The Inner Curtain

Today, as I write, it is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was twenty at the time and I still remember the images broadcast on TV and that libertarian electricity running through Europe. Young people like me were living in a kind of ecstatic trance, dreaming of a future that promised freedom and a horizon of endless improvement, which intoxicated us and united us.

Of course, I would have had every element I needed to understand "the deception", but things turned out differently and I have no regrets. Believing in something made our lives better than those of today's twenty-year-olds, who seem faded creatures compared with what we were back then.

As happens many times in history, the apparent defeat of a system, then the communist one, in fact marked its victory on a planetary scale (globalisation). Our society today is far more Marxist than it appears, with Marxism having drawn the liberal/capitalist cause into a deadly embrace.

"Freedom" is granted by the new order only within limits that do not disturb power. Citizens are really just "consumers" with tamed, dulled souls; police control has been replaced by the cultural homogenisation so beloved of Gramsci, Lenin and Mussolini. The contemporary (non-)being is constantly distracted, so much so that it forgets itself and its vital impulses. Pornography spreads everywhere, with obscenity mistaken for freedom.

The iron curtain is no longer external but internal, made barely visible so as to eliminate in the masses every instinct of rebellion and every real enthusiasm for the future.

m.m.