General Nicolò Pollari

Last week, Italy became the first nation to condemn and sentence to prison two of its own secret service chiefs for assisting the CIA in February 2003 in kidnapping suspected Islamic terrorists on Italian soil and deporting them supposedly in accordance with America’s post-9/11 secret “extraordinary rendition” program.

On February 12 a Milan court condemned General Nicolò Pollari, the former head of the Italian military secret service, to 10 years in jail, his right-hand man Marco Mancini to nine years, and three of their colleagues to six years each. Two other colleagues had earlier been given jail sentences of two years and eight months.

It was the culmination of proceedings that have dragged on through Italy’s labyrinthine court system for nearly 10 years. 

The proceedings began soon after the sequestration on a Milan street in broad daylight by CIA agents on February 17th, 2003 of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, or “Abu Omar” for short, as he was walking to the mosque where it was his habit to fulminate against the West.

They bundled the cleric into a van and took him to the American airbase at Aviano in northeast Italy from where he was flown to the American airbase at Ramstein in Germany and then to Egypt where he was consigned to the pro-West, anti-Islamist government of Hosni Mubarak.

At the time of his kidnapping, Abu Omar was under investigation and on the verge of arrest by another set of Italian judges in connection with planned terrorist attacks in Italy and past terrorist crimes related to his links with al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the Islamist group that some think were responsible for the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the 1997 massacre of 62 people, mostly tourists, at Luxor in Egypt.  

But despite this, yet another set of judges had just granted him political asylum in Italy.

According to Abu Omar’s Egyptian lawyer, once rendered to Egypt the Mubarak government imprisoned and tortured him until February 2007, except for a brief period when he was under house arrest. Nowadays, with Mubarak gone and Morsi in charge, things are looking a lot brighter for him. In February 2009, he wrote to President Obama to say how impressed he was by the new president’s approach to Islam, requesting cash compensation for what George W. Bush had done to him. In August of that year, he filed a suit against the Italian government at the European Court of Human Rights which will enable him to claim massive damages if he wins.

Italy already had the honor of becoming the first nation to condemn, albeit in absentia, 23 Americans involved in “extraordinary rendition,” namely the same 2003 kidnapping episode. Last September, Italy’s Supreme Court confirmed the convictions by the same Milan court in 2009, and again in 2010, of 21 CIA agents, plus a US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Joseph L. Romano, who were all stationed in Italy at the time of the kidnapping. They got seven years in jail each. In addition, the Supreme Court confirmed the conviction of the CIA’s Milan station chief at the time, Robert Seldon Lady, who got nine years.

Two weeks ago, the Milan court convicted in absentia three more CIA agents involved in the kidnapping who had claimed diplomatic immunity and so been acquitted in 2009. These three include the CIA’s then Rome station chief Jeffrey Castelli. (In Italy, the prosecution, not just the defense, can appeal.) That’s a grand total of 33 Italian and American secret agents sentenced to jail as a result of a single 2003 kidnapping and rendition of a suspected Muslim terrorist.

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But why stop there? Why not prosecute the last three Italian prime ministers as well, plus the last two American presidents? I mean, why stop with the men manning the gas ovens? Why let Hitler off the hook?

“Extraordinary rendition” is something that not even the poster boy of the international left, Barack Obama, seems to have entirely abolished. Although his official stance is against torture, some say that at the very least, he’s practicing “Extraordinary Rendition-Lite.” Just as Obama doesn’t mind killing people from the air with drones, he doesn’t seem to mind outsourcing their torture to countries that do not see torture as an issue.

One of the Milan prosecuting judges said of the Supreme Court ruling: “It confirms that what happened was incompatible with democracy.” Oh, no it doesn’t! It confirms that Italian judges see their role as that of interpreting Italians’ democratic will so long as it tallies with their view, and that their power is greater than that of Italy’s democratically elected governments. Italy is governed not by elected politicians, but by unelected judges.

Things are not looking good at all for the condemned Italian Secret Service chiefs and agents. They had even denied helping the CIA in any way to kidnap Abu Omar but were unable to defend themselves in court because of Italy’s official secrets laws. As for the judges in the case (in Italy, judges investigate and prosecute crimes as well as sit in judgment at trials, often without a jury), they had no proof one way or the other and therefore prosecuted and convicted on the basis of that time-honored Italian judicial standard of proof: Come off it, they must have done it! That the Italian government had (or had not) told the accused to do it, or that Abu Omar was (or was not) an Islamic terrorist was deemed by the judges to be irrelevant.

For as Oscar Magi, one of the Milan judges responsible for the original guilty verdict in the case of the CIA agents put it in his written judgment: That the CIA was able to kidnap a suspected Muslim terrorist in Italy “leads to the presumption that such activity was carried out at least with the knowledge (or maybe the complicity)” of the Italian Secret Service. But it was “not possible,” he admitted, to prove those ties.

The seven condemned Italians now face years in jail. The 26 condemned Americans left Italy years ago. As fugitives from Italian justice, they are the subject of EU arrest warrants and if caught must be handed over to the Italians.

Probably they are back in America and so their only risk of going to jail is if the Italian government requests their extradition and it is granted by the American government. Neither is remotely possible.

The Milan judges complain that they have asked five successive Italian justice ministers to request their extradition without joy. This is hardly surprising given that the Italian government approved of what both the CIA agents did and its own secret agents did (or did not do) that day in February 2003 on that Milan street in broad daylight only a stone’s throw down from the mosque.

Cardinal Peter Turkson

Let us pray that the next pope is a black man. Better still, let it be a black African born and bred in the heart of the Dark Continent near the source of one of those massive snake-like rivers. The less contaminated the new pope is by the dominant Euro-USA secular liberal-left mindset, the better it will be for normal people everywhere, Catholic or not. So the blacker the pope, the better the chances not just of driving the liberal left bananas, but driving it out of the citadels of culture which it captured back about 1962.

Normally, popes are Italian. But they don’t have to be, thank God. The last two popes have been non-Italian Europeans: a Pole and a German. 

John Paul II, with his immense charisma and personal knowledge of what it means to live in Soviet Bloc Poland, saw off communism. 

Benedict XVI, with his immense intellect and his emphasis on the power of reason and the purity of tradition, has attempted to see off communism’s equally toxic derivative: moral relativism. But now he has announced he is to resign, aged 85, old and exhausted, after not quite eight years, with the battle barely commenced.

He will retire at 8PM on February 28th and his intention is to live as a recluse with his cat “Ciccio” (fatty) inside the Vatican in a convent of nuns di clausura whose vows mean that they are not allowed to go out of the convent or to meet anyone from the outside world.

“B-16,” as he is nicknamed, made the extraordinary announcement on Monday morning at a routine meeting in the Vatican to a group of Cardinals in Latin, a language many of them did not understand. He said that during the past few months he has lost the spiritual and physical vigor necessary to govern the boat of St. Peter. That same afternoon, lightning struck the cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica. For his was a momentous decision. 

A pope, who is not only the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics but an absolute monarch, albeit these days only as head of the tiny Vatican state, can voluntarily abdicate under canon law but it has not happened in more than 700 years: The last pope to resign voluntarily was Celestine V in 1296. There then followed the most divided and difficult century ever in Catholic history. Today there are many signs that the 21st century is likely to be as traumatic as the 14th century, and not just for the Catholic Church.

There has never been a black pope, but such a pope might do what no white pope can do anymore: embolden and empower the West’s terrified silent majority, regardless of its take on God. He could enable real public opinion to make its voice heard once again and thus turn back the relentless tide that in the name of that iniquitous modern mantra “the right to equality” is eroding each foundation stone of Western Civilization.

Think about it: Who better to tell white liberal lefties to fuck off than a black pope? 

A white pope has huge problems defending what the Catholic Church defines as the “non-negotiable” values, i.e., those core values that normal people, even if not Catholics and even if agnostics or atheists, recognize as the reason why the West was for so long the most civilized place ever to exist.

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Catholics, meanwhile, are howled down, censored and criminalized as “bigots,” “sad,” “killjoys,” “homophobes,” “misogynists,” and “fascists.”

So bad have things become that we now even have same-sex marriage being about to be made legal in France by a socialist president and in Britain by a conservative prime minister. 

But the moral relativists would find it much more difficult to use such hysterical abuse against a black pope, and the trickle-down effect as far as the rest of us were concerned would be torrential. Look at the way such people avoid such abuse at all costs in the case of Muslims however bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, and fascist their words and deeds.

I know America has a black president who is a raving liberal. But Barack Obama is the epitome of a brainwashed black man—brainwashed by the white liberal left.

Blacks may vote for Obama but they do so because he is black; that, and the money side. He is not representative of the black people I know, who on social issues revolving around sex and the family are far more conservative than white people. They believe—oh, how ignorant!—that right and wrong exist, as do good and evil. They believe—oh, what terrible homophobes and misogynists!—that men are born men and women are born women, and that men and women do not magically become men or women. They even believe that the family (defined as mother, father, and children) is sacred—oh, the fascist bigots!—and that same-sex marriage is wrong. Yes, South Africa is one of the fifteen or so countries in the world that have legalized same-sex marriage, but only because its black political caste is drunk on white liberal firewater.

