Franco Freda: Plato on Trial

The Tree and the Roots

‘The life of every one is manipulated by those with more power. In my case I accept that I have been a puppet in the hands of ideas, but not in the hands of men from the secret services here [in Italy] or abroad. That is to say that I have voluntarily fought my own war, following the strategic design that came from my own ideas. That is all.’

-Franco Freda

In 1990, Franco Freda established the political organization Fronte Nazionale. In 1993, the trial began to declare it illegal.

Franco Freda was accused in 1993 of attempting to reconstitute the National Fascist Party. A charge that Freda vehemently denied. A transcript of sections of the trial was released by Freda’s publishing house, in a book entitled “L’Albero e le Radici.” To my knowledge, none of it has ever been translated into English.

I have recently tasked myself with carrying out a radical reevaluation of Italian Fascism and its Postwar manifestations.

No figure is more deserving of such a reexamination as Franco Freda.

Franco Freda occupies a forbidden throne in the Italian national consciousness. His name conjures a certain aroma. His myth— his story— is a dark amethyst, stitched between historical fabrics of contrasting texture. His personage lay at the intersection of powerful political currents, intertwined with the very mysteries that haunted the age. What were the man’s intentions? Who was he really working for? Was he a creature of the Italian Secret Services? A golem of the CIA? Or is there a stranger conclusion: That he truly fought his own war, for his own ends, in the service of ideas less alien than they first appear.

Before we approach the subject of this essay, the trial of the 90s, we must say a few words about his first trial, the one that occurred in the 70s, and that summoned him into the Italian imagination. Franco Freda was convicted and later acquitted (for lack of evidence) for his alleged involvement in the infamous Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan. The carnage in question occurred in 1969, and claimed the lives of 17 people while wounding 88 others. The Piazza Fontana bombing was supposedly carried out by several Right Wing militants, and it marked the beginning of what is known as the “Strategy of Tension.” As the name of its location would ironically suggest, it would become a veritable fountain of questions for years to come. The bombing was suggested to have been directed or at the very least greenlit by the Italian Secret Services, and the CIA was rumored to have had a hand. This paroxysm of violence gave birth to a kind of egregore, a monster of mass anxiety that would haunt the Italian people for decades to come. Franco Freda was a central figure of this trial, and therefore Freda underwent a kind of sinister apotheosis in the Italian imagination. His countenance became synonymous with Italy’s great fear, that of a Janus-faced state, of a monstrous force lurking in the shadow of the Republic’s democratic institutions.

But this essay today has nothing to do with the bombing of Piazza Fontana. It has nothing to do with the Secret Services, Gladio, or the CIA. It has nothing to do with acts of terrorism. Today we will examine his lesser-known trial, a trial that was infinitely more interesting in its content and implications. For the subject of the trial was not a physical crime, but ideas themselves. Which ideas are licit? Which ideas will the state condemn?

What was so remarkable about the second trial, the trial over Fronte Nazionale, was the ingenious way in which Freda subverted it. He managed to transform the court proceedings into an environment where it was not Freda on trial, but the very legitimacy of the Italian judicial system, along with the foundations of Western Civilization itself.

The central accusation was that Freda’s organization Fronte Nazionale was attempting to reconstitute the National Fascist Party. Most of the Prosecutors questions were aimed at explicating Freda’s ideology and linking it to Italian Fascism or German National Socialism. Freda denied these charges. He insisted that National Front did not constitute a new Fascist Party, but instead, its prerogative was to research and offer legal solutions to the burgeoning issue of Non-European mass migration into Italy. I believe the best introduction to the trial as a whole is the following exchange between Freda and the Public Prosecutor (translations are mine):

PM: “In particular, I remember points 2, 3, and 4 (referring to a National Front document), where it calls for: ‘the immediate expulsion of all illegal foreign immigrants of non-european stock’.

Freda: “Excuse me, Mr Prosecutor, are you aware that this very topic is today one of great discussion?"

PM: “I most certainly do.”

Freda: “There is a total agreement in this regard among the current democratically elected political forces (as to its importance).”

PM: “I know this very well, and this is one of the cornerstones of the prosecution.”

Freda: “So we have demonstrated prescience and foresight?”

PM: “The topicality of the subject is one of the cornerstones of the prosecution and reveals the clear danger of your movement.”

Freda: “It demonstrates prescience, lucidity, and political foresight.”

PM: “And it demonstrates the political danger!

Freda: “Five years ago! With foresight and prescience we foresaw what would come to pass, so much so that today, five years later, all the political forces of democratic parliament tend towards the gradual abrogation…”

PM: “Your foresight we recognize. In fact, foresight is a requisite for dangerousness.”

