The Coronavirus has proven the essentiality of the traditional mode of community and being, which can survive manufactured crises and transcend the entire capitalist paradigm

By Alessandro Napoli

We are in a moment of epoch-making transition in which concepts such as development, progress and the “normality” of modern life are proving inconsistent in the face of a threat of a virus, one probably produced by the same as those who brought hybrid wars and a race to global domination by a super-bourgeoisie.

This is a virus which in fact among the fundamental and dominant characteristics does not have the lethality of diseases of the past or still existing today in remote places on the planet, but that of mainly destabilizing the administrative, economic, social system due to its high level of virulence and its effects on those affected who need invasive interventions to survive. These are those which are not available to everyone when they are too many – there is an atavistic fear of the instability that this condition could generate, as well as the the same fear of imminent death that re-emerges from the deepest depths of history, re-evoking medieval scenarios, fears to which individuals and peoples react differently depending on the impact they suffer with it.

In places now used to living with this fear such as Syria, Yemen or Donbass they worry more about a bombing which, in addition to causing victims, could move the front line, sanction a retreat, make progress vain. In other countries such as the U.S., the founder of individualist societies has sparked an arms race as if one had to defend against each other and not against a common danger.

Looking at our country, Italy, until a few days ago the global epicenter of the pandemic and in which the virus has already caused the collapse of the economy and to date almost 15,000 deaths with an average rate of 800 per day, it is curious to note that the regions that are best resisting the impact are the poorest economically, socially proven, where globalization has compromised even the only available resource that resided in agriculture and the cuts to healthcare wanted by the liberal model have reduced the health system to the worst in Europe.

Calabria, Sicily, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania among the last regions in Europe as long as everything was fine, but at the same time those that have never lost the relationship with the ancient, the tradition, the sacred Fire of the Fathers that at this moment allows them to survive as if nothing were in a context in which, if the virus took root, it would be a massacre that could wipe out an entire civilization making people die on the streets as today happens in rich New York or in other metropolises of the western world .

These regions, in which the communitarian culture of the démos has never been supplanted by post-modern individualism, which even here has timidly appeared in recent decades, but found before it the wall of shields of sacred tradition and continuity with a simple and glorious past which to the prejudiced eyes of the cosmopolitan subject of bourgeois nature appeared as retard, obsolescence, unsuitable for the times, to be overcome, to be denigrated.

This is Magna Graecia, more than 5,000 years of conceptual continuity instinctively and naturally internalized in the depths of the soul of those who were born and raised here. Galenica, Agoghé, Paideia, aristotelian dialectics, political platonism, even the ingenious and ancient culinary art that conceived: preserves, sausages, pastes of pork fat mixed with chili peppers that allowed our ancestors to resist the cold, plague and sieges of the Saracens.  It has been everyday for millennia for these people with faces sculpted by an archaic genetics that are both mixed and unchanging.

People who in this moment of global crisis have transformed their pleasant villages into impregnable fortresses in which one protects the shoulders of the other by challenging the adverse fate with pagan courage and Christian fatalism indissolubly amalgamated together from epochs and eras of cultural and spiritual continuity from the times of the City-States of Nea-Polis, Kroton, Rhegion, Thouri, Taras, Syracuse, Agrakas through the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the “Puer Apuliae – Stupor Mundi” that of this same land it had made it the “wonder of the world”. That is, until today dominated by the “Merchants of the Temple” whose religion of money has not managed to corrupt the soul of those who in these dark times are showing that what really matters is the blood flowing in one’s veins, human and people’s dignity.

Times in which, while elsewhere the infected of Covid-19 are discriminated against, isolated, even driven out of their homes, as happens in some metropolises of America, here they are protected by the same community in the anonymity and in the typical spirit of the “small tribe” until yesterday mocked and a reason for shame. And today it is a reason for strength, persistence, resilience.

These are times in which, while civilized peoples of Northern Europe rush to grab the last rolls of toilet paper, as if it were the vital antidote to the virus, triggering barbarous fights at the entrance of supermarkets, here the community self-organizes itself and automatically, in the spirit of “Christian Caritas”, for the distribution of basic necessities to the increasingly numerous who no longer have the opportunity to eat due to the economic collapse. A collapse which, moreover, should have raised the alert for the danger of riots where there is no longer any fear of the virus but the only concern is that for tomorrow, when all this will pass, our country should remain in the E.U. and the communitarian spirit, reborn in the small village, will have to yield again to the big finance that will restructure the system to their liking and advantage.

