Saturday Commentary and Review #100

Regime Change in Italy Then and Now, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Power of Narrative, Berlin LGBT Daycare, Are Americans a 'People'?, Blue-Eyed Anti-British Irish Monk of 1901 Rangoon

Back in January of this year, I speculated on what Europe would look like politically if, by some miracle, the USA withdrew from the continent:

Some western countries would, in my opinion, remain liberal democracies. The UK first and foremost, as it is its home. Others have adapted to this system thanks to the stability of their own polities. Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the Baltic states, and possibly Finland as well would most likely perpetuate liberal democracy.

Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, and Greece would vacillate between liberal democracy and autocracy. Spain would be once again forced to contend with separatism in both Catalonia and the Basque Country, but absent overwhelming US influence, it would have a free hand in dealing with secessionist movements on Spanish soil.

Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Nordic Macedonia, Bulgaria and Ukraine would in turns move from some form of parliamentary democracy through to autocracy and dictatorship, the latter especially would it be engulfed in war as I described above.

I bring this up because regime risk in Europe is back in the news thanks to the victory of the FdI-led right wing coalition in Italy. The EU is already dealing with ‘maverick’ governments in both Warsaw and Budapest, and the fear in many quarters is that Italy will now join this group, creating a bloc that some would call ‘illiberal’ or ‘authoritarian’, but in actuality would simply be non-liberal. The hopes in Brussels are that Meloni will not be a shit-disturber, and she has so far acted as a balm with her messages of overt support for President Zelensky of Ukraine.

Others would prefer not to wait and see, instead demanding that the EPP (centre-right bloc of EU parties) expel Berlusconi’s Forza Italia if it enters into government with Meloni’s FdI, a party with roots in Italy’s Cold War Neo-Fascist movement. What is funny is that these three MEPs (Members of EU Parliament) are all German, and that none of them belong to parties that are within the EPP bloc. One is a social-democrat, another belongs to the Greens, and third one is a liberal. They insist that the EPP do to Forza Italia what they already did to Orban’s Fidesz.

A Spanish Marxist in the EU Parliament weighed in as well:

MEP Iratxe García Pérez, chair of the Socialists and Democrats group, also argued that the alliance between Forza Italia and the Brothers of Italy set a worrying precedent and could put “the European project in danger.”

Garcia Perez, naturally, sees her type as having the monopoly on defining what the European project actually is.

Italy is one of Europe’s giants, and its national debt has been an almost-permanent threat to the EU’s financial sector as a whole. This is why they overthrew Berlusconi the last time around and put in his place a pair of ‘safe hands’ in the form of technocrat Mario Monti, formerly a senior advisor to Goldman Sachs, and “leading member” of the Bilderberg Group. Italy is simply too important a country to allow it to be run by those elected by its citizens.

Italians are natural communists and natural fascists (after all, Italy is the home of fascism), which is why I suggested that absent foreign hegemony over the continent, Italians would segue between periods of democratic and authoritarian rule. Even during the Cold War Italians made their pro-authoritarian feelings well-known: the first post-war election would have seen a communist-led Popular-Front coalition win if not for the covert intervention of the CIA. The USA was simply not going to allow Italy to defect from the American-led western bloc to the Soviet one, allowing it to link up with the Red Army in occupied Austria, and with Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia (which was to break with the USSR that year). Regime change and regime manipulation on the continent is as old as government itself.

This wasn’t the only instance of foreign powers meddling in Italy’s elections during the Cold War. For example, the UK and its Information Research Department, a “covert Cold War propaganda arm of the Foreign Office”, openly interfered in the 1976 parliamentary elections, where the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) threatened to win:

Just as many observers now fear Italy’s new right-wing government might go soft on Putin’s Russia and disrupt the EU, in the mid-1970s British officials feared a similar outcome if the PCI joined a coalition.

In local elections in 1975, the PCI won 33% of the vote, just behind the governing Christian Democrats, attracting support by attacking corruption, distancing itself from Moscow and committing to democracy, freedom and private enterprise. Berlinguer promised an accommodation with Nato and the EEC.

The Foreign Office was divided on how genuine this was. Some believed Berlinguer’s leadership offered a chance of a “glittering prize” – detaching a western European communist party from Moscow – but others saw the PCI as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In fact, KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin would later tell British intelligence that while Moscow continued to fund the PCI, the Soviets were dismayed by Berlinguer and, like the IRD, tried to discredit him.

But the cold war warriors prevailed.

