are not necessarily attributes of fascism.… The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised.… With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn.210
In attendance at that 1962 conference was perhaps the most important product of the OAS’s parafascist-Maoist mixture: a Belgian influenced by Yockey named Jean-François Thiriart.
A communist in high school, Thiriart had changed sides as fascism swept Europe. During World War II, he assisted in locating British and Jewish resistance fighters during the Battle of the Bulge, and he maintained his militancy through the 1950s.211 In 1960, Thiriart founded a group called Mouvement d’Action Civique (Movement for Civil Action) to resist the liberation of Congo, and later admitted to hiding paramilitary OAS soldiers in his house when they returned to Europe from fighting against the Algerian National Liberation Front. He also published their communiqués in his weekly, La Nation Européenne, an organ inspired by Yockey’s Imperium. However, as decolonization spread, Thiriart’s aspiration grew to accentuate the left-wing aspects of fascism and to transform the character of mainstream politics. At the Venice conference, he and others called for a National Party of Europe, demanding increased workers’ rights, representation within a new European parliamentary government, the elimination of the United Nations, and decolonization.
The fascist notion of decolonization remained distinct from the Third World decolonization movement, and it seemed to contradict the ideology of the OAS and other pro-colonial and ultranationalist groups from Northern Ireland to Angola to Chile. While fascists attempted to identify their “third way” beyond left and right with the Third World outside of the United States and the Soviet Union, their notion of “European liberation” demanded the expulsion or otherwise liquidation of populations deemed non-European. The strong odor of anti-Semitism and racism continued to emanate from their literature, which emphasized violence against the state, “Zionists,” and NATO as a means of achieving the spiritual empire of Europe. Hence, Thiriart’s appeal to the left by violently rejecting NATO and embracing Soviet and even Maoist influence retained only a short-term promise of liberation from capital with a long-term plan of genocide. This support for decolonization was, more or less, a disingenuous ruse to cater to possible left-wing recruits.
Upon his return from the Venice conference, Thiriart was arrested by the Belgian police for passport fraud. Undaunted, he founded an organization called Jeune Europe (Young Europe) after leaving jail, likely named after a Nazi group that, in turn, had relied on the prestige of Mazzini’s Young Italy and Karl Schapper’s Young Germany—two revolutionary groups predating the International. Thiriart’s Jeune Europe set up schools throughout Europe to train a young vanguard in ideology and physical combat.212 They trained with members of the Evolian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo and the OAS, extending their network into the “groupuscular” neofascist underground.213
Thiriart even renounced fascism from time to time, calling himself a national communist. Continuing to support neo-Nazi terrorism into the 1960s and 1970s, Thiriart called for a single European empire, inclusive of the Soviet Union. He supported Muammar al-Qaddafi’s ideas of nationalist direct democracy and Fidel Castro’s revolutionary strategies. In general, the Nazi-Maoist ideology remained grounded in the “guerilla war” tactics of the OAS. Thiriart also advocated entering leftist groups and encouraging division. By intriguing within the Communist Party of Belgium, Thiriart managed to create a split, drawing followers of “National Communism” to his own Nazi-Maoist party, the Parti Communautaire Européen (an outgrowth of Jeune Europe).214 Thiriart’s success in his pursuits was relatively small, and his influence remained restricted to fascist circles; however, that network of fascist groups and leaders would gain momentum through the 1970s during what was called the anni di piombo, or the Years of Lead.
The Years of Lead
In 1966, a CIA front group called Aginter Press was set up by a former OAS officer named Yves Guérin-Sérac to bring fascists the credibility of press passes while providing material support to pro-colonial forces and gathering intelligence on and undermining left-wing groups. The next year in Greece, ultranationalist military forces linked to a network of paramilitaries involved in terrorist attacks used political instability largely blamed on the left to stage a military coup d’état.215 In 1968, amid that year’s global social tumult, the US-backed military government in Greece quietly invited some fifty Italian neofascists to tour their coup government. The tour apparently involved meeting officials and discussing strategies and tactics.
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