Sebastian, when we met in Paris, we thought we were free men in a free world. There was no hysteria & no despotism hanging on our every breath, so to speak. Love & friendship had not been outlawed, deaths, funeral, & mourning had not been stripped from our humanity. We had a past & a future. I suppose in a sense we are still free--because we are angry at this state of affairs, young enough to hate even the threat & the moralism that accompanies this new imprisonment because we try to avoid it & escape the finger of death that seems to write our annihilation into policy. Bureaucratic liberalism dictating to us the terms of our submission & survival has made us conspiracy thinkers.
Sebastian: It’s all very true what you say. As I told you in some of our private conversations, I actually preferred to be labelled—if I really must be labelled—a conspiracy factist. Because, apart from the fact that, for whatever reason, now a conspiracy theorist is not a person hatching a secret plot but somehow got to be anyone who does not fall in line with the mainstream media spiel peddling us whatever convenient lie suits the particular interest of the Establishment… But then again, it’s always good to have & maintain an open mind—being careful though to not have our mind so open that our brain falls out. Meaning that reason & good sense alongside Occam’s razor principle should alway rule our thoughts. Meaning, therefore, that there is a big difference between believing in a reptilian race ruling our planet from the inner core of the flat earth & coordinating the efforts of the on-surface billionaire Zionist elite that wants to rule us from the hollow Moon we never went to, in order to install a military, shopping-addicted, product-fetishist, ego-crazy & social media drunk, eco-fascist police state where we’ll all live in perfect global government harmony & through the vaccine & 5G, of course, they’ll be able to manipulate our every thought & force us to watch the twelfth season of some transgender-hyper-woke-pro-gay-eviromental-friendly-climate-change-groupie Netflix show) —& the very real possibility instead that, perhaps, all throughout history we have had some groups of interests that have tried to create and or at least manipulate events in such a way as to have personal gain from them & have the world go according to their desiderata. & this is the best interpretational key, in my opinion, with which to decipher our current situation, the sanitary-technocratic-fascism that is upon us. I’ll quote the great late Bill Hicks here: “You are free! To do as we tell you.” This is what is happening. Clear & simple. Let’s take my home country of Italy for example: It takes a magistrate, a judge, to restrict your liberties, to put you in jail & yet for almost two years now, we are being told that we have to stay home, for safety reasons, of course. For your own good & the public good, ça va sans dire. The EU is proving herself to be even worse if possible, confirming herself to be as useless as always. I mean, for the love of God, if there was one chance to put all all differences aside within the various EU states & try to prove we are truly one Confederation of States united in a common idea of Europe, then this was this global pandemic. But no. Nothing of the kind happened; instead, the various nations & governments started arguing, quibbling about money, about not wanting to pay for someone else’s sanitary expenses; (cannot wait to see to whom you will sell all your tulips, dear Netherlands, once the EU you take more money from than you contribute finally dissolves? Just to mention one example, of course...) To this day, they have not even been able to conceive one, single, unified Covid-19 protocol even. But, curiously enough, do you know what they were very fast to push forward & approve as a European Parliament (& let me remind your audience that we Europeans have the distinct & very questionable privilege of having the only parliament in history that cannot make laws, nor overturn the Government, the two basic functions and powers of any parliament in the world)? The issuing of the EU “Green Pass”, a smartphone app that collects data on vaccines — a legislative aberration that goes against anything the founding fathers of Europe, any Constitution & indeed the Schengen area stand for. What are the odds of that concentrating every legislative mind!
You are an intrepid young man, the opposite of a conformist, a careerist, or an opportunist. What are your tactical devices & achievements in escaping imprisonment? What should young men do to be more adventurous?
