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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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?
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.)
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>
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.
]]>