The statements made by the candidate for “Toscana Rossa,” Antonella Bundu, about the need to “dismantle whiteness” have sparked fierce controversy, to which her political party has reacted more solito with the usual lamentations about “racism” against Bundu, an Italian-Ghanaian with a cosmopolitan background. This accusation was levelled in particular against journalist Francesca Totolo, who was subjected to a real lynching in the mainstream media. The underlying message of wokeist and deconstructionist discourse on “whiteness” is that white people must renounce their ethno-racial nature to make way for immigrants (or the descendants of slaves, as in the US) and, in Europe and particularly in Bundu’s case, accept a new “mixed-race” nature. Underlying this renunciation is the culpabilization of white men, a veritable reversal of colonial-era theories, such as Kipling’s famous “burden,” which must be considered oppressive, colonialist (in the pejorative sense), and the repository of all those other characteristics (patriarchy, bigotry, heteronormativity, etc.) that wokeism considers to be the epitome of evil.
But does it make sense to talk about “mixed race” for European nations and especially for our Italian nation? No way, especially in the sense in which it is invoked by supporters of mass immigration. Not so much for rational reasons, the first of which is to ask those mixed-race Italians or “new” Italians if their desire to be part of our nation’s three-thousand-year history consists in denying it and wanting to change it radically, genetically.
Rather, it is the history of migration, of the birth of nations in Europe, of the fusion and mutual assimilation between the peoples of the classical and early medieval ages that confronts us with the most emphatic ‘nope!’ when it comes to immigration: the Art of Clio speaks clearly and tells us unequivocally of a trail of blood, oppression, ethnic replacement (and outright genocide) that involves several ‘before’ and ‘after’ points, ridges beyond which it is impossible to think of repeating the experiences of the past. But let’s proceed in order.
Raspail’s warning
The new edition of Jean Raspail’s famous and chilling novel The Camp of the Saints is innovatively accompanied by an extremely interesting introductory essay entitled The Big Other. The text, also written by Raspail, analyzes, starting from the Orwellian play on words in the title, the obsession with “the other” that permeated European civilization in the second half of the 20th century, identifying its essence as oikophobic cupio dissolvi.
“The term français de souche makes no sense. We were all mestizos,” writes Raspail, quoting a five-column article from Le Figaro (not exactly L’Eco di Pavullo…) dated January 27, 2010. This is one of the seals on the campaign of ideological annihilation of the “French by descent” that began decades ago and should culminate in the recognition of the “mixed-race” essence of that people (and ultimately of all European peoples).
A crude but effective statement. An “innovative semantic scam,” Raspail calls it. After all, the French are the sum of Gauls and Romans, Franks, Burgundians and Alamanni, Normans and Jews, and then the immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries from Italy, Poland, Portugal… Isn’t this “mixed race”? Yes and no. “It was Europe invited into its own home,” Raspail cuts short.
The problem, analyzed from a historical and anthropological perspective, can be further explored. And the results of historical reasoning would also provide very interesting answers about who and what we Italians are. This is a topic that the Fondazione Machiavelli has examined in depth in a dossier that will be presented in the coming weeks and is worth previewing here in part.
History is a teacher but has no students…
Among the supporters of the thesis that we are all “mixed race,” it is very fashionable to cite the Roman Empire as a perfect example of “mixed race,” of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-racial structure. This is true: it was an empire, i.e., a state structure that annexed peripheral territories, peoples, and nations into a multifaceted reality, in which there were those who ruled (the Roman-Italic stock) and those who were ruled (the others). The Romans tended to absorb the most proactive elements (today we would say “collaborators”) of the subjugated peoples in order to Romanize them and make them part of their own ruling aristocracy. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the millions of slaves imported into Italy were regularly tampered with and acquired the privilege of citizenship for themselves and, above all, for their descendants, but not before assimilating every aspect of the lives of their former masters.
