In the early autumn, when the pomegranates ripen, I embark for the ruins
of the destroyed Palestinian village of Saffurie. The
native city of Mary’s mother, it still guards the Crusader church of
St Anne. This old village was an important city some two
thousand years ago, when, under name of Sephoris, it refused to join
the Jewish Zealots, and remained loyal to Empire. It
provided a comfortable home to the man who reinvented Judaism after
its collapse, Rabbi Judah the Prince, and for many
Christian sages and Roman nobles. It survived all vagaries of time,
until in 1948 it was stormed by Israeli army and destroyed.
Its villagers became refugees and went to refugee camps or to nearby
Nazareth. The groves of the dead village remained
hidden in the valleys, bringing full, off-round, heavy and bursting
pomegranates each year, but there is nobody left to pick the
fruit. People from the Jewish settlement built next to the ruins are
indifferent to the fate of pomegranates and of the peasants
who planted them. In this kingdom of desolation amid bountiful red
fruit laden trees, there is also a carefully laid Roman floor
mosaic sometimes called Mona Lisa of Galilee. It consists of thousands
small stones of various shades and together they form a
proud elongated face with a straight nose, high hairdo and full lips
in the acanthus frame of leaves.
This mosaic always reminds me of our beautiful world, this delightful
mosaic of small towns, green meadows, civilised
megapolises, castles and cottages, rivers and streams, churches and
mosques, each piece of the mosaic is fine, precious and
perfect. I saw a lot of them and I love them all. The rocky low-lying
islands in lucid and transparent Baltic, where yellow-haired
kids wave to the passing ships from the pier. La France Profonde of
Conque, a tiny hamlet in the Massif Central on the old
pilgrim road to St Jacques, with a narrow chatty river skirting the
hill, slated roofs, thousand years ago paved streets. Domes of
Russian churches in the high grass on Oka River, where girls in flowery
shawls listen to a harmony. Pretty voices of Suzhou
girls reverberate in the temple courtyard among canals crisscrossing
South China. Baroque houses of Trinidad tobacco factors
and proud stature of Cubans dancing on its streets. Superb bodies of
tattooed Masai around the bonfire at Serengeti savanna.
This world is lovely and its folks are very good.
This beautiful and intricate set-up is threatened by the forthcoming
hostilities, as this Third World War is not only against the
Third World. This war started even before the first bomb fell on the
rocky ground of Afghanistan. A million of new refugees are
on the road, creating the great commotion and unsettling Asia. There
is no doubt, sooner or later the refugee wave will hit
Europe. Hundreds of thousands refugees already are on the move towards
Europe, Russia and relatively stable countries on
the rim. One can understand them: as the US promised to use nuclear
weapons against their homes, the defenceless population
has no choice but flee the target areas. No border controls would be
able to withstand their hectic push. Pakistan will be first,
but not last. As the US and Britain plan to turn their Crusade into
a long war ‘against terror’, there will be more and more
refugees, until, eventually, the fragile social fabric of Europe would
crumble and collapse. Europe would be overrun, as Roman
Empire in its day, and it will face a stark choice: to establish a
system of apartheid and discrimination, or to lose its identity.
Would Europe be an incidental victim of American fury, like an innocent
bystander in a Western shoot-out? It appears to me
that Europe is rather one of the real targets of the forthcoming offensive.
It is not what the ordinary people of the United States
wish, but they are not being asked. The new ruling elites of the US
and their partners and agents overseas put destruction of
prosperous independent and cohesive Europe on their list. This desire
has a practical short-term reason: Europe is a competitor
to America, it is too independent, it started its own monetary unit
that can push dollar. Europe supports more even-balanced
policy in Palestine. Europe is too egalitarian: in New York, I saw
a lift boy, an immigrant from devastated Panama, who
actually lives in the elevator. You would not find such things in Europe,
as Europe is not yet Mammonized.
II
The new ruling elites do not care much for Christ or Muhammad, it is
true, but they have a lot of religious feeling towards
another old Deity, Mammon. This ancient god of greed was much loved
by Pharisees, some two millennia back, as we learn
from the Gospel. Jesus told them: you can not serve both God and Mammon.
But Pharisees sneered at him, because they
loved money’[i]. This faith was pushed away by the following developments.
Love of Mammon became known as Avarice,
one of the Mortal Sins, it was condemned by Christian and Muslim societies
alike.
