On the evening of November 1, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini He eats a steak at a Roman restaurant. He talks about his next film, laughs, and makes plans. A few hours later, he's dead, mauled at the Idroscalo di Ostia. His body is unrecognizable, mangled by an Alfa Romeo used to run him over. A seventeen-year-old boy confesses. Case closed. Too easy.
What's difficult is that Pasolini, in the preceding months, had done something dangerous: he had revealed the future. Not vague oracular prophecies, but lucid analyses, as sharp as a scalpel. He had written that he knew. That article of his was called precisely “I know”And what did he know? He knew who was pulling the strings of power, he knew where we'd end up. And fifty years later, looking around, one wonders how "useful" it was to someone that someone like Pasolini was silenced so quickly: because he had seen the return of fascism all too clearly. And not the "fascism" that is now used as a childish accusation, seen everywhere by the first squeamish person who passes by. Pasolini was talking about true fascism. The worst fascism. The one we live in today.
The new fascism, the one you can't see
In 1960, Pasolini writes something that sounds like a theorem: “Fascism is but one of the ideological elements of capitalism: and as long as there is capitalism, there will also be fascism.”Simple, direct. But in the 1970s the diagnosis became more precise, more disturbing. It was no longer archaeological fascism, the kind with parades and pennants. It was something new, more subtle. The power of the consumer society, he calls it. A power that doesn't repress you by beating you in the streets, but by transforming you from within.
Years later, in 1973, on the Corriere della Sera writes: “No fascist centralism has succeeded in doing what the centralism of consumer civilization has done.”Because this new power doesn't just repress from the outside: it penetrates inside, changes desires, modifies bodies, erases cultures. It is an anthropological genocide, says Pasolini. And he's been saying it since the Italy of the economic boom was filling up with televisions, highways, and supermarkets. While everyone was celebrating “well-being”.
The television, for Pasolini, is the key instrument of this transformation. It does not inform: it homologates. It creates an average Italian, erases dialects, regional cultures, differences. It impoverishes language and stifles inventiveness which characterized the boys of the people.
And above all, it creates needs. Fake desires that seem yours but are induced, constructed, and functional to the production-consumption system.
The mutation that no one wanted to see
There is a passage in the corsari script in which Pasolini describes a scene he's seen a thousand times: the kids from Rome's slums, the ones he hung out with, filmed, and loved. He sees them change before his eyes. They lose their way of speaking, their gestures, even their way of walking. They conform to a model derived from television, advertising, and consumerism. They are no longer themselves. They are copies of a bourgeois prototype that doesn't belong to them.
This "anthropological mutation" is at the heart of Pasolini's vision of the future. He understands that it's not just about economics or politics. This is a change in human substance. The boys who could have played Beggar in 1961 they no longer exist in 1975. They have been replaced by another species: sad, neurotic young people, marked by an ostentatious and aggressive cheerfulness. Power has forever scratched, torn, violated the soul of the Italian people., he writes. Fascism had never succeeded.
I know: the article that cost Pasolini dearly
In November 1974, Pasolini publishes on Courier a text that makes the buildings tremble. I know, it's titled. He knows the names of those behind the massacres, the coups, the strategy of tension. He knows the connections between political power, organized crime, and deviant secret services. But above all, he knows something even more dangerous: he knows that the new fascism, that of total capitalism, requires this violence to consolidate itself.
He writes that he wants to put everything into his novel Petroleum, the book he is writing. An entire chapter, "Lightnings on Eni," should reveal the background to the death of Enrico Mattei. Subsequent investigations found connections between Pasolini's murder, that of Mattei and the disappearance of journalist Mauro De MauroA triangle of inconvenient deaths, all linked to economic power and its shadowy areas.
On the night between November 1 and 2, 1975, Pasolini was lured to the Idroscalo in Ostia. The official version says he was there for a meeting with Joseph Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old street urchin. Pelosi confesses, is convicted. But DNA tests find traces of at least three unknown people at the crime scenePelosi himself, years later, recanted: there were five of them. They attacked him along with Pasolini. It was an organized ambush.
One thing is certain: Among the names that recur in the investigations are those of criminals linked to the Roman subversive right, to the nascent Magliana gang which was in turn linked to the secret services, and to those neo-fascist circles that Pasolini had described and denounced.
The lawyer defending Pelosi is paid by the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democrats. Fifty million lire, “money well spent”, someone will say. Also, perhaps, to buy silence about what really happened that night.
