Coronavirus Exposes Open Ports to Africa Danger

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas and is our second post on the subject, here's the first on Coronavirus and Italy.

Italian physician and psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi rightly described as paradoxical Italy's current policy of "closed schools and open ports", letting in migrants at such a time of emergency for Coronavirus (whose official name, which initially and temporarily was 2019-nCoV, has from early February become Sars-CoV-2, also adopted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), while the disease it causes is called COVID-19).

If we don't close our borders others close theirs, Dr Meluzzi added.

This happened, in fact, and China itself was among the countries isolating Italy.

Dr Meluzzi was making correct predictions as early as 31 January, when he said in an interview:

"My feeling is that the Italian situation is already totally out of control".

He added that he considered with great concern the hypothesis of the spread of Coronavirus on the African continent:

"When the virus arrives in Africa, where countries do not have adequate health coverage to deal with the epidemic, this could spread in a potentially catastrophic way".

He referred to the great number of Chinese workers and companies in Africa, "which create a large flow of trade with China, especially with the industrial area from which the epidemic originated", concluding: "I dare not imagine what could happen in Africa."

From China to Europe via Africa

The African "bomb" became a later alarm about Coronavirus and its further spread in the world.

There are two factors that greatly elevate the potential risk of contagion: one is the thriving trade relations between China and Africa, the other is the uncontrolled immigration that from Africa regularly arrives in European countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, particularly Italy.

Let's be frank: when we say "uncontrolled", it is very literal. We know nothing of many, indeed probably the great majority, of people landing on our shores from smugglers' boats and NGO ships, since they have no documents or false documents. In a very high number of cases we don't even know their name, let alone their past history, criminal record and health status. The newspaper Il Giornale wrote:

Italy hosts immigrants at its own expense without having the slightest idea who they are. To know their stories, we rely on the stories given by them in front of the various commissions.

For their personal identities, we are satisfied with having them put their name and surname in writing the moment they disembark...

In Italy, in fact, thousands of people arrive who can carry with them cell phones but never a shred of an identification document.

Hardly Any of the Arrivals Are Refugees

There have been cases of fake refugees who disclosed to the media that they paid thousands of euros to obtain ways to claim asylum status.

For a long time Italy has been literally overwhelmed by would-be asylum seekers and migrants. A Nigerian interpreter and "cultural mediator", calling himself Uchenna, has explained how it works:

To judge asylum seekers there should be 4 people for each commission [called 'territorial commission'], who include representatives for the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), Italian police and local authorities. Now, there are only 1 or 2 left to follow the interview because there are several organisational problems... so many requests arrive that if they were all present at each interview, it would never end. The system is practically collapsing.

This means that in some cases the waiting times for obtaining the opinion of the commission can be extremely long. Meanwhile, Italy hosts many immigrants at its own expense, who will then never obtain refugee status. And they are a very high number. Says Uchenna: "The majority of those who are arriving on the Italian coast from Nigeria certainly do not run away from dangers: they are looking for money and success to be able to return home one day and strut the wealth achieved".

He explained that to do this, therefore, many times they invent stories of suffering and persecutions that they have never undergone: "I often hear the same identical story told by different immigrants".

Asked why everyone coming to Italy on the migrants' boats is undocumented, the interpreter answered: "Those who land in Italy say they never had a document or lost it in Libya. In Nigeria, falsifying documents and changing identity several times is normal. They do the same during recognition in Lampedusa".

But in Italy, he says, the 'poor thing' rule applies, explaining: "In the commissions we hear them say of every tale: 'Oh, what a poor man'. Yet these people often only tell lies."

Migrants, particularly those who seek asylum under false pretence, are also known for cutting, abrading and burning their fingertips to prevent identification.

Anna Bono, former University of Turin researcher in Africa's History and Institutions, who has long lived in Africa and has worked with the Italian Foreign Ministry, sums up the situation:

We now know with certainty that 95% of the foreigners who land in Italy are not refugees: they are not people exhausted from extreme poverty, they are not people who have escaped death threats, torture, deprivation of human rights.

They come from southern Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast ... they are illegal immigrants. In 2016, 181,045 arrived, 123,482 of whom applied for asylum. The territorial commissions examined 90,473 requests, accepting 4,940 of them, namely 5.4% of the applications examined, 3.9% of those submitted and 2.7% of the total landings.

Prof Bono says that the vast majority of asylum seekers do not get asylum because they are not persecuted at home, nor are they fleeing wars.

However, not all applicants rejected over the years have left Italy. Many of both fake asylum seekers and illegal immigrants remained in Italy, escaping the control of the authorities and often disappearing. With the "residence permit for humanitarian reasons" many have been allowed to live in Italy in hiding, doing illegal jobs or illegal activities.

Therefore it's not surprising to know that 1 in 3 inmates in Italian prisons is foreign. This gives some indication of a serious problem of security in the country, a danger that has been in existence for a long time.

Yet again, it should come as no surprise that people with no official identity, no ties with the larger community that hosts them, generally no family (they are mostly young men of military age) and few opportunities for legal jobs should be enormously overrepresented in crime statistics.

Incidentally, this statistic is similar in other European countries. In Germany, for example, as reported by Free West Media: "In a sample of the 3930 prison population of Berlin 31 March 2018, 51 percent had no German citizenship. Of the individuals in pre-trial detention facilities, 75 percent had foreign nationality, the Berliner Morgenpost reported."

The epidemic of the new virus simply adds to this grave risk, and, paradoxically, it seems almost to offer an opportunity to examine it.

It's terrible, though: it shouldn't have been necessary to face a dangerous epidemic to be allowed to more openly discuss it.

We must also mention a well-known illegal trafficking of identity documents among immigrants across various European countries, including Italy, Germany, Greece, involving even people who have been recognised as refugees.

This Migration Phenomenon Is Not Good for African Countries Either

As we've described in this previous article “Young People, Don’t Emigrate” Say African Bishops, Italy, with 1 in 3 youths unemployed, has nothing to offer to migrants. African Cardinals and Bishops themselves have repeatedly and constantly exhorted their flocks to stay at home and help their countries.

Those who emigrate are usually the best equipped and qualified to help their own economies. They are richer, otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the expensive people smugglers, younger, stronger, more skilled, with more initiative than the rest of their population that they leave behind.

And no-one in his right mind can seriously think that Africa's poverty problems - which have nevertheless diminished over the last few decades - can be solved by transferring the 1.2 billion Africans (rapidly increasing as we are counting) to the continent of Europe, the world's smallest.

And why don't we ever hear the same people who, for self-declared humanitarian reasons, worry so much about illegal immigrants equally condemn the most atrocious persecution of Christians all over the world? Why don't they beat their chest, similarly, for those Italians who commit suicide because their business failed and they can't support their families? While Italy is paying to host and keep thousands and thousands of fake refugees and illegal immigrants, what about the Italians who also need help?

The series of articles on Italy and Coronavirus continues.

SOURCES
Stop Censura
Researchgate: Fingerprint Alteration
Il Giornale: Gli immigrati raccontano bugie
Dei profughi non sappiamo nulla
La NuovaBQ: Io, falsa rifugiata
Un detenuto su tre e' straniero
Free West Media
Traffico di identita'

PHOTO CREDIT
Il Primato Nazionale

Norway Says Enough, Deports Record Numbers of Immigrants to Reduce Crime

The Norwegian paper The Local reported in September that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants (euphemistically called "persons living in Norway without papers") are over-represented in the country's crime statistics:

Asylum seekers and visa-less immigrants in Norway are charged with twice as many crimes per head of population as Norwegians, but still account for a very small proportion of overall criminality, a new report has said. [Emphasis added]

The authors of the report from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI), in the typical, apologetic style of officialdom, felt compelled to add: "This is so little that it has minimal significance to the big picture of crime in Norway." This reservation echoes the way in which in Britain figures are twisted and contorted to portray immigration, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as economically beneficial to the UK.

But on this occasion there has been a sort of social experiment carried out in Norway in the last couple of years, that empirically disproves the "minimal significance to the big picture of crime" fabrication.

Norwegians have progressively become aware of the link between crime and immigration. A November 2013 survey revealed that over half of the capital Oslo's residents feared street crime due to the rise in muggings. It got so bad that even the new Prime Minister, Conservative Erna Solberg, declared that immigrant parents should control their mugger kids.

Oslo saw 120 robberies in October [2013], more than any other city in Scandinavia. There were just 78 robberies recorded in Copenhagen and only 63 in Stockholm.

