Back from a trip to Europe, I sketch down a few notes and observations. They are personal, and the patient reader may object to some of my conclusions. But this is, of course, inherent to the general elusiveness of truth.
Given the anecdotal nature of my observations, I describe the anecdotal causes that inspired the trip. Which relate to the night of the last Christmas Eve, a time of year when I easily drift into a somber Dickensian mood, followed by a session of sweet, silent thought, when I summon up remembrance of things past (1). And when, from across the valleys of years, carved by the inaudible and noiseless foot of time (2), long lost memories unexpectedly return.
For memory is the library of time, but its index is somewhat jumbled. The library contains everything: episodes, people, events, actions, reactions, recordings of sounds, taste, tastings and images – but they cannot be recalled at will. However, in certain conditions they spontaneously return, from across the valley of time, unexpected and still fresh after so many years.
When in Europe it’s already Christmas Day, in Oregon it’s still the night of Christmas Eve. And under the influence of unsolicited sudden memories of my high-school years, I wrote them down as short mnemonic sketches, and sent them to a high-school friend with whom I had remained in touch.
I like to think that my message prompted my friend to contact other surviving high-school companions. In turn, this led to their first reunion, last January and then to a second, which I just attended.
I should add that, while in America high-school reunions are an industry, it’s not so in Europe, or at least not in Genova, Italy, where my high-school was, still is, and is called a Classical Lyceum.
And where the ‘classical’ reflects my having studied Latin for eight years and Greek for five, only to discover that prospective employers were remarkably indifferent and uninterested in dead languages. Necessity being the mother of many decisions, I opted for an engineering degree, as a more reliable path to employment and consequent, concurrent sustenance.But I digress. I also considered the trip as an occasion for randomly testing the accuracy of news gathered at home from various sources, other than the unreliable mainstream media.. There is no order in my observations – they follow a list of short notes, as I moved from place to place, or meditated from time to time.
Noticeable at first, in Italy, was the general lack of Italian children accompanying their parents in the streets of towns and cities, including weekends. But even in historic, small provincial towns, the presence of migrant children was noticeable, along with Muslim women, their head in a ‘hijab’, their body in an ‘abaya,’ and their children in tow.
In Genova, a huge African woman in her colorful bo-boo, a small child strapped to her back and an enormous vertical pile-of-something on her head, slowly ambled across the central square, the heart of the city. By now the locals must find the sight unremarkable, for I appeared to be the only one paying attention, and covertly attempting to get a snapshot.
Nizza Monferrato is a historic town, where my cousin works and lives with his family. Monferrato is an area within the region of Piedmont and officially part of Unesco’s World Heritage sites. In 961 AD the Monferrato was made a ‘margravate’ of the Sacred Roman Empire by Emperor Otto I. During 1000 years it was governed by a succession of Marquesses, Dukes and Kings, who intermarried with royal or ruling families in Italy, Europe and even the Byzantine empire.
There are several versions on the etymology of ‘Monferrato.’ Perhaps the most unlikely but colorful has Aleram, the first Marquess of Monferrat, needing a hammer to shoe a horse. Not finding one he used a brick (mon in the local Piedmontese dialect), as a substitute for an iron hammer. The horse was shod (‘ferratus’ in Latin), hence the name Monfrà yielding Monferrat and then Monferrato.
It’s a land of castles, old churches, abbeys, medieval villages, truffles, superb cuisine, grapes and famous wines.
In the town of Alba, the very smart Ferrero family focused their interest on a relatively old Piedmontese snack, made of hazelnuts and chocolate, and originally manufactured even by small one-man shops selling milk and milk products. The Ferreros converted the snack into a worldwide popular brand, known as ‘Nutella,’ thus joining the register of large multinational companies and operators.
My cousin runs a successful accounting firm, founded by his grandmother 60 years ago. He manages the payroll of local firms and farms, as the Italian labor laws are a labyrinth of requirements, where only seasoned and trained experts can find and follow the thread of compliance.
