“Of Hobbits and Tigers”: Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in Italy since the Mid-1970s

From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s right-wing terrorists committed nearly 1.200 attacks in Italy. Although the number of right-wing terrorist attacks massively increased in this period compared to the “strategy of tension” of the early 1970s, this phenomenon has received little scholarly attention. This paper focuses on the internal dynamics to explain the changes and radicalization of right-wing extremism in the mid-1970s, looking at the cultural and ideological shifts that occurred within the extremist milieu in Italy. Using Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “cultural hegemony” I argue that this change was predominately carried by a younger generation of right-wing radicals, which feared further marginalization within Italian society and politics and felt abandoned by the old elite of the neo-fascist party.

The paper particularly focuses on the works by English novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974) to depict and analyzes this shift. While Tolkien’s fantasy novels served as a metaphor for the right-wing youth’s rejection of the modern world and their longing for a better future, Evola’s anti-modernist philosophy with its eternal fight between good and evil served as a legitimizing tool for some radicals to commit terrorist acts. Through committing a terrorist deed, they felt to belong to an order of likeminded heroic warriors that was fighting to hasten the destruction of the modern world.

Given that Evola’s work and his traditionalist and anti-modernist philosophy, anti-liberal aristocratic elitism, spiritual racism, and male-dominated worldview have recently seen a transnational renaissance, we need not only a deeper understanding of his teachings and philosophy in order to shed important light on the thinking that animates the transnational right-wing extremist and terrorist milieus. It also helps us to decipher the importance of culture in the recruitment by and radicalization of right-wing extremists.