Refusing to accept Italy’s decline

Italy is now a clear victim of globalization, which is governed only by those who have a very precise vision of their own country and have access to very confidential information, as well as by those who are able to quickly and wisely exploit its continued asymmetries and finally by those countries that impose their game with a wide range of “indirect strategies”.

These are the dimensions of the battlefield of this new, endless, “limitless war” which is fought without even firing a shot.

Non-sovereignty over its own national space, now ratified by unconscionable agreements on territorial waters with France in February 2016,  or with the new borders between Italy and Slovenia on the Torrente Barbucina, as well as the utter foolishness – despite Interior Minister Minniti’s professionalism – in the late response to the epochal crisis of migration from sub-Saharan Africa, all are signs that – after losing the  globalization game – Italy is also losing sight of the Hobbesian goals for which all Sovereigns are born, namely protecting the life, property and freedom of their citizens.

Today the losers do not go to Versailles hat in hand, but are simply wiped out.

Hence those who lose the globalization game are pulverized and turned into an undisputed mass of losers, whereas the winners become a new nation-State absorbing and hegemonizing its neighbours.

Not to mention the tensions on the external value of the euro and the complex manoeuvres on government debt securities.

The real rulers govern also financial markets; they do not expect to be contacted, they talk to those markets every day and can impose their will on them.

Hence, for Italy the Second Republic – as it is called with some exaggeration – has been only a crown of thorns.

Born as a swindle, the one of “honest” politicians against the “thieves”, it will end – unlike what T.S. Eliot said – “not with a bang but a whimper”.

And it will continue to be a silly crown of thorns, while the future  governments will believe in an inevitable fate or in what Saragat – a great albeit now forgotten political leader – called the “cynical and cheating destiny”.

The rampant corruption which, in the transition phase from the First to the Second Republic, simply shifted from the ruling class to the administrative-bureaucratic class; the environmental crisis and the recent fires; the economic growth affecting only exports and only to the tune of  18%; mass poverty and the tension that will never slacken with these low economic growth rates, are all signs that we are passive subject and not the active subject of global strategies decided by others and about which our rulers know nothing.

As long as these are the elites representing us, the disgusted people will vote elsewhere, while the superficially globalized ruling classes will unite, but will gradually lose any power.

Hence the Catholic Church responds to the new global scenario with Pope Francis, a Bishop of Rome coming from Argentina, another country of failed globalization and economic disasters caused by the combination of hetero-directed policies and parasitic ruling classes.

As demonstrated by the latest article by Father Antonio Spadaro, director of “La Civiltà Cattolica”, that rightly aroused great interest in the current cultural and political world, the Catholic Church knows very well what is really at stake.

In this perspective, Pope Francis’ Church is changing its evangelization model completely.

In other words, Catholicism is currently playing its new global role as winner of globalization in everybody’s favour – and particularly in favour of the countries and peoples that are losing this game.

Following his Jesuit background, Pope Francis wants to transform – on the basis of equality – Peter’s Church into a universal Church, even at physical and material levels.

Never be identified as “part of the West”, but as the suffering Heart of Christ in all mankind.

This reminds us of the Jesuits who learnedly equated the Sioux and Cheyenne mythologies to the Trinitarians’ ones, or of the Fathers who introduced – in Portuguese India – Hindu or Buddhist words in the Holy Mass.

The Holy Pope’s words seem to echo the cries of the Jesuits who organized estancias in Paraguay or who always defended Latin American peoples during the 20th century dictatorships. such as Father Jalics, or the cry of the six Jesuits killed in El Salvador’s universities only twenty-five years ago, possibly while some high prelates played tennis with the “Generals”.

Hence we can understand the Vatican’s rational negotiations with China, disliked by the Conservatives, or the political and religious connection with the Russian Federation, while Cardinal Parolin is preparing for a visit to Moscow that will certainly lead to significant results.

As Cardinal Parolin stated, the visit to Russia, at the time when the relations between Russia and the West are at the lowest ebb, shall build  new “bridges” and pave the way for a dialogue with the Kremlin’s leadership “in which we put ourselves in the shoes of others” – so as to  talk about Middle East, Islam and Ukraine also with Putin and his aides and associates, but certainly with Patriarch Kirill.

In the past it was the Russian President who donated to Pope Francis a copy of St. Vladimir’s icon of the Mother of God, the highly-venerated icon that was flown over Moscow’s skies by the atheist Stalin at the toughest time of the Nazi siege.

