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Garibaldi and the Risorgimento paved the way for Fascism and EU

2010-08-02T22:41:07Z

It pains me to contradict Daniel Hannan, whose relentless bombardment of the Evil Empire based in Brussels is an inspiration and a joy to read, but in praising Garibaldi and the Risorgimento he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The forcible unification of the geographical expression called Italy was a dress rehearsal for the European Union.

The Italian preunitary states were nations which Piedmont – the Prussia of the Italian peninsula – incorporated by conquest into an artificial, bureaucratic and despotic entity called the “Kingdom of Italy”. The much-abused Bourbons of the Two Sicilies were popular monarchs who spoke the local dialect, kept the national debt and taxes down, and ensured their subjects had cheap food.

They were demonised by that sanctimonious old windbag Gladstone (and no, Daniel, an “Italian Gladstone” is an oxymoron) who took time off from saving fallen women to denounce the Bourbon monarchy as “the negation of God erected into a system of government”. That phrase would accurately describe the European Union. The true negation of God was the extravagant cynicism with which Cavour and Napoleon III, at Plombieres in 1858, plotted a war in which thousands would die: “a plausible excuse presented our main problem”, wrote Cavour.

The plebiscite held by the conquerors showed a Stalin/Ceausescu-style 99 per cent voting for incorporation into the Piedmontese state. The remaining 1 per cent must have been formidable since it held the Italian army at bay for five years in a bloody civil war in which more people were killed than in all the other Risorgimento wars combined.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, conquered and subjected to another rigged plebiscite, when under Habsburg rule was called by liberals such as Pietro Giordani “The Earthly Paradise”. Its economy was so dedicated to Free Trade (long before Britain) that cab drivers at the station in Florence were even forbidden to advertise their fares. The brutal invasion of the Papal States caused thousands of Catholics to enlist in a romantic international army of crusaders fighting for the rights of Pius IX, of whom 476 gave their lives in the Papal Zouaves unit, which included Englishmen.

The Sicilian mayor who denounced Garibaldi as “a ferocious murderer in the service of Freemasonry and the British” spoke the truth. The craft's International Bulletin, in 1907, described Garibaldi as “the greatest freemason of Italy” and Mazzini was not far behind. The regime he imposed was a prefiguration of Fascism, with which it later comfortably cohabited. Today, freemasonry is a powerful element within the Brussels elites.

In recent years there has been a welcome resurgence of legitimism, with annual commemoration of the Bourbon cause at Civitella del Tronto, the last fortress to surrender to the usurpers. The Grand Duke Sigismondo of Tuscany was made a freeman of the city of Grosseto where he received a rapturous welcome and drove in the historic state coach.

These are real patriotisms in revolt against rule from both Rome and Brussels. Italian legitimism is subsidiarity in action. It is a common cause with all of us who detest the atheistic Brussels bureaucracy.

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The World Cup For Everyone Else

2010-06-02T20:43:42Z

Provence (in white) faced off against the Kingdom of the two Sicilies in this week's Viva World Cup.

By MAX COLCHESTER

If you're eager for the latest match analysis from the World Cup, which just got under way Monday in Malta, you've come to the right place.

Provence kicked off the tournament with a stirring performance against Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Iraqi Kurdistan, which hopes to host the tournament someday, looks like a fairly decent side, while the local Gozo team may have its hands full if it has to tangle with Padania.

In other news: Tibet and Greenland dropped out, citing a lack of funds, and the Sami team couldn't come because the president of its association didn't organize a team and an attempt to oust him failed. "It was a dark day for Sami football," says Hakan Kuorak, the coup leader.

As you might have gathered, we're not talking about the FIFA World Cup—the one that begins this month in South Africa and includes soccer behemoths like Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany and Italy. Every two years since 2006, an organization called the New Federation Board has hosted something it calls the Viva World Cup—a tournament that operates by a slightly different set of standards.

Basically, if you hail from a tribal area, an agricultural province, an occupied nation, a semiautonomous region, an ancient city-state, a disenfranchised minority enclave or a nation that doesn't get any respect from soccer's international governing body, this is the tournament for you. "The goal is ideological," says Luc Misson, a Belgian lawyer and vice president of the New Federation Board. "It's about allowing peoples to exist through sport."

