Visit to an Old Lady
Welcome! The Old Lady is not quite what she used to be. Gone are the days when her sons set out across the oceans to reveal the world to itself. Nowadays Europe gives the impression of having decided to let herself go gently into the good night. But how is decline the stuff of daily life, if it is? Here is the account of the author’s homecoming after ten long years spent in the dark heart of the Globalist American Empire (GAE), while Europe limped through one crisis after another.
Pausanias may have been the first of our race, and Namatianus the closest kin in hardship:
Pausanias may have been the first of our race, and Namatianus the closest kin in hardship:
"Fate snatches me away from these beloved shores-
the fields of Gaul are calling for their son.
Those fields, as lovely once as now they're pitiful,
are ravaged and disfigured by these long wars.
When times are good, ignoring home's not such a crime,
but now shared losses call back native sons.
The family home requires our presence now,
for often grief can tell how best to serve.
Ignoring such disasters further is not right:
delaying aid will only make them worse."
The landing was, as is natural, in the westernmost end of the continent: Portugal, land of the dead!
Lisbon
The relative poverty of Portugal transpires in generally subpar upkeep of buildings, including historical ones, which acquire as a consequence a vaguely rundown air, but a deliberate effort seems to be made to keep the streets clean, and the old town exudes a kind of worn-out charm, a residual afterglow of glory perhaps from the Age of Exploration, which leaves it always poised on the edge between the quaint and the decrepit. The best days of the city and the country are in the past. Compare the Jeronimos Monastery, its art so self-confident and mighty, the choir of its church so expressive of religious intensity, with the bare, desolate modern parks and suburbs.
The relative poverty of Portugal transpires in generally subpar upkeep of buildings, including historical ones, which acquire as a consequence a vaguely rundown air, but a deliberate effort seems to be made to keep the streets clean, and the old town exudes a kind of worn-out charm, a residual afterglow of glory perhaps from the Age of Exploration, which leaves it always poised on the edge between the quaint and the decrepit. The best days of the city and the country are in the past. Compare the Jeronimos Monastery, its art so self-confident and mighty, the choir of its church so expressive of religious intensity, with the bare, desolate modern parks and suburbs.
Throughout the West we live still in material plenty, we are assured that we are the freest humans that ever lived, so how is it that we can't create beauty anymore, and what we inherited has wizened, lost its nature, and is now embalmed into museums? The empty chapel of the Order of Christ, built in 1459 with the profits from the spice trade even as the caravels of Diogo Gomez were venturing in the Gambia, is open to tourists every day 9PM to 6PM for 12 euros.
Related, the Portuguese are a surprisingly rare sight in Lisbon. Most inhabitants are now of Brazilian or African origin, a fact brought well in evidence with every ride on the metro. This is the daily reality of the Great Replacement, concealed under deceptive statistics that designate 90% of the urban population as "native Portuguese" (would white settlers born in Nigeria be considered “native Nigerians”?)
A perhaps surprising fact, to an American, about the Afro-Portuguese is that they appear to be less degenerate than black Americans. The Bantus have higher crime rates and not a very distinguished record of achievement in Portugal as everywhere, but they are on the whole much more functional both from the physical and the social point of view (less obesity, less trashy ghetto mannerism, more gainful employment). In other words, the Afro-Portuguese recall what the Afro-Americans used to be like before the sinister demagogues and race-baiters that made the American progressive scene in the 1960s took them as a pretext to wreck society.
The Lisbon metro system is a microcosm of the entire city in other respects too: it is passably clean and functional, but also basic and bare. A kind of humdrum life goes on, as if through the motions. We are a far cry from the times of Henry the Navigator, a man of characteristically austere Lusitanian temperament, but also of dogged curiosity, relentless in his quest to overcome the familiar by expanding beyond the horizon of the everyday world, and possessed of a vital energy that seems to have spent itself and vanished from modern Europe.
After having personally led an army to the conquest of Ceuta from the Moors, he developed a lifelong obsession with gaining a better knowledge of the western ocean and for a sea-way along the unknown coast of Africa to the supposed western Nile (our Senegal), to the rich negro lands beyond the Sahara desert, to the half-true, half-fabled realm of Prester John, and so ultimately to the Indies.
