AEROPLANE TO AEROPLANO

       “The National Vanguard,” in Italian Avanguardia Nazionale, was a nationalist, anti-communist and anti-bourgeois movement founded in 1960 and led by Stefano Delle Chiaie (1936-2019).      The following is a translation of a chapter of the 2012 autobiographical book by Stefano Delle Chiaie: “L’aquila e il condor” (The Eagle and the Condor). It narrates the events that led to the murder in La Paz, Bolivia, of Pierluigi Pagliai, a young Italian political militant and friend of Delle Chiaie.      On August 2, 1980, a bomb exploded in the Bologna, Italy, railroad station, killing eighty-five people and wounding hundreds. It was the cruelest of the series of bloody attacks that began with the 1969 bombing of the branch of Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, in Milan.      Right away, the government authorities decided to orient the investigation toward a phantomatic “black medusa,” that is, an international extreme-rig...

    Donkeys and Horses By Fr. Claudio Doglio  (Translated from Italian by L. Pavese) Donkeys and horses fill the biblical bestiary and are very important symbolic figures. Horses represent strength and power. They remind us of the pharaoh’s army lined up for battle. In fact, impressed in the collective imagination of Israel are the archetypical figure of the pharaoh’s army chasing the people and the saving intervention of God, who made the horses end up at the bottom of the sea. The ancient sea hymn celebrates that fundamental victory with these words: “[s]ing to the LORD, for he is gloriously triumphant; horse and chariot he has cast into the sea.” (Es 15,21). Because of these words , the figure of the horse recurs as a noble, intelligent, strong, bellicose animal; a symbol of human strength but, for that reason, also the emblem of a self-assertive arrogance. A psalmist counterposed the worldly attitude of someone who relies on horses and chariots to the faithf...