Squadrismo
스콰드리스모
The movement of the squadre d’azione, the fascist action squads organised outside the authority of the Italian state after the First World War. Led by local chiefs called ras, they used violence to smash socialists, trade unions and peasant leagues, providing the base for the rise of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.
In depth
Frightened by the factory occupations and farm strikes of the “Red Biennium” of 1919–1920, landowners, merchants and the middle classes supplied the squads with money and arms, while the police and army mostly looked away. From late 1920 “punitive expeditions” burned socialist town halls, labour chambers and cooperatives across the Po valley and Tuscany, and ras such as Dino Grandi in Bologna, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona and Italo Balbo in Ferrara took control of their provinces. When Mussolini signed a “Pact of Pacification” with the Socialists in 1921, the ras denounced him as a traitor and he abandoned it. Squad violence was both a political tool and the core of the movement’s identity; after the March on Rome of 1922 the squads were absorbed into the state militia in 1923.