Salò, Pasolini's Testament That No One Wanted to See
A few months before dying, Pasolini ends Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. The hardest, most unbearable film ever shot in Italy. He himself describes it as a metaphor for what power does to the human body.: commodification, the reduction to a thing. It's not pornography, it's politics. It's the representation of how any form of power, when it becomes total, transforms human beings into objects.
The film was presented posthumously in Paris, three weeks after the murder. In Italy, it sparked trials, seizures, and scandals. But Salò is not the desperate cry of a defeated man, as some have wanted to interpret it. Salò It's the last warning. Pasolini is saying: look where we're going. Look what a society becomes when power has no limits, when everything is permitted as long as it serves the system.
In the last interview of his life, the one on November 1st, Pasolini talks about a wrong education That drives everyone to want to possess everything at any cost. He says that hell is rising to the surface. They ask him how he plans to avoid this danger. He replies that he'll think about it the next day. But the next day he's already dead.
Feltrinelli and the intellectuals who chose action
In those same years, another Italian intellectual made a different choice. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, publisher, millionaire, communist, decides that words are no longer enough. In 1972 He died at the foot of a power pylon in Segrate, while trying to plant an explosive device. The official version is that it was an accident. Other theories suggest murder. But it didn't matter: Feltrinelli had chosen armed struggle as a response to the creeping fascism he saw advancing.
Pasolini and Feltrinelli represent two opposing approaches to the same diagnosis. Both see the danger, both know that Italian democracy is under attack by dark, or all-too-clear, forces. But one chooses words, cinema, public denunciation. The other chooses explosives. It's not a question of who was right. It's a question of understanding that that generation of intellectuals had seen something real, something threatening. And who paid with his life, in different ways, for having seen it.
The future we live in, the one he saw
Today, in 2025, exactly fifty years after Pasolini's death, just look around. The winds of war are rising across Europe and the United States. Social media has multiplied television's homogenizing effect a thousandfold. Consumerism, gossip, shopping, and fast fashion have become the cults of a single, shared religion. Cultural differences are being flattened under the weight of algorithms that serve us all the same content, the same desires, the same ways of thinking.
The new fascism Pasolini spoke of has no need for black shirts or truncheons. It disguises itself as freedom, as tolerance, as progress. It tells you you can be whoever you want, while simultaneously turning you into a standardized consumer. It promises you individuality while inserting you into an algorithm. He's a polite friend who smiles at you while he empties your soul.
The “anthropological mutation” that Pasolini spoke of is complete. The kids from the suburbs no longer exist, replaced by generations who grew up with smartphones in hand, educated by TikTok and Instagram to desire the same things, to speak to each other with the same set phrases, to think of themselves as unique when they are perfectly interchangeable. Dialect is dead (even those who don't know Italian can't even speak or write it), popular culture is dead, true diversity is dead.
Only the Center remains, the homogenizing power of consumption, which decides what you should want, what you should be, what you should follow, what makes you laugh, and above all what you should buy to feel alive.
What if Pasolini hadn't died?
One wonders what would have happened if Pasolini had survived that night in 1975. He would have had seventy-three years old in 1995, when Berlusconi rose to power bringing into politics the very television model he had denounced. He would have been eighty years old in 2001., when the Twin Towers collapsed and the world entered a new phase of authoritarianism masquerading as security. He would be one hundred and three years old today, and perhaps we would be here saying that it has spared itself the era of social media, artificial intelligence, and surveillance capitalism. It had already seen it, to some extent.
Perhaps in the years after 1975 he would have continued to write, to make increasingly harsh, increasingly disturbing films. Perhaps he would have found new ways to say the same thing: that power is transforming us, that we are losing what makes us human, that fascism has returned in disguise.
And perhaps, and this is the most painful thought, his presence would have made a difference. Not because a single intellectual can stop global capitalism. But because a free voice, a voice that speaks the truth without fear, can awaken other consciences. It can create antibodies.
Pasolini died while screaming that we were in danger. They silenced him, perhaps for this very reason. Fifty years later, the danger has materialized. We live in the world he predicted, in the future he saw. And there's no one left to yell at us to wake up. Or maybe there is, but we don't listen. We're too busy consuming, to shake in fear, to be perfectly standardized while we believe we are free.
Hell, Pasolini said in his last interview, is rising towards us. Fifty years later, it's here. And we haven't even noticed.