That something has started to change in Europe is obvious from the response from Norway's immigrant politicians, who agreed that young gang members are mostly foreigners and their parents could do more.

"I think actually Erna's hit the nail on the head here," said Abid Raja from the Liberal Party. "It's time to get past worries over making immigrant parents feel stigmatized. It is mainly young people from immigrant community who commit these robberies."

Action followed words. Last year the brand new government elected in Autumn - a minority coalition of Conservatives with the right-wing, anti-immigration, populist Progress Party, that has replaced a Labour government - started cracking down on immigration.

Progress, created 40 years ago, is in government for the first time.

Among the tougher measures implemented was that deported foreign criminals who return to Norway now face 2 years’ jail, a 10-fold increase in the penalty from 35 days, a measure that had the unanimous support from all parties.

But the most important policy introduced has been the vast increase in number of deportations.

In 2013, a record number of 5,198 foreign citizens were expelled from the country, an increase of 31% from 2012, when 3,958 people were deported.

Frode Forfang, head of the UDI, put it simply: "We believe that one reason for the increase is that the police have become more conscious of using deportation as a tool to fight crime.”

The number of deportations increases from one year to the next and one month to the other.

In October 2014, 824 people were forced out, which is the highest number of people deported in a month in the history of Norway’s National Police Immigration Service (PU).

This has established a new record, beating the previous record set in the month before, September 2014, with 763 deportations.

The National Police Immigration Service (Politiets Utlendingsenhet) has released latest figures showing in the last six months [from the article's date, 3 July 2014] an average of 18 illegal immigrants per day were deported from Norway. This figure is up from 13 deportations for the same period last year.

The main reasons for deportations are people not having valid residence visas or being involved in crime. During the first half year this year, 3,167 people were forced out of Norway, 1,237 of whom had criminal convictions, newspaper Dagbladet reports.

Kristin Ottesen Kvigne, head of the police immigration service, told the newspaper: "We are at our highest number of illegal immigrants ever and deportation is a policy the government wants".

The service has a target of 7,100 people to be deported by the end of 2014.

What has the result been?

PU head Kristin Kvigne, in an interview with the Dagsavisen newspaper, said that the increased deportations save Norwegian society much money. It costs money to try people in the courts and to jail them.

She explained that people have been deported because their asylum applications have been rejected in terms of the Dublin Agreement, the international agreement which governs asylum seeker applications.

If the current trend continues, the PU will “reach its target” of deporting at least 7,100 people this year, meaning that at least 20 per day are being sent home.

Of the 5876 people deported this year so far, the majority have already been found guilty of criminal acts, Kvigne said. She said it was thus “important to view the high number of deportations made by PU in the context of falling crime rates across the country.”

She said that Norway has a voluntary repatriation program, where “asylum seekers” are paid to return to their home countries, but few take up the offer and most have to be forcibly deported.

Patriotism Means Uncovering the Truth

Unfortunately I'll have to skip tomorrow's London Forum meeting.

But I wish to write about the topic of one of the announced speeches, by Richard Edmonds: "Bad Nenndorf – a Nuremberg Trial for Allied War Criminals". The subject is described as "the tragedy of Bad Nenndorf where in the aftermath of WWII British torturers, many of them later emigrating to Israel, killed dozens of National Socialist sympathisers including girls belonging to the BDSM."

Richard Edmonds is a British nationalist who is capable of criticising his country when necessary, who rightly doesn't believe that patriotism means defending the indefensible.

I'd never heard of this Allied interrogation centre, a secret prison established after the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945, so I did some research and here's what I've found.

This is Wikipedia's brief introduction to it:

The Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre was a British Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in the town of Bad Nenndorf, Germany, which operated from June 1945 to July 1947. Allegations of mistreatment of detainees by British troops resulted in a police investigation, a public controversy in both Britain and Germany and the camp's eventual closure. Four of the camp's officers were brought before courts-martial in 1948 and one of the four was convicted on charges of neglect.

Hundreds of mostly German prisoners after the end of WWII were held in a camp converted from a mud bath complex - with the former bathing chambers becoming prison cells - in Bad Nenndorf, a spa town near Hanover.

Although British authorities tried to keep this centre hidden from public scrutiny, in December 2005 investigative reporter Ian Cobain wrote an article published in The Guardian, based on information he had obtained from a Freedom of Information Request to the Foreign Office. He described Bad Nenndorf in powerful terms:

Britain's secret torture centre. The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons.

German spa became a forbidden village where Gestapo-like techniques were used...

CSDIC [Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre], a division of the War Office, operated interrogation centres around the world, including one known as the London Cage, located in one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods. Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. Last week, Foreign Office files which have remained closed for almost 60 years were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, lay bare the appalling suffering of many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.

They detail the investigation carried out by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, following the complaints of Major Morgan-Jones and Dr Jordan. Despite the precise and formal prose of the detective's report to the military government, anger and revulsion leap from every page as he turns his spotlight on a place where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to release photographs taken of some of the "living skeletons" on their release.

Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. A significant number, however, were industrialists, tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners who had flourished under Hitler.

By late 1946, the papers show, an increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and Hungarians - but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

Of many of these men Scotland Yard detective Hayward said that there were not charged with any crime but on the contrary were willing to help, were detained for no reason at all, and died of malnutrition and lack of medical care. Inspector Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us." Cobain goes on to explain an important part of the problem:

Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".

Cobain has penned other articles on the subject for The Guardian and written a book on the history of torture perpetrated by British officials during and after the Second World War, entitled Cruel Britannia (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . The book was published in autumn 2012, when one of his essays appeared in the Daily Mail with this headline, upsetting but truthful:

How Britain tortured Nazi PoWs: The horrifying interrogation methods that belie our proud boast that we fought a clean war.

James Heartfield, in the book Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , writes:

Internal investigations revealed that torture was rife at Bad Nenndorf, and that many had died of injuries or of starvation.

Why, then, were there so few convictions?

After, in 1946 and 1947, several Bad Nenndorf inmates were taken to nearby hospitals and some died there, the doctors reported these cases. A court of inquiry was appointed, followed by a full enquiry by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. By June 1947 Hayward had amassed an enormous amount of evidence in support of the allegations of ill-treatment and use of methods which were extreme even for a harsh military prison holding suspected Nazi war criminals.

His report led to the camp's closure the following month, and to the courts-martial of the camp Commandant Lt Col Robin Stephens, the medical officer and two interrogators in 1948.

Hayward had found that interrogators and guards were not likely to be impartial towards the prisoners because of the criteria used in their selection, among which knowledge of German language and hatred for Germans were predominant. The most likely new recruits, as a consequence, were Austrian and German Jewish refugees. One such recruit was Lt Richard Oliver Langham, one of the interrogators to be court-martialled.

News of the courts-martial reached the papers, in particular The Times and The Daily Express.

The book Liberal Democracies at War: Conflict and Representation (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , edited by Andrew Knapp and Hilary Footitt, gives some idea of why these men were acquitted or convicted on minor charges, like neglect rather than manslaughter.

The Times's coverage of the courts-martial well reflected the spirit of the time and its little appetite for getting to the truth and giving a just punishment which was unpalatable for so many reasons, not least as an admission of guilt involving the war effort itself. That spirit was probably behind the excessive leniency of the court.

This latter topic is too long for the present article, and may be worth covering in a separate one.

"Gay" Leader Sentenced for Paedophilia

You won't see the news in the mainstream media. After all, this is not a priest.

44-year-old Stefan Johansson, former President of the RFSL (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter), or the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, was sentenced on 24 October to five years in prison and ordered to pay 60,000 euros for pain and suffering caused by rape, pimping and paedophilia.

Founded in 1950, the the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals is Sweden's largest organization of its kind, with more than 6,000 members. The RFSL was recognised in 2007 by the United Nations as a non-governmental organisation with consultative status. In Sweden, the RFSL was in 2009 one of the main promoters of the legalization of homosexual marriage.

According to the indictment, he administered alcohol and drugs to minors in order to have sexual intercourse with them, and he also alleged to have embezzled $ 3,000 that were supposed to be donated to AIDS research.

On his Facebook profile, he published among other things, an invitation to a [sic] "Education Day", which was organized on 18 July 2013 for "LGBT people with experience in the sale of sexual services" and specializes in "young people who prostitute themselves on the Internet".

The Homo-Imperial Association as an Offshoot of the Gay Lobby ILGA

The RFSL was the Swedish branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), which in turn has promoted pedophilia for about ten years and is certified there at the UN as a non-governmental organization with consultative status, the European Section and in the EU , The RFSL always maintained pedophile contacts to a workgroup as well, which have campaigned for the legalization of sexual relations between adults and minors.

