Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race — and to a lesser extent, gender — to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past.
Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness.
Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions — albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism's hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.
But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is.
Wokeism's natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and — if need be — those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden.
Woke's Victims
Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America's suburbs.
Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity.
The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy.
They are the ignored — the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.
We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón's unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences.
The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared.
And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word "gangs" to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars.
Always In Search of Targets
It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance — on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective.
For over a half-century, female athletes have sought to achieve parity in society's attitudes to sports. Title IX forced universities to ensure rough equality for both female and male sports.
But the woke effort to redefine transitioning biological males as identical to biological women will assuredly destroy the life work of thousands of pioneer athletes.
Ironically, the sexist woke movement has allowed men to take hormones and undergo surgery to become females — even as their immutable skeleton frames, muscularity, or organ characteristics ensure an unfair and asymmetrical contest.
The lives of thousands of young female athletes will likely be diminished. Each sprinter, every swimmer, and all female pole-vaulters will now inevitably at some future date have a rendezvous with career implosion — defined by losing to a transgendered female/biological male.
Records are being rewritten, the very nature of individual women's sports changed, and soon there will no longer remain an idea of "women's sports" at all.
The Forgotten Broken Eggs of the Woke Omelet
The green wokeists postulate that they are saving lives by radical efforts to restrict gas and oil production, to raise fuel prices. They want to force Americans to buy high-priced alternative sources of wind- and solar-generated power and battery-powered cars. But away from the faculty lounge, millions of Americans are colder and less mobile this winter, paying far more to heat their homes and to drive to work.
Most of the woke climate change activists rarely see the poor trying to empty their purses to scrounge combinations of cash and credit cards to leverage over $100 to fill their cars' gas tanks. Tesla drivers might be the architects of last year's war on carbon fuels. But real-life victims pay for their piety — those who have no such options to buy high-priced electric cars.
For the cosmopolitan woke, the border is many things: a mere xenophobic construct, a racist barrier, a nationalist tic.
But the thousands who live near the Mexican border see their homes and farms overrun with drug traffickers — and during a pandemic thousands of unvaccinated and possibly sick illegal aliens. They suffer firsthand from daily violence as all security disappears.
For the American poor, who rely on government health clinics and state entitlements, the influx of thousands of illegal aliens into their communities becomes a zero-sum game. The more noncitizens put demands on such already oversubscribed services, the fewer citizens there are who will have access to quality care.
The woke lecture that colleges and universities must now go beyond their former de facto racial quotas for admissions and hiring, already mostly based on proportional representation and disparate impact. But now a sort of reparations system emerges. It is what the Left itself used to call in derision "overrepresentation."
Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past.
Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers — simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that.
The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.
Once a morally bankrupt society — for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons — begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.
Power, Not "Equity," Is the Creed
In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality.
It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers.
Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover.
They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the "other."
If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation's existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago last year. And no such television execs have a clue — or likely a concern — about how to stop it.
The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate — although always at someone else's expense.
Woke = Wealthy Careerists
And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality.
For all the woke talk about "constructs" of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One's appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge — even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike.
A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action.
In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute "the privileged." And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection.
No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved "Revolution."
So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism's obsessions with ferreting out "white privilege" are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette.
Totalitarian Wokeism
A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government.
Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about "racists" eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about "counterrevolutionaries." Today's wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak's character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao's Little Red Book concerning "suppression of counterrevolutionaries."
No wonder the woke, so-called "humanists" are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.
Wokeism's logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union.
But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult — created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.
Reader Comments
Wokesters suck ass and everyone with even half brain can't help but be gobsmacked by that fact.
Defund the police and then bleat amazement while the shit hits the fan from every imaginable direction. Let perps, pervs and pedos out of jail and wonder why kids and women are afraid for their lives.
W. T. F.
Well some have, after they've been cancelled.
It's been around since the 80s in usa university's I heard a prof say a while back.
It went rabid after hrc lost her right to rule imho.
Genoese or Spanish? Christian or Jew?
Convinced until the end of having discovered new oriental lands or aware of having landed in a "New World"?