Sebastian: This is actually such an easy answer to give because it’s so cliché & true at the same time: Read. Read all day, every day, if you can. Because—I am quoting the late genius semiotician Umberto Eco here—those who read will have lived a thousand lives. Those who do not, only their own. & this is especially important—go beyond your literary comfort zone, meaning don’t go & read just authors & books that you know will confirm your intellectual & cultural bias. As Murakami aptly pointed out: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Now, truth be said, I was also very lucky—assuming, indeed, that there is such thing as luck & it’d not all preordained by a Higher Power that had the wisdom to make us forget about his decisions & the kindness enough to make them pass of our own via free will. One of these many lucky events & circumstances that constellated my life has been the perfect mix between nature & nurture in my earliest years. Being brought up in a certain environment & cultural system & then, later, having the right books & teachers always come to me over the course of my life when I was ready for them. All these contributed decisively to the right balance in my life—a conservative & classical upbringing, but also one rich of a sense of thoughtful rebellion & a sense of questioning & if necessary changing the status quo I was confronted with. Qualities that allowed me to not just sit there, accept everything, dwell in my privileged social milieu & fiddle while Rome burns, but that, instead, instilled in me a sense of duty & responsibility to go, explore, take risks, bring back ideas &, if I deemed it necessary, indeed take actions against a situation that is becoming intolerable.
Serious people cannot believe that the vast changes in state bureaucratic control will vanish never to be seen again, as a nightmare. We have to think dangerous thoughts to defend freedom. What's on your mind?
Sebastian: Too many things probably. But what is worrying me the most these days is this perilous notion that is slipping into the public mind, that freedom is a kind concession on the part of the government, not your God-given right, which we had to wind back with two World Wars. Isn’t it funny, now you are being told that you need to give up some parts of your liberties to protect your & our lives? Yet, in history, it has always been the other way around: We have always given our lives for our freedom & liberties.
Part of the problem is also—pardon me the brutal thought here—that we have been at peace & free for way too long. Meaning that the oh-so-hailed-as-good-thing 70-years of peace that the EU procured & secured us (an utterly childish, simplistic notion, as the reasons for such lasting peace in Europe is much deeper & due to far more complex & fundamental reasons) came with a huge price tag: Obliviousness. You see, unlike our grandfathers, who took our freedom back from the clutches of tyranny, or our fathers who, raised by their parents who had witnessed the horrors of war, we were born & raised in a world of freedom & prosperity so abundant & conquered so distantly in the past that we forgot at what price it came to us & how easy it is to lose it again. So, drunk on both freedom & peace, & since Power got infinitely more sophisticated in its strategy in the meantime, we are witnessing our prosperity & freedoms being eroded, it's been happening for decades now, often if not always, under the virtue-signaling-induced-feel-good-false vestige & pretence of “the common good” or “public safety”. The pandemic was not, I repeat, was not created by some obscure elite in a smoke-filled room, but—once it did happen, because of a virus that somehow escaped—once they had this chance they sure as hell took it to pursue their agenda. & that meant counteracting that extremely dangerous trend for them which has been happening all over the world in recent years: The rising to power of the so-called populist & sovereignist movements. Not to mention the drastic increase & proliferation of the most fearsome enemy of all for them: Free information from alternative news sources on the internet. Et voila, what do we have now? Un-elected governments with their task-forces handling the pandemic in many different countries & the wild, completely illegal censorship of any voice on the internet that diverges form the scientism-vulgata of the new pandemic & vaccine credo.
Who in European political, intellectual, or artistic life earned your admiration in this era of the pandemic?
Sebastian: Oh, so many, thank God. The one good thing about our enemies becoming more & more overt about their pitiful master plan is that they cause a counter-reaction. So we got the return on the scene, after a long & debilitating malady, of Jordan Peterson, & not a day too soon! We missed you, Peterson! We got the brilliant philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Europe, in America Bishop Barron. Then His Eminence Carlo Maria Viganò.
The first one especially, Agamben, is particularly interesting to me & might not be very well known to the American audience, so allow me a little synthesis of his thought, perfectly condensed & summarized in a lapidary phrase of his. Obviously aimed at the Italian public, for their willingness to be deprived of their freedoms over the fear of a, quite remotely statistically speaking, deadly virus: “It is evident that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections & religious and political beliefs in order not to fall ill. Bare life—& the fear of losing it—is not something that unites men, but it blinds & separates them.” Bare life. This is the key concept here: The insane notion that life is nothing more than mere biological functions, such as breathing & eating, & once those two are secured & taken care of, we are, by definition, alive. So what the governments have to do to protect that bare life is to limit our freedoms. But life is obviously so much more than mere biological, bodily functions: It is communal life, social interactions with our fellow humans, it is affection & gathering of men & women for all sorts of public endeavours. As you can imagine, Agamben got tremendously popular again during this recent pandemic given the legislative distortions that were forced on us to safeguard dear dear bare life, fueling & rekindling a sense of resistance in the silent minority—which I suspect is not so silent anymore, nor even perhaps a minority.