Black people, in my experience, are also far more outspoken and up-front, far less careful about hiding their true feelings and thoughts, than white people. They call a spade a spade. They are less two-faced than white men, less prone to speak with a forked tongue. 

A black pope, therefore, is just what the world, not just the Catholic world, really needs. It’s time to take off the velvet gloves. It’s time to get down and dirty.

The two men talked of as most likely to become the first black pope are Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana who is only 64 and Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria who at 80 is probably too old. True, Cardinal Turkson wants to regulate the excesses of capitalism, but I’m pretty cool about that. Who isn’t? Bankers? Line them up! The real crisis in the West is not economic but social. At least Turkson is brave enough to warn that Europe is becoming Eurabia. Sort society out and the economy will follow. And right now, society is in a very bad place. 

Silvio Berlusconi

I never used to believe in miracles before I came to live in Italy, but last week I witnessed the resurrection of a political corpse. It was all thanks to a bizarre potion whose ingredients are a black soccer superstar, a busted red bank mired in scandal, and a dash of Benito Mussolini.

As a result, with three weeks to go before the crucial Italian general elections on February 24, Silvio Berlusconi and his center-right coalition, far from being dead and practically buried, are now within spitting distance in the
opinion polls of the front-runners: the ex-communist-led coalition of the left.

In November 2011, this mega-rich media tycoon forever derided and defamed by the media as a corrupt buffoon and grotesque sex maniac was forced to resign as prime minister despite enjoying more voter support than any of Italy’s 60-odd governments since fascism’s fall in 1945.

Two things caused the resignation of “Il Cavaliere” (The Knight), as he is called by those Italians who refuse to swallow the media line on him, or “Silvio Il Magnifico,” as I am still not at all ashamed to call him.

These two things were: the spread between interest rates on German and Italian bonds which had become a dangerous chasm and so threatened the very survival of European single currency; and the sex scandal trial known as “Bunga Bunga,” manufactured out of nothing by the media and a group of politically driven judges in Milan. Each fed off the other.

Democracy was suspended. Ever since, Italy has had an unelected governo tecnico with the grey economics professor Mario Monti as prime minister. His only noticeable personality trait is his dull and mechanical hypnotist’s voice.
They call Monti “Il Professore.” I call him “Il Dentista” (The Dentist). Either way, he is the perfect pin-up boy for bankers and bureaucrats. For a while he managed to hypnotize not only the markets but even the Germans who call the shots in the doomed Eurozone. Yet all he has done is raise taxes and invent new taxes.

As the Eurozone crisis goes from bad to worse, Italians are disillusioned with Italian democracy’s impotence. There are 169 parties standing in the elections.

Monti is also a candidate for premier. His hastily invented party of the center, Scelta civica con Monti, stands at about 14% in the polls. This would guarantee him seats in Parliament (under Italy’s version of proportional representation 4% is all you need) and maybe make him kingmaker.

The other major new political figure is a professional comedian Beppe Grillo, whose slogan is Vaffa! (Fuck off!)—to everything, it seems, except wind farms. This bearded longhaired comic who looks and behaves like a middle-aged Hell’s Angel is hovering around the 18% mark.

But well out in front was the coalition of the left at about 35%. Their candidate for prime minister is Pier Luigi Bersani of the ex-communist Partito democratico (Pd), its major component.

Meanwhile Berlusconi’s center-right coalition was trailing by about 10%. He is not actually running for prime minister. (Angelino Alfano has that honor.) But it is as if he were. And who knows what will happen if his side stuns the world and wins?

Italy, though, looked all set to follow France with a bog standard fuck-the-fools-who-still-work-in-the-private-sector lefty government à outrance.

But then the miracle happened.

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On the face of it, things went from bad to worse when last weekend in Milan at the unveiling on World Holocaust Remembrance Day of a monument to the Jews deported from Italy to the Nazi death camps when Berlusconi decided to speak his mind.

Berlusconi told reporters that Mussolini’s worst mistake was to impose the 1938 anti-Semitic laws on Italy’s Jews but that Mussolini had done many “good things” and it had been the alliance with Hitler that imposed “the war on the Jews,” so “Italy does not have the same responsibility as Germany….”

The media in Italy and abroad crucified Berlusconi for these words, however true. Mussolini and fascism were not anti-Semitic until the alliance with Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930s. Many senior Italian fascists were Jews, as were most Jews, including Mussolini’s main mistress until around 1930, Margherita Sarfatti. Even after siding with the Nazis, the Italian fascists’ aim was not to exterminate Jews and no Jews in Italy were arrested and deported to the Nazi death camps until after Mussolini’s fall in 1943.

You would have thought that this latest Berlusconi “gaffe” would have banged shut the coffin lid on his corpse. Well, yes and no. Those Italians who bother with truth as opposed to propaganda—the silent majority—agree with Berlusconi. Not because he or they want to restore fascism, but because what he said is the truth.

That same weekend, however, a bigger story got bigger still. God himself, it seemed, had intervened to rescue Il Magnifico. The share price of Italy’s third biggest bank, Monte dei Paschi di Siena (which is under investigation for a whole raft of crimes), had collapsed.

The Bank of Italy, the state-owned central bank, announced a 4-billion-euro loan to Monte dei Paschi (financed by a fat chunk of Monti’s tax revenues).

But here’s the beauty of it: Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest bank, founded in 1472 in the picturesque Tuscan city of Siena which has been “red” since the war, just happens to be run by the ex-communist party—the Pd—which had assumed electoral victory was a foregone conclusion.

Then this! What worse news could there be for such a party to be exposed to exactly the same accusations that it has so hysterically made against banks and big business since the collapse of the world as we knew it in 2008? Now we discover it is up to its neck in the same stuff that it professes to despise!

So all week Comrade Bersani, the party’s candidate for premier, has been frantically trying to insist that his party does not have a bank, let alone this one. But he has a problem: The majority shareholding of Monte dei Paschi is owned by a fondazione which is controlled by local authorities in the Siena area (all left-wing-run) and whose directors are all leading figures of his party to which they donate large slices of their huge incomes.

Then came news of the sale by Britain’s Manchester City of black striker Mario Balotelli for 20 million euro to the top Italian side AC Milan, which Berlusconi owns. The press calls the petulant Balotelli “uomo nero.” His cars include a military-camouflage-colored Bentley Continental GT. He was born to Ghanaian parents in Palermo who gave him up for adoption but when he became rich and famous tried to get him back. The so-called “Balotelli Bounce” could bring Berlusconi up to 2% of the vote.

Italians have had quite enough of Monti Il Professore and his taxes without growth. But who else is there? Bersani the ex-Comunista of Monte dei Paschi di Siena fame? Grillo the foul-mouthed professional comedian? Who else, that is, except for Silvio Il Magnifico?

Willingly or not, women play a starring role in the death of the West. 

Women in Europe and America have made one great big fat suicidal error as a result of modern feminism since the movement’s inception: They have confused work with freedom. This confusion has had catastrophic consequences for all of us because it has fatally infected the core activity of any healthy civilization: the creation and upbringing of children.

During World War II there was a chilling slogan stamped in wrought iron above the entrance gates of Auschwitz in Poland where it can still be seen: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Labor Makes You Free); labor in this case meant work rather than giving birth.

That Nazi slogan could just as well be used nowadays by women in the West and their male collaborators (we know who you are) as their own slogan. What they have desired above all else (and got) this past half-century is work. 

They have decided that to work full-time in an office or factory makes them free. They have therefore also decided that to be a mother is a prison sentence that deprives them of freedom. They have then also decided: Motherhood Makes You a Slave.

They must be mad. The truth is the precise opposite. In the case of the Nazis, work meant not freedom but physical annihilation; in the case of Western women, not freedom but creative annihilation.

Nearly all work, if we mean the work that most people in the West do day after day in exchange for money, is a life sentence in prison. It is dull, repetitive, and soul-destroying. It does not liberate.

The fact that women work means that fewer children are born. It also means that those children are raised by women other than their mothers. It also cranks up the stress still more on the already very fragile equilibrium in the male-female dialectic. 

Women, unlike men, once had a way to avoid work. They still do, if they chose to compel governments to organize things differently. The choice is theirs and theirs alone. 

If women stopped work tomorrow it would solve the West’s chronic unemployment crisis overnight. Due to the dire shortage of workers left, salaries would rocket.

The state could even chip in, if women made enough noise. The state could even pay married women to stay at home and have children. It already does in the case of single, non-working mothers. So what’s the big deal?

But more important than the cash side of it, surely women would be so much happier.

Let me take the example of Carla, my young Italian wife and mother of my five small children. Carla does not “work” 9-5 outside the home for a wage. She works instead 24/7 at home and for free. People where we are in Italy think she is out of her mind. Not only does she have more than the one or two children permitted by fashion, but she does not even “work.” I think they are out of their minds because I am convinced that she is far more fulfilled, free, and creative than if she were a part-time mother wage slave like them.

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In the West these days even to suggest such a thing anywhere mainstream transforms a person, especially a male, into a deranged and dangerous social pariah.