THE OLD STORY
The barrier created in the mid-15th century in south-eastern Europe due to the new conquests of the Ottoman Turkish empire, in full possession of the city of Constantinople from 29 May 1453, forced European navigators and traders to seek new routes of communication with the East, to get around what had now become a real break between the West and the gigantic Asian markets. The great national monarchies needed new economic resources, the internal tax levies no longer proving to be sufficient; new mines and new riches were to be sought in distant lands. The hypothesis was thus advanced of reaching India and China by circumnavigating Africa, in order to avoid the Turkish obstacle, and the first to achieve this was the Portuguese Bartolomeo Diaz, who in 1488 opened a new trade route with the 'East by rounding the Cape of Good Hope (the extreme tip of southern Africa), with a new type of boat, the caravel, a small and light sailing ship born in Portugal in 1430.
Thus began an era of GREAT NAVIGATIONS AND DISCOVERIES GEOGRAPHICAL unprecedented. In fact, if the Western world had already known legendary journeys such as that of Marco Polo, who had arrived in Beijing in 1275, it must however be emphasized that this important Venetian merchant had traveled on a personal basis, for private interests (although aided and encouraged by the Venetian Republic ). In this case, however, it was a question of trips financed directly by the state apparatuses, interested in expanding into new territories and enriching themselves through new discoveries and new commercial and economic resources. no doubt to Christopher Columbus. The story taught at school tells that the navigator was born in Genoa in 1451 and died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506, who from 1479 moved permanently to Lisbon (he himself tells of having miraculously escaped a shipwreck in August 1476 , managing to swim to the Portuguese coasts "attached to an oar"), where his brother Bartolomeo was also and where he began to exert considerable pressure on King John II to convince him to finance him a colossal enterprise. Columbus's idea consisted in trying to reach the East by sailing towards the West, in the firm belief that the Earth was spherical (probably a courageous belief, for the time. , he had even calculated the earth's circumference, his books, however, had been hidden and were faked among the many censored by the Church of Rome, which had thus become aware of his hypotheses about the existence of "another Continent inhabited in the temperate zone ").
The Portuguese king refused the project after having submitted it to a commission of experts and Columbus, a widower since 1485 following the death of his noble wife Felipa Moniz Perestrello (no less than a cousin of the same king), decided to move to Spain with his son Diego, not hesitating. to propose his idea to the very Christian kings Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who, after having repeatedly shown themselves perplexed, agreed to finance the improbable expedition after seven long years of pressure, during which Columbus had now reduced selling books and drawing maps to support both Diego and his second son Fernando, born of a relationship with Beatrice Enriquez de Arana. The intercession of bishop Alessandro Geraldini, confessor of the queen and friend of Columbus, was decisive for the consent of Isabella of Castile). Isabella, therefore, granted the Genoese the title of Admiral, Viceroy and Governor of all lands eventually discovered, and Columbus left on 3 August 1492 with three caravels (Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta), also financed with the help of the inevitable Florentine and Genoese banks, heading for the very rich oriental markets of China and Japan about which he had read about Marco Polo's Million.
On 12 October 1492 land was sighted, and the island on which Columbus landed was called San Salvador. It was actually an islet in the Bahamas, but he believed it to be an eastern island. Two other expeditions followed, in 1493 and 1498, thanks to which he explored the Antilles and the Orinoco delta. Here, finally, he was able to find gold and extremely precious pearls, thus awakening the interest of the powerful, who were already regretting having financed expeditions without any economic feedback and therefore proved useless as they were "only" of anthropological and naturalistic interest.
During these years, however, violent rebellions of Indians broke out in its colonies, who were rumored to be violently quelled (in this regard there are those who maintain it was above all slanders elaborated within the Spanish court, in a climate of strong envy. against the power that Columbus was accumulating in those areas, by nobles looking for a pretext to steal all the rich discovered territories. However, the fact remains that there are historians, such as Consuelo Varela, who claim that there are many testimonies about the numerous violence and torture to which the Indians were subjected by the men of Columbus . Other scholars, such as Corina Bucher , argue instead that the alleged "crimes of Columbus" were invented or at least very exaggerated, by historians (especially Iberians), who wanted to justify Ferdinand II's subsequent revocation of the title of Viceroy to the navigator. or, due to these accusations, traditional history tells us that the Genoese navigator was joined by Spanish officials, who arrested him and dragged him to Spain and sent him to jail. Freed through the intercession of the same queen, he was able to leave for the fourth expedition in 1502, this time exploring Honduras, but on returning to Spain he learned that his patron Isabella was now dead.
