I

In the early autumn, when the pomegranates ripen, I embark for the ruins of the destroyed Palestinian village of Saffurie. The native city of Mary’s mother, it still guards the Crusader church of St Anne. This old village was an important city some two thousand years ago, when, under name of Sephoris, it refused to join the Jewish Zealots, and remained loyal to Empire. It provided a comfortable home to the man who reinvented Judaism after its collapse, Rabbi Judah the Prince, and for many Christian sages and Roman nobles. It survived all vagaries of time, until in 1948 it was stormed by the Israeli army and destroyed. Its villagers became refugees and went to refugee camps or to nearby Nazareth. The groves of the dead village remained hidden in the valleys, bringing full, off-round, heavy and bursting pomegranates each year, but there is nobody left to pick the fruit. People from the Jewish settlement built next to the ruins are indifferent to the fate of pomegranates and of the peasants who planted them. In this kingdom of desolation amid bountiful red fruit laden trees, there is also a carefully laid Roman floor mosaic sometimes called Mona Lisa of Galilee. It consists of thousands small stones of various shades and together they form a proud elongated face with a straight nose, high hairdo and full lips in the acanthus frame of leaves.

This mosaic always reminds me of our beautiful world, this delightful mosaic of small towns, green meadows, civilised megapolises, castles and cottages, rivers and streams, churches and mosques, each piece of the mosaic is fine, precious and perfect. I saw a lot of them and I love them all. The rocky low-lying islands in the lucid and transparent Baltic, where yellow-haired kids wave to the passing ships from the pier. La France Profonde of Conque, a tiny hamlet in the Massif Central on the old pilgrim road to St Jacques, with a narrow chatty river skirting the hill, slated roofs, thousand years old paved streets. Domes of Russian churches in the high grass on Oka River, where girls in flowery shawls listen to a harmony. Pretty voices of Suzhou girls reverberate in the temple courtyard among canals crisscrossing South China. Baroque houses of Trinidad tobacco factors and proud stature of Cubans dancing on its streets. Superb bodies of tattooed Masai around the bonfire at Serengeti savanna. This world is lovely and its folks are very good.

This beautiful and intricate set-up is threatened by the forthcoming hostilities, as this Third World War is not only against the Third World. This war started even before the first bomb fell on the rocky ground of Afghanistan. A million of new refugees are on the road, creating the great commotion and unsettling Asia. There is no doubt, sooner or later the refugee wave will hit Europe. Hundreds of thousands refugees already are on the move towards Europe, Russia and relatively stable countries on the rim. One can understand them: as the US promised to use nuclear weapons against their homes, the defenceless population has no choice but flee the target areas. No border controls would be able to withstand their hectic push. Pakistan will be first, but not last. As the US and Britain plan to turn their Crusade into a long war ‘against terror’, there will be more and more refugees, until, eventually, the fragile social fabric of Europe would crumble and collapse. Europe would be overrun, as the Roman Empire was in its day, and it will face a stark choice: to establish a system of apartheid and discrimination, or to lose its identity.

Would Europe be an incidental victim of American fury, like an innocent bystander in a Western shoot-out? It appears to me that Europe is rather one of the real targets of the forthcoming offensive. It is not what the ordinary people of the United States wish, but they are not being asked. The new ruling elites of the US and their partners and agents overseas put destruction of prosperous independent and cohesive Europe on their list. This desire has a practical short-term reason: Europe is a competitor to America, it is too independent, it started its own monetary unit that can push the dollar. Europe supports more even-balanced policy in Palestine. Europe is too egalitarian: in New York, I saw a lift boy, an immigrant from devastated Panama, who actually lives in the elevator. You would not find such things in Europe, as Europe is not yet Mammonized.

II

The new ruling elites do not care much for Christ or Muhammad, it is true, but they have a lot of religious feeling towards another old Deity, Mammon. This ancient god of greed was much loved by Pharisees, some two millennia back, as we learn from the Gospel. Jesus told them: you can not serve both God and Mammon. But Pharisees sneered at him, because they loved money’ [i]. This faith was pushed away by the following developments. Love of Mammon became known as Avarice, one of the Mortal Sins, it was condemned by Christian and Muslim societies alike.