ILGA has openly revealed since 2001 that the majority of their funding is obtained directly from the European Commission. The gay lobby is thus financed by the European taxpayer. And the rich. In 2012 alone, 1,017,055 euros flowed from the EU Commission in the ILGA-coffers. That's more than 52 percent of the annual budget. Over such a windfall, other, more widely socially relevant associations were also pleased.

Gay lobby: Funds Come From the EU and George Soros

Among the other sponsors, there is the ubiquitous in the left-liberal spectrum, financier George Soros, who contributed 200,000 euros, which is more than ten percent of the total budget. ILGA today enjoys consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This is a position that was long been denied it, because the homo-association refused to condemn "sex between adults and children". But then it was possible that the gay lobby has brought this last dam to collapse, without having to relinquish these positions.

And now Johansson's conviction follows, who was certainly not in the last rank of gay lobbying. Most media take no notice of such news, however. With their gender-ideological blinders on, they do not see what they do not want to see. A flimsy pretext can always be found where the crimes are trivialized. Most editors are also much too busy to demand ever new and radical gay rights, as they would deal with the dark side of their ideological zeal. Self-criticism anyway, has not been a strength of ideologues nor of those who ride the waves of fashion. The results of this attitude are known. Stefan Johansson is one of them. Only: The public should know nothing of it if possible.

Belgium To Ban Ritual Slaughter, Sign Petition

The petition "Stop the barbaric slaughter without stunning of animals under the guise of religion" has almost reached its target of 4,000 signatures.

The petition, which I've also signed, is addressed to the Belgian politician Ben Weyts, who is Flemish Minister for Animal Welfare, and to Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner for the Environment.

Ben Weyts said on the Belgian television show De zevende dag on the VRT network that he would actively pursue a total ban on ritual slaughter. The ban, he added, could be implemented by 2015, as well as further legislation.

In the meantime, Weyts called for Muslims and Jews to adhere to current laws, which allow animal slaughter without previous stunning to be carried out only in licensed abattoirs.

The cabinet office of his Belgian government counterpart, Wallon Minister for Animal Welfare Carlo Di Antonio, indicated it would "take the same shape as that suggested by" the Flemish Minister.

Please sign the petition now:

The slaughter of animals without stunning is not only barbaric, it is also very painful as vets proclaim for years. Waiting animals know exactly what is going to happen, they are stressed by the smell of blood, urine, feces, by the cries of fear and pain of the animals slaughtered in front of and before them. Muslims do not have a valid reason to slaughter animals in such a cruel way: apparently nowhere the Koran states that animals may not be stunned for slaughter! As well for the Jews: Kosher slaughter is as reprehensible as halal ! There is no immediate or painless killing for slaughter without stunning. We live in the 21st century. Peoples knowledge has grown such as the means to slaughter animals painless. If you really want to hold on to the tradition of 'cutting throats', then just do it to animals who were stunned before slaughter! That is not only human, it is a form of respect! Or do Muslims nor Jews need to respect animals? I do not believe that. Religion should never be an excuse to let animals suffer ! Stop the slaughter of animals without stunning worldwide. Provide a law that forbids slaughter without stunning in Belgium and Europe, and hopefully the whole world will follow. Do it now !

Italy: 100,000 in Anti-Immigration Demo

An estimated 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration, Islamisation and the European Union at a rally organised by the Lega Nord (Northern League) in front of Milan's Cathedral, the heart of the city.

The crowd was so enormous that it took two hours for everybody to get to the vast square.

Demonstrators were holding banners saying "No to mosques", "Fewer illegals = fewer diseases", "Less money to refugees", and "If I catch Ebola I'll infect Alfano". Angelino Alfano is Italy's Minister of the Interior, responsible, among other things, for internal security and immigration.

The main message was similar to that of my party Liberty GB in the UK: in social priorities Italians must come first, otherwise it is reverse racism.

This was the first major event organised by the Northern League under the new leadership of Matteo Salvini, followed with interest in Central and Southern Italy as well.

"Stop the invasion" was the demonstration's slogan, with the objective of stopping the Mare Nostrum operation, Italy's mission of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean - called "Mare Nostrum" (our sea) by the Romans, but ironically not ours even around our coasts any more.

Said Salvini in his speech at the rally: "Like other countries, we have to use Navy ships to defend our borders and not to help the people smugglers." The Italian term for a person who ferries illegal immigrants to Italy by boat for a high fee is "scafista".

A few days later, in Strasbourg, the Northern League's leader discussed these issues with his party's French ally in the European Parliament, Front National's Marine Le Pen. Together they'll call for the suspension of the Schengen Treaty and for border control. The League identifies mass immigration as a source of unfair competition against the unemployed Italian workers.

As in Britain with the EDL, a counter-demonstration was held a few hundred yards away by the "anti-fascist" radical Left. And, like in here, the massive deployment of security forces ensured that there was no contact between the two camps.

Wearing a T-shirt, Salvini led the march to the Piazza del Duomo suggesting slogans through a megaphone, and when it got in front of Palazzo Marino, home to Milan City Council, he stopped the march to shout at Mayor Giuliano Pisapia: "We do not want the new mosque in Milan."

The Northern League has gone from strength to strength and is now a force to reckon with, in Italy. But, unlike a party like the UKIP in Britain, it has a firm anti-Islam position. I cannot imagine Farage yelling against mosque building.

Illegals with Scabies Disinfected, Italy Chastised



The tragedy of the "boat people" in the Mediterranean is now in the news more than ever.

130 migrants were presumed dead after two boats capsized on 2 October.

This date is so close to the anniversary of the first tragedy of that kind. Just a year before,

On October 3, 2013, the 368 [in fact, 366] bodies laid out on the wharf at Lampedusa marked a watershed in the history of immigration — in the Mediterranean and perhaps even the world.

The latest events have led to a rethinking of immigration policies. First by Italy:

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano called for the Mare Nostrum surveillance-and-rescue operation to shut down in favor of ''European action able to show that Europe takes charge of its own border'', during a visit to Tunis on Friday, the first anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck in which 366 immigrants died.

The debate was then extended to Europe.

The UK government is being chastised by the Left - and not only - for its refusal to support migrant rescues in the Mediterranean:

Foreign office minister says that providing comprehensive rescue cover in the Mediterranean is encouraging more migrants to make the dangerous journey and risk their lives.

Even The Telegraph joins the condemnation, with this ridiculous headline:

Drown an immigrant to save an immigrant: why is the Government borrowing policy from the BNP?

This is where the death spiral into a political bidding war on immigration leads us.

And yet, generosity is like everything else: you can have too much of a good thing.

This furore reminds me of another case, in which it was Italy that received international scorn for doing the right thing.

After the Ebola outbreak, it's useful to revisist that episode from last December, when Italy was severely criticised in the most absurd way just for trying to prevent contagion and an epidemic by spraying with a disinfectant the guests of a reception centre on the island of Lampedusa, the destination of thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa.

This is how the BBC reported the story, to which the above video refers:

Footage filmed secretly on a mobile phone appears to show detainees being forced to strip naked in mixed company while a worker hoses them down.

The man who took the video - an unnamed Syrian refugee - says the migrants are being treated like "animals".

The camp houses people from Africa and the Middle East who make the dangerous crossing to Italy by boat...

The images, which were broadcast on state television, show migrants queuing up in a crowded, open-air courtyard.

One after another, in cold, winter conditions, they have to strip completely naked.

The man who filmed the scene says this is apparently an effort to combat the skin condition, scabies, and that both men and women have to go through it every few days.

The illegal immigrants were disinfected by means of a hose spraying a substance protecting them from scabies.

This, nothing more than a mass shower, prompted a national inquiry, with Italian politicians and media condemning such a treatment that made the centre look like a "concentration camp".

How can a country which had received more than 40,000 illegals in just a few months wash them one by one? As an Italian blogger put it:

If you import Africa, your country will look more and more like Africa.

The press melodramatically and hyperbolically described the shower as "dehumanising" as well as freezing, but people's comments to those articles were overwhelmingly of a different opinion. Just a sample:

Don't be ridiculous. Being freezing cold in Lampedusa, that's big news! They have scabies and who knows what else. Disinfecting them is the least. First of all, no-one has invited them; second, if they want to keep scabies, lice etc. they can stay in their own countries...

15 degrees is not a freezing temperature, they can always go back and keep their scabies and whatever else they have. In case you didn't know, there have been 7 cases of scabies in an elementary school in Parma. Who knows how it got there, and what other filth they are bringing here...

