Woke weekly bullettin #5

by Enrico Petrucci and Emanuele Mastrangelo

The Social Justice Warriors world knows no rest, and the rainbow unicorns' action this week puts two titans of Italian culture in their gunsights: Michelangelo and Puccini.

Symbolizing patriarchy and white supremacism is now the Creation in the Sistine Chapel. Such wokeshit comes from the notorious Robin DiAngelo ( Italian-American-born), renowned author of White Fragility, who in her podcast Not Your Ordinary Parts in February described Michelangelo's Creation as the perfect example of white supremacy and patriarchy. Propping up this learned conclusion is a display of biblical expertise:

The single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel God creating man.' You know, where God is in a cloud and there’s all these angels and he’s reaching out and he’s touching - I don’t know who that is, David or something - and God is white and David’s white and the angels are white. That is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy, right?

You made my day.

Hard to do better, and poor Puccini can only chase. Then again, Nessun dorma has been widely used by Donald Trump, ergo the Social Justice Warriors have had him in their sights for years. Once again in the eye of the storm is Turandot, the Puccini classic, this time guilty of stereotyping, cultural appropriation, and you name it.

North American theaters for several years have been trying various solutions to try to please SJWs. In Toronto in 2019 they had decided to "Westernize the plot." In Boston in 2023 they had opted for an all-Asian cast to avoid accusations of yellowface. And now it is the turn of the New York Metropolitan, which has opted for a measured trigger warning in the program sneered at by many media outlets. But as mentioned the action against Puccini guilty of operas interwoven with problematic elements of gender, class, cultural stereotypes, as well as sympathy for fascism and Romanism, has been going on since 2009. And back in 2016, when Trump was making extensive use of Nessun dorma from the pages of Slate they thundered against Puccini by describing Turandot as if it itself were an allegory of fascism. By the way, SJWs obsessively repeat how Turandot, now widely appreciated and adopted by China, was even banned by Mao for cultural stereotyping.

Remaining in the realm of Art, in our forthcoming volume for Eclectica we wrote "how long would it take before activists would go after and destroy a painting that does not have glass?". Well, the book is not even printed yet, that already on March 8 a painting guilty of depicting Arthur James Balfour, the British prime minister who in 1917 authored the eponymous declaration of intent for a Jewish people's land in Palestine, was first daubed with red spray paint and then shredded. The painting was on display at Cambridge University.

To stay on the subject of the Far East, a controversy inspired by the Shogun series, a Japanese co-production that comes with a philological approach remarked upon and claimed by the production. Too philological evidently. An article by William Spivey appeared on the Medium platform lamenting the absence of blacks in the series. A lack that is pointed out in a passive aggressive manner:

I don’t ask out of a desire to see representation when it wasn’t historically accurate. I inquire because there were Black people in Japan in 1600 and before.

He then ended up recounting the dozen (or less) of ascertained cases of Black people in Japan from the year 1000 onward. News that sounds extremely paradoxical because the same SJWs a few years ago were applauding the "mono-ethnic" cast of the South Korean TV hit Squid Game that spawned a very short-lived #hashtag trend like "Is Squid Game proof that you don't need an all-white cast to be successful?"

We then come to a couple of issues of "political correctness" with regard to language. The first on a murder that occurred in the United States: victim a student killed by an illegal Venezuelan immigrant. During the State of the Union address, Biden had used the term "illegal" or "illegal immigrant" (after the usual gaffe about the victim's name), a term that has become loaded with an offensive meaning in recent years. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had stymied Biden, who was guilty of using a term that Republicans use. In the days that followed, Biden had to apologize for the language, explaining that in the net of tragedy he should have used the term "undocumented."

Then tragedy struck Haiti, where some media outlets speculated about cases of cannibalism. Many social channels showed a fake headline from an online newspaper where it deprecated the racist undercurrent in the criticism of cannibalism. Many people fell for it, but it was for all intents and purposes a fake.

The problem is that there is no shortage of true news stories of the same tenor. A few weeks ago the Daily Caller had critically relaunched an article in the online magazine New Scientist that stigmatized Western religious tradition for placing all this emphasis on the sacredness of the body.

We live now in a time when reality is less credible than fakes.

Ending, a few words on the case of our friend and Machiavelli Scientific Council member Spartaco Pupo, a professor at the University of Calabria "guilty" of quoting David Hume on social media for March 8. And already the call out culture replicates the same patterns of the Anglo-Saxon world since a few days earlier another university professor, Donatella Di Cesare, La Sapienza, posted a heartfelt remembrance of a red brigade. Ear-pulling for the R.B., scandal for David Hume. Figure who despite being a pillar of British philosophy has already been at the center of attempts to cancel culture for several years, including the erasure of titling buildings.

Enrico Petrucci

An essayist and popularizer, his publications include "Alessandro Blasetti. The forgotten father of Italian cinema" (Idrovolante, 2023). And with Emanuele Mastrangelo "Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia and the Hegemony of Information" (Bietti, 2013) and "Iconoclasm. The contagious insanity of the cancel culture that is destroying our history" (Eclectica, 2020).