But it did not disappear completely. Two thousand years later, a grandson
of the Trier Rabbi, Karl Marx, came to a
revolutionary conclusion: the faith of Mammon, this ‘weekday religion
of Jews’, in his words, became the real religion of
American elites. Marx approvingly quoted a colonel Hamilton, ‘Mammon
is Yankees’ idol, they worship it not only with their
lips, but with all strength of their body and soul. In their eyes,
the earth is but a stock exchange, and they are convinced that
they do not have other purpose on earth but to become richer than their
neighbours’. Marx concluded, ‘The practical
domination of Jewish spirit over the Christian world has achieved in
North America its unambiguous, complete expression’.
This victorious Jewish spirit, for Marx, was based on ‘greed and egoism,
its confession was business, it’s god - Money’[ii].
These words, as other ideas of Karl Marx, were known but their deep
spiritual meaning was not understood in full. For a good
reason: until our days, the religious features of the creed of Greed
were not expressed, and one could possibly imagine a
capitalist who thinks of his own interest and promotes the common good,
as it was presented by Adam Smith.
Things changed with advent of ‘neo-liberalism’. Lectures of Milton Friedman
manifested ‘outing’ of Mammonites, adepts of the
new/old faith. They differ from ordinary greedy folks, as they elevate
Greed to the level of jealous God, that does not suffer
other gods. The traditional wealthy men would not dream of destroying
their society. They cared about their land and
community. They would like to be the first among their own kind. They
still considered themselves ‘shepherds of men’. It is
true, shepherds also eat sheep, but they would not sell the whole lot
to the butcher just because the price is good.
The Mammonites see such consideration as a betrayal of Mammon. As Robert
McChesney wrote in his Introduction to Noam
Chomsky’s Profit Over People[iii], ‘they demand a religious faith in
the infallibility of the unregulated market’, in other words,
a faith of egoism and greed unlimited. They are devoid of compassion
to the people they live amongst, they do not see the local
people as ‘their own kind’. If they would be able to eliminate local
folks and supplant them by poor immigrants, to optimise
their profits, they would do it, as their brothers did in Palestine.
The Mammonites do not give a damn for the people of America, but use
them as their tool to achieve world domination. Their
ideal picture of the world is archaic, or futuristic: they dream of
the world of slaves and masters. In order to achieve it, the
Mammonites strive to destroy cohesiveness of social and national units.
As long as people stay on their land, speak their tongue, live among
their own kith and kin, drink water of their rivers, worship
in their churches and mosques, they can not be enslaved. But if their
lands are flooded by masses of refugees, their social
structure will collapse. They will lose their great advantage, the
feeling of belonging together, the feeling of brotherhood, and
they will become an easy prey for Mammonites.
II
Afghanis are wonderful folk, sturdy, independent, self-reliant. They
are formed by their mountains, and as all highlanders, they
are quite stubborn and conservative. Fear of American bombs would push
them into the lowlands of Holland and into the cities
of France, and they will unwillingly but irreversibly change the land
they enter. This process is going on for quite a while. As the
global policies of the Mammonites deplete the poor countries of the
Third world, pump out natural resources and incomes,
support the nasty quisling rulers, destroy their nature, more and more
people are forced to join the stream of refugees to
Europe and the US.
This threat is already felt in Europe. Oriana Fallaci, a well-known
Italian journalist, published in the leading Milanese
newspaper, Corriere della Sera[iv], an article bewailing the fate of
Europe overrun by “Muslim hordes”. She viewed
immigrants as a courtier of Romulus in Ravenna considered the Germanic
warriors. Oriana says that “Somali Muslims defaced
and shitted and outraged for three months the main square of my city”,
that some "children of Allah" urinated on the walls of the
Cathedral, that they had mattresses inside the tent "to sleep and fuck
on" and poisoned the square with the smell and smoke of
their cooking. Oriana goes on to say that Florence, "once the capital
of art and culture and beauty" is "wounded and humiliated"
by "arrogant Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisians, Algerians,
Pakistanis and Nigerians" who "sell drugs" and pimp
whores. She calls for the support of American-led Crusade and contends,
"If America falls, then Europe will fall [...] instead of
church bells, there will be the muezzins, instead of miniskirts, chadors,
instead of cognac, camel's milk".
