Like Foucault, Pasolini was a Catholic who became a Communist after his religious faith got derailed by his homosexuality. By the early 1970s, in the wake of the failed revolution of 1968, both men became disillusioned with traditional Marxism and turned to the sexualized version of Marx combined with Freud as promoted by people like Wilhelm Reich as an alternative. One of the seminal events in this regard was the release of Dusan Makavajev’s film promoting Reich’s conflation of Marx and Freud, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which premiered in 1971. Inspired by the same Reichian Zeitgeist, Pasolini released his film Decameron in the same year as the opening shot in what would become his Trilogy of Life series of soft-core porn flicks. Pasolini’s Decameron takes a nostalgic look at the Italian Middle Ages, where religious devotion and innocent sexuality could exist side by side without contradiction, as in a canvas painted by Giotto. Not coincidentally, Pasolini appears in Decameron as Giotto, the artist who could bring all of these contradictions together through art.

Pasolini’s infatuation with the innocence of the Catholic Middle Ages stood in stark contrast to his disillusionment with the Communism of the 1970s. In May of 1971, after being put on trial for maligning the Italian armed forces, Pasolini said:

I can no longer believe in revolution, but I can’t help being on the side of the young people who are fighting for it. It’s already an illusion to write poetry, and yet I go on writing it, even if for me poetry is no longer that wonderful classical myth that heightened my adolescence. . . I no longer believe in dialectics and contradictions, but in pure opposition. . . . All the same, I’m increasingly fascinated by that exemplary combination, achieved by saints like St. Paul, of the active and contemplative life.[38]

Pasolini saw how sexual liberation was progressing in Italy and knowing that he was one of the main forces propelling it filled him with mixed feelings. He was a homosexual in the grip of a vice which would eventually lead to his death but he, nonetheless, found abortion repugnant:

I am traumatized by the legalization of abortion, because like many I consider it a legalization of homicide. In dreams and everyday behavior—something common to all men—I live my prenatal life, my happy immersion in the maternal fluids, and I know that there I existed. I know . . . that the majority is, potentially, all for the legalization of abortion . . . Legalized abortion is in fact—no doubt about it—an enormous convenience for the majority. Especially because it would make coitus—heterosexual coupling—easier, and there would practically no longer be any obstacles to it. But by whom has this freedom of coitus of the “couple” as conceived by the majority—this wonderful permissiveness on its behalf—been tacitly desired, tacitly promulgated and tacitly made to become part, in a now irreversible way, of people’s habits. By the powers of consumption, by the new fascism. . . . [39]

“Fascism” was the word leftists like Pasolini fell back on to disguise their inability to describe the new oligarchic ruling class as the sexually liberated proponents of capitalism, which was their new identity thanks to thinkers like Foucault. The Left reacted to the spectacle of a pro-life Communist homosexual with ridicule, claiming that Pasolini attempted to use deviance as the solution to the inconveniences of heterosexual coupling that could be solved by abortion. They also claimed that Pasolini was angry at higher wages because economic prosperity had jacked up the price he had to pay for the services of Rome’s ragazzi di vita, the Italian term for rent boy.[40]

But Pasolini could see where things were going in a way that his equally lust-besotted contemporaries could not. His initial plan, after completing Arabian Nights, the final segment of the Trilogy of Life, was to do a film on the life of St. Paul. Pasolini was no stranger to religious films. His film on the Gospel of St. Matthew had garnered praise from the Vatican. Another possibility was something called “Porno-Teo-Kolossal,” which was probably as bad as it sounded. But that film didn’t get made either. Instead, Pasolini rented a villa near Mantua in the early months of 1975 and began filming Salo or The 120 days of Sodom.[41] Bernardo Bertolucci, now famous for The Last Tango in Paris, which premiered in 1972, was filming his epic 1900 not far away, but the world had changed. The heady days of post-‘60s sexual liberation had passed and something darker had taken its place. In America the harbinger of change from sex to horror was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which appeared in theaters one year before Salo in 1974. The cultural dam broke five years later with the arrival of Halloween and Alien and the flood of horror flicks and their sequels which followed for the next decade.

Pasolini was one of the few mainstream directors who understood the new direction the Zeitgeist was taking. The conventional trajectory for the year 1975 was clear. In Germany, the wave of sexual liberation which began with sex farces like Der Schulmaedchen Report and Lass Jucken, Kumpel went from soft to hardcore. Instead of heading in the same direction, Pasolini proposed an image of the future in which the oligarchs, whom Pasolini portrays as the fascists in charge of the last days of what was left of Mussolini’s regime after it had fled to the northern Italian town of Salo, commandeer sexual freedom and turn it into a sadistic fantasy perpetrated on the young at a hermetically sealed off location which had uncanny similarities to Italy under the coronavirus quarantine of 2020. Like the Israeli invasion of Ramallah and the quarantine of 2020, Pasolini’s Salo takes place in time of war. Allied bombers can be heard flying ominously overhead. The Italian version of Goetterdaemmerung is in the air, and the rulers of Salo are not going to let this crisis go to waste. They kidnap the most attractive young people they can find and then immure them in a mansion not unlike the one Prospero equipped in The Masque of the Red Death.