Christopher Columbus then spent his last years in extreme poverty and forgotten by all; died in 1506 perhaps (but, as mentioned, a wide debate is open among historians on the subject), still convinced that he had discovered mysterious new Asian lands. possible number of new lands to exploit. Thus, in 1493, the Spanish crown obtained from Pope Alexander VI the recognition of all the exclusive rights on the lands to the west of a line that cut longitudinally the Atlantic Ocean, through the Inter caetera bull. The following year, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which stipulated that Spain would have exclusive access to "all the lands of the West" west of the Raya meridian (370 leagues away from the African islands of Cape Verde), and that it assigned to Portugal those east of the same meridian (ie practically nothing, apart from a lot of water and what it already possessed).
This, then, is the "official version". Many controversial aspects, however, persist on the whole affair. How could Columbus, for example, completely neglect the hypothesis of having discovered a new continent, especially since Amerigo Vespucci had given his name to this New World when the Genoese was still alive? Above all, how could the Spanish crown have ignored it, given that the bull of Alexander VI and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas clearly reveal the intent to favor the Catholic kings at the expense of Portugal? Many shadows also remain on the biography of Columbus. Genoese, Spanish, Jewish? Of humble origins but received with all honors at the largest European Courts? Son of weavers and yet an expert in Astronomy, Physics, the Art of Navigation, etc.?
On that occasion Alfonso had even been captured by the Genoese army, which had not hesitated to ask for a ransom in exchange for his freedom. For this reason, according to Giunciuglio, the Spanish monarchy waited more than six years to grant permission to leave for Columbus. The company, in fact, obtained the clearance only for the death of the Genoese Innocent VIII (moreover rather mysterious and sudden, for some following poisoning, an element that cannot but make us think of the successor Rodrigo Borgia, the great poisoner!), And to the consequent ascent to the papal throne of the Aragonese Alexander VI. A subtle way to then be able to attribute to Spain all the credit - and all the consequent economic rights - of the discovery. Precisely for this purpose, according to the "non-aligned" scholar, the true origins of Columbus were then deliberately obscured and falsified by the very Christian kings.
A dense series of unsuccessful attacks against the Admiral, which occurred during the first expedition and supported by the two Pinzon brothers, captains of the two Spanish caravels whose presence had been imposed by the most Christian kings, would have had their own, according to July, the goal to get rid of the Italian to turn the company into an all-Spanish success. The sinking of the ship owned by the Admiral, the Santa Maria, should be considered in this sense, given that it took place in circumstances that were far from clear and that Columbus really risked leaving his skin behind. But all the attempts failed and the Spanish royals, therefore, had no choice but to obscure the Admiral's Italian character as a last resort to convince the world of the Spanish exclusivity on the exploitation rights of the New World.
As for the randomness of the discovery of America and Columbus's belief that he had landed in the Indies, it is not difficult to point out that the sphericity of the Earth was absolutely not a mystery, at the time of the Admiral. Eratosthenes, in the third century BC, had already measured its circumference, quantifying it in 252 thousand stadiums, about 39,600 kilometers today, a result that is strikingly close to that recognized in our time (about forty thousand kilometers on average, given that the earth does not is perfectly spherical). On the other hand, the numerous representations dating back to antiquity and relating to our planet, contrary to what is often stated, do not consider it "flat", but simply portray it in the half considered "inhabited", the upper one, roughly extended from the Iberian peninsula to India (ie the entire "known world"), perfectly centered in the city of Jerusalem, the sacred place for Christians and therefore considered the central point of the Earth. The other part, the lower one, was not depicted as it was believed impossible that any human being could inhabit it, without immediately detaching from it in free fall or forced to live constantly upside down. Not only Columbus, therefore, was aware of all this. The royals of Spain, the various Popes, etc. were aware of this. It was a question, if anything, of understanding whether this "underneath" part of our planet could really be navigated.