Here in Italy, droves of these “liberated women” spend their days or nights assembling washing machines with pneumatic riveting tools or cutting off chicken heads with manual or mechanical neck cutters, or else sexing baby chickens with their bare hands. How creative is that?

Naturally, they are so busy drilling and decapitating and sexing that they have few children. You might be amazed given that old archetypal image of Italy as a place where mamma is surrounded by lots of bambini, but for years now Italy has had one of the lowest birthrates in the West: currently, only 1.4 children per woman. Italy is a Catholic country, so either the modern Italian woman is having very little sex or she is ignoring the Catholic diktat that contraception is a mortal sin right up there with abortion and adultery. 

If I ask those Italian women I chance upon in my meanderings why they are having hardly any sex…no, let me rephrase that…if I ask Italian women why they have only 1.4 children, their reply is always the same. They do not trot out the bog-standard liberal London reply “overpopulation is killing the planet,” which is a lie—in Europe at least, where the problem is too few babies, not too many. But they lie just the same. “I can’t afford it,” they say.

But even if such a decision as the creation of life were taken solely on the basis of such bleak economic considerations, children are an investment, not a cost. Look at me! If I can afford five kids and a wife who’s not working, anyone can. The real reason is that Italian women, like your average woman all over the hedonistic “Anything Goes” West, just want to have a good time and children are a bloody nuisance. 

Yes, the money gained in exchange for work gives women the financial independence to do things such as pay the mortgage, the rent, and the bills personally. They can also pay someone else to look after the 1.4 children while they work and have a good time. But if I were a woman I would find the human price of such independence too high.

Sooner or later I am going to have to have “the talk” with my own three daughters. Should I—dare I—tell Caterina, Magdalena, and Rita the truth? Or would that lead to the state’s confiscation and reeducation of my family? 

Gerard Depardieu

I admire the great French actor Gérard Depardieu. Not only does he annoy the French left, he has now left France. In so doing, he has given me a great idea: to transform myself into a fiscal ghost.

My aim in 2013 is to vanish into thin air fiscally. It may turn out to be illegal, but it definitely will not be immoral. There is only so much tax a man can take. And no law, not even one supported by the majority, is necessarily just.

Depardieu has just moved from France to neighboring Belgium in part to avoid the consequences of the new French socialist government’s decision to impose a 75% tax rate on anyone earning more than one million euro a year.

It is the same counterproductive, growth-destructive story everywhere in the Eurozone: tax increases and new taxes not just for the rich like Depardieu who can move, but for the middle class who cannot. All for what? To keep alive the insatiable beast known as the state, which will kill us unless we kill it.

Here in Italy, the sales tax on nearly every transaction is 20%, and the total tax rate on commercial profits is 68.3%, compared to 30.2% in neighboring Switzerland. (It’s 46.7% in America.)

That an actor such as Depardieu, whose personality both on- and offscreen personifies La France Profonde, should quit the country is a heavy propaganda blow to the French left and President Francois Hollande. Film people, as America sadly knows, tend to love the left.

But when France’s socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault nonchalantly dismissed Depardieu’s decision as “minable” (pathetic), it made things worse—for the French left—because last Sunday Depardieu hit back in spades with a letter published in Le Journal du Dimanche. Addressed to the premier, few honest people anywhere could disagree with it:

I am leaving because you consider that success, creativity, talent, and in fact, just being different, must be punished.

Quel homme! What a fabulously succinct definition and critique of socialism! It even comes complete with its own inbuilt flipside, namely: Socialism only rewards unsuccessful, uncreative, untalented sheep. And he added for good measure: “I am handing in my passport.” So he intends not only to leave France but also to renounce his French citizenship. Zut alors!

Depardieu, 63, wrote that he has paid 145 million euro ($189 million) in taxes since he began work at age 15 without a single qualification to his name and that he has never claimed welfare money from the state:

We do not anymore share the same country, I am a true European, a citizen of the world.…Who are you to judge me, indeed I ask you monsieur Ayrault, prime minister of monsieur Hollande, I ask you, who are you?

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Like Depardieu and so many other millions, I am very angry at the erosion of liberty and the rise of tyranny in Europe as evidenced by the inexorable rise in the taxes imposed on us.

My profile, unlike Depardieu’s, is very low. He can leave France but wherever he goes he cannot disappear off the fiscal radar screen. But I might be able to swing it.

The general rule is that you pay tax in the country where you live. But I am self-employed and all I need for my work are a computer and a telephone. I could just as easily write while sitting at a table in a bar overlooking the harbor on a Greek island or from inside a centrally heated tent at the North Pole. Who is to know any different?

The Italian taxman knows that I live in Italy and the details of my address here. But there is no law that obliges an EU citizen such as myself to be residente in Italy. I do not need that piece of paper. I can simply be here sans papiers of any description. And I have noticed that my 10-year residenza expires in March 2013. Oh, but you must have one of those, the Italians insist. They say it’s for medical treatment, which in Italy is partly free for adults and wholly free for children. Not true. All EU citizens are covered for the free bits of healthcare in all EU countries.

I plan not to renew my residenza when it expires. How, then, will the Italian taxman be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I live in Italy? Even if he turns up at the Forlì flat and sees my wife and five children, so bloody what? I can simply reply: “Yes, but yesterday I was on a Greek island, and tomorrow I’m off to the North Pole.” His only hope of getting the dirt on me would be to interrogate my mother-in-law. Would he be man enough?

Thanks to the Internet revolution, there must be millions of us rootless cosmopolitans dotted about the EU’s 27 nations whose work requires only a computer and a telephone. It is time for our revolution. Unlike Depardieu, we do not have to move about from country to country. It is enough to pretend we are doing so.

The European Union’s propagandists define their subjects as “European citizens.” Fine. So let us, if we must, as European citizens—not Frenchmen or Italians or Englishmen—pay our taxes to the ghost called “Europe” which does not truly exist.

My aim, as British guitarist Jeff Beck put it, is to tell the taxman that I am “everywhere and nowhere baby.”

Like all my great ideas, it will probably end in tears. But it’s a risk I have to take.

If it were not for the Apocalypse which is due any day now I would be the owner at last of a large stone farmhouse perched in the gentle foothills of the Apennines and surrounded by soothing vineyards with a spectacular view stretching to the Adriatic 25 miles away.

Sadly, my Italian wife, Carla, gave the house the thumbs down. It is in the hills, you see, and the hills, plus all mountains and islands, are destined to disappear. 

I knew all this. But I thought: Hell, it’s not on top of a mountain in the Alps, only an Apennine foothill, and by God is it beautiful. Surely, God couldn’t possibly want to destroy something of such beauty, could he? I thought I could talk Carla into it. I even got an architect involved and the money ready—a mere 350,000 euro—more or less. Nothing doing. To me, it was a house to die for; to Carla it was a house in which we and our five children were doomed to die.

It pains me to recall the rush of enthusiasm I felt that day this summer when after years of searching in vain for the right place to buy at the right price I found this house just a 15-minute drive from Forlì, the irritating little provincial city where I live above my mother-in-law, down in the pianura (plains).

This house had everything. For a start it had not been “restored,” which in Italy means “ruined.” It was in fabulous condition. It also came complete with a superb barn and a delightful set of outside buildings that had once housed, among other things, the pigsty. It even had a few acres of land and a vineyard groaning with grapes and there, on an adjacent hill, a medieval watchtower framed by a few elegant pine trees’ tall silhouettes.

When the modern Italian gets his hands on an old rural dwelling he either knocks it down and builds something nice and new, or else he encases it inside a nice new concrete straitjacket. Either way, he destroys its past and therefore its spirit.

I find this Italian hatred for the old and worship for the new most odd. I would have thought that Italians—who gave the world the Renaissance—would revere the past. Not a bit of it.

Here’s the explanation: The Italians were until 50 years ago nearly all peasant farmers and so regard stone farmhouses as repellent; they also confuse physical cleanliness with spiritual cleanliness. So to the Italians, old stone farmhouses reek of penury and sin. Exactly the same mindset applies to their pathologically obsessive use of the bidet.

Meanwhile, the Italians, like so many people elsewhere on the planet, prepare as best they can for the Apocalypse. There are several apocalypses on the boil. There is the Mayan one, due on December 21st, which marks the end of the 5,125-year b’ak’tun—or “Long Count”—Mayan calendar. Something to do with a hitherto hidden rogue planet never seen by scientists but called Nibiru crashing into Earth, or so I gather.

Unlike my wife Carla, those who believe in this particular apocalypse think that the only safe place to be when it hits is as high up as possible. If only Carla were a follower of the Maya rather than of the Madonna.

In the French Pyrenees the mayor of Bugarach, population 179, has temporarily banned people from ascending a flat-topped mountain near his village believed to house an alien spaceship garage—Pic de Bugarach—where many had planned to go in the hope of being rescued by aliens on the 21st. The owner of a house in the village with a view of the mountain is charging £1,200 a night, and other locals are flogging mountain stones for £1.20p a gram and mountain water for £12 a bottle.

