OpEds
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he MacDonaldization of words forces many to lay that reason asleep which disturbs their gayety. Among recent new entries is ‘Brexit’, a word suitable to a speaking-club made of millions, where most half-hear what, if they heard the whole, they would but half-understand.
Furthermore, some words in time are debased by repetition, and can no longer be heard without an involuntary sense of annoyance. Hence I will spare my twenty-five readers further comments on how England will work-out her separation from the European Union. Official news suggests that about half of the citizenry is filled with all that sparkles in the eye of hope, while the other sees but penury ahead and thickens the gloom of one another.
Being a matter of contest, the success of one party implies the defeat of the other, and at least half the transaction will terminate in misery.
Instead I will deal with two separate events in another European country, a historic Italian chocolate factory being moved to Turkey, and the saga of an Italian truck driver – both edifying examples of the benefits of the European Union and of globalization at large.
To start, while being conscious that dainty bits make rich the ribs but bankrupt quite the wits (1), I confess to liking chocolate. On mountain-walks or bike-rides I rate it well above any ‘energy-bar’, another recent entry in the MacDonaldized English dictionary.
As a brief aside, in his essay “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell presents an argument in support of useless knowledge and says that he enjoyed peaches and apricots more since he learned that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of Han Dynasty, and that the word ‘apricot’ is derived from the same Latin source as the word ‘precocious’, because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology.
In the same spirit… the chocolate factory in question is (was) dear to my heart for being old, historic and located in a small town not far from where I was born – besides being famous worldwide for a special brand of chocolates.
The town is Novi Ligure, mostly unknown outside Italy. Its ancient Latin name was Curtis Nova (New Court) and in 970 AD Emperor Otto 1st donated it to a monastery. In time it became an Independent Township, then it changed hands among various neighboring feudal rulers. When Napoleon invaded Italy in 1798 he annexed it to the French Empire. After Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, Novi became part of Piedmont and the Kingdom of Savoy.
In 1860 – one year before Italy became a country as the Kingdom of Italy – Stefano Pernigotti set up a shop in the market square selling his home-made ‘torrone’ (an Italian hard candy of Arabic origins) and ‘mostarda’ (an Italian chutney). In 1882 King Humbert I allowed the Pernigottis to use the royal emblem on the cover of their products – then Pernigotti started experimenting with chocolate. Their actual chocolate industrial production began in 1927 with the ‘Gianduiotto,’ a now world-famous and classy dessert chocolate.
During the 1980s, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, their continental followers and globalization created a crisis. Heinz acquired the company, but management and manufacturing remained in the hands of the last Pernigottis. Followed a sequence of different ownerships and management transfers, until the Turkish group Toksoz acquired it two years ago. Now Toksoz announced the closure of the Italian plant for good and the 200 employees will be laid off. There have been demonstrations by workers and their families, but very likely nothing will come of it.
Turkey is not part of the European Union, but, as far as workers’ rights, there is no difference, as the next recounted saga of an Italian truck driver will illustrate.
I translate here the actual recordings of an interview that the truck driver gave to a journalist. The translation cannot fully convey the spirit and nuances of a truck driver’s rendition of his state of mind and view of life, but the reader can easily imagine.
“I’m 52 years old and have always been a truck driver. I started at 20, driving a small truck, delivering drinks in my area, which is a valley in Northern Italy where the “white-asses” (read the Christian Democrats) were always predominant. Then came Bossi, (leader of the Northern League – more on him and the League later) who began to pick up more votes than the white-asses ever did. But with the League, things, as I’m about to tell you, instead of improving worsened.
At the age of 23, I began driving a large truck for a young entrepreneur of the town (near Milan). I carried iron rods. The truck was always overloaded by up to 100 tons. In those conditions, to stop the truck you need tens and tens of extra meters: if you are a car or a cyclist or a pedestrian at less than that distance braking is useless. The truck does not stop and mangles everything.
