Even now, Caribbean rhythms episode 55, election news is on everyone mind, election only about two weeks away, so I ask you mobilize to focus power so we can humiliate our enemies. Put other things out of your mind and focus on this for the next two weeks. If it is not clear to you by now, if Gamel Harris, the cow, wins, I joked on this before but she really will try to drone me. I told you exactly what would happen, how it would play out, they would shut down my communications of course, they tried to shut down my show, of course I will keep broadcasting for you even on ham radio if I have to, but as they cannot arrest me abroad, she will try to drone me, so I think I told you before how this will play out, you let that turmeric

jerk chicken hole win, and by 2022, she tries to drown me while I'm hiding in Mato Grosso Wetlands in Brazil, in a Brazil safe house. And of course Bolsonaro is our friend, so he gives me protection. So because of this violation of the law of nations, right, because of Gamal Harris' tyrannical action, Bolsonaro, 2022, to avenge the attempt on me by Gamal. He will invade Washington, D.C. He will send a Brazilian bodybuilder, paratrooper battalions to Washington, D.C., and they will just arrive there and completely annihilate the Gamal-Harris citizens, militia, bulldog, minority divisions, minority higher divisions, and D.C. then is left defenseless to the Brazilian bodybuilders and their desires and they are reaped right and left.

You can imagine the scenes in Georgetown and townhouses including at Cafe Milano, right? Just a muscular Brazilian in uniforms, entire D.C. lobbyist consultant class just reaped on the streets, muscular, sweaty. This is my vision of the future. And then this will be the payback if Gamel Harris ever dares to threaten the life of an artist and orator such as myself, Bolsonaro will avenge. Be careful. But okay, so you want perversion with this Hunter Biden, okay, and I hear from top-level source that some very bad things about him are going to be revealed on that laptop they found, something, webcam, look, I don't want to say, let's hope my sources are correct. But I hear of at least one thing that will be quite abusing to us and shocking to Normies

and middle-of-the-road voters even, I mean. You can probably guess what it is, how strange it is that since Anthony Wiener, or excuse me, was his name Carlos Danger, you know this is what he called himself, right? Carlos Danger, Anthony Wiener was trying to wank it over teenage girls, chat online with teenage girl and he called himself to them Carlos Danger in chat room, right? So everything since 2016 has had that Pizzagate flavor around it, okay? Every one of these revelations about who runs certainly the DNC, but in fact much of American government in general, it all has the pizza flavor, the Pizzagate flavor, whether it's Epstein or Weiner or now with Hunter Biden. And I think many of you who believe Biden is this colorful, crazy guy, full of flashy vice, you should reconsider that.

He's very much a broken male, you know, you should reconsider given what will come out about him. Is Alex Jones and that Chinese guy right about Hunter Biden on video torturing Chinese girls? I don't know. I don't know this. I don't know if it goes that far at all, but it has that flavor, you know, what I hear. And I was never impressed with Hunter Biden's antics, because I've known guys like him before and there's nothing exciting, even, I mean, aside from the gruesome diddling of the 12-year-olds rumors and things, but even just what is publicly known right now. He's a bleak and depressing character. He's just a typical kid from part of a new family who spirals out of control, you know. So Delicious Tacos had a good observation about Hunter Biden, that even though he's

not bad looking and he's rich and he's going around the world doing coke and whores and impregnating stripper, he just, he whines to his father in emails, you know, about how the world is out to get him. So there's no joy in what he does. I knew guys like this, it's a, it's a fixture of life. The out of control son from a part of a new family and especially if you can think of family as bleak as the Bidens. Just this kind of dreary, wretched D.C. fixture has no vital force, believes in nothing. Just what is Biden but to make his whole life in existence, be a tool and conduit for others. This what Biden is. Before today it was credit card companies, he was their whore, and then it became China or whoever, nobody knows.

And if he has to go one time with the Scranton working class thing, then that suits him fine. And if he has to then abandon the working or middle class and to be a conduit for the coalition of grad students and upper middle class faggots. And Tranny writes, like on this last debate, you know, he said he'd support training treatments for 80-year-olds. Then he goes with that if it suits him. And so just the cipher of a man who both times, if you look at Biden, the peak of his life, right now, 2020 and then 2008 during a bongo, and why is he choosing? They chose him for the symbolic image they have of this dopey old erased white guy who is meant to play second fiddle to Mulatto Obama and now to literally be a senile foil

and transition to a second mulatto of questionable gender, you know, to babysit her and to pave the way for her, the ascendancy of the mulatto class, I mean, think of being cast as this weird prop like this in Geffen's highly weird script for the future of America. And now imagine being this guy's son, okay, and continuing the family business. Imagine growing up in that bleakness. Could you descend into cocaine and hookers out of despair? Because this is the whiff I get about Hunter Biden. He's not this international gigolo having fun. He's the son of a corrupt parvenu who feels he doesn't deserve it and goes into a tailspin. It's actually a fixture in literature. It's a real life thing. I knew once, okay, I knew in real life.