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Another mountain, this one in Serbia and called Mount Rtanj, apparently conceals a pyramid built by aliens thousands of years ago which on the 21st will emit a special alien energy field that will protect people inside it as the world ends outside. Hotels within striking distance are fully booked.

In Italy, the only place to be on the 21st is a narrow strip of land around the town of Cisternino, hitherto noted only for its strange cone-shaped houses called trulli, in the hills between the cities of Taranto and Brindisi on the peninsula’s heel. I am unable to find an explanation for its safe-haven status. It has something to do with an Indian guru’s followers, who have been there since 1979.

None of this has anything to do with the real Apocalypse—the one my wife and the Catholics anticipate. As far as Catholics are concerned, all this Mayan stuff is the work of Satan.

The details of the real Apocalypse have already been passed on in the form of 10 secrets by the Virgin Mary to six Catholic peasants in the small town of Medjugorge in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These six visionaries, who have been in daily contact with the Virgin Mary since 1981 when they were teenagers, will reveal the contents of the 10 secrets to a designated priest just three days before the Apocalypse. The 10 secrets are said to contain details of what form the Apocalypse will take and who will be saved and who doomed. They will be revealed, if we are to believe sources close to Medjugorge such as Padre Livio—the exalted and raucous editor of Radio Maria—while the visionaries are still alive, and they are now well into middle age. So while the world is likely to make it into 2013, from then on it’s anyone’s guess.

Carla says that unless I convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism immediatamente, I am doomed even if we continue to live in pianura (on the plains) along with all non-Catholics and all bad Catholics.

I keep trying to tell her that the problem is not conversion: It is faith. I do not disbelieve the existence of a God but nor do I believe it. To convert without faith would be dishonest.

For some months now, Carla has been monitoring Italian earthquake activity on my computer daily. She tells me the Apocalypse will involve earthquakes and fire, not floods or plagues of frogs. So I say: “But there are earthquakes in pianura, not just in collina (in the hills), you know.” And she looks at me as if I am insane. 

I am therefore doomed to contemplate not the imminent Apocalypse, but the only existential question that matters. It is the question posed by Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942):

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Does realizing life’s meaninglessness and absurdity require suicide? Camus’s answer is surprisingly optimistic:

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

But I remain condemned to continue living down here—in pianura—not able even to begin like Sisyphus to scale those soaring heights with my boulder—unless I can conjure a miracle.

Image of apocalypse courtesy of Shutterstock

Alessandro Sallusti

Ah, Italia! Such a great place to get your head around great art and great women, but such a shitty little country.

How else to describe a so-called free and democratic country where the police cart off a national newspaper editor to serve a 14-month sentence because of an article he published?

This happened here on Saturday to Alessandro Sallusti, the editor of one of Italy’s most important daily newspapers, when the police interrupted the morning editorial conference at its Milan office to take him away.

His crime?

In 2007 Sallusti had published an anonymous opinion piece which stated that a judge in Turin had “ordered” a 13-year-old girl to have an abortion, when technically the judge had “authorized” the girl to have an abortion. 

The 13-year-old girl and her mother had wanted the abortion but didn’t want the father to know. So in the absence of the father’s required consent, their only alternative was to get a judge’s authorization.

The article’s anonymous author, who was not prosecuted, had described the resultant abortion as murder, which it is according to the Pope and millions of other Italians.

The author had then said that if capital punishment existed in Italy for murder, then this case was one where those responsible—the judge, the parents, and the gynecologist—deserved it. I find it really scary that the state—i.e., a judge—can authorize 13-year-old girls to have abortions so daddy won’t find out she’s pregnant.

In Italy the author has no such right to express such an opinion, as this case so poignantly and disturbingly illustrates.

In Italy, unlike in less shitty countries, defamation is a criminal offense as well as a civil matter. Italy’s definition of defamation is highly elastic and depends on the judge’s opinion, and Italian judges are very differently abled compared to your average human being. 
 
In a civilized country, as opposed to a politically correct spaghetti republic such as Italy, newspapers have a number of perfectly reasonable defenses against a libel suit.

These include: a statement, if in good faith and based on a reasonable belief in its truth, that turns out to be false; the expression of an opinion because opinions cannot normally be falsified; and fair comment on a matter of public interest based on the honest belief in its soundness and significance.

Clearly, the opinion piece published Sallusti published was not even defamatory by normal civilized standards, and so he should never have been sued for libel in a civil court, let alone tried for criminal libel.

But—hey, man—this is Italy. 

It is not as if the article described the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophile, or even gays as sodomites. It merely described those responsible—including a judge—for ordering/authorizing a 13-year-old girl to have an abortion as murderers, which is exactly what the Pope thinks. 

You might assume that this Sallusti guy is some kind of freedom fighter who has fallen afoul of a dictatorship.

You might also assume that Italy’s judges, who investigate, prosecute, and judge alleged crimes, are a crucial arm of this dictatorship.

And you would be right. 

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But the paper is owned by the very man who—if we are to believe what the Italian media has been telling us all these years—runs this diabolical regime, isn’t it? A certain Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi, who has been prime minister of Italy three times and who owns nearly all of Italy’s private television channels. Something does not figure here.

But that is the point. Italy is indeed run by a diabolical regime, but Berlusconi is not its boss. He is its victim, as is his daily newspaper’s editor.

Sallusti is a rebel who champions the cause of those Italians who believe in freedom and the free market—of those Italians determined to rid Italy of the whole rotten crowd that has called the shots here since World War II, the crowd that fervently believes the state should run everything. It is made up of all those in Italy who worship the state and despise people. This rotten crowd includes a monstrous number of judges.

I used to think that free-market Italians such as Sallusti formed Italy’s silent majority; nowadays, I am convinced they form a doomed minority. 

I know Sallusti pretty well. In 2003, he gave me a job as a columnist for Libero, the only other national daily newspaper in Italy which champions freedom and the free market, and which he then edited. He has a genius for writing hard-hitting and extremely funny headlines. He is brilliant, not just at touching and exposing but stomping on the numerous raw nerves of the Italian left, which therefore despises him and defames him daily with impunity. But Sallusti is a relentless stickler for factual accuracy.

It was in Libero that the “criminal” article appeared on September 18, 2007. I also know the article’s previously anonymous author—Renata Farina—whose identity emerged only recently. He is godfather to one of my children.

I, too, have been condemned for criminal libel. In 2008 a judge gave me four months in jail plus a 25,000-euro fine for a 2005 opinion piece of mine just after the 7/7 al-Qaeda attacks in London which left 56 dead and more than 700 injured. My crime? My opinion that Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, two famous female Italian “pacifists,” were “traitors of the West.” They had worked for a left-wing outfit in Iraq whose aim was (is) to form an alliance between the international left and Islam to bring down satanic capitalism. In June 2004 they were taken hostage by Islamic terrorists and after the government of their archenemy, Berlusconi, had secured their release with a huge ransom, they declined to thank him and instead praised their Islamic terrorist captors.

I did not go to prison because it was my first offense. People don’t normally get incarcerated in Italy if given less than two years (though it is up to the judge), but also because I appealed and the appeals judge has yet—as far as I know—to render a verdict. No doubt I’ll lose and then appeal again and lose. Only then, after that third trial, will my conviction and sentence become definitive (as is the way in Italy). If still alive, I shall then appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that what I wrote was not even defamatory, let alone criminally so, and that criminal libel may be fine in those medieval theocracies that left-wing pacifists admire but not in a modern democracy.

In Sallusti’s case, the judges moved with unusual swiftness to complete all three trials in an unheard-of five years. To rub salt in his wounds, they chose not to suspend the sentence even though it is for under two years. Sallusti could still have avoided prison if he had agreed to subject himself to psychoanalysis by social services and do a few months of socially useful work such as road-sweeping. But he refused because he is adamant. He will go to jail so that the world knows how shameful Italy is and to shame Italy’s politicians into abolishing criminal libel.

The Italian media, meanwhile, has been generally either disgustingly silent about the Sallusti case or else disgustingly gleeful about his jail sentence.

To spite Sallusti, and fearful of the inevitable global media storm if he ended up in jail for 14 months, the judges have now pulled out of the hat a previously unknown legal justification that enables them to compel him against his will to serve the sentence under house arrest in Milan. That is why they sent the police into the newspaper’s offices to arrest him on Saturday.

Sallusti, however, is determined not to let the judges get away with this attempt to stifle the story before it goes global, and so on Tuesday he wrote to them to say he refuses to be granted the house arrest privilege. He remains locked up at home, not yet in jail, awaiting their reply.

I salute you, Sandro: Unlike so many of your colleagues, you are a brave and principled man. But Italy urgently needs millions more like you.

About a year ago an Italian judge ordered me, as a condemned criminal, to perform 166 hours of unpaid “lavoro socialmente utile” (socially useful work). I kept putting it off until three weeks ago when I could put it off no more, and now I have to finish it by Christmas—or else.

So I spend large chunks of my life being “socially useful.” In my case this means not being a priest or a gigolo, which is what I had suggested to the woman in charge of me. Instead I’m sweeping the streets and the piazzas in the old center of the small provincial city of Forlì, which has been run by the Partito Comunista—now calling itself the Partito Democratico—since World War II.

