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 Sepphoris, it refused to join the Jewish Zealots, and remained loyal to the 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 the Israeli army and destroyed.

Its villagers became refugees and went to refugee camps or to nearby Nazareth. The groves of the dead village remain 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 the Mona Lisa of Galilee. Its thousands of small stones of various shades form a proud elongated face with a straight nose, high hairdo and full lips and frame it with acanthus 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 have seen lots of them and I love them all: the rocky, low-lying islands in the lucid and transparent Baltic where yellow-haired kids wave from the pier to passing boats; La France Profonde of Conque, a tiny hamlet in the Massif Central on the old pilgrim road to St Jacques, where a narrow chatty river skirts the hill, the slated roofs, and streets paved a thousand years ago; domes of Russian churches in the high grass on Oka River, where girls in flowery shawls listen to a melody; pretty voices of Suzhou girls reverberate in the temple courtyard among canals criss-crossing South China; baroque houses of Trinidad tobacco factors and the proud bearing of Cubans dancing on its streets; the superb bodies of tattooed Masai around a 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 new refugees are on the road, creating great commotion and unsettling Asia. Without a doubt, sooner or later the refugee wave will hit Europe. Hundreds of thousands of refugees already are on the move towards Europe and Russia.

One can understand them: as the US bombed their homes, the defenceless population has no choice but to flee the target areas. No border controls will 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 will crumble and collapse. Europe will be overrun, as was Roman Empire in its day, and it will face a stark choice: establish a system of apartheid and discrimination, or lose its identity.

Will Europe be an incidental victim of American fury, like an innocent bystander in a Western shoot-out? It appears to me that Europe is 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 have put the destruction of prosperous, independent and cohesive Europe on their wish list.

This desire has a practical short-term reason: Europe is a competitor to America, it is too independent, it has established its own monetary unit that can displace the dollar. Europe supports a more evenly-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 the Pharisees, some two millennia back, as we learn from the Gospel. Jesus told them: you cannot serve both God and Mammon. But Pharisees sneered at him, because they loved money.

This religion has been rejected by Christians. Love of Mammon is Avarice, one of the Mortal Sins; it was condemned by Christians and Muslims alike. But it did not vanish completely.

Two thousand years later, a grandson of the Trier Rabbi, Karl Marx, came to a revolutionary conclusion: the faith of Mammon, this ‘week-day religion of Jews’, in his words, became the real religion of the American elites. Marx approvingly quoted a Colonel Hamilton: “Mammon is Yankee’s 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 the 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’.

These words of Karl Marx had a deep spiritual meaning overlooked by the Marxists. Until our days, the religious features of the Creed of Greed were not expressed. There were capitalists who thought of their own interest and promoted the common good, as Adam Smith preached. Things changed with advent of Neo-Liberalism. 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 the 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 wanted to be the first among their own kind. They still considered themselves ‘shepherds of men’. It is true that shepherds eat sheep, but they would not sell the whole lot to the butcher just because the price is right. The Mammonites see such consideration as a betrayal of Mammon.

As Robert McChesney wrote in his Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit over People, ‘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 could eliminate local folk and supplant them with 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 a world of slaves and masters. In order to achieve it, the Mammonites strive to destroy the cohesion 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 cannot 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.

III

Afghanis are wonderful folk, sturdy, independent, self-reliant. They are informed by their mountains, and as all highlanders, they are 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 acutely felt in Europe.

Oriana Fallaci, a well-known Italian journalist, published in the leading Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera, an article bewailing the fate of Europe overrun by “Muslim hordes”. She viewed immigrants as a courtier of Romulus in Ravenna regarded 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 the American-led Crusade and contends, “If America fails, 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 the success, not by the failure of America’s offensive. If America succeeds in her wars, Oriana’s nightmare can become a reality. She does not want to notice that the refugees and immigrants are arriving in Italy because their lands were devastated by the US and its allies. She would not see Albanians if NATO had not ravaged the Balkans. She would not see Sudanese, if Clinton had not bombed the Sudan. She would not see Somalis, if Somaliland had not been ruined by Italian colonization and American intervention. She would not see Libyans if Libya would not be bombed. Neither she, nor America would see a Palestinian immigrant if the peasants of Saffurie would still be tending 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 have no meadow land at all, and my island rises rock-like from the sea. Yet its goat-pastures are more lovely in my sight than your fields for grazing horses’.

People migrate when their lands are ruined. The Irish would not have left the green fields of Erin for Chicago, if the English government had not starved them out. My own Russians would not come to occupy Palestine if Russia had not been ruined by the pro-American forces of Yeltsin and Chubais. For host folk, an immigration wave is a nuisance at best, a disaster at 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 join the Indian tribe. The tribe would disappear; it would not be able to keep its ways.

While a single émigré is always welcome and adds colour to a society, mass immigration is no better than invasion. 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 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 the English-reading audience, was justly horrified by her racism. He is right, Ms Fallaci speaks as a racist, as does 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 rests with the hunter — but that does not mean the buffaloes did 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, the Economist. Their editorial called even before the ‘new Pearl Harbour’ for an increased 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. They would push down the salaries of European workers and increase profits for entrepreneurs. As a side profit, the outflow of the dynamic element weakens the donor societies and makes them an easy prey for hostile takeover. It is an improved version of slave trade, as what could be better than willing slaves competing to board a slave ship. Naturally, the pre-condition for such an intake was not articulated in the editorial: the countries of the Third World must 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, thus 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 the New York Democrats. It is the Mammonites, who should be on the receiving end of Oriana’s diatribes, not the innocent immigrants on the streets and squares of Europe.

(To be concluded…)

Courtesy shamireaders

http://www.unz.com/ishamir/on-the-move/