On the morning of 27 October 2022 in Sammichele di Bari, the police arrested Luigi Pennelli, 23, with very heavy charges: conscription for terrorism purposes and incitement to commit a crime on the grounds of racial discrimination.
In the pre-trial detention order, the investigating judge Paola De Santis wrote that the man was ready to commit an attack to make the “extreme sacrifice in defense of the white race”.
A compressed air rifle, crossbows, bows and baseball bats with Nazi symbols were found in his home in the Apulian municipality. Investigators claim that Pennelli was about to buy a 3D printer to make a ghost gun, a gun without a serial number and untraceable.
Also based on the survey, Pennelli claimed to be the Italian referent of The base, a neo-Nazi semi-clandestine group founded in the United States in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro, 49, a former analyst of the US Department of Homeland Security who lives in Russia and is currently wanted by the FBI.
The Base, which is on the list of terrorist organizations in Canada and the United Kingdom, adheres to the so-called far-right accelerationism. It is an ideology that points to the collapse of modern society – corrupted by multiculturalism, feminism and politically correct – through a “racial war” and the creation of a white and “purified” ethno-state.
However, Nazzaro’s movement was not the only source of inspiration for the man, who spread the propaganda material of The Base translated into Italian on his Telegram channel.
On the packaging of the rifle he had written with a felt-tip pen the names of Anders Behring Breivik (the Norwegian bomber from Oslo and Utøya), Luca Traini (the neo-fascist responsible for the attempted Macerata massacre) and Brenton Tarrant (the murderer from Christchurch, New Zealand ). The practice of writing the names of one’s idols on weapons was inaugurated by Tarrant.
On the same package there was also written “remove Kebab”, which can be translated as “eliminate the kebab”. It is not a reference to the dish, but an Islamophobic meme of the American far right – by “kebab” we mean Muslims – taken from a 1993 Serbian song celebrating the Bosnian Serb genocide Radovan Karadžić. The same song was used by Tarrant as the soundtrack of the live attack on him.
The judge also spoke of “alarming recurrences” with the Buffalo bombing last May in the United States, in which 18-year-old extremist Payton Gendron killed ten people, almost all African Americans, in a Tops supermarket.
Gendron, who had radicalized online during the covid-19 pandemic, had written the names of other attackers on his weapons and before committing the massacre he had published a manifesto which in turn plagiarized the one written by Tarrant. Also Pennelli, according to the survey, was writing a manifesto, entitled River of blood: the cult of the race in the shadow of the Kali Yuga.
Often the attackers who act alone, such as Brushes, are erroneously called “lone wolves”, that is, without ties to groups or movements. But Pennelli was part of a transnational ideological circuit that feeds on bloody manifestos and racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories: above all the one on the alleged “ethnic substitution” of the “native” (ie white and Christian) European and American populations.
In this sense, wrote researcher Milo Comerford of the British Institute for Strategic Dialogue, we are facing a new type of far-right terrorism, which is characterized by its “post-organizational” and horizontal structure: there is no they are more leaders and hierarchical organizations (as was the New Order in Italy for example), but many small cells and individuals who share an ideology, and frequent the same online spaces, including Telegram and 4chan, the US forum that has gave rise to the so-called alt-right.
It is a form of political violence that also affects Italy: the case of Pennelli is not isolated.
In January 2021, Andrea Cavalleri, 22, was arrested in Savona as part of an anti-terrorism operation. The man proselytized online, idolized Breivik and Tarrant, was inspired by another American movement of the accelerationist far right, the Atomwaffen Division, and in an intercepted conversation he said: “I really do the massacre, I have the weapons, I’ll do Traini 2.0 “.
A 17-year-old boy from Turin was also involved in the investigation that led to his arrest, who had published on his Telegram channel, Black Sun, a violent twelve-page manifesto entitled “Vento Blocked: a call to arms”, in which he urged the “comrades” to “train” for the “most devastating revolution of all time” because “unfortunately a lot of blood will be shed.” According to the boy, Cavalleri had contributed to the drafting of the document “especially with reference to anti-Semitic historical revisionism” and with the advice to carry out “actions towards Jewish subjects”.
In December 2021, the Rome prosecutor’s office requested and obtained the arrest of the founder of the identity forces union, defined as a “latest generation subversive structure, operating on the web through intense propaganda.” Also in this case the indoctrination took place through “the exaltation of terrorist actions,” obviously including that of Anders Behring Breivik and Luca Traini.
What emerges from these cases, in short, is the fusion between Italian neo-fascism and Anglo-Saxon white supremacism.
An investigation carried out by journalists Gabriele Cruciata and Arianna Poletti, merged into the podcast Black hole released for Storytel in 2021, then identified a “virtual den” of Italian neo-fascists inspired – so to speak – by Melevisionea Rai children’s program: each user signed himself as Lupo Lucio, while the moderator (who called himself a “prolific Nazi-fascist”) used the nickname Melevisione.
In this virtual space there were many ideological, linguistic and symbolic references to the US far right. In particular, the novel was cited a lot The Turner diaries (translated in Italy with the title The Second American Civil War), published in 1978 by the American Nazi ideologist William Luther Pierce.
The text is considered the bible of US white supremacism, as well as a real operational manual for would-be terrorists. The Second American Civil War it inspired the creation of the terrorist group The Order, which between 1983 and 1984 committed racially motivated murders and robberies in various states of the northwestern United States, and above all pushed Timothy McVeigh to commit the attack on a federal building of Oklahoma City in which 168 people lost their lives.
Finally, in July 2021, the police discovered a small neo-Nazi cell called the revolutionary avant-garde, made up of four boys from Milan, then sentenced in February 2022 with sentences of up to two years in prison.
One of them was codenamed “Anders Breivik”, while the group’s main ideological references – once again – came from the United States. In particular, the militants highly valued the writings of James Mason, a former member of the American Nazi party, who published the book in 1992. Siege. His central thesis is that society must be destabilized by random and unpredictable acts of violence, and then to restore order with the establishment of a National Socialist regime.
What emerges from these cases, in short, is the fusion between Italian neo-fascism and Anglo-Saxon white supremacism. In an interview with beraking latest news, the head of the prevention police Eugenio Spina spoke of “groups that are taking their first steps [in Italia] and I’m in an embryonic state ”.
The problem is that it is a phenomenon that is difficult to intercept and tackle, which acts locally but is coordinated internationally. Unlike in the past, the new far-right terrorism is fully globalized: it can strike anywhere and at any time.
No country can therefore be said to be immune. Not even Italy, even if we prefer to pretend that this is not the case.