Seeing me thus reduced amuses those among the local “ex” communist majority who do not care for my articles in which I point out that it is thanks to them that Italy has gone to the dogs. I once received a bullet in the post, which according to the anonymous covering letter was for the eldest of my five small children, Caterina, who is now nine.

It is all the fault of a man called Mussolini—not the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but the traffic cop Marco Mussolini, who is (and I am not joking) a comunista. I know, I know, Mussolini though an infamous name is a rare one, and I couldn’t believe it either.

This Maresciallo (sergeant) Mussolini as opposed to Il Duce Mussolini spotted me late one night a couple of years ago. I was at the wheel of my black, seven-seater, long-axle, Land Rover Defender which flies the Union Jack from its radio antenna and is nicknamed “Che Guevara” as I passed his roadblock on my way home at a perfectly reasonable speed and doing nothing untoward. This Mussolini nonetheless abandoned his roadblock and another vehicle he had already stopped to take off after me in his little patrol car with his blue lights flashing hysterically. When he stopped me less than half a mile from my home, he offered no reason for his extraordinary behavior and simply whipped out his truncheon-like Breathalyzer. As I had drunk more than the two glasses of red wine permitted by the law in this supposedly civilized country, that was that.

The judge banned me from driving for two years and sentenced me to a couple of months in jail plus a whacking great fine. And if my beloved Defender had been in my name rather than my wife’s, Mussolini would have seized it at the scene of my horrific crime and then sold it at auction, with the money used to pay some parasite’s welfare entitlement claim for a week or two. If however I were prepared to do 166 hours of “socially useful” work, I would lose the driving license for one year only, not two, the jail sentence would be annulled, and the crime would be taken off my record. So I agreed.

As all normal Europeans know, the “drunk”-driving law is unjust in all European countries and is yet another example of tyranny creep. It is even more so in Italy. I am 54 and have driven for 37 years, more often than not well over the two-glasses-of-wine limit. Yet not once in all those years have I been involved in a traffic accident, not even a minor one.

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You do not need to look at the statistics to understand who has traffic accidents and why. Alcohol alone does not cause accidents unless a driver is hog-whimpering drunk. At least one other factor is also required and in high doses: testosterone. This explains why young men under 30 have the most accidents. Their high testosterone count and invincible belief that their youth is a shield against death—turbocharged by a few cans of beer—cause them to drive too fast and very badly.

There are other vital factors at play: luck, chance, destiny, Satan, and all that jazz. But there is nothing a man, whatever his age or testosterone count, can do about such stuff. Here is the solution: Keep the current drunk-driving law for men under 30, but introduce another much more flexible and civilized new law for men over 30. 

I drive much more competently after a few glasses of red wine because I feel far more at ease with the world and far less contempt for other people. I know this because I no longer drink. In August 2011, I gave up alcohol for unrelated reasons: I could not stand what it had done to my face and physique. But I have noticed that nowadays, I drive much more aggressively and dangerously when I’m stone-cold sober than I ever did as a seasoned “drunk” driver. These days, I hoot everything long and hard with my Defender’s extremely loud horn and make obscene hand gestures even at old ladies who get in my way.

The Italian state defines the purpose of “socially useful” work as “reeducation”—a euphemism that used to be bandied about only in standard communist regimes. But then what is political correctness, which is as rife in Italy as anywhere, if not the application of communist dictatorship to the mind rather than to the means of production?

There is no way anyone is going to reeducate me, however many hundreds of hours they condemn me to being socially useful if by that they mean forcing me to sincerely accept that what I did was wrong. What I did was against the law, a law that I think is unjust, and I got caught by a cop called Mussolini. That is all. This reeducation by road-sweeping is merely a punishment that deprives me of my time and my earnings and involves me being humiliated in public. It is a modern version of being put in the stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables. It is possibly a deterrent against reoffending, though I would not bet on it and it is most definitely a fantastic money-spinner for the company under whose supervision I toil, a left-wing “not for profit” cooperative that enjoys a whole raft of tax breaks. This cooperative pays nothing to those sentenced to reeducation by road-sweeping such as me but instead gets paid to take us on. Not once, but twice: first by the court, then by the council. Imagine if such a system that transformed wages from a cost to a profit operated everywhere. No doubt the Chinese are already working on it. 

I am no stranger to manual work. I once, for example, strangled geese with my bare hands for a living on an English farm. And I rather enjoy being a road-sweeper. It gets me out in the fresh air and away from the computer. It compels me to do one hell of a lot of something I have hardly done for years: walk. It is a bit like doing a stint at a health farm, not that I have ever been inside such a place. I also get to wear a manly bright orange and luminous jacket and trousers and they allow me to keep my black Basque beret. The jacket in particular causes women to look at me in a certain way they normally do not. The other morning my Italian mother-in-law told me: “Quel giubbotto ti dona, sai, ti dona, sul serio.” (“That jacket gifts you, you know, it gifts you, seriously.”) Even my wife called me “mio uomo” when I came home in it after my first six-hour shift and the kids buzzed about squealing: “Sei proprio bello, papà!” But it is not a job I would recommend to psychopathic perfectionists such as Adolf Hitler or Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Forlì is not Naples but as a road-sweeper you cannot do a perfect job wherever you are. And cleaning up other people’s carelessly discarded rubbish makes you keener still on dealing with them in the required fashion once and for all. Or as the Italians say of their useless and corrupt politicians: Di fare piazza pulita. (“Make a clean sweep.”) Road-sweeping is a job best left to poets and dreamers. So I sweep on.

Dolomites

The Remembrance Day commemorations in honor of the war dead always prompt even me to think that the Italians’ reputation as a nation of cowards on the battlefield is unfair.

But the Italians are cowards in another sense: They are afraid to remember, let alone honor, their war dead. So they do not get to hear about them, nor does the world.

I can understand that the Italians want to run away from their past in World War II, when they backed the wrong side and their battle performance was disastrous. It was the 1939-45 war that spawned the joke that still does the rounds even today:

Q: How many gears does an Italian tank have?
A: Five—one for going forward, four for going backward.

The Italians have a reputation that if they are fit for anything, it is only to stab you in the back.

And yet to find irrefutable evidence of Italian courage there is no need to leap back though the millennia to ancient Rome’s military prowess. It is enough to go back to World War I. In “The Great War” the Italians fought with extraordinary bravery and sustained appalling battlefield casualties. They also fought on the right side. (Allied military deaths in the First World War: France, 1,397,000; Britain, 886,939; Italy, 651,000. Not bad, not bad at all.)

But in Italy, Remembrance Day (as the British call it) or Veterans’ Day (as it is known in America) hardly even registers on the national radar screen. This is very odd and probably insane.

For it is above all to remember the deaths of those who died in the 1914-1918 war that so many countries in Europe and elsewhere observe the somber but uplifting ritual each year on November 11th—the day now nearly 100 years ago that the “war to end all wars” which had claimed 17 million lives ended “at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Those were the terms of the armistice signed by the defeated Germans in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne near Paris.

Nor on November 11th are people in those countries doing anything to which even an honest West-hating left-wing “pacifist”—and Italy has more than its fair share of the breed—could object. They are not celebrating war, military victory, or national aggression. They are simply remembering and honoring the sacrifice of those among their countrymen who died in war.

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On Remembrance Day, the French wear a blue cornflower—le Bleuet de France—which was the color of the French army’s uniform in the 1914-18 war. The British wear a red poppy inspired by the brilliant 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields.”

Italy in theory commemorates its war dead—on November 4th—the day the Austro-Hungarian Empire signed the armistice with Italy in 1918 after the Italians had routed the Austro-Hungarians at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. But no one really takes any notice. What Italy does remember instead each April 25th is its liberation in 1945. This involves wildly exaggerating the role of the largely communist and largely irrelevant Italian Resistance and conveniently forgetting who really did do the liberating: the Americans, the British, and the Poles.

Given this dire need for a total makeover of Italy’s reputation, there is no better place to start than the stoic bravery their armed forces displayed in World War I—especially as the 100th anniversary of that war’s outbreak is nearly upon us.

Yet on this matter the media silence in Italy is near total. Italy’s communists and their toxic derivatives are to blame, as they are for so much else. In their view, World War I was a criminal war between imperial powers e basta. Their predecessors, the Italian Socialist Party, did their utmost to stop Italian intervention in the conflict which happened in May 1915. Socialist parties elsewhere in Europe, such as those in France and Germany, supported the war.

Few British or American writers visited or served as soldiers on the Austro-Italian front to the north and east of Venice. But this mountain war was as infernal as the trench warfare in the fields of France and Belgium so well described by so many soldier-authors. Among those who did go to Italy was Ernest Hemingway as an 18-year-old Red Cross ambulance driver. He was badly wounded in July 1918 within a month of his arrival at the front. The experience provided the inspiration for his first great war novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

The few British authors to go included the already hugely famous H. G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds. Wells was full of genuine praise for the prowess, courage, and organization that he witnessed firsthand from the Italian military in 1916.

The 100th anniversary of World War I’s start will probably involve the European media’s last detailed look at that brutal conflict which unfortunately failed to solve so many of the problems that still haunt Europe, such as the obsession of its chattering classes and bureaucrats with imposing the tyranny of European political union on Europeans against their will.