If 15 degrees is cold for them, how can the illegals migrate to Sweden or Germany, as they say they will, and survive?...

Maybe the shower rooms have been destroyed like everything else [a reference to previous episodes of rioting and vandalism by illegals attacking the reception centre]...

Shame on you Lefties, it's all your fault, you wanted the immigrants to appear humanitarian; and now you're paying the consequences!...

If they had remained in their own countries they would still have scabies......

The real shocking images are not these, they are those of the victims of the increasing number of crimes committed by illegals.

Frontex, the European Union Agency for border management, has released data according to which, in the first four months of 2014, landings of immigrants in Italy have increased by 823% compared to the same period last year. And from early May things have got even worse.

Not only the immigrant reception system is collapsing under the weight of these figures. Another consequence of this invasion is the impossibility to control who is coming, with the probability of health emergencies increasing all the time.

The migrants are from countries with serious health problems and travel in poor hygienic conditions, therefore can be carriers of infectious diseases.

Diseases like polio and tuberculosis, disappeared from our countries, are coming back to Europe, carried by immigrants. The city of Syracuse, in Sicily, has a tuberculosis incidence not unlike that of a Third World city, because of the many illegal landings.

There have already been cases of immigrants with scabies amidst the general Italian population.

Scabies is a serious and extremely contagious disease, and can only be eliminated by the method used in Lampedusa. It is in the interest of both Italians - in case anybody still cares about them - and illegals that the latter are sprayed with disinfectant, as many of them are contracting the illness in the asylum centre itself from other guests.

Giambattista Vico's Importance for the Anti-Establishment Movement

Saturday 27th September I attended a meeting of the London Forum, which organises conferences with various international authors and thinkers of the New Right or - in the words of one of Saturday's speakers, Mark Weber - the "anti-Establishment" movement. The latter is actually my favourite name, as it does away with the anachronistic distinction between Left and Right. Our opponents he calls the "Establishment".

Four speeches were delivered.

The first was by Mark Weber, historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, writer, and director of the Institute for Historical Review. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he was educated in the US and Europe. The IHR has been attacked as a "hate group" and a "Holocaust denial" organisation, but we know that this kind of accusations mean nothing in our politically correct world.

I want to find out for myself. The organisation's website explains:

In fact, the IHR steadfastly opposes bigotry of all kinds. We are proud of the support we have earned from people of the most diverse political views, and racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The IHR does not “deny” the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no “position” on any specific event or chapter of history, except to promote greater awareness and understanding, and to encourage more objective investigation...

One prominent American journalist and author who has looked into the critical claims made about the IHR is John Sack, who is Jewish. He reported on a three-day IHR conference in an article published in the Feb. 2001 issue of Esquire magazine. He rejected as unfounded the often-repeated lie that the IHR and its supporters are "haters" or bigots. He described those who spoke at and attended the IHR conference as "affable, open-minded, intelligent [and] intellectual."

The London Forum says that Weber "has appeared countless times as a guest on US and overseas television and radio. He has produced many podcasts, and his many writings have appeared in newspapers, periodicals and websites around the world, and in a range of languages."

Weber's speech was "The End of the American Century: The Accelerating Crisis of the West, and Prospects for the Future". He talked about the impending extinction of Europeans as an ethnic group in both Europe and North America, and the end of the hegemony imposed at the end of the Second World War.

He introduced a 2010 book available only in German: Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Is Eliminating Itself"), by Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic Party politician, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and former senator of finance for the State of Berlin.

In short, the book's author is as much Establishment as you can get. The book itself is described by Wikipedia as

the most popular book on politics by a German-language author in a decade, [and in it] he denounces the failure of Germany's post-war immigration policy, sparking a nation-wide controversy about the costs and benefits of the idea of multiculturalism.

Pretty good for a social democrat.

The second speaker was Bain Dewitt, described as "a rising star" and the young blogger of The Identity Forum . His speech, "The God of the Whites", was an examination of religion as an expression of racial unity. Bain attempted to see if religion can be the spiritual dimension of nationalist and traditionalist movements.

He was followed by another American writer, Greg Johnson, editor of the website Counter-Currents Publishing. His was a particularly interesting speech for me, partly because I'm Italian and partly for its philosophical nature: "Giambattista Vico and Modern Anti-Liberalism".

Vico is a 17th-18th century philosopher from Naples. Most Italians know of him and his theory of the "corsi e ricorsi storici", or the cyclical nature of history. But he's little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, despite having had some influence, especially on James Joyce's books. Vico's Scienza nuova ("New Science") is the basis for Finnegans Wake.

The idea of history going through the same stages over and over again is very far from the contemporary view of history as progress. Vico, according to Johnson, was exceptional, in that he was the first anti-Enlightenment thinker and the only one of his time, despite being himself an Enlightenment thinker in some ways.

Vico postulated a fundamental law of historical development, that follows the same pattern by evolving through three phases: the age of gods, "during which gentile [meaning "pagan"] men believed that they were living under divine rule"; the age of heroes, when aristocratic republics were established; and the age of men, or what we may call "democracy", "when all were recognised as equal in human nature". Here Vico is a son of his "Enlightened" times, when he talks of the necessity to respect "natural reason" and of "the human rights dictated by human reason when fully explored".

At that point man’s increased powers of reasoning result in a state of anarchy, when everybody considers himself his own ruler and only looks after his own pleasure and short-term interest. Sounds familiar? It must do, because it's a fairly accurate description of what we are going through now, a description which will become even more faithful as decades, nay years, nay months go by.

Then men get tired of that anarchy and “turn again to the primitive simplicity of the early world of peoples”, and to religion. Thus the cycle starts again.

The beauty of it all, said Johnson, is that Vico's view of history enables us to stop trying to mend the present state of affairs, which is beyond repair, and instead look forward to - even accelerate - its end, which will usher a new era.

Or I would put it as "the darkest hour is just before the dawn".

Johnson concluded his speech by saying that, whereas Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Right-wing Italian party Movemento Sociale Italiano, said, "Julius Evola is our Marcuse, only better", we can say that Vico is our Karl Marx, only better.

Finally, barrister and contributor to Heritage & Destiny magazine Adrian Davies concluded the conference with his speech "Two World Wars and One World Cup: Myths and Realities of the Anglo-German Relationship in the Twentieth Century".

In this year, which marks the hundredth anniversary of what historians have called the first "Western civil war" and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the second, Davies narrated German history until 1914, arguing that the Great War not not caused uniquely by Germany, as the myth goes, but also that Germany was not a perpetual victim either.

It's early days yet. I consider my newly-found London Forum very stimulating. I'd like to see more of it, and in particular what the role of Christianity is in the various ideas represented.

Milan and New York, AD 2014

These two astonishing pictures were not taken in Cairo, Islamabad or Riyadh. They are horrendous depictions of our Islamisation.

The first photo was shot in New York City, on Madison Avenue. The second in the place that is the heart and soul of Milan: Piazza del Duomo, Cathedral Square.

No comment is necessary.

H/t Alessandra Nucci

Italians Are Getting Tired of Muslim Invasion

A small but significant story comes from Italy.

Adel Smith, born in Alexandria, Egypt, son of an Italian father and Egyptian mother and living in Ofena, a little town in the central Italian region of Abruzzi, has just died at 54 from a serious illness.

The reason why he is remembered is his constant attacks against Christianity, which this Muslim man probably believed to be an easy target in the current secularist climate.

In 2003, his intolerance for Christian objects in public buildings prompted him to request the removal of all Christian symbols, including crosses, from the primary school in Ofena attended by his children, request granted by L'Aquila Court judge Mario Montanaro.

In 2005, Smith succeded in his request to have even Christmas plays and Nativity scenes banned from the same school.

But eventually he met his comeuppance in 2006, when he was sentenced to 8 months in jail for contempt for religion for his gesture of 3 years before: at the height of his anti-Christian delirium, he had hurled a crucifix out of the window of the hospital where his mother was a patient.

There is only so much that Italians can take.

I found this story on the Facebook page of the aptly-named group "Italians are not racist, they're just tired of this invasion".

Islamic Hatred and Persecution of Christians Is Imported into European Refugee Centres

Christians persecuted by Muslims in Islamic countries who think they are escaping their fate by fleeing discover that the same treatment awaits them in Europe, which after all has simply imported Islam's barbarism by opening its doors to large numbers of Muslims.

The German daily newspaper Die Welt reports on the terrible exclusion and violence suffered by Christian refugees at the hands of Muslims in Germany's asylum centres.

