An Italian sociologist goes undercover to infiltrate a militant hate group.

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.

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 city (called Lenintown in the book) is left-leaning, while the other (dubbed Mussolinia) is more conservative.

The views and motivations that Orsini finds in the group he calls Sacrifice aren’t shared by most of Italian society. 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.

But 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 group called CasaPound (named for poet Ezra Pound, a Mussolini supporter) won 9 percent of the vote, enough for a seat. 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.”

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. “This is living ethnography,” he writes.

And it can be brutal, judging from the opening scene’s eye-gouging brawl. Orsini argues that the group members he studied don’t embrace violence out of ignorance. Rather, they come to it from readings they’ve sought out and absorbed.

“They study, they read, they reflect,” he writes.

Still, some of their words express simple groupthink. “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. Our motto is: We are what we do!” The group has no written rules. Yet at least one branch leader insists that his members read from a core list and join weekly study sessions.

Orsini interviews members in small groups and individually. He questions protesters against the group and tests them with provocative statements. In the course of his undercover research, the author starts to feel the alienation of his subjects. Friends are incredulous about his choice to immerse himself with the Fascists. His parents are deeply ashamed of his work.

I’m no ethnographer, so I can’t assess the quality of Orsini’s observations. At points, he seems a less-than-reliable narrator. Characters seemingly change behavior without warning or explanation. A “friendly” chief of police suddenly warns Orsini ominously that authorities may not be able to protect him if something goes wrong.

Since Italy’s constitution forbids any reconstituted Fascist party, Orsini writes, “Militants are planning to combat bourgeois democracy from the inside, as Hitler and Mussolini did.”

Some conversations go in circles when members avoid being pinned down on their beliefs. The author describes a visit to a bookseller he calls Romulus, who runs a secret shop in the heart of Rome, selling outlawed Fascist tracts. The documents celebrate the values of loyalty and friendship, and the idea of dying for a higher cause — the fatherland.

One member complains, “Europe is being invaded by blacks from Africa. Very soon Italy won’t exist anymore. There’ll be a huge mosque in place of the Vatican. Italians have become spineless. Know what I’m saying?” To defend his country, he envisions a “glorious death.”

That mindset became vivid in 2013 with the public suicide of Dominique Venner, a French far-right historian and veteran. Surrounded by more than a thousand tourists and worshippers at Notre Dame in Paris, Venner approached the altar and shot himself in the mouth with a handgun.

His suicide was in part a gesture of protest against France’s law legalizing gay marriage, but members of Sacrifice interpreted it as a “noble and most heroic gesture,” the kind that could mobilize change and stop immigration. Venner left behind a letter encouraging far-right groups and explaining his act; it was read aloud at many branch meetings of Sacrifice.

Orsini follows along to a mixed-martial-arts cage match and to political protests. He learns the Fascists’ secret handshake. He gets spat upon by anti-fascists who assume he’s associated with Sacrifice and finds himself seething with rage. “Hatred is a hot fluid that invades your heart, lungs, blood, and arrives at your brain. It’s a stream that comes from the outside, like a dose of poison injected into your vein.”

There are digressions and spy-like episodes of scribbling notes in a car after an altercation. These give the book moments of thriller-like suspense. Orsini goes to lengths to give coherence to the group’s violence. To create their own social reality apart from bourgeois society, he says they construct a “parallel world” using violence in three ways: via sport, constant tension with the far left, and brawling.

“Although many people believe that barroom brawls are caused by irrational behavior,” he writes, “it’s precisely the brawls that reveal a more complicated interaction…They are steeped in symbolism.”

Besides the nativist slogans, the militants use targeted actions to gain support. Orsini describes their programs for food distributions to needy families: They prepare packages at night and deliver them in the morning — but only to poor white Italians, of course.

It gets them votes. One 34-year-old house cleaner in the Ostia election voted for CasaPound, the rightist group, because, she said, they were “the only ones who are here helping — helping the Italians.”

In the end, the militias expel Orsini and threaten to punish him if he tries to contact any of their members. It’s an inverted expression of their belief in loyalty.

Orsini mentions fascists in other countries, including Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber. It’s tempting to draw parallels between the groups described in Sacrifice and the escalating situation here, but that would gloss over big differences in historical context. What Sacrifice can show is one piece of the dynamic in today’s Europe, and offer a glimpse into actions and motives that can seem incomprehensible.

