Ginseng, the Divine Root by David A. Taylor

Yet at least one branch leader insists that his members read from a core list and join weekly study sessions. Our motto is: We are what we do!” The group has no written rules. “What counts is we all have the same way of thinking,” one member tells him “We’re all Fascists and we all do the same things. Still, some of their words express simple groupthink. “They study, they read, they reflect,” he writes. Rather, they come to it from readings they’ve sought out and absorbed. Orsini argues that the group members he studied don’t embrace violence out of ignorance. “This is living ethnography,” he writes.Īnd it can be brutal, judging from the opening scene’s eye-gouging brawl. That is still far from the current picture, but Orsini’s portrait of Fascism (the Italian party and its progeny, distinct from broader, lowercase “fascism”) isn’t that of a distant past.

The candidate, Luca Marsella, told a New York Times reporter, “If this happens in other cities, we’ll have a chance to go into Parliament to defend our nation.” The group called CasaPound (named for poet Ezra Pound, a Mussolini supporter) won 9 percent of the vote, enough for a seat. As he notes, Italy is among the most peaceful European countries and was slow to erupt with the anti-immigrant fervor seen elsewhere on the Continent.īut that may be changing, with recent news from Italy about a fascist candidate for city council winning a seat in Ostia, a suburb of Rome, in a November election. The views and motivations that Orsini finds in the group he calls Sacrifice aren’t shared by most of Italian society. One city (called Lenintown in the book) is left-leaning, while the other (dubbed Mussolinia) is more conservative. Orsini, a sociologist and researcher affiliated with MIT’s Center for International Studies, spent five years undercover with fascist cells in two Italian cities to get a range of views in the movement.

One of the common complaints from the young fascists that Alessandro Orsini hangs out with in Sacrifice is that “girls only look at guys who have money.” Women regard guys like them as “penniless scum.” Fascists don’t get respect, they act out.

Ginseng, the Divine Root by David A. Taylor