So, did everything go as the champions of “welcoming” and ‘interbreeding’ say it would? Not at all. Because in the meantime – to paraphrase Raspail – in the vast majority of cases, the “new Romans” welcomed into the Empire were “Mediterraneans in their own home.” Except for insignificant portions of sub-Saharan slaves, the vast majority of imperial subjects and slaves came from the Mediterranean basin and neighboring areas: they were Caucasian populations, mostly Indo-European-Nordic or Semitic and Hamitic (to a lesser extent), the latter already very amalgamated with each other by Alexandrian Hellenism. Therefore, they all belonged to the same lineage. With the notable exception of the Jews, an exception that proves the rule, any imperial subject or citizen could move from one end of the Respublica to the other and find a temple in which to pray to their God. This is something that, despite all the irenicism of Vatican II, no one can do freely today in any state, even the most secular. The era of monotheism is radically different from ancient polytheism, in which historians and travelers struggled to understand simply how other peoples called Ammon, Hermes, or Minerva…
There was therefore a unity in diversity that is totally absent today and no longer achievable (sorry, John Lennon…). And this is the first of the differences. The second, no less important, is that two thousand years ago, nations as we conceived them during the Middle Ages and as they then crystallized in the Modern Age did not exist. Modern Europe is made up of nation-states, which you may or may not like (we like them), but which cannot be circumvented or ignored. History is therefore a harsh teacher.
The nation is born in blood
It is not that the ancients did not have the concept of lineage. But it was more flexible, also linked to ancestral traditions in which exogamy was a value (taking a wife from outside one’s clan meant, in many ways, forging strategic ties, reducing tensions and rivalries within the clan, introducing new genes into often restricted gene pools, etc.). In the twilight of Rome, however, new categories arrived to change and innovate these customs. They were brought by the Jews, the first people in the Mediterranean to conceive of themselves as completely foreign to their neighbors and unyielding, and by the Germanic barbarians, among whom the concept of blood surpassed any possibility of voluntary adherence to the tribe by outsiders: one was born a Lombard or a Burgundian, one did not become one. This concept was not dissimilar to that of the Slavs (who would appear in Western Europe a couple of centuries later).
How these new concepts, hybridizing with each other, led to the birth of modern nations is a very long and complex story that goes beyond the scope of this short article. In fact, however, by the end of the Carolingian era, the ‘dispersed peoples’, the many fragments of the Roman Empire that had fallen six centuries earlier, were already taking the form of modern nations. First and foremost among these was Italy, favored also by its unique geography.
Here too, supporters of ‘miscegenation’ will jump up and have something to argue for: “Wasn’t Italy born with the arrival of Goths, Lombards, Saracens, and other immigrants? So we are also mixed race!” In addition to paraphrasing Raspail’s answer to a similar question asked about the French, we can readily concede that the Italian people were also born thanks to these contributions. But, precisely, they were born.
And like all births, it happens in blood and pain. The peoples who migrate to Italy soon become arrogant masters: the Goths fight with the Byzantines for possession of the peninsula for decades in an apocalyptic conflict. Gothic and then Lombard rule in Italy were not painless: the new rulers behaved precisely as such, oppressing and plundering the Roman-Italians. Things were no better (in fact) in Saracen Sicily, where Muslims and converts were free, while the Greek-Italic Christians who survived the bloody invasion of the island were forced to pay a tax in order to practice their religion (some say that this is the origin of the ‘pizzo’ or protection money…).
The Saracens were then swept away by new invaders, the Normans, thus completing the geographical picture of modern Italy and bringing about the union of the various geographical realities from Sicily to the Alps, from Dalmatia (no longer Italian) to Corsica. The arrival of the Normans was by no means a walk in the park, even though their small numbers compared to those of the Goths and Lombards allowed them to blend into the national melting pot much more quickly than their Germanic predecessors. But they were the last.
For four centuries, Italy was therefore a region where immigrant peoples behaved like masters over the native population. It took over four hundred years to achieve the final fusion and the birth of the ‘Italians’ as we know them today, and these were not exactly the easiest and most comfortable years to live through.
This story applies to many other places. Raspail’s France is no different, with the fusion between the Gauls and Romans costing half a genocide by Caesar, the Germanic and then Norman invasions—equally bloody and ferocious—and the internal wars that led to the extermination of entire populations (such as the crusade against the Cathars and the wars to subjugate Brittany).
