by Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci
Have you just finished reading Il mondo al contrario by General Vannacci? Well, it is a work that had the not-so-small merit of bringing to the wider public and put back into the center of debate a narrative antithetical to what the liberal left proposes on many hot topics: immigration, gender, environmentalism, national culture. In short, thanks to Vannacci we have discovered that there is intelligent life even outside Murgia's books and Massimo Giannini's editorials. Is it not enough?
Vannacci as Daniele Scalea points out makes an "overview and popularizing representation of topics explored in depth by others." A digest, in short. A first step from which to go deeper. The red pill is not a single dose, but has a nice long cycle, before, during and after meals.
And so here is the Centro Studi Machiavelli coming to offer you a list of twelve texts and twelve authors (which are really thirteen), both Italian and living, who have anticipated, and above all, deepened those issues finally made pop by the general. This is also to respond to and refute Lorenzo Castellani's pithy article for Domani, re-published by Dagospia: "First, because in the circles close to the majority parties there is a lack of quantity and quality to carry out a project of that kind, and second, because the right-wing electorate cares nothing about cultural hegemony." The reality is that there is quality and quantity, authors and texts are of absolute level. And there is reader interest, which for the past month has sanctioned the publishing dominance of an "anomalous" text currently available only on Amazon, and which is preparing to be translated into other languages as well. What has been missing so far is just a reasoned approach to visibility. It lacks the transmission belt between the intellectuals, who are there, are many and are good, and the people, who would like to have something to inform themselves with, to think, to give rational form to their feelings. And who instead find Sanremo music festival.
However, the list of 12 must-read books for those who liked the general's book also applies to those who disliked it. Too simple and blunt in the serviceman's prose? Too many concepts assembled like bar chatter, avoiding insights? Or simply a sincere belief that living in the best of all possible worlds, considerations like the general's apply only to the alt-right and tinfoil-hatted conspiracists? Or that the general's is a gatekeeping operation designed to confine the discourse?
If you recognize yourself in these cases, the list of 12 books to read after Vannacci also returns good for you. Especially for you. Happy reading.
1 – Francesco Borgonovo: L’Era delle streghe, Altaforte, 2019
There is a joke going around Facebook that says, "Feminism is the brain tumor of humanity." Never was this line more true than for the fourth feminist wave, recounted in Borgonovo's book. From the frenzy of witches that make witch hunts with #Metoo to the deconstruction of sex roles, from the moral castration (underneath, dreaming of the physical one) of the male to the transhumanist hopes of transcending bodily reality, turning into a futuristic dystopia the words of Donatella Rettore in "'Splendido splendente'": "As I am will be seen, man or woman ageless, sexless will grow, for life a shining vanity." By Borgonovo we cannot but recommend alsoConservare l’anima. Manuale per aspiranti patrioti (Lindau, 2021).
2 – Eugenio Capozzi: Politicamente corretto, Marsilio, 2018
Capozzi meritoriously sits among Machiavelli's scholarly advisers. Among his many books, the one on the history of political correctness is most appropriate on this list, considering the dark times in which we live. Capozzi identifies the irrational, para-religious, fanatical matrix of this ideology of the post-ideological residual left. A genealogy of the evils of our time when they were not yet lumped together under the umbrella term "wokeism": feminism, anti-colonialism, immigrantism, gretinism, elleggibitism... Propaedeutic.
3 – Boni Castellane: In terra ostile, Signs Publishing, 2023
The columnist for La Verità and sharp Twitter commentator who hides behind the pseudonym and behind the mask of a French politician and dandy, in his ln terra ostile takes us on a reconnaissance beyond the lines of the future that awaits us in the new never normal. Between suggestions of Jünger and Saint-Exupéry Vannacci's Il mondo al Contrario appears as an overture to what is to come. The volume is enhanced by a preface by Francesco Borgonovo.
4 – Francesco Erario: Woke. La nascita di una nuova ideologia, Idrovolante, 2022
Everything you always wanted to know but never dared to ask about the umbrella term that is wokeism. The ideology that brings together all the trends of the new liberal left, the one that has abandoned workers' rights for the new rights of the new minorities. The ones you have already heard about like gender theory, postcolonial studies and intersectionalist feminism. And those you will hear about soon, perhaps in your children's school curricula, if you have any: critical race theory, ableism, white studies, fat studies. Also available in Italian is Cynical Theory by U.S. academics Linsday and Pluckrose, but Erario's Woke has the virtue of having the same academic minutiae with decidedly more engaging prose and making connections that the two Americans lack.
5 – Elisabetta Frezza: Mala Scuola, Casa Editrice Leonardo Da Vinci, 2017
Frezza is a lawyer who has decided to take up educational issues. A mother of five, she is a highly acclaimed lecturer who, precisely because of her legal training, never has the wrong word in the wrong place. Sharp as a razor, here she gives the ominous Renzian "good school"a dressing down. The "good school" is the Trojan horse with which the worst pedagogical theories from America - from gender to intersectionalism - are threatening our children. Desertifying children's minds and substituting "skills" for knowledge, stuffing them with Agenda 2030 nonsense and uprooting them from their real identities.
