To power with square and compass

So, what is Freemasonry today, Magaldi? "Freemasonry always moves in the same direction, which is that of knowledge and power, whether material or spiritual." Power is a word that comes up often in his answers. And in Freemasons, throughout page after page, he relentlessly and meticulously lists the protagonists of that power he's talking about: Merkel, Schröder, Sarkozy, Hollande, Chirac, Mitterrand, Blair, Thatcher; almost all the American presidents, except Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, who weren't Freemasons but merely para-Freemasons; Deng Xiaoping, Vladimir Putin, and before him Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Stalin, and Lenin. And the Shah of Persia, Reza Pahlavi, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, the anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, even a pope who was recently canonized, John XXIII, Gianni Agnelli, Giorgio Napolitano, Francesco Cossiga, Massimo D’Alema… We could fill a phone book with this many names. All of them Freemasons. All of them affiliated with some Ur-Lodge. True? False? Half true and half false? For a layperson, as we have already said, it is impossible to verify in the lodge archives the names of those who have actually been initiated, where and when, or by whom they were presented. And if Magaldi asserts: “Mario Draghi is affiliated with as many as five Ur-Lodges,” and lists the “Edmund Burke,” the “Three Eyes,” the “White Eagle,” the “Compass Star-Rose,” and the “Pan-Europa,” the lay reader has no choice but to believe him. Or not. But setting aside the possibility of error, the potential controversial misunderstanding, the denials or counter-denials that may arise, there is something that stands out: and that is the vividness, the narrative.