Germany is the second country in the world, after the US, for number of asylum applications received, with 13% of them last year, and the first in Europe, with 23.2% last year.

The report starts with some figures:

In Iraq, there are currently 30,000 Christians fleeing. But these are only those who are currently in the main news. Worldwide suffering estimate by humanitarian organisation Open Doors is around 100 million Christians under persecution. The organisation World Watch List 2014 has particularly strict Islamic countries - such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - among the ten states with the worst persecution of Christians.

An example of the discrimination suffered in German reception centres for refugees is what happened to Leyla S, an Iranian whose Christian faith compelled her to flee to Germany about three years ago with her husband and daughter.

The woman related to Die Welt her experience in the reception centre in Hessen, where about 20 of the approximately 100 other refugees cursed the family from the beginning again and again as “infidels” and “dirty dogs” and banned Leyla from the two kitchens.

"For two years", she says, "we always had to cook in our room. Once I tried to go in the communal kitchen, but the Muslim refugees from Afghanistan housed in the centre immediately chased us away, claiming that our presence rendered the food impure.

"Why then are these people coming to Germany, home to millions of Christians, who for them are unclean, although not their money?"

Die Welt also exposes the wall of silence of the authorities. In the refugee camps of Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse, those responsible say that there are no cases of discrimination, while in reality they happen under the roofs of the refugee camps. The incidents take place in silence, hidden from the police.

Max Klingberg of the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR), an organisation that for 14 years has been working with refugees, explains that attacks against Christians are far from isolatd cases and that all Christians and Christian converts arriving in Germany are victims of harassment, threats, pressure.

And psychological violence sometimes leads to physical violence. In the case of an Iranian Christian convert, a woman, Muslim men urinated on her clothes and other personal effects to humiliate her.

The situation is so bad that in Bavaria, in order to stop the violence, separate accommodation for different religious groups of refugees has been requested.

Since the moment of his arrival at the reception centre Ramin, an Afghan refugee who converted to Christianity, has been threatened by three Muslim countrymen with whom he shared the room. He recounts: "They said that I belonged to the Dar al-Harb [house of war, as Islam calls all the part of the world which is non-Muslim] and not the Dar al-Islam [house of Islam]." For the three Afghan Muslims, Ramin deserved death as an infidel and apostate.

The man tells of various attacks, including one that led very close to his death: "We were in the room when my three roommates beat me in the kidneys with the remote. When I managed to wriggle out, one of them went into the kitchen and took a knife. I then attempted to flee in another room, but another had blocked the door with his foot. At that moment I was shaking, I turned to Jesus asking Him to save me. Then one of the men pointed the knife to my chest, saying that it would be impossible for me to stay alive for much longer. Fortunately, the other two reminded the man that he had to suspend for the time being his revenge, since he had yet to complete his application for political asylum."

In line with the constant denial of Muslim supremacism and Islamic persecution of Christians, authorities more often than not don't deal with these cases of hatred. An Iranian 19-year-old Christian tried to escape his Mohammedan tormentors by asking for a transfer to another city. The local council refused the application on the grounds that the dispute had nothing to do with religion but was purely personal.

Peter Ulrich, director of a free school for asylum seekers managed by the Evangelical Free Church, says that Christians are much closer to European culture and far better capable of integration than Muslims. No surprise here.

"In my work as a teacher of German language" he adds, "I have observed that many refugees from Syria, Iraq and Iran seek asylum precisely because of religious persecution. They are disappointed and irritated by how often their problem is not taken seriously by the authorities of our country, from which they instead expect understanding and support."

The solution is pretty simple not just for Germany but for all of Europe: give asylum to Christians, deny it to Muslims.

Le Pen Leads in Poll on Next President

An opinion poll among 947 people on the French electoral roll, with a margin of error of about 2.5%, conducted for the French magazine Marianne, shows Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National party, leading in first round of France’s next presidential election.

The FN performed very well at the last European Election in May, getting almost 25% of the French vote, while President François Hollande's socialists only got 14%.

The Front National wants France to leave the euro and would support France's continued European Union membership only under certain, very strict conditions - including primacy of French law over EU law, abolition of the Schengen Area of free movement of people, €0 net contribution to the EU budget and nationalisation of agricultural policy.

It is firmly opposed to unrestricted immigration, on which its policies are:

Reduce legal immigration 95% to 10,000 people annually, no amnesty or benefits for illegal immigrants or their children, abolition of jus soli, and citizenship only to be granted to foreigners’ children who are legally resident, speak French, are law-abiding and show “proof of assimilation.”

According to the latest poll, carried out online by Ifop on July 21 and 22, Le Pen would attract 26% of the vote, more than former president Nicolas Sarkozy's 25%. From Bloomberg:

The socialist candidate, President Francois Hollande or Prime Minister Manuel Valls, would finish third and would fail to make the second round with 17 percent. The poll did not measure second-round voting intentions.

Marine Le Pen's father and founder of FN Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002 with 17%, beating socialist Lionel Jospin and only losing in the second round to Jacques Chirac.

Marine took over the Front National in 2011 and has been trying to render it more moderate, although some say that the transformation is more superficial than fundamental.

Neverthless, for a while she and Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch anti-Islam party PVV and one of the best-known figures of the European counterjihad, seemed bound to form a publicly-funded alliance of like-minded parties in the European Parliament.

Italy Is One of the EU Largest Net Contributors

Net receipts from the EU budget, based on 2009 budget data (negative amounts show net contributions)

Member state	Per capita (in euros)	Percentage (of national GDP)	Total amount (in million euros)
Austria	−59.7	−0.18	−499
Belgium	90.0	0.29	968
Bulgaria	77.4	1.76	589
Cyprus	−34.0	−0.18	−27
Czech Republic	150.4	1.11	1,575
Germany	−107.3	−0.37	−8,797
Denmark	−211.0	−0.53	−1,163
Estonia	416.2	4.02	558
Finland	−113.8	−0.36	−606
France	−100.4	−0.34	−6,461
Greece	267.2	1.30	3,009
Hungary	265.1	2.68	2,660
Ireland	−35.0	−0.09	−156
Italy	−100.7	−0.41	−6,046
Lithuania	438.2	5.33	1,468
Luxembourg	2364.5	3.05	1,167
Latvia	218.8	2.62	495
Malta	17.4	0.13	7
Netherlands	−90.2	−0.26	−1,488
Poland	160.5	1.66	6,119
Portugal	196.4	1.25	2,087
Romania	74.8	1.24	1,609
Spain	9.7	0.04	444
Sweden	−43.6	−0.13	−404
Slovenia	92.8	0.55	189
Slovakia	88.8	0.78	481
United Kingdom	−62.7	−0.24	−3,865

One William Gruff left this comment to my post The Looting of Italy:

Italy is not and has never been a nett contributor to the EU. Not a nett contributor means not a contributor at all in precisely the way that being a public sector worker means not a tax payer. In the same way, Scotland makes no contribution to the 'U'K, despite partisan claims to the contrary.

This sums up the kind of widespread ignorance and prejudice about Italy, largely due to media distortions, that my Italian journalist friend Alessandra Nucci laments in her article, "The Looting of Italy", that attracted that comment.

The comment requires a documented reply.

Above is a table for the year 2009 reproduced from Wikipedia, based on research by Deutsche Bank Research. The net contributors are shown in blue.

Wikipedia says:

The four largest net contributors in absolute terms are Germany, France, Italy, UK.
The four largest net contributors in per capita terms are Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy.
The four largest net contributors as a proportion of GDP are Denmark, Italy, Germany, Finland.

Only Italy and Germany are among the four largest net contributors in all categories. It's also easy to see from the table that in absolute terms Italy contributes almost double the net receipts from the UK, the country from which our commenter friend William Gruff hails.

As you can see, in total amount Italy is third, little behind France, which Italy, though, overtakes in terms of per capita contributions. As a proportion of GDP Italy comes before both Germany and France, and is second only to Denmark, an economic lightweight compared to Italy.

Also observe how Italy is usually placed by the international media together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, which are among the largest net recipients - along with Luxembourg and some Eastern-European countries -, therefore at the other end of the spectrum.

A table showing member states' net contributions to the EU’s annual budget for the period from 2000 to 2011, compiled by the European Commission, can be found here. Again, somewhat counterintuitively, if the figure is negative it means that the country has received fewer payments from the EU than it should and is therefore a net contributor to the EU’s budget.

This table shows again that, except in 2000, Italy has been a large net contributor all these years.