The British Isles, in turn, have a history of successive invasions, and blood, blood, blood. The Roman conquest was ferocious (and the story of Boadicea is one of many examples), and the departure of the Romans three centuries later, with the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, was no different, so much so that the bitter wars between the old and new inhabitants of the island entered into myth with the Arthurian cycle. This was followed by Viking raids and invasions, then those of the… second-generation Vikings, the Normans from France. As anyone who has read Scott’s Ivanhoe knows, even more than a century after the Battle of Hastings, the Kingdom of England was divided into a dominant Norman caste and the subjugated Anglo-Saxons, who were treated like dirt. This was a far cry from the ‘interbreeding’ depicted in mozzarella adverts featuring multicolored students playing guitar on a Roman terrace in front of a beautiful caprese salad…
A story that would continue in the following centuries, with the annexation of Wales, still Roman-Celtic, and then Scotland and Ireland. Stories of blood, genocide, and ethnic replacement by London, which, when it could not use hunger and famine to annihilate the Celtic populations, used them as settlers and cannon fodder on the battlefields of the nascent overseas empire and in the wars on the continent: emptying the rebellious provinces of hotheads to replace them with ethnically acceptable and obsequious subjects.
Yet, despite all this bloodshed, while England managed to unify and today no one thinks of separating Jutish Kent from Saxon Anglia, despite everything, attempts to unite the British Isles under a single language and make them into a single nation (Great Britain) have almost completely failed, with Ireland breaking away in 1921 and Scotland and Ulster now virtually autonomous and with very strong separatist tendencies.
The difference between the fate of England and that of Great Britain is that the former was formed during the gestation of modern nations, while the latter was formed when the nations had already been born. Scotland was already a nation when it was dynastically united with England.
The same can be said of the Iberian Peninsula: during the Reconquista, León and Castile merged before the birth of nations, while the dynastic union between Castile and Catalonia, which took place in the middle of the 15th century, never gave rise to a distinctly united nation. So much so that Catalonia still aspires to secede from Madrid. Portugal, in turn, took its own national path without ever uniting with the other Iberian peoples, and the brief period of dynastic union under Philip II of Spain never even touched on the idea of merging the Lusitanians with the Castilians and Catalans.
Once nations are born, in short, they remain so. The Etruscans, Sabines, and Latins could merge into the Romans. The Lombards and Romans could merge (with more difficulty) into the modern Italians. But the Catalans and Castilians remain so, even under the glorious crown of Spain.
The litmus test: immigrants in Italy (before it was mainstream)
The era of the gestation of nations was therefore an era of “miscegenation.” But it cost blood, segregation, slavery, massacres, and looting, oppression of the newcomer over the native. History teaches us that there is no such thing as “peoples living together in peace.” The Romans crushed the Iceni, the Saxons crushed the Romans, the Normans crushed the Saxons… When, at the end of centuries of bloodshed, modern England was born as a ‘melting pot’ of the aforementioned peoples, it pounced on its neighbors—the Bretons, Welsh, Scots, and Irish. Some were literally eliminated (the Bretons, who fled across the Channel), others did not have time to establish their own nation, such as the Welsh, and ended up as an exploited province of London, so much so that their flag does not even appear in the Union Jack. Ireland and Scotland resisted and formed autonomous nations for a few centuries, but between 1600 and 1800 they suffered ethnic replacement and attempted genocide by the English.
In any case, after the formation of the nations, there was no longer any possibility of them merging. The Scots remained Scottish and the English remained English. There were only two ways to keep them together: appeal to dynastic loyalty or exterminate/force the most die-hard to emigrate.
After the Norman conquest of Sicily, Italy was almost unified at the ethnolinguistic level. A century later, literary Italian was born at the court of Palermo, and two centuries later, Dante, studying the language of the Italians, recognized a dozen varieties, different but perfectly intelligible to each other. Italians recognized themselves and were perceived by foreigners as one people, despite the political fragmentation of the peninsula.