He said that the industrial base of the area is gradually disappearing, due to competition from countries with cheap labor. But fertile agricultural soil, the earth nurturing the famous local vines and grapes, cannot as yet be removed to lands where labor is cheap. Consequently cheap labor has moved to the land of the Monferrato. Migrants from Tunisia, Morocco and Eastern Europe have replaced Italian farm workers.
Average Italians cannot survive on ever lower wages, but migrants can, due to tax-payer funded subsidies. A situation that does not prevent the mainstream media from saying that “migrants perform work that the Italians refuse to do.”
My cousin’s 5-year old son attends a local pre-school, where Italian children are already a minority. The same applies to the other schools in town – a challenge for teachers who must cope with children and students speaking a host of non-European languages.
But the social engineers routinely inject migrants, unemployed or unemployable, into small towns. Of course, the transported new inhabitants are fed, housed and even stipended at public expense. I found quite a few Africans leisurely cycling on country or mountain roads, in excellent shape and seemingly in excellent health.
Also noticeable, and responding to the ‘need for integration,’ a good number of mixed couples – all with an African male and an Italian wife or companion. Clear evidence that the threatening admonition by the French crypto-Jewish Sarkozy to ‘miscegenate or else’ had some effect – as did the famous declaration by the spectral Barbara Specter that “Jews will be resented because they are at the heart of European integration” – which is but new-speak for miscegenation.
This massive racial displacement and substitution continues, while the corporate media angrily howls, whenever an objection is raised at the landing of yet another boat of illegal African migrants. Women on board are pregnant – says the media. Hence those who object to the landings show callousness and racism.
While in Italy, I read a headline, on a major daily, about a directive from the Chief Prosecutor of Milan, instructing the police NOT to arrest pregnant migrant women caught stealing. Why? “Because they would be immediately released, anyway.”
As readers know and I hinted above, this is the unfolding of a massive project of social engineering, planned and set in motion by we know who, though he who says so is branded as a “conspiracy theorist.”
In Italy, welcoming or unwelcoming the illegal migrants’ invasion has turned into a substitute for political labeling. The welcoming are non-communist communists and non-socialist socialists. The unwelcoming are Nazis, racists and, of course, antisemitic.
A “non-communist communist” is neither a paradox nor an oxymoron. After the 1960s revolution, and inspired by the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism, the communists in parliament decided that it was time to ‘open’ to the plutocratic elite, in exchange for a piece of the pie and a place at the trough.
Consequently, labor laws set in place after WW2, and providing a viable protection for workers at large, were dumped, and in came the ‘new economy.’The neo-liberal fairy tale began to spread its contagion worldwide in the early 1970s, featuring the diabolical Kissinger and his equally diabolical “Chicago Boys” (Milton Friedman et al.)
To start, it proved successful for removing Salvador Allende from Chile. Then the tale became interwoven with the development of the personal computer and the dawn of the “information age.” The extraordinary enrichment of some protagonists of the computer industry, who, from a modest garage where they assembled their new devices, had reached the summit of wealth, fostered some new urban legends. Legends that were useful to spread the whopping falsehood that limitless private profit, tied to the logics of the market, implies the triumph of meritocracy.
Examples are worth a thousand speeches, the more so if the official narrative collides with the apparent contradiction between merit and the accumulation of capital. Nevertheless, two generations were led to believe that people of condition so modest as to begin their ascent from a cramped home garage, have, through their sole merit, climbed the social pyramid, reaching the top rung of the ladder, within sight of God.
This, again, is a whopping lie. The protagonists of those remarkable exploits could devote themselves to computers because they had their backs covered by their families, sometimes multi-millionaire or at worst very wealthy.
Without in any way questioning their merit or resizing their achievements, Bill Gates is the son of a wealthy lawyer, in turn the son of wealthy banker. His mother, Mary Maxwell, was an executive on the board of directors of First Interstate Bank. After founding a number of companies along with the more skilled Paul Allen, Gates purchased from Tim Paterson – for 50 k$ – the rights to use the DOS operating system and resold it to IBM. In turn, DOS had been copied from Gary Kindall, who developed the first high-level programming language for micro-computers, called PLM.
