“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” [1925]
~~G. K. Chesterton
Posted on 11/04/2011 2:02:23 PM PDT by IbJensen
Will popular democracy bring down the New World Order?
A fair question. For Western peoples are growing increasingly reluctant to accept the sacrifices that the elites are imposing upon them to preserve that New World Order.
Political support for TARP, to rescue the financial system after the Lehman Brothers collapse, is being held against any Republican candidate who backed it. Germans and Northern Europeans are balking at any more bailouts of Club Med deadbeats.
Eighty-one members of David Cameron's party voted against him to demand a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union altogether, the worst Tory revolt ever against the EU.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou imperiled the grand bargain to save the eurozone by announcing a popular vote on whether to accept the austerity imposed on Greece, or default, and let the bank dominoes begin to fall. The threat faded only when Papandreou cancelled the referendum.
But the real peril is Italy, No. 3 economy in the eurozone, with a national debt at 120 percent of gross domestic product.
After the plan to save the eurozone was announced, interest rates on new Italian debt surged above 6 percent, with 6.5 regarded as unsustainable.
When Papandreou announced his referendum, the cost of Italian debt surged again. Should buyers of Italy's debt go on strike, fearing a Rome default or write-down, that is the end of the eurozone and potentially the end of the EU.
But an even larger question hangs over Rome. Will Italy survive as one nation and one people?
For the austerity demanded of Italy to deal with its debt crisis is adding kindling to secessionist fires in the north, where the Lega Nord of Umberto Bossi, third largest party in Italy, seeks to lead Lombardy, Piedmont and Veneto, with the cities of Turin, Milan and Venice, out of Italy into a new nation - Padania.
The north has long resented Rome, Naples and Sicily, seeing them as lazier and less industrious. Bossi, who calls himself "Braveheart," after the Scottish hero of the Mel Gibson movie, sees northern people as Celts who are ethnically different and separate from the rest of Italy.
The Northern League belief that people of Southern Italy caused their debt crisis, bringing on austerity, mirrors the belief of much of Northern Europe that Italy and Greece do not deserve to be bailed out.
As the north is also home to 60 percent of the immigrants who have poured into Italy - Gypsies from Romania, Arabs from the Mahgreb and Middle East - Bossi's party is aggressively anti-immigrant, as are the other surging populist parties of Europe.
Americans who deplore the tough laws against illegal immigration in Arizona and Alabama might look to Italy, where the Northern League managed to have illegal entry into the country declared a felony.
The League was also behind a new law calling for sending back tens of thousands of Arab Spring migrants who arrived on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, which is closer to Africa than Italy.
But while resentment against the south for alleged freeloading and causing the debt crisis is bringing the secession issue to a boil, demography may be the greater threat to the national future.
Italy, says Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian Bishops Conference, is heading for "demographical suicide," and the reason is a low birth rate caused by its "cultural and moral distress."
According to Italy's National Office of Statistics, in 2009 the fertility rate of Italian women was 1.41 children per woman. This is only two-thirds of what is needed simply to replace Italy's existing population.
Italy's fertility rate has been below replacement levels for 35 years. By mid-century, Italy will be a nation with a birth rate that will have been below, at times far below, zero population growth for 75 years.
Italy's birth rate in 1950 was almost twice its death rate. But the death rate equaled the birth rate in 1985, exceeds it today and will be approaching twice the birth rate by 2050.
Italy is not only aging, with the median age of its population going from 43 today to 50 at midcentury, Italy is dying. If this does not change, what the world knows as Italy will not exist at the end of this century.
Like other European nations, Italy faces an existential crisis.
Her national debt is twice what the EU says is tolerable. She must undergo years of painful austerity to pay back what she has borrowed and spent. Yet a shrinking population of working age young and an expanding pool of seniors and aged to care for will make that increasingly difficult, and default on her debts increasing attractive, as it is today to the Greeks.
The Northern League, seeing the south as the source of its troubles, will grow in appeal, as those troubles grow.
If your debts are larger than your economy, your death rate exceeds your birth rate and every new generation will be one-third smaller than the previous one, what kind of future does your country have? The kind of future Italy faces.
Indeed, the only reason Italy continues to borrow at all is to meet the principal and interest payments on its existing debts.
Sounds like one of those Pan-Aryan Stormfront types.
Italy, like France, the US, the UK, and many other places, has fewer and fewer native-born working age people, and those that do immigrate are disproportionately from Muslim or non-Western countries.
Or, as my uncle likes to say, everyone worth a damn in Europe came to the US a hundred years ago.
Goods from Italy, truly made in Italy, are generally of very high quality. A limited amount of these goods ever make it to the US, and when they do they cost much, much more than they do in Italy. We in the West are propping up the economies of nations like China that share little of our world-view and cultural background, while we ignore or shun each other.