The last immigrants from outside who completely blended into the national fabric were the Normans. After them, other peoples entered Italy, mostly fleeing the Ottoman armies. But they retained their national identity. Grecanics, Albanians, Slavs, Gypsies, and Catalans arrived in our country between the 14th and 16th centuries, maintaining their original identities. They were parts of established nations that came into contact with another established nation. They were welcomed (after all, the population density allowed it), but like water and oil, these peoples did not blend with the natives, even though they lived peacefully throughout the peninsula side by side with the Italians, and still do so today in the so-called “linguistic islands.”
Things went less well in Istria and Dalmatia, where Slavic immigrants from the Balkans, welcomed when not called upon by Venice to repopulate the lands devastated by wars and plagues and to fight as mercenaries (“i fa i mestieri che i veneti no i vol pì far!” – “they do the jobs that the Venetians don’t want to do!”), in the 19th century they began to develop a modern national consciousness – imitating the Italian Risorgimento – and to compete with the local Italians. We know well how this story of “welcome,” “coexistence,” and “intermarriage” (sarcastic quotation marks obligatory) ended: nationalist polarization, clashes, mutual denationalization (first against the Italians, then against the Slavs, then again against the Italians), the exodus of the Italian community from Dalmatia (in the 19th century) and Istria (in 1943-54), and the foibe. It is a story that should be very instructive in these times.
The challenge of the 21st century
So, does history teach us anything or not? By the late Middle Ages, national identities in Europe were practically formed, mature, crystallized. Cases of internal population movements became increasingly rare and, with the notable (and worthy of further study, but not here) exception of the French Huguenots expelled for religious reasons during the Wars of Religion, practically no other people moving within modern and contemporary Europe ended up amalgamating with the native population: internal colonization within our continent usually ends very badly, as the history of Istria or the Germans in Eastern Europe demonstrates abundantly. The masses of workers who emigrated in the 20th century from poor countries to industrial ones is another story of exploitation, pogroms (such as the anti-Italian one in Aigue-Mortes, France), and pain, with some returning to their homeland bon gré mal gré and others having to sweat blood and tears to earn equality with the native population.
Today, Italy – which was a mono-ethnic country until the end of the last century – is seeing its native population fall at an alarming rate below 90% of the total number of residents. Looking ahead, immigrants, including new arrivals and new births on the national territory, are set to become an increasingly large proportion of the total population. All the communities present on our territory, despite every attempt by pro-immigration propaganda to present them as ‘integrated’ if not directly ‘new Italians’ (perhaps for mere sporting merits), maintain their national specificity of origin, all the more so when they come from distant continents, from worlds totally different from ours in terms of religion, traditions, and customs. Even linguistic assimilation does not transform foreigners into “new Italians” in most cases, because, as we have seen, the era of national identities is by no means over. Certainly, it is not enough to “support the same team as our children” to make an immigrant a “new Italian,” as certain politicians have claimed.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the supporters of immigration and ‘miscegenation’ are also the most fanatical advocates of every possible curse on the Italian national spirit: they have understood more or less well how the nature of the Italian people as a nation is an obstacle to immigration and to the multiracial society they recklessly dream of. so there is no historical mystification, propaganda argument, or falsification that they are not willing to use in order to convince Italians that they are not a people, that their nature is intrinsically “mixed,” and that welcoming people on boats today is a good and right thing to do because, after all, we welcomed the Trojans three thousand two hundred years ago and the Lombards in the seventh century…
What the immigrationists do not say, and would not admit even under torture, is that if there is a parallel between immigration in past centuries and today, it is the burden of blood, death, and suffering that it brought and will continue to bring. A burden that will not diminish at all because some beautiful spirit in the 18th century dreamed that there were such things as “human rights.” Nations, realities with a thousand years of history behind them, cannot be erased in the space of thirty years of propaganda and social engineering, but even if this were to succeed, the process of merging denationalized indigenous peoples with immigrants would still be a harbinger of endless suffering, as every single historical case from the past teaches us.
Therefore, if a politician truly loves Italy and its history, they cannot seriously ask it to abandon its national heritage, which has been so painstakingly built up over centuries. Individual experiences of “integration” and “intermarriage,” however happy, are not the norm and never will be. If one truly loves this country, one must be able to take a step aside.
