By FOIA Research on

Gabriele Adinolfi (born January 3, 1954, in Rome) is a Paris-based neofascist leader, who was a founding member of the Third Positionist group Terza Posizione ("Third Position") in the late 1970s. When an arrest warrant was issued against him following the Bologna massacre in Italy in 1980, Adinolfi fled to France, where today he is still involved in several extra-parliamentary far-right formations, most notably the Lansquenets, a neofascist elite cadre group, and the far-right think tank EurHope, connected to the ultranationalist European party Alliance of European National Movements.1 He is also deemed an éminence grise behind CasaPound, an influential Italian neofascist movement that emerged in 2003.

Adinolfi is very active on social media, particularly on Facebook2 and Twitter.3 A featured image on one of his Facebook profiles shows him together with former Front National leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen.4

Adinolfi is certainly one of the most notorious Third Way ideologues and networkers in Europe, frequently traveling to far-right conferences and meetings.5 There are many open questions in regards to what his exact role was in the Bologna massacre, how he managed to live underground for so long without ever getting caught, and finally, where he got all the money from for the frequent traveling and his publications, which can hardly be that profitable.

Biography

Already at a young age, Gabriele Adinolfi got involved in far-right groups. In 1968, he became an activist of Giovane Italia ("Young Italy"),6 the youth organization of the far-right party Movimento Sociale Italiano ("Italian Social Movement," MSI). For a short period he joined the "Filippo Anfuso" section of the MSI in via Livorno (Piazza Bologna), Adinolfi's neighborhood in Rome.

From 1972 to 1973, Adinolfi became a member of the "People's Struggle Organization" (Organizzazione Lotta di Popolo, OLP), most likely of its youth section Fronte Studentesco ("Student Front").

From 1973 to 1975, he was an activist of the neofascist terrorist group Avanguardia Nazionale ("National Vanguard," AN),7 founded by the infamous Stefano Delle Chiaie, by then living in hiding in Francoist Spain. AN, established in its nucleus in 1958, was a group initially tasked by Italian secret service elements (of the Servizio informazioni forze armate) with infiltrating and breaking up left-wing demonstrations.8 At a later point the group got involved in domestic false-flag operations, supported by elements of American,9 Italian10 and other European secret services,11 which were devised in order to defame the Left. These included the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, a terrorist attack that killed 17 people and wounded 88, which initially was attributed to anarchists.

Terza Posizione

In 1976, Adinolfi was among the co-founders of the neofascist student organization Lotta Studentesca, together with Walter Spedicato, Giuseppe Dimitri and Roberto Fiore.12 In 1978 Lotta Studentesca renamed itself to Terza Posizione,13 by then mainly composed of ex-members of previously existing neofascist groups, such as Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale, Lotta di Popolo, and Fronte Studentesco. Peppe Dimitri was the leader of the group, while Roberto Fiore and Gabriele Adinolfi were TP's most important ideologues.

National secretary of the far-right Forza Nuova party, Roberto Fiore, posing in front of a Wolfsangel flag.

Image Source
https://espresso.repubbl…

Terza Posizione was a very short-lived "movement" (outlawed 1980; dissolved 1982), ideologically oriented towards traditionalism, nationalism, anti-parliamentarism and militarism. TP rejected both capitalism and communism, pledging instead for a political and economic "Third Position." But despite the conciliatory sounding name, TP was clearly a right-wing extremist organization, drawing its inspiration mainly from fascist ideologues, such as Julius Evola, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Cornelio Codreanu.

With some TP members increasingly pledging for an armed struggle, they joined in parallel another group, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, NAR), which turned into the militant arm of TP within a short period. The history of Terza Posizione radically changed its course after the events of August 2, 1980, the day when a bomb explosion caused a massacre at the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and wounding 200. Already in the hours that followed the attack, then Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga saw a fascist matrix behind the massacre, an investigative trail that the magistracy itself would pursue from the beginning. With all leads pointing to members of TP and the NAR, an arrest warrant was out against Adinolfi and others,14 who fled to France, and subsequently would live for almost 20 years underground. During that time, however, he traveled back and forth between Italy, the United Kingdom and France.

