Yesterday, Italy’s probable next Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, made the following statement:
“We did not fight against and defeat communism in order to replace it with a new internationalist regime, but to permit independent nation states once again to defend the freedom, identity and sovereignty of their peoples.”
I posted this quote on my Facebook page, where it won quick approval from a wide range of people, people who disagree, sometimes strongly, on a wide range of issues, including, significantly, religion.
I was especially heartened to see several people who likely were dismayed by my recent essays on religious matters join the cheering. Not because they were cheering on a Catholic politician. But because they were cheering on a politician who sees clearly, as they do, that the battle against globalism will not be won by abandoning our own particular attachments to create a simulacrum of globalism. That was the way of Saruman. Ours is the way of Gandalf.
The overarching conflict of our age is not a conflict between places or a conflict between tribes. The overarching contest of our age, a contest that takes many forms, is an attempt to replace all attachments to any place with an attachment to no place, and an attempt to replace all types of tribalism with a universal tribelessness.
In that struggle, there have been but few words of hope from Rome since March 2013. Which helped make yesterday’s words particularly sweet to me.