Even the German news magazine Der Spiegel wrote at the end of 2012, accompanying the article with a clear graph:

Italy is the country that most contributes to the European budget...

Compared to the 2011 Gross Domestic Product, no other country has contribuited so much to the European budget as Italy...

...but, despite its strong debt, [Italy] has not yet received a cent from the various European "parachutes".

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

This is the fourth and final part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first three parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy


Also read Italy Invented Banks by Enza Ferreri

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Attack Begins In Earnest

2011 is when they began in earnest to train their guns on us, with the military aggression that started with the Nato attack on Libya culminating in half-truths calculated to stampede investors away from Italy in the direction of presumably safe bonds. And what bonds can be safer than Germany’s?

After the attack on Libya pulverized the country’s infrastructure, mainly built by Italy, as well as the many giant Italian industries that lined the coast, the banksters sprang into action. In July, Germany’s heavily-leveraged Deutsche Bank - which a month later was revealed to be one of the prime recipients of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s tremendous secret bailout, to the tune of $354 billion - dumped over 7 billion euros’ worth of Italian bonds onto the market in one swoop, loudly trumpeting this fact to the press and then just as dramatically buying up unnecessary swap options that bet on Italy’s going bust.

This of course signalled to all investors to follow suit, lest they remain saddled with bonds that might never be paid back! After which the panic inevitably spread to the shareholders’ market, driving the price of wealthy banks and huge joint-stock companies down to levels of craziness where one could buy a mega-multinational concern at the cost of maybe a single one of its properties.

Der Spiegel may have let the cat out of the bag when it wrote that documents in its possession showed that the reason Angela Merkel was holding out against the Euro-bonds - which would guarantee the debt of all the euro-zone countries - was that in exchange for relenting she planned to demand privileges for foreign buyers of choice property in Southern Europe.

This may or may not be. What is certain is that they have had this on their minds for a long time. In one sole day, in July 2011, Germany’s Deutsche Bank dumped billions of euros’ worth of perfectly good Italian sovereign bonds onto the market, trumpeting the move as the markets were still open – something that is NEVER done – and then dramatically buying swaps that would make a profit if Italy went bankrupt. By stampeding investors away from Italy they managed not only to distract the press from their own banks’ toxic assets, which they were busy dumping onto other countries’ debit accounts, but also to attract the money thereby freed up to – where else? Germany of course.

This kind of situation is a problem even in normal free markets. But in the euro-zone, where the spigot of money creation has been clamped off in the name of thrift (“austerity” they call it) - and, thanks to Maastricht and other assorted treaties, cannot be turned back on except by fiat of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt - it becomes a matter of mors tua vita mea. It’s like when you tilt a glass of water letting it all flow to one side, leaving the rest high and dry. If there is a fixed amount of money and it is all made to flow to one corner of the continent, the rest is left high and dry, with no way for people to exchange the fruits of their respective labour to procure the rest of the things they need to live. Money has no value in itself. The value lies in goods and manpower. But barter became impossible a long long time ago. Even in the bronze age there were products of human invention that needed some instrument to fraction their worth with respect to whatever needed interchange. Can a piano manufacturer barter his goods in exchange for his daily bread? Or must he grow his own produce if he wants to eat? Without money, markets are not free but paralyzed. Such is the situation of the captive countries of the euro-zone.

Hence, from July 2011 on, Germany’s vested interest in the collapse of other countries, and particularly of Italy’s rival economy, has been obvious to all who cared to see. Nevertheless, no-one could possibly have imagined that two months later, and a fortnight before the financial putsch in Italy, the Deutsche Bank would go so far as to secretly request the Troika [European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund] to impose a “massive and profound decommissioning of the system of social welfare and of services to the public, to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, for France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland” (the so-called “PIIGS” countries, plus France), according to a report which we only discovered the following year.

Unsurprisingly, the insultingly-named “PIIGS” countries are all non-Protestant. As attested in several editorials, since the euro no longer evokes wealth and stability but unemployment, poverty and decline, there has been a return of anti-Catholic prejudice in Northern Europe, where many consider the “PIIGS” countries to be doing badly because of Catholic sin. The whore of Babylon all over again.


Mario Monti's Government of Technocrats

Enter Mario Monti, the unelected Prime Minister, self-proclaimed Catholic and supposed conservative economics professor who went to visit the Pope eight times in little over a year while impoverishing the country and instigating the suicide of dozens of industrialists.

Under his watch billions were siphoned out of the economy, while the vast majority of Parliament remained inert, the conservatives mostly looking on in passive and silent dejection and the leftists simply waiting for election time to reinstall them in power. All of them, left and right, were as if traumatized at the display of power in what amounted to a coup d’etat by President Napolitano, and even more frightened at witnessing each other's silence. One MP, an ex-socialist friend of mine who had joined Berlusconi's centrist party Forza Italia, wrote a piece early on which ended saying that we were in the midst of a tragedy which risked changing forever the face of the country. When I called to compliment him for his perspicacity, he cut me short replying “Yes but nobody else is speaking up.” In a matter of weeks he had eaten his words and climbed aboard Mario Monti’s brand-new political party.

I think that a sequence of events of this kind – plus the court actions which have devastated and closed down one major industry after another on charges usually involving either environmental disaster, health hazards or corruption, increasing unemployment by the thousands - are probably what is routinely done to countries when there is a leftist takeover. I hold that they could purposely be using the power to legislate money away, isolate the country from investors so as to tear the system down for good and render the people powerless to recreate it. This is the only explanation I can find to the inexplicable way the technocrats have been sending money abroad as if there were no need for it at home: 5 million to Albania to buy equipment for doctors’ offices, 3 million to Bolivia to help protect its biodiversity, 1.3 billion to help Ethiopians guard against a new drought, 400,000 for a school for tour operators in Mozambique... it goes on and on.

Is it any wonder that Monti’s supposedly un-political, technocratic administration was actually made up of 99 % left-wing ministers? Why else would our ex(?)-communist President Giorgio Napolitano - whom The NYT enthused about dubbing him “King Giorgio” - install Monti in the Premier’s office the minute the stock markets’ plunge finally managed to dislodge the entrenched incumbent, overriding all constitution-mandated Parliamentary prerogative? The international press immediately recorded this unprecedented power grab as the virtual coup d’etat it was, but this soon became an embarrassing detail that it is impolite to even mention any more.

Because Italy's politics was purposely programmed by our post-war Constitution - largely dictated by the powerful Communist Party - to be unmanageable and incomprehensible, hardly anyone in the international press bothers to delve into anything that regards Italy. Journalists have us conveniently shelved under the categories of fashion, pizza, the mafia, the Leaning Tower and the Pope. Investors care only about what the herd will do next in order to follow suit and try and turn a profit on the stock exchange. As a result, no-one ever writes about Italy except if there is a sex scandal, a mafia crime, or talk of corruption. Or, today, if the press says that Italy is being bailed out.

All of the good things, the 95 percent of hard-working, honest Italians, who are not corrupt but actually the first victims of corruption, the mafia, etc, are invariably ignored.

Ironically, despite the country's having had as Prime Minister a media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, whose supposed expertise in manipulating media coverage might have served Italy in good stead, the international spotlight has remained firmly projected onto the unfavourable clichés and the sole unfavourable numbers of Italy’s external debt. Our erstwhile Premier’s ludicrous private lechery deservedly made him the butt of worldwide ridicule, and dragged Italy down with him. However, I can’t help remembering that Bill Clinton was President of the United States when his sex-capades in the White House were made public. Has this ever made a laughing stock of the entire American populace for having elected him? Hardly.

I believe that in this globalized world, relying solely on the mainstream media for news about other countries is a mistake that can prevent a needed comprehension of what is going on. Because, the globalist players being a tight-knit clique, the blueprint they follow can eventually come round to harass other countries in their turn.

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

This is the third part of the article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci. Here are the first two parts:

The Looting of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Never-ending Flow of Illegal Immigrants Overburdens Italian Welfare

Very little is ever said about the immigration load, which together with bureaucracy is largely responsible for the burgeoning debt. It is routinely downplayed, while Italy gets lectured to for supposedly not living up to impossible standards that are provably not expected of any other country. The Italian Coastguard and Carabinieri have saved countless lives and generous Italian welfare, including old-age pensions, is doled out not only to illegal immigrants but, incredibly, to their relatives back home. Nonetheless Amnesty International feels free to scold us on the subject, and periodically issues press releases condemning the heartlessness of Italy alone, never anyone else, even though Spain has been known to shoot against boats approaching its shores and Malta routinely turns away boats heading in its direction, instructing them to come to Italy and France, and literally closed its borders after having prompted the renewed stowaway immigration by instigating the attack on Libya.