Up from 1982, he was involved in the publication of several issues of the magazine Terza Posizione as well as Dixie. From 1982 to 1995 he ran the "Scholarship Center for Orientation and Research" (Centro Studi Orientamenti & Ricerca) together with Walter Spedicato, whom he knew from his time in Rome.15 Within a decade, the center published several political documents as well as a quarterly. After Spedicato’s death in 1992, the Centro kept on for three more years before ceasing its activities. According to the historian Elisabetta Wolff16 :

It was in 1985 that Adinolfi founded the Centro Studi Orientamenti e Ricerca (CSOR; Study Center Guidelines and Research, 1985–1995,), a name that reminds us both about Rauti’s CSON and Julius Evola’s pamphlet Orientamenti [Guidelines] from 1950. The aim of the center, as we can still read on a forgotten, but visible home page, was ‘to offer an element of reflection and analysis to the radical right considered excessively vitalistic, as well as to provide a platform for confrontation-meeting with any other non-conformist formation.’ Centro Studi Orientamenti e Ricerca, which ceased its publications in 1995, produced in fact five political documents and several bulletins at quarterly intervals. Since then, Gabriele Adinolfi’s intellectual activity has been dedicated to the proliferation of fascist ideas grounded in anti-Americanism and the vision of Europe as a third force. This includes the idea of Europe as a new imperial Euro-Asiatic order based on a political ‘axe Paris-Berlin-Moscow’. This order, according to Adinolfi, works towards the re-affirmation of national sovereignty over the European integration project, through defusing globalization and overcoming capitalism in search of a social third-way. Adinolfi’s rhetoric insists on opposing the ‘trinity of work-solidarity-duty’ to the ‘trinity of capital-selfishness-individual rights’. He declares that he wants to protect the ‘lobby of people’ against the ‘oligarchic lobbies’. At the same time, and in quite a contradictory manner, we read that he wants to ‘train’ new elites who are able to provide cultural and economic leadership. In other words, Adinolfi has placed himself on the same path already trodden by Evola and Rauti during the 1950s, i.e. a cultural fascist revolution, a ‘radical commitment to a metapolitical and parapolitical plan’. Simultaneously, Adinolfi has kept in touch with far right circles not only in Italy and France, but also in Spain and Belgium.

Publications

Terza Posizione (Italy) (1978-1982)

Terza Posizione's logo is a variation of the Wolfsangel ("wolf trap") symbol, widely used in the Nazi era, with the central bar substituted by a fist holding a hammer.

Image Source
https://en.wikipedia.org…

When in March 2000 the arrest warrant against Adinolfi was finally dropped or lapsed, and he (officially) returned to Italy,17 Adinolfi intensified his publishing activity. The same year he published Le api ei fiori (“The Bees and the Flowers”) with edition 451 and Noi Terza Posizione ("Our Third Position"), written together with Roberto Fiore and published by the series Sangue e Inchiostro ("Blood and Ink"). Between 2000 and 2001 Adinolfi presented his book Noi Terza Posizione around Italy, and the following years wrote several other books on far-right politics and history. During a summer university seminar 2002 in Rieti he lectured on the “New world order between imperialism and the Empire," outlining a “new form of metapolitical expression," which he elaborated in the 2001 publication Lama Editoriale XXIII Marzo. In 2002 Nuovo Ordine Mondiale tra imperialismo e Impero ("The New World Order Between Imperialism and the Empire") appeared, followed by Nos belles années de plomb ("Our Wonderful Years of Lead") released 2005 in France, Quel domani che ci appartenne, published in 2006 by Barbarossa in Italy, followed by Tortuga, l'isola che (non) c'è, ("Tortuga, the island that (doesn't) exist") also published by Barbarossa in 2008, and appearing in French under the title Pensées Corsaires.

After his return to Italy, Adinolfi was also the driving force behind several journals and websites in the early 2000s. He hooked up with the network around the neofascist Orion magazine, which was reconceptualised during a summer university seminar in 2001 in Lombardy. During that time Adinolfi mentions “voluntary commitment […] in support of tortured Argentina.”18 Since 2004, Adinolfi has been managing the daily news website www.noreporter.org.