Yet to remember Italy’s sacrifice in that war would mean left-of-center Italians admitting that the Italian left was and is wrong, that nation-states are not artificial constructs that bourgeois capitalist tyrants impose and that patriotism is a positive, admirable, and perfectly normal feeling. They would have to admit that the internationalist solutions they favor—the latest example being the terrifying European Union—do not work because they are artificially imposed constructs. They would therefore also have to admit that there is no difference between the “empires” of nations that they so despise and the “unions” of nations they so adore. Both lead to the same thing: tyranny.

Day after day, Italian newspapers pullulate with deeply disturbing examples of the antics of Italy’s judges. But this past week has been a vintage one even by Italian standards.

First, a judge in the city of L’Aquila, where in April 2009 an earthquake killed an estimated 309 people, convicted seven staff from the government Commissione Grandi Rischi (Natural Disaster Commission), six of them scientists, of the manslaughter of 29 of the earthquake victims, jailing them for six years. Their crime? They told the people of L’Aquila in the days before the earthquake that such an earthquake was improbable. Why stop at the manslaughter of only 29 victims and not all 309? It is not hard to imagine where the application of such insane and terrifying logic might lead. Who now will dare even to be a weatherman in Italy for fear of what Italy’s judges will make of a false prediction?

On Friday, a Milan court convicted Silvio Berlusconi, AKA “Silvio il Magnifico,” of tax fraud and sentenced him to four years in jail, banned him from public office for five years, and ordered him to pay 10 million euros to the tax office. He too had been unable to prove his innocence. Ever since the 76-year-old media tycoon and three-time prime minister became a politician in 1994 to save Italy from the “ex”-Communist Party, Italy’s highly politicized magistrati (judges) have been on his back.

In Italy, there are up to three gradi, or trials, if either the defense or prosecution lodges an appeal. This is the fourth time Berlusconi has been convicted “in primo grado.” Justice in this country is unjustly slow and maddeningly byzantine. It has taken six years simply to reach the end of this first trial, which relates to crimes allegedly committed between 1995 and 1999. But even Silvio il Magnifico is not immortal and so he will probably be dead before its conclusion. But the damage to his reputation from this and all the other prosecutions brought against him has been massive and irreparable. 

He has been investigated and prosecuted down the years for practically everything except murder. But he has never spent a single day in jail. Few do in Italy, unless the sentence is greater than three years in jail—that is, few do after conviction and sentencing. Cattle trucks full of people get locked up before trial prior to even being charged with a crime while the magistrati work to gather evidence against them.

As Berlusconi told the media on Friday after the sentence: “This is the barbarity of an uncivilized country. We can’t go on like this. Democracy is finita. We must do something. Italy has become invivibile.”

There remains the notorious bunga bunga trial, which before it even got to court branded Berlusconi in the world’s eyes as a whoremonger and pedophile, leading to his resignation in November 2011.

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As ever in Italy, during the investigation before Berlusconi had even been charged, someone with access to the telephone intercepts and witness statements (the judges themselves?) leaked the spiciest details to the press, which published them day after day. Such trial “in piazza” destroys not just reputations but any chance of a fair trial.

The bunga bunga trial, in which he is charged with paying for sex with a minor, illustrates perfectly how rotten the Italian judicial system is. Both he and the girl, Karima El Mahroug—a Moroccan belly dancer known as “Rubi la Rubacuori” (Ruby the Heart-Stealer), who was 17 at the time she attended his regular parties—deny having sex together. There are no witnesses to the alleged sex. The only evidence to support the charge is that Berlusconi paid money to Mahroug. But Berlusconi is a very generous man who surrounds himself with young women to whom he gives money and presents all the time. So what? It is not illegal to give money to a girl who’s under 18. In Italy, the legal age of consent is 14 for “free” sex and 18 for “paid” sex. I somehow doubt that Silvio, however magnifico he is outside the bedroom, and even though Italian, can get it up any more—even if equipped once in the sack with a purpose-built pump and miniature crane while connected intravenously to a Viagra drip beside his bed. Silvio Berlusconi is 76 and has survived prostate cancer.

No foreign company, if it can possibly avoid it, sets up an office in Italy for fear not just of one of the civilized world’s highest tax rates but of falling into the Italian magistratura’s clutches.

The Italians should bring a class action, or rather a national action, against Italy’s magistratura not only for all the damage its judges have done to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product but for their massive daily violations of its citizens’ most basic human rights. For all the obvious reasons, they will have to bring such a legal action in a country other than Italy.

Francesco Schettino, the 52-year-old captain of the cruise liner Costa Concordia, began his pretrial hearing last week in the small Tuscan city of Grosseto.

The Costa Concordia capsized on the evening of Friday January 13th after hitting barely submerged rocks close to the tiny island of Giglio 10 miles off the Tuscan coast. Thirty-two of the 4,229 passengers and crew onboard died. Captain Schettino is accused of manslaughter, causing the shipwreck, and abandoning ship.

The Italian skipper had ordered his helmsman to steer the floating citadel close to the island “per fare l’inchino” (to take a bow) to the daughter of the headwaiter in the à la carte restaurant who lives on the island. He had then left the bridge to go to dinner with a blonde dancer from Moldova who is not his wife. After dinner, he returned to the bridge, female guest in tow, in time to take command of the vessel himself for the “inchino.”

Once disaster struck, Captain Schettino did not send a Mayday message for 45 minutes. Then, in true Italian style, he abandoned ship while there were several hundred people still onboard. His crew, the Italians among them at least, shoved passengers out of their way in the scrabble for the lifeboats.

He then blamed the disaster on everyone except himself and claimed that had it not been for his skill, thousands of lives would have been lost. In his hometown of Meta di Sorrento in the corrupt and Mafia-infested south, he enjoys the status of a wronged and wounded hero. 

The week before his first court hearing began in a theater because the courthouse in Grosseto is too small to accommodate the scrum of journalists and survivors, he even launched a lawsuit against his employers. He is—wait for it—claiming wrongful dismissal and back pay.

The prosecution told the court that Schettino could not take credit for the loss of so few lives. Schettino, who arrived at court wearing sunglasses and looking like an actor from The Sopranos, retorted that God had nothing to do with it: “Ma quale volontà di Dio? Meglio di lui ho fatto io.” (What will of God? I did better than him.)

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In my view, Captain Schettino, dubbed “Captain Coward,” is not getting a fair hearing. It remains unclear exactly whose fault it was that the Costa Concordia struck those rocks. Given the sophisticated technology at their disposal, why did no one on the bridge realize that those rocks were there? 

Captain Schettino says that it was thanks to his skill and what he did after the impact that the lives of nearly all those onboard were saved.

After the Costa Concordia hit those rocks, she remained afloat for around an hour before coming to rest on the seafloor just yards off the coast, less than a mile further on from the rocks she had hit.

It was only then, once the ship had beached, that Captain Schettino gave the order to abandon ship. And it was only then that the ship eventually capsized on her port side. Within 40 minutes of beaching however, all but 300 passengers and crew had been safely evacuated.

At the time of the disaster, an excellent shipping news Internet site—gcaptain.com—did a simulated reconstruction of what had happened based on the AIS data (Automatic Identification System)—the automatic open-channel tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services to identify and locate vessels.

According to this reconstruction, eleven minutes after the impact with rocks, the Costa Concordia came to a halt 500 meters off the coast with her bow pointing away from the island.

It took her 59 minutes to turn around and head back toward the island. She beached on the seafloor only 50 meters from land. If stationary and without power, how did she manage to turn around and nearly get to shore?

On the gcaptain site, the shipping experts said that the only way Captain Schettino could have done such a thing was by using the Costa Concordia’s three bow thrusters, which do not depend on the main engine room for power.

Photographs of the stricken Costa Concordia taken at the time by survivors from the shore clearly show that she capsized only after she had beached, and slowly at that. They show that the ship beached more or less upright and only then began to tilt. They also show that the ship began to tilt only after the lifeboats and life rafts had been launched—not before. And they show these life vessels in the dead-calm sea with people in them.

The charge is that Captain Schettino should have given the order to abandon ship far sooner, when the ship was well out to sea. Sure, he could have done that as soon as the ship had come to a halt. But the ship was afloat and not in danger of immediately capsizing. What caused the ship to capsize—but only slowly and after the life vessels had been launched—was the impact when she beached.

Captain Schettino abandoned ship before the last passengers had done so. But under international law, a captain does not necessarily have to be the last person to abandon ship. What counts is not where a captain is but what a captain does.

If the trial reveals that the will of God caused the Costa Concordia to drift back to shore rather than Captain Schettino’s bow thrusters, I am perfectly willing to eat my hat. 

Eric Hobsbawm

They played “The Internationale” at Wednesday’s funeral of Eric Hobsbawm, Britain’s “greatest historian.” No one took offense. Indeed, all felt uplifted. The mourners at the crematorium in Golders Green, London’s Jewish heartland, included Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who proclaimed Hobsbawm “an extraordinary historian” who “brought history out of the ivory tower and into people’s lives.”

