Italian Catholic blogger and substacker Alessandra Bocchi

As someone who has been vocal against mass immigration and warning about it far before it was popular to do so, with actual reporting on the ground - I’m fed up of the right-wing focusing on this issue alone. If all illegal migrants were deported tomorrow, Europe would still be dying and headed towards demographic collapse. Immigration is a symptom of a much deeper malaise, the immediate one is the cost of living crisis for Europeans, which makes them unable to have families and the general spiritual nihilism and defeatism that comes with it. Right-wingers have cognitive dissonance; they refuse to acknowledge the economic plight of the ordinary people they claim to represent. Most citizens feel unrepresented by progressives on immigration and unrepresented by conservatives on the economy.

Do European leaders now feel loyalty to "the West" rather than to their countries?

Pascal Lottaz in his Neutrality Studies podcast this morning:

'Today funnily enough US imperialism was so successful at integrating the EU and European elites into this superstructure that they've built that all of those kind of worries [about a nuclear war in Europe] are completely gone because the allegiance of these people is not anymore to the country. It is to the cause of the group of the West. Mr. Merz he knows he can go back to Blackrock and make much more money or he can go and and work for one of the big international organisations, right? I mean, these people do not need to care anymore. And actually just today, on Twitter again, Merz said like my primary concern is not the economy of Germany. My primary concern is what's happening in Ukraine. It's like really you as a chancellor of Germany you say that? But can you just imagine how deep in their brains this is now? It is crazy.'

I think this is probably right and I think the CIA Young Leaders Program is part of the reason why leaders in European countries see their allegiance as being to the West (the West being a term which became outdated after the end of the Cold War) rather than to their nation. 

This applies to Nicusor Dan in Romania, in England to Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch, the list is endless. 

I find this terribly concerning. It may extend to the generals and top civil servants?

The European Economic Community, which is now the European Union, was itself an American idea intended to prevent war in Europe and unite Europe against a communist foe. Harold Macmillan was a true believer but originally supported the project because he knew the Americans wanted him to. 

Neagu Djuvara told me that the biggest difference he had seen in his lifetime was that in the 1930s nobody in Europe gave any thought to America. He might have added, or I add anyway, that since 1945 Europe has been ruled entirely by the Americans and the Russians. 

It turns out that even the end of the Cold War did not end the struggle between Americans and Russians over Europe. England, France and Germany seem to have no agency. 

During the Cold War this was less apparent than it should be now but it doesn't seem to be very apparent to a lot of people even now. 

I just watched a curious clip on the British conservative TV channel GB News. It was a fierce angry argument between two men, both of whom thought that young British people should be prepared to fight Russia, but one of whom thought that other considerations were also important before we do so. 

This is former British Conservative politician Matthew Parris. I often disagree with him but I agree with him here.

The surveillance state goes global

You may remember Benjamin Netanyahu saying a while ago that when it comes to surveillance Israel came second only to the United States and not very far behind even the United States. 

We learn now from Reuters that an Israeli spyware company Discover-Tech has been targeting Starlink users in order to infect their devices with spyware.

There have been so many stories like this involving various Israeli companies that it's hard to keep track. Here are some I found by doing some research. You can google them. 

Citizen Lab and numerous journalists have repeatedly shown that Israel spyware companies effectively serve as a private-sector extension of Israeli intelligence. 

NSO Group is the most notorious example. It makes Pegasus, a zero-click trojan horse capable of completely infiltrating mobile telephones without user interaction. In 2021 a leak exposed that Pegasus had been used by regimes around the world to track over 50,000 people.

Google Candiru, which was blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department in 2021 for supplying malware used to target victims globally, Quadream, Toka, Paragon Solutions, and Psy-Group. 

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb's reporting and her book "One Nation Under Blackmail" discuss this phenomenon. She says that companies like Toka and Discover-Tech map entire populations. 

She also says that an early version of the Blackberry mobile telephone had a trap door in it, which enabled Israeli intelligence to read all communications anywhere in the world using that telephone for years at a time when the Blackberry was the fashionable mobile telephone. Imagine the power it gave the people reading the communications to blackmail. 

The methods used by Epstein, according to Whitney Web, are now out of date as mobile telephone surveillance and data have taken his place. 

"One Nation Under Blackmail" is a two-volume book that I cannot recommend highly enough, which traces the connections between the Mossad, the CIA, MI6 and organised crime and how they have manipulated world events since the CIA-mafia alliance was formed in 1943 before the invasion of Sicily, and in the case of the Israelis since the founding of the State of Israel. 