It happened to some of my colleagues, but even after that no one ever checked. That overload was a weapon: one unexpected occurrence and all is gone, cargo, bodies and all. One day I said to the boss:
– Boss, do we need to overload the truck in this manner?
– I am forced to do it – he replied – because to win the contract with the foundry, I had to lower the rates. If I respect the load limits I have to make more trips and I will be in the red. If you don’t feel like driving on overload, I can find someone else.
To make all of the trips our owner was committed to do, we also had to reduce loading and unloading times. Which meant that the load was not secured to the floor – a real problem during transport because materials can slip.
One day, a friend and colleague who was carrying cold-drawn steel tubes, had to brake suddenly to avoid a tractor coming out of a field. My friend was driving like crazy, because another risk factor was speed: to respect the scheduled deliveries, you were forced to routinely exceed the legal limits.
When my friend saw the tractor he immediately realized he had no chance of stopping in time, precisely because it was overloaded and going too fast. But, instinctively, he pushed on the brake, partly due to conditioned reflex and partly to the fear of killing the poor fellow driving the tractor.
The tractor, on seeing the truck in the mirror approaching at crazy speed, swerved into a field, tipped over but the driver was not seriously hurt. But the braking of the truck caused the mountain of steel tubes to slide against the cabin, killing my friend. His body was so mangled that his wife identified him from a shoe. “I bought him these shoes the day before yesterday at the market,” she said. The rest of her husband was literally mush, “Martha, it’s better you don’t look,” said a firefighter who knew her.
Then the steel tube manufacturers transferred their ironworks in Eastern Europe and I was unemployed for a few months. Until the owner of a company who contracted for a larger company in another province hired me.
It was, in fact, a detached department of the same larger company, with about 200 employees. But in this detached department employees were split-up into many small sub-companies, each with less than 15 employees. The 200 employees worked essentially elbow-to-elbow, but the payroll had the stamp of 14 different companies. This enabled the employer to bypass the workers’ statute and trade-union rights that apply to companies with over 15 employees. Therefore the boss was free to fire anyone at any time and without reason.
Yet no one complained. They thought that, in a ‘valley of hunger’ like ours, it was already a sign of grace having a boss and a shitty job, because both are still better than no boss and no job.
I was on the TIR truck (TIR= acronym of International Road Transport) from Monday to Friday and often on Saturday and even Sunday, if there were urgent deliveries. Yet I was considered as having a privileged position. I climbed in the cabin at six in the morning and left it at six in the evening, with an hour stop for lunch, later reduced to twenty minutes because the intensity of the traffic forced you to make up for lost time. More and more often I happened to leave after eight in the evening.
A couple of years ago the owner calls me, invites me to sit down, and shows me a letter with a header consisting of a yellow and red truck, and asks:
– Camillo, you know Willi Betz?
– Who is he?
– He is a sharp and sly German who understood everything about the European Union and organized himself ahead of time to use it to advantage.
Basically, the boss explains to me that this German set-up a transportation company with hundreds of trucks in an Eastern European country. Now, thanks to the European Union, which has knocked down the borders, they can transport goods anywhere without any problems, no bureaucracies, no duties, nor loss of time. At the wheel of all those trucks the German has put East European drivers, whose wages are one-third of ours.
– In short, Camillo – my master comes to the point – you understand that if I sell my truck and have Bets transport my goods I save a lot of money. Look here – and he shows me a letter by Betz hammering it with his finger – have you seen those prices? Calculating your contributions and the cost of the truck, you cost me 60% more than a driver of Betz…
– Boss, you don’t mean to lower my pay by 60%?
– Nooo! Whom are you taking me for? A slave driver? I am happy with a 40% reduction.
My blood went to my head, I wanted to punch the bastard. But I checked myself. My wife lost her job in the garment industry many years ago and I still have one son at school. The other works but earns so little that each month he asks me to help… So I accepted.