Having become Grand Master of the fabulously wealthy successor order to the Templars in Portugal, he used the treasury of the Order to fund an immense burst of exploratory activity: to Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores, the Sahara interior, and on to Guinea and Gambia.
Related, the Portuguese are a surprisingly rare sight in Lisbon. Most inhabitants are now of Brazilian or African origin, a fact brought well in evidence with every ride on the metro. This is the daily reality of the Great Replacement, concealed under deceptive statistics that designate 90% of the urban population as "native Portuguese" (would white settlers born in Nigeria be considered “native Nigerians”?)
A perhaps surprising fact, to an American, about the Afro-Portuguese is that they appear to be less degenerate than black Americans. The Bantus have higher crime rates and not a very distinguished record of achievement in Portugal as everywhere, but they are on the whole much more functional both from the physical and the social point of view (less obesity, less trashy ghetto mannerism, more gainful employment). In other words, the Afro-Portuguese recall what the Afro-Americans used to be like before the sinister demagogues and race-baiters that made the American progressive scene in the 1960s took them as a pretext to wreck society.
The Lisbon metro system is a microcosm of the entire city in other respects too: it is passably clean and functional, but also basic and bare. A kind of humdrum life goes on, as if through the motions. We are a far cry from the times of Henry the Navigator, a man of characteristically austere Lusitanian temperament, but also of dogged curiosity, relentless in his quest to overcome the familiar by expanding beyond the horizon of the everyday world, and possessed of a vital energy that seems to have spent itself and vanished from modern Europe.
After having personally led an army to the conquest of Ceuta from the Moors, he developed a lifelong obsession with gaining a better knowledge of the western ocean and for a sea-way along the unknown coast of Africa to the supposed western Nile (our Senegal), to the rich negro lands beyond the Sahara desert, to the half-true, half-fabled realm of Prester John, and so ultimately to the Indies.
Having become Grand Master of the fabulously wealthy successor order to the Templars in Portugal, he used the treasury of the Order to fund an immense burst of exploratory activity: to Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores, the Sahara interior, and on to Guinea and Gambia.
Neither my fondness for my son nor pity
for my old father nor the love I owed
Penelope, which would have gladdened her,
was able to defeat in me the longing
I had to gain experience of the world
and of the vices and the worth of men.
Therefore, I set out on the open sea
with but one ship and that small company
of those who never had deserted me.
I saw as far as Spain, far as Morocco,
along both shores; I saw Sardinia
and saw the other islands that sea bathes.
And I and my companions were already
old and slow, when we approached the narrows
where Hercules set up his boundary stones
that men might heed and never reach beyond.
[…]
‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the West,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of virtue and knowledge.’
To Henry, his vision and perseverance, the world is indebted for the opening up, within one century (from 1420), of more than half of the great global waterways, of both the East and West.
That is the spirit of Europe. But what European today can claim such an inheritance?
That is the spirit of Europe. But what European today can claim such an inheritance?
The historic center of Lisbon, which displays the memorials of that supremely confident age, now teems with Nordic tourists and Eastern European drug dealers hawking their wares (invariably hashish and cocaine) in broad daylight in central areas unmolested by the law.
As young Portuguese are scarce in Lisbon, the author interviewed the available Germanic youth instead. A Danish itinerant musician was eager to inform me that he frowns on his native country because his fellow Danes are conformist and racist, and he loathes America too for the same reasons. He had unfriended many on Faceborg because of their lackluster hate for Trump.
This so-called anti-American attitude is common in Europe among those that fancy themselves enlightened cosmopolitans, but it is a profound mistake to regard it as anti-Americanism. The opposite is true. Thoroughly Americanized Europeans look down on America for not living up to the American values of egalitarianism and commercialized individualism (the striving for undifferentiated human matter), which colonized Europe after WWII and debased its culture, an aristocratic-individualist one that aimed for excellence and beauty.
Would it have been any use to say that the multiracial utopia, the dream of dissolution into one world of denationalized individuals, is inextricably the vision brought about by the rule of money, mass entertainment, and consumerism as the only destiny of a people?
