The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones Read Free Book Online

, and formed their own study centre, Ordine Nuovo . The move had been precipitated by a perceived softening of the MSI, and Rauti remained outside the party until 1969. During that time, the new movement made its position explicit: ‘the Aryan blood of the SS is still warm and so is that of the Kamikaze and of the Black Legionnaires and those of the Iron Guard who fell in the name of and for the eternal Ordine Nuovo .’ Rauti presented a paper at a conference in 1965, where Communists were described as ‘some sort of an alien presence, like the extra-terrestrial races of science fiction …’
    Although Rauti denies chairing a meeting of Ordine Nuovo in Padova in April 1969, shortly before the spring bombing campaign, it’s certain that he went on an ‘educational’ tour of Papadopoulos’s Greece in the summer of that year. When an electrician came forward as a witness, claiming that he had unknowingly supplied the timers for Ordine Nuovo’s bombs, Rauti (identified by the electrician’s wife) apparently visited the shop to counsel silence. (Asked about this in court, Rauti indignantly replies that it’s inconceivable that a respected politician would do such a thing.) The strange thing – if it’s true – emerging from the trial is that Rauti and his Fascists weren’t isolated extremists, but rather pawns of a very clear, strategic plan. In his Istruttoria , the prosecutor, Guido Salvini, wrote of Ordine Nuovo that it was ‘one of the organisations of the right characterised by the most extensive collusion with the apparatuses of the state …’ Rauti’s cantankerous performance in the witness stand isn’t because he denies his Fascism (which he proudly admits), it’s because after years of appearing the most threatening extremist in Italian politics, he now seems little more than a man manipulated by much greater forces. During hisdeposition, newspapers report that in the early 1970s, Rauti was receiving cheques from the US embassy.
    It gets even stranger, though. As I emerge into the hazy Milan sun of the June evening, I watch Rauti chatting amiably with journalists, talking about his bridge-building towards Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. It’s partly wishful thinking on his part, but they have been in alliance in the past (Rauti claims to have swung the European elections the way of Berlusconi’s ‘Pole of Liberties’ when they shared the electoral ticket in Abruzzo, Caserta and Calabria). I’m amazed, not because Rauti might be on the fringes of a rather dark, right-wing coalition – it’s simply that he’s still there. A man whose organisation has been accused of almost every Italian slaughter is still in politics: smiling, suited, flirting with the female journalists. I join the huddle around him, and ask for an interview. He courteously invites me to Rome.
    Italy’s capital is normally sneered at by those in the north. Many friends in Parma or Milan have never even been there. It’s a city sated with august classicism. The man-hole covers are still initialled with SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus . There are palm trees outside embassies and governmental palaces. Here the graffiti is very different to Parma: swastikas and celtic crosses, obscene phrases against ‘the blacks’ and gli ebrei , ‘the Hebrews’. It’s a strange, beautiful place, almost knowingly theatrical. It has the perfect balance of modernity and antiquity.
    The political definition of Rauti and the MSI in the 1970s was doppiopetto : a word that means double-breasted, and sums up that ambiguous combination of respectability, duplicity and aggression. ( Dare il petto , ‘to give the breast’, means to be up-front or aggressive.) The seat of the ‘Tricolour Flame’, Rauti’s political party, is a short walk from the Vatican. Rauti, the secretary of the party, sits mock-presidential between threadbare flags and ageing posters.
    In 1943, at the age of seventeen, he volunteered to serve under Mussolini during what