FIFA's World Cup is a quadrennial competition between the recognized soccer nations. Its guidelines state that only one soccer association can be recognized per country. Of course, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland aren't separate countries, but because England created the rules and played the world's first international match against Scotland in 1872, an exception has been made.

For everyone else, there's the Viva. The NFB staged the first such event in 2006, three years after its founding. The Viva World Cup name was supposed to sound like the original. The group named its championship trophy after Nelson Mandela, even though the former South African president has nothing to do with the organization.

One of the teams recognized by the NFB consists of the Sami, an indigenous population that hails from a region, sometimes called Lapland, stretching across northern Norway, Finland and Sweden. They say that playing together reminds them of their culture and language.

"I am proud to play as it means a lot to the Sami people," says Jan Egil Brekke, the Sami captain, who has played for his team since 1998. The 35-year-old plays professional soccer for a second-tier Norwegian club called Alta Idrettsforening.

Others are hoping that the competition will help draw attention to their people's plight. The Iraqi Kurds have been granted an autonomous region within Iraq and would like to join FIFA. But FIFA considers them to be Iraqis. The next Viva World Cup, in 2012, will likely be held in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurdistan Football Association hopes the event will showcase the region and attract business.

"It is time that people recognized and learned about our country," says Sarhang Abdulkhaliq, a spokesman for the KFA. He said that most of all, the 2012 event will prove that Kurdistan is "100% safe," in spite of the images of the Iraq war many people have.

The Iraqi Kurdistan team, most of whom play for Kurdistan club teams, already has made its mark on this year's Viva, beating the southern Italian team Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 4-1, to qualify for the knock-out stages.

The tournament has been blighted by in-fighting and a lack of funds. Of the nine teams expected at the event in Malta, three pulled out at the last minute, including Tibet and Greenland—a country FIFA doesn't recognize in part because it's too cold to grow grass there.

The first Viva World Cup in 2005 was canceled when hosts Northern Cyprus said they didn't want Kurdistan to take part for political reasons, says Jean-Luc Kit, a 48-year-old business developer who co-founded the competition. In 2006, South Cameroon's team was barred entry to France because the players didn't have visas.

At a recent match featuring the Padanian team, which represents several regions in northern Italy, Mr. Kit had to walk around a stadium removing flags depicting the crest of the Lega Nord, an Italian political party that wants to create an autonomous northern Italian state separate from the poorer south.

"There is a fear that there could be an element of nationalism" creeping into the project, Mr. Misson says. "We may have to draw up a charter at some point."

As many as 200 nonrecognized teams could join the NFB, says Mr. Kit. Easter Island, a territory of Chile, signed up recently. Sealand, an old military fortress off the coast of England that claims to be an independent sovereign state, is a provisional member. It is organizing its first official match in London.

Mr. Kit says he wants to include teams from Quebec and the northern Spanish region of Catalonia. Even the Vatican's soccer team is being tapped to join. He is also looking for a sponsor to cover the costs of travel and hosting the event.

Not all the participants take Viva seriously. Though Provence has been part of France since 1486, many of its people spoke a local dialect until the early 20th century. Thierry Marcadé, one of the NFB's founders, says he has no nationalist agenda and simply thought a Provence team would be fun. His team doesn't train much, and in the past two Viva World Cups won just two games out of eight.

"We don't have any fans yet," says Mr. Marcadé. "But interest is building."

Three teams withdrew from this week's Viva World Cup, leaving six participants.

TEAM (COUNTRY)
Gozo (Malta)
Iraqi Kurdistan (Iraq)
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Italy)
Occitania (France)
Padania (Italy)
Provence (France)
Source: NFB

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Book review – “Terroni: All that was done to ensure that the Italians of the south would become ‘meridionali' (southerners)” by Pino Aprile

2010-05-30T20:37:35Z

Pino Aprile's “Terroni: All that was done to ensure that the Italians of the south would become meridionali (southerners)”, published by Edizioni Piemme, is one of those books that could cause a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, if read by enough people at the same time. It could become “the spark that starts the fire” by igniting a sentiment of unity among southern Italians, who are discovering that something is missing in mainstream history books informing how Italy was united 150 years ago. Aprile explains, through a series of anecdotes and historical events, how the south of Italy has ended up becoming the “minority” of the country, relegated to a backward condition with respect to the north of the nation and to the rest of Europe, when 150 years earlier, Naples was, in Aprile's account, behind only Paris and London on many counts. The books title is a political statement. He uses the word “terroni”, which is a derogatory term used by northern Italians to describe those from the south, and its root is “terra”, that is, land. It can be translated generally to mean peasant, with a negative connotation. In the subtitle Aprile uses the Italian word “meridionali”, which can be translated literally as “southerners”, and it also has a pejorative connotation, rather than a geographical one. .

