Non-fiction

Of Alberto Negri

Source: Alberto Negri
One year after taking office in the White House, The Donald, “the very stable genius”, extremely famous for gaffes and crazy ideas, it's about to come to us and even the snows of Davos are getting hot. With Donald Trump's speech the 25 January at the World Economic Forum promises to be the most agitated edition of the summit in recent years. To the Europeans, and not only to them, we don't like the American president and yet, while Europe is still the only continent not to have emerged from the crisis, the US economy soars. Of course it's not all thanks to Trump but at this moment the slogan coined for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 2019 applies to him 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid”. And the US economy is moving like never before in recent years. Read More

Of Marcello Veneziani

Source: Marcello Veneziani
Fifty years ago, these days, the global protest took shape and air, which then became more simply '68. It will be this year's hit, years has already begun.
'68 was the last revolution in the West even if it wasn't bloody, he didn't throw down states, powers and regimes and did not change the system he wanted to overthrow. But the customs and language radically changed, school and university, the family and the relationship between generations, sex and the female role.
All this did not happen in 1968, but that year was considered the peak, the starting point, although signals had preceded it. '68 was an event that then designated an era. The world changed.
If you believe in symbolic coincidences, in '68 three symbols of the old Italy that believed in God died, in the homeland and in the family: Padre Pio, the saint from Pietrelcina, Giovannino Guareschi, the singer of the small world of Don Camillo and Peppone, and Vittorio Pozzo, the legendary commissioner of the national team who won two world championships and made the players sing patriotic anthems before playing. It was their doping, like the stigmata of Padre Pio and the White by Guareschi. Read More

Of Stefano Feltri
Source: The Daily Fact
Many readers may have the impression that all this interest in the events concerning Carlo De Benedetti, Repubblica and the Espresso Group (which is now called Gedi) are internal issues within the small caste of journalists, settling ancient scores or venting frustrated professional ambitions. Maybe there's this too, but what is happening around Repubblica concerns the whole country or at least that part, in a broad centre-left sense, who has always looked for an ethical and cultural compass in that newspaper and in that editorial group, well before politics. I write about it, despite being in a competing newspaper, because I made that piece of the country (and maybe I do) I'm leaving too, grew up reading and sometimes cutting out Repubblica, the Espresso, Micromega, Limes. Read More

Of Sergio Cabras
Source: The neo-peasant alternative
Karl Marx saw the colonization of India by English capitalism as a positive event, as a necessary step for those peoples - like the European ones before them - to free themselves from a medieval social system and an economy centered on the land and find the conditions (albeit in exploitation) which would have triggered the historical mechanisms from which class consciousness and class struggle would arise, then directing them necessarily, as we know, towards communism.
As we know, however, it wasn't like that, and we also know what happened where, Instead, those historical mechanisms reached us up until communism. Nonetheless we still have those, rereading the speech in an updated way, proposes a similar vision of the paths that History would be destined to follow. In my book (“The neo-peasant alternative“) I dedicated part of a chapter to commenting on some passages of Toni Negri's well-known essay (written together with M. Hardt) Empirein which it is hypothesized that the system of advanced capitalism in its current globalized version, now constituted in “Empire”, demolishing in fact - and gradually also in law - every border, state, but also normative and cultural, will end up having as a collateral effect that of uniting the masses of the exploited and excluded, configuring a global "multitude" that will rebel on a planetary scale and re-establish a humanity (new, as always in this type of theory) of equals. This in a really extreme summary (I refer to the work of Negri and Hardt for further information, wanting, also to my book for those interested in my criticism on the matter). Read More