But it did not disappear completely. Two thousand years later, a grandson of the Trier Rabbi, Karl Marx, came to a revolutionary conclusion: the faith of Mammon, this ‘weekday religion of Jews’, in his words, became the real religion of American elites. Marx approvingly quoted a Colonel Hamilton, ‘Mammon is Yankees’ idol, they worship it not only with their lips, but with all strength of their body and soul. In their eyes, the earth is but a stock exchange, and they are convinced that they do not have other purpose on earth but to become richer than their neighbours’. Marx concluded, ‘The practical domination of Jewish spirit over the Christian world has achieved in North America its unambiguous, complete expression’.

This victorious Jewish spirit, for Marx, was based on ‘greed and egoism, its confession was business, it’s god – Money’ [ii]. These words, as other ideas of Karl Marx, were known but their deep spiritual meaning was not understood in full. For a good reason: until our days, the religious features of the creed of Greed were not expressed, and one could possibly imagine a capitalist who thinks of his own interest and promotes the common good, as it was presented by Adam Smith.

Things changed with advent of ‘neo-liberalism’. Lectures of Milton Friedman manifested ‘outing’ of Mammonites, adepts of the new/old faith. They differ from ordinary greedy folks, as they elevate Greed to the level of jealous God, that does not suffer other gods. The traditional wealthy men would not dream of destroying their society. They cared about their land and community. They would like to be the first among their own kind. They still considered themselves ‘shepherds of men’. It is true, shepherds also eat sheep, but they would not sell the whole lot to the butcher just because the price is good.

The Mammonites see such consideration as a betrayal of Mammon. As Robert McChesney wrote in his Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People [iii], ‘they demand a religious faith in the infallibility of the unregulated market’, in other words, a faith of egoism and greed unlimited. They are devoid of compassion to the people they live amongst, they do not see the local people as ‘their own kind’. If they would be able to eliminate local folks and supplant them by poor immigrants, to optimise their profits, they would do it, as their brothers did in Palestine.

The Mammonites do not give a damn for the people of America, but use them as their tool to achieve world domination. Their ideal picture of the world is archaic, or futuristic: they dream of the world of slaves and masters. In order to achieve it, the Mammonites strive to destroy cohesiveness of social and national units.
As long as people stay on their land, speak their tongue, live among their own kith and kin, drink water of their rivers, worship in their churches and mosques, they can not be enslaved. But if their lands are flooded by masses of refugees, their social structure will collapse. They will lose their great advantage, the feeling of belonging together, the feeling of brotherhood, and they will become an easy prey for Mammonites.

III

Afghanis are wonderful folk, sturdy, independent, self-reliant. They are formed by their mountains, and as all highlanders, they are quite stubborn and conservative. Fear of American bombs would push them into the lowlands of Holland and into the cities of France, and they will unwillingly but irreversibly change the land they enter. This process has been going on for quite a while. As the global policies of the Mammonites deplete the poor countries of the Third world, pump out natural resources and incomes, support the nasty quisling rulers, destroy their nature, more and more people are forced to join the stream of refugees to Europe and the US.

This threat is already felt in Europe. Oriana Fallaci, a well-known Italian journalist, published in the leading Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera [iv], an article bewailing the fate of Europe overrun by “Muslim hordes”. She viewed immigrants as a courtier of Romulus in Ravenna considered the Germanic warriors. Oriana says that “Somali Muslims defaced and shitted and outraged for three months the main square of my city”, that some “children of Allah” urinated on the walls of the Cathedral, that they had mattresses inside the tent “to sleep and fuck on” and poisoned the square with the smell and smoke of their cooking. Oriana goes on to say that Florence, “once the capital of art and culture and beauty” is “wounded and humiliated” by “arrogant Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis and Nigerians” who “sell drugs” and pimp whores. She calls for the support of American-led Crusade and contends, “If America falls, then Europe will fall […] instead of church bells, there will be the muezzins, instead of miniskirts, chadors, instead of cognac, camel’s milk”.