Until his death at age 95 on October 1, Hobsbawm had remained a wide-eyed, barely repentant believer in the religion of world communism. Naturally, Britain and Europe’s most influential journalists and academics revered him. So on the day of his death, Britain’s BBC—the state broadcaster whose remit is to tell us the truth—interrupted everything to pay sickly sweet homage to the nation’s greatest communist.

Hobsbawm’s golden reputation is proof that communism did not die with the Soviet Union. It is also proof that if you defend communism, far from it being shameful, it remains laudable and even necessary—especially if you are a journalist or an academic keen to get ahead.

It’s indicative of who really calls the shots in Britain and Europe that to brand someone “a fascist” or “a Nazi” is an insult, but to call someone a “communist” is not, and that to deny the communist holocaust is allowed, but to deny the Nazi holocaust is not.

Can we imagine what the PC (post-communist/politically correct) people who command European culture would have had to say if at the funeral of an academic who was an unrepentant apologist of National Socialism they played the “Horst Wessel Song” as the flames devoured his corpse and the mourners felt uplifted? No politician would dare to attend. Arrests would be made.

How can killing six million Jews be more evil than killing 94 million people (including 65 million in China and 20 million in Soviet Russia)? If it is unacceptable to kill your racial enemy then surely it is also unacceptable to kill your class enemy, right?

Wrong, say the hordes of communist fellow travelers in the non-communist world, for this reason: Unlike the Nazi cause, the communist cause was justified because a property owner deserves to be eliminated, whereas a Jew does not. 

But no decent human being can justify what was done during the 20th century in communism’s name. 

Yet despite it all—despite the belated admissions about Soviet genocide after Stalin’s death in 1953, despite the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, et tout ça—despite all that and so much more, Britain’s greatest historian could see no evil.

The genocides were either mistakes, you see, or mistakes that occurred behind his back. However regrettable, such mistakes did not matter because the end justified the means. 

It is one thing to kill people in a war of survival as the Allies did; it’s quite another to kill them in cold blood as the communists did.

Unlike nearly everyone else, Britain’s “greatest” historian did not care because those genocides did not matter.

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Hobsbawm came to London at age 15 from Berlin in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. He soon joined the British Communist Party. At Cambridge University, he was a member of the notorious Apostles, a secret club whose membership in the 1930s was mainly communist. Several members at this time who later had jobs with access to British government secrets were eventually revealed to have been Soviet spies during the Cold War. These included Michael Straight, American speechwriter to Franklin D. Roosevelt and later publisher of The New Republic, who admitted spying for the Soviets to the American government in 1963.

Was Hobsbawm a communist spy as well? In 2007, he applied to see the files that MI5 kept on him. His request was rejected in 2009. To the press, he denied being a spy but mysteriously said that his request must have been turned down to protect the identities of those who had “snitched on me to the authorities.”

Either way, he did much more damage to the cause of liberty and democracy as a communist propagandist. In 1947, he was appointed a history lecturer at Birkbeck College in London, where he eventually became president. 

Countless other members of the European intelligentsia who had fallen for communism abandoned the faith back in the 1930s as the murderous and miserable reality of what it entailed began to emerge.

But Hobsbawm was unable or unwilling to accept the brutal and clinical repression of all left-wing groups in the Spanish Civil War which tried to remain free of Stalinist control, as had George Orwell who saw it firsthand as a volunteer and wrote about it in his 1938 book, Homage to Catalonia.

After World War II, Hobsbawm minimized the horrors that communist regimes perpetrated everywhere. He distorted and corrupted the facts. In his 1997 book On History, he wrote:

Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal, use of force was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.

Perhaps he meant that such systems were wanted by and not imposed on the public in those countries, which is untrue.

He simply could not get enough of the Italian Communist Party, which nearly made Italy become Western Europe’s first domino to fall in the 1970s. 

In his review of Hobsbawm’s 2002 memoir Interesting Times, British historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson cites this passage from Hobsbawm:

The Party…had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the lines’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it….We did what it ordered us to do….Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed….If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.

Yet this man was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1978, and in 1998 New Labour’s Tony Blair appointed Hobsbawm a Companion of Honour—one of the highest accolades for a British intellectual.

It is deeply disturbing that so many other influential people still not only take such a man seriously, they shower him with adulation. It makes me feel that there is one class war that really must be fought: The one to eliminate the chattering classes. 

In Italy—which is the next eurozone domino to fall after Spain, Greece, and Portugal—things are bad and getting worse.

The mood here is one of black pessimism and utter contempt for politicians. Italians simmer with anger, but no one has a viable solution to the problem. How could they? Italy is a prisoner of the euro. There is no solution.

So the Italians cling to the tangible stuff they can get their heads around—and the more easily visible targets.

One colorful detail can speak louder than a thousand statistics. In Italy, it was a toga party. 

When photographs were published the other day by the online magazine Dagospia of politicians at a lavish and vulgar toga party paid for with taxpayers’ money, it caused a huge scandal even in Italy, which has surely seen every scandal known to mankind.

In these times of economic and existential crisis, Italians regard politicians throwing such a party as an utter disgrace.

The Italians, like the other Mediterranean peoples whose tragedy it is to possess the euro, are forced to endure austerity, which in reality just means more and more taxes and fewer and fewer jobs. Worse, such austerity is futile because it does not tackle the real problem: the crippling public debt. To solve that would require fiscal (therefore political) union of the 17 countries in the eurozone, which none will ever accept—or otherwise penury (not just austerity), which would provoke revolution.

So while Italians, like everyone else in the eurozone, are forced by their politicians to make all these useless sacrifices in the name of the terminally ill euro, those same politicians make absolutely no sacrifices whatsoever.

The toga party was held in 2010 and cost a paltry 30,000 euro, but that has not mattered. Italians see it as emblematic of political decadence. Like Nero, Italy’s politicians fiddle while Rome burns.

The party was held in the spectacular surroundings of the Foro Italico, the fascist-built marble Olympic sports stadium opened by Benito Mussolini in 1932, which is lined with enormous statues of athletes in the classical style. 

The theme of the toga party was “The Return of Ulysses,” which has nothing to do with ancient Rome. The published photographs show bunches of grapes dangling into the mouths of scantily clad women and so on. But what made the wheel fly off was one photo of two male guests in togas wearing pig-face masks. In Italy, the word “maiale” (pig) has several connotations, including “sex maniac” and “politician with his snout in the trough.”

The other detail that caused outrage was what Franco Fiorito, the obese capogruppo (leader) of the party that governs the Lazio region, ate that night: Two huge plates of fettucine con i funghi porcini and four bistecche (steaks). But he turned down the pudding, saying: “I just can’t, I’m so sorry, I have to be careful alla glycemia (blood-sugar levels).” This was odd because earlier in the evening, Fiorito, whose nickname is “Batman” and who weighs nearly 400 pounds, had been spotted demolishing the contents of a box containing 24 baci perugini (Perugian chocolate kisses).

The toga-party revelations prompted the media to turn the spotlight on expenditure in Lazio and other regions, especially the wages and extras trousered by regional councilors.

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In the case of Fiorito, according to figures compiled by the Italian news agency ANSA, this means a basic net monthly regional councilor’s salary of 8,100 euro, plus 8,000 euro a month net as capogruppo of his party, plus 8,000 euro a month net as presidente of the regional budget committee. Total: 24,100 euro a month net ($30,973). Add to this his expenses allowance: 7,190 euro a month. So by my reckoning, Signor Batman gets 375,480 euro a year ($482,567).

But it does not even end here. 

According to those same ANSA figures, he also gets 21,000 euro a month net to administer the taxpayer money that his party receives.

In total, the political parties to which the 71 Lazio regional councilors belong (of which Batman’s right-wing party forms the majority) received from the taxpayers in 2011 “for the functioning” of their party groups a total of 8,900,000 million euro—roughly $11.4 million.

And it is all perfectly legal, though what the parties do with all that taxpayer money may or may not be. So as a result of a toga party Fiorito, like so many Italian politicians before him, is now under investigation for all the possible crimes related to that money. He has resigned his post as capogruppo.

The presidente of Lazio, Renata Polverini, was extremely reluctant to resign because, hey man, where’s the crime? She was also a guest at the toga party, though dressed as a modern Roman rather than an ancient one. At a press conference last Monday she said that the vast sums the parties received were spent “per senso dello Stato” (out of duty to the state) and “per rispetto dei cittadini” (out of respect for the citizens)! She has now resigned. Her predecessor Piero Marrazzo also resigned in 2009: A married man with children, he was secretly filmed semi-naked in stockings and suspenders next to a heap of cocaine in a Brazilian transsexual’s Rome apartment. 

Right-wing, left-wing: It makes little difference. Politicians everywhere in Italy have their snouts in the trough, not just Batman and his mates down in Rome, and not just at the regional level.

The average net monthly wage in Italy is only 1,300 euro, so it is easy to see why Italians are so contemptuous of their politicians.

Italian politicians are the highest paid in Europe and probably in the Western world. They are also among the most corrupt. So why are they so corrupt if they are paid so well? 