As for the randomness of the discovery of America and Columbus's belief that he had landed in the Indies, it is not difficult to point out that the sphericity of the Earth was absolutely not a mystery, at the time of the Admiral. Eratosthenes, in the third century BC, had already measured its circumference, quantifying it in 252 thousand stadiums, about 39,600 kilometers today, a result that is strikingly close to that recognized in our time (about forty thousand kilometers on average, given that the earth does not is perfectly spherical). On the other hand, the numerous representations dating back to antiquity and relating to our planet, contrary to what is often stated, do not consider it "flat", but simply portray it in the half considered "inhabited", the upper one, roughly extended from the Iberian peninsula to India (ie the entire "known world"), perfectly centered in the city of Jerusalem, the sacred place for Christians and therefore considered the central point of the Earth. The other part, the lower one, was not depicted as it was believed impossible that any human being could inhabit it, without immediately detaching from it in free fall or forced to live constantly upside down. Not only Columbus, therefore, was aware of all this.
The royals of Spain, the various Popes, etc. were aware of this. It was a question, if anything, of understanding whether this "underneath" part of our planet could really be navigated.
Not to mention the distance to cover to reach India, which tradition has it was the real destination of the navigator. Columbus could have ignored a treatise such as The practice of trading, written between 1310 and 1340 by Francesco Balducci Pegolotti with the intention of providing an authentic travel manual to merchants, full of detailed information for all routes of commerce, including those necessary. anyone wishing to travel to Beijing? Pegolotti's information led any reader to realize that the road to travel in a "traditional" way for Beijing, thus following the east direction, could measure approximately between 14 and 16 thousand kilometers today, a figure that could not fail to suggest. to Colombo that the reverse direction would have cost him an enormous degree of longitude (albeit "correct" with the relative latitude difference with respect to the equator), especially in comparison to the seventy / eighty that at most he used to cover during his travels and that the equipment with which he set sail allowed him.
It therefore seems at least unlikely that the Admiral, through his legendary expedition, really intended to reach the phantom Indies.
Serra revealed the address: Vico Dritto di Ponticello.
Young people poured into the streets of Genoa shouting insults against all the Doges and Bishops who for centuries had also kept this important information hidden, and anger spread among the people.
To support such a thing, Serra had relied on two emphyteusis mysteriously sprung up in 1798, one dated 1440 and the other 1455, through which the Colombo family was granted, by virtue of their poverty, to reside respectively in "carubeo de Olivella "(Vicolo dell'Olivella), and, in fact, in" carubeo Recto ". The Rector, however, made a mistake not just: if, as traditional historiography maintained and still maintains, the Admiral was born in 1451, his birthplace certainly could not have been the one granted to the Colombo family in 1455. nobles (and then why on earth would they need emphyteusis?), arguing at the same time that the name of Cristoforo's mother was Susanna Fontanarossa (and here Giunciuglio reminds us how Susanna was a typically Hebrew name, with which no other Christian noble up to that moment had never been called).
But what was behind this incredible and belated discovery? Why had those long leases only appeared at the end of the eighteenth century? Giunciuglio, ironically, observes in this regard: "... it was easier to discover America [by Columbus] than his birthplace in Genoa! In fact, the first was discovered in 1492 while the second only in 1812, after well three hundred and twenty years! ".
So let's try to reconstruct the facts that, according to the exuberant Genoese scholar, would motivate such an unclear event.
January 1796. Napoleon swoops into Nice with an army of 38,000 soldiers, threatening to invade Genoa. His Paris is in economic collapse, bled to death by the Revolution. Money is needed, and the Corsican general, who descends from a family of revolutionaries who had fought for their island to be freed from the domination of Genoa, is very clear how to recover it. Since 1768, with the Treaty of Versailles, Corsica has practically ended up in the hands of France, which has long been allied with the Genoese against the Corsican rioters. Under the treaty, the island passed to the French as a "temporary" guarantee of the debt contracted by Genoa towards them in exchange for all the military aid provided. In practice, in this way, Genoa gave up Corsica anyway, giving it to the French instead of the Corsicans! In fact, in the following years Genoa was unable to cope with this debt (which amounts to four million lire).