All Romanians know that the real world of geopolitics and Romanian domestic politics are dominated by intelligence services. The real history of the events of our age is unknown to readers of the newspapers but is largely known to Israeli, American and Russian intelligence, which is why ex-CIA podcasters are so useful.  

This is not conspiracy theorising, though it sounds like it, but has been tracked by Whitney Webb and other researchers. Miss Webb's book exclusively uses, as evidence, facts publically available from the internet. Everything that secret services do is a conspiracy, of course. 

Max Blumenthal has written very illuminatingly about the deep CIA involvement in the international drug trade and Israeli intelligence services' operations in Latin America and Africa. I recommend him too. 

“Israel doesn't want peace but dominance”

Ronald Lauder, the billionaire American Zionist, heir to the Estée Lauder scent company fortune, announced in time for the Israeli election that he has broken with Bibi. “I realized at the end of the day that Israel really didn't want peace, but they wanted dominance. And I walked away from it."

"You've lost the Democratic Party, and you're losing the Republican Party. And it's all because of foolishness on your part. I want to tell Israelis, 'Shame on you! Shame on all of you. Your fathers and your grandfathers fought for this place, and you're losing it because of foolishness. Period.'"

How odd that he formerly thought Israel did want peace, at least after Rabin was murdered at the incitement of Netanyahu and the latter took power. 

Tribal feeling is blind, I suppose. 

Melania Trump's past

I followed the story of the former Prince Andrew, who is still the Duke of York though he does not use the title, and bought and read my old friend Andrew Lownie's book Entitled, then lost interest.  Now X just thrust in my face Andrew Lownie saying HarperCollins made him cut two lines: about Epstein claiming he introduced Melania to Trump and a diplomat telling him it was “very well known in Milan she was a high-class hooker.” 

The unnamed diplomat later said he was fine to go on the record.

I had heard this before but I'm not sure if I remember Andrew Lownie saying this explicitly and thought it worth noting.

I don't like repeating these stories about a woman who seems to me the only person in the Trump entourage who behaves with dignity. 

I didn't like it when a Hollywood film producer told me this story as Trump became president the first time. 

I don't think it matters what she did before she married. She had her way to make and she could not have been a bigger prostitute than her husband. 

Bucharest 'high society' is full of girls like that who marry well, though they usually trade in expensive presents rather than cash down, which is considered quite another thing altogether in the best Bucharest circles.

Mrs Trump also dresses better than Mrs. Kennedy, although nobody mentions this. 

But I do think anything that reminds us of the links between Epstein and Trump should be disseminated as widely as possible. That's why I am doing so. 

I'm talking about the way Epstein ran a blackmail operation in favour of Israeli interests. 

The links between Epstein and Trump are essential to understanding why America made an unprovoked attack on Iran, though admittedly the Americans have been trying to destroy the Iranian government since it took power in 1979, long before Epstein appeared, always unprovoked. 

As for Melania, I'm put in mind of the words that Walter Savage Landor used about Catullus.  

'Such stains there are—as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
    With nectar, and runs on.'

What they said

Jeffrey Sachs:

“How many wars has China been in, in the last 40 years ? Let me count them. That would be zero. Not one war in 40 years.”

The last one: a month-long border war with Vietnam, 1979.

Now count America’s wars in the same 40 years >

> Panama, Iraq twice

> Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya

> Syria, Somalia, Yemen

> and this year, Iran

So who is the threat ?"

Zhai Xiang: "The most dangerous crisis for any civilization is not when its economy stops growing, but when its younger generation stops believing in the future."

Alessandra Bocchi: "Both immigration and the cost of living are leading to Europe’s demise. Addressing only one at the expense of the other wouldn’t stop the train from traveling on that railroad. Both must be addressed for Europe to be saved. There is no Left or Right in any meaningful sense anymore; this is merely another divide-and-conquer trap by our elites. Seeing right-wingers patrol the streets to guarantee safety is part of the plan for new guerrilla warfare to unfold among citizens while the government emerges as the saviour and the status quo continues unabated. The debate today is about our survival. The ruling class wants you to think it’s about us fighting each other. Change only takes place when our voice can no longer be ignored. We need that change, and our chance is now."

Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of Charles de Gaulle:

"It makes me smile when people talk about Russian interference because it suits our political elites and allows them to avoid telling the truth to the French people. Most of our politicians took part in the Young Leaders program, sponsored by the CIA"

The Romanian defence bonanza is a feeding frenzy

"Corruption has evolved, it has become much more refined. We no longer find situations where someone takes a bag of money or an envelope in the middle of the street. Instead, there has been a shift toward hiding these amounts through consulting contracts, payments through offshore accounts, or consecutive commercial transactions." Laura Codruța Kövesi, then head of Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate, in an interview with ProTV September 30, 2015

The corruption involved in Romanian defence contracts is particularly hard to uncover and no doubt particularly widespread because defense contracts are confidential for reasons of national security. The bonanza in defence spending is going to involve very widespread corruption of a kind that hasn't been seen for years. 