Two Germans were next, young fellows from rich Bavarian and Hessian cities. Barely one month after our conversation, the hometown of one was rocked by a mass stabbing by an African “refugee”, but to me he expressed with absolute confidence his country’s media's view that everything is fine, integration is working, and the only threat facing Germany is the far-right. Both will probably vote for the Greens in the next elections, though one seemed to be tacitly sensitive of the plight of his fellow Germans that have been economically harmed by mass immigration, and might therefore vote CDU…
Sintra, a mountain town near the capital and the old summer retreat of the Kings of Portugal, is rather fetching, and more familiarly Portuguese than Lisbon, as far as the inhabitants are concerned. As befits a resort town, they come across more laid back and courteous than the Lisboans. The palaces of the old Portuguese nobility, built in a medley of exotic styles, stand here in the mountains, hidden in the midst of luxuriant oak forests. Their parks make for peaceful hiking grounds, in whose paths one can lose the stray German tourist.
The climate, not only up in the Sintra mountains but throughout the Lisbon area, is pleasantly cool and windy well into the summer. It is not hard to fathom why this spot where the Tagus goes to die into the Atlantic, is one of the longest continuously inhabited human settlements.
Iberians, Celts, Romans, Visigoths: hence, for a thousand years, the Portuguese...
Spain
Merida
Founded as the Roman colony Augusta Emerita, this sunbaked town near the Portuguese border (and former capital of the Empire's Lusitania province) has many exceptionally preserved Roman sites: theater, amphitheater, aqueduct, baths, forum, temples. The Theater of Merida is possibly the best extant Roman theater.
The modern town is clean and inhabited almost exclusively by actual Spaniards, there are few international tourists, and, best of all, almost nobody speaks English. The author's pathetic fumbling with the local language elicited disapproving looks from middle-aged ladies and aborted promising persiflage with the curt waitress in the joint across the square from the National Museum of Roman Art. The proud disposition of the inhabitants reminds us that all the early conquistadors were locals: Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, the Pizarro brothers, vanquishers of the Incas, Pedro de Alvarado, subjugator of Central America, Hernando de Soto, first of our race to cross the Mississippi, Vasco Nunhez de Balboa, first to see the Pacific Ocean, and Francisco de Orellana, explorer of the Amazon--all of them were born within 100 km of Merida. The blood of the Roman legionaries that settled the region may not have spent itself after the length of 20 centuries!
Highly recommended.
Merida
Founded as the Roman colony Augusta Emerita, this sunbaked town near the Portuguese border (and former capital of the Empire's Lusitania province) has many exceptionally preserved Roman sites: theater, amphitheater, aqueduct, baths, forum, temples. The Theater of Merida is possibly the best extant Roman theater.
The modern town is clean and inhabited almost exclusively by actual Spaniards, there are few international tourists, and, best of all, almost nobody speaks English. The author's pathetic fumbling with the local language elicited disapproving looks from middle-aged ladies and aborted promising persiflage with the curt waitress in the joint across the square from the National Museum of Roman Art. The proud disposition of the inhabitants reminds us that all the early conquistadors were locals: Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, the Pizarro brothers, vanquishers of the Incas, Pedro de Alvarado, subjugator of Central America, Hernando de Soto, first of our race to cross the Mississippi, Vasco Nunhez de Balboa, first to see the Pacific Ocean, and Francisco de Orellana, explorer of the Amazon--all of them were born within 100 km of Merida. The blood of the Roman legionaries that settled the region may not have spent itself after the length of 20 centuries!
Highly recommended.
Trajan's bridge -- the world's longest surviving Roman bridge
Roman Amphitheater and Theater -- among the best preserved ones in the world
Roman Forum -- includes the so-called Temple of Diana (actually dedicated to the Imperial Cult)
Visit the National Museum of Roman Art, and in the alley leading up to it, the little-known Bronce Romano , a shop that makes unsurpassed reproductions of Roman bronzes (used by museums and eBay scammers the world over). Only this author makes perhaps better reproductions of Roman statuettes, but not in bronze, and they are not available for sale in any case.
