Covid Feuilleton #9

As published at SubStack, 1/11/22:

[Aswan, 1/27/21]

In Beirut, I tried to get a visa to Iran. After two visits to its well fortified embassy, plus phone calls to a Tehran contact, and even intercession from an Iranian ex ambassador, I was still refused entry. This took weeks.

I thought I had an in because I had provided commentaries to Press TV for nearly five years, with dozens of videos on YouTube (now erased). Perhaps they discovered my real name was Leonard Dinkelstein? After wailing and railing while slurping my matzo ball soup, I had to come up with another destination, thus on 12/29/20, I flew to Cairo.

Nine months into my Covid wandering, I had forgotten all about Corona-chan, so even if she was sitting on my face, I wouldn’t have recognized her deadly ass. This actually happened later, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In Beirut, I had seen a gorgeous, truly world-class city wrecked by Jews. In Cairo, I would discover an even more magnificent city, destroyed by Jewish thinking.

Here are the basics. Grounded in Chosen People vs. Goyim, Jewish thinking is the insistence on seeing classes of people, and not individuals, so landowners and businessmen are all bad, for example, and peasants are all good. It can also be applied racially, so blacks or “people of color” are all blameless victims, while whites, as privileged exploiters, deserve to be dispossessed, if not assaulted. It doesn’t matter if a white is an undernourished Albanian subsistence farmer or toothless Moldavian miner with lung cancer, he’s an exploiter, if you line him up next to any black, that is, from Spike Lee to Davido. Historical grievances, mon, and debts.

Jewish thinking is also an insistence on erasing your entire heritage, incrementally or all at once, to make room for radical progress, thus we had the promises of Communism, a Jewish project, mostly, and now The Great Reset, as pushed and pontificated by a strangely lifeless, soulless Jew, with no mirth on his lips nor gleam in his eyes, ever, the monstrous Klaus Schwab. Spearheading its genocidal wing is another grimly determined, wax-faced Jew, Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer.

[Cairo, 1/3/21]

In Egypt, Nasser may have championed Arab nationalism, but he used Jewish rhetorics and tactics to wreck his country. A prototypical Third-World dictator, Nasser chased away Egypt’s most productive classes, in the name of establishing equality, always a Jewish justification. A tyrant who jailed and tortured political opponents and dissenting intellectuals, Nasser claimed he was fighting “reactionaries,” a favorite Jewish tag.

The greatest proof of Nasser’s Jewish thinking disaster is Cairo itself, a stupendous city reduced to ruins, practically, like all other socialist metropolises. How many decayed threefoil arches, latticed balconies and mashrabiyas did I see? With his rent control, Nasser prevented landlords from making money, so most buildings went unrepaired for decades. All Egyptian cities crumbled.

When Nasser became president in 1954, Egypt had 22.61 million people. This rose to 34.51 million when he died (as president) in 1970, a 53% increase in just 16 years. This happened primarily because Nasser gave Egyptians free land, free bread, practically free housing (if they were renters) and government jobs (if they were college graduates). The last blimped an already bloated bureaucracy. Knowing they couldn’t starve or become homeless, Egyptians fornicated like Jewish porn stars, naturally. Though Nasser welfare has been trimmed, the screwing never dipped, so Egypt now has over 103 million people, in a land that’s 96% desert! Growing little of anything, Egypt is the biggest importer of wheat in the entire world.

[Damanhour, 1/14/21]

Now, how is this relevant to you? Living just a 10-minute drive from a Safeway, Giant, Piggly Wiggly or Whole Foods, you’ve always counted on Mexican strawberries, Peruvian guacamole and Guatemalan bananas, etc. As for cheese, you’re partial to cave-aged Kaltbach, imported from Switzerland, which you often pair with Oyster Bay Rosé, shipped then trucked to your fussy gullet from, uh, nearby New Zealand, 8,000 miles away. Slumming, sometimes you settle for something native, such as Bleu Mont Dairy Bandaged Cheddar, made just a thousand miles away in flyover Wisconsin, with its hideous Covid and Holocaust denying deplorables, but hey, they almost know how to make cheese! Jew educated, you’ve been thinking long and hard about boycotting all products from the Midwest and South. Maybe you’ll start a new movement, Divest from Whiteys! Buy Trans Only is another possibility. You already have the coolest bumper sticker, “PROTECT TRANS FETUSES.”

With the plandemic hindering or destroying commerce worldwide, merchandises can’t get to customers, and it’s not just a question of logistics, or supply lines, but unjabbed workers being fired, with Pfizered ones incapacitated or killed. Schwab and company want millions of useless eaters to starve. Stoking racial tension, they also want you to riot against each other. In this light, I finally realized in late 2021 that Unz Review, where I had been a columnist for seven years, was as guilty as any mainstream outlet. Deflecting from their crimes, especially current ones, Jews rile racial bile.

Ridiculing concerns over the Covid jab, Ron Unz blithely claimed on 8/1/21 that “all the medical experts everywhere support vaccination.” When asked by a reader on 12/19/21 about all the outrageous vaccine mandates worldwide, Unz could only attribute them to “Mostly stupidity and incompetence I’d guess…” Nearly two years into this unprecedented crisis that had dominated everyone’s life, no serious analyst or dissident would squeak out such a pussified answer, especially with “I’d guess.” Is there a punch line?