Alarmed by Italy’s slide to the left, in November 1975 Foreign Office officials asked the IRD to target Berlinguer and his party and expose the contradiction between the PCI’s new democratic image and its official commitment to Marxism-Leninism.

“We do not want the communist parties of western Europe to come to power in any form,” a senior British diplomat noted. They “must continue to be opposed by every possible means”. Britain’s ambassador in Rome argued it would be “catastrophic” if the PCI entered government.

Some of you may like this, others will not. That all depends on where your political loyalties lie, and what your principles look like as well.

The strategy of destabilization was mooted:

Four days after the date of the Italian election was announced, officials put forward their “options for action” in a paper sent to Crosland. It warned that PCI participation in government was “a very dangerous prospect” and that if the party achieved “majority participation … leading on to full power, the situation would probably have to be regarded as irretrievable by the Nato allies and Community partners”.

A “clean surgical coup” was rejected as “unrealistic”, although “in the right circumstances”, officials mused, they could encourage the Italian government to repress the PCI, and suggested “it might be worth” arranging pretexts for this. But officials advised they could “orchestrate a campaign” against Berlinguer and the PCI, recommending “increased action in the propaganda field, both overt and covert, to undermine the credibility of the PCI”.

While officials awaited Crosland’s approval, the documents reveal, the IRD was already starting covert operations. Dunlop of the SEU was seconded to the embassy in Rome to discover ways “to influence Italian opinion” to support “the middle ground in the run-up to the election”.

….but was then deemed unnecessary thanks to the actual results:

On election day, there was a swing to the left, but the Christian Democrats emerged as the largest party. Dunlop, reporting afterwards, identified the key development as “a largely spontaneous and effective campaign” by the Italian press, alerting Italians “to the dangers of voting the PCI into power”. The IRD’s operations against the PCI were, she wrote, “last minute” and “could only have had a limited impact”.

Joy said the elections had “won us a short breathing space in which to prepare for the second round in Italy”. But the secret operation was the last major “black job” mounted by the IRD and its SEU: the following year, the new foreign secretary, David Owen, shut down the IRD.

Deem something an ‘existential threat’, and all is allowed.

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“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

-Ben Shapiro, 5’7”

Carefully-constructed narratives don’t care about your facts, Ben. They will also crush your facts, provided that the narrative has enough institutional, cultural, political, and economic backing.

I had this in mind while I was reading this terrific (and very long) profile of American journalist and writer Nikole Hannah-Jones. Safely perched up on high at the New York Times, her massively-promoted book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, has elevated her to the position of the country’s foremost Black intellectual, displacing both Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Her book sparked serious debate for playing fast and loose with the facts, charges that she easily brushed off through the many weapons in her arsenal.

Mark Weitzmann on the woman herself:

And what could better embody these internal American contradictions than the story of the author of The 1619 Project herself—the tirelessly careerist daughter of a civil rights-activist white mother and a troubled Black father; the formerly quiet, bookish, Midwestern, working-class girl who became one of the most powerful and influential figures at The New York Times, where she often speaks with a Southern accent strikingly displaced from the region in which she grew up; the would-be scholar of American slavery for whom history is as much about “narrative,” “memory,” and “the present” as it as about truth or “the past”; the journalist driven by a seemingly outdated faith in the power of the written word, but whose output as a public intellectual has been largely distributed through the unforgiving medium of Twitter, where her sometimes cruel, often petty tweets come under the name of Ida Bae Wells—derived from Ida B. Wells, the pioneering 19th-century journalist who was born a slave and died a legend of both the Civil Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements.

In addition to Ida Bae Wells, Nikole Hannah-Jones has frequently referred to herself as the “Beyoncé of journalism,” an appellation her critics have enjoyed ridiculing, but which mainly serves to obscure her more complex and sometimes tragic upbringing as a bright, aspirational, biracial girl from a broken town that history left behind. While her detractors are quick to point out her privilege and success as an adult, it seemed to me that America never really gave Nikole Hannah the chance to have any identity other than the one she’s locked into now.

Hannah-Jones represents the growing trend in journalism to discard with historical fact in favour of current narrative-building that can project itself backwards in time to reinterpret history through a contemporary lens. This is dangerous for many reasons, one of them being that if basic historical facts cannot be agreed upon, discussion and debate are rendered impossible. If facts fall victim to trendy interpretations that are not objectively grounded, it means that they can be constantly reinterpreted to suit shifts in trends, leaving everyone a potential ‘criminal’ if they fail to keep up with the perpetually-shifting goalposts.