Of Alessandro Montanari

Source: National interest
…But if thought corrupts language,
even language can corrupt thinking.
George Orwell
Until they become aware of their strength they will not rebel.
E, until they rebel, they will not become aware of their strength.
George Orwell
One hundred and seventy years after Metternich's famous definition, Italy seems to have returned to being nothing more than "a geographical expression". I know this is not an accepted assessment but what I see, and which I ask anyone who succeeds to refute, it is a country stripped of all sovereignty and in an identity crisis, with a foreign coin in his pocket, Berlin by actual capital, an impostor English elected as the new mother tongue and cultural relativism to govern the minds instead of the state religion.
My forgiver jumped on foot’ the first point is equal, but I have already written so much about the euro that I risk pedantry. Suffice it to remember that also Vincenzo Visco, former Finance Minister of Romano Prodi, he now had to admit, in clear contrast to the narrative that is still hegemonic on the left, that the single currency is “an undervalued German mark”.
However hyperbolic, I also doubt that the annoying image of Berlin as the capital requires particularly in-depth explanations. As known, Indeed, the long Italian season of technical governments, began in the summer of 2011 and I fear it is still far from the desirable end, it was the consequence of a violent surge in the spread, triggered, keep case, from a maxi-sale of BTPs that had until then been jealously preserved in German safes. Then it was Chancellor Merkel herself, once the summer spread campaign has been won, to unofficially declare the “German protectorate”, dictating Rome's political agenda point by point with the infamous formula - evolution of the ancient conditions of peace – of “homework”. Since then Berlin has had, perhaps through his Brussels ventriloquists, and Rome executes, writing notebook after notebook of "homework" with the tears and blood of Italians…
However, I would like to point out that the docile acceptance of the German yoke has been added to, for some time, an equally mortifying sight, but even less understandable: the organized oblivion of the Italian language, that is, the last intact legacy of our national identity.
With a decision considered outrageous even by the Accademia della Crusca, the Ministry of University and Research led by Valeria Fedeli has in fact established that Research Projects of National Interest (By) that aspire to public funding must be written in English, however allowing candidates who wish to attach a subsidiary copy in Italian to the application. E’ therefore true, as the ministry immediately protested, that “it is incorrect to say that the Italian language has been banned”. In fact it was just degraded, in Italy, to the rank of a complementary and optional language.
He's very wrong, moreover, those who try to reduce the scope of the issue to a sectoral level, remembering that international scientific publications are normally compiled in English. The announcement, Indeed, Prin also admits of a humanistic nature; therefore even those who wish to present a project aimed at the conservation of vernacular poetry will be forced to explain it …in English. If we are not absurd, we don't have much left.
However, I fear that it is somewhat naive to reduce the absurdity of such a decision to Mrs. Fedeli's lack of personal inclination for Italian.. The adoption of English, which is not only the language of science but is and remains above all the language of the markets, in fact it obeys a categorical imperative of globalization which, through the planned destruction of national idioms, aims to build a serial prototype of a new man, perfectly identical to their peers regardless of their place of birth and culture of origin. Hence the need to proceed by constant subtraction of differences, starting naturally with the language, since different languages ​​express different thoughts. Standardizing language therefore serves to standardize thoughts while standardizing thoughts is the essential condition for standardizing behaviors.
The creeping replacement of Italian with English does not only concern university education. From this year, Indeed, students from all secondary schools will have to attend, in addition to the usual ones (e, let's be clear, sacrosanct) English lessons, also to lessons "in" English of the main scientific subjects. Scientific subjects, maybe you don't know, like history. But there is no logical short circuit in demanding that Italian history be taught in English? In that story, at least, something seems to be missing. Something huge.
It is said that the fruit never falls too far from the tree. And it's true. To pass off all these legislative innovations as progress, effectively, it is a rampant political class that has been around for years now, showing off the classic cosmopolitanism of the provincial, has taken to justifying every filth of the globalist agenda in a of the English sneaky that is so reminiscent of slimy of the Latins used by Don Abbondio to make fools of the peasants. Calling it exotically the Jobs Act, Matteo Renzi managed to give a blinding look of modernity to the cancellation of worker protections, thus avoiding the popular base of the Democratic Party, workerist and post-communist, immediately interpreted that law for what it was: a reactionary and bossy counter-reform. On the other hand, today it is easy for the people to fall into the trap of the learned. Politicians and journalists keep telling us that we need to do it spending-review because otherwise it goes up spread and we risk the default, also exposing our savings to the risk of a bail in. And who claims the opposite, Obviously, he's just telling fake-news…
Having to pay my tribute to Anglo-Saxon culture, allow me to paraphrase a deadly scourge of the "modernists" of all times, and continues to be, George Bernard Shaw. Me too, like him, I don't think it's necessary to be stupid to speak English among Italians, but it certainly helps.
For the sake of irony, which even in the delirium of the global world remains the most suitable sword for skewering idiocies, I forgot to tell you that even Rai, despite the well-known budget problems, wanted to contribute to the linguistic internationalization of the country by launching a new Italian radio-television channel totally in English.
Change the language, as said, it serves to reprogram minds. But the minds, to maintain the illusion of functioning autonomously, they need a philosophical "software" capable of giving meaning even to non-sense. This guiding philosophy, in my opinion, it is clearly traceable in Cultural Relativism, a platform of thought inspired by the denial of every thought that preaches hyper-tolerance to better practice tyranny. I exaggerate? Judge for yourself. With the surreal justification of respect for diversity (but nothing actually different, actually, it is no longer allowed to exist), this current of non-thought calls fathers and mothers “parent 1” and “parent 2”, bans masculine nouns, corrects the plot of operas, he puts wooden underwear on statues and offers cultural shelter to those who transform Jesus in Peru, even going so far as to invoke, no, the systematic demolition of those monuments that would give equivocal testimony to the "dark ages" of our past.
The darkness of yesterday against the light of tomorrow that we are building today… I don't know about you but me, if I stop to consider the present, I struggle to imagine anything darker than this Enlightenment Obscurantism and this Mephistophelean promise to hand over Everything to us, but only if, prima, we will have agreed to prostrate ourselves to Nothingness.

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