Postcard from Turin

Western lefties live in an earthly paradise and find it so spiritually intolerable that they want to destroy it for everyone else.

I’m in Italy for a few weeks, making my annual summer pilgrimage to my favourite place in the world, the little village where I lived as a kid.

This year, I stopped in Turin for a few days with my husband. Just to have a look around. It’s a gem of a city. Pristine streets, not overcrowded with tourists, lots of achingly beautiful arcades and shops that sell endless gorgeous trinkets, jewels, books, and clothes. Cinemas and theatres. Galleries and academies. Churches and gardens and the very clean, meandering, Po river. We came upon piazza after piazza, where we sat in cafe after cafe with mahogany panelling and gilded lettering and sampled flaky pastries. I drank my first vermouth, in the city that invented it apparently. I ate agnolotti filled with beef, rabbit and pork, and at another meal, grilled beef heart. I drank a glass of Franciacorta wine that had bubble structures so perfect and tiny it would make a hardened cynic believe in a benevolent God. In a small, quiet square over which looked a church with Corinthian columns, Brian and I enjoyed the speciality drink, bicerin: coffee, whipped cream and at the bottom hot, rich chocolate. it is clearly meant for their cold, grey, sub-Alpine winters but it went down easy even in the summer heat. From the rooftop race track of what used to be the Fiat car factory, I had an Aperol spritz with a platter of delectable, unusual foods (raw sausage, for example - it was delicious) and gazed northwards toward the magical looking Alps, shrouded in summer mist but with a bit of snow still on top, imposing and stunning. I describe all this not to make you all jealous. I painstakingly recording what is perhaps the height of human civilisation, where every material need is not just met, but done with care and beauty and tradition.

But Turin is also a university city. And so, alongside the material wealth and perfection of the human lifestyle, is the disordered, nihilistic rage of our time. I regret to inform you, if you were not already aware, that the educated middle class youth of Italy are just as fucked up as our own kids in the Anglosphere.

This is no doubt obvious to all of you by now, but universities are THE vector of this civilisation-threatening mental disorder we commonly call woke. And the favourite hosts of this disease are the wealthy and the young. Communism, or whatever you want to call this updated version of it, is an affliction of the rich and the comfortable, who have lived in an earthly paradise and found it so spiritually intolerable that they want to destroy it for everyone else.

On one of the many elegant colonnades, some malcontent had plastered posters harking back to The Cause of a few years ago — global warming. But because this was an Italian malcontent, the message was focused on food, listing all the local winter specialties that would not be available on “a dead planet.” Some other vandal concurred, simply writing “viva morte” — long live death — underneath. An Italian trying to spoil the delights of Italian seasonal cuisine — things that we are blessed to enjoy as they were passed down with care and reverence generation after generation — is particularly offensive to me.

In Piazza Madama, in front of the civic museum of ancient art and a monument honouring the military, idiot lefties were trying very hard to get a tent city going. But because Italians of the haute bourgeoisie are physically incapable of being indecorous, it was clean and tidy, not filled with defecating meth heads like the US equivalent would be. Someone scrawled LBTQIACAB (ACAB stands for ‘all cops are bastards’) and hung a Palestinian flag.

On the roof of the old Fiat factory, the old race track walls were adorned with far-left propaganda, which I’m pretty sure was not the result of revolutionaries scaling the walls, but rather some libtard government grant providing art school graduates with make-work programmes. I’m also quite certain, even in this city with such a huge industrial and working class history, whoever was scrawling Antifa slogans has not worked an hour in any factory.

Other graffiti proclaimed: “burn everything.” Maybe it was just the Italian knack for drama and flair. But even so, it was coupled with something far darker, a malaise that was made all the starker by its contrast with the elegance and beauty surrounding it.

This mindset — which has become almost the common sense of society at this point, with otherwise sensible adults going along with the furious children — has the potential to be civilisation-ending. We must find a way to neutralise the malevolence of this movement, or at least outnumber the lost souls who have been captivated by it.