The 1619 scandal:

Indeed, the event as a whole seemed to serve as an extension of the release of The 1619 Project by The New York Times Magazine in August 2019, which kicked up a fuss when several eminent historians accused it of factual errors, such as the claims that Abraham Lincoln maintained a consistent opposition to racial equality, and that African Americans have fought for their rights “for the most part” without non-Black support. The most salient of these apparent flaws was one of the premises of the project itself: that the American Revolutionary War was largely fought in order to protect slavery from the efforts of abolitionists in England.

I had started to try to understand this admittedly alien debate while traveling in New York, before I came to Waterloo; for me, the most memorable comment about it came from a friend who teaches literature at Columbia University (who asked to remain anonymous). “What about the inaccuracies?” she asked me, by way of explaining her support of The 1619 Project despite the historians’ objections. “Are John Ford movies accurate? Were history books of the ’50s accurate?”

“This is America,” she said. “We vulgarize everything.”

The bolded parts above attest to the power of elite-driven narratives in the face of challengers, who in this instance are historians concerned with objective truth and facts.

Backlash:

The right-wing backlash to the project has been mostly offensive, but the long-term impact of 1619’s genuine flaws may have been more damaging than anticipated. On Aug. 17, 2022, when president of the American Historical Association James H. Sweet published a column in the organization’s magazine mildly criticizing The 1619 Project for being a “powerful” journalistic event rather than a work of history, he launched a storm of criticism on Twitter, where several activist historians (most of whom, for what it’s worth, were white) demanded his immediate resignation on the perfectly circular logic that any public criticism of the project is “going to be weaponized by the right.” Others claimed the project is indeed a work of scholarship, but did not rebut any prior claims of error. Hannah-Jones, who in 2020 claimed that “I’ve always said that The 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism,” retweeted the criticism of Sweet.

Doubling-down:

I became less interested in finding out how exactly The 1619 Project came to be or in unearthing the gossipy details of Hannah-Jones’ role at The New York Times—a tired story, in large part, of digital-age news media business-model implosion—than in how Americans increasingly find themselves in this odd and idiosyncratic predicament: splitting into opposing camps that are more or less aware of their deliberate deviations from the truth, yet clinging desperately to ever more extreme and factional positions of unreality. To a foreign observer, at least, few things seem more distinctly American than this racially tainted, self-destructive double nature of every norm, institution, and subculture.

This last point here leads me to think about how ‘competitive narration’ is a driving force in the current growing divide in the USA today.

Do yourself a favour and read the rest of this interesting and thought-provoking profile here.

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If you rely solely on American (and/or Canadian) media, you would never know that British feminists are in many ways leading the charge against the institutionalization of transgenderism, and in particular its impact on children. TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) view transgenderism as not only a threat to lesbianism, but more importantly as an erasure of woman altogether. This is an existential fight for them, one that has seen them go on offense, completely opposite to what their American sisters have done thus far.

Of particular concern to them is how paedophilia has made inroads in society through the promotion of transgenderism. It is precisely this threat that serves as an opening for TERFs to continue to their attacks by way of positioning themselves as “Pro-Woman, Pro-Child Safeguarding, and Anti-Bullsh*t.” Case in point is Redux, a feminist magazine that has taken a no-holds barred approach to attacking the Transgender Lobby for being a trojan horse for paedophiles. This past Monday, they posted a report about how a “paedophile sympathizer is sponsoring a new LGBT daycare in Berlin, Germany”.

A gay rights organization in Berlin, Germany, is set launch a new pilot program next spring by opening two daycare centers with a special focus on providing the children education on LGBT issues. But disturbingly, an academic with a lengthy history of normalizing pedophilia is one of three people on the board overseeing the organization.

………

Roughly translated to the “Diverse Living Place,” the complex will host 69 apartments, a dedicated geriatric facility, a restaurant, and more — all of which will aim to provide “multigenerational housing for homosexual, bisexual, transsexual and intersex (LGBTI*)” people. The stated goal of the initiative is to create a space where residents can live “without fear of exclusion due to sexual or gender identity.”

In addition to living quarters and common areas, the Place will also have two daycare centers to accommodate approximately 90 children in total. The daycare facilities will have a specialized focus on LGBT education.

“Many schools and daycare centers still struggle to educate when it comes to homosexuality, transsexuality, and intersex with respect with children,” the daycare’s about page reads, “We want to change that now.”

