Guareschi, del '68 se ne fece un baffo

Of Marcello Veneziani

Like today (yesterday for those reading, n.d.r.), fifty years ago, in the fateful '68, he went to the other world Giovannino Guareschi. He left the small world that few had described, to reach the big world, the one where that Lord lived who in his House gave advice to one of his fiery dependents on earth, Don Camillo. At least that's what Guareschi says.

He left early, Giovannino, a 60 years, after a troubled life, between concentration camp, prison under fascism and anti-fascism, plus a host of books translated all over the world, of very popular films that represented that fabulous post-war Italy, and adventures in the press, like his impertinent Candide who played a decisive role in the defeat of the social-communist popular front in the 1948 elections.
Giovannino died on 22 July '68 but he had time to write his last Don Camillo dedicated to today's young people. The book was released posthumously and marked the striking contrast between the old communist Peppone (that the anti-communist Guareschi had made sympathetic with his irrepressible humanity), the tough Don Camillo and a young, beardless protester, who was traveling on a motorbike with studded and fringed bags and a black jacket with a skull and the words "Veleno". Which becomes the boy's nickname for Guareschi and also the metaphor of the protest. "The Chinese" also arrive in the town of Brescello and upset the ideological geometries of the Italian-Stalinist Peppone and also displace the religious ones of the parish priest. Guareschi links the protest to the advent of the consumer societyi. For him the antagonism between the two phenomena is only occasional, related, not substantial. Consumerism devours the small ancient world and the old faiths, but he catches Peppone who leaves his bike and rides in a red spider. Consumerism is the habitat of 1968. Read More

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Checkmate the news wizards

Of Marcello Foa
Checkmate the news wizards
Source: aldogiannuli
The contemporary world is characterized by a heated debate on the role and future of information: information always seen as an instrumental component of modernity, given that diatribes such as the one that arose over so-called fake news were essentially focused on their consequences for electoral purposes. The information is, in any case, a battlefield where each contender is interested in putting their most refined strategies into play; a very often overlooked role is the one played, in this context, by spin doctors, communication experts linked to political power who, moving in the shadow line between institutional and personal communication of leaders, exercise a decisive weight in the orientation of public opinion. Read More

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When Zionism collides with reality

Of Stanley L. Cohen*
When Zionism collides with reality
Source: Comedonchisciotte
“The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish were thus premeditated, so evil and so devastating, that a civilization cannot tolerate them being ignored, because it could not survive their reiteration"
With these authoritative words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S. Attorney, had opened the work of the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War.
In charge of ascertaining the guilt of prominent members of the army, of politics and the judicial apparatus for violations of international laws... including war crimes, crimes against humanityand against them laws of war…the court had validated the principle of personal responsibility for the genocide against Jews and other ethnic groups, that had been considered, from the German state, a threat to one's own, declared, racial supremacy, religious and political.
Although these crimes had manifested themselves in different forms, their savagery resulted, actually, from a shared collective thought, who considered all those destined to be suppressed by the state not only (beings) inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of grotesque derision, whose very existence contaminated the national concept of racial supremacy.
There are no more secrets about the terror campaign unleashed from the Third Reich, as he invaded nations and unleashed international violence never seen before. Nor have its methods of total war ever been subject to serious debate, both towards the military, than against civilians. Even if someone has chosen to dispute the number of victims or to rework the exact instruments of persecution, no serious historian doubts the role played by cattle trucks, from the ghettos and crematoriums in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life, while most of the world looked elsewhere. Read More

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