ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the self-narratives of three prominent neofascists who were protagonists of the extreme-right violence which in the 1960s and 1970s threatened Italian democracy and resulted in numerous bloody episodes. These neofascists include Stefano Delle Chiaie, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, and Luigi Ciavardini. The neofascists' stories used charges of involvement in stragismo to construct conspiracies with the narrators as victims, 'erasing' the memory of their own role as perpetrators of political violence. Ciavardini's understanding of the 'youth war' of the 1970s bears many similarities to the stories told by extreme-left perpetrators of violence, particularly those who managed to flee abroad. As Rachele Tardi showed, these tend to represent the narrators as veterans of a civil war, which is portrayed as inevitable. More recently, narrative psychology has been applied to political self-narratives of conflict and violence, as produced by both the perpetrators and the victims of violence.
