Guest Op-Ed
Submitted by Erasmo Russo
The last several years have exhibited an incredible collapse in Western culture in the United States and Europe, and an ever-increasing exportation of the worst ideas and elements of the American scene to the rest of the world. Those of us in the Mediterranean and Levant chuckle as bewildered US officials appear on camera, shocked that people around the world not only have no interest in these novelties, but actively resist them. Even nations such as Ireland, with strong diplomatic and historical ties to the US, are complaining of the importation and imitation of Americanisms such as corporate franchising and mass pop culture and secularization.
Sadly, there seems to be a true lack of fresh ideas and effort to combat this on the ground, in the heart of the beast. This spells ever-increasing pressures and hardships on the Patria. As the Anglo-Americans are losing demographic numbers and cultural capital (and arguably some political capital while they do retain economic power), their strategists are arguing for a mixture of legal battles in the local court system and for a so-called “American ethnogenesis”, as articulated by a new book by Jeremy Carl, a former American Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. This notion of the creation of a “people” based on an eventual amalgam of ethnoi which would all willingly accept local foundational values, such as democracy, republican constitutionalism, classical liberalism, and now, an ever-leftward shifting set of “luxury beliefs”, as described by American scholar Rob Henderson. Carl’s notions appear to be a conglomeration of José Vasconcelos’ Raza Cosmica ideas and a founding mythology a la Atatürk or “nos ancêtres les Gaulois,” whereby North Americans could finally transcend their centuries-old British colonial binary black/white system. This unsatisfactory strategy is a last attempt to save dying secularized, deracinated Anglo-Saxon culture, and lacks the organic unity of Vasconcelos’ notions of a Latin Catholic Spanish and indigenous Indio-rooted society of the former Spanish Empire, and is indeed more like the state-planned homogenization of Turkey in the 1920s whereby a large underlying base of Greeks, Armenians, and others where to politely assume and pretend to be newly minted “Turks” who were not to be particularly religious, and who were to adopt the Latin alphabet and gaze westward longingly to London and Paris. This American ethnogenesis is really just an expansion of American melting pot assimilation, which was of course, just as a hundred years ago, a strategy for the survival of the Anglo North Americans and their ways- not to uplift and benefit our people.
Our diaspora communities are formed largely by the roughly 50% of our people who chose to remain abroad and not repatriate. While living in distinctive enclaves and retaining our culture has been possible in multilingual places like Canada and Belgium, or hospitable Latin Catholic nations like Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, which were never at odds with Italy, that 50% of us that remained in Anglo lands such as the monolithic United States, was subjected to overwhelming political pressure to demonstrate local loyalty, accept local political values, and even religious ones. Having made the choice to remain and sign on to the “American project,” our people had to abandon much of their identity and pivot from the guest-worker strategy of politely and quietly working and planning for the eventual repatriation. To survive, gain power, and thrive, our people were encouraged to join the ranks of the American “white” side of the binary divide. Our Catholic practitioners were eagerly likewise recruited during the post-World War II Cold War years to fill the American anti-communist ranks. Since the end of the Cold War and the leftward shift around the globe, our diaspora people have become less relevant and have indeed started to become “invisible,” a “vampire” group, as Italian American scholar Fred Gardaphé quipped- a people without a reflection in the mirror, and no image or signifier to mirror our peoplehood back to ourselves and to the host society. Therefore in the present time, the 50% of our people living abroad are faced with severe pressure to assimilate or to actively work to reclaim their language, history, folkways, and overall identity. Even hospitable places like Australia are experiencing a more American-style assimilation program under the pressures of rising Islamism and leftism.Our diaspora communities must not fall into the trap of again becoming raw material or filler for a faceless crowd of the local nation-state. Our people are being courted and goaded to bolster decadent self-immolating local populations which are cracking under the strain of their perverse destructive ideologies, the last offspring of the French Revolution and the siècle de Lumières. Even if we are reduced to nomads on the Eurasian steppes, let us circle our caravan and carry on our ways unapologetically. Is it interesting to note how quickly we have disappeared from film and literature, how quickly our people’s Catholic schools and churches have disappeared as soon as our people were not needed. Our people are now being asked to fill the pews in evangelical heretical churches or to join the most far-left radical chic protest groups, i.e. to fill empty spaces in somebody else’s army and help hold the barricades of their programmes.
In a further bizarre twist of history and policy, a major American news network misleadingly reported the United States political élite are now seeking to mask (and not truly resolve) the massive illegal migration issue by reaching accords with Italy and Greece to accept migrants from South America and Central America apprehended by authorities! Instead of seeking to assist its regional friends and allies economically or commercially, or even to secure its own borders and properly staff its own police and courts, the notion was floated that Italy and Greece settle these desperate migrants. The Italian government did affirm that preliminary talks were being held whereby a small number of asylum seekers might be accepted by Italy, particularly Italo-Venezuelans. While it is difficult to assess the truthfulness of these reports, the UK has indeed openly spoken of accords with Rwanda to hold migrants apprehended in the UK, which seems to have inspired the US to test a similar idea. These temporary patch fixes are inhumane and fundamentally silly, designed often to make politicians look good as elections approach in their countries.
The only glimmer of hope among so much chaos is offered by the increasing number of diaspora Southern Italians returning, some after two or more generations of exile, to voluntarily reside in their ancestral towns and to indeed, even invest in local economies. Benvenga!