In order to de-industrialize an economy as big as Italy’s, money has to be pried away from millions of hard-working Italians. Which explains the sudden deluge of illegal immigrants which has been literally tossed onto our shores by the shiploads, starting in 1993.

That first time, Italy flew them right back from where they came from, like any other sovereign country would. But in 1997 they were back, with Romano Prodi, the leader of leftist Catholics, as Prime Minister. He hedged and hawed and eventually ...refused to send them back.

The flooding continued, to the self-righteous glee of Italy’s powerful leftists, until it was stopped by a costly “friendship” treaty with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (who was not friends with Italy alone. His friendly relationships with the leaders of France and Britain, as well as with Nelson Mandela, are well documented on the Internet, and it is rumoured that he financed the election campaign of Sarkozy, his prime assailer of 2011, in which case Sarkozy would have had good reasons for preferring him dead rather than imprisoned and eventually allowed to talk; same goes for his sons).

Which leads us to when the West suddenly discovered the pressing need to get rid of Gaddafi, and Sarkozy led the way in Nato’s …humanitarian bombing.

It has been proven that the attack on Libya was based on a flagrant lie. There were no mass graves and Gaddafi was demonstrably not killing his own people. (Just like with Syria’s Assad today).

But the testimony of the Archbishop of Tripoli and other witnesses went unheeded, the forgery of the mass grave pictures was brushed aside, and the “humanitarian” bombing began. (Again, just like with Assad.)

The no-fly zone, which immediately turned into a viciously destructive bombing (like Nato’s intervention in Kosovo, which went on even after Serbia had surrendered), was not just about Gaddafi. It was all about Italy; it was a frontal attack on

1) Italy’s major companies, which all had legitimate business with Libya and costly infrastructure built up through years of work on the Libyan coast,

2) the treaty that had put a stop to the wholesale invasion of Italy by impoverished immigrants, who happened to come prevalently from Muslim countries.


Consequences of the Libyan War for Italy

Both of these were enormous blows to Italy, but the second one was made particularly odious by the double standards that were flagrantly applied: with Italy being required to take in any and all who come by boat to our shores, or are dumped almost anywhere in the Mediterranean between here and Libya, while France - whose raids had started it all - literally closed its borders. When refugees from Tunisia (a former French colony) showed up expecting to get into France, they were shoved back into Italy! This incredible behaviour revealed to public scrutiny for the first time the existence of a Treaty signed in Dublin and dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, by which all illegal immigrants to the EU are to be registered and dealt with by the country where they first set foot. Italy being a stone’s throw away from Africa means that the boat people obviously come here as their first “choice”, and the Treaty makes sure they go no further than here.

This incredible burden notwithstanding, our rulers in Brussels, perhaps savouring the day in the not-too-distant future when the Vatican (considered the Book of Revelation’s “whore of Babylon” ) will inevitably be surrounded by a predominantly Muslim population - armed and financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and incited by Quran precepts to conquer the world for Allah and his prophet - ignored our legitimate pleas for help. Not only that: there were dark intimations here and there in the press about Italy needing to face up to its responsibilities. Whoever googled "Italy+colonialism" would come up with a lengthy Wikipedia list of Italian colonies, which actually correspond to the ancient Roman empire, plus charts of what amounts to dictator Mussolini’s 1930s colonial …wish list!

Now, the illegal immigration forced on Italy is a large part of what has caused our huge national debt. Yet, whenever Italy is concerned, the EU applies a sort of right of anyone in the world to come and live here, with his family, and be supported by us as well. In early 2012 the European Court of Human Rights even fined Italy for repatriating 24 illegal immigrants from Eritrea and Somalia, who had tried to enter the country three years earlier, 2009, on board a boat that was setting sail from Libya. These people were not harmed in any way, they were merely prevented from setting sail.

This was in accordance with the Treaty between Italy and the then-existent Libya, which allowed the Italian Coastguard to halt the massive illegal immigration that had been bringing immigrants to our shores in uncounted multitudes. Many drowned in the attempt.

Today, particularly after Pope Francis - in the aftermath of the October 2013 shipwreck of a shipload of 300+ Africans - amazingly went to Lampedusa to lament a generically wretched treatment of migrants, the situation is that Italy’s Navy is perennially fishing unlimited numbers out of the sea, ferrying them and towing their boats into Italian ports by the thousands. Daily. From the beginning of 2014 to Easter, over 20,000 were saved and brought into Italy, after Easter the rate of intake has been on average over a thousand a day, with no end in sight. Secretary of State Angelino Alfano has made it known that an estimated 800,000 people are assembled in Northern Africa, waiting their turn to be ferried into Italy. He has said that Italy cannot shoulder this burden by itself. But the Italian government dares take no action to stop them, knowing full well that the newscasts and daily press would immediately be filled with statements of moral outrage.

In sum: Italy has one of the highest population densities in the world, an economy saddled with the notorious public debt, yet we are high-handedly expected to take in unlimited masses of people who come here with their families, empty handed, expecting to be supported for the rest of their lives. In 2013 Australia, a continent with the lowest population density of the world, let it be known that boat people demanding asylum by landing on Christmas island – their Lampedusa – were denied entry and immediately deported to detention centers in Papua New Guinea or the island of Naum instead. Where was the international outcry?


Read the fourth and final part of the article:

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy

How the EU and the Left Ruined Italy

This is the second part of the article "The Looting of Italy" by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How the Looting Works

I will venture to suggest that there must be a blue-print out there on how to manage a country after a revolutionary takeover, such as what has been done to Italy (and to Venezuela? Cuba? China? Russia?)

I would say that basically, after A) overwhelming the system (the Cloward-Piven strategy), the revolutionary leader will aim at B) impoverishing the middle class in order to prevent its every chance of rebelling. This can be done in various ways, which should include: 1) continuous price hikes in utilities, 2) a credit crunch, 3) tax-tax-tax, 4) media influence used to a) scare investors away b) deflect attention from what is really going on and c) create an iron-clad reputation for the revolutionary “good guys”, 5) sale of the nation’s property at bargain prices.

This sequence is coming full circle in Italy.

A. Overwhelming the system. In the years prior to 2011 the hard-working Italian people had been saddled with a bloated bureaucracy and progressively swelling taxes, due to the unquenchable demands imposed on our welfare system by competing leftist and populist parties, goaded on by trade unions with a finger in every pie. I think that the most telling examples of legislation foisted on the people were a law that was passed by another technocratic administration in 1992 (also unelected but at least concerted by the elected political parties) whereby immigrants over 65 were entitled to old-age pensions (whether or not they had paid into the pension funds), and a law of 2007, passed by ex-EU-Commission President Romano Prodi, whereby the old-age pensions were extended to the relatives of immigrants who joined them in Italy. In 2009 the Conservative government managed to limit this provision to relatives who could prove they had at least lived in Italy for ten years, but the burden on Italy’s budget remains enormous and climbing. It is estimated that in 2015 Italy's old-age pensioners coming from outside the EU will cost over €1.5 billion yearly.

All this preceded Prime Minister Mario Monti [unelected, invited by President Giorgio Napolitano to form a new technocratic government in 2011], who was called in precisely to put a stop to it, lower the debt and put Italy back on course. But what he did was the exact opposite, in other words:

B. Adding taxes upon taxes, wiping out liquidity, scaring investors away, protecting certain privileges and playing the media with expertise. Very creative.

He then proceeded to the bargain sale of the family jewels.

It goes like this.

Italians, who are notoriously very attached to their offspring and grandchildren, were used to judiciously setting aside their savings, usually investing them in real estate. This was highly prized collateral that should have avoided all the pernicious alarmism about the national debt.

But the alarms were contrived (See this video where Monti states that crises are good events). Having set inordinately high property taxes, Monti crippled their prices, thereby reducing at the wave of the magic wand the value of Italy’s financial collateral.

Then Monti announces that Italy is all set to sell off huge amounts of prestigious state-owned real estate.

Funny, the Bank of Italy announced the very same thing more or less at the same time. Which means glutting the housing market with fine property from one moment to the next. The technocrats know that the glut will make the tax-depressed prices collapse even lower, but it will appear as if it were no one’s fault, apart from the usual culprit: the free market. This way they can sell off the family jewels at bargain prices to their foreign friends (the rest of us in Italy not having the liquidity left, as explained above).

This is a tragic déjà vu.