Around 2004, he founded the think tank and publishing house, Centro Studi Polaris, which remained active until around 2016.19 The Centro Polaris had organized several national and international conferences and meetings, and has a long list of publications “including a DVD series, three books (Geopolitics of drugs and oil, Immigration and Earthquakes), multi-level communication courses, cadre courses and a quarterly magazine.”18

Meanwhile, he started also to write articles for various far-right newspapers, such as Rinascita e Contropotere and Giornale d'Italia, for which he reported on the French presidential elections. Some of these pieces were republished by the French extreme right-wing and antisemitic magazine Rivarol. Around that time Adinolfi started also to contribute to the magazine L’antagonista. Since 2003, Adinolfi appeared frequently as a speaker on far-right events covering topics such as “globalization and world power, the possibility of European rebirth, US imperialism, future scenarios.”18

Connections to CasaPound

On his online schedule, Adinolfi has painstakingly protocolled his activities since 2003,20 the founding year of CasaPound. It reveals that he attended the inauguration of CasaPound on December 27, 2003. The entry for this day reads:

Inauguration - together with approximately hundred people - of the newly occupied CasaPound: allocation of vacant premises to families, creation of a center against usury and the high costs of living.

When CasaPound was established, Adinolfi did not publicly appear as a figurehead of the movement, and called himself a mere “patron” of the project, but his central role is certainly acknowledged as such by the far right. In 2010, the German New Right magazine Sezession (Götz Kubitschek) published a long feature about CasaPound written by Martin Lichtmesz, in which he traces CasaPound back to Adinolfi:21

Among the exposed heads of CasaPound are the mastermind Gabriele Adinolfi, co-founder of the group Terza Posizione, which was active in the seventies and closely linked to ‘black terrorism,’ and the 1973-born Gianluca Iannone, a bearded, tattooed giant who cultivates the image of a rough motorcycle rocker and has additional cult status as the head of the hardcore band Zetazeroalfa.

In 2004, Adinolfi held 13 lectures at CasaPound, including one on Julius Evola (“Julius Evola, the Empowering Legend”). Most of the events were “experimental courses” (corsi sperimentali) of his Centro Studi Polaris.

Until 2008, CasaPound was closely linked to the neofascist party Fiamma Tricolore, but after an internal dispute in 2008 they split and CP appeared as a social association. Fiamma Tricolore is a far-right split-off from the neofascist MSI party led by Pino Rauti (1926-2012), who was implicated in the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing.22 Rauti was known to be close to the terrorist Mario Merlino, who in turn had life-long ties to the infamous neofascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie.23 In the early 2010s, Merlino and Delle Chiaie revived the outlawed neofascist terrorist group Avanguardia Nazionale, also implicated in the Piazza Fontana bombing.24

In 2012 CasaPound turned into a party, and from early on supported the Alliance of European National Movements (AENM), an ultranationalist far-right European party founded in 2009 and led by Jobbik’s Béla Kovács, which until 2011 included the French far-right party Front National. Before CasaPound had become a party the AENM had already been supported by Fiamma Tricolore. When the Centro Studi Polaris ceased its activities around 2016, Adinolfi opened a new think tank, EurHope, which was supported by the AENM,25 and in the run-up to the 2019 European elections, CasaPound, which in the meantime had retracted from its status as a party, was supporting the AENM openly. The announcement came from CasaPound's national secretary Simone Di Stefano on April 7, 2019.26

Simultaneously to Adinolfi's commitment to CasaPound, from 2003 onward he has been part of the “Honor Guard of Benito Mussolini” (Guardia d'Onore Benito Mussolini), which organizes fascist vigils over Benito Mussolini's grave. Adinolfi had "worked" at the latter’s crypt from 2003 to 2007.

The Lansquenets

Besides, EurHope, Adinolfi founded the so-called Lansquenets, and is still the group's main face. Not set out as a mass movement, it rather tries to recruit a fascist elite from all over Europe. From among the French far-right supporters of the Ukrainian nationalists, Pascal Lassalle has been involved in the group.

As of late, Adinolfi is appearing often on events organized by Roland Hélie's Synthèse Nationale. Synthèse Nationale has been hosting a series of dinner talks, where Adinolfi has appeared as a speaker. A driving force in this circle is the militant Alix Grabé (de Roux), also a Lansquenet.27

Adinolfi's view on Ukrainian nationalism

A year after the far-right regime change operation in Ukraine in 2013, a video featuring Adinolfi was published on YouTube entitled "I am at the same time with Pravyi Sektor and Putin."28 In the course of the video he specified this statement, saying that he is "with Pravyi Sektor unconditionally, and with Putin conditionally."

Although having not appeared on Ukrainian far-right platforms, close colleagues from France and Italy have, among them Pascal Lassalle and Alberto Palladino, who both appeared in the context of the neo-Nazi Third Positionist Paneuropa Conference in Kyiv. Lassalle is a member of Adinolfi's Lansquenet group, and translated Adinolfi’s books Noi Terza Posizione and Tortuga, l’isola che (non) c’è into French.

