Pier Paolo Pasolini

An intellectual, and many other things. I did not see all of his movies, and I did not read many books about him. On the other hand, everytime I could read his articles, or even watch his interviews on TV, I was always astonished by his dialectics, his knowledge, his violent and unique analysis on social issues, culture, politics.
Above all, he was to my eyes a clever mind, with a strong political and social commitment. He pictured like noone else what he saw like the evils of the time, the odds of our country and people. A month ago I saw an article on Open Democracy (thanks to GBV links!) about him, and I could not but link it, looking for the time to read it. Well, after a month, here I post some sentences:

"Italy was a “second-rate” power going nowhere. “In reality Italy is a horrible place”, he wrote in July 1975. “All one has to do is go abroad for a day and then return. The Italy of today has been destroyed exactly as was the Italy of 1945. Indeed the destruction is more serious, because we do not find ourselves among the ruins, however distressing, of houses and monuments, but among the ruins of values, humanistic values and what is more important popular values.”

For Pasolini the main blame lay with Italy’s degenerate political class. The Christian Democrats (DC), which had ruled Italy virtually uninterrupted since the defeat of fascism, now assimilated the values of the capitalist revolution, despite the fact that its “hedonistic ideology” was some way from Catholic values. Yet as the remnants of the “clerico-fascism” of the post-war years adjusted to meet the demands of the “new economic power”, it only intensified the contradictions at the heart of the Italian state.

For Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy in the 1970s was not a normal country, but one run by a parliamentary regime, corrupt to the core, complicit in Mafia dealings, and above all conspiratorial in sustaining its own grip on power. It was “a ridiculous and sinister country”. The spate of neo-fascist bombings which had gone unpunished and the so-called “strategy of tension”, in which fear of a communist takeover was triggered by violent terrorism, continued to prevent any kind of political and social change.

“Over the whole of Italy’s democratic life”, he wrote, “there looms the suspicion of Mafia-like complicity on the one hand and ignorance on the other; from this is born almost of its own accord a natural pact with power – a tacit diplomacy of silence.”
His warnings were accompanied by an appeal to citizens, intellectuals and movements to demand the truth from Italy’s rulers: “Until they know all these things…the political consciousness of the Italians will be incapable of producing a new awareness. That is to say Italy will be ungovernable.” ". [The life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini]