Italian Priest Offers Reward for Weddings

In the small village of Volania, in Northern Italy, home to about 300 families and 1,000 people, the local priest Father Giancarlo Pirini has decided to offer a "bounty" of 500 euros, in cash, of his own money to every couple who will get married.

The Father is worried about the crisis of marriage.

"Some time ago, leafing through the marriage register of the parish - says Fr Pirini - I noticed that it was still at the first volume, which began in 1955." Scanning it, the parish priest ended in despair: in 1960 only 17 weddings were celebrated, in 2006 and 2012 none.

Europeans, if the current rates of marriage and reproduction continue, are going to die out.

New Facebook Page: Save the West

I have started just 3 days ago a new Page on Facebook, called Save the West.

Save the West from what threatens to destroy it from without, Islam, and from within, cultural Marxism, what we kindly call "political correctness".

Come and have a look and, if you like it, Like it.

The Marxist-Leninist Roots of the European Union. Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky

Below is my translation of an interview I found very interesting with former Soviet dissident and political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky by Alessandra Nucci, published in the December 2012 issue of the Italian periodical Radici Cristiane. What he says provides a very useful background to understand what lies behind the European Union project and its similarities with the Soviet Union, a subject on which Bukovsky has written a book.

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Vladimir Bukovsky, 70, is one of the most famous ex-political prisoners of the former Soviet Union. In total he spent twelve years of internment, including prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals, before being ejected and swapped for the Chilean prisoner Luis Corvalan in 1976. Since then he has lived in Cambridge and took British citizenship.

In 2007 he co-authored with Pavel Stroilov EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration in which he reconstructs, on the basis of documents copied from the Soviet archives in 1992, plans to transform the European Union into a Union of Socialist Republics in all identical to the former Soviet Union.

Radici Cristiane has asked his opinion on current developments.

Mr. Bukovsky, at least since 2000 you have been saying that the European Union is the exact copy of the Soviet Union. Aspects in common you highlighted include the new Europe’s structure itself: a union of republics with a socialist structure, run by a handful of unelected people who make typically Bolshevik promises - equality, fairness and justice - and do not recognize nations but only citizens of a new people, with "European" instead of "Soviet". In common, in addition, the two unions have the typical corruption of a socialist republic, a corruption organized from the top, aggressiveness towards the outside and even gulags inside. Many years later, are the events proving you right?

You forgot the similarity in the way they started. How was the USSR created? Of course, by military force, but also by forcing the republics to join with the financial threat, making them economically fearful. So there we are.

But we are still at the beginning, at the first stage. The ultimate goal of all unions that have been built so far does not end with the submission to the control of Brussels, but it goes further. The target is the building of a single state, under one world government, with a single law, a single pension....

The financial crises serve to push in this direction.

The general impoverishment would then be wanted?

It is the very concept of "union" that removes flexibility from the economy. A single economy makes the constant adjustments necessary to facilitate trade impossible.

Don’t let's forget that the Soviet Union went bankrupt. Of course, we were far ahead on the road to integration towards a single state: not just a single currency, but also one people. And the Soviet Union, in contrast to Europe, had enormous resources, so, every time it was on the verge of bankruptcy, it would discover new resources: oil, diamonds, gold... That's what made ​​them carry on. Otherwise they would not have failed in the eighties but by the end of the thirties.

You said that the crisis was the first stage. What about the second?

Over time there is a development of distrust that can lead to hostility. That is the next stage. Examples abound, just think of Yugoslavia, the USSR… Countries forced to live under the same roof. I myself grew up under a federal flag. But it is a pressure cooker that sooner or later blows up.

Is this why they are gradually unifying the military?

It still has to do with the construction of a single state. One government, one president, one policy. The economic difficulties help to reduce the sovereignty, because people are more willing to accept and obey. In Italy not coincidentally you have an unelected Prime Minister.

Are they using the economy to crush the nation state? It seems to me that they use it to crush people. They manipulate people to prevent them from opposing the new policy, which must, on the contrary, appear to them as the only hope.

Are they therefore all socialists in Brussels?

The project is socialist. I do not know these people personally, but most of them are on the Left, more or less extreme. That means that they favour statist solutions and the regulation of everything. And they all talk like in Lenin's book The State and Revolution, which explains how the nation state will die. His words are that it will "fade until it disappears."

For their part, the Conservatives hold the curious idea that the project can change from within. The EPP does not resist, and trying to influence it from within becomes a good excuse for doing nothing.

Is then in Lenin the matrix of what we are experiencing?

The dream of socialists, the Maximum Programme, has always been to eliminate the private property, the family and the nation state. With the private property they have not succeeded, but they continue on the path of destruction of the family and the nation.

The plan that failed in the East has been transferred to the West; Europeans and Moscow have worked together to implement the "convergence" of the "Common European Home". Prior to 1985, the Left was opposed to the European Community because it was saying that it helped the owners, industrialists, capitalists, and let down the workers. Then they made a U-turn.

“Socialist” for us is a term very different from “communist”. You seem to apply it to the Soviet paradigm as a synonym for “communist”.

No, socialism is the gradual and less violent form of communism, and socialist is the project of the European Union, which was born in Maastricht in 1992. The intent was to save socialism in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the predictable bankruptcy of the welfare state in the West as well. Welfare costs were growing and there was no way to counter them or stop them.

You can give benefits to people but cannot take them away without alienating a huge part of the population, because you do not get re-elected. So when leftist leaders realized that they were going into the red and that their socialist innovations in Europe would go belly up, they decided to create this administration of unelected people, who could not be sent home.

An administration that however already existed!

Before Maastricht there was no European Union. There was a common market, created to facilitate trade, movement of capital. That's why no one has had anything to object for so long. But in the mid-eighties, rather than an economic community they decided to set up a state. Before Maastricht they never said “union”, they were saying “community”. And they were not talking about it publicly.

Among your predictions for the EU-USSR there was also the gulag. Do you confirm it?

Unfortunately, yes. The EU is creating them slowly. The politically correct is imposed not by persuasion but by repression. In Britain just last month they jailed for hate speech a nineteen-year-old who had written something offensive on Twitter about a football player with black skin. He was sentenced to a month and a half in prison.

As nobody protests, they will gradually widen the net and eventually we will get the gulag. And remember that the European police force is granted immunity, something that was not granted even to the KGB!

Is Barack Obama not part of all this?

For now, Americans do not perceive the European Union, do not see where it is going. But America has a parallel special project, the American Union.

If the process includes the United States of America, what hope is there to stop this global government? It will fail, because it is too big to handle. It is impossible to govern such a huge entity. And notice that the most common resistance is not open, but passive: sabotage.

On the other side is Putin. I know that you have an entirely negative opinion of him, but times change and its strong ties with the Orthodox Church have meant that a few weeks ago Russia joined the majority of other nations in opposition to the United States and the countries of Western Europe on the subject of abortion. Thus Russia is, and has been for a while, a reference point for the Orthodox churches and also for the Catholic Church.

For that matter the same applies to Muslims, who on these issues make a common front at the UN with the Church, but in obedience to their own religion. This does not make them "good", because outside of this topic they are opposed to us as their enemies. It is one of the paradoxes of this world.

Minority German Children Bullied by Muslims in Their Own Schools

Just published on YouTube is a shocking video of discrimination against German and Christian children in German schools. They are severely bullied by Muslim kids in a school where immigrant children are an astonishing 96 percent. Hardly anybody speaks to them, they become introvert. They are outcasts, not integrated into the schools of their own land.

The reporter investigating this shameful situation interviews a boy who tells her how he was chased and attacked for saying that he does not believe in God, and a girl who says she is regularly insulted for being a Christian and called "You shit Christian".

The problem is not addressed by the school staff or the education authorities. The teachers even refuse to talk to the journalist in the video.

Indigenous and Christian children then become fearful even of reporting that they have been bullied to the teachers, not knowing how they will react (maybe they'll be called "racist"?).

The school councillor interviewed in the video admits that this causes real problems in children, like academic failure and refusal to return to school, and yet teachers are afraid to discuss it openly and reproach the Muslim bullies, lest they come "under immediate general suspicion of being against foreigners": and that's obviously anathema to them.

Cultural Marxists and liberals prefer to let their children grow up shy and socially inept than to risk fomenting "xenophobia" by openly discussing this scandal. They seem to be prepared to throw even their kids under the bus.

Some families move away closer to a different school. Do native Europeans have to leave their homes and cities to make way for Muslim immigrants? Many British people choose to go and live abroad and not just for the climate. Is this the future of Europe, or lack thereof?

The last kid interviewed in the video describes his plans for the future thus: "Move away from here to where there are Germans living and where one is left in peace".

Germany's Family Minister Kristina Schröder aknowledged the existence of this issue of children being bullied in schools just for being German as part of "a growing tendency to violence stemming from a 'macho culture' among young Muslim men".

The problem was highlighted in 2010 in the city of Essen by the German TV channel Das Erste:

"They're not threatened with a knife every day. but the children of immigration background clearly have their way here," says the school principal. The female teachers have to deal with students saying "don't speak to her, she's just a German slut."

"When it's Ramadan, there's a state of emergency. The last time it went so far, that they spit in our food," says the home-economics teacher. "People always say that foreigners are discriminated, but here it's precisely the other way around." A Lebanese Arabic teacher says that the German way of living is very clearly being rejected by his students, the attitude is almost chic.

The German children respond with aggression or by over-adapting their behavior. In the playground you find them in the corners. Sebastian, an ethnic German 16 year old, feels bullied by the Muslim students, and is often involved in fights. Juli is a friend of the devout Saleh from Palestine. She calls herself a Muslims, which means: no parties, no alcohol, no sex.

The teachers try to respond t the situation with clarity and by upholding German laws and regulations, but also by mother-tongue classes and understanding for the Lebanese.

Every 5 Minutes a Christian is Killed for His Faith

Every 5 minutes a Christian is killed for his or her religion somewhere in the world.

Yet, leftists, dhimmi media and assorted "intellectuals" say that the main problem is "Islamophobia".

From Zenit, Sociologist: Every 5 Minutes a Christian Is Martyred. Speaks of Emergency in Religious Discrimination:

ROME, JUNE 3, 2011 (Zenit.org).- A sociologist representing a European security organization says that the number of Christians killed each year for their faith is so high that it calculates to one martyr's life being taken every five minutes.

Massimo Introvigne of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported this data at a conference on Christian-Jewish-Muslim interfaith dialogue, which concluded today in Hungary. The conference was sponsored by the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union, and included a variety of high-level representatives from the three monotheistic religions, as well as political and social leaders.

Introvigne reported that Christians killed every year for their faith number 105,000, and that number includes only those put to death simply because they are Christians. It does not count the victims of civil or international wars.

"If these numbers are not cried out to the world, if this slaughter is not stopped, if it is not acknowledged that the persecution of Christians is the first worldwide emergency in the matter of violence and religious discrimination, the dialogue between religions will only produce beautiful conferences but no concrete results," he stated.

Egyptian diplomat Aly Mahmoud said that in his country laws have been passed that will protect Christian minorities, for example, prosecuting those who give speeches that incite hatred and banning hostile crowds outside churches.

"However, the danger is that many Christian communities in the Middle East will die from emigration, because all Christians, feeling threatened, will flee," he said.

The diplomat suggested Europe prepare for "a new wave of emigration, this time from Christians fleeing the persecutions."

For his part, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, chairman for the Russian Orthodox patriarchate's Department of External Church Relations, reminded that "at least 1 million" Christian victims of persecutions are children.

Sharia Police already a Reality in London

Five people so far have been arrested by the police in connection with the offences committed by the self-proclaiming "Muslim vigilantes" last weekend, including causing grievous bodily harm and public order offences.

The video above shows ordinary people on the streets of East London being confronted by Muslim vigilantes telling them that it is a "Muslim area" and "this is a Muslim patrol". They say: "No alcohol is allowed", "The Muslims patroling this area forbid evil, and alcohol is evil", forcing people to relinquish cans and bottles.

Other utterances are: "We don't care if you believe it or not", "We need to control this area and we need to forbid these people to dress like this and exposing themselves outside the mosque", followed by telling aggressively to a normally-dressed (i.e. without hijab) woman and man: "Remove yourself away from the mosque now, and don't come back. Do you understand?".

To another woman who retorted that she was appalled they shouted: "We don't care if you are appalled at all" and "Vigilantes implementing Islam upon your necks".

Despite "progressive" reporters and commentators' lame attempts to insinuate that this could have been a far-right's plot to inflame and divide public opinion on the issue of Islam, investigative journalist Ted Jeory has done his job and found out that Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the now proscribed Islamist association Islam4UK, knew the Muslim vigilantes group.

The Bishop of Rochester's warning in January 2008 that Islamism had turned "already separate communities into 'no-go' areas" is turning out to be true.

This should not surprise anyone who has even sporadically followed the news.

The group Muslims Against the Crusades (MAC) has long designated Tower Hamlets, an East London borough, as one of three areas - the other two are Bradford and Dewsbury, in Yorkshire, Northern England - where to establish three independent states or autonomous territories within the UK, medieval 'emirates' operating entirely outside British law, as testbeds for blanket sharia rule.

