NYT has a brief today on a detention center in Greece that is being closed due to overcrowding and rights violations. What rights? These are illegal immigrants! This week there was an innocent heading in Il R saying that ancient Rome was already “multi-ethnic” as if that is supposed to make our Rome more palatable (in light of growing rightist action against zingari and hatred of the Chinese). No, it wasn’t! How many times in my life will I have to suffer people using our culture specific (non-universal) concepts to judge the ancients? The Romans had no concept of ethnicity or biology. You were Roman or not. You were a barbarian, a Greek, an Egyptian, or Summarian (among others). But these distinctions had no relation to the ultra-modern concept of ethnicity. Why is this so important?
Well, well meaning liberal humanists use the argument to “prove” that Rome has always been “diverse”. OK, fair enough - there have always been different people living here. But here is the difference. Whereas today we are all too willing and proud to emasculate ourselves and then give our culture and traditions away to our multicultural others (out of fear of reprisal or shame that we are in fact superior), Rome’s others were either slaves who, while not dehumanized racially, were worked to death to build this amazing city or were some other degraded “class” (another un-transferable modern concept). If you came to Rome and refused to worship Rome’s gods (as so many Muslims openly and angrily do today) you were not pampered and bowed down to in an effort to mollify your incompatibility with a place you chose to come. Instead you were hung on a cross and left to die and then rot. Or fed to lions! If you came to Rome and killed a Roman citizen (as a few Romanians and Albanians have done [murder is quite rare here]) you were either crucified or sent to gladiatorial camps that ensured for most a quick death. That is if you survived the family of the person you harmed.
Lest I be seen as advocating harsh police or vigilante measures against immigrants and criminals, I must be clear that instead I am arguing that we throw off the conceptual breaks that keep us so afraid of violence, cruelty, offending, and suffering - and thus from defending ourselves from the unworthy. Terribly, someone has been poisoning bears, vultures, and wolves in Abruzzo National Park. It is assumed to be farmers (already under suspicion for starting many of the fires that scorched Italy’s heartland this summer) tired of being harassed by the animals. WWF has suggested a 10,000 euro bounty for information on perpetrators. Closer to home, every morning we dodge zingari digging in our trash for food and clothes. For doing the same as the bears and wolves, why do we not think of poisoning them? Are they somehow a more valuable form of life than bears and wolves? I can’t really speak for bears, but I assume one zingaro (or zingara - no discrimination here!) equals less than a pile of wolf poop. While Americans are accustomed to living around filth and mediocrity, the Romans are not. And more and more are becoming active against the growing mound of human trash collecting in their city. Last week two zingaro camps were raided by Molotov and machete wielding Romans, followed by a well attended three-day event by Forza Nuova that I must assume (knowing FN like I do) pulled no punches on the changing face of Italy.
They have yet to be fully disarmed by our relativism, hedonism, and indulgences in empathy (that’s right - empathy is the problem, not apathy). Americans gave it away with a smile (we are told for the chance to pay lower prices for all kinds of goods and services). Hopefully someone will have to take it from the Italians while facing the threat of a violent struggle (in part because vulgar market-driven understandings of our species are still out-of-place here). What we are witnessing play-out here is a different meaning of being human. America was born with an idea of human equality (and hence the idea that each and all of us can be bought [Nietzsche discusses in great detail the links between trade and its need for valuation and the moral/ethical principles buttressing equal rights. I am extending his analysis a bit, in light of many Italian critiques we hear of American assumptions that the market can solve all our problems]) and now we suffer the most vulgar and simple populism and popular culture in the world. Consumerism as culture (which must by definition be popular), so that, what it means to be human is some rights-based mumble-jumble that amounts to little more than being free to buy something at a cheap price.
Italy, by contrast, understands our species from the perspective of ancient and medieval ideals. From the Roman ideals of honor, valor, strength, dignity, and passion (that became fascism) to the medieval Christian counter-ideals of compassion, pity, and meekness (that became liberalism’s socialist and communist variants), Italians tend to have little room for the market or biology when placing meanings on our time and purpose here.
Padoa-Scioppa and Prodi combined today in separate press conferences to offend most Italians by suggesting that an open door policy to immigrants is positive. P-S went so far as to say that immigrants were a boon to businesses, less skilled workers, and in care for the elderly. NA’s Mantovano got it right in response: by telling a gathering of the foreign press that Italy has open doors to immigrants is like issuing an invitation to every North African to come and settle. This also on a day when over 200 more illegals arrived in Lampedusa. Fortress Europe announced today that almost 1100 illegals have died this year attempting to arrive in Europe by boat. I’m not sure if FE wants us to cry or clap.
No comments:
Post a Comment