Conclusion

Shortly after being condemned to death for war crimes in 1946, the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg declared: Within fifteen years we will begin to be talked about again, and within twenty years Nazism will again be a force. Rosenberg’s prophecy did come true, but not in quite the way he imagined it. The history of neofascism over the past twenty years, as seen through the story of Stefano Delle Chiaie and his colleagues of the Black Orchestra, gives us a clear indication of their true role: agents of an inner, oligarchic power sphere which sets itself above all law and morality.

The account of Stefano Delle Chiaie’s involvement in the events described in the previous pages has been drawn from a wide variety of sources, some honest and some highly suspect. Stefano Delle Chiaie himself vehemently denies all the allegations made against him concerning the Piazza Fontana, Italicus and Bologna bombings, the various coup d’etat attempts or any connection with the Italian secret service, the SID. When interviewed by Italian journalist Enzo Biagi in January 1983 on the edge of the Amazonian rain forest Stefano Delle Chiaie recounted the conversation between him and Captain Antonio La Bruna when discussing the SIDs plan to spring Freda and Ventura from prison and, with Delle Chiaie’s assistance, safehouse them in Spain before finding them haven in Latin America:

La Bruna then began to describe the situation in Italy, adding that it was the time to strike back and that we were indispensable to that operation. He said one thing that stuck in my mind. He said: Some SID people are convinced that you have connections with the Interior Ministry, while others are not. I said to him, How come? Because, he answered, you have never contacted us. My answer to that was that I held that the national revolutionary movement was not a prize to be disputed between the Interior Ministry and the SID.

That’s the only contact I have had with the SID and it was severed immediately, so much so that La Bruna has been one of my fiercest accusers. And, of course, this shows that I had had no contacts with the SID, as had Giannettini for example.

Whether or not Stefano Delle Chiaie was directly responsible for the outrages and terrorist activities ascribed to him is a matter for conjecture. However, there are sufficient attendant circumstances and statements to directly and inferentially place Delle Chiaie as a key figure in the events described in previous pages, though the extent to which he was or is a willing or unwitting agent of others may never be known. But there are more important considerations.

LESSONS

Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak: they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.

— Victor Serge, What Everyone Should Know About State Oppression

The aim of this study in black terrorism has not been to establish the guilt of Stefano Delle Chiaie or present him as an evil genius controlling a vast international network of thugs and terrorists. Nor yet is it an exposé of the nonsensical but sinister selectivity of the Western media in presenting the quantitatively and qualitatively lesser Marxist and nationalist terrorist groups as the agents of soviet destabilization cumulatively eroding the foundations of democracy.

The primary aim has been to underline the real dangers of fascism in the hope that useful lessons can be drawn from the experiences of the past twenty years:

• Fascists are the subordinate element of more cohesive and powerful forces which are the real backbone of any violent reactionary movement. These forces can be identified within certain sectors of the economic, political, military and religious bureaucracies and organized crime.

• A coalition of all or some of these elements at any one time can provide the basis for a scenario in which the neofascists and other reactionary elements can be called on to play what they see as their assigned historic role.

• Having failed to win power through the ballot box, believers in national socialism must turn to other methods. In a recent article in his occasional publication Gothic Ripples, British fascist strategist Colin Jordan says: For us the days of the ‘political party’ as a primitive means of political action are now finished and gone forever. This political isolation, and their obsessive anticommunism which extends inevitably against all dissent and all rival political standpoints, together with their predisposition to violence and covert action, places them in a position whereby they can easily be manipulated, however unwittingly, by external interests.

• The infrastructure and friendship networks of the extreme right internationally are such that the fascists and organized crime are in effect assets of clandestine state agencies who, in the intelligence parlance, are both plausibly deniable and can, in the same parlance, respond to a crisis without transgressions of administrative jurisdictions in order to neutralize troublesome dissidents (or even, indeed, political opponents seemingly more powerful than themselves, e.g., J. F. Kennedy) or safeguard and enhance the investment climate.

• Although the attempt by the Italian neofascists to infiltrate the extraparliamentary left, in particular the anarchist groups, was ultimately unsuccessful (inasmuch as it was eventually exposed), it did underline that the anarchists, because of their negative symbolic value and a confusing variety of tendencies, were considered easy prey for short-term manipulation. However, anarchist structures tend to reveal their infiltrators rapidly, as they are thin or transparent. More structured movements may conceal traitors indefinitely. The more rigid the structure the easier it is to remain undetected, as one simply carries out orders!

• It is important to stress that although the strategy of provocation and tension has counter-revolutionary aims which depend upon producing certain conditions (i.e., political and economic destabilization) that does not necessarily make those conditions counter-revolutionary. We must be careful to distinguish between real provocation and genuine resistance and avoid fueling the arguments of those who criticize and oppose all resistance on the grounds that it causes repression. As Victor Serge noted in What Everyone Should Know About State Repression: The intrigues of power elites only reveal their corruption and contribute in no small measure to their eventual downfall. Provocation acquires growing importance in proportion as the regimes it serves go into decline and enter onto the slippery slope to oblivion it is the curse of decomposing regimes.

• Provocation is much more dangerous in terms of the distrust it sows friends and comrades. Suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by more reliance not just on tighter, but also on more tested local affinity groups who are united by shared activity and working together, rather than mere adherence to a common program or platform.

• If we are to avoid another Chili or Bolivia or prevent future massacres such as the Piazza Fontana or Bologna railway station, it is imperative that we are able to recognize and counter the intrigues and maneuvers of covert political elites in their attempts to quash political dissent and, ultimately, impose totalitarian methods of social control. We hope the present work goes some way towards furthering our understanding of the methods of the modern-day Dr Caligari and the nature of the zombie in his cabinet.

• Finally, it cannot be stressed too often that it is the working class against whom the fascist terror is ultimately aimed and from the working class that the only final resistance can come. Given the contradictory trends towards greater and greater state power on the one hand and greater and greater demands for the democratization of everyday social life on the other, it is inevitable that the strong-arm tactics of the state should be carried out by plausibly deniable agents apparently (by their antiparliamentary stance) unconnected with the moderate center/consensus, since any clear connection would destroy the democratic façade of the state and the semi-benign image of the economic institutions it serves. Since society continues to rest on wage slavery, which ultimately denies the vast majority of its members any say in their own destiny, individual or collective, things cannot be otherwise.