October 31, 2003

ITALY’S IMMIGRANT INVASION

by Srdja Trifkovic

A flotilla of rickety boats bringing up to five hundred illegal immigrants landed on Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa on October 28. Many more vessels were reported to be on their way from Libya, the country that is quietly facilitating the exodus.

Only nine days earlier, on October 19, the Italian coast guard boarded a disabled wooden fishing boat near the island. On board they found 15 Somali illegal immigrants alive, and 13 of them dead. The authorities were told that dozens of others had been tossed overboard during the hellish 16-day voyage from the Libyan port of Zuwarah.

The death toll was even higher last June, when two hundred illegals drowned after their overloaded trawler sank off Sicily. Many more boats packed with migrants from Africa and Asia land somewhere along Europe’s southern coast almost every day. Their numbers are unknown, but the cumulative effect is not in doubt: it is estimated that Italy is currently home to one million Third World migrants, overwhelmingly Muslims from North Africa, Somalia, and the Middle East.

The Italians are facing an invasion, and losing their nerve. Giuseppe Pisanu, Italy’s minister of the interior and top official responsible for controlling the country’s borders, declared that the October 19 incident was "a dreadful tragedy that weighs on the conscience of Europe." His reaction is incongruous but characteristic of the liberal mind. If "Europe" should feel guilty that people who have no right to come to its shores are risking their lives trying to do so illegally, then only the establishment of a free passenger service between Tripoli and Palermo—with no passport or customs formalities—would offer some relief to that burdened conscience.

Umberto Bossi, Italy’s Minister of Reforms, is the only influential member of Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right cabinet who demands strict enforcement of the country’s immigration laws. When he suggested that boats carrying illegals should be prevented from landing by force, his stand earned him the label of a "racist" and a "xenophobe." Even his partners from the "post-Fascist" National Alliance (AN) are wavering. The AN now favors giving the vote to non-citizen immigrants. Some ministers in the center-right coalition favor abolishing all quotas on immigrants in the name of economic necessity, as Italy’s population ages and dwindles.

The unceasing deluge of illegals is being slowly accepted by many Italians as inevitable, and therefore unworthy of resistance. Once they reach Lampedusa, halfway from Sicily to Africa, the illegals are shipped to the mainland while their "asylum" applications are processed. Once there, they disappear. The results are visible in certain parts of Milan and Turin, which now resemble Algiers or Tripoli. In Venice—as Oriana Fallaci laments—little rugs with "merchandise" have replaced the pigeons of Piazza San Marco, and in Genoa the marvelous palazzi that Rubens so admired "have been seized by them and are now perishing like beautiful women who have been raped."

The phenomenon we are witnessing in Italy today was forecast and diagnosed with uncanny precision over three decades ago by French novelist Jean Raspail in his Camp of the Saints. He predicted a conquest of Europe by Third World boat people supported by the enemy within—politicians, professors, talking heads, churchmen—who had already quashed in the minds of young Europeans any vestige of "the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest" and replaced it with a "monstrous cancer" of self-loathing. "It wasn’t a matter of tender heart," Raspail says, "but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment." Sr. Pisanu could have been his model.

Population explosion and utter dysfunctionality of most Third World societies, coupled with the spiritual enfeeblement and demographic collapse of Europe, has produced predictable results. In all creation disease and frailty invite predators. Both the loss of the will to define and defend one’s native soil, and the loss of the desire to procreate, send an alluring signal to the rest: come, for no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—in the name of its own survival. As Raspail says his Afterward,

"the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles. No other race subscribes to these moral principles—if that is really what they are—because they are weapons of self-annihilation."

Those "moral principles" are traced by Igor Shafarevich, in his Socialist Phenomenon, to Utopianism—the yearning for man’s God-like absolute freedom that cannot stop short of the freedom to choose death over life. Short of a miraculous last-minute recovery, Europe’s choice of death will become irreversible within a decade. On Italy’s present form no miracle is to be expected.

All rights reserved, ¿ÞÓÛÕÔØ - 2003. ÓÞÔØÝÕ.

Design and maintenance - www.proxy.co.yu     web master