But in Italy the danger of fascist radicalization and the dangerous intentions of certain far-right groups are all an invention of the newspapers? Is it really all an enlarged game in view of the next run-offs for the local elections? There is a story that perfectly represents the risk of propaganda and it is worth retracing it even if it dates back to a few months ago.
In January of this year, a 22-year-old from Savona, Andrea Cavalleri, was arrested with a very heavy accusation: association with the purpose of terrorism and propaganda and incitement to crime for reasons of racial discrimination aggravated by denial.
Until three years earlier, Andrea Cavalleri was a model student of the Chiabrera high school. But above all Andrea Cavalleri was actively involved with the Institute for the Resistance, even obtaining a prize trip to Auschwitz with the school: his theme was the best of all the classical high school in Savona. In fact, he had won the eighth edition of the competition organized by the Ligurian Regional Council: “January 27: Memorial Day”.
On the net in an online newspaper we still find the photo of the award ceremony. “His work was so appreciated that he was gratified by a trip to Poland, to Auschwitz, to be able to deepen his knowledge even more,” Alfonso Gargano, principal of the high school, told La Stampa.
Three years later he wrote neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic documents on the web with which he incited the violent revolution against “the state occupied by the Zionists” and the physical elimination of Jews, inspired by the American supremacist group AtomWaffen Division and the Nazi Waffen-SS. According to the investigators Cavalleri (who in the meantime had also profoundly changed in physical appearance as well as in political sympathies) was ready to make the “leap” and commit an attack. Cavalleri had created an organization, New Social Order, which aimed at the recruitment of other volunteers and the planning of extreme and violent acts for subversive purposes. He used online messaging platforms to keep in touch with people who shared his ideological positions.
In the interceptions we read of Cavalleri who says that “Jews are the first evil to be eliminated. Jews were born to destroy humanity “and that” I want to kill a demonstration of feminists. Jewish and Communist women are our enemies. Modern women are without feelings, dolls of flesh to be exterminated ”. Cavalleri had also founded a Telegram channel, Sole Nero, which had several hundred subscribers: to be accepted among the members, one had to take a quiz to verify the level of radicalization.
Far-right organizations (which in the last decade have been characterized by the fusion of the fascist or Nazi historical legacy and the supremacist ideology of American inspiration) are often the subject of police operations throughout Europe and some, when they have escaped the ‘attention of the investigators, they carried out massacres in various countries such as Germany, Norway and Sweden. Andrea Cavalleri wrote that it is “Better to die with honor in a school shooting than to live a life of shit” and that he declared himself ready to commit a massacre: “I really do a massacre. The only thing to do is to die fighting. I have the weapons. I’ll do Traini 2.0 “. It is the myth of the lone wolf: already in March 2017 Jason Burke in the Guardian explained that the attackers often lose even the connection with the extremist circles with which they came into contact, making them ideologically part without even being members.
In three years the model student had become an expert in weapons and military objects. In July of last year, investigators had confiscated the weapons of his father, a collector, regularly detained. An administrative police operation, linked to the failure to update a document. “In reality – revealed then the commissioner of Savona Giannina Roatta – we jumped at the opportunity, because we were already following the young man’s speeches on the Internet and we had to avoid any risk”.
We are really sure that right-wing extremism is just a political exploitation here, in the country where Luca Traini already held a semi-automatic pistol on February 3, 2018 and shot several people, all Africans, wounding six and leaving bullets on the walls of shops. and housing?