For months at Unz Review itself, Mike Whitney and Paul Craig Roberts had written relentlessly about deadly problems with Covid “vaccination.” Here are some Craig Roberts headlines, “The Vaccine Is As Deadly As the Virus” (6/15/21), “The Covid Vaccine Is Causing the Covid Variants” (6/15/21), “Is the Danger Covid or the Vaccine?” (6/21/21), “Profits Take Precedence Over Public Health and Civil Liberty” (6/24/21), “A Conspiracy to Murder—The Government and the Big Pharma-Dependent Medical Profession Are Hiding the Facts About Covid and the Vaccine” (7/8/21), “Vaccination Does Not Protect Against Delta Variant” (7/9/21), “How the Covid ‘Pandemic’ Was Orchestrated—Everything you should know about Covid” (7/15/21), “Covid Cases Are Surging in the Most-Vaxxed Countries, Not in the Least-Vaxxed” (7/19/21), “America’s Frontline Doctors File Federal Lawsuit to Curtail Emergency Use of Covid Vaccines” (7/20/21, or 12 days before Unz said, “all the medical experts everywhere support vaccination”), “The Covid Deception Exposed” (7/21/21), “The Evidence Is In: the Covid ‘Pandemic’ Is Not Real But the Vaccine Pandemic Is” (7/22/21), “The Prevalence of Evil” (7/23/21), “Is the Survivability of Covid-Vaccinated Societies at Risk?” (7/23/21), “How the Covid Scam Is Perpetrated” (7/26/21), “The Fauci Protection Team” (7/27/21) and “The Covid Scam Is Unraveling” (7/29/21). There are many more, but you get the idea, and these are only from six weeks, so I’m not exaggerating about Craig Roberts being relentless on this issue, and right under Ron Unz’ nose too.

No less emphatic, Mike Whitney sounded the alarm even earlier, “Here’s Why You Should Skip the Covid Vaccine” (11/28/20), “The Covid-19 Vaccine; Is the Goal Immunity or Depopulation?” (12/4/20), “COVID VACCINE – the Nightmare Scenario” (2/10/21), “Coronapocalypse; Big Pharma’s Doomsday Vaccine #666” (2/19/21), “Is the 'Variant' Being Used to Scare People Into Getting Vaccinated??” (2/23/21), “Vaccine Diabolus and the Impending Wave of Rare Neurodegenerative Disorders” (3/7/21), “Operation Vaxx-All Deplorables: Codename; 'Satan’s Poker'” (3/10/21), “You Refuse to Get Vaccinated, But Are You Ready to be an Outcast?” (3/25/21), “Pure, Unalloyed Evil” (4/11/21), “Terminate the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and Complete Phase 3 Trials” (4/27/21), “New Report Sheds Light on Vaccine Doomsday Cult” (5/3/21), “The CoVaxx-19 Scorecard: Bleeding, Blood-Clots and the Whole Nine Yards” (5/10/21), “The Same Pattern Everywhere?—Mass Vaccination triggers sharp spike in Cases and Deaths” (5/15/21), “NoVaxx Rebellion: Resist, Refuse, Reject” (6/1/21), “Were ‘The Elderly… Killed in Hospitals’ … During the Pandemic?” (6/7/21), “The Killer in the Bloodstream: the ‘Spike Protein’” (6/10/21), “The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right; It IS a ‘Poison-Death Shot’” (9/16/21), “Will Vaccine-Linked Deaths Rise Sharply This Winter?” (10/9/21), “It All Makes Sense Once You Realize They Want to Kill Us” (10/17/21), Excess Deaths Point to Depopulation Agenda” (11/5/21), “Lethal Injection; Frontline E.R. Doctor Gives Chilling Account of Unusual Vaccine-Induced Illness” (11/20/21), “‘I Believe We Are Facing an Evil That Has No Equal in Human History’—Interview with Moscow-based author, Riley Waggaman” (11/26/21), “Research 'Game-changer': Spike Protein Increases Heart Attacks and Destroys Immune ​System” (12/1/21), “Operation Extermination--the Plan to Decimate the Human Immune System with a Lab-Generated Pathogen” (12/8/21) and “Report Links Ballooning Fatalities to ‘Specific Batches’ of the Covid-19 Vaccine” (12/19/21).

Also at Unz, Gilad Atzmon wrote a dozen articles about the Covid jab. Examining Israel, Gibraltar and Great Britain, Atzmon stressed that the Pfizer “vaccine” triggered a surge in Covid related hospitalizations and deaths. On 1/30/21, Atzmon stated, “The case of Israel, leading the world by far in the mass vaccination contest, doesn’t leave much maneuvering room for skeptics. Since Israel launched its vast vaccination campaign in December, it has been witnessing an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases and deaths.” Exponential!

(As for the oddity of Pfizer injecting Israeli Jews, I got this reminder from Henry Herskovitz, “I would tell people that Jews have never shied away from slaughtering their own to achieve what they felt to be overarching goals. Here’s David Ben Gurion in the late 1930’s: ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.'”)

Late to the game, I published at Unz “Mass Death Ahead” (10/14/21), “Mislabeling, Misthinking, Misanalysis, Sure Death” (10/25/21), “Killer Cure” (11/6/21), “Covid Box Car, Vaccine Plunge Dip and Faucian Bargain” (11/14/21), “Mass Child Sacrifice in Plain Sight” (11/20/21), “Cull, Track and Control” (11/25/21) and “Darkest Christmas” (12/12/21).

Beyond Unz Review, many astute observers have dissected the Covid scam as it’s unleashed against humanity. Most notably, James Corbett posted a podcast, “Corona World Order” on 4/10/20, then “COVID-911—From Homeland Security to Biosecurity” on 9/11/20.

On 9/13/21, James Howard Kunstler wrote, “So, while pretending to object to the implacable fact of death—a certainty of the human condition, according to science—we killed a whole bunch of people by withholding treatment. And concurrently, we rolled out the vaccines promising to ‘protect everybody’ only to learn that it provided other, even more diabolical, routes to death.” With his unmatched prose, Kunstler has continued to pound away at the scamdemic

Since starting his SubStack blog on 10/31/21, Steve Kirsch, a Jewish millionaire like Ron Unz, has become a leading opponent of the Covid jab. His latest initiative is an invitation for healthcare workers to speak openly about Covid “vaccines” on 1/23/22

There are so many others, such as Del Bigtree, Whitney Webb, Robert Malone, Sucharit Bhakdi, David Martin and Peter McColough, with the last three seasoned doctors, and Robert Malone the inventor of the mRNA “vaccine,” now being lethally deployed by Pfizer and Moderna.