Stranger Danger:

Disturbingly, one of the members of the board overseeing and sponsoring the Gay Counseling Services and their project is Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist and gay rights advocate who has a lengthy history of normalizing pedophilia.

Lautmann is a former professor at the University of Bremen, where he taught from 1971 to 2001. Most notably, Lautmann authored a book titled The Lust for Children: A Portrait of Pedophiles. The book is based on his interviews with 60 men who admitted to sexually abusing young children, primarily boys.

“They really love the children, read their every wish, organize trips, buy toys and are only comfortable around children,” Lautmann says of the 60 pedophiles he interviewed.

Released in 1994, the book became popular with pedophiles for its sympathetic portrayal of adult attraction to children, which Lautmann described as a sexual orientation, and its repeated assertions that children are capable of sexual autonomy.

“For me, it is is very clear that there do exist relationships that do not require any intervention,” Lautmann wrote, “The children cling to their lovers, and can leave them any moment if they choose.”

Yikes!

More creepiness:

“Even with a four-year-old something can happen,” Lautmann writes, “The pedophile, of course, wants his penis to be stimulated manually or orally. Only rarely will the children comply with this.”

Lautmann describes cues for “childish consent,” and suggests that pedophiles do not use force to secure compliance from children, but instead allows them to lead sexual activity.

“The vast majority of the encounters described appear to be based on consent,” Lautmann writes, prefacing descriptions of child sexual abuse by his interviewees. He also rejects the “prevailing line,” which he describes as an “unsatisfactory” argument that children are incapable of giving consent, stating that it is “based on deductions from normative foundations.” Lautmann also accuses “campaigns against child abuse” of “profiting” from the “strictness and simplicity” of current laws.

“Excited and attractively dressed, these little people – not to mention all their other qualities – embody something of the sensual side of our world; at least that’s how children are staged today,” writes Lautmann. “Pedophilia brings out something that no one wanted, but which objectively follows from the desire to beautify childhood.”

Paedophile Network:

Throughout his career, Lautmann maintained a close relationship with notorious pedophile sexologist Helmut Kentler.

Beginning in 1969, Kentler’s project had placed foster children in the homes of pedophiles in an attempt to test his theory that pedophiles could make good foster fathers. Kentler had theorized that the pedophile’s attraction to children would result in a strong drive to take care of them.

“These people were able to put up with these [mentally] retarded boys only because they were in love with them, infatuated with them, crazy about them,” Kentler explained in 1970.

He also suspected the children would develop meaningful, loving relationships with their pedophile foster fathers, and would not experience any negative consequences if sexually abused by them.

Kentler’s project was approved by the Berlin Senate, and the pedophile foster fathers received monthly allowances from the government to care for the orphaned children.

Lautmann was also involved in a 1979 motion calling for the deletion of Section 176 of the German legal code, which would effectively eliminate the age of consent — a political goal that was supported by Kentler.

He assures us that there is nothing to be worried about:

Lautmann has often warned against “moral panic” – a term often used in pedophile circles to portray those with child safeguarding concerns as unreasonable.

News of Lautmann’s position on the board spearheading the LGBT daycare centers featured prominently on the website of an active pro-pedophile lobbying group, Krumme-13 (K13Online), in a post which asserts that leaders within the organization “welcome the objectives” of the childcare facilities.

Krumme-13 advocates for lowering the age of consent to 12, and states: “Children from the age of 12 can decide for themselves whether they want to enter into a pedosexual relationship or not. Children’s right to sexual self-determination must be protected by the Basic Law.”

They want to fuck your kids.

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One of the main themes of this Substack is the transformation of the USA and what it means not just for Americans, but for the rest of the world as well.

Another main topic of discussion here is identity, how we build it, how we maintain it, and how it morphs and changes due to forces out of our control. With this in mind, I want to present to you a somewhat-edgy and very raw rant from a young American who seems to have arrived at the sad conclusion that Americans are no longer a People.

A ‘propositional nation’, the USA rejected the “blood and soil” of the Old World for something new. Is this still a viable model? If so, for whom?

How many traditions and customs have you inherited from your family? How many do you remember experiencing as a child, but were never passed down to you? The shared experience of Americans today isn’t far removed from the CONSOOMER culture we want to destroy. How much more did your parents and grandparents understand about the world that you’re just barely finding out about? A leftist would be happy with where we are, but say there is more to be done. The experiences of the past were racist anyways. For the most part, nothing you say will change their mind.