In 2025 Romania spent almost €9 billion on defence, over 2% of the country’s GDP,  most of which goes to Western defence contractors. A lot of money is stolen at the level of sub-sub-contracts to Romanian companies. 

This is where politicians come in. The whole thing makes a great deal of money for their friends and associates. 

The new PSD-dominated government will busily award contracts after a hiatus of five months when there was no government to sign off on contracts. (It is also required to sign off on incredibly large amount of cash the judges have awarded themselves for pensions but that's another story. That's why other parties didn't join the government.) 

The USA gets a very good deal indeed because it spends only about $200 million a year on defence in Romania. The American empire in Romania is more than self-financing. It makes the American economy a very big profit as well as providing America with an obedient satellite in a strategic position. 

The term "deep state" comes from Turkey where it described a network of military officers and intelligence agents close to NATO that were more powerful than the government. Organised crime is in the mix too. The phrase was borrowed by a Swedish academic Professor Ola Tunander to describe the security state in Sweden, which had close covert links to NATO even though Sweden was neutral. The Swedish deep state achieved the entry of Sweden into NATO after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

NATO is, of course, the American empire, so I don't think it's fanciful to describe it as the military extension of the U.S. deep state, at least until the advent of Donald Trump but still today.

The Romanian deep state includes the various very powerful secret services and their alumni reaching back to the Securitate of communist days, as well as the generals. All of these, including the generals I'm afraid to say, are often corrupt. 

But is the American sector very much less corrupt? 

None of this as far as the actors in the defence sector are concerned is about fighting for democracy or other ideals. That's just the shop window. It's about power and money. 

The world crisis stretches from Cuba to Albania

From Donald Trump's speech at a midterm election campaign rally in Fort Myers, Florida:

"We'll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran. We'll do a little stopover. No, we'll do a little stopover. Actually, what we're going to do with Cuba is we're going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands, and then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal."

What Trump says "should be taken seriously but not literally".  I hope he is being a stand-up comedian. His crowd loved it. 

A Romanian politician said to me recently that there's no way the United States will attack Cuba and I hope and think that that's right. I can't be sure. 

As John Mearsheimer says, we can be sure that Fukuyama's "end of history", which was never going to happen, is a long way back in the past. It was predicated on the idea that the final victory of America was the final victory not of American force but of liberal democracy, freedom and free markets. 

All these things are in trouble as France burns, there are riots in Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Italy and Albania is in turmoil. 

Who guessed that the revolution would begin in Albania? This wave of unrest did, provoked by the behaviour of Jared Kushner. 

Albania is playing the role that Tunisia played in the Arab Spring. 

Are we looking at another 1848? This time a revolt not against absolute monarchy, but against green policies, expensive fuel and in the Albanian case corruption linked to the Trump family including its former member Kimberly Guilfoyle (her again)? 

The comparison with 1848 highlights how fragile European monarchies were then and how powerful the police and the military and security apparatus are in Europe today and how the media plays its role in supporting the established order. 

To repeat an obvious point: the Cold War which was always pointless and unnecessary did not come to an end because of American force but because Gorbachev had the good sense to bring it to an end. 

Communism failed because the people who were administering it ceased to believe in it. 

The great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga described the Balkans after the Ottoman conquest as "Byzantium after Byzantium". What we have in Romania now is the communist structure of power after communism. The PSD are the children, usually literally, of the communists who executed a lucrative management buyout. 

What we have throughout the West is Cold War thinking after the Cold War. New enemies are found to take the place of communism, except in Cuba where it lingers on. China is the biggest threat but not because she is communist. 

But the new spectres haunting Europe may not be potent enough to keep the population quietly paying for expensive gas. 

I think this is the most interesting moment in European history since 1945 and possibly even for centuries, primarily because of AI but for many reasons. 

Everything has changed. Except the things that haven't changed including the PSD. 

Peccavi

'When a Protestant sins he has no one to whom to confess except his solicitor.' Philip Guedalla

Quotations

"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into one city of the poor, the other of the rich." Plato

"One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not 'for good'; one thinks everything is a rehearsal – to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance." Sybille Bedford

If it keeps going at this rate, we might, for (I think) the first time in history, be about to witness the first continent-wide youth revolt in Europe - a "European spring" of sorts.

