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The Politics of Subversion

Following the war, fascist activists including French ideologue Maurice Bardèche, Oswald Mosley, and Otto Strasser attempted to recreate a political movement from the ashes of their ideology. Otto looked to his brother Gregor, murdered in the Röhm purge of 1934, as “a martyr for the idea of a ‘German Revolution,’” positioning himself as the rightful alternative to Hitlerism. Nevertheless, both Gregor and Otto Strasser’s public statements were characterized by nebulous syncretism against a backdrop of demagoguery. Otto’s were as theoretically unimpressive but lacked the same cult following.207 By the mid-1950s, Strasser had become known for his “Third Position” ideology—an insistence on a common European path of national socialism beyond both capitalism (United States) and communism (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). In Italy, Mussolini’s faithful formed the Movimento Sociale Italiano with many of Strasser’s ideas in mind, and the broader movement became known as the European Social Movement, with Strasser and Mosley as the two chief influences. However, an important split emerged right away.

The extremists broke with the moderates, believing that violence and explicit racism would bring about a reactionary revolution faster and more effectively than slow integration into the political and economic elites. Led by an Evolian war veteran named Pino Rauti and Stefano Delle Chiaie, their plan was not new despite their name—the Ordine Nuovo, or New Order. Infiltration, provocation, and even framing the left had become the norm for state agencies and extrastate groups. During the late nineteenth century, Tsarist spies infiltrated the Russian group Narodnaia Volia to turn the Narodnik toward anti-Semitism.208 During the interwar period, while the Popular Front in France debated supporting the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, a group of French military officials formed the Cagoule (hooded cloak), which would conduct terrorist bombings and then blame them on the left to draw the public toward fascist sympathies.209 During the 1950s, such “dirty tricks” characterized France’s Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS—Secret Army Organization), the colonial heir to the Cagoule.

Organized by high ranking members of the French military who sought to apply the lessons of the country’s defeat in Indochina (Vietnam) to the colonial mission in Algeria, the OAS’s founding members included former Wehrmacht, SS, and Vichy officials. They studied Maoist guerrilla techniques and leftists strategies in order to develop a “revolutionary war” model that they could apply to the fight against the national liberation movements in the colonies. They also helped engineer the 1958 crisis that brought Charles de Gaulle to power, and they were duly shocked when their heroic figure granted independence to Algeria. In response, they devoted their revolutionary war strategy to sabotaging and attempting to overthrow France’s Fifth Republic. Bardèche observed the trends and set the stage for the new era of fascism during the lead-up to a pivotal conference in Venice in 1962:

The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism.… The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised.… With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn.210

In attendance at that 1962 conference was perhaps the most important product of the OAS’s parafascist-Maoist mixture: a Belgian influenced by Yockey named Jean-François Thiriart.

A communist in high school, Thiriart had changed sides as fascism swept Europe. During World War II, he assisted in locating British and Jewish resistance fighters during the Battle of the Bulge, and he maintained his militancy through the 1950s.211 In 1960, Thiriart founded a group called Mouvement d’Action Civique (Movement for Civil Action) to resist the liberation of Congo, and later admitted to hiding paramilitary OAS soldiers in his house when they returned to Europe from fighting against the Algerian National Liberation Front. He also published their communiqués in his weekly, La Nation Européenne, an organ inspired by Yockey’s Imperium. However, as decolonization spread, Thiriart’s aspiration grew to accentuate the left-wing aspects of fascism and to transform the character of mainstream politics. At the Venice conference, he and others called for a National Party of Europe, demanding increased workers’ rights, representation within a new European parliamentary government, the elimination of the United Nations, and decolonization.

The fascist notion of decolonization remained distinct from the Third World decolonization movement, and it seemed to contradict the ideology of the OAS and other pro-colonial and ultranationalist groups from Northern Ireland to Angola to Chile. While fascists attempted to identify their “third way” beyond left and right with the Third World outside of the United States and the Soviet Union, their notion of “European liberation” demanded the expulsion or otherwise liquidation of populations deemed non-European. The strong odor of anti-Semitism and racism continued to emanate from their literature, which emphasized violence against the state, “Zionists,” and NATO as a means of achieving the spiritual empire of Europe. Hence, Thiriart’s appeal to the left by violently rejecting NATO and embracing Soviet and even Maoist influence retained only a short-term promise of liberation from capital with a long-term plan of genocide. This support for decolonization was, more or less, a disingenuous ruse to cater to possible left-wing recruits.

Upon his return from the Venice conference, Thiriart was arrested by the Belgian police for passport fraud. Undaunted, he founded an organization called Jeune Europe (Young Europe) after leaving jail, likely named after a Nazi group that, in turn, had relied on the prestige of Mazzini’s Young Italy and Karl Schapper’s Young Germany—two revolutionary groups predating the International. Thiriart’s Jeune Europe set up schools throughout Europe to train a young vanguard in ideology and physical combat.212 They trained with members of the Evolian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo and the OAS, extending their network into the “groupuscular” neofascist underground.213

Thiriart even renounced fascism from time to time, calling himself a national communist. Continuing to support neo-Nazi terrorism into the 1960s and 1970s, Thiriart called for a single Europ­ean empire, inclusive of the Soviet Union. He supported Muammar al-Qaddafi’s ideas of nationalist direct democracy and Fidel Castro’s revolutionary strategies. In general, the Nazi-Maoist ideology remained grounded in the “guerilla war” tactics of the OAS. Thiriart also advocated entering leftist groups and encouraging division. By intriguing within the Communist Party of Belgium, Thiriart managed to create a split, drawing followers of “National Communism” to his own Nazi-Maoist party, the Parti Communautaire Européen (an outgrowth of Jeune Europe).214 Thiriart’s success in his pursuits was relatively small, and his influence remained restricted to fascist circles; however, that network of fascist groups and leaders would gain momentum through the 1970s during what was called the anni di piombo, or the Years of Lead.

The Years of Lead

In 1966, a CIA front group called Aginter Press was set up by a former OAS officer named Yves Guérin-Sérac to bring fascists the credibility of press passes while providing material support to pro-colonial forces and gathering intelligence on and undermining left-wing groups. The next year in Greece, ultranationalist military forces linked to a network of paramilitaries involved in terrorist attacks used political instability largely blamed on the left to stage a military coup d’état.215 In 1968, amid that year’s global social tumult, the US-backed military government in Greece quietly invited some fifty Italian neofascists to tour their coup government. The tour apparently involved meeting officials and discussing strategies and tactics.