(di Isabella Pezzoli)
“Adolf Hitler was a martyr. And like many martyrs, he brought extreme visions with him”
(Ezra Pound’s statement in the twentieth century)
CasaPound is a far-right political movement, with a neo-fascist and populist matrix, which is born in Rome in 2008 with the aim of reviving and implementing the fascist ideology.
The mobilizations and initiatives of CasaPound started in Rome and then spread throughout Italy, thus connoting CasaPound as a real political party that ran for electoral competitions until June 2019.
This new fascist movement takes its name from Ezra Pound, an American poet of the period of the two World Wars, who lived mostly in Europe supporting the fascist ideas of Mussolini. He is idolized by CasaPound because he sacrificed his life to fascism and for this reason he was captured by the partisans and interned in a criminal hospital by the Americans after the end of the Second World War.
CasaPound, like many neo-fascist groups, bases its propaganda on historical revisionism by portraying the fascist society of 1920 in an idealized and preferable way compared to the democratic systems of today (Ezra Pound describes democracy as a system that benefits those who are already rich and in power).
It is also interesting to note that CasaPound is present in the major social channels, such as telegram, twitter, facebook and youtube and has its own radio called “Radio Bandiera nera” to propagate the lines of conduct that characterize it: ultranationalism, white supremacism, xenophobia and opposition to immigration.
In the field of communication, CasaPound goes further: a 2016 journalistic investigation documents a manipulation of Wikipedia by Casapound which began in 2011 to improve its image, eliminating negative elements or facts that referred to this movement.
In 2006 CasaPound set up its own student organization as well as the fascist movements of the past. Indeed, fascist university groups existed as recruiting channels for the fascist party, and for several years they were the only source of new party members. Mussolini proclaimed that the purpose of university groups was to inspire young people to conquer and command.
Lastly, Casapound dialogues at an international level with various European and world far-right organizations: in Greece, it has relations with the neo-Nazi party “Golden Dawn” and in Spain with the neo-Nazi movement “Hogar Social”.