On 11/16/21, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Though Ron Unz has commented extensively on this eye-opening book, he has focused on its expose about AIDS, and not Covid. On 1/10/22, Unz even wrote, “Despite Kennedy’s efforts, my own position on Covid vaccinations or other related public health measures still remains very conventional, not too different from what might be found in the pages of the Times or the Economist.” 

Unfortunately, the man’s not joking. Despite all the evidence presented by Kennedy, and so many others besides, Unz still leans towards the Jewish media, Jewish Schwab, Jewish Bourla, Jewish Wallensky, Jewish Zients, Jewish Zaks and Jewish Slavitt, etc. Perhaps Unz is just stubbornly foolish, and not a limited hangout hustler.

In any case, this is my very last sentence at Unz Review, “Whoever ignores or distracts from this global emergency is, at best, useless, if not a tool of the mass murderers.”

My my, I certainly strayed away from Egypt, didn’t I, so let’s return there to close out this segment. In Cairo, there’s a 614-foot-tall tower dubbed Nasser’s Prick. Built with an American bribe the dictator found insolent, it faces the US Embassy across the Nile as a permanent fuck you.

Nasser’s grandest project, however, was the 3-mile-long Aswan Dam. Meant to prevent floods, irrigate land and generate electricity, of course, it’s also a doomsday mechanism for nearly the entire country. With just one fertile strip, most Egyptians live along the Nile. With the massive Aswan Dam upriver, nearly all of them will be drowned, if not flushed into the Mediterranean, with one well-placed bomb.

A charismatic man is one who can’t get enough of himself. Nasser was certainly that. What he wasn’t was a military strategist, for he got his ass kicked by Jews in just six days. His crowning achievement in this arena, though, is the Aswan Dam.

Like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab or Albert Bourla, one man can achieve so much.

 

[to be continued, of course and unfortunately]

[Alexandria, 1/14/21]

Useless Eaters

As published at Unz Review, 6/27/21:





Last year in South Korea, I went into a fried chicken place and asked for half a bird. Misreading my hand gestures, the lady gave me a full one, but chopped up. It’s standard in South Korea to gorge on an entire chicken, while downing mugs of beer. Their BBQ restaurants also stuff you with meat, usually pork.

Germans, too, can devour frightful quantity of pork at one meal. Served such a sinful portion in Munich, I immediately thought, There’s no way all that is going to fit inside my body.

In Cairo five months ago, I’d sometimes eat dinner with the staff at my budget hotel. Though it was always varied and delicious, there was almost no meat. With flat bread, we scooped potato chunks, mashed fava beans, lentil dip, eggplant in an oily tomato sauce, pickled carrots and turnip, feta cheese spread or falafel, etc. Not bad, since it only cost around $4 to feed three people. All over town, however, there were fast food joints that offered obscene-sized burgers. One named Cheesy Heart Attack had three huge beef patties topped with bacon, slices of cheese and deep-fried mozzarella sticks. A multi-tiered chicken sandwich was dubbed Bazooka. A five-piece chicken meal was called Bomb Attack!

Meat consumption is certainly an affluence index. In Albania, a typical deli sandwich, costing a buck or $1.25, has only a few thin slices of salami or prosciutto, and even the cheese is broken up. Used to heftier Philly hoagies, I’d buy one to go, then supplement it with store-bought meat.

In downscale Tirana eateries with no English menus, you can get spaghetti with butter for around $1.70, or a plate of pilaf with a meat-flavored broth for just $1.30. Either can be consumed whenever, including for breakfast, and your glass of water is free.

I’m giving you these examples to show that eating habits vary very widely, with each considered normal, for its time and place. In Saigon, even a piss-poor banh mi is supposed to have pate, ham, cucumber, carrot, cilantro and mayonnaise, but in a mountainous village near the Chinese border, I ran into a guy bicycling around to hawk six sweetened rolls for 22 cents, for that’s all the market would bear, near the end of a winding, unpaved road, among the clouds, with fairies, angels and maybe even God, just around the next bend. Like a dumbshit, I asked him, “What else do you have?”

We’re not just ignorant of what others eat, but what we had to swallow not even that long ago, and that’s why Orwell is, again, so magnificent. Big-hearted, he paid the closest attention to the most banal, yet most insistent, of our problems. That of feeding ourselves.

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell reproduces the food budget of a poor man, as printed in contemporary newspapers. His diet consists of just bread, margarine, dripping, cheese, onions, carrots, broken biscuits, dates, evaporated milk and oranges.

Orwell, “Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food-value from it than that.”

Though in serious decline, the British Empire was still one of the most powerful, yet millions of Englishmen were literally disfigured by their poverty.

Orwell, “The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody’s teeth. In Lancashire you would have to look for a long time before you saw a working-class person with good natural teeth. Indeed, you see very few people with natural teeth at all, apart from the children; and even the children’s teeth have a frail bluish appearance which means, I suppose, calcium deficiency. Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality.”

(In movies about England during this period, you don’t see any toothless smile, do you? That’s just Hollywood, obviously, so keep that in mind when you watch a film about any country. From its biggest claim to the smallest detail, Hollywood nearly always lies. You’d think everyone already knows that, but recently, an imbecilic reader used a Hollywood film to badger me about the Vietnam War. As Ron Unz sadly points out, Americans get most of their history from Hollywood. Talk about Jew-screwed! Shoah proves the Holocaust. Roots is a documentary about slavery. Three sistas took America to the moon, even if it never got there. It must be true because I saw it on a screen! No wonder the country is being flushed down a Third World shit hole.)