Steve Jobs was the son of a wealthy family. This enabled him to drop out from college after a semester and to tinker with his computer-skilled friend Steve Wozniak, whose father was head engineer at Lockheed, giving Jobs and Wozniak further financial support and connections.
In my humble case, the company I founded from literally nothing, developed the first color Macintosh, about one year before Apple came out with the Mac II. I claim no merit, it was the idea of a brilliant engineer. The system was slow – many new chips and processors were still to come – but it worked. When we showed it at Comdex in Las Vegas, we generated significant interest and a few sales. But when we contacted Apple, we didn’t even receive a reply. We were the proverbial ‘nothing’.
Again, the point is not to diminish the merit of well-established legendary characters, but to show that the obviously positive precondition of having important contacts and not worrying about money, or about financial and elemental survival, significantly alters the landscape of prospects.
Still, the narrative is (was) seductive and usable by the social engineers as the founding myth of the “thought-unique,” designed to promote and launch policies leading to massive inequality, and to block the development of what is (was) generally called social progress.
In writing a book titled “The Anxieties of Affluence”, sociologist Rachel Sherman interviewed 50 among the wealthiest families in New York. They all justified their incredible privileges and attributed their massive wealth to “meritocracy” and “hard work” – something, hard work that is – which they don’t even know what it is.
For merit has a meaning only in a strongly egalitarian society. In a strongly unequal society, meritocracy is a euphemism for the power of the strongest.
Back in Italy, the social engineers – including the non-communist communists mentioned above – launched the myth of entrepreneurship – based on the Italian rendering of the slogan, “From rags to reaches.” In turn, jobs that earlier had some protection became independent one-man enterprises. Thus, for example, a pizza delivery boy becomes the owner and director of the “Food Handling and Delivery Services” company, etc.
Outside the city of Asti, I had lunch in a restaurant called “Add a bit more salt” (Aggiungi un po’ di sale). The owner accommodated 3 other customers at my table, and I took the occasion to ask them if they could offer a dispassionate view of current life in Italy. One was a wines representative, the other an engineer testing the octane levels of refinery fuel, the third an agent of a long-term car-rental agency. The first two quickly drifted into the irrelevant. The third said that he was really concerned that his son will have to leave Italy to find (living wage) employment – a remark I heard repeated by others during the trip.
Which means that young people either leave the country or, if they remain, they tend not to have children because they cannot afford maintaining a family.
In the meantime, the social engineers and their minions have popularized the buzzword or the notion that migrants are ‘resources.’
In Italy, the high-school final exams, opening the path to university, are handled by a panel of instructors selected from a totally different district. This to avoid the positive or negative bias that some teachers acquire towards the students during the years.
The head of one such high-school panel, a day before the examinations, happened to post an ironic tweet online showing a criminal migrant with the caption, “Here is another ‘resource.’” He was promptly fired from his post.
The anecdote illustrates at what minute level social engineering and its related censorship operate. In essence, criticism of migrants and/or of LGBT’s excesses equates, in consequences, to criticism of the Zionists.
How can a relatively small nation, compared to, say, the US, handle an influx of illegal, poor and prolific migrants, who require free food, lodging, education, health care and stipend? After all, nations, like individuals, rely on a balance of income and outcome to administer the material requirements of life. If, say, a family of four, is suddenly required to support an ever increasing number of individuals needing everything, how will they cope?
It is a question that makes sense to most, but apparently not the social engineers behind the European-civilization-displacement project. Or rather, it does, but asking it is a sign of racism, given the mental conditioning the public has been subjected-to for at least 4 generations. In the meantime, the most expedient way to pay for the non-productive human load is to increase indirect taxes, which affect the least advantaged, and to further reduce social services and general citizens’ rights.
On the other hand, during a Sunday there was held in Turin a massive LGBT parade, with disgusting transvestites and drag-queens parading in the main historical square of the city – with ample coverage given by the mainstream media and television. Zionists are at the forefront of the promotion of LBGT rights, same sex marriages and sodomy at large – by their own admission.