Napoleon, therefore, in '96 is preparing to blackmail the hated former rulers: if Genoa does not want to be attacked by his army, he immediately disbursed thirty million (officially in the form of a "loan"). It is a technique that works in many areas of Italy: Piedmont, for example, agrees to pay, as does the Papal State. But Genoa has a tradition to respect. Genoa is the Superb. Thus the Minor Council disdainfully refuses, proclaiming (like Venice) its neutrality. Napoleon makes a second offer, willing to settle for much less, and this time the deal is made: Genoa agrees to pay six million.
The four of the debt (whose request shows that Napoleon does not recognize the "exchange" between his country and the sum paid out by the Superba in '68), plus two others.
But general Bonaparte - who passed from the rank of captain to that of general in a single day precisely because, according to Giunciuglio, considered particularly suitable by virtue of his origins, to treat fiercely the rich and hated Genoa - is not to be trusted . In fact, Napoleon will attack indiscriminately, conquering both the territories that have agreed to pay, and those that have refused to do so. March 31 is the day of the famous Nice Proclamation, addressed precisely to its soldiers: "You are naked and poorly fed. The government has many obligations with you and can do nothing for you. The patience, the valor shown in these mountains are admirable. , but they do not procure glory for you, nor do they illustrate your name. I will lead you to the most fertile plains of the world; great cities, wealthy provinces, will come there, in your hand; there you will find honor, glory, riches ... ".
Thus the aggression begins. The French troops arrive as far as Savona, and everything they find is looted. "C’est L’ argent qui fait la guerre ", says the general, who leads his men to attack the Italian peninsula.
Behind this figure, however, Giunciuglio glimpses another, much more powerful, which the history books often forget.
It is Antoine de Saliceti, Corsican and anti-Genovese too.
He is Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge of Bastia, the Saliceti. A lodge he founded. And according to our "non-aligned historian", Freemasonry, in this as in many other "stories" of the modern age, plays a fundamental role.
In contact with Robespierre (especially with his brother Augustine), Saliceti participated in the Storming of the Bastille and in the Assembly of the States General of Versailles, then returned to Corsica, invested with the office of Public Prosecutor, with the specific task of convincing his compatriots to support a French domination against Genoa. Indeed, he is the author of a decree that transformed Corsican tenants into actual owners, thus managing to free them from the burden of rents to be paid to Louis XV. In 1791 he was appointed Commissioner of the People for Italy by Saint-Just, with the task of preparing the invasion of our Peninsula. In this capacity it was he who exerted pressure on Robespierre to appoint the 25-year-old Captain Bonaparte as a general, during the Battle of Toulon. When Robespierre was guillotined, Napoleon did his utmost to save Saliceti - accused of having been one of the men closest to the architect of Terror. Later he organized the popular uprisings in Northern Italy, materially realizing the conditions for the creation of the Cisalpine Republic. He settled in the Prefecture of Milan and from there, according to Giunciuglio, he moves the threads of all the Italian Masonic lodges.
After having obtained thirty million from the Papacy, twenty from Milan, ten from Modena, four from Bologna and Ferrara and two from Parma (money disbursed to avoid an aggression which then systematically occurred), the idea of also looting Genoa to restore the French accounts is still his.
Saliceti has in mind the Banco di San Giorgio, the oldest European bank. When Napoleon occupies Genoa he hastens to sign with him the Convention which sanctions the birth of the Ligurian Republic. It is June 6, 1797, the day of the definitive death certificate of the ancient Republic of Genoa. Then he begins a subtle propaganda which, from the pages of the city gazette, tends to discredit the Four Protectors of the banking institute. Among the various holders of the Bank's deposits, the anxiety of losing everything is beginning to spread, due to what is passed off as mismanagement of their savings.
Finally, the fatal blow: a decree sanctioning the transfer of all Banco's funds from Genoa to Paris. Because the new center of Power is now there.