Never was a gift more politically symbolic.

At that time, somehow rightly, there was talk about an alliance between Russia and the Vatican in a pro-Shiite perspective and, in any case, excluding the United States.

In our opinion, the fundamental fact is that currently the Church of Christ makes global politics just because it is abandoning its typically Western image and approach and hence does no longer want to be regarded and interpreted according to the positive or negative categories developed in the wake of this universe of political and cultural identities.

This is universalism, also and above by putting itself in the shoes of others and of their very ancient traditions.

In fact, Xi Jinping reminded Pope Francis of the Jesuit artist, Father  Castiglione, and the Holy Father, who loves the Chinese people, said to the Chinese President that “the world is awaiting the wisdom and civilization of the Chinese people”.

As St. Ignatius of Loyola said, while obviously referring to Satan, the enemy is like a military leader who must besiege a city and get round its walls to find a weak point.

For the Pope who comes from the Society of Jesus, the enemy getting round the world that must be saved by the Word is the old dual thinking  that caused the peripheral wars during the USA-USSR confrontation, characterized by a closed-mind cultural approach, by the fear of the others and by the hegemony of the old powers.

If the old “Cold War” balance of power remains after this phase of globalization, only old living corpses will remain.

While the globalization-Americanization still seeks to divide the world between the rich and the poor, between the winners and the losers, by crazily widening gaps, Pope Francis wants to build “bridges” with everyone so as to prevent the globalization of the economy – or indeed its Americanization – from still breaking mankind into two.

It is worth recalling that there is the severe danger that the universalisation of the economy – or even the absolute adoration of the golden calf – binds itself to an economic system based on a politically overvalued currency, with a huge debt – namely the US dollar – and to a project of “democratic wars,” such as the absurd Arab Springs, which are bound to create very poor small client States and often odd ethnicity pockets.

And the future wars will certainly be “never-ending” conflicts which are intended to stabilize at a high level of contrast.

Hence the Church’s bridges are designed to avoid or overcome a new Yalta, or to marginalize some peoples and favour others.

And this is a fundamental theme, namely the polemic on the Protestant political theology, which can be found in Father Spadaro’s article.

The Puritanism that was sent, as punishment, to the thirteen colonies was a kind of proto-jihadism within the Church of England that the sect sent there by the London Inquisition (also the Church of England had its own Inquisition) accused of being too pro-Catholic.

It is worth recalling that the word “fundamentalism” was coined in the modern era within the many factions of American Puritanism, and was later applied by similarity to the neo-extremist factions of the Wahhabi jihad and to the theology of the “Solid Base” (al-Qaeda al-Sulbah) – halfway between the Karigites and the Muslim Brotherhood – that went to Afghanistan with Saudi, Pakistani and US funds to fight against the Red Army.

It was a US friend, a cruel butcher of the Balkan wars, Alja Izetbegovic, who in the 1940s, in Tito’s prisons, wrote the book entitled “Islamic Fundamentalism”.

Hence, in the North-American Protestant theology, Father Spadaro sees an empirical connection between religion and politics, between the brains and the brawn, without any assessment of circumstances – a Machiavellian and Jesuit theme.

We may say that currently in the Unites States the reformed radical religiosity is present almost exclusively within the social classes marginalized by globalization, that have no voice in today’s US society.

Not even with a President prisoner of the “Deep State” between the State Department and CIA, that – for once – agreed to have a Clinton Presidency to “end the job” in Syria and create a casus belli with the Russian Federation.

A sort of Dr. Strangelove, who deals with psychological and IT wars, is currently operating in some US halls of power.

However, both the US ruling class and the US working class – that is more linked to the images spread by media – are prey to a real negatio Dei.

By using the title of a famous Rolling Stones’ song, this negatio Dei often turns into a practical and operational sympathy for the devil.

The refusal of any vestiges of Western civilization in fashionable university campuses; the servile implementation of  “political correctness”, which even comically erase the great classics – as not even done by the Red Guards, who at least had the courage to destroy them; the systematic   destruction of personal identities and “intermediate bodies”, that have always been the basis of every democracy from Pericles to the present time, are all signs that not only – and not so much – the old fundamentalist and  Protestant theology, but today’s atheism-Satanism, are the real enemies to be fought.