Orwell, “In one house where I stayed there were, apart from myself, five people, the oldest being forty-three and the youngest a boy of fifteen. Of these the boy was the only one who possessed a single tooth of his own, and his teeth were obviously not going to last long.”

After depicting working class life so grimly, Orwell paints an idyllic scene of a comparatively prosperous blue-collar home. On a winter evening after tea, “when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat.”

It’s where “you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages—an if which gets bigger and bigger—has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.”

This assertion that a laborer is more likely to be content than an intellectual was likely derived from Orwell’s socialist orientation at the time. Still, no society can be deemed healthy if its working man’s lot isn’t at least tolerable. In the US, it’s already impossible, and will only get worse.

Most men need to employ their muscles, and not just to kill. Education isn’t for everybody. Orwell, “The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby.”

Men have gone from hunters to farmers, to factory workers, and they’re also counted on to build, repair, police and defend society. With the rise of the machine, however, they are increasingly pushed into feminine jobs, or simply become redundant.

Automation and artificial intelligence accelerate this radical transformation. Soon enough, apparently, men won’t even be needed to drive trucks or taxis, and war, too, can be fought mostly by drones, robots and computer geeks, at a distance. The disappearance of many jobs will also affect women, of course, so who will be left to bring home the bacon?

Admired by Bill Gates, Angela Merkel and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuval Noah Hariri is one of today’s most celebrated public intellectuals. Of this rising “useless class,” his term, Hariri comments, “The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?”

And, “In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This ‘useless class’ will not merely be unemployed—it will be unemployable.”

To Hariri, humans don’t have inner selves, much less souls. Totally deluded and mostly incompetent, we’ll be obsolete computers soon enough. Already smarter than us, machines will also be more artistic and soulful. To a fawning, laughing audience, Hariri declares, “I don’t think life has any meaning.”

Hard and clean, metal symbolizes immortality, so even a coin is impressive enough, much less a complex machine. Though moving so precisely, it doesn’t sweat, slurp loudly or defecate, so, of course, billions of mortals can’t help but worship cars, motorbikes or just watches. Now that machines can even think, we should just slink away.

You can be sure, though, the elite will continue to see themselves as having economic, political or artistic value, even if they or their offspring are as degenerate as, say, Hunter Biden, or even worse. Though perverts and criminals, they decide what’s good, true and feasible.

Useless eaters can only survive on welfare, but if they’re kept breathing, they’ll only breed recklessly, since they have nothing to do but screw all day. Surely you don’t think they’ll compose novels or symphonies? Of course, they’ll rap, but who wants to listen? This endless cloacal stream of useless eaters will rape this already ravaged planet to death. Even now, we can hear Mother Nature screaming. Why tolerate this disaster?

The elite like to toy with us useless eaters. On March 28th, 2019, there was a masked contestant on Project Runway named Kovid Kapoor. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Another cute mind diddle is the Netflix series, Utopia. Finished filming by October 19, 2019, so before Covid, it was released on September 25, 2020. Conning the world into believing there’s a deadly virus, a vaccine is then released to stop human procreation.

The evil architect of all this is Kevin Christie, as played by John Cusack. In one scene, Christie lays out his rationale:

How much evil do you have to do, to do good?

[…]

We now have exactly what we want. Hundreds of millions of Americans lining up, offering us their arms and letting us give them our creation.

[…]

What we’re doing is far greater than death.

Tell me this, what have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world. Exactly! Everything I do is a cure for our current situation.

[…]

That’s the amazing epiphany we had. We didn’t have to kill to accomplish our goal.

We intend to stop human reproduction for three generations. The busy, endless, global assembly line of babies will grind to a halt.

[…]

In the first five years, we’ll see major birth rate declines, as teenagers vaccinated today hit their childbearing years.

[Civilization] is a very nice euphemism for a species that has replicated like a contagion across the planet, killing all other species in its wake. Except things that are cute, like puppies or koalas. Never in history has there been a creature begging for extinction more than the fucking panda, except us.

[…]

A hundred years ago, the global population was 1.7 billion. In 2011, it reached 7 billion. People live too long, die less often, fuck too much and shit out babies.

Global warming, mass extinctions, food and water shortages. All these problems can be boiled down to one thing: Overpopulation.

At 1.7 billion, we can be as decadent, self-indulgent and shitty as we want. At ten billion, we have to live strategically. We have to live modestly. We have to live selflessly. And, as you know, we’re not that good at it.

For decades, we’ve been shamed for just being alive, since our existence, with its out-of-control carbon footprint and everests of plastic trash, wrecks this planet. Draining precious resources, babies are not blessings but curses, spawned by the mindless.

Since eating beef increases global warming, we must switch to vegan burgers, or better yet, learn to appreciate deep fried tarantulas, ant larvae tacos and stink bug risotto. Even eating shit is possible, scientists tell us. Still, glaciers disappear, icebergs melt and oceans rise, because we can’t stop driving or farting, not to mention flying everywhere for no good reason. Where should I go next?

To thwart human life is utopia, then, to the elite, so we need to be culled, for sure. War will also depopulate, and with increased demand for just about everything, there’s also lots of money to be made. Borrowed cash will fatten banks.

Rid of unsightly useless eaters, the elite will have more space and nicer views. The prettiest among us will be retained to pleasure them, for isn’t that what life is all about?

With their minds uploaded onto computers, their cells rejuvenated and their defective organs not just replaced, but fantastically upgraded, they’ll live forever as gods.

We won’t even get to become devos, just forgotten history.

Egyptian Dogs, Kenneled Men and a Normalized Albania

As published at Unz Review, 2/14/21:





The older you get, the more likely you are to ramble, or, to put it more delicately, to improvise quite freely, incoherently or repetitively, the more you’ll sound like Sun Ra on acid, in short.