Finally, Sebastian, let's return to Italy, which we should—we shall do again over the next month. Is Rossini the most important Italian musician or Verdi?
Sebastian: I’d say Verdi—but also, let me be perfectly honest here, I am totally biased in this respect as well. You see, as a fervent monarchist, I know the role Verdi had in the public imaginations of the time, what a great instrument for the Monarchy’s causes he was. Many people don’t know this, but on the walls of the many cities of Italy, the writing—proto-graffiti we could say—”W VERDI” was appearing everywhere. But that had a double meaning, as it also stood for: W Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia - All hail King Vittorio, King of Italy.
Now, as a lover of Opera in general, it is very hard for me to say which one I prefer, but I do have a particular fondness for the magic of the Aida, by Verdi of course. Set in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Aida tells us about love & betrayal, against the backdrop of war. Aida is an Ethiopian princess held captive in Egypt & in love with General Radames, who loves her back, but when he is chosen to lead a war with Ethiopia we follow the conflict of Aida’s love for both Radames & her country. It is simply a breathtaking & timeless work of art—to the point that, during the making & unification of our country, its Triumphal March was briefly considered as the national anthem of the newly created Kingdom of Italy.
Were you to lead a revolution in the manners, opinions, & habits of Italian men, what would you have them start doing or stop doing?
Sebastian: Careful what you wish for! The great Italian journalist & thinker Tiziano Terzani once wrote that what the world needs is a “Conspiracy of Poets”, meaning the absolute necessity for poets to take over & rule the world, because if the poets & artists will not find the way, no one will. To become a poet & an artist, one has to feel & think, & the only thing one can do for that is to sit down & observe. Listen. Be in the present, a much blasé concept, due to the pervasive & nefarious “new age” mindfulness culture. But let’s not forget that Marcus Aurelius & the Stoics advocated themselves the “logos ataraxia,” the ceasing of all distracting thoughts, the admonition to be aware of the present. In the end, what is prayer if not a meditation aimed outwards, towards God, while meditation is a prayer aimed inwards, to ourselves & our minds?
But what I would like Italian men & women to do, specifically, is to start first & foremost to widen their intellectual & mental horizon. That starts with a problem that has been trucking my people for decades now: Our scarce knowledge of English. I was, again, extremely lucky, in this regard as well, as I got sent to a German school right away & thus English came to me extremely easy, to the point were it became my second language. But for the rest of Italians English still remains an elusive mystery. It is poorly taught in schools & thus we start with a linguistic & thus cultural & informational handicap. I say this because, whether for better or for worse, most of the books & knowledge accessible out there are in the English language, so by only knowing Italian all the information my fellow countrymen can have access to & comprehend is our own. & believe me that is not a comfortable thought. We have a very biased, very manipulated & limited news apparatus, for example, & what that means is to be swimming in an informational pond while there is an untapped & unknown ocean there for us. Conversely, what I would like us to stop doing is to quibble & fight about our own regional petty disputes & start looking at the bigger picture of things. We’re ancient as a culture & society, but are fairly recent as a nation: We got unified only in 1861, with the annexation of the Papal State. Before that, Italy was a gorgeous myriad of kingdoms, ducats, marquisates, counties, & then also consider that we have been conquered and ruled by, over the centuries, the French, the Austrians, the Spaniards—even the Arabs (we had the emirate of Sicily at one point!)—so on & so forth, so what this did to us is it instilled very deeply in our Italian character a very unhealthy sense of divisiveness & a very, very scarse sense of State. Which manifests itself, first of all, in a very provincial way of thinking about the rest of the world & its issues, a very vague notion of what is happening outside our little town reality. Which, for example, in the case of the much dreaded EU, leaves us painfully unequipped to have that sense of dignity & national pride to say “enough of this” & “begone” to this bureaucratic & soulless nightmarish monster that is our current dominus: Brussels & its banksters henchmen. It is no coincidence, case in point, that, in fact, the UK has been the first country to leave the European fiefdom: A Parliamentary Monarchy, under Common Law, & with a strong & proud sense of identity. Now, just one more little quip here: I love Europe & I would love a European Union such as the one envisioned & promised to us by the fathers of our common European dream: De Gasperi, Schumann, Adenauer. Giants of politics. A real federation of independent, proud states, united in some common goal & policies, with a rich heritage that must be protected at all costs. Not this farce we got instead after the Lisbon Treaty especially: A merely monetary union of obscure unelected bureaucrats that couldn’t agree on the color of the sky, let alone the destiny of 500 million people.