Before condemning her style, let us attend the faults of her logic.
Ms Fallaci, an experienced and not too young journalist sees
in America a possible protection, rather than the source of her – and
Florence’s trouble. She should be worried by victory, not
by fall of America. If America succeeds in her Afghan war, Oriana’s
nightmare can become a reality.
She does not want to notice that the refugees and immigrants arrive
to Italy because their lands were devastated by the US and
its allies. She would not see Albanians if NATO would not ravage Balkans.
She would not see Sudanese, if Clinton would not
bomb Sudan. She would not see Somalis, if Somali would not be ruined
by Italian colonization and American intervention.
Neither she, nor America would see a Palestinian immigrant if the peasants
of Saffurie would still tend their pomegranate
groves.
Nobody, but nobody would leave his own land with its unique nature,
lifestyle, friends and relatives, holy places and fathers’
graves for the dubious pleasure of camping by the walls of an Italian
Cathedral. Like ducklings have their imprinting, men are
born to love their native land. Young Telemachus compares his rocky
and lean island with broad meadows and rich fields of
Lacedaemon, and says to his host, ‘we’ve got hardly any grass, and
still, I prefer our mountains with its goats to all your
meadows suitable for horses’[v] People immigrate when their lands are
ruined. The Irish would not leave the green fields of
Erin for Chicago, if English government would not starve them out.
My own Russians would not come to occupy Palestine if
Russia would not be ruined by pro-American forces of Yeltsin and Chubais.
For host folk, immigration wave is a nuisance at the best, a disaster
at the worst. It is not their fault, it is the question of
numbers. Carlos Castaneda joined an Indian tribe and learned a lot
of their ways. I am sure the tribe learned something from
Carlos Castaneda. Now imagine, that thousand wonderful guys and gals
from Yale and Berkeley would join the Indian tribe.
The tribe would disappear, it would not be able to keep its ways.
While a single émigré would be always welcomed, and
would add some colour to the society, mass immigration is bad.
Whether immigrants come as invaders and conquerors, or as refugees,
the receiving society gets a shock. If they are smart,
they push local people away from interesting and important social positions,
and create their own subculture. If they are violent,
they can take over the land by other means. If they are humble and
timid, they will bring down the price of labour. That is why
in normal circumstances immigrants are not popular.
A good man and my friend, Miguel Martinez, who brought Oriana’s article
to the attention of English-reading audience, was
justly horrified by her racism. He is right, Ms Fallaci speaks as a
racist, as Ann Coulter, this American scourge of ‘swarthy
men’. But he failed to see some truth in her words. A man whose garden
was overrun by buffaloes does not notice the hunter
who rushes the herds his way and blames the innocent animals. He is
mistaken, the blame behoves the hunter, but it does not
mean the buffaloes do not ruin the garden. Mass immigration is painful
for immigrant and host alike.
But it is not painful for the Mammonites. They actually like immigration,
as it lowers the price of labour. A leading Mammonite
magazine is the British weekly Economist. Their leader called a few
weeks ago, before the ‘new Pearl Harbour’ to increase
intake of immigrants from the Third World. The most dynamic, best qualified
people from Africa, Asia and South America
could be useful for Britain, Europe and the US, wrote the Economist.
It would push down salaries of European workers and
increase profits of entrepreneurs. As a side profit, the outflow of
the dynamic element weakens the donor societies and makes
them an easy prey for the hostile takeover. It is an improved version
of slave trade, as what could be better that willing slaves
competing for the board of slave ship. Naturally, the first condition
of this intake was not written down in the leader: the
countries of the Third World should be devastated and ruined.
Mammonites need immigrants for their own sake, as well. A cohesive and
healthy society rejects men of greed instinctively, as
greed is a socially destructive drive. In a healthy society, Mammonites
would remain pariahs. Immigration destroys
cohesiveness of the host society. Mammonites do not like their
society being cohesive, they prefer it thinnish and liquescent, so
it would be easier to drink it up. That is why Mammonites support immigration.
Immigrants conceive them as their natural allies
and fail to comprehend that the Mammonites like them as vampires like
fresh blood. Because of this lack of understanding,
immigrants support with their votes the Mammonite power of Tony Blair
and New York Democrats. It is the Mammonites,
who should be on the receiving end of Oriana’s diatribes, instead of
innocent immigrants on the streets and squares of Europe.