The answer is simple enough: Italian politicians are corrupt because they are Italians. But why are Italians so corrupt?

The Italians answer this question in two ways. “Our politicians are corrupt,” they insist, “but we are not.” Such a distinction, of course, is unsustainable. An Italian politician, no two ways about it, is an Italian. Secondly, the Italians say: “Tutto il mondo è paese.” (All the world is the same town.) In other words, people are corrupt everywhere. So I ask: “So how come there’s so much more corruption in Italy?” And they retort: “People in other countries are just più furbi (more cunning) and don’t get caught.” 

I do not believe that, either. So my view is this: Unfortunately, a country—especially a democratic one—gets the politicians it deserves.

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

One of the reasons the West is in such deep trouble is that it has allowed “rights” to kill off what’s “right,” as in “that which is right.” 

Rights are used to justify a whole series of wrongs, from the declaration of unwise or unjust wars to the condemnation of smokers to a life on the streets. 

Rights do not merely kill other people’s liberty; they kill other people.

Rights conflict all the time. Some are more sacred than others, so someone must decide which are more sacred. The case of the Duchess of Cambridge’s topless photographs illustrates this. She has the right to privacy and the press to freedom of expression. Whose right wins?

Your right to this, that, or the other has become sacred, regardless of whether it is right and quite often when it is plain wrong, and regardless of the cost and damage to me. 

But the dominant view in the West that rights—nowadays known as “human rights”—are each human being’s inherent, universal, and inviolable private property, is nonsense. 

Rights did not even exist in Europe before the Renaissance, and they still do not exist in much of the world. What did exist was objective “right” (ius) and “by right” (de iure).

Yet the history of Europe and America, indeed of the entire planet, might have been very different had Franciscan monks of the Order of Friars Minor won their titanic struggle in the 14th century to deny the existence of rights in particular with Pope John XXII who was French and insisted—in the cause not of liberty but of avarice—that rights do exist.

The leader of the rebel friars during much of the struggle in the first half of the century was the scholar Michele da Cesena (Michael from Cesena), named after the pretty little Italian city where he was born. 

Much of the drama was played out not in Rome, nor even Italy, but in the south of France at Avignon, where from 1309-1376 the seven popes of the Avignon papacy resided and from 1378-1423 two of numerous antipopes.

The Franciscan order, founded by Saint Francis of Assisi in 1209, lived according to the doctrine of apostolic poverty based on the belief that Christ and the apostles possessed nothing. Franciscan monks could not “possess,” personally or collectively, either property or money. But they “had,” or had “use” of, much property and money nonetheless.

Yet how is it possible to “have” or “use” something but not “possess” it, and what does that word “possess” really mean? 

The labyrinthine debate that this question provoked was made more poignant because the Catholic Church had become bloated by immense wealth and riddled with endemic corruption. Many believed that Satan had conquered it in Avignon.

The debate led to the suppression for a time of the Order of Friars Minor and the excommunication and condemnation of many Franciscans as heretics. Some were burned at the stake.

But as a result of this theological investigation into the nature of property by 14th-century Catholic scholars, aided by the recent rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman texts, the first notions of subjective rights as the possessions of individuals emerged.

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They were not called “rights” at this stage. The key words were the Latin “dominium” (mastery) and “ius,” which gave “dominium” legal force. The Italian translation of “ius” was “diritto,” which means “right,” not “a right,” and still today is the Italian word for “law.”

In the 13th century, popes had tried their best to fudge the issue by agreeing to vest Franciscans’ property in the Holy See and distinguish between “possession” and “use” and then by banning discussion of it altogether. But the Avignon Pope John XXII (1316-1334) decided to resurrect it in spades, for reasons that remain obscure, perhaps simply because he was French. 

In March 1322, he removed the ban on discussion and commissioned scholars to investigate. These duly accused the Franciscans of heresy. Their reasoning was flaky: If the Franciscan doctrine of apostolic poverty was correct, it implied that the Catholic Church could not have possessions either, which was unthinkable.

Many Franciscans, led by Michele da Cesena, refused to buckle. In May 1322, they met in Perugia, now known as the city where in 2011 Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” Knox from Seattle was acquitted on appeal of her conviction for the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher. The Franciscans declared in a manifesto: 

To say or assert that Christ, in showing the way of perfection, and the Apostles, in following that way and setting an example to others who wished to lead the perfect life, possessed nothing either severally or in common…we corporately and unanimously declare to be not heretical, but true and Catholic.

But Pope John XXII simply retorted that it was “ridiculous” to pretend “every egg and piece of bread given to and eaten” by the Franciscans did not belong to them. Even when they used something they did so, he said, either justly or unjustly, and if justly “by right” (de iure). 

In November 1322, he issued a papal bull condemning as heretical the doctrine that Christ and the apostles had no possessions. He canceled the arrangement by which Franciscan property was vested in the Holy See, thus forcing them to accept it as their possession.

The controversy was not over. Ironically, the Franciscans now found themselves arguing that rights did exist: the right of a subject (a friar) to refuse a right imposed on him by a tyrant (the pope). It was William of Ockham, a Franciscan scholar that Michele da Cesena invited to help the rebel cause, who came up with that one. Pope John XXII summoned both to Avignon and put them under house arrest, but they and other friars escaped in the night soon afterward and fled to Italy by boat. They were branded heretics, and the Franciscans lost in the end.

The existence of natural, inalienable, and inviolable rights is denied both on the right and the left. For Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Burke, rights arise from the actions of government or evolve from tradition. For Karl Marx, who wanted to abolish private property, they were bourgeois inventions that would be unnecessary in a communist society. For Friedrich Nietzsche, they were creations of the weak to shackle the strong and destroy liberty.

No right, not even to property or life, is inviolable as Webster’s defines it—“not capable of being broken or violated.” 

So rights were invented like Poulet Marengo in 1800 on the evening of Napoléon Bonaparte’s victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo which secured him Italy when his chef had to concoct something special in a hurry but had only the meager results of a local forage to work with.

Rights were not discovered, as was that semi-aquatic, beaver-tailed, egg-laying, freshwater mammal with venomous claws on its webbed feet that detects its prey by means of electroreceptors. I refer to the duck-billed platypus, first spotted splashing about the streams of eastern Australia by explorers in 1798. They thought it was an elaborate fraud, a man-made invention no less—just like a human right.

The bad thing about “what is right,” they say, is that it is prone to degenerate into “might is right” and tyranny. 

The great thing about rights, they say, is that they take the tyrant out of the equation. But they don’t, and those who allege such things are simply not right.

In continental Europe, S&M seems to be a northern Teutonic phenomenon rather than a southern Latin one. The Germans, for example, are dead keen on it.

Given that Italy invented fascism, you might have thought that the Italians were also keen. For as Sylvia Plath wrote in the poem “Daddy” a few months before her suicide in February 1963: “Every woman adores a Fascist.” 

Unless I am totally missing something, you would be wrong, especially as it regards Italian women. I can imagine one or two Italian women I know in the role of sadistic dominatrix, dressed in black leather, masked, and equipped with whips and handcuffs.

But few, if any, Italian women spring to my mind as willing to play the role of sex slave as the virginal college student Anastasia Steele does in Seattle with the rich, handsome, cultured, and older Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, whose millions of readers around the world are nearly all women.

I have read a number of the articles written by women in the English-speaking world about the trilogy. The ones that struck me were those saying that the reason for its success is not that women are as keen on pornography as men, or that they want men to tie them up and inflict physical pain on them.

No. The articles I found most intriguing were those saying that the trilogy is an allegory that has touched a chord in the female zeitgeist: Women want a man who protects them from the world—an old-fashioned man.

This is good news for male chauvinists such as myself who have yet to be deconstructed, let alone reconstructed, and probably that is why such articles interested me. But it is bad news for feminism’s succubi and all their male victims.

If that’s the true reason behind the book’s success, this means that women do not yearn for liberation if liberation means trying to have a career and be a mother at the same time. They apparently do not want such freedoms because frankly they are a pain in the ass. They have realized that most work sucks. And they are not wrong.

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On the back of all of this Fifty Shades fever, the Italian media are trying hard to come up with homegrown headlines that connect Italy to the world of sadomasochism.

The best one I have spotted so far was about a female shop assistant in Padua who signed a contract in 2004 with an older man similar to the one who figures so prominently in Fifty Shades of Grey in which she agreed to be his sex slave. 

Under the contract, “la schiava” (the slave) would obey “il padrone” (the master) and satisfy whatever he desired. She would renounce her right to all pleasure, comfort, and gratification unless it was with his consent.

In 2006, the couple got married but then in 2011 the woman, now 32, said, “Basta!” Not only is she seeking to divorce her husband but also to put him on trial for all the violence he inflicted on her. The husband, now 41, opposes the divorce and denies the violence was a crime.

In English—British English at any rate—the word “c—t” is used as a particularly offensive insult, rooted presumably in hatred of women. In Italy, its equivalent—“figa”—is a high compliment. “Che bella figa che sei! (What a beautiful c—t you are!)” say Italian men to the women they fancy. Italian men may well be womanizers, but they are not misogynists. They simply adore women! Something to do with their mothers, no doubt.