An extraordinary admission on the part of the public prosecutor. The prosecutor claimed that the fulcrum of the legal proceedings was interlinked with his call for the immediate expulsion of illegal immigrants of noneuropean stock, and yet, by the time that the aforementioned conversation took place, this very topic was being discussed on Italy’s own political stage. The exchange ends with the prosecutor stating that Freda’s political foresight is what demonstrates the danger of his movement, and that political foresight itself is a requisite for dangerousness.

Franco Freda and his organization never called for the elimination of non european people, he never even called for their subjugation. National Front only insisted on the existence of fundamental differences between peoples, and the absolute need for these differences to be respected—to be given room to breathe. Freda’s crime was a certain foresight, and the Prosecutor admitted such. But ideas before their time represent a fundamental danger to a system with the foresight to work against them. Freda saw with absolute clarity the coming tempest which is just now touching our civilizational shores. Twenty years later, verbalizing opposition to this hurricane is licit. The current Prime minister of Italy entered power with these words upon her lips. But acting upon such words remains de facto illegal.

A few days before the writing of this article, Italian prosecutors requested a six year prison sentence for Matteo Salvini for his decision to prevent an NGO vessel from landing in Italy when he was Interior Minister in 2019. Onboard the vessel were over a hundred migrants looking to disembark on the peninsula. The ship, operated by an NGO known as Open Arms, had gone across the Mediterranean Sea picking up migrants illegally attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Italy. They refused to disembark anywhere but Italy, manufacturing a “crisis” of their own design, and initiating a 19 day standoff. Salvini was defending his borders. The Palermo prosecutor claims he was acting illegally and in violation of humanitarian principles.

Now that the greatest demographic replacement in European history is underway, a statesman is allowed to express and campaign upon his opposition to it. But he may not act upon such ideas. He may not fulfill the mandate of the people, the people who voted for his ideas in democratic elections.

The crux of Freda’s trial in the early 90s was his supposed attempt to reconstitute the Fascist Party and therefore threaten Italy’s parliamentary democracy. And that his “xenophobic” calls for the expulsion of illegal immigrants represented a core element of this very undermining of democracy. And yet, over 20 years later, the citizens of the nation went to vote for a party which campaigned upon such “xenophobia,” expressing the will of the people in a democratic context, and now the judiciary is stepping in to prevent it. Maybe in another twenty years, when the demographic replacement becomes so entrenched, when the problem becomes irreversible, the courts will allow a leader to make an impotent attempt at stopping it. But as of today, Salvini’s foresight is dangerousness. And his foresight may cost him six years of life.

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Let us return to Freda’s trial. Time and time again, the prosecution attempted to prove Freda’s fascist orientation to his frequent protests. The segment below reveals the essence of his denials.

Freda: “What I wanted to say, is that the historical experience of fascism is an experience that is now exhausted: we no longer need to discuss it further. This is the synthesis of what I was attempting to express with my words. The historical-ideological experience of fascism is exhausted, and today there are dominant problems which are problems that press upon the whole of the national Italian community. Independent from the immediate historical experience which has marked this community, the fascist/anti-fascist dialectic must be overcome for the problem of the next decade, of the 21st century, the problem of an invasion from the masses of non-europeans, which will also soon come to our national soil.”

And then continuing:

PM: You have heard that we dedicated a good part of yesterday morning to researching these so called ‘cultural roots,’ of the ‘humus’… My question is this: you have spoken now of segments of your history, or the history of some of us present.

Freda: Certainly.

PM: So, evidently, you have personal experiences connected to this culture.

Freda: The roots of a tree— to use an image, because it is becoming difficult to continue with abstract concepts— cross various layers of soil: between deep layers and shallow ones. We are saying that the layer of the historical experience of fascism was a ‘shallow’ one. There then exist the deeper ones, those layers more profound. It is necessary to turn to those deeper layers, for an evocative appeal to the latent and superior energies of our national community. This is what we wish to state and what we wish to reiterate.

Freda denies the charge of being a fascist, just as easily as he could deny being a Ghibbeline. “Fascism as a historical phenomenon is exhausted.” Freda is looking to transcend the fascist/anti-fascist dialectic all together. And before continuing, I would like to use this statement to reiterate another point. Freda is seen in the west as a kind of goofy eccentric due to the innapropriate “Nazi-Maoist” label that was attached to him. His strange fans in the anglosphere percieve him as the godfather of all edgy zoomers who want their smorgasbord of ideological syncretism (I am a Hezbolian-Evolian-Hoxhaist! You’ve never met someone like me before!). But this is the absolute opposite of what his vision was. It’s obvious he was trying to transcend the ideological rubble of the 20th century and overcome the fascist/anti-fascist ouroboros, and this is where his naive outreach to the communist youth flowed from. However misguided some of his moves were, he was a man looking to the future while all of his supposed anglosphere fans are looking to a weird postmodern past.