Warning label out of the way, I must talk about dogs, to start with.

In Egypt, they’re everywhere, but nearly all are strays. Never petted nor allowed indoors, they find warmth on the heated metal of parked or abandoned cars. Like Egyptian sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, cats and even herons, they eat garbage, which in Egypt is quite plentiful, everywhere. From birth to death, they live a most unnatural existence, not unlike humans.

Eternally hounded, they look at you with pitiful eyes and don’t even dare to whimper. Only once did Egyptian dogs bark at me, and that was in Cairo’s City of the Dead. Among the lowest of that society, these creatures seemed less wretched.

With its quiet, uncluttered streets and often grand, dignified structures, The City of the Dead is perhaps Cairo’s most pleasant neighborhood. Incredibly, it’s also very affordable. Paying no rent, the living coexist, quite peacefully, with the long-dead, inside abandoned tombs.

Since the dead don’t drive, parking isn’t a problem, but they definitely do enjoy coffee, at least in moderation. Relaxing at a City of the Dead café, I was vaguely hoping some long departed broad would show up. Well decomposed, she had had enough time to deconstruct herself, thus come to some self-understanding, if not wisdom, after a conversation or two with God, perhaps. If in hell, she could finally see the Devil without disguise. Her conquered, done with, he could laughingly confide to her all his tricks.

Plus, to her eyes, I would be considered young, fresh meat.

Even with minimal foot traffic, the City of the Dead still has its beggars, so I gave some cheerful, white bearded guy, sitting on the ground, enough for lunch.

Speaking of which, I just had my first cheeseburger in Tirana. Most promisingly, it came with what looked like dill pickles, but, oy vey iz mir, these were merely thinly sliced cucumber!

As a bonafide Jew, as proven by this T-shirt, dearly purchased in Vientiane, Laos, there’s no way I’m going to put up with this gasly insult! It’s like being slapped six million times! And where, pray tell, is their Holocaust Memorial Museum? There’s not even a synagogue here. I don’t care that Albanians fought against both Mussolini and Hitler, these people are obviously brazen Nazis!

Italian culture is common here. Everywhere, pizza, pasta and calzoni are sold. Albanian prosciutto is not quite Italian quality, but good enough. Standing in a bakery, I’m staring at rolls called tartarughe [turtles] and rosette, just like in il bel paese, and a croissant here is also a brioche.

Every language is a collective poem, with each grunt or exhalation an inspired moment, once upon a time or just yesterday. Take the Albanian makina. Derived from the Italian macchina, it means machine or car, but car as merely machine is very childish, of course, if not ridiculous, but that’s its charm, just like the Spanish tienda means tent or store.

Call me biased, but the cutest along that line is the Vietnamese for crocodile, cá sấu, which literally means ugly fish.

Man plays with language, for it’s his most available toy, and costs nothing, except loss of employment, prison or even death, if he’s corralled inside a Satanic system. Worse off than dogs in a necropolis, he can’t even bark.

Smile, you’re not quite there yet, but watch your back.

If you consider death as the total erasure of reality, then its eclipse is always a partial death, so how dark has your noon become?

As I waver between turtles and rosettes, Fred Buscaglione is belting, “Guarda che luna! Guarda che mare!” From this night, without you, I must remain. OK, Fred.

During those suffocating decades of Enver Hoxha’s Communism, Italian radio broadcasts, heard surreptitiously, were all Albanians had of the outside world.

In return, Albania beamed its Stalinist and Maoist messages towards Italians, but such relentless hammering and sickling wasn’t too popular, so music had to be interspersed.

In December of 1972, Hoxha have had enough of this diluted nonsense, so he ordered Radio Tirana’s directors, composers and singers sent to internment camps, along with their families.

Few things are as weird as a Communist song and dance routine, for it is most awkwardly pistoned by rigid, coerced emotions. No spontaneity is allowed, not even an impromptu smile.

I witnessed this firsthand at a North Korean restaurant in Phnom Penh, where the stiffly pretty waitresses wore the most plastic faces as they gutted out shlock rock or pop numbers. Their guitar, bass and drum playing was adroit, but as anyone with a soul must know, precise muscle twitching alone doesn’t make music. It was torture, especially for them.

Granted, to be civilized is to compose and choreograph yourself constantly, but under a totalitarian regime, this imperative is pushed to an insane degree, at all time, even when you’re alone, for Big Brother has been implanted inside your skull.

Everyone is always watching everyone else, and himself, for ideological deviations. A single thought crime can finish you off. No playfulness is allowed. Hyper conscious, your mind eats itself.

Even with your children, you must always be on guard, for they have been well indoctrinated, day after day at school, to detect and denounce heretics.

In Tirana, the former headquarters of the secret police has been turned into a museum, House of Leaves. Here, thousands were taken to be interrogated, often under torture. Like its innocent name, this sinister place has been mostly scrubbed of its terror.

In one room, though, there are photographs of political prisoners on trial. Violated, humiliated and hopelessly doomed, their faces show fear or abjection, of course, but also a stubborn dignity, with more than a hint of disbelief, as in how can such savagery occur in a land they so love and think they know so well?

Across the street from the House of Leaves is the huge Resurrection Cathedral, consecrated in 2014. Albania’s archbishop is a 91-year-old Greek, Anastasios Yannoulatos. Hoxha’s decades-long war against all religions left Albania with almost no priests or imans. After being jailed for 23 years, Hafiz Sabri Koçi became its Grand Mufti in 1991.

Just down the street was the well-guarded block where the top Communist pigs, only those with three chins or more, lived grandly.

Since totalitarianism is all about conformity, its advocates and apologists are not fighting for more justice and freedom, but less, much less. They’re as radical as the worst religious extremists, and just as rigid. Hyper masculine, they have stone tits.