The town is studded with unexpected gems, like a miniature temple of Mars converted into the shrine of a Catholic saint (Eulalie, well-known to P. G. Wodehouse fans), the scattered mosaic-clad ruins of domus, and an awe-inspiring Roman aqueduct.
Even after millennia, the beauty, power and majesty of the works of the Roman genius move us.
Will today's brutalist tenements be the wonders of ages to come?
The town is studded with unexpected gems, like a miniature temple of Mars converted into the shrine of a Catholic saint (Eulalie, well-known to P. G. Wodehouse fans), the scattered mosaic-clad ruins of domus, and an awe-inspiring Roman aqueduct.
Even after millennia, the beauty, power and majesty of the works of the Roman genius move us.
Will today's brutalist tenements be the wonders of ages to come?
Madrid
The authors spent barely a couple of days here while en route to France. The inhabitants seem to be more cheerful than the Lisboans, and overall still European (the two phenomena might not be wholly unrelated). I skipped Toledo, the old capital, which bears witness to a long and glorious history, from the siege of 711 to the Civil War.
Indeed, the most famous episode to occur during the latter conflict involved the Alcazar of Toledo.
The authors spent barely a couple of days here while en route to France. The inhabitants seem to be more cheerful than the Lisboans, and overall still European (the two phenomena might not be wholly unrelated). I skipped Toledo, the old capital, which bears witness to a long and glorious history, from the siege of 711 to the Civil War.
Indeed, the most famous episode to occur during the latter conflict involved the Alcazar of Toledo.
The Alcazar is a stone fortress that towers above the city. At the time of the Civil War it had for many years served as an infantry academy. There, in the days following the uprising, some 1,800 Nationalists entrenched themselves, led by the head of the Academy, Colonel Moscardó. The core of the defenders was made up of some 600 Civil Guards and 200 Army officers, who were joined by another 100 Falangists, Carlists and other fighting men. The fortress also sheltered some 600–700 elderly people, women and children who sought refuge from the pending Red terror.
Toledo lies in the middle of what was the Republican zone at the outset of the war, and is located 45 miles from Madrid. The rebels could not hold the city when vastly superior government forces arrived on 21 July 1936, but retreated to the castle on the heights above. They had managed to seize a great deal of ammunition from the city’s arms factory, but were only equipped with rifles, a few machine guns and some grenades.
For over two months, the castle was bombarded to rubble by the overwhelmingly stronger Republican forces, from the air, by Soviet-made tanks and by heavy artillery. In spite of an almost hopeless situation, those besieged held their ground until, starved and exhausted, they were liberated by Nationalist troops on 27 September.
In the epic stand of the Alcázar, there is one particularly moving episode that has gone down in history. In Republican Spain, the Communists and Anarchists had set up committees for dealing with those suspected of ”disloyalty to the Republic”. The Reds called these committees chekas, after the infamous Soviet secret police which had operated in the early bloodsoaked days of the Bolshevik Revolution. On 23 July, the boss of the Toledo cheka, a lawyer named Candido Cabello, phoned Colonel Moscardó to inform him that they had captured his 17-year-old son Luis, and were going to shoot him unless the Alcazár’s garrison capitulated. Cabello then handed the phone to the boy. Father and son had the following short conversation:
Toledo lies in the middle of what was the Republican zone at the outset of the war, and is located 45 miles from Madrid. The rebels could not hold the city when vastly superior government forces arrived on 21 July 1936, but retreated to the castle on the heights above. They had managed to seize a great deal of ammunition from the city’s arms factory, but were only equipped with rifles, a few machine guns and some grenades.
For over two months, the castle was bombarded to rubble by the overwhelmingly stronger Republican forces, from the air, by Soviet-made tanks and by heavy artillery. In spite of an almost hopeless situation, those besieged held their ground until, starved and exhausted, they were liberated by Nationalist troops on 27 September.