From two podcasts I just heard as I walked to the office

Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman: “In an exchange between Ansarallah [Houthis] and the Saudis, the Saudis lose, because they have so much to lose and the Ansarallah has almost nothing to lose.”

Professor John Mearsheimer on Glenn Diesen's podcast which was released on October 17, 2026: "There was always a very important moral dimension to the Fukuyama argument [about the end of history] because the idea is that liberal democracy is a positive end and liberal democrats or countries that are liberal democracies are the good guys and everybody else is the bad guys. We have moral virtue on our side. That was the basic underpinning logic behind “The End of History.” The good guys won. We are morally superior to the rest. But afterwhat happened in Gaza where the West basically is complicit in a genocide, and this is certainly true of the United States, it's hard to make the argument that the West is morally superior to the rest. Not a serious argument."

News is not really about information but part of the entertainment industry and the intellectually brilliant podcasts with which YouTube abounds are also a form of entertainment. They eat up so much time that I have given them up except occasionally in the bath or walking, but when walking I now rarely listen to them. There's very much to be said for silence and observation, being part of a dying breed a flaneur. 

Why Trump wants rid of Zelenskyy

Talking on the Judging Freedom podcast US Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski says that Trump is cooling on Zelenskyy because he's slowly losing and Trump only likes winners. That is psychopathic of him though I do not think he is necessarily a psychopath. He might be.

The war, she says, was about degrading Russia and making money but the Russian army is "bigger and better than it ever was" and massive amounts of money are being stolen in Ukraine. 

Russian victory she thinks inevitable and Trump knows it. 

Zelenskyy meanwhile is disobedient, attacking Russian refineries. 

Brivael Le Pogam: The French owe everyone an apology for the scourge of wokism

This apology by a Frenchman for the harm modern French philosophers have done is extremely worth reading.


'We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Rosy-fingered dawn over the Dâmbovița this morning

 

Romania will at last have a government and government contracts will be awarded again

Shortly after Kimberly Gilfoyle had dinner with the leader of the Romanian Social Democratic Party (PSD), but that was purely a coincidence, the PSD brought down Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan who had refused to buy the expensive American gas.

It did so by leaving the governing coalition which President Dan had formed in order to keep the nationalist/pro-peace AUR out of office. That, he thought, was required to defend democracy. 

Today it looks as if a new government of technocrats plus PSD will be formed.

I liked this observation by Sorin Ionita today:

'The Niculescu-Neacşu government will manage the budget with selective prudence and will tell Brussels everything they want to hear, while the public space will be occupied by cultural wars transplanted, to a large extent, from the MAGA repertoire. Some will keep us busy with national values ​​and sovereignty, while others will share contracts and subsidies, including with the former. In this regard, PSD and AUR will complement each other perfectly while they will always deny that they are forming a coalition.'

In fact an alliance formal or informal between PSD and AUR makes perfect sense since in the 1990s the predecessor to PSD was the anti-American party. There's nothing remotely socialist about the PSD, that party of wicked multi-millionaires, except for the fact that they do things for the poorer half of the population in order to get returned to office (which, if you think about it, is all that parties on the left are supposed to do). 

We are so used in Western Europe to parties on the left being liberals and therefore spending their time working against the interests of the working class that we forget this. The one redeeming feature the PSD has is that it has no trace of liberalism.

Energy riots in France

France is the largest purchaser of Russian gas in Europe, and the reason is binding, pre-existing long-term  contracts.

French energy companies are locked into "take-or-pay" agreements signed years ago. If they refuse to lift the gas they must still pay for it. France has chosen to import the fuel until next year. 

Nevertheless expensive American prices are contributing to the cost-of-living crisis, which has had people take to the streets in France.  

The media say nothing about this. 

Green policy also means higher taxes and this contributes to the crisis. I expect to see riots replicated in other European countries - it's surprising they're not happening in England. 

Romania has her own gas fortunately and will have much more shortly, thanks to gas found in the Black Sea. 

Israel Katz says 70-80% of Gaza and Southern Lebanon have been destroyed

Israeli Defence Minister Katz:

“The achievements are dramatic. In Gaza, we have achieved our objectives. 70-80% of Gaza is destroyed. The same is true in southern Lebanon.”

Katz said that Israel is actively applying the "Gaza model" to its military operations in southern Lebanon.

In southern Lebanon, he claimed the operations have already resulted in the destruction of more than 60 villages, 23,000 homes, and a 700-square-kilometer area, displacing roughly 200,000 residents.

"In Gaza, we don't just destroy what's underground, we destroy all the houses."