Certainly, the former created the latter and every Gnostic reference to God’s will according to our desires – from the Cathars to the Hussites until present time – with the theologies of confusion and wellbeing, is a Gnosticism calling the Enemy to operate directly.

It is worth remembering, however, that in the United States the fundamentalist Protestant theology is typical of those who are losing the game of globalization, while the establishment – that is the offspring of the LSD “dilated experiences” and of the American nonconformist 1968 protest movement (experiences that it later implemented in creative accounting and finance) – hates God, even Comenius’ God, with a fiery passion. Hence it has full sympathy for the devil and fights explicitly against any religion and forms of transcendence, with the pretext of a cheap form of  “enlightenment”.

A fight even against the transcendence now lost in all Western ruling  classes, focused on a unitary but not ecclesial, as well as a ritual but universalistic theology, which has always characterized the oldest traditions of Freemasonry, such as that of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

Today, especially in Italy, the narrative of the Association that has materially built Italy’s unit is linked to “Mafia”, “corruption” and to other scarcely esoteric issues.

Hence the real glue holding the ruling class is lost, while in the past the old Liberals and many Socialists, as well as many Republicans and some liberal Catholics, sat amicably in the Freemasons’ Lodge, thus being trained to dialogue and to political and human maturation.

In political terms, the loss of prestige of the Masonic Brotherhood is the seal of the structural fragmentation of Western ruling classes, which will bring them to death.

Without a unitary and identity narrative of elites, they will be progressively dissected and later destroyed.

Certainly the purpose of the current establishment is to reach a re-edition of Orwell’s 1984, but with a difference: what was previously explicit conditioning – engrammed, through consumers’ and Web algorithms, in everybody’s apparently free behaviour.

The new totalitarianism will lead us to do the same things, to buy the same items, to become poor and powerless, albeit with a feeling of  instinctive omnipotence and uniqueness of the ego that certainly Orwell’s regime could not afford. Indeed, a Metaphor of Sovietism as it was.

Hence Italy will be a completely non-existent power.

We will only be a buffer country between Africa and North Europe, without even being allowed to say anything, by crawling like cats on the windows.

We will become a North-European colony with regard to the still productive structures. All the Northern productive chains are integrated into the German value chain. Hence it is worth recalling that the Neue Zuercher Zeitung has recently predicted a slow annexation of Lombardy to the Canton of Ticino by 2050 – and there are already many signs in this regard.

Nevertheless we will have a huge amount of people in the South – similar to what Baron Compagna defined as “rabbit runs” – who will live on charity at the expense of public debt or organized crime, which will make its globalization, between Africa and the South and between Southern Italy and the Balkan and Asian drugs routes.

As a great Italian banker predicted “we will be a country for tourism and art”.

When we created our great art masterpieces, however, Vespucci colonized North America, the Genoese bankers borrowed money to the King of Spain and Switzerland only provided us with the mercenaries that Machiavelli disliked.

Certainly, with a view to solving the Italian crisis at institutional level, the notes that President Cossiga sent to Parliament on June 26, 1991 would be enough.

Something very different from the Senate working half-time, as envisaged by the recent reform rejected by voters.

It was simple: end of the Constitution written by enemies who were glowering at one another, but were only busy blocking one another – and in fact a US analyst has defined our Constitution “the most dysfunctional in the world”; revision of local authorities and of the specific autonomy of the Higher Judiciary Council (CSM); a different and stricter  organization of public finances.

We will talk about this issue, by also recalling a beautiful project developed by Gianfranco Miglio and some of his colleagues, gathered in the “Club of Milan”.

This ruling class, however, will do nothing but die in this institutional bed, now unable to dictate even one twitter to its press officer.

Giancarlo Elia Valori
Giancarlo Elia Valori
Advisory Board Co-chair Honoris Causa Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is a world-renowned Italian economist and international relations expert, who serves as the President of International Studies and Geopolitics Foundation, International World Group, Global Strategic Business In 1995, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dedicated the Giancarlo Elia Valori chair of Peace and Regional Cooperation. Prof. Valori also holds chairs for Peace Studies at Yeshiva University in New York and at Peking University in China. Among his many honors from countries and institutions around the world, Prof. Valori is an Honorable of the Academy of Science at the Institute of France, Knight Grand Cross, Knight of Labor of the Italian Republic, Honorary Professor at the Peking University