In the last year of his life, the same Pasolini who had dedicated his life to flouting sexual morality realized that the oligarchs were going to allow sexual freedom to happen on their terms and not the terms of the young people who were its prime victims. That meant that “consumerism” and “fascism” trumped anything Pasolini could conjure from Boccaccio. The sexual revolution was in reality a sadistic capitalist fantasy perpetrated by degenerate oligarchs on a group of unsuspecting victims in their teens and twenties, who were now being held captive in a luxurious concentration camp where pornographic fantasy was mandatory and religious practice punishable by death. After Foucault made his pact with the devil in 1975, he began teaching Austrian School Economics, and a whole generation of homosexuals in San Francisco, including Fr. Robert Sirico of the notorious Acton Institute, followed his lead, but Pasolini, in spite of his homosexuality, was still Catholic enough to protest, “This is not what I meant; this is not what I meant at all.” The extraordinary powers which martial law has granted to the government has resulted in a situation where sadistic pornographic fantasies get imposed on the population at large, but, as the president of the Republic of Salo announced at the beginning of that quarantine: “Any religious act is punishable by death.” Salo was, mutatis mutandis, the sadistic culmination of the ‘70s sexual revolution and, more importantly, the prophetic artistic description of the Italian quarantine of 2020 which would arrive 50 years after the fact as punishment.

Nineteen Seventy-five is also the year in which Pasolini died while cruising for ragazzi di vita amid the garbage dumps near Idroscalo, the seaplane basin at Ostia.[42] A 17-year-old rent boy confessed to the murder, but those familiar with Pasolini’s injuries claim that a teenager wielding a stick could not have inflicted them, and that Giuseppe Pelosi was the fall guy for sinister figures whose identities remain unknown to this day. The oligarchs and their communist lackeys had motive enough to kill Pasolini for spilling the beans, but most people, especially the Catholics, were too obtuse to understand what Pasolini was really saying.

In both 2020 and 1944, war was the excuse to suspend the conventions of normal life, and the Left in both instances was incapable of describing, much less preventing what was going on. Both Foucault and Pasolini understood how the state was using “science” as a form of control; both rebelled against the party line. Both felt that the enlightenment state was the real enemy, primarily because the Church had internalized the Enlightenment’s command that science determined “ultimate reality” and had become as a result irrelevant. Pasolini got expelled from the party because of his homosexuality, but his Decameron is full of nostalgia for the Italian Middle Ages when sex was innocent and everyone was Catholic, and he was Giotto. Foucault longed for a Catholic Church which would punish him for his transgression, and when both state and church refused, Foucault punished himself in the S&M torture chambers in the bath houses of San Francisco. In an analogous scene in The Canterbury Tales, the second film in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, a homosexual gets caught in flagrante dilectu and then, with Pasolini’s approval, gets burned at the stake.

Salo is the most accurate artistic representation of the quarantine which has now been imposed on the entire world. Pornography, abortion, and drugs are now available to those in quarantine but not religious services. Salo is also an uncanny artistic premonition of what the Israelis did in 2002 when they invaded Ramallah and started broadcasting pornography overPalestinian TV stations. The entire world is being subjected to that regimen right now, mutatis mutandis. Religious services have been banned, but abortion, which is considered an essential service, is, along with pornography, freely available. Abortion clinics did not close during the lockdown in California,[43] but that state’s Catholic churches did.

Catholic reaction to this remarkable state of affairs depended largely on the writer’s relationship to the state in general and the American Empire in particular. In an article which appeared in America, the flagship of contemporary Americanism and Jesuit support of the regime, Patrick O’Neill stated in no uncertain terms “I am a scientist working to stop coronavirus. We should cancel all Masses.”[44] The article appeared on March 13 but was written when there were 1,700 confirmed cases and at least 41 deaths. O’Neill then takes that number and extrapolates, claiming that “the true number of infections in the United States is therefore now between 17,000 and 170,000.”

This is true. One week after O’Neill’s article appeared in America spreading panic among bishops in the United States the number of infections stood at 19,383, which is between the two numbers he mentioned but nowhere near the upper limit O’Neill used to scare the bishops. Of those infected 256 died. O’Neill claimed that the mortality rate for COVID-19 was 3.7 percent, but he forgot to tell us when that number applied. This is a significant omission because during the period which stretched from March 8 to March 20, 2020, the period in which the US bishops decided to suspend Masses in public, the United States fatality rate declined from 4.06 percent to 1.32 percent. This meant that while the total numbers increased from 22 deaths out of 541 at the beginning of that period to 256 out of 19,383 at the end, the gross numbers went up but the percentage of those who died went down. As of March 20, 2020 the death rate in Italy was 8.5 percent but the death rate in South Korea was 1.16 percent, which was close to the death rate in the U.S., which was 1.34 percent. The real picture becomes clearer if we look at total cases per million inhabitants. As of March 20, 2020, China had 56 total cases per million; the United States had 59 cases per million, but Italy had 778 per million.