Six months ago, the boss calls me in again. With him there is a guy I don’t know, greasy haired and badly dressed.
– Camillo – says the boss– this is Vilic… his name would be a bit complicated to learn, but let’s call him Vilic. He comes from Poland and for a while he will give you a hand.
I’m worried. Each time the boss announces a novelty it turns out to be a rip-off.
– Vilic, continues the boss, will make a few journeys with you, to learn the way. Then he will take your place, but you don’t have to worry, because you will drive a new truck and make deliveries elsewhere, even abroad. You know, the bosses of the mother company are moving operations to the East and I need someone I can trust, like you, for deliveries to their new factory, and you will see advantages from this change.
The prospect of international travel and of being away for a whole week scares me a little, but I think of the gain. I have driver friends who commute between Milan and Poland, and bring home a salary that is the double of mine.
I begin my journey with Vilic at the side. He brought a bag with him, from which drifts out an unpleasant smell of food. He wears the same clothes when I first met him in the office of the boss, and smells a bit.
He speaks little, in a broken Italian. At any road deviation I point to a reference that will help him remember. Here, you see that big sign? Careful, here you must stay on the left and turn…
He points with his finger at the sign, tells the names of the towns we go through, and takes notes in a notebook.
We stop at a rest station. He tells me that he brought food with him. He pulls from the bag an oily paper bag, and begins to eat a kind of meatballs that exude an unpleasant smell of garlic. When I go to the toilet, I find him drinking from the faucet.
This continues for a week, he’s always dirty and smelly, always munching on meatballs. One day I offered to buy him lunch, but he refused.
I thought that he had no money and felt uncomfortable for not being able to reciprocate. So the next day, I made up that the owner had offered lunch to us both. He devoured everything like a very hungry creature. With the beer he opened up for the first time with a few confidences. He said he had a wife and a daughter, who, however, left him.
He told me that at night he sleeps in a kind of closet that the boss found for him, and that, with the first pay-check, he will move into digs that a Polish shopkeeper has promised him in exchange of an advance.
He told me his wages: less than half of mine, and no contributions. The boss convinced him to register as a business owner and independent contractor. I look at this poor soul with the unpronounceable name and I feel great pity for him. Yet, according to European Union statistics, he is an industrialist, a businessman, a sole proprietor, the founder of a start-up company!
One Saturday evening I speak with my wife about these filthy tricks, and she says:
– Camillo, according to me, your boss cannot get away with this business! Do you remember what Bossi said at Ponte di Legno? [Bossi was the notorious boss of the Lega Nord – I will get back to this later. Ponte di Legno is the resort where Bossi went on vacation, near Camillo’s town].
Bossi said that we have everything to gain with the European Union. Why don’t you go to talk about your situation with Congressman Magrelli? [name altered].
So I go to see Congressman Magrelli, whom I have known for many years, we use the ‘thou’ when talking to each other.
– Dear Magrelli – I say at the end of a meeting in the headquarters of the League Section in the Valley – do you think it’s right that they reduce my pay by 40% while they hire a Pole to do the driving, treating him as an independent contractor and with a pay at the level of hunger?
– Dear Camillo, says Magrelli, we of the (Northern) League are not afraid of free competition, because a free market benefits all.
– But if the free market is the freedom to reduce the pay of the Italians to the level of those of the slaves of the East, the European Union is a big workers’ rip-off! But tell me Magrelli, Bossi preaches the autonomy of Padania (Northern Italy), but he is not even able even to defend the autonomy of Italy?
At this point, Magrelli moves away to greet someone else, and we are no longer able to talk. Every time I get closer to him, and try to restart our conversation, he ignores me until he leaves.
Last week the owner calls me again. He keeps his gaze low and his features are drawn. With a wave of the hand, he invites me to sit down without even looking at me. Minutes go by while he shifts sheets on his desk, reads or glances at them, as if I were not there. Then he says:
– Unfortunately, things are not good, we need to cut costs, and you are a burden that we can no longer afford… tomorrow Vilic takes your place, as he has learned roads and ways.
