Iryna, Charlie Kirk, And the Rivers of Blood
In 1968, a symbolic date marking the decline of our civilization, British MP Enoch Powell gave a speech that cost him his political career. It is known as the “rivers of blood” speech, as he prophesied that mass immigration would lead to violent clashes. Here we are: the rivers are still streams, but the path has been laid out and it will not be easy to stop it. In the United Kingdom, ethnic polarization is dramatic, and the law affects British citizens while favoring immigrants and “new Britons”. Even the mayor of London and the interior minister are of Pakistani origin. The situation is similar in France, a powder keg aggravated by political, economic, and social crises.
In America, it is worse: two murders shake the conscience of those who still have one. The first concerns a Ukrainian girl, Iryna Zarutska, killed in the subway of a provincial town by an African American (it must be said this way, for political correctness) out of racial hatred. The murderer had fourteen previous convictions and had been released after a trial by a judge, who was African American like him. Racialization is rampant in the US, imposing the law of blood over the law of rights. The victim had all the characteristics to become a symbol of mourning: a woman, young, a refugee, killed by a male predator. But no: she has the misfortune of being white and of having been killed by a black man. Iryna does not deserve the attention of professional anti-racists or feminists.
No femicide, no outrage at the behest of resentful neo-suffragettes. No sports or entertainment stars kneel as became mandatory for George Floyd, the black convict killed by a white police officer. Black Lives Matter, but poor Iryna’s life does not. The victim, in this case, is the perpetrator, representative of a mistreated ethnic group. Quite a few say so openly. No one denounces the short circuit of a hyper-individualistic society that hates the past but makes the faults – real or imagined – of previous generations eternal, imposing penalties and compensation on their descendants. Once again, the law of blood prevails, in defiance of all the principles of liberal democracy (ah!ah!ah!).
On September 10, Charlie Kirk, a young conservative activist, was murdered at a university where he was giving a lecture. He was the perfect target for the hatred of the radical progressive mob (great progress). Thirty years old, Christian, father, white, sexually normal, anti-immigration, educated, supporter of family and country. Moreover, he was able to mobilize consciences with his Turning Point movement and challenge his opponents on the concrete terrain of ideas: “Prove me wrong” was his signature phrase. Impossible: the wicked, the evil, the absolute enemies – Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan understood everything in 1963 – must be destroyed, annihilated. No discussion: they deserve death.
In Charlie’s case, the joy at what happened – the approval of murder – shines through in the comments of most of the leftists. Leftists, yes: the only correct definition of the somewhat liberal, very radical, woke, highly progressive, post-Marxist, and now post-human world that has been hit by a disastrous mental and moral earthquake that has lasted for half a century. Charlie, in the most sober of comments, “asked for it”, as [the italian] Piergiorgio Odifreddi suggested. We all have it coming, all of us who dare to believe in God, country, and family, who are attracted to the opposite sex, who love life and its transmission, who recognize our debt to the past, who are what we are as children of a civilization, a language, an identity, a people, and a tradition. Try to prove us wrong, but confronting us is forbidden. And, also, dangerous for you, as it would call into question unproven, rock-solid theorems, the tablets of the new law of magnificent and progressive destinies.
An intelligent and courageous young man has died. The murderer seems assured of justice, so says the formula of the most hackneyed conformism. He too was a young man, twenty-two years old, a prisoner of poorly thought-out ideas, fed, it seems, on LGBT rhetoric, animated by a relentless hatred. A brilliant marksman with a precision rifle and bullets on which, along with other rambling phrases, Bella Ciao is engraved in Italian. Bingo. No blame to the ANPI or the last centenarian partisan, of course, but the climate, the sentiment is there. The enemy is shot and eliminated, amid the thunderous applause of the ultra-fans and the unconcealed satisfaction of the beautiful souls, for whom hatred is always someone else’s. Serves him right, one less, are the recurring, sickening phrases.