Before condemning her style, let us attend to the faults of her logic. Ms Fallaci, an experienced and not too young journalist sees in America a possible protection, rather than the source of her – and Florence’s trouble. She should be worried by victory, not by fall of America. If America succeeds in her Afghan war, Oriana’s nightmare can become a reality.

She does not want to notice that the refugees and immigrants arrive to Italy because their lands were devastated by the US and its allies. She would not see Albanians if NATO would not ravage Balkans. She would not see Sudanese, if Clinton would not bomb Sudan. She would not see Somalis, if Somali would not be ruined by Italian colonization and American intervention. Neither she, nor America would see a Palestinian immigrant if the peasants of Saffurie would still tend their pomegranate groves.

Nobody, but nobody would leave his own land with its unique nature, lifestyle, friends and relatives, holy places and fathers’ graves for the dubious pleasure of camping by the walls of an Italian Cathedral. Like ducklings have their imprinting, men are born to love their native land. Young Telemachus compares his rocky and lean island with broad meadows and rich fields of Lacedaemon, and says to his host, ‘we’ve got hardly any grass, and still, I prefer our mountains with its goats to all your meadows suitable for horses’ [v] People immigrate when their lands are ruined. The Irish would not leave the green fields of Erin for Chicago, if English government would not starve them out. My own Russians would not come to occupy Palestine if Russia would not be ruined by pro-American forces of Yeltsin and Chubais.

For host folk, immigration wave is a nuisance at the best, a disaster at the worst. It is not their fault, it is the question of numbers. Carlos Castaneda joined an Indian tribe and learned a lot of their ways. I am sure the tribe learned something from Carlos Castaneda. Now imagine, that a thousand wonderful guys and gals from Yale and Berkeley would join the Indian tribe. The tribe would disappear, it would not be able to keep its ways. While a single émigré would be always welcomed, and would add some colour to the society, mass immigration is bad.

Whether immigrants come as invaders and conquerors, or as refugees, the receiving society gets a shock. If they are smart, they push local people away from interesting and important social positions, and create their own subculture. If they are violent, they can take over the land by other means. If they are humble and timid, they will bring down the price of labour. That is why in normal circumstances immigrants are not popular.

A good man and my friend, Miguel Martinez, who brought Oriana’s article to the attention of English-reading audience, was justly horrified by her racism. He is right, Ms Fallaci speaks as a racist, as Ann Coulter, this American scourge of ‘swarthy men’. But he failed to see some truth in her words. A man whose garden was overrun by buffaloes does not notice the hunter who rushes the herds his way and blames the innocent animals. He is mistaken, the blame behoves the hunter, but it does not mean the buffaloes do not ruin the garden. Mass immigration is painful for immigrant and host alike.

But it is not painful for the Mammonites. They actually like immigration, as it lowers the price of labour. A leading Mammonite magazine is the British weekly Economist. Their leader called a few weeks ago, before the ‘new Pearl Harbour’ to increase intake of immigrants from the Third World. The most dynamic, best qualified people from Africa, Asia and South America could be useful for Britain, Europe and the US, wrote the Economist. It would push down salaries of European workers and increase profits of entrepreneurs. As a side profit, the outflow of the dynamic element weakens the donor societies and makes them an easy prey for the hostile takeover. It is an improved version of slave trade, as what could be better that willing slaves competing for the board of slave ship. Naturally, the first condition of this intake was not written down in the leader: the countries of the Third World should be devastated and ruined.

Mammonites need immigrants for their own sake, as well. A cohesive and healthy society rejects men of greed instinctively, as greed is a socially destructive drive. In a healthy society, Mammonites would remain pariahs. Immigration destroys cohesiveness of the host society. Mammonites do not like their society being cohesive, they prefer it thinnish and liquescent, so it would be easier to drink it up. That is why Mammonites support immigration. Immigrants conceive them as their natural allies and fail to comprehend that the Mammonites like them as vampires like fresh blood. Because of this lack of understanding, immigrants support with their votes the Mammonite power of Tony Blair and New York Democrats. It is the Mammonites, who should be on the receiving end of Oriana’s diatribes, instead of innocent immigrants on the streets and squares of Europe.