At the end, Orsini writes that part of his motivation for the book came from when he was young and witnessed a childhood friend grow disaffected. After failing exams and feeling adrift, the friend went from an easygoing joker to a Fascist group member. Orsini concludes that, for himself, “The most effective way to fight violence is to get to know it.”

Formatted review available at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025289568.

Alessandro Orsini studies political extremism, with a focus on "revolutionary youth movements fighting against capitalism and bourgeois society." Orsini joined the ranks of a neo-fascist group as an observer. He was in the group for four months, but it was a five-year project. He outlines the details of his approach, entry, and expulsion. The two local cells of the group he calls Sacrifice exist in different political climates: one has the quiet support of the left-wing mayor, while the other is denounced by the local government. The men in these groups are small-town guys, not mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh or Anders Breivik. Their day-to-day activities are mundane, but the world they want everyone to sign up for is horrifying: dictatorship, single party, and no free press.

Sacrifice wants to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, make sure all Italians have a home, stop all immigration, and for Italy to exit the European Union. In their rigid belief system, the group is more important than the individual. They believe you must "sacrifice your life for an ideal, submit to your leader, and live in a heroic manner." They resent Italy's pacifist society, because it doesn't allow them to demonstrate their core values of sacrifice, courage, and honor. They see those unwilling to fight as weaklings who are allowing their culture to be corrupted and destroyed.

This book caught my attention because of the clashes between Antifa and white supremacists in the United States. The topic is inherently interesting, but I lacked the background knowledge of fascism and sociology to fully appreciate this particular book. The author states upfront that he's not interested in rehashing the history of fascism. His main goal is to study Sacrifice's interpretation of the world and how that interpretation influences their actions.He explores what Sacrifice thinks of the outside world, what greater society and opposing groups think of Sacrifice, and what Sacrifice thinks about what other people think of them.

Orsini is much more objective than I'm going to be in my analysis, but he's honest when any emotions arise. The writing style is a bit dry (paraphrasing: "This occurred for three reasons. Reason number one...."), but is also approachable for the layman. The information was sometimes repetitive, especially with regards to Sacrifice's values and relationship with violence, so I might have enjoyed it more as a long-form article. Of course, more detail would've also been great because there were many questions raised that Orsini was unable to study directly because of difficult circumstances. The most interesting part of this insider account are the interviews with Sacrifice members and Orsini's interviewing techniques.

While this book wasn't a favorite of mine, it addresses several interesting topics:
• Concealment - Sacrifice obscures some of their beliefs because of restrictions in the Italian constitution, but they also do it for strategic reasons. They know how the public perceives them, so they conceal some of their more controversial views, such as an admiration of Adolf Hitler, to ease the recruitment potential "soldiers." They participate in charity initiatives, but they are careful not to reveal themselves. For all the focus on ideological purity, they make political concessions to protect themselves and gain a sympathetic ear for their viewpoints. The goal is to further ingratiate themselves into greater society and gradually normalize their views.
• “I’m not a racist." - "Racist" has become such a dirty word that racists go to great lengths to deny their racism, even while being undeniably racist. This also happens with white nationalists in the USA. In their minds they aren't racist, they just simply think all the races should be segregated.
• The construction of parallel worlds - It was interesting to witness the similarities between the fascists and the opposing groups (communists/anarchists) and how they fed off of each other. Orsini describes a "big world" and a "small world." In the "big world," most people are just living their day-to-day lives without any notice of the clash of grand ideas going on between small subsects of their community. But to the few political extremists in the "small world," a global war that will determine the fate of civilization is being fought. These radicals alone are privy to the true ways of the world and the high stakes, while the rest of us are just fools blinded by our complacency and consumerism. The opposing groups must remain infinitely at battle to maintain their worlds.
• Violent antifascist groups and press bias invigorate them - Sacrifice members were condemned by the press for instigating violence against the communists, even though they had video proof showing that the communists began the violence. While Sacrifice typically romanticizes violence, the video was important to them because it showed that they had the moral high ground. They were the aggrieved party. They simply want to share their ideas, while the close-minded communists want to silence them. It's a badge of honor to them that they are willing to shake hands with the other side, while the communists are combative and unwilling to listen. It's a good reminder of how tactics that feel good can be counterproductive, though it does serve to reinforce the walls of their self-created worlds.
• Author's experience with hate. - Orsini was assaulted because of his association with Sacrifice. He sees firsthand how easy it is to be consumed by hate and how reflexive it was to blame broad categories of people rather than the specific individual who assaulted him. Paranoia takes root and he starts seeing the chosen boogeyman everywhere.
• Ethnology - I generally prefer my nonfiction to be more about the stated topic than the author, but obviously I took my chances with a book titled "My Life in a Fascist Militia." It was interesting to learn about the methods for getting people to talk openly and the considerations that have to be made when joining a violent group that could kick you out at the slightest whiff of impropriety. I also learned that being friends with a sociologist must be frustrating! 

