FIFTH COLUMN

It was true. With the death of the last empress, Marella Caracciolo-Agnelli, the Fiat dynasty ends, tragically decimated by fate. His regal figure summarized the meeting of the imperial dynasty of cars and our own capitalism with the princely-publishing dynasty of the Caracciolos., already owners of la Repubblica-l'Espresso. For the radical world that greeted her, the Lady was the perfect synthesis of the Fiat Empire and the progressive-liberal world. This is how Gianni Riotta remembered her, Nicola Caracciolo, Ezio Mauro and others. Marella Agnelli symbolized, with class and sensitivity, it must be said, the meeting between the employers' saga and the world of the left that came from communism, from workers' struggles against the "bosses". Fiat and Martello, auto, state aid and the progressive press. Then, maybe the lady had other sensitivities, he loved the East, Jung e Hillman, he suffered with admirable self-control, some excesses of her husband, King John. But she is celebrated in her role as a link between the world of the rich and the left, between the small snobbish world and the left in the press. Read More

 
FIFTH COLUMN

FIFTH COLUMN

The day will come that the League will separate from the 5 Stars but it is not today and it will not be tomorrow. But before talking about it, let's take a snapshot of the situation. If you notice, Italian politics at the moment is the perfect representation of the four cantons.
In the first canton there is the League, at his side, in the left canton, there are the 5place, on the right side there is Forza Italia, in the opposite canton there is the left. Changing point of observation, the proximity and distance between the forces in the field remain unchanged. A perfect quadrilateral, even in intermediate sizes. Brothers of Italy, for example, it is located halfway between the League and Forza Italia. More Europe than the liberal-radicals is halfway between Forza Italia and the left. Liberi e Uguali is also halfway between the radical pauperism of the Grillini and the left of the Democratic Party. There is no intermediate movement between the League and the Grillini in the middle because the government is already in the middle, Conte is there.
Each political force can at most ally itself with one of the two cantons next to it, but not with both nor ever with the one in front of him, which is its opposite. The main enemy of the left is in fact the League, and vice versa. Forza Italia's main enemy is the grillini, and vice versa. It is the exact representation of Italian politics. Here are the four cantons: the sovereignist pole, the populist pole, the liberal-popular pole, the left-dem pole. Read More

But what if his name was Michele, if he had been hopelessly Italian, if his musical genre hadn't been Moroccan pop, as he himself defines it, Mahmud or Mahmood Sanremo would have won? I'm not a song expert, I don't follow Sanremo, I don't pretend to judge a song. And I find Mahmud a nice guy, and probably a good singer. But if the popular jury had indicated another singer, if the Sanremo audience rose up for the verdict, if the mass media favored other songs, if the critics hadn't considered that the Italian-Egyptian boy's song stood out above the others, then I wonder: what is the added value, the decisive reason for the award to Mahmud? It's the message, as the media have already begun to say, that is, rewarding a boy named Mahmud, half Italian and half Egyptian, his Arabic singing style, his genre Morocco-pop. If he had been the best, the best, nothing to complain about. But it is the message that justifies the award.
After all, that boy, within two months, much to his surprise, as he candidly said to the microphones, win first Sanremo young people and then Sanremo-Festival, it doesn't make you understand that that is the determining motivation? That message is always - but look at it - a predictable controversy in Salvini's time and the denied landings of migrants. Read More

FIFTH COLUMN

Read More

FIFTH COLUMN

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