The Catholic Church, which formerly operated as defense against the penetration of Zionism into the fabric of society, has been wholly Judaized. Interestingly, a faint voice was recently heard from Benedict XVI, the pope who resigned – officially for old age, unofficially because he could not stem the tsunami of sodomy flooding the Catholic Church, as readers well know.
In an article on a Catholic Magazine on the subject of mass-migration, Benedict XVI wrote that migrants ‘should have the right to live in the country where they were born.’ The message was addressed to those who have ears and still wish to use them.
For the non-communist communists, who control the mainstream media, the cause of African and Muslim migration is Europe’s history of “colonialism.” This is the transatlantic counterpart of “slavery” as the cause of alleged “discrimination” against African Americans. Colonialism is also the reason why – in Europe – Africans and Muslims should be ‘integrated,’ or actually replace Europeans to atone for Europe’s sins.
In the US, however, apart from frequent cases of reverse-discrimination, historical “slavery” is also allegedly responsible for 78% of African American births occurring out of wedlock. Which, in turn, creates a self-reinforcing situation of fatherless families, with mothers and offspring on welfare, unable to leave the cycle, leading to the consequences we all are aware of.At the same time, Louis Farrakhan, a leader who has attempted with some success to inspire pride of ethnicity as a means to inspire a collective sense of self-worth and a constructive desire for betterment, is ostracized, banned, pilloried and condemned as a black Nazi. The ‘Nazi’ element refers, among other things, to his organization having published an instructive 3-volume study detailing, from ample and un-doctored archive documentation, the role of the chosen people in the American slave trade and industry.
During my trip, I could not miss visiting at least one Cistercian Abbey – in the instance, the beautiful Abbey of Staffarda, located at the foot of the hills below the majestic mountains that form the South-Western Alps.
There is a connection between the Cistercian and Benedictine Abbeys, and the absurd notion that racism is the true obstacle to integration.
Cistercians and Benedictines were great constructors and farmers. Where they operated, they built magnificent Romanesque and Gothic architectural jewels. Equally, they transformed the surrounding lands, making them fertile and sources of life and sustenance for the community of men.
For over 1500 years “Ora et labora” (Pray and Work) have been words expressing the spirit that kindled the development of the European civilization. Monasteries have inspired a strong and profound faith. The monks learned how to best employ the scientific knowledge they acquired, so as to convert bogs into arable lands and rocks into homes. They did it through a careful observation of nature and her environment, to which they added the study and practice of ancient medical knowledge, philosophy and astronomy.
Staffarda, like other abbeys, represents the ‘summa’ of an artistic, cultural, theological, philosophical and human patrimony that equally reflected itself in other spheres of life.
In the Middle Ages, Cistercians and Benedictines had to develop and test their skills in dealing with the necessities concerning the management of the territory, land surveying, topography, the study of waters, the handling of goods and money, the building of functional structures and irrigation canals. And all aimed at linking the human with the divine and theological experience.
Some historians actually connect the traditional acknowledged work-discipline and skills of the Germans in manufacturing, design and innovation, to the large numbers of abbeys throughout the land, which helped inspire what we can broadly call the spirit of patient labor. In Germany, but also in other European countries, wherever abbeys grew and flourished.
Therefore Europeans, as an ethnic group, carry within themselves the spirit and the distillate of the work of centuries. For not everything that exists we can touch. The notion that all races are ‘equal’ is questionable. And the coarse and crass imposition of ‘integration’ and ‘miscegenation,’ as the penalty to pay for the ‘colonialism’ of earlier Europeans, is an aberrant, malignant and malicious notion, floated by the social engineers bent upon the destruction of the goy.
Not far from the Abbey of Staffarda, a mountain river creates an opening, a small lake where the water acquires the color of the rocks it runs over. A few white geese leisurely lingered under the sun. The dazzling whiteness of the birds, heightened by the sunshine, composed a picture, which, like that of Wordsworth’s daffodils, the inward memory can re-create, but no painter could represent.