Just listen to them. Brainwashed, they only speak in catchphrases and slogans. Rabid, they can’t discuss anything, but only hector, attack and denounce. Humorless and deranged, they seethe.

Nearly all the self-styled Socialists I’ve met in the West are social misfits who can’t get along with three people, much less the masses. Misanthropes, they hate just about everybody, not just “Fascists.”

Sated by soft bread, bland beer, beamed sports and virtual sex, many also resent being spared all historical cataclysms, as in no bombing raid, Storming of the Bastille, Saigon airlift or stepping on babies to reach the last escaping ship, so why not, bring on the totalitarianism! At least it won’t be boring, so they think.

Even with the terror, nothing will be more tedious.

I’ve been away from Saigon for more than a year. On one of my last days there, I went with my buddy Giang, also a Vietnamese-American, down to the Saigon River. We had no problem locating the exact spot where he had escaped in 1975. (It’s also where Tony Lueng Ka-fai was last seen in The Lover.)

“I was so scared, I shat in my pants!” Giang cheerfully said. Always grinning, he would be chirpy even if standing on a chair, with a badly knotted noose around his neck.

“So you got onto the ship just like that!” I laughed. “How many days?”

“A few.”

When you’re about to lose everything, shit and other trivia hardly matter. Some, though, will keep on swallowing shit until the very end, for it’s become habitual. Shit in their eyes, nose and mouth, they’ll spew their share of shit also.

Today in Tirana, it’s colder than usual, with snow on the ground. Looking girlish with a pom-pom on her knit cap, a young mother pushes a stroller. With its fingers spread, a tiny arm sticks out, but the baby is warm. Trotting by its striding owner, a thickly coated dog flutters is tail rhythmically. As the sun heats up, puffs of snow flake from the dark, wet branches.

Since the café is underheated, each customer wears a coat and even a scarf inside, but the conversations are bright and cheerful. Laughter erupts. Again, the music is Italian. Un’altra vita mi darai, che io non conosco…

Having had my burek with ham and cheese, plus three cups of macchiato, I’ll steal out of here with an 80-cent baguette. Bread without crust is no breakfast of champions, whatever Kaitlyn Jenner may think.

It’s a normal Sunday morning, and that’s enough. Like Vietnam, Albania has emerged from its foulest days.

Wish you were here…

Good Morning, Albania!

As published at Unz Review, 2/9/21:





I’m in downtown Tirana. My 8th floor room has a fridge, desk, three chairs and a wardrobe. There’s also an electric kettle, which is useful not just for hot beverages, but instant noodles and soups. Heat is love.

My private bathroom is clean and new, with plenty of hot water, and strong shower jets. My wide window affords a panorama of tenements backstopped by a mountain range. Each dawn, a soft, considerate sun rises, cheering my prospect. On my wall, there’s a nice kitschy painting of snow-capped, craggy peaks.

For all these privileges, I pay just $427 for four weeks.

Although my landlady speaks no English, there’s no problem. Tiny, pleasant and hushed, she’s in the next room. Walking by her door, I can barely hear her television murmuring, if she’s there. In her 60’s, she’s as scatterbrained as me.

When I paid her at check in, she looked perplexed, before remembering she had left her money purse under my mattress. Fishing it out, she giggled at her own battiness. Still amused at herself, the old bird handed me my change in leks.

With suppressed excitement slightly tinged with dread, I should lift the mattress to see what else she has forgotten? There’s liable to be anything, from a broken comb, to tangled hair, to a mummified mermaid. In Egypt, where I was just at, you can book a fully furnished apartment, wink, wink, and get your musty cellar hosed out by the en suite maid.

Leaving Cairo was more eventful than necessary. An airport employee asked repeatedly for a tip just for lifting my backpack and duffle bag onto the luggage scanner, although I had told him specifically not to, for who needs such a service? Although it was only a minor shakedown, I didn’t pay him.

Two security guys then spent five minutes examining my three hard-drives, with one demanding I checked them in. After I firmly balked at this, he backed of.

At passport control, an officer steered me to another who said I had to pay $23 for overstaying my visa. After I explained that Egyptian laws allowed visitors to overstay for up to two weeks without being fined, both officers cracked up and promptly let me through. Guffawing along, I merely blurted, “I loved Egypt so much, I had to stay another week!”

Don’t get me wrong. Ordinary Egyptians were fine. On subways, strangers would offer me their seats, since they couldn’t stand to see such a white-haired guy standing with his eyes shut. (I often close them to focus or just rest.) Cairo’s streets invigorated me, and its architecture is second to none, though awfully decayed, as I’ve already stated.

What’s wrong with Egypt, above all, is its government. As established by Nasser, it is a police state dominated by the military, with socialist policies that have wrecked its economy.

Since Nasser gave the poor free bread, free land and practically free rent, he was hugely popular among them, but by chasing out the enterprising class, Nasser destroyed Egypt’s development.

Promising a job to every college graduate, Nasser created a huge bureaucracy of state employees who did almost nothing. His universal welfare triggered a huge population explosion, so now, there are over 100 million Egyptians on a land meant for a fraction of that.

Nasser’s revolutionary zeal also led him to intervene in Yemen, a catastrophe that drained his treasury and weakened his army, but the great, charismatic man with plenty of bon mots couldn’t see this, obviously, for he kept on threatening Israel most bombastically. Only a spectacularly humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War could puncture Nasser’s hubris.

Arriving in Cairo just before New Year, I noticed many armed soldiers, and even armored vehicles, around Tahrir Square. This was a preventive measure against crowd disturbance or terrorism during the holiday, I thought, but the military never left. It’s there, 24/7, primarily to prevent fresh protests against the government.

A clerk at my hotel was jailed for a month just for snapping photos of a protest, but luckily, he wasn’t abused while locked up, a too common practice there.