6 – Luigi Iannone: Critica della Ragion Tecnica, Idrovolante, 2021
Contemporary man facing the technical forces that he himself has unleashed, as if they were golems. Now men must come to terms with the Machine Age and are becoming its slaves. Iannone's proposed solution is not in a Luddite return to a pre-industrial past but in an empowerment of today's man through the rediscovery of the spirit. "Heart and steel," sang the poet. A well difficult road, but we know that the easy roads normally are those where the Great Enemy awaits us, just before a narrow bridge...
7 – Emanuele Mastrangelo ed Enrico Petrucci: Iconoclastia, Eclettica, 2020
Yes, we like hear ourselves talk. Just as in 2014 we were the first to make an inquiry about Wikipedia, so in 2020 we were the first to raise the alarm about the arrival of cancel culture in Italy. So the first ones that when we started writing, we didn't even use the term cancel culture, which arrived in Italy as we were closing drafts. From demolished monuments to demolished churches, from blackwashing to the follies of social justice warriors, a look at the coming cultural genocide that liberals are setting up for Western nations. Also coming in a few weeks is part two, even more politically incorrect.
8 – Spartaco Pupo: Oicofobia, Eclettica, 2023
Hatred of one's own home, already identified by the great Roger Scruton, is analyzed by Pupo - a professor at the University of Calabria - with a perfect new interpretive model: as a "phobia," it is a mental discomfort, an irrational, hysterical fear, the result of an adolescence never left behind. Self-harming as an emo kid getting cuts on her arms turned into cultural fashion à la page for radical chic intellectuals. Rousseau with fluorescent hair and birkenstoks. A dangerous fashion, especially for the resilience of a truly democratic society, which needs behind it a strong, cohesive and identity-conscious national community.
9 – Valerio Savioli: L’uomo residuo, Il Cerchio, 2023
Another journey into the new and upside-down world of political correctness and cancel culture but told from the point of view of what is left of the human. This is L’uomo residuo by Valerio Savioli, a cultural agitator published by Il Cerchio, the publisher that took on the thankless task of bringing Il mondo al contrario off Amazon. Savioli's perspective is to tell how political correctness and cancel culture, both practices of wokeism end up leaving behind a hollowed-out man, a residue believed to be full of a fluid ideology and victimhood.
10 – Daniele Scalea: Immigrazione. Le ragioni dei populisti, Historica, 2020
Of course. "His Excellency is due
to take his station. Hail, hail Freedonia!". But his book is on this list because it is necessary to plant it with the "diversity" bubble. There is nothing beautiful about diversity. There's just the social parameters collapsing down - education, security, social cohesion, reciprocal trust... - war between poor locals pitted against poor immigrants for welfare crumbs. All served up on unobjectionable data. The beauty of spice scents from ethnic restaurants appeals only to those who live in penthouses and walk around with security escorts.
11 – Adriano Scianca: Contro l’eroticamente corretto, Bietti, 2017
Journalist for La Verità and chief editor of Il Primato nazionale in this well-referenced essay from 2017 offers an analysis of "erotically correct," that is, those trends in gender theory, crytical race theory and intersectionalist feminism that have gradually over the years led to the blaming of the traditional family and, above all, the notorious straight white male. But also with a jab at the "50's family of the ADs" and certain petty-bourgeois stereotypes that are meant to pass for "naturalness." By Scianca we also recommend Identità sacra (AGA, 2020).
12 – Andrea Venanzoni, La tirannia dell’emergenza, Liberlibri, 2023
When a State wants to turn into tyranny and become the enemy of its citizens it pulls some kind of emergency out of its hat. Venanzoni is a libertarian who wins easily after three years of the covid regime in pointing to a sprawling, hysterical State based on the "right to fear" its subjects (once upon a time, citizens) extending its power to people's lives under the guise and mirage of "zero risk." And meanwhile, this is how Rule of Law dies, with thunderous applause of people with facemasks and "I support the current thing" pinned to their chests. Start sewing your own yellow flag with the black snake and the words "don't tread on me." By Venanzoni go read also Ipotesi neofeudale (Passaggio al bosco, 2020), of course.
PS. This list is short, incomplete, missing so many deserving authors and books. Let us reassure everyone that this is only the first broadside. The ship's magazine is full.
Essayist and popularizer, among his publications Alessandro Blasetti. Il padre dimenticato del cinema italiano (Idrovolante, 2023). With Emanuele Mastrangelo Wikipedia. L’Enciclopedia libera e l’egemonia dell’informazione (Bietti, 2013) and Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia (Eclettica, 2020).
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