III
A Mammonite senator for California, Diane Feinstein, imports more and
more poor Mexicans into her state. They give her the
vote, stay out of politics for many years, they agree to work for less,
they undermine the organised labour. Ordinary
Californians live worse, but she does not care. Some people consider
her a Zionist by virtue of her support for Israel.
However, it would be a mistake to call her a Zionist. Historically,
Zionists felt that man needs roots. They considered easy
mobility of Jews to be a sign of wanting. They wanted to provide the
rootless Jews with the roots in the Holy Land.
Mammonites do not understand who needs roots. They want to uproot everybody.
Zionists felt that Mammonite way of life is
wrong. Mammonites of all backgrounds adopted the way of life discarded
by Zionists.
The Zionists were wrong as they did not understand that without Palestinians,
they can not achieve their goal of striking the root
in the soil of Palestine. They were wrong, as a person of Jewish origin
can strike his root anywhere, not only in Palestine. A
Jew can become an American, an English, a Russian as well as a Palestinian.
It calls for identification with his countrymen, for
supreme concern with his land. Every land is a Promised Land to man
who loves it. People who force America to send away
billions of dollars to Israel, instead of providing for America’s poor,
are not loyal to America. But they are not loyal to Israel,
either. They admire Israel as the model of their world.
Many good men dislike Zionism, for it caused this massive destruction
of the lovely land of Palestine and uprooted Palestinians.
But Zionism is a local disease. Its big brother, Mammonitis, is a world-wide
plague, that wants to turn the world into a “ Big
Israel”, with shopping malls and destroyed villages, settlements for
the chosen few, and many-many refugees as a source of
cheap labour. Zionists ruined nature of Palestine, Mammonites ruin
the world environment. Zionists uprooted Palestinians,
Mammonites uproot all.
Zionists fight Christ. In modern Israel, St Paul and St Peter would
be jailed for teaching Gospel. Mammonites fight every faith,
every conviction, Christ and Muhammad, Nationalism and Communism. Enemies
of Zionism hope Mammonites will reign the
Zionists in, as too independent policy of Zionists can become an obstacle
to the world-embracing plans of Mammonites. But I
tell you, God tolerates the excesses of Zionists so you would notice
the plans of Mammonites.
IV
It is not a cry of dye-in-the-wool Leftie. We can live with some people
of wealth, we can survive some amount of privilege.
Both the left and the right are good and needed for the society, as
left leg and right leg are needed to stand up. Imagine a
springtime meadow in the Jerusalem mountains. It is a magic carpet
of flowers, that calls you to seat on it. If everybody will
walk it, there will be no flowers left. If it will be fenced, it will
be lost for us. These two tendencies: of access and of
preservation, are the paradigms of Left and Right. Their correct combination
allows many people to enjoy the meadow.
The right is the conservative force, preserving the power of traditional
elites. They save the landscape, protect nature, keep the
tradition. The left is a moving force of society, the guarantee of
its liveliness, of ability to change, of social mobility. A society
without its left would rot, a society without its right would collapse.
Left provides movement, right provides stability. But
Mammonites create for their purposes a pseudo-left and pseudo-right,
using errors of real left and right.
One of the faults of the European ‘real’ right was its lack of compassion
and racist tendency. Their knee jerk reflex was
correct: immigrants destabilize the society. But it is not because
they are worse men, as racists say. Immigrants could be
wonderful folk, and they are still a trouble. Dutch moved to Indonesia,
and plagued their land for quite a while by their
presence. They ruined Indonesia heavily. Indonesians went to Holland
and troubled it back. English plagued America in the
heavy way: they exterminated the natives. Colonial process often leads
to mutual plaguing: Brits despoiled Ireland and were
troubled by Irish.
Racism is wrong, as it claims that some groups of men are inherently
better or worse than others. Everybody is wonderful, Zulu
and British, Russians and Chechens, Palestinians and French, Pakistanis
and Turks, while at their own ground. At others’ land,
these good people become a nuisance. In the days of European imperialism
and colonial expansion, racist theories were
necessary to justify the one-sided flow of men. Without racism, one
could not exterminate natives, take their property, ban their
industries, create huge landholdings, and keep people without basic
human rights. But now racism is not needed anymore. As
the colonial adventure of Europe is over, morally wrong and scientifically
mistaken theory of racist superiority can be laid to
rest.