– Will I then be given another truck to drive?
– No, No… in fact, here lies the problem, the mother company has moved operations to the East and has taken over cross-border deliveries – they will handle them.
I never felt so humiliated. I was shown the door because a slave imported from Poland costs much less than me, who had already given up 40% of the salary.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s for the Northern League, here is a related personal but short chapter from my extended chronicles of wasted time (2). The N League had originally acquired notoriety, among other things, for having introduced the language of the toilet in the main stream of Italian politics. Though tasteless, I rated the matter as an act of sincerity, given the notoriously pharisaical nature of politicians at large.Still, it never dawned on me to participate in the N League or in any other party. Then a friend of mine called me to say that the Politbureau of the N League had decided to establish a foreign chapter. The goal, my friend said, was to soften the tone and modify the coarse impression of the party abroad – as well as, indirectly, projecting an alternative image of the party at home. That is, the objectives of the Foreign League were cultural. One of which was a broadcast, on the League’s Radio Network, of call-in shows. Another was to establish links with political or educational groups in various countries interested in preserving their own local languages.
Though generally skeptical, I decided to believe my friend and accepted the invitation. It was a voluntary operation – no salaries or compensation involved.
For some time I broadcast a live monthly radio program titled “Window on America,” which was well followed, at least judging by the number of phone calls and messages. Then some inexplicable events converted a developing suspicion into a conviction – namely that the objectives of the Foreign N League were not as stated – therefore I resigned.
A few short months later, the bubble burst. It turned out that Bossi and a restricted conniving crew, were crassly and personally appropriating the funds that flowed into the coffers of the League, thanks to the quizzical Italian system of funding political parties. Unofficially included in the bubble were 3 million Euros assigned to the Foreign N League.
In time Bossi was condemned to over 2-year imprisonment. But, via continued and extended appeals, it is expected that the sentence will exceed the statute of limitations, hence it will not be served.
Something similar happened with Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who vied with Bill Clinton to get the Nobel Prize for porno-lies and porno-politics. Sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment for a fiscal fraud of gargantuan dimensions, his sentence was converted into a few sessions of community service in a retirement home.
These people represent the simple, squalid and frightening concretion of personal interest with the arrogance of power. In the end, the only good thing that can be said of them is that they are not worse than what they could be.
But what connects the tortuous Brexit, a closed chocolate factory, the depressing story of a truck driver, the corruption of politicians and the European Union?
Most readers will know already. They are examples and consequences of an ideology imposed from above under different disguises.
All men are agreed concerning the truth, when demonstrated; but they are too much divided about latent truths, or when truth conflicts with prejudice. Brexit is/was about immigration from within and from without of the European Union. The saga of the truck driver made redundant, thanks to the European Union, is both an example and an archetype.
An aristocratic idealist, Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize in 1950. The 1972–1973 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as the music for the European Anthem.
However “anti-semitic” it may sound, it is not my or anyone else’s invention. Kalergi envisioned a mongrelized Europe led and controlled by the best of the Jews. They would retain their racial-ethnic identity, though the genetic stock of their upper echelon was to be strengthened by intermarriage with the best of the European nobility.
WW2 disrupted the plan. After the war, the Allies (Roosevelt and Churchill) first signed off on the Morgenthau Plan for the actual physical elimination of the German race. Morgenthau was Roosevelt’s Jewish Secretary for the Economy. And only the fear of Germany’s assimilation by the Soviet Union caused the Morgenthau plan to be scrapped.
Nevertheless, the Kalergi plan restarted with a vengeance in the early 70s, following three events that I do not think unconnected.
1. The 1968 ‘student’ revolution, a product of Cultural Marxism – whose end result was trading the workers’ struggle for sexual liberation and degeneracy.