IV

A Mammonite senator for California, Diane Feinstein, imports more and more poor Mexicans into her state. They give her the vote, stay out of politics for many years, they agree to work for less, they undermine the organised labour. Ordinary Californians live worse, but she does not care. Some people consider her a Zionist by virtue of her support for Israel.

However, it would be a mistake to call her a Zionist. Historically, Zionists felt that man needs roots. They considered the easy mobility of Jews to be a sign of wanting. They wanted to provide the rootless Jews with the roots in the Holy Land. Mammonites do not understand who needs roots. They want to uproot everybody. Zionists felt that the Mammonite way of life is wrong. Mammonites of all backgrounds adopted the way of life discarded by Zionists.

The Zionists were wrong as they did not understand that without Palestinians, they can not achieve their goal of striking the root in the soil of Palestine. They were wrong, as a person of Jewish origin can strike his root anywhere, not only in Palestine. A Jew can become an American, an Englishman, a Russian as well as a Palestinian. It calls for identification with his countrymen, for supreme concern with his land. Every land is a Promised Land to man who loves it. People who force America to send away billions of dollars to Israel, instead of providing for America’s poor, are not loyal to America. But they are not loyal to Israel, either. They admire Israel as the model of their world.

Many good men dislike Zionism, for it caused this massive destruction of the lovely land of Palestine and uprooted Palestinians. But Zionism is a local disease. Its big brother, Mammonitis, is a world-wide plague, that wants to turn the world into a “Big Israel”, with shopping malls and destroyed villages, settlements for the chosen few, and many-many refugees as a source of cheap labour. Zionists ruined the nature of Palestine, Mammonites ruin the world environment. Zionists uprooted Palestinians, Mammonites uproot all.

Zionists fight Christ. In modern Israel, St Paul and St Peter would be jailed for teaching Gospel. Mammonites fight every faith, every conviction, Christ and Muhammad, Nationalism and Communism. Enemies of Zionism hope Mammonites will reign the Zionists in, as the too independent policy of Zionists can become an obstacle to the world-embracing plans of Mammonites. But I tell you, God tolerates the excesses of Zionists so you would notice the plans of Mammonites.

V

It is not a cry of a dyed-in-the-wool Leftie. We can live with some people of wealth, we can survive some amount of privilege. Both the left and the right are good and needed for the society, as the left leg and right leg are needed to stand up. Imagine a springtime meadow in the Jerusalem mountains. It is a magic carpet of flowers, that calls you to seat on it. If everybody will walk it, there will be no flowers left. If it will be fenced, it will be lost for us. These two tendencies: of access and of preservation, are the paradigms of Left and Right. Their correct combination allows many people to enjoy the meadow.

The right is the conservative force, preserving the power of traditional elites. They save the landscape, protect nature, keep the tradition. The left is a moving force of society, the guarantee of its liveliness, of ability to change, of social mobility. A society without its left would rot, a society without its right would collapse. Left provides movement, right provides stability. But Mammonites create for their purposes a pseudo-left and pseudo-right, using errors of real left and right.

One of the faults of the European ‘real’ right was its lack of compassion and racist tendency. Their knee jerk reflex was correct: immigrants destabilize the society. But it is not because they are worse men, as racists say. Immigrants could be wonderful folk, and they are still a trouble. Dutch moved to Indonesia, and plagued their land for quite a while by their presence. They ruined Indonesia heavily. Indonesians went to Holland and troubled it back. The English plagued America in the heavy way: they exterminated the natives. The colonial process often leads to mutual plaguing: Brits despoiled Ireland and were troubled by Irish.

Racism is wrong, as it claims that some groups of men are inherently better or worse than others. Everybody is wonderful, Zulu and British, Russians and Chechens, Palestinians and French, Pakistanis and Turks, while at their own ground. At others’ land, these good people become a nuisance. In the days of European imperialism and colonial expansion, racist theories were necessary to justify the one-sided flow of men. Without racism, one could not exterminate natives, take their property, ban their industries, create huge landholdings, and keep people without basic human rights. But now racism is not needed anymore. As the colonial adventure of Europe is over, morally wrong and scientifically mistaken theory of racist superiority can be laid to rest.