Times in which the people of the South find even the time and soul to intone the national anthem on the balcony, on the other hand we who “have been trampled and derided for centuries” are the grandchildren of those who left from Lucania, from Sicania, from Brutium, from Salento, from Irpinia. They are those who went go to fight on the Piave river singing hymns of revolt that mocked death in the name of the Unity of those people who, from the Alps to the Ionian Sea, in their diversity and peculiarities, have always constituted a single and indissoluble spiritual entity.

And it is an ironic fact that the same people who trample and mock us today are disposing of corpses in black sacks of rubbish at best if not burning their dead on the street so as not to stop the Capital machine which takes advantage of a pandemic that it reproduces the effects of a world war to regenerate itself. It is this as Lenin also demonstrated precisely a century ago – and this is not a coincidence either – talking about the effects of decaying capitalism in his work “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”.

Others, whose presidents went to the theater giving their backs to Italy asking for help, will probably arrive shortly to it, while it filled our hearts to see our brothers in misfortune imitate us and to sing their hymns among the high-rise buildings of Tehran or sending their doctors from China to rush to the rescue, albeit the latter, according to some, to fill a geopolitical space left empty by the jackals who until yesterday have feasted on the remains of our Italy.

On the contrary, it seems to me rather, in this regard, to be a red thread, an indissoluble bond that is lost in the dawn of time that binds the fate, blood, nobility of martyrdom to the ancient peoples of the Silk Road: The center of Mare Nostrum – Roma Caput Mundi – with the Partia and the Middle Land. And in my opinion, surely, this is also a key to understanding the events we are experiencing today, events that absolutely cannot be reduced to the mere formulas of international relations conceived by an Anglo-Saxon world of short memory, utilitarian and lacking that foresight that allows one to grasp the spiritual nature of civilizations and peoples understood as eternal entities.

Returning to the topic and to conclude, this seems to be the moment for everyone “the integral man” must be ready to seize all the opportunities that are offered to him by exploiting the contradictions to be as much sand as possible in the engine of globalization and post-modernity. It is this that will be the great post-capitalist reconstruction – because this will be an overcoming of capitalism by an elite that will ferry the world into a total financial dictatorship – or a possible near future. 

In that potential near future, in which in addition to the spirit of the ancestors, it will also be necessary to recover their knowledge of daily survival in hostile environments and situations, in which case there will be individuals more prepared than others, civilizations more prepared than others. Only those who have not lost contact with tradition, the link with the land, the “Cult of the Lares” who find continuity in the culture of our country in the Catholic tradition of the traditional and indissoluble family, the cornerstone of the community, will be able to resist what will be.

If the South of Italy – Our Magna Graecia – manages to preserve its walls from the pandemic wave that threatens them and that is bending the country, it could be this very tormented land the nucleus from which to start again, when the fire has burnt everything, only the pillars will remain standing and it is from there that the fate of a nation that is free and sovereign will have to be rebuilt.

This is not “the darkest hour”, as farnetic those who are complicit in this torment. This moment is only the mystical place in which to rebuild the resistance that will be needed when moral responsibility passes into the hands of the individual, or rather of the individual who has not yet bowed.

This is the sacred wood of ritual sacrifice before the final battle, Gethsemane before Golgotha.

his is the moment when the “radical subject” gathers his strength and waits for when it will be time to carry out his task and his vocation to make the new forest sprout, it is time to transform the herd into a pack because when the oligarchic Hydra will give the final assault. There will be no room for half measures and half men: when the elites will try to impose their total domination, only those who are the last today will be able to avoid it if they can maintain their intransigence, purity, integrity, nobility of mind, as it is precisely on the level of the spirit that this war is fought.

In fact, we are having the opportunity to meditate on the transience of life itself in a world based on the material, the ephemeral, the superfluous typical of an alienating and standardizing post-modernity of which we are today seeing the true inhuman and brutal face for which the money matters more than human dignity and mind you, I speak of dignity not of life itself, since it – dignity – is worth even more than human life itself: dying with dignity matters much more than living in itself. Just as there are ideals, values, duties, bonds as intimate as they are indissoluble that transcend life itself: this is 2020, the Midnight of the World, the Italian Peninsula is the most plagued place on the planet by the pandemic, yet none of us would like to be somewhere else.