Ordine Nuovo - History

History

Previously, L'Ordine Nuovo ("The New Order") had been the name of a radical left-wing paper edited by Antonio Gramsci in the early 1920s, with Gramsci's followers being nicknamed "ordinovisti". However, later on the term - in Italian and various other languages - was appropriated by Fascists and Nazis, its original left-wing predecessors forgotten.

The extreme right-wing organization here referred to, whose members were also nicknamed ordinovisti, though being the political opposite of the earlier ones, was born from an internal current and then a schism in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). In 1954 Arturo Michelini, a moderate seeking an alliance with the Italian Monarchic Party, and possibly with the Christian Democracy, became general secretary of the MSI. This led to the schism of the most intransigent and spiritualist, Evolian current (Nazism was also a reference), led by Pino Rauti, Lello Graziani and Sergio Baldassini. They refused any compromise that brought the party apart from aristocratic principles. The intransigent and spiritualist Ordine Nuovo was then founded in Rome, but still a part of the MSI.

The real break with MSI happened at the MSI congress in Milan in 1956. Pino Rauti declared that, being disappointed with the moderate drift of the MSI, his movement would abandon the political scene, creating the "Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo", an association dedicated to "political studies and analysis". This wanted to be a literal application of the theses of Julius Evola, that is, an aristocratic refusal of contemporary, materialist society. Ordine Nuovo, nonetheless, had a capillary and hierarchical organization on the Italian territory, and often behaved more like an extra-parliamentary political organization than a simple "scholarship center".