This book shows how people on the fringes of society maintain their egos in an antagonistic and unfair world. Joining an extremist group provides a ready-made framework for interpreting the world and shows that the true problem is everyone else. Even though this book focuses on a singular Italian extremist group, many of the attitudes were uncomfortably recognizable to me. I've witnessed toned down versions of Sacrifice's statements and impulses from people not affiliated with any type of extremist group. While most of us manage to avoid it, it wasn't hard to see how easy it is to fall down the slippery slope of extremism. There was even one man who eventually left Sacrifice because it became too moderate for him! Sacrifice: My Life in a Fascist Militia is a unique glimpse into a clandestine and paranoid world.

If you're interested in books about the realities we maintain to preserve our worldviews, you might enjoy The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time. You might also be interested in the movie Imperium (link goes to quote page). In it, Daniel Radcliffe plays Nate Foster, an FBI agent who infiltrates a white supremacist group.

An enjoyable read and also a timely one. Orsini provides incredible insights from the birthplace of fascism by engaging two small-town fascist militias thorughout several years. I think the main strength of the book is the expoition of difficulties, suprises and ultimate benefits of engaging in such an immersive etnographic study. On the other hand, the small-town aspect of the study is also significant, one cannot help but wonder if Orsini would be accepted in a fascist militia in a big city. My guess is No. This leads the author towards a portrayal of fascists being victims of their own politicization: isolated and despised in their small communities. While the author accepts the etnographic work has not been the best possible version (constant threat of violence and expulsion is the reason here), some inquiry into the elitist nature of fascist organizations is missing in my opinion. One of the characteristic aspects of fascism is hierarchy with a constant emphasis of love of the people and community. Yet, even with a public supporting fascists, its core remains to be elitist or in a fascist’s words from the book: “I don’t care, because it means we’re different from the others. It means that our spirit is different from the other guys’ in this town. We have values, they have nothing.” This quote displays both the despised and alienated nature of a fascist militia in Italy in 2010s but also the sense of superiority of fascists over the masses.
Another missing part is how antifa or communists view themselves in these rural towns. The communists are portrayed as somehow victorious in the book, because they have the numbers against fascists, but also fascism is defeated in Italy 70 years ago. Yet repeatedly, communists are portrayed on the defensive (on the defensive as in they already are victorious and defending their advantageous position) in the book while fascists try to (re-)establish themselves on the political scene of small-town Italy. This is probably from the fascists’ perspective as we already know from the Anglophone countries that fascists claim “cultural Marxism” prevails in today’s world and this leads all of us towards the decay of Western civilization. A few mentions of what author calls “revolutionary gnosticism” (which sounds an incredibly weak and ahistorical argument although I didn’t read the author’s book on Red Brigades but read some reviews of it) luckily did not derail the fascinating etnographic work.
All in all, as Orsini says in the book there are probably enough material out there enough for writing at least ten books, but all we have is this one. A nice read.

This is an excellent account of the dynamics of a fascist organization in Italy. The author does a masterful job of telling a compelling, interesting story while also explaining how he approached the task as a sociologist. He weaves his discussion of methodology into the account instead of creating a separate chapter to deal exclusively with it. The result of this choice is a book that is both scholarly and accessible to lay readers interested in contemporary fascist movements. Orsini strikes a good balance between creating a more complex portrait of fascists and underscoring the violence and danger inherent in fascist beliefs and goals.