The real left should promote interests of lower classes and it means to object to mass immigration. But, under Mammonite influence, the liberal left supports immigration for the reason of compassion. Mammonites, normally devoid of compassion, utilise this humanitarian reasoning in their own purposes. It gives them an additional profit: European and American working people are being alienated from the liberal left. For workers, the dangerous nature of immigration is obvious. Immigrants live in close quarters with the local workers, and suffer from their competition for the work places. Thus, they are forced to embrace the racist extreme right.

There is a good way out of the impasse, a way that is good for everybody but the Mammonites. Stop immigration, and open a money transfer line to the Third World. Africa and Sweden should have the same income. Tax money should flow to the Indians of Amazon and to the peasants of Afghanistan. Not many Pakistanis will immigrate to Britain, if they would have the same (or almost the same) income back home. The EC is a proof of it: though Swedes still earn more than Portuguese, Greek and Italians, the difference is not that big, and the lands are peaceful, so there is a very little immigration into Sweden or Germany. If you say: compassion; the true Christian compassion tells you to let people live at home, under their vine and their fig tree, as good as they would live at your land. You would not have very cheap cleaners, but you will live in a cleaner and better land. It would be just, as for hundreds of years Europe and the US pumped out the wealth of the South and the East.

The immigrant’s lot is a sad one. After all, immigration is an exile, this saddest state of man. Ovid bewailed it on the Moldavian shore, and prince Genji decried in Suma. My Palestinian friend Musa brought his elderly father from the village of Aboud to his new home in Vermont, and the old man began to build terraces, as on the slopes of Samarian hills. We are so much a part of landscape, a part and parcel of mountains and valleys. Now, when in the US, there are attacks on immigrants, probably many of them think of their homes they were forced to leave.

While I think that immigration should be stopped and supplanted by transfer of funds to the poorer lands until the incomes would level, immigrants that already came over, probably came to stay. They could become locals: Germans in Germany, French in France, Americans in America, Palestinians in Palestine. The ancestors of European and American people also migrated, and adopted to new ways. Germanic tribes of Franks overrun Romanised Celtic Gaul, and together with its old population they formed modern French. Descendents of European Crusaders still live in the Palestinian village Sinjil that preserves the glorious name of the Provencal commander Raymond de St Gilles, but they became Palestinians in every way and are being besieged by Israelis as everybody else. So did the Georgians brought eight hundred years ago to the Jerusalemite village of Malcha by the orders of Queen Tamar. They became Palestinian, and shared the fate of other Palestinians when they were expelled from their houses by Zionist invaders in 1948. Human beings are adaptable, and if the immigrants love their new land, they can become locals. I know it: a native of Siberia, I choose to become a Palestinian.

VI

WWIII is a war against variety per se, initiated by the adepts of Greed. They do not like the delightful mosaic of races and cultures, they would rather homogenise the world. They have a practical reason: it is easier to sell goods to homogenised mankind. They have a moral reason: they do not want people to enjoy this beauty for free, so it has to be destroyed. They have a religious reason: the Mammon worshippers, they feel this jolly plurality is a sacrilege against their jealous god. Beautiful things of old belong in a museum, where they can charge entrance fee, after the village is destroyed.

In a beautiful adolescent movie, the Never-Ending Story, the many-coloured world of Fantasy disappears into Nowhere. The same thing happens to our marvellous world. Old and unique places are being erased and supplanted by shopping malls and scorched land. The left and the right should join forces against the Nowhere that threatens our very existence.

[i] Lk 16, 13-14
[ii] Deutch-Franzosische Jahrbucher”, 1844
[iii] Chomsky, Profit Over People, Seven Stories Press, 1999, page 8 [iv] English translation : LEADING ITALIAN DAILY SPEWS RACIST HATRED by Miguel Martinez http://www.kelebekler.com Italian original Saturday 29 September 2001, “Corriere della Sera”
[v] Odyssey IV