FIFTH COLUMN

SMS is the code name of Left Magistrates Press, the transversal snake that tells us what we should think, who should we condemn and how should we be indignant. The SMS tells us every day that we are living under the worst possible regime, at the worst possible time, under the heel of a criminal in uniform named Matteo Salvini which must be processed immediately. But I feel like I've already seen this horror film. And so I went back in my memory to the beginning of the present decade. The scene was totally different, the protagonists as well.
The worst possible regime in that terrible time was the center-right and the criminal's heel, with heel lift, was that of Silvio Berlusconi. The alarm was no different, the persistence, hatred for another democratic emergency, another “unprecedented” situation. Even then we lived in “a South American dictatorship”, populist and rascal, we were outside of Europe even then, from Modernity and Democracy, and naturally outside the law. Read More

FIFTH COLUMN

If you are nostalgic for the gods, go and see The First King, a great film about Romulus, Remus and the birth of Rome under divine fire. Usually if you go to the cinema to see a historical film, you find the usual refrain: the past is adapted to today, updated and ideological, they speak of Aeneas as an illegal migrant, Spartacus as a Landini of antiquity, history is reviewed with the smallest meter of the present: see budding feminists, liberated homosexuals, unionized slaves and always good and generous blacks. Evil is represented as the fascism of the ancients, the enemy is a Nazi ante litteram.
If instead you think that ancient history should be represented in all its glorious and bloody distance from the present, The First King is the masterpiece you've been waiting for. Cinema is the workshop of myth in our times and the First King expresses it fully, without sugarcoating the harshness of the past. In the film you can already feel the respect for the almost three thousand years that separate us from the time in which the Eternal City was founded in the choice of the Proto-Latin language. The presence of the sacred, of the elementary forces of nature, the impetuosity of the primary bonds for life and death, the strength of command and the fear of God, the ritual importance of sacrifice, of blood and fire, submission to the verdicts of fate, the aura and the mystery, they are the horizon in which this extraordinary representation of brotherly love develops, very powerful, which turns into fratricide by divine will. Read More