Aprile very ably connects the events of 150 years ago to today, either in terms of similarity between those of the past and today's events, or showing the actual causal relationship between yesterday's events and today's. He recounts how the Piedmontese government had set up the first concentration camps in 1860 and 1861, where thousands of Neapolitan and other southern Italian soldiers and irregular combatants were deported and left to die within a few years, preceding by approximately 80 years the notorious Nazi concentration camps in Europe. The comparison between the Nazis and the Piedmontese soldiers is continued also when Aprile describes how the towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni were destroyed by the Bersaglieri infantry troops in August 1861, in the same way that the Nazis destroyed Marzabotto in September 1944. In both cases, the civilian population was massacred in response to the action of irregular combatants against occupation troops. Aprile also draws a comparison between the torture used by the American military in Abu Grahid and what the Piedmontese did in the years following the unification of Italy. His analogies between past events and today's allow the reader to immediately relate to events that took place 150 years ago.

Aprile uses an abundant amount of data taken from official Italian governmental sources to draw causal relationships between the events surrounding the unification of Italy and the current condition of the south of the peninsula. The most astonishing fact relates to the wealth of the treasury of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which amounted to over 443 million lire in gold, compared to the 20 million lire in paper money held by the invading Kingdom of Sardinia, as the Piedmontese state was known at the time of the unification of Italy. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies held 60 percent of the total value of all the treasuries possessed by the different Italian states in 1860. Aprile argues that the treasury was taken north, and used to pay for the debts of the House of Savoy, the royal family leading the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, which had been involved in waging wars against its neighbors for several years, and for unfairly financing the industries of the north. Aprile notes that, ironically, the money of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has been used to modernize the North and then a small part has been allowed to trickle back to the South, in terms of public subsidies and loans. In brief, according to Aprile, the South has ended up borrowing its own money, inappropriately held by the North.

The book recounts the story of cutting-edge Southern industries which, at the time of the unity of Italy, were either dismantled or allowed to go to ruin, due to the unfair competition from the North, or due to explicit decisions made by the newly formed Italian State. The metal works in Mongione and Pietrarsa, the shipyards in Castellammare, the textile industries, and the sulfur mines of Sicily are among those allowed to perish or to degrade into secondary ones after the unification of Italy.

The most striking aspect of the book for a southerner is to discover that there was virtually no immigration before the unification of Italy. The so-called “southern question” emerged only after the southern economy was practically destroyed as a consequence of the invasion by Piedmont. Millions of southern Italians left their occupied nation to reach the shores of America, South America, Australia and other locations overseas, leaving behind an impoverished land.

Aprile attempts to do justice to the irregular combatants, called brigands by the Piedmontese, by describing their heroic resistance against 120 thousand Italian regular troops, who fought almost ten years to suffocate the southern rebellion. The irregular troops were composed of soldiers from the defeated Borbonic Army, peasants, and idealists who were unhappy with the occupation of their homeland by the Piedmontese. Aprile is not very generous with the Italian national hero, Garibaldi, who is described as making arrangements with local criminals belonging to the mafia and the camorra in order to conquer the South.

Aprile's book is a call to action and unity of the southern Italians, emphasizing the need to connect, with a sense of dignity, to their history, to fight the prejudice created in the minds of most Italians, whereby any investment by the State in the south is “extraordinary”, while what takes place in the north is “ordinary”.

His book, when translated into English, will be an eye opener for millions of Southern Italians dispersed throughout the globe. It will allow them to understand why they were born in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Australia and so on. They will also understand how heroic their ancestors were when they fought against a brutal occupation force, sustained by Great Britain and other powers interested in annihilating the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The book, when translated into English and Spanish, could very well generate, on the part of southern Italians dispersed throughout the globe, significant support for the numerous movements calling for a rebirth of the Italian south, with a new sense of “national” dignity.

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