In the report on the 1st Paneuropa Conference in 2017 written by Olena Semenyaka (and translated by Pascal Lassalle into French) one can read in regards to Adinolfi:29

Thus he not only delivered a speech in front of the conference’s audience, but also recited an honorable address to the Ukrainian revolution by this legendary co-founder of Italian Terza Posizione who back in times of the Maidan revolution was far-sighted enough to see that “Eurasia is a Utopia, the Kremlin and the White House are the Heirs of Yalta.” Gabriele Adinolfi’s address will be published separately on the Reconquista resources...

Current European Union, undoubtedly, is the very opposite of the traditional empire: it’s artificial, maintained by the police control and devoid of the cultural foundation. In full accord with Gabriele Adinolfi, Pascal Lassalle underlines that Europe hasn’t really broken free from the post-war Yalta world’s partition into the Washington-dominated (along with its Brussels puppets) and Moscow-dominated areas. Notwithstanding the ongoing chauvinistic encroachments of the neo-Soviet Russian Federation, Ukrainians, in his opinion, should also beware the threat of American globalization.

Recent Activity
  • In December 2014, Adinolfi published a whitewashing account of his life during the later phase of the Years of Lead in Italy, when he went underground. The book, entitled Années de plomb et semelles de vent, was published by Synthèse Nationale.30
  • In late October 2017, Adinolfi traveled to Delphi, Greece, where he can be seen holding up the Lansquenets flag.31 The image is subtitled:

On October 31, accompanied by Irène Dimopolou, director of Empros, the Lansquenets of Europe went to the Sanctuary of Delphi where they hoisted the flag next to the Omphalos of Pythia, on the altar of Apollo, the absolute symbol of light and cosmic vibrations, and then dipped it in the water coming from the spring of Delphi.

On November 1, we marched with torches and flags in dignified and solemn remembrance of Giorgos and Manolis, the two Greek boys murdered four years ago by Red terrorists.

On November 2, we created a collaborative program with the AIGIDIS cultural foundation, intended to make the Greek roots of Europe known. For the methodological preparation of cadres, a Greek translation of our courses has also been agreed on.

  • On February 17, 2018, Adinolfi appeared as a speaker at Lyon's Bastion Social chapter. The by now outlawed Bastion Social was a French neofascist political movement modeled on the Italian CasaPound, founded in 2017 by former members of the far-right group Groupe Union Défense. On a picture posted by the Lansquenet Alix Grabé, Adinolfi can be seen together with Steven Bissuel, then head of Lyon's Bastion Social chapter, known for his close contacts to Ukrainian neo-Nazis.32
  • In June 2018, Adinolfi participated in a far-right conference entitled "The beginning of the Reconquista. Italy in the center of a sovereign Europe. Myth and necessity." On a picture taken during the conference he can be seen together with Alexander Markovics, a prominent Austrian far-right figure.33
  • On October 15, 2018, Adinolfi appeared as a speaker at an event organized by Roland Hélie's Synthèse Nationale, on the political and military situation in Syria.

Flyer of a Synthèse Nationale event including Gabriele Adinolfi and Elie Hatem on October 15, 2018, in Paris.

  • In 2019, Adinolfi authored a book on Matteo Salvini in French, Matteo Salvini ou l’itinéraire d’un parcours politique météorique, published by Roland Hélie's, Synthèse Nationale.34
  • In June 2019 he partook in a "dinner talk" organized by Roland Hélie's Synthèse Nationale about Matteo Salvini.
  • In Dec 2019, Synthèse Nationale has published a book dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Ordre Nouveau. In that context, Adinolfi's Lansquenets were hosting a dinner debate including several former Ordre Nouveau members. In the announcement one can read:

...At the end of the meeting, Gabriele Adinolfi, creator and leader of the European Lansquenets network, recalled that the strongholds of this network were mainly located in Italy, Spain and France. He answered questions about the latest actions carried out, referring to training sessions for elected representatives of our camp in Europe, its participation in the recent national assembly of this small and very dynamic movement that is Dissidence Française, as well as, soon, in a demonstration by Spanish comrades - thus showing how the very "Gramscian" approach of the Lansquenets contributes, little by little, to the birth of solidarity that is indispensable to the birth of this other Europe that we are working on.

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