In the epic stand of the Alcázar, there is one particularly moving episode that has gone down in history. In Republican Spain, the Communists and Anarchists had set up committees for dealing with those suspected of ”disloyalty to the Republic”. The Reds called these committees chekas, after the infamous Soviet secret police which had operated in the early bloodsoaked days of the Bolshevik Revolution. On 23 July, the boss of the Toledo cheka, a lawyer named Candido Cabello, phoned Colonel Moscardó to inform him that they had captured his 17-year-old son Luis, and were going to shoot him unless the Alcazár’s garrison capitulated. Cabello then handed the phone to the boy. Father and son had the following short conversation:
– What’s happening, my boy?
– Nothing, only they say they will shoot me if the Alcázar does not surrender.
– My dearest son, if they do — commend your soul to God, shout Viva España and die like a hero! Goodbye my son, leave me a kiss!
– Goodbye father, a very big kiss!
Luis Moscardó was executed three or four weeks later.
The place remains consecrated to the memory of those who died for the sake of civilization.
The place remains consecrated to the memory of those who died for the sake of civilization.
Barcelona
Barcelona is the poster case of a Disneyland ruined by the onslaught of globalism. All its supposed historical buildings (e.g. Gothic Quarter, old Cathedral) were manufactured in the 19th and 20th centuries as tourist attractions. It is now an overcrowded, overbuilt, noisy and slightly filthy theme park for party-goers chasing cheap entertainments amid Bangladeshi electronics shops. Gaudi's works stand out as an exception, his architecture being a testament to what innovation outside the barbarity of modernism can look like. There is a slightly cartoonish quality, however, to Gaudi's Art Nouveau-Neogothic fusion. Nietzsche wrote that decadent Europe is living in the age of the actor, not of the architect. Is the Sagrada Familia, a 140+ year construction project, an exception?
Barcelona is the poster case of a Disneyland ruined by the onslaught of globalism. All its supposed historical buildings (e.g. Gothic Quarter, old Cathedral) were manufactured in the 19th and 20th centuries as tourist attractions. It is now an overcrowded, overbuilt, noisy and slightly filthy theme park for party-goers chasing cheap entertainments amid Bangladeshi electronics shops. Gaudi's works stand out as an exception, his architecture being a testament to what innovation outside the barbarity of modernism can look like. There is a slightly cartoonish quality, however, to Gaudi's Art Nouveau-Neogothic fusion. Nietzsche wrote that decadent Europe is living in the age of the actor, not of the architect. Is the Sagrada Familia, a 140+ year construction project, an exception?
One thought leading to another, we must recall that Catalonia was a hotbed of bloody anarchist and communist banditry during the Spanish Civil War. Its post-war mystique as the center of a heroic struggle for the defense of "democracy" against "fascism" is an extravagant fabrication , popularized by Orwell and other useful idiots.
The rebellion that sparked the Civil War was finally triggered by the arrest and murder of the spokesman of the nationalist opposition, José Calvo Sotelo. As the author left Barcelona, he wondered (and wonders still) who America's Sotelo will be.
The rebellion that sparked the Civil War was finally triggered by the arrest and murder of the spokesman of the nationalist opposition, José Calvo Sotelo. As the author left Barcelona, he wondered (and wonders still) who America's Sotelo will be.
Countless Africans are found along the route of the train headed for the French border town of Cerbere, possibly because they seek to cross illegally into France. The border is unguarded. It is possible to cross avoiding police checks by taking regional trains. A historic population transfer is under way, orchestrated by a transnational oligarchy, beyond the control and against the will of the citizens of “Our Democracies”™, who pay the price for it with their own material and cultural dispossession. If America's future is bloody, Europe's will be even more convulsive.
Crossing the Pyrenees one notices that the French side is wetter, lusher, greener. One can't help noticing, too, the surpassing beauty of Europe, even its smallest, most insignificant towns possessed of venerable old Gothic or Romanesque churches.
Crossing the Pyrenees one notices that the French side is wetter, lusher, greener. One can't help noticing, too, the surpassing beauty of Europe, even its smallest, most insignificant towns possessed of venerable old Gothic or Romanesque churches.
France
Beziers
On the trail of Otto Rahn we arrive in the heart of Occitania: Beziers, city of the last stand of the Cathars!
