Swriting a weekly column in these frenetic times inhabited by keyboard velociraptors seems like an almost nineteenth-century undertaking, when letters were written by hand and after having stamped them with sealing wax they relied on couriers.
More than everything flows, we could say that now everything flows and we just have to chase the facts with bated breath. One minute there was peace and the next minute it’s gonegovernments in France last the space of a morning and Trump memes follow one another at such a rapid pace that they would make even the most experienced stand-up comedians pale.
But suffering and abuse, inequalities and injustices remain a constant in the backgroundnow accepted collateral damage that acts as wallpaper for History transformed into the saga of a video game. In this chaos, what will happen to democracy and the old theory of counterweights that guaranteed it, at least in Europe, from the post-war period to today?
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
Is there still hope for reasoning and depth or are these old trappings to be thrown in the attic? If you too are racking your brains about these epochal questions, you must read Predator time by Giuliano da Empoli (Einaudi), an original work between memoir and political essay: it won’t give you answers, much less saving recipes, but it will offer you the tools to orient yourself in our contemporaneity on the edge of the abyss.
“The hour of predators” by Giuliano da Empoli (Einaudi).
The author who teaches at Sciences-Po in Paris and has frequented places and rooms of power he accompanies us like a Virgil 2.0 in this new one Divine Comedy of power and international politics revealing the mechanisms of current world control through its protagonists: aggressive autocrats and power-hungry manipulators like new Borgia princes and digital oligarchs, billionaires and without control.
«Today the hour of the predators has come and everywhere things are evolving in such a way that everything that needs to be decided will be decided by fire and sword». The arms race had already made us understand this, even in our latest financial statement, but the author, with writing as gripping as that of a novel, explains to us that today wars are inevitable «because attacking is much cheaper than defending». It’s the beauty economy!
And if politics is in the hands of predators it can only rely on the laws of violence and abuse as we observe every day astonished like beaten boxers. But not all is lost and understanding the danger gives us the strength and courage to get up from the mat and get back to fighting.
The fight continues.
All articles by Serena Dandini.
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