One of precious few Italian films to deal with the pre-war Fascist period, and most especially with the acme of Mussolini’s popularity, Ettore Scola’s Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day) takes place entirely within the confines of a tenement complex known as Palazzo Federici in Rome. Watching the film again during the week of Scola’s death in late January, and being familiar with the story, I find that my attention is drawn not to the characters but to the buildings themselves.

While still considered unusual in the Australian context, most of the arguments about masking up at public protests are well-rehearsed. Perhaps the most important point to consider is that, prior to the emergence of the internet, the documentation of protest activity, including the identification of those involved, was largely a matter for the state and media. This is no longer the case. With the advent of social media, what happens at such events is now the subject of intense scrutiny by participants and observers, and there is an ongoing battle to shape the narrative surrounding them.

On that day, a local court in Dresden in the German state of Saxony handed down two sentences. In one, a group of Nazis by the name of Sturm 34 were tried for a range of violent criminal actions including attacks on left-wing and migrant community shopfronts, physical violence, intimidation and racially motivated hate speech, distributing placards bearing slogans like ‘Criminal foreigners out!’. For these actions they received an assortment of suspended short sentences and fines.

‘In Vietnam they killed the Child Jesus. This phrase does not come from a cruel modern fable, but reflects instead the tragic truth and cautionary moral of a real event that took place in a Vietnamese village, where, whilst a group of people enacted a nativity scene, a brief battle ensued between Vietnam and Viet Cong troops, and a stray bullet hit the infant who stood for the Child Jesus in the crib.‘

Until Boris Kelly popped up on the weekend with his usual lucid description of things, I was starting to wonder if Utoya would pass uncommented by the Overland blog. The Overland blog is often punctuated by some odd silences (nothing to date on SlutWalks or the implosion of the Murdoch empire), and any conversation in […]

By his own admission, Anders Breivik’s act of mass assassination was politically motivated and designed to ignite a revolution in which a lengthy war would be waged against Muslims in Europe. Breivik’s motives have been outlined in a 1500 page manifesto containing a farrago of political and historical influences laced with thematic resentments and prejudices. […]