Note: the word "holocaust" means "a sacrifice burned completely by fire". 

Joe Kent, who resigned this year as director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, and Pelle Taylor

Joe Kent on X:

“The war is not meant to be won." George Orwell 

Defense contractors & their powerful lobby will never be satisfied with simply aiding the U.S. in building a strong military that is prepared for war. 

The nature of the industry’s existence is not patriotism, but endless conflict. War is their business model—a perpetual state of war ensures a perpetual demand for their products. 

The news today - no comment

Israeli settlers in the Israeli occupied West Bank attacked a French mayor and European diplomats, as well as Palestinians. The head of the British Army has told the country to prepare for war. Supporters of Donald Trump are urging him to introduce martial law and even pause the midterm elections according to Axios, a news outlet very close to Donald Trump and the Trump family: one of its leading journalists is a Mossad agent. Starlink is still restricted in Ukraine, hampering the Ukrainian war effort. Anonymous White House sources say the order to do this came from the White House although Trump denies this. Elon Musk pleads not guilty. He says the US army runs Starlink in Ukraine. France is descending into anarchy because of high prices.

Democracy is a system of control

Brian Berletic today:

It was this exact flawed thinking that led millions of Americans and many commentators to enthusiastically anticipate the Trump administration ending multiple US wars, proxy wars and worldwide interference that has only - very predictably - expanded instead.

'Understanding a problem is paramount to solving it. 

'If one thinks US policy is determined by electoral outcomes instead of by unelected corporate interests, focus will be placed on influencing otherwise meaningless elections only ensuring the problem persists.

'This is by design to prevent corporate interests from being the focal point of public attention instead of endless election cycles and an endless supply of disposable politicians. 

'Western-style "democracy" is a system of control, not one of self-determination.

'While electoral cycles are designed to move us emotionally - empirically they are an exercise in manipulating, not empowering us.'

These last sentences are extremely true of Romania and probably of most 'democratic' countries. 

Fights about social liberalism are distractions.

If an election produces a wrong result it's cancelled. When a referendum produces the wrong result, another referendum is held until the electors get it right, then no further referendums. 

Blair and Mandelson, friend of Epstein, tried very hard to do this in England with Brexit but failed. But they came close.

The Epstein class at war

Left-wing dissident American journalist Max Blumenthal thinks that the Ukraine war is being waged to benefit what he terms the "Epstein class", meaning global financial elites and defence companies.  

Zelenskyy acts as a manager on the ground, sustaining a forever war that keeps profits flowing and checks Russia, which is a threat to  the global hegemon.

The more I talk to people in the defence sector and the more I see the money being made in Romania out of defence procurement - it's a feeding frenzy - the more persuasive his view is. 

A conservative like me finds the left-wing critique of American foreign policy very insightful, much more so than the liberal view 

An American defence consultant who knows people like Elon Musk and all the big players in the American defence sector to whom I spoke had a Hobbesian worldview and said that they, unsurprisingly, and the people working at the top of government are simply interested in power and money and absolutely nothing else. 

That's the universal view of Romanian taxi drivers, and taxi drivers usually know everything, unlike mainstream journalists who are paid to do so. Blumenthal calls them stenographers of empire. 

With politicians I think that there is a often a scintilla of genuine ideals but I might be being naive. But it's power, and the enjoyment of playing the political game that motivate them mostly. In Romania it's mostly money. 

In his latest podcast on Judge Andrew Napolitano's always excellent "Judging Freedom" podcast, Mr Blumenthal makes the point that by attacking Russian refineries Zelensky is driving up the price of diesel in order to blackmail Trump into giving him more money. 

An interesting take. But it could have the opposite effect. 

The world would be better off without Trump, Putin or Zelensky in power but the former two are not going anywhere. 

Actually the man who  succeeds Putin (it will be a man) might be worse. 

A friend of mine said that Putin is the best leader Russia could have at the moment but I do not agree. The invasion of Ukraine was a terrible blunder, like the US attack on Iran. 

Xi, despite what he does at home and did in Hong Kong, is the grown-up in the playground. 

He isn't part of the Epstein class. 

Quotations

Barack Obama two days ago in Ireland: “The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge.That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, This is injustice, and I want my land back.”

Sir Roger Scruton: “If you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left, because that provides a systematic solution, an answer to the questions, puts it all in a system, and also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system. But if you think a bit harder and longer about it, you’ll move back to what you would have been if you had never thought at all. That’s my view of what an intellectual conservative is: it’s someone who articulates the real reasons for not having reasons.”

Bunny Sheffield: "Feminism is Marxism in drag."