The real left should promote interests of lower classes and it means
to object to mass immigration. But, under Mammonite
influence, the liberal left supports immigration for the reason of
compassion. Mammonites, normally devoid of compassion,
utilise this humanitarian reasoning in their own purposes. It gives
them an additional profit: European and American working
people are being alienated from the liberal left. For workers, the
dangerous nature of immigration is obvious. Immigrants live in
close quarters with the local workers, and suffer from their competition
for the work places. Thus, they are forced to embrace
the racist extreme right.
There is a good way out of the impasse, a way that is good for everybody
but Mammonites. Stop immigration, and open
money transfer line to the Third World. Africa and Sweden should have
the same income. Tax money should flow to the
Indians of Amazon and to the peasants of Afghanistan. Not many Pakistanis
will immigrate to Britain, if they would have the
same (or almost the same) income back home. The EC is a proof of it:
though Swedes still earn more than Portuguese, Greek
and Italians, the difference is not that big, and the lands are peaceful,
so there is a very little immigration into Sweden or
Germany. If you say: compassion; the true Christian compassion tells
you to let people live at home, under their vine and their
fig tree, as good as they would live at your land. You would not have
very cheap cleaners, but you will live in a cleaner and
better land. It would be just, as for hundreds of years Europe and
the US pumped out the wealth of the South and the East.
The immigrant’s lot is a sad one. After all, immigration is an exile,
this saddest state of man. Ovid bewailed it on the Moldavian
shore, and prince Genji decried in Suma. My Palestinian friend Musa
brought his elderly father from the village of Aboud to his
new home in Vermont, and the old man began to build terraces, as on
the slopes of Samarian hills. We are so much a part of
landscape, a part and parcel of mountains and valleys. Now, when
in the US, there are attacks on immigrants, probably many
of them think of their homes they were forced to leave.
While I think that immigration should be stopped and supplanted by transfer
of funds to the poorer lands until the incomes
would level, immigrants that already came over, probably came to stay.
They could become locals: Germans in Germany,
French in France, Americans in America, Palestinians in Palestine.
The ancestors of European and American people also
migrated, and adopted to new ways. Germanic tribes of Franks overrun
Romanised Celtic Gaul, and together with its old
population they formed modern French. Descendents of European Crusaders
still live in Palestinian village Sinjil that preserves
the glorious name of the Provencal commander Raymond de St Gilles,
but they became Palestinians in every way and are being
besieged by Israelis as everybody else. So did the Georgians brought
eight hundred years ago to the Jerusalemite village of
Malcha by the orders of Queen Tamar. They became Palestinian, and shared
the fate of other Palestinians when they were
expelled from their houses by Zionist invaders in 1948.
Human beings are adaptable, and if the immigrants love their new land,
they can become locals. I know it: a native of Siberia, I
choose to become a Palestinian.
V
WWIII is a war against variety per se, initiated by the adepts of Greed.
They do not like the delightful mosaic of races and
cultures, they would rather homogenise the world. They have a practical
reason: it is easier to sell goods to homogenised
mankind. They have a moral reason: they do not want people to enjoy
this beauty for free, so it has to be destroyed. They have
a religious reason: the Mammon worshippers, they feel this jolly plurality
is a sacrilege against their jealous god. Beautiful things
of old belong in a museum, where they can charge entrance fee, after
the village is destroyed.
In a beautiful adolescent movie, the Never-Ending Story, the many-coloured
world of Fantasy disappears into Nowhere. The
same thing happens to our marvellous world. Old and unique places are
being erased and supplanted by shopping malls and
scorched land. The left and the right should join forces against the
Nowhere that threatens our very existence.
Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer living in Jaffa. His articles could
be found on the site www.israelshamir.net and
www.israelshamir.com
Write to Israel Shamir: info@israelshamir.net
info@israelshamir.com
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[i] Lk 16, 13-14
[ii] Deutch-Franzosische Jahrbucher", 1844
[iii] Chomsky, Profit Over People, Seven Stories Press, 1999, page 8
[iv] English translation : LEADING ITALIAN DAILY SPEWS RACIST HATRED
by Miguel Martinez
http://www.kelebekler.com Italian original Saturday 29 September 2001,
"Corriere della Sera"
[v] Odyssey IV