Serious people can no longer believe in Progress—too many things said, done in faith in Progress have been catastrophic. We want therefore to learn from the past, from a world older than the fanaticism of Progress, in order to deal with the weaknesses of our society. What should we be retrieving from the pre-modern world?
Sebastian: Our firm convictions. We are too flimsy in our beliefs & preferences, too addicted to change, progress, & the latest poll on Twitter. When Heine was asked by a friend, visiting a cathedral, why they are not able to build such a magnificent building any longer, he replied: “Because people in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. & it takes more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.”
Secondly, the pride of having these convictions as a corollary to our belonging to a certain culture & society. Which does not at all mean, as a certain political ideology would love us to believe, that my culture is better than yours, but rather it has to do with understanding that we are who & what we are because of the fact that we are the children of a particular tribe. The tribe of our fathers and forefathers. Whether that tribe be the Shipibo people of the amazonian jungle in Perù or the sophisticated citizen of Eternal Rome or Ethereal Paris - & that we do things a certain way that is ours & ours alone. But also that over the hill there, there is another tribe—doing & seeing the same things in another way. A way that we might learn & implement in our own tribe, should it prove better than ours. It’s alway amazing to me to see how the propagandists of the one-global-society fail to see how there would be nothing to learn from each other if all the differences between us were to be eliminated. A pax mundi describable by paraphrasing Chesterton, in these terms: When men chose not to have any differences anymore, they’re not thereafter equal, they are nothing. &, if you allow, best exemplified in the verses of a great Italian poet, enormously famous here but barely known in the Anglosphere, Giacomo Leopardi: “When the whole world became a Roman citizen, Rome no longer had citizens; & when a Roman citizen became the same thing as a cosmopolitan, neither Rome nor the world was ever loved the same: The patriotic love for Rome, which had become cosmopolitan, became indifferent, inactive & null: & when Rome came to mean the same as the world, it was no longer the homeland of anyone, & the Roman citizens, having the world as their homeland, had no home anymore.” How prescient was this?
Let's end with some recommendations. Who would you have people read? Some of my readers are old enough to remember freedom & enjoy it's taste, some are young enough to be dissatisfied & to long for something better. If people are won over by your words, who should they turn to next?
Sebastian: Well, clearly, reading the warnings of 1984 or V for Vendetta hasn't helped much (the latter was a graphic novel by the great Alan Moore), as didn’t Fahrenheit 451 or Philip K Dicks’ dystopic future… Never mind Pasolini's foreseen techno-fascism… So I would urge your readers to turn to some more unknown & rather prophetic authors & books: “Tale of the Anti-Christ”, by Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, the great mystic theologian. Now, this is a particularly interesting, little known booklet, written in 1900 in Russia, a chillingly accurate look into what is now our present, soon to be our nightmarish future. He details a vision of how events might take place in the 20th century & into the 21st with the appearance on the global stage of a great & much beloved by his people leader—indeed, loved & hailed by everyone all around the world. A charming, charitable, & charismatic philanthropist, who wants to unify the world in one common Faith & Leadership, who turns out to be none other than the Antichrist. I shan’t tell more, in order to not ruin the story for your readers.
Giordano Bruno’s work would be another recommendation of mine. He—apart from having undergone the formality of being burnt at the stake by the Church in 1600—nostra culpa—foretold what is about to happen as well, but ended his warning with a spectacular phrase which we should all hold to: “I don't know when, but I do know that many of us have come in this century to develop the arts & sciences, to plant the seeds of the new culture that will flourish, unexpectedly, suddenly, just when Power will have deluded itself it has won.”
You can find Sebastian on Instagram & share in his love of beauty. First part of the interview here!