Franco Freda
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Franco "Giorgio" Freda (Avellino, Italy, February 11, 1941) is one of the leading intellectuals of the post-war Italian far right. He has been accused of having personally contributed to the Piazza Fontana bombing.
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[edit] Biography
Passionate about politics since the high school, Freda started his career as the leader of the FUAN-Caravella of Padua (the undergraduates association of the Italian Social Movement).
Graduated in law, Freda, supporter of an "Aryan aristocracy" and of nazionalsocialist theories, in the '70s begun to critic from the right the MSI leadership, accusing it of compromising with the "agonizing democracy of the Republic". In 1963 he founded the political Group of Ar, on the track of the philosophy of Julius Evola, and managed a far-right library. Later, when the Group of Ar was disbanded, he founded the Edizioni di Ar ("Ar Publishing"), a militant publishing house of the far right. The Group of Ar and the publishing house were involved in reading, discussing and spreading the traditionalist philosophy of Julius Evola, Rene Guenon and associated thinkers.
Edizioni di Ar is still active today and continues to issue classics of the antimodern thought, like Arthur de Gobineau, Oswald Spengler, Friederich Nietzsche, Alfred Baeumler, Adolf Hitler and Julius Evola, and philosophical and political contemporary far-right essays.
In 1969 he publishes The Disintegration of the System , a seminal book for the far right extremism of those years. In this book Freda breaks the classical anticommunist stance of the far right and proposes a strategical alliance between the far left and the far right to help subverting the capitalist society. This position, along with the proposal of a hierachical, collectivist State which found its roots explicitly in Plato, deserved him the qualification of "nazimaoist". This original political ideology influenced many Italian groups of the far right of the '70s, especially Lotta di Popolo and Terza Posizione.
He defined himself a "scholar of ethnicity" and proposed the principles of a so-called "morphological racism" supporting the supremacy of the Aryan race. He pleaded himself as an admirer of Himmler. After contacts with Pino Rauti, he participated to activities of Ordine Nuovo, even if he never formally joined the movement.
From 1971 he has been involved in several trials, of which the most famous is that for the Piazza Fontana bombing. He spent several years in jail for the crime of "subversive association".
In 1990 he founded the far right movement Fronte Nazionale and publishes the journal L'Antibancor, about economical and financial studies.
Fronte Nazionale, a neonazist movement that fought against globalization and multiethnic society, has been disbanded by the Italian government in 2000, on the grounds of the Legge Mancino. 49 members of Fronte Nazionale, among them Freda, have been found guilty of "reconstruction of the Fascist party" (which is illegal in Italy).
Freda is still present in the far right scene as an ideologue and publisher, although public appearances and writings are rare. Freda is well known in the far right scene for his unusual erudition, elegant writing style and uncompromising attitude.
[edit] Involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing
The March 3, 1972 Franco Freda, the friend Giovanni Ventura and Pino Rauti, a national dirigent of Italian Social Movement and founder of the neonazist movement Ordine Nuovo are arrested. They are accused of having planned the terrorist attacks of April 25, 1969 (at the Fair and Railway Station of Milan) and of the 8 and 9 August of the same year (on several trains). The two are later accused of the Piazza Fontana bombing.
Several elements brought the investigators to the neofascist area:
- The composition of the bombs used in Piazza Fontana was identical to that of the explosives that Ventura, a few days later the attacks, hid in the home of a friend.
- The timers, coming from a stock of fifty Diehl Junghans timers bought September 22 1969 by Franco Freda in a Bologna store. Freda later explained that he bought the timers for Mohamed Selin Hamid, a sedicent agent of Algeria secret services (whose existence has been denied by Algerine authorities) for the Palestinian resistance. Israel secret services declared that no timer of that kind has ever been used by Palestinians.
- The bags where the bombs were hidden had been bought in a Paduan shop (the same city where Freda lived in), a couple of days before the attacks.
In 1974 the trial is moved from Milan to Catanzaro. The October 4 1978 the police finds that Freda disappeared from the Catanzaro apartment where he was obliged to stay. February 23 1979 he was pronounced guilty for the Piazza Fontana bombing and the court sentenced him to life imprisonment.
August 23 1979 Freda is captured in Costa Rica and extradited to Italy. Several trials followed. March 20, 1981 Freda is sentenced to 15 years of jail for "subversive association". The last sentence on the Piazza Fontana bombing, August 1 1985, acquitted Freda for lack of evidence.
In 1990 new investigations on Piazza Fontana were made, and in the latest sentence, due to the declaration of new witnesses, Freda and Ventura are acknowledged to have had real responsibilities in the terrorist attack. However they cannot be put on trial again, because they were acquitted from the crime in 1985.
[edit] Footnotes
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[edit] Bibliography
- Fabrizio Calvi e Frédéric Laurent, Piazza Fontana - La verità su una strage, edito da Mondadori (ISBN 8804406984) (Italian)
- AA.VV (a cura di F. Ferraresi), La destra radicale, Feltrinelli, Milano 1984 (Italian)
- Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995 (Italian)
- Chiara Stellati, Una ideologia dell'Origine. Franco Freda e la controdecadenza, Edizioni di Ar, Padova 2001 (Italian)
- AA.VV., Piazza Fontana:una vendetta ideologica, Edizioni di Ar, Padova 2005. (Italian)