Twice, I was accosted by armed cops, one with an assault rifle, for merely taking photos of Coptic churches. Outside Faisal Metro Station, an un-uniformed cop grabbed my camera after I had snapped some funky food stand. He then forced me to follow him inside to see his supervisor. In Alexandria, an angry cop told me to stop photographing a tenement.

Seeing a smiling Sisi often, I couldn’t help but photograph his face at butcher stalls, a laundry service, draped on a hotel, inside a subway station, over a café, another café, a snack and soft drink stand, at a machine part dealer, a coffee and tea store, clothing store, behind a vegetable stand, by a garage, stuck to a tenement, on the side of a truck, outside a spice shop, paired with the Sphinx, saluting himself, and here shaking hands with the always clueless Pope Francis.

Sometimes, though, Sisi’s face would be slashed, but listen, man, I wasn’t dumb enough to post such an image while still in Egypt.

If you see your great leader everywhere, most likely your country’s at war, either against an outside foe or, much worse, against you! In any case, it is tremendously ironic that Nasser, the great Arab leader, was inspired by a Jew, Marx, and used Jewish tactics to cripple his Arab nation.

With its demonization, dispossession and even roundup of entire categories of people, socialism is quintessentially Old Testament, thus Jewish, with its vengeful us vs. them dichotomy. Many people are drawn to this, however, for they think their enemies will be liquidated en masse, but socialism/communism will also shove these silly naïfs down the bloody chute.

Unlike Yahweh, Jesus only spoke of individual culpability and never demanded collective punishment, much less genocide, like the Jewish god.

Few nations suffered as much under Communism as Albania, and its 47-year-long nightmare only ended in 1992. Arriving by sea shortly afterwards, Paul Theroux was swarmed and snatched at by a howling mob, “Third World, I thought, but it was the only Third World scene I had ever witnessed that was entirely populated by Europeans—the most dissolute and desperate and poverty-stricken and rapacious, lunging at me, following just behind me, demanding money.”

Living in Italy during 2002-04, I encountered my first Albanians. There, they had a reputation for organized crime, but that’s common for any poor recent immigrant group, anywhere. In my village of Certaldo, they only stood out occasionally by squatting, which lent them a vaguely Oriental aura.

Last year in North Macedonia, I saw many more Albanians, but since there’s a turf war there between nominally Muslim Albanians and the majority Christian Slavs, they’re not spoken of too highly. Any population, though, is only fully itself on its home turf, so to really see Albanians, one must come to Albania.

On the packed plane from Athens, I had to be the only foreigner, for I didn’t hear any other language spoken at the gate, on the apron bus or the plane itself. Right away, I could tell Albanians couldn’t have been too Muslim, for no woman had her hair covered, a stark contrast to Egypt.

Athens’ airport was very elegant and well-organized, by the way, though my impression was perhaps boosted by a lovely Aegean Airlines employee who somehow thought I was an actor. Doing some kung fu kicks and punches, she gushed, “You’ve never been asked that? You look so strong!” Flabbergasted, I could only laugh it off, “Uh, I look homeless.”

Tirana’s airport was much more modest, but still user-friendly, with courteous, efficient employees, so just like that, I was in a taxi heading into town, with the correct fare quickly agreed upon.

All the tenements and shops outside seemed reasonably neat, but as we entered Tirana, a few beggars appeared. One man pushed a baby carriage in the dark between cars. Hobbling along, another was on crutches with a deformed leg. After we exited the highway, however, there were no more beggars among the bright shops.

In the taxi, the driver had the radio on, and listening to the news, I could pick out individual words, at least, if not understand them. Wandering the streets the next morning, I could identify so many cognates, such as avokat, bileta, avioni, makina, sigurimi, penale, shkolla, ore, pule, shnicel, proshute, revista, libraria, argjendari, pantallona and bluza, etc., that Albania instantly became familiar in ways that Egypt, South Korea or Laos, say, could not.

Though quarantined for more than four decades, Albania never left Europe, so as one who studied French from kindergarten, lived for 3 ½ years on this continent and writes primarily in English, of course I should feel an immediate affinity for this society. Plus, its agony under Communism echoes that of my native Vietnam.

Albanians seem relaxed. Even when in packs, young men don't appear aggressive. Neither swaggering nor smirking, they don’t need to convince you they’re gangstas, ready to kick your ass.

There’s almost no littering. On such clean sidewalks, I refrain from tossing even a toothpick. There are also fewer graffiti here than in any Western city I’ve visited. In Germany, they mar just about every building. (In South Korea, graffiti are most noticeable around American military bases, as sprayed by Yankee soldiers.)

Cafes and bakeries are open at 7AM. Restaurant service is fast and courteous. No one is slovenly. Most buses are newish

When I can’t understand a middle-aged barista, a young lady at the next table promptly translates for me, in perfect English, so we talk a bit.

It’s just before 8AM, and she’s about to go to her German class, for in September, she’ll emigrate to Frankfurt, where she has a brother.

“That’s exciting, no?”

Smiling, she merely shrugs.

Of course, it’s exciting, though scary also. To assimilate into any culture is always a drawn out, challenging process, requiring tremendous will power, so keep that in mind when it’s your turn to dive from a burning, listing and sinking ship.

At this point, though, it’s far from clear which vessel is sailing more smoothly, the German or Albanian one, but should her life turn sour overseas, she can always come back to tranquil yet bustling Tirana.

In nearly five months in South Korea, I never had such a spontaneous conversation, but that peninsula is not called The Hermit Kingdom for nothing. Albanians are more open. To be fair, though, they’re also more comfortable with English.

All the English I’ve seen on Albanian signs and menus is free of misspellings or grammatical errors. Unlike in Cairo, there’s no “QUALITY MEET” advertised at a butcher shop.

