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

Flop a parte, I don't know whether to review Beppe Grillo as a comedian on TV is really an advert in favor of the 5 Star Movement or is it counterproductive for them. The show aired the other night on Raidue, Grillo is there, it actually arouses very mixed feelings: there are those who resell him and regret his role as a comedian and entertainer, rediscovering his verve as a free curser. There are those who do not see a solution of continuity and believe that the political prophet Grillo is the continuation of the comedian Beppe with other means, but with the same purposes: tell the truth, getting angry. Have fun & Subvert. And there are those, on the contrary, seeing him in the guise of a comedian, confirms that the reins of the country cannot be entrusted to a movement inspired by a cabaret artist. As long as you're joking, it's fine... In short, I think after seeing the Grillo comeback on Rai, everyone strengthens their judgments and prejudices. Read More

FIFTH COLUMN

Everyone repeats: it is the war of the people against the elites, the common people against the powerful, here is populism, here is the sovereignism that spreads everywhere. Yet an important aspect is overlooked, decisive, perhaps even more important and more decisive than the other, which clearly emerges in political choices, electoral and democratic elections in the United States and Brazil, of Russia and the Philippines, of Hungary and the countries of the Visegrad area, of Japan, of India and even Turkey: the widespread demand for order and leaders that they are the guarantors. Trump and Bolsonaro, Putin is Duterte, Orban e Duda, Erdogan, Abe and Modi were voted for or gather consensus because compared to their progressive antagonists they guarantee or promise Order. And in Italy? Salvini sensed that the challenge of the present/future is being played out on the theme of the Order and for this reason he chose the Ministry of the Interior for himself, He sports the uniforms of the police forces and publishes posters with his image under the writing Dio, homeland and family. And for this reason his approval has doubled in just a few months and today he leads the polls. After all, at the League demonstration in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, last 8 December, the people's applause began precisely on those themes that concerned Christian civilisation, love of country and defense of the family. And the Battisti case and the other fugitive terrorists, crime arrests, the stop to wild immigration are variations on the theme of order. Read More

FIFTH COLUMN

Oh my God, what a crazy year this is shaping up to be, with the five hundredth anniversary of the death of my bearded and extravagant painter, what he called himself?, Lionardo by ser Piero da Vinci... How much trouble, how many inconveniences, how many evil tongues are left over for the anniversary... Obviously, you want to stop tormenting me for five hundred years? Since that blessed man da Vinci, who did many jobs, he decided to take my portrait, I lost my peace. Without any will I became the most famous face in the world, they visit me constantly and bullshit me from morning to night. I'm on Feisebucche, on Uozappe and on Istagramme for five centuries before they invented it. But I too have no right to prayer and private death, There wasn't an edict from you? And women's rights, protection from stalkers, as the foreigners say, It doesn't apply to me? Read More

But where were the beautiful souls who now rise up indignantly for “the sovereignist provocation” of remembering Jan Palach, at the time of the tanks and then in all the following years in which that sacrifice was remembered? Why didn't they remind them of that example and then of the other examples of many young people in Hungary before, then in Poland and in the rest of the world they paid their lives to rebel against communism? They want to spread the false legend that, apart from a few old communists in the apparatus, the local left had been libertarian since that day and had sided with the insurgents, which then - at their sole discretion- they were all on the libertarian left, nothing else. And therefore if today on the right, or in the concert of musical groups in Verona, some insist on remembering the deeds of Jan Palach and his emulators, it appropriates memories that are not theirs, carries out a fascist provocation, which today is updated to "sovereignist provocation".
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For several days now the Republic the theater of the absurd is staged: the Caste explains to the people why they lost and why their enemies won. They are self-critical because they don't accept criticism, the only ones entitled to criticize them are always themselves. They have the presumption that only they know how things actually went, even their defeat is understood only by them who caused it, at least in large part. Their self-criticism excludes the presupposition of any serious bath of humility: listen. Listen to others, listen to who won and who decreed the victory of the populists and sovereignists, listen to people, listen to those who already before the collapse explained the reasons for the change underway. Nope. The others don't exist, they have no right to speak, they are plebs, or fascist, reactionaries, sovereignists or their accomplices. The Democratic Party did the same thing. Read More