Despite the decree, things must be done without attracting too much attention, so as not to risk arousing the indignation of the Genoese. Thus Giunciuglio tells us of long weeks of nocturnal transfers of money and registers, full of names of all the customers of the very ancient and very rich Banco, for the whole of 1804. "... every week military wagons full of heavy trunks and "Cartulari" of the institute that included the files of all the wealthy European customers, transferred to Napoleon's newborn bank in Paris ", of course the Bank of France, born for the occasion in 1800 and literally filled with the money of deposits of the Genoese Bank. All with the approval of account holders resident throughout Europe, for whom, after all, it does not change anything that their money is available in Genoa or Paris, but who appreciate what they believe to be a greater reliability of the French Institute. Thus, thousands of gold bars vanish into thin air, whose sale, in exchange for precious currency, is entrusted to James Rothschild , the most powerful scion of the family of German bankers whose progenitor Amschel Mayer, in the course of the previous fifty years, has scattered the offices of his credit institutions in the great European capitals, assigning them to his five children (Mayer, in the second half of the eighteenth century, understood that granting loans to kings was much more advantageous and safer than to private citizens; a very solid guarantee: taxes on subjects). Their own surname makes you think. It dates back to the 16th century, and derives from the name of the star-shaped sign placed on the house in Frankfurt (in the Judengasse, the Way of the Jews ), of an ancient ancestor, the Jewish Isaac Elchanan . The sign read: "To the red shield". An all too clear allusion to the equipment with which - according to the Jewish tradition - David fought against Goliath.
A red shield, formed by two crossed metal triangles so as to outline a six-pointed star.
In our history, therefore, the Jewish element returns continuously.
As well as the Rothschild family itself - of which we will find ourselves talking about many other topics and to which we have reserved a special space traceable in the Index - which will become the most powerful and richest dynasty in the world. Needless to say, James Rothschild, thanks to Genoese ingots, will dramatically multiply his wealth and his power. In 1816 all five brothers will be ennobled, then, in 1822, they will be appointed Barons of the Austrian Empire.
To this day, their descendants manage the fate of the entire planetary economy.
But let's get back to the facts. One of the most important accomplices in this colossal "theft" against the Banco di San Giorgio is the newly appointed Director of the Institute itself, the Jacobin Luigi Corvetto, who physically dismissed the four elderly Protectors (of whom we no longer know null), then supervising the transfer of funds to Paris until 28 December 1804, when the Doge Gerolamo Durazzo (a simple pro-French puppet), decrees the bankruptcy and consequent closure of the ancient Banco.
On May 26, 1805, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy. In Genoa the Doge gives way to a French Prefect. The zealous Corvetto makes a career. The former Director of the former Banco is called to Paris, appointed Count of the Empire and Councilor of State of Bonaparte. In fact, he secretly administers (so as not to attract too much attention to the Genoese, who consider him a benefactor who has tried by all means to save their ancient credit institution), the newly created Bank of France. The effects of the propaganda in his favor, which Saliceti had been able to build in the years of the sacking of the Banco di San Giorgio, show no sign of diminishing. In Genoa everyone continues to believe that they have lost a great statesman, an important economist. Giunciuglio heavily ironizes the fact that his fellow citizens have dedicated one of the most important squares of their city to the man who actually helped take away a fabulous treasure, which the scholar hypothesizes to be around 4500 million lire.
For Giunciuglio it is no coincidence that, immediately afterwards, Paris turns into a construction site. Sixty new streets and sumptuous palaces are built. The population grows by fifty percent in ten years (and here the Genoese historian exaggerates, but not by much: from 1801 to 1817 the population actually went from 546 thousand to about 714 thousand inhabitants. The increase is undoubtedly of considerable magnitude) .
The money of the ancient Banco di San Giorgio to make the capital of the Empire beautiful!
But if Paris grows, Genoa is now in full decline. Misery and discontent increase, while thousands of young people are also recruited there to participate in the various Napoleonic wars. In 1812 the Italians who ended up in the defeated army in Russia numbered at least forty thousand. Several thousand are from Genoa.
Thus, according to Giunciuglio, the myth of Columbus can again be useful for propaganda purposes, to engulf the people and induce them to think, once again, what the powerful want them to think. The Jacobin and collaborator Marchese Gerolamo Serra, one of the many to have made a career out of his support for Napoleon, from the top of his new position as President of the Linguistic Academy and Rector of the Genoese University, has a brilliant idea.
Identify, as if by magic, the birthplace of Columbus and thus divert the hostility hatched by the Genoese towards the Prefect Maire, directing it instead towards the many Doges of the Superba. Doges once again guilty of having hidden the hero's abode from his people over the centuries in order not to have to publicly admit that he never supported him and that he had not accepted, in 1502, his generous proposal which would finally free him from paying so many hateful taxes. his beloved people.