There are plenty of young people in Italy who are very willing to work hard, but the opportunities there are horrible. If the West wants to preserve Western culture, then the West needs to start exploring ways to strengthen relationships that benefit the West, and I don't mean like the Eurozone that essentially blurred the lines of sovereignty and played against the natural strengths of some members.
There is a growing discontent in Europe with the loss of culture and sovereignty, and the time is now to stop the continued decline of Western culture.
“Sounds like one of those Pan-Aryan Stormfront types.”
I don’t know; they ARE visibly different. Look at the Italians in the Winter Olympics (they actually seem more Germanic).
One reason for the difference between the north and south is temperature; the siesta exists because normal humans cannot work the fields in the mid-day sun in southern Italy or Spain. They compensate for that siesta by working later.
“There is a growing discontent in Europe with the loss of culture and sovereignty, and the time is now to stop the continued decline of Western culture.”
Apparently not enough to start breeding; as long as Europeans live as though another European war might destroy them in a heartbeat anyway, the “culture” (what is left of it) is doomed. The last time many Europeans were proud of their cultures was in the 1930s and 1940s, when their strongmen governments extolled the virtues of their old civilizations. Leftism eradicated those strongmen and the cultures they harkened back to.
Didn’t Northern Italy once declare herself a separate state?
The Italian Socialist Republic, with Benito Mussolini in charge? Looks like they need better leadership and a national will. Italy will be Ok—they are not Greeks.
I’d imagine you’re referring to something like Vichy France, Italian style? After Mussolini was initially imprisoned and rescued, he never had any real power; he was at the mercy of the German troops retreating up the boot.
Modern Italy itself only dates back to 1871 or so; they’ve always had different dialects in their various regions. The stereotypes they have are probably no more serious than those we have in the US, between Yankees, Rebs, California types, Pacific Northwest, etc.
The Europeans I know think they like socialism, but when you talk to them, they don’t like taxes, they don’t like politicians, and they think that freeloaders should not be taken care of on their backs. They are, in essence, conservatives, but they have been so conditioned to think that socialism is the only alternative to fascism that they don’t even realize that socialism and fascism are close cousins, both harboring the family totalitarian gene.
Europeans are so permissive, it is impossible to refer to them collectively as conservatives. While they say they oppose taxes/politicians/etc., in their heart of hearts they know they either already do, or will someday, benefit from those socialist policies. Conservatism died in Europe when the last Western European emigrated to the US a years ago; when they stopped coming, they clearly indicated a preference for their status quo.
The true conservative parties in Europe, while making headlines for some modest gains, are fringe groups; the masses constantly demonstrate against surrendering any of their benefits.
Sure, as I am partially of southern Italian descent myself...but my comment was aimed more at the “lazier and less industrious” comment.
“the masses constantly demonstrate against surrendering any of their benefits.”
Yes, but when it becomes clear to all that there is no money to pay for those benefits, things will change. Socialism is unsustainable, but unfortunately whole generations of people, sometimes many generations, have to suffer before change occurs.
I personally have never felt so negative about the future in my entire life. I know things will get better, eventually, but more and more I’m believing that it may be too late to be a positive in my life. I have to maintain hope that my child will see a much better world.
“Sure, as I am partially of southern Italian descent myself...but my comment was aimed more at the “lazier and less industrious” comment.”
Understood; that is between you and them. Like I said in my post (hoping to clarify it for us non-Mediterranean people), I understand the siesta; mi esposa es Espanol.
“I personally have never felt so negative about the future in my entire life. I know things will get better, eventually, but more and more I’m believing that it may be too late to be a positive in my life. I have to maintain hope that my child will see a much better world.”
Train them to make it better; I will never let my children accept the sh!t thrown at them. We have a Spanish flag in our home; not the goofy Republican flag of the 1930s, or the Bourbon flag of today - it is the generals’ flag pre-dating the death of Franco (no crown on the eagle), by which St. Francisco insisted he would live & die in a Catholic Spain.
Viva Franco! Viva Cristo Rey!
ogawd. they really need to chat with a branding consultant. That'll never catch on.
Someone needs to replace the fools in Italy and Greece as the stewards of the place of our great classical past, which is the root of our national soul.
I say that as being ethnically Italian (though 4th gen). I have no love for this “nation-state” of Italy... and the “Greeks” (I use that term extremely loosely) are worse.
All that history should be glorified, integrated into and integral to our civilization’s celebration and foundation today. Instead, it just rots waiting to be destroyed by invaders. =(
I’m 4th gen, and abhor all of Europe, let alone feel any “ethnic” connection to Ital.
That said, Im 50% Sicilian and 50% “Padanian”
IMO, they are all worthless socialists, ruining our history.
See my other comment. Romans these are not (even my mom’s side which seem to claim they have that gene line still in tact).
“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” [1925]
~~G. K. Chesterton
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