2. The 1967 Israeli aggression and annexation of Arab and Palestinian lands, aiming at the goal of a “Greater Israel” (from the Nile to the Euphrates). It turned out to be a test to see if the world would react to the utter disregard by Israel of the UN resolutions, calling for the return of lands stolen through aggression in 1967. As we know the world did nothing.
3. The launching of the “Holocaust” in 1972, a program whose strength increases in proportion to the distance in time from the alleged historical occurrence of the event. {This is also referred to by critics of Israel such as Norman Finkelstein as the “weaponization of anti-semitism.”]
Add to this a parallel phenomenon in the US, with massive Jewish congressional and senate pressure to first eliminate quotas on immigration and now to eliminate borders altogether.
For the saga affecting the truck driver in Italy is repeated in America on a scale comparable or greater than in Europe. The human tsunami that reached California from the South essentially eliminated jobs for those Americans who cannot survive on radically lower wages.
But unlike Americans, immigrants can accept jobs at essentially any compensation, because they automatically join the welfare system, which includes various supplementary benefits and health-care.
Of course it would be inhuman to deny treatment to a person who needs it. At which point the endlessly intractable issue of health-care meets with the equally intractable issue of the hyper-medicalization of America. Prompted and encouraged through massive advertising to seek treatment for any ailment, the migrant patient could not possibly pay for insurance, medicines and costs. Whereupon the government becomes the payer, and the consequences are easy to envision and calculate.
In the meantime, the human tsunami in California initially caused Americans looking for a job to move North. But now the same tsunami is moving North. Trump promised to put America First, but at least so far, it turned out to be mostly a euphemism for “Israel First.”
One factor, certainly ignored by the Zionist controlled media, but even overlooked by the social media, has to do with the nature of current Zionism. And I realize that the subject would need a better treatment than the simple following references.
There have been different currents (religious and political) among Jews. Through history, the strain that most antagonized the goy is referred to as ‘Classical Judaism.’ Exemplified by the case of the ultra-religious Jew who refused to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who collapsed in a street of Jerusalem. Or by the declared contempt for the goy at large by high-ranking rabbi(s), who said and say that that the goy will hopefully live long, because they are like donkeys, alive only to serve the Jews.
Furthermore, it is generally unknown, that at the historical peak of Classical Judaism, Jews always succeeded in allying themselves with the upper echelons of goy society, kings, lords, even some Popes. For, setting National Socialism aside, resentment and pogroms against the Jews came from below, not from above.
Today, the same symbiotic relationship of old seems to bind the American Congress with the neo-cons and their own current-day version of Classical Judaism. Which goes some way to explain the fathomless hypocrisy inspiring the present (nominally American) foreign policy. Including ignoring the ongoing murders of Palestinians, waging disastrous wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel, declaring unending friendship with the retrograde state of Saudi Arabia, (with Trump literally dancing with the Saudis,) piling beyond-ridiculous accusations and threats against Russia, subjecting to racketeering, via the international payment system, countries that do not pay homage to Israel, and so on.
There is no viable explanation as to why more reasonable currents of the Jewish community are unheard or ignored. Because there is no plumb line long enough to fathom the depth of hypocrisy, contained in some pronouncements of the Talmud, on which Classical Judaism was founded. And the current neo-conservative practitioners of Classical Judaism seem to have preserved with steadiness a doctrine which their ancestors have accepted with docility.
To conclude, this was but a quick sketch, traced by the pencil of concern for the patience of the readers. And I realize that in detailing, however cursorily, what I learned, I fear I may be accused of exaggeration. All I can do is cautiously to avoid deserving it. The intent is always to motivate readers to inform themselves independently. The subject is highly interesting, let alone critical, and it would be a fault of no trifling nature to treat it with levity.
References
** (1) Love’s Labours Lost
** Sonnet 106
Image Source: https://cartoonmovement.typepad.com/.a/6a014e5f5d3c7c970c01bb0988157c970d-750wi