Further confirming the accuracy of stereotypes, the hotel the authors was lodging in was managed by Araboids, Koran prominently displayed behind the reception desk.
Beziers
On the trail of Otto Rahn we arrive in the heart of Occitania: Beziers, city of the last stand of the Cathars!
Further confirming the accuracy of stereotypes, the hotel the authors was lodging in was managed by Araboids, Koran prominently displayed behind the reception desk.
Interesting street names...
One third of young people in the town of Beziers are now non-European Muslims. All this history, the spiritual past of this proud and once warlike People, put in jeopardy... for what? Shared humanity is mere animality. Strip men of their differences, and what you're left with is livestock, "human resources". At best.
Here is the church where 7000 Cathars were massacred on July 22nd 1209. "God will recognize his own". Diversity+proximity=war. History bears this out.
The beautiful Nimes, where the German-French manager of the hotel I was staying at, reassured himself, under the guise of reassuring me (unbid), that the demographic replacement under way, very well in evidence here too, "is not the end of France"... Restive banlieue surround this incredible town, studded with exceptionally preserved Roman sites.
The Arena of Nimes, perhaps in even better shape than the Colosseum:
The Arena of Nimes, perhaps in even better shape than the Colosseum:
The Temple of Augustus. Thousands of buildings like this used to stand throughout Europe, before the Christians destroyed them...
But modernist architects couldn't resist the temptation of defiling a holy place of the European Tradition...
It's hard to think of a more beautiful town than this. This is Europe, the fair lady, where the flame of the human spirit has burned brightest.
From 17th century gardens to a Roman tower and library (the so called "Temple of Diana"). The graffiti of 18th century tourists can still be made out, with their meticulous calligraphy...
From 17th century gardens to a Roman tower and library (the so called "Temple of Diana"). The graffiti of 18th century tourists can still be made out, with their meticulous calligraphy...
In the Jardins, I had a small accident at the expenses of an 8- or 10- year old French boy playing boules. I'm afraid I ruined his score. I hope he will grow up to inherit all the great collective beauty and grandeur his ancestors built.
On the march again. This time on to the Riviera, and Eze, where Nietzsche stayed for a while and reportedly found inspiration for part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Here, I grow on the sun as the plants grow there" he wrote."…This splendid plenitude of light has on me a miraculous action."
On the march again. This time on to the Riviera, and Eze, where Nietzsche stayed for a while and reportedly found inspiration for part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Here, I grow on the sun as the plants grow there" he wrote."…This splendid plenitude of light has on me a miraculous action."
Italy
On to Monaco (which I didn't like; overbuilt, overcrowded) and then fair Italy... The border crossing into Liguria was a vision of the future. Whole trainloads of African boat migrants, without a single Italian in sight--all of them trying to cross into France. Police patrolling the stations in military gear with machine guns.
Finally, the Cinque Terre. These are five hilltop villages in Eastern Liguria, connected by hiking trails. It is truly amazing to think of the effort spent by so many generations, stretching back centuries, to make a difficult terrain (topography-wise) not only productive and comfortable, but extremely beautiful to boot!
Finally, the Cinque Terre. These are five hilltop villages in Eastern Liguria, connected by hiking trails. It is truly amazing to think of the effort spent by so many generations, stretching back centuries, to make a difficult terrain (topography-wise) not only productive and comfortable, but extremely beautiful to boot!
Pisa. A very brief passage on the way to Florence. In the first picture below, the building (left, behind the statue) where Count Ugolino was starved to death (not before resorting to cannibalism on his own sons, imprisoned with him). You will say: cruel, barbaric--the barbaric past! But Ugolino della Gherardesca had betrayed the trust of his fellow citizens, intrigued with the enemies of his people, and threatened the liberty of the city for the reward of personal power and wealth. A man of no loyalty and no honor. The modern ruling class of the West has outdone Ugolino, yet it continues unpunished in the enjoyment of its pelf. Who is cruel?
Beautiful Florence. Birthplace of the Renaissance (the Neoplatonists of Ficino's academy receiving the inheritance of the great light of Hellas from the scholars fleeing Constantinople after its fall to the Turks), but mostly a city of medieval buildings.