Those areas have been chosen because they are heavily populated by Muslims. MAC has been banned, but its ideas are flourishing in Tower Hamlets.

MAC said on its site, now removed:

We suggest it is time that areas with large Muslim populations declare an emirate delineating that Muslims trying to live within this area are trying to live by the sharia as much as possible with their own courts and community watch and schools and even self sufficient trade...

In time we can envisage that the whole of the sharia might one day be implemented starting with these enclaves.

Tower Hamlets Council, the area's local authority, is notorious for having been exposed as infiltrated by Muslim extremists, as has the Labour Party itself, which runs the council.

Tower Hamlets elected as its first directly-elected mayor Lutfur Rahman, an Islamist with ties to the fundamentalist Islamic Forum of Europe, which controls the East London Mosque. This fact also should give an idea of the political propensities of the Muslim population that dominates this part of London.

In another twist of this shameful connivance between Labour and Islamism, last Spring the defeated London mayor candidate for the Labour Party, Ken Livingstone, gave an infamous speech promising to turn London into a “beacon” for the words of the Prophet Mohammed and pledging to “educate the mass of Londoners” in Islam. Andrew Gilligan, London editor of the Telegraph, reports:

[Livingstone said]: “That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet.” Mr Livingstone described Mohammed’s words in his last sermon as “an agenda for all humanity.”

He praised the Prophet’s last sermon, telling his audience: “I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands its words and message.” He also promised to “make your life a bit easier financially. [or, to call things by their name, jizya in the form of welfare]”

Thank God he lost.

Hope Is a Theological Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple, in his excellent book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , wrote in the year 2000 that the liberal elites at the BBC and other UK media were denying the reality of the British working class's degeneration in the previous few decades.

He describes what he saw in the downmarket seaside resort of Blackpool, in Northern England, which he had visited for the purpose fo writing an article commissioned to him "to describe the conduct of the people who go there for a weekend":

This sophisticated innocence has departed. Without the institution of marriage, mother-in-law and divorce jokes are pointless and passé. Fun now means public drunkenness on a mass scale, screaming in the streets, and the frequent exposure of naked buttocks to passersby. Within moments of arriving on the street along the beach, which was ankle-deep in discarded fast-food wrappings (the smell of stale fat obliterates completely the salt smell of the sea), I saw a woman who had pulled down her slacks and tied a pair of plastic breasts to her bare buttocks, while a man crawled after her on the sidewalk, licking them. At midnight along this street—with the sound of rock music pounding insistently out of every club door, and each door presided over by a pair of steroid-inflated bouncers, among men vomiting into the gutters, and with untold numbers of empty bags of marijuana on the pavement—I saw children as young as six, unattended by adults, waiting for their parents to emerge from their nocturnal recreations.

He recounts how, after the article's publication, he was accused by the mainstream media's intellectual elites of being a snob, and letters sent to these media outlets accused him of not understanding the working class "culture".

But other, unpublished, letters sent by the public were supportive of his position:

The liberal assumption, in this as in most things, is that to understand is to approve (or at least to pardon), and therefore my disapproval indicated a lack of understanding. But strangely enough, the letters that the BBC and the newspaper that published the original article forwarded to me—those they hadn't broadcast or published—wholly endorsed my comments. They were from Blackpool residents and from working-class people elsewhere who passionately denied that working-class culture had always consisted of nothing but mindless obscenity. Several writers spoke very movingly of enduring real poverty in childhood while maintaining self-respect and a striving for mental distinction. The deliberate exclusion of these voices from public expression provided a fine example of how the British intelligentsia goes about its self-appointed task of cultural destruction.

Since the time when Dalrymple wrote about his difficulty in breaking through the media wall on the subject of descent from self-respecting working class to underclass, the press and TV networks have repeatedly published images of events similar to the ones he described occurring at weekends in many other cities and towns across the country, and indeed even abroad, in places like Spain or wherever British holidaymakers can be found.

A single man armed with a pen, determined to expose a problem and indicate a solution, has had a lasting influence in showing a path that other mass means of communication followed.

It is just one of the numerous examples of how change can be easier than we sometimes think.

When I was a teenager in the 60s and 70s, the radical ideas of the Left seemed unrealistic and their goals unattainable. Now for them it's almost mission accomplished.

Things can turn around the other way just as easily as they did this way.