For the modern-day looting of Italy began back in June 1992, with the now notorious, but then super-secretive, meeting on the HMS Britannia, anchored off the shores of Latium, the region of Rome. The British royal family yacht had been lent for the occasion to a group of Anglo-American financiers. Among the guests was today’s President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi.

What did these invisible financiers want from Italy? Well, just as they do today, they wanted to get their hands on Italian banks and telephone and energy companies: the “family jewels”. Their main target is probably ENI [Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Italian large multinational] – but more about that later.

To go about this they had to speed up the changing of paradigm, making politics subordinate to the economy, and making the economy in turn to hinge on volatile finance.

In 1992, Italy’s IRI (Institute for the Reconstruction of Italy), the world’s largest state-run holding company, began to sell off its assets, at bargain prices, thereby starting the rush that has led to an avalanche of private industries to follow suit and seek a foreign buyer for their “Made in Italy” products in order to escape the combined stranglehold of bureaucracy and taxes. In the intervening 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands, of famous Italian brand names have been sold off to foreign companies.


The Attack in the Press

Reputation is everything, in a globalized market where traders encounter no restrictions to gambling with their own or other people’s money and are therefore in a position to cripple banks, currencies and entire countries. Demolishing investor confidence in a country can cost it millions, in the higher interest rates needed to attract buyers of its bonds. Disparagement by competitors is also a good way to increase investor interest in alternative bonds. In practice, as a piece in the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore put it, “the worse the reputations of Italy and Spain, the lower the interest rates on German bunds”.

Normally ignored in the general press, except to confirm uninformed clichés about things like the mafia and corruption, Italy started being described in the financial press as a basket case, hovering on the verge of disaster due to the size of its public debt, at the beginning of 2011. Despite its (then still) humming industries, mostly healthy banks and debt-free, educated, well-to-do population – conditions that are more than enough to guarantee secure payment of a country’s sovereign bonds - the press portrayed Italy’s condition as being desperate and placed the blame on the shoulders of the nation as a whole.

In actual fact, the situation was only desperate because of an uninformed international press pretending it is informed while choosing its sources only from among the “progressive” liberal press that mirrors their own biases. And the blame should actually be laid where it belongs, for example at the door of the decades-long unreasonable demands and manipulations of domineering communist parties and trade unions with a finger in every pie: a tale of warning that bears out the Cloward-Piven strategy of instigating the downfall of a capitalist society by overwhelming the system with massive demands. It could be a useful read for the U.S. before it finds itself winding up in the same spot.


Some Technical Notes, by Way of Explanation

Up until the single euro currency was invented, Germany was the “sick man of Europe”, mainly due to the fact that Western Germany had absorbed impoverished and backward Eastern Germany (Prussia) in one swallow, sharing with it the strong Deutschmark as its currency, with no adjustment. The Germans are still having to pay a tax for the support of ex-East Germany, but the common currency has enabled them to spread the burden onto all of the other members of the EU as well.

Since the introduction of the euro in 2001 German exports have soared, and every year there has been a surplus in Germany's accounts and a consequential mirror-image deficit in the accounts of the rest of the euro-zone countries.

There are many little details that have favored the image of Germany presented to the world as the most prosperous, honest, solid, upright and reliable country in the EU, or maybe the world. Things like the liabilities from the Kreditanstaltfurwiederaufbau which they don't include in the official accounts, so that they don’t come to bear on the total debt. Or the covert bailout they received when, as revealed by Bloomberg, Germany was allowed to spread its exposure to Greece onto all of the other EU countries. Most outrageous of all: the arms deals foisted on Greece, which in order to gain Germany’s assent to the bailouts was bullied into handing over a sizeable amount of said bailouts back to Germany itself, settling its debts for a purchase of submarines!


So Who Is Bailing Out Whom?

Bailouts are carried out in order to help a country’s creditors as much as the country itself. This is particularly obvious in the case of Greece, which Germany and France cynically compelled to use a considerable part of its bailout money (borrowed from the EU, at interest) to pay off previous purchases of German submarines and French helicopters. Percentage-wise, with respect to its exposure to Greek debt, Italy has contributed more than any other country to Greece’s bailout. But while the Greek government was forced to pay for German submarines (at least one of which doesn’t even stand up straight), as well as for French helicopters, it neatly rescinded its contract for Italian fighter planes, with no penalty attached .

Of the total €340 billion granted to Greece in official loans, only about 15 billion came directly from Germany, which corresponds to only 68.6% of Germany’s exposure in terms of the Greek bonds held by its banks. France, also imperilled by a possible Greek default, has contributed an even smaller proportion: 21% of its exposure. Conversely, Italy which, having relatively few Greek bonds, was one of the countries least at risk, has forked out 214.6% or more than double its exposure. According to some accounts, it was Berlusconi’s attempt to refuse this apportionment, balking at the Italian tradition of meekly accepting unfair conditions, that unleashed German fury against Italy, an account confirmed by ex-Spanish Premier Jose Zapatero who in his memoirs tells of the irritation against Italy's Prime Minister and the Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti at the G-20 meeting in Cannes, in September 2011, a little over a month and a half before their ouster.

Most unfair of all is the fact that, despite being lumped into the “PIIGS” [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain] group, Italy, which has never received a penny of the 285 billion lent out to the other troubled countries, actually contributed a hefty 55 billion to bail-out Greece, Spain and Portugal. This is:

- money we must borrow at some 6% while getting a 3% interest in return.

- money that contributes to increasing not only the recipient countries’ debt, but also our own debt, for which we are fined by Brussels and reported on as profligate spenders!!


The Press: Conniving or Incompetent?

So which country do you think is being trumpeted by the international press as being the one and only magnanimous and put-upon benefactor of all things European? Italy, which is shouldering a share of the bailout which is wildly disproportionate to its exposure? Of course not. As always these days, when something is being meted out to enhance reputation and/or the economy, Germany is on the receiving end.

Here are some other examples of pernicious press incompetence.

On August 7th 2011 Fox News’s Shepard Smith suddenly came out with "A couple of weeks ago there was a run on the banks in Italy"... which was totally made up. Italy has had to cope with lots of problems but so far never any runs on banks! Who fed Fox News that lie?

When the “humanitarian” bombing of Libya was being carried out and the papers were dwelling on the situation in Northern Africa, The Washington Times wrote that Italy was "the former colonial power in Tunisia". Of course, Tunisia was a French colony, as were Algeria and Morocco. Of all the territories in North Africa, the only one that was a colony of Italy's was Libya, which it accrued in 1911, as the Ottoman Empire was starting to disintegrate, and held only until World War II. With all the North African autocrats suddenly being presented in their worst colors, singling out Italy, the least of the colonial powers, as the colonial power par excellence is particularly unfair.

Whether out of ignorance or interest, The Daily Telegraph wrote in a front-page headline in 2012 that “Spain and Italy are to be bailed out”, while it was Spain that was to be bailed out, with Italy shouldering 20% of the cost.

At the end of June 2012 an opening headline piece in The New York Times informed the public that our unelected, then Prime Minister Mario Monti had been doing wondrous things, and would do even better if it were not for those petulant little nuisances, the political parties, who are reluctant to let him take the tough decisions he would like.

Actually, things are the other way round! Monti enjoyed the unmitigated praise and support of an unprecedented majority of Parliament from both sides of the aisles. He was able to do whatever he pleased and they ratified, very few questions asked.

And unfortunately, what he did amounted to grinding the Italian economy to a halt, ruthlessly imposing punitive taxes on everyone and everything, giving our money away as if it were everyone else’s due, and pretending slow-motion to do something to help companies that were struggling not out of lack of business or readiness to work hard, but for want of liquidity. Not that the state coffers are empty, they’re not. Italy has the wherewithal to settle these overdue accounts, but can’t do it because of treaties such as the European Stability Pact which requires us to keep the money on hand. Businessmen have been committing suicide by the dozens, and one of the reasons was and is that they await payment for services rendered to the state, yet are required nonetheless to cough up income taxes immediately to that same inflexible state.

All this, and more, notwithstanding, The NYT certified that Monti was unquestionably competent and did more in his first six weeks in power than the entire political class had done in the preceding ten years!

In actual fact the Monti government did pitifully little, apart from eliminating some remaining early-retirement loopholes. Now Italians must stay at work (if they have it) until they are 67, while Germans retire earlier and the French only recently raised their retirement age from 60 to 62.



Read the two final parts of the article:

EU-Imposed Immigration Is Destroying Italy's Economy

Euro, Technocrats and Media Role in the Undoing of Italy