During the trip, I was not totally cut off from the news from across the Atlantic, including the vulgar representation of Venezuela by the Trump Cartel, let alone the related lies, even larger than Trump himself. The Cartel’s pronouncements show that their passions are under little restraint from law, less from respect for decency, and none from public opinion. By their unwarranted arrogance and braggadocio, Trump’s compadres are happily unaware that it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass (3) – convinced as they are that their wealth, pride or shameless ignorance produces the desired feeling of awe in the vulgar. They endeavor, by their fury, to fright away contempt from before them, when they know it must follow them behind.
I also happened to watch an interview, on Venezuelan television, with General Jacinto Perez Arcai, retired head of the Venezuelan Armed Forces. He said, among other things, that Hugo Chavez was assassinated, because the nature of his deadly disease is still unknown to this day. According to Arcai, who inspires credibility by his demeanor and nobility of address, the killer was one of Chavez’ bodyguards, called Leamsy Salazar.
Salazar was born in 1974 to a large family living in a slum district of Caracas. A. He was a slightly below-average student at the Naval Academy. But in 1999 Salazar became a presidential honor guard. Tito Rincón Bravo, Venezuela’s minister of defense and father of Leamsy’s first wife, was instrumental in the appointment – see the earlier section in these notes about the power of connections.
Not long after Chavez’ death, Salazar married again and flew with his new wife to the Dominican Republic, – and from there to Spain. From Spain, a special plane, belonging to the Drug Enforcement Agency, as a cover for the CIA, flew Salazar to the US. Ever since, the Salazars live in the US under federal protection.
General Arcai gave an interesting definition of Hugo Chavez. “He is the sword of Cervantes, but with auctoritas” (Es la espada de Cervantes, con auctoritas). Where the Latin term ‘auctoritas,’ better carries the meaning of legitimate, distinctive and instinctive leadership, as opposed to the generic ‘authority’ we are familiar with.
Given that, allegedly but with some evidence, the Mossad has just sent a contingent to Colombia to assist in the efforts across the border to assassinate Maduro, I cannot help suspecting that Israel’s hatred of Venezuela stems from Chavez’ pronouncement about Israel. When, alone among all world leaders, Chavez had the courage to say, on world television, that “Israel es un pays de mierda.” Considering that the Old Testament is an orgy of blood, resentment and revenge, and that the Talmud is worse, it’s easy to understand Israel’s hatred for Chavez and his legacy.
On the last leg of my visit, I travelled from Piedmont to Ventimiglia, the western-most outpost of the Italian Riviera, bordering France. To do so, I crossed an enclave around the little town of Tende, lost to the French after WW2, thanks to Mussolini. That Tende is now a totally French town is also proven by the presence of a fantastic French pastry shop, featuring the unique, delicious, irresistible and inimitable ‘millefeuilles,’ as well as a French cheese shop, bound to excite the most dormant appetite. A tempting gathering of dainty bits, that make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits (4).
To sit down and enjoy my millefeuille I walked to the little train station of Tende. The railway connecting Nice and Ventimiglia with Piedmont, built in the early 1900, is a miracle of acrobatic architecture, and well worth the rail trip. It bores through tunnels built on the brink of precipices and the open sections stand on the edge of abysses.
The 2-van train, of which one was also the diesel electric locomotive, was lingering at the station. A passenger had alighted to smoke a cigarette. He approached me and said in French,
“I have been a soldier for over 20 years and now the government maintains me.”
Good for you – I replied.
I deserved it –he continued
I am sure you did – I said.
That ended our short exchange, for the stationmaster, his green palette in hand, invited the retired soldier to get back on the departing train.
I know that in Italy, on the other side of the Tende Pass, few, or probably none would ever make a similar proud statement or observation, let alone to a stranger. On the other hand… Italy never had a Napoleon. Which shows, once more, the lingering presence of the past, the weight of time on men and nations, and the long tail of history.
References:
*** (1) Sonnet #30
*** (2), (3) All’s Well That Ends Well
*** (4) Love’s Labours Lost