The bigger concern is those Americans who descend from the founding stock and care about the country they live in. The worldview of such Americans is also not far removed from consoomer culture. They still support almost all the things responsible for their current plight. They’re more likely to attack the right — which actively trying to stop the destruction of the country — than to attack the ones responsible. The question that then follows is, are we even a people anymore?

My retort would be that the focus on the primacy of the individual by way of elevating personal liberty as the sine qua non for the founding of the USA means that creating a “People” was a secondary goal. Some will dispute this, and I encourage you to dig up evidence from the Founders and others during that era that would disprove my assertion (happy to be proven wrong!).

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The final piece in this weekend’s Substack is a look at U Dhammaloka, a Buddhist monk celebrated in Burma/Myanmar who was a blue-eyed working class Irish radical, and who managed to stir up problems for the British Empire in Southeastern Asia:

On 2 March 1901, the Buddhists of Rangoon (today’s Yangon) in Burma celebrated the full moon festival, the largest of the year. Visitors, respectfully barefoot, filled the grounds of the huge gold-plated Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s most important Buddhist pilgrimage site, its glimmering spire visible from miles away. On the platform, people were chanting, meditating, offering candles, flowers and water, talking. The surrounding streets were alive with food stalls, music and drama performances, banners and decorations. In the midst of these crowds and celebrations, an act of profound civil disobedience took place: a shaven-headed Buddhist monk stepped out in front of an off-duty colonial policeman, in the employ of the British Empire, and ordered him to take off his shoes.

We can imagine the ripple that spread as people noticed the confrontation. Wrapped in the saffron robes of religion, the monk was not just challenging one policeman. His protest targeted the power of the empire, the largest the world had ever seen.

News of this act spread from the Rangoon bazaars into the Burmese newspapers. It sparked attempts by the colonial authorities to control the situation, followed by further polemics and confrontations, and launched the ‘shoe issue’ as a rallying-point for Burmese anticolonialism for the next two decades. When Barack Obama visited the Shwedagon more than a century later, he did so barefoot.

Who was the monk that started it all? The eyes that stared down the policeman were the blue eyes of the mysterious ‘Irish Buddhist’ from Rangoon’s Tavoy monastery, known to many by his Buddhist name of U Dhammaloka. What was his original name? Where had he come from? And what was an Irish-born man doing as a Buddhist monk, in Rangoon, challenging imperial power beneath a full moon?

Even in his own day, Dhammaloka was no easy man to pin down, despite the best efforts of the colonial police and intelligence services. He used at least five aliases and left out about 25 years of his past in the very different tales he told. It took me and my co-authors Alicia Turner and Brian Bocking a decade to put together the pieces in our book The Irish Buddhist (2020) – but, in tracing his life, we rediscovered an extraordinary biography that offers a window on the crowds, networks and social movements that brought about the end of empire in Asia.

Read the rest of this fascinating piece here.

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100th Edition of the Saturday Commentary and Review!

I’ve been on the internet for a long, long time. From the very beginning, I’ve always liked to share interesting articles, analyses, think pieces, profiles, histories, and so on with others that I thought would enjoy reading them. Therefore, it came very naturally to me to do this exact same thing here on my Substack for my readers. I humbly started this feature back in June of 2020, and have now completed the 100th edition. This means that I have shared 500 articles with you for your reading pleasure, with my indulging in a bit of commentary and analysis while doing so.

Each one of these Saturday columns takes around 3 hours for me to compose and then publish. I view it both as a public service (since it is free for all to read and comment on) and as a lure for readers to check out the rest of the material that I publish here. It’s a fair amount of work, but I do enjoy it, and I also enjoy your participation and especially am thankful for just how many people have signed up for it.

If you want to show some gratitude for my toil, the simplest thing is to hit the like button every time you read the Saturday column (and everything else ;). Sharing the Saturday Commentary and Review (especially by using the share button) would also be appreciated very much. Ideally, I’d like you all to subscribe to support my writing. Tens of thousands of you have signed up for free, and thousands are now paying subscribers as well. I am truly touched by just how much support I have received since I started this Substack in order to test the waters to see just how much attention my writing could get from an audience (that is constantly growing, and growing faster), and without any institutional support or backing.

The comments section has been very active (thank you!) and has almost entirely policed itself (thank you once again!). I aim to build an even larger community here, so don’t be shy if you haven’t participated just yet. Please make the leap.

Once again, thank you everyone for reading my Substack. Its success has exceeded my original goals, and there is a lot more to come!

-Niccolo