The killer is said to be a lone wolf, like Irina’s tormentor, too white to live. Possible, but there are far too many isolated, unbalanced individuals with weapons, military training, and infallible aim. Trump got away with an unpredictable move; the young Colombian candidate Miguel Uribe, opposed to the Left (and the narcos), was not so lucky, nor was Japanese politician Shinzo Abe. Assassination is once again becoming a weapon of political struggle. Slovakia’s Fico survived an assassination attempt, while the opponent of pro-Western Moldovan firebrand Maia Sandu is in prison on trumped-up charges. Alternative fuer Deutschland candidates are dying inexplicably in the run-up to the vote, and former Brazilian president Bolsonaro has been sentenced to decades in prison for political crimes.
Yes, it really is a turning point. Evil is no longer hiding; the beast is wounded and responds only to the logic of hatred, destruction, and death. The progress of the world in reverse. In Kirk’s case, the target was carefully chosen, certainly not by the usual madman always present in American political assassinations: young, capable of mobilizing, gifted with dialectical skills, strongly devoted to his cause. Prove me wrong, he said, showing his belief in his ideas and in the method of dialogue, a word abused and discredited by the use made of it by the Left. Those who encourage debate are not fanatics, however clear-cut their positions may be. They believe in true pluralism, which progressive radicalism sees as smoke and mirrors; they respect and acknowledge their opponents. This is too much for the Left-wing swarm, whose media representatives describe Charlie Kirk as controversial or divisive. It is disgusting hypocrisy not to condemn him directly. Yes, controversy is the soul of thought, as it divides by comparing positions. Another thing is the extreme polarization of formerly liberal and democratic societies, which has led to the establishment of the crime of hate, naturally against those who do not share the wonders of open society.
Judgment becomes slippery, harsh, going beyond the decline of the United States, the creeping civil war being fought there, and the decline of European societies. The rift is now irreparable, both on the ethnic side and on that of principles and values. History, with all due respect to liberal supremacism, did not end with the collapse of 20th-century communism. The debris of the past century has given birth to woke madness, the LGBT wave, and the deconstruction of every common principle, while keeping intact the potential for violence and hatred of old ideologies. All this has become obsessive and dehumanizing, with the stigma of fascism and Nazism being attributed to anything that does not conform to the dominant ideological criterion.
The generation of the writer has experienced this firsthand. In the 1970s and 1980s of the short and endless century of which we are children, Italy experienced a wave of hatred and violence fueled by universities, newspapers, and a sick mindset for which killing the enemy became a revolutionary act, a gesture of justice and liberation. Killing a fascist is not a crime, people sang at the top of their voices in the squares and schools. Quite a few actually did so. Today, anyone who does not belong to the progressive front is a fascist; homophobic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, anti-abortionist, Christian, these are no longer insults, but labels, scarlet letters that identify targets. Those who experienced hatred in those cursed years know this well.
The writer has been a witness and a victim: I am the target, even though they do not know me and know nothing about my thoughts. It is something that changes your life and leaves you with only two alternatives: to become like them, responding to hatred with more hatred, to violence with more violence, or to discover the pride of being different. Not thinking, speaking, or acting like those who call us enemies. Marking the distance in moral, cultural, and behavioral terms. Unfortunately, violent words, widespread resentment, bitterness, and prejudice are inevitably followed by physical violence, the desire, the lust to finish off the other, the dehumanized enemy. Dehumanization, however, is the fate of those who hate, those who use, instigate, and elevate violence, those who reason in terms of hatred and opposition, whose only solution is bloodshed.
This is how the West is dying, overwhelmed by a thousand earthquakes, disfigured by countless changes, sick with too much madness. There can be no mediation between “us” and “them” unless we agree to question everything. With strength and humility, in mutual recognition: prove me wrong, Charlie Kirk’s challenge. Otherwise, rivers of blood will truly flow beside us and over us. May the sky be gentle to you, unlike the earth, Iryna, Charlie, and all those who fell for their ideas or for who they were.