSI, using a variety of lures, never succeeded in garnering more than 4 to 6 percent of the total votes cast
in national elections.16 The MSI, as a neofascist organization, was always
essentially a marginalized and marginal political party.
The MSI was founded on December 26, 1946, by those who had survived the civil war that brought antifascists into armed conflict with those, Fascist and nonfascist alike, who had collected around Mussolini’s Republic of Sal `o. Antifascism had triumphed and made its antifascism an inextricable compo- nent of the nation’s creed. Antifascism became an integral, legal constituent of Italy’s postfascist government.
As a consequence, the MSI was compelled to organize itself in an envi- ronment in which any effort at the “reconstitution of the Fascist party” was an actionable criminal offense. A proscriptive law was first promulgated by the provisional government of Italy immediately following the conclusion of the war. A similar proscription, article number 17, was introduced into the peace treaty with the Allies, and further reaffirmed by a law (number 1546) enacted by the postfascist Constituent Assembly. Finally, the postwar Italian constitution itself included, as a “transitional proscription,” the ban on attempting the reconstitution of Fascism.17
The war and its devastation had exhausted the nation. Italians gave every evidence of wishing only to be allowed to reconstruct their lives as best they could. For antifascists, it simply was not possible to allow life to return to “normality.” For almost a quarter-century, the normality of life included Fascism. After the war, the antifascist victors wished to assure themselves and the nation that such a “normality” would never resurface. That the antifascists chose to exclude and isolate Fascists from political life in the immediate postwar years is perfectly comprehensible. Together with the Italy that antifascism aspired to leave to its heirs, it was impossible to dissipate the rancor and bitterness that the civil war had begotten. Both Fascists and antifascists lived in a poisoned atmosphere of tension and distrust.
As a result, the MSI was everywhere confined by law. Within such con- straints, it was never really free to articulate its ideology. We will never be quite sure what that ideology might have been had the Movement not been so confined. One cannot deal persuasively with counterfactuals. We do not know what the ideology of the Movimento might have been had its leader- ship, and its members, been free to articulate it as they saw fit. Moreover,