Speaking of which, “Mishit Hallall” is often seen here, so it’s still a Muslim country, though you wouldn’t know it from how people are dressed. As the westernmost reach of the Ottoman Empire, and the whitest country in Dar al-Islam, Albania is an anomaly, but if you go back far enough, Christianity was also an alien import. No God is intrinsic to anywhere.

On Rruga Ibrahim Rugova, I paused to check out used books for sale on the sidewalk. Among the titles were Stefan Zweig’s meditations on Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz’ Adolescents, Balzac’s Père Goriot and, naturally, several volumes by Ismail Kadare. Granted, there was also garbage, like Ulli Weiss’ book on Sylvester Stallone, but trash is a given in any culture. You must judge what rises above it, if anything.

Also browsing books was a young man who turned out to be a popular travel vlogger, as I would find out after we had sat down at a nearby café, at my suggestion.

It’s very difficult to travel with an Albanian passport, Juli said. “You practically have to beg during the interview at an embassy.”

Despite this, Juli has gone as far as Indonesia and Malaysia. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur as Covid erupted, he was immediately quarantined inside his hostel, so he saw almost nothing of that idyllic nation.

After citizens from more prestigious countries like the US, UK and France had been evacuated, Juli was still stuck at this hostel with people from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria and South Sudan. He laughed at this dreadful memory.

The more we talked, the more impressed I was by his fluent, rapid and accent-free English, all self-taught, but this 28-year-old is clearly very gifted linguistically. In Italy for two months, he could converse in Italian, “I had to. I had no English then.” In Poland for three months, he was chattering in Polish, and he also speaks Greek. (I have an Italian friend, Niccolo, now living in Japan, who’s also mind blowingly multilingual.)

Featured on television, Juli is often recognized by strangers on the street, and he’s constantly invited by Albanians, from all over, to stay with them.

Like me, he’s fascinated by the quotidian. In a YouTube video, Juli interviews an Albanian couple living in Istanbul. With his phone camera, he records every square foot of their modest apartment. Such stuff is life made of, so if you’re sick of the ordinary, you’re sick of life.

Traveling during Covid is stressful, to say the least, because you don’t know if rules will change after you’ve booked your ticket and made lodging accommodations. Right now, there are only seven countries with no Covid-related entry restrictions or quarantine, and three of them, Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia, are clustered in the Balkans.

I came to Albania because Americans are allowed to stay here for a year without a residency permit. To add another year, I just need to go next door to North Macedonia, then return after 90 days. Such planning may sound extreme, paranoid even, but we’re living through extreme uncertainty.

Totalitarianism conjures up images of jackboots and gulags, but its two core features, affecting all, are the removals of free speech and free movement, and both are happening, with frightening speed, in the supposedly freest countries!

With absurd rules at airports and no-fly list, Americans have been conditioned, for many years now, to accept traveling as not a right, but a privilege granted by the state. Now, suddenly, they are told they can’t even leave their house, for weeks on end. Even Enver Hoxha never tried this stunt.

Hoxha didn’t have internet porn to somewhat pacify his captive population, though. Already addicted to the virtual, why shouldn’t you spend all your time inside, masturbating? Brain and stomach empty, you can still leak what’s left of your soul.

As I’ve discovered this past year traveling through South Korea, Serbia, North Macedonia, Lebanon, Egypt and now Albania, lockdowns aren’t necessary to combat this way overblown Covid. In each of these countries, I walked daily through crowded streets, ate in restaurants and relaxed in cafes or bars, without a mask, of course, or any social distancing. Within touching distance of my kind, I happily ate and drank.

As I laughed and bantered with some Egyptian good old boys in Cairo’s Horreya [Liberty] Bar last week, I couldn’t help but think how preposterous it was that taverns were fully open in Islamic, restrictive Cairo, while they stayed closed in freewheeling Amsterdam, London, Manhattan and Dublin, etc.

On airplanes, too, we’re repeatedly warned to keep our masks on, but when meal is served, everyone removes his and happily eats right next to his seatmates, yet no one dies from such reckless exposure!

Clearly, there’s a sinister agenda at play, and you’re the hapless toy, so escape while you can, before all your borders are slammed shut, as has happened in every totalitarian state. Hesitation may be fatal.

Of course, you can also stay and fight, if there’s any fight left in you, but it will take an army, and what will you be fighting for?

Drinking my third beer, I’m in a pool hall in the afternoon. Young and old men drop in for a quick game or two. A boy whose elbows can barely reach over the table is also shooting, and he’s not bad. Elvis, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe are depicted on its sign outside, lending an exotic glamor to this modest establishment.

On a wall is a Route 66 sign, representing, obviously, the open road and American freedom, still so sexy.

Little do they know.

.

.

.

Bottom of jacket, "It was fun but were glad its done."


.

.

[Salah, Sisi, Sadat and Nasser]


.

.

.

.

.

.

Just about every day, I'd go here to get takeaway coffee or tea, bottled water, Cheetos, nuts or a brownie. A tiny cup of tea here costs just 19 cents.


.

.

.

.

[in Horreya]


.

.

[Horreya]


.

.

[same joint as below]


.

.

[same joint as below]


.

.

Chinese restaurant in Daher. Pure garbage, one of the worst meals I've ever had, and I've eaten some of the foulest food in vile conditions. At a nearby table, however, sat three Malaysian Muslim women who were perfectly happy with their lunch. Students at the university in Mansoura, they're in the second of a five-year program, with all their classes in English. Though none spoke much Arabic, one was conversational in Korean and Mandarin, so she could talk to the criminal cook and even ordered tea for me.

We chattered a bit about Egypt. When I spoke negatively of Alexandria, they all laughed, with one declaring, "Wait till you see Mansura!"

They were very pleased to hear I had visited Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Malacca and Kajang. They were extremely pleasant, these ladies, but so are most Malaysians.


.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.