So the Persian Jews in Los Angeles, okay, they are very different from maybe the Woody Allen types, the Ashkenazi. For the most part, they're quite different. So I knew one of them. He and his brother were running their own business in Los Angeles. I don't want to give details about this. It's identifiable who he is then, but this guy had scars on his face from all the fistfights he got. It's that kind of a culture, like the Chechens, similar to that. He told me he got so tired of getting scars on his face in a bar fight, and I could see he wasn't making it up. I could see the scars on his face. is that now he just carried a mace and he sprayed in the face of anyone who talked back to him. He was arrested for pulling guy out of car at traffic light and beating the shit out

of him on the street. Things like this, okay? This is how they live. A friend he knew was in a gang-type rivalry with some other Persian Jew. So this guy is hiding out in the house and other guy crew come on front lawn talking big, you know, just brandishing baseball bats, trying to scare him in this blowhard way. So he comes out of the house with a giant curved knife, and he says, I will give you a scar you will never forget. So he just slashes this other guy's face, leaves a huge gash, everyone is shot. So he has to leave the country. I don't know for where, but his parents helped him leave the country. He lived for a long time. But this is how they live. You see on police TV series like The Shield with the Armenian ammonia train and this kind

of gangster oriental life in Los Angeles that Steve Saylor also talks about where he walk around some neighborhood and these people from Azerbaijan or wherever they have barbed wire around the fence of the house, the gold chain races, okay? What Hakan calls the gold chain races. Are the Finns a gold chain race? I don't know. Well, this is how the Persian Jews in Los Angeles are. So this guy, he's a chad and very vital. I'm not talking about him. He was a very jolly guy. He enjoyed carousing and women's in this. He did it out of fun. But okay, I met an acquaintance of his who was just like Hunter Biden. He came from very rich Parvinu family, boasted about spending an average of $35,000 a month, not including housing I think.

Okay, so this kind of guy who boasts on this, and completely in a tailspin with drugs, all kinds of drugs, and you could see around him aura of brokenness and darkness. He was not doing this out of fun, but out of compulsion to escape something. There was nothing very romantic or chad about it, okay? If you see movie Tokyo Decadence, about the troubles of a Tokyo prostitute, it's somewhat art house movie, I think I maybe mentioned it on show before, but in it there is a scene with a dominatrix and she explained to this young, inexperienced prostitute in Tokyo, she says in Japan of today much wealth has come very fast, wealth has accumulated very fast and the beneficiaries are often people who don't deserve their wealth or feel they don't at least and they want to be punished for it.

So I take advantage of this, says the dominatrix. It's called fin dom, okay, and some women are into this. Just look into Carly Fiorina. It's before Trump came along there was a whole industry of republican women in the GOP who made a killing just playing precisely to these impulses among the weak Paul Ryan type fagged GOP males. They just eat this up, it's very common, okay, so you look at Rich Lowry's reaction to Carly Fiorina in 2016, just drooling over this thin, dumb freak. So anyway, you see the Hunter Biden phenomenon in many things, real life and in literature. There is a Chekhov story. My life is almost novella, a longer short story. Chekhov's short story is amazing if you want to learn to write, okay? But this short story, my life, is quite depressing.

Very good short story, but depressing about the downfall, you can say, of a Russian merchant family in the 19th century, and you can see in that the narrator's brother in a different way, but has this kind of Hunter Biden insane self-destructive tailspin air about him. It's a very common thing, it's very sad, and actually it happens sometimes even in old and established families, in noble families too. It's a function of loss of vitality of blood, which in any case this can come from two directions. But we will see if this guy Hunter redeems himself, because it's possible if you read some of the texts, he's not on very good terms with his father. Is he the source of the evidence that will expose much of the corruption in DC to the normies?

You and I already know about it, but is it possible he did this as a payback against his father? It would be very much in character. And I do wish Trump would hit more on Biden the cipher, more on this problem. cipher of Wall Street, the grey man of the monopolies, but we will see. Go and humiliate your enemies. On this show, I will talk a man of power, Cola dei Rienzi, a populist demagogue, champion of the people in Rome of the 1300s, who rose up through the power of charisma of speech alone, and he managed to chastise the oligarchs that were inflicting just terrible chaos and violence, poverty on the state at that time in Rome, and he almost achieved a restoration of ancient Roman glory in our age. He's a tragic figure, almost, because for all his greatness he was done in by equally

great vices and inconstancy, actually maybe by plebeian vices. But in any case, he is so unusual a figure and so much unknown now, even a professional historian or academic mostly, will know nothing about Cola di Rienzi. And this is too bad because he is a very unusual man, almost like a meteor in the sky of medieval Europe. A man out of his time, a shooting star. I will be right back, must go to break. What you just heard, the musics was the beginning overture to Rienzi by Wagner, his opera to Cola di Rienzi, composed around 1840. It was Wagner's first great success, it made him world famous and this opera became just very famous in the 19th century about this Italian statesman hero and his unusual reputation because Hitler is said to have had his revelation of political mission when

he listened to this music as a teenager with his friend, when he received revelation to unite all the Germanic peoples and so forth. So you know, this opera then became untouchable by some. And it's very strange too because Wagner, who by the way, I think he repudiated this opera later in his life, not its political message, but I think he no longer liked it aesthetically, the music. But it remained a very popular piece nevertheless in the 19th and 20th century. But you know, musicians sometimes do this for unusual reasons. recant their earlier work, Rachmaninoff too, for quite bad reasons. Later in his life he went back and edited and butchered actually some of his best works. But so Wagner, he based this opera on a novel also about Cola Di Rienzo called Cola Di Rienzo

the Last of the Roman Tribunes, a novel in English. You can find it in full online by Edward Bulwer-Lighton, who was a British statesman and novelist, very colorful life, and this same Edward Bulwer-Lighton is actually the author of another novel called Vril, The Power of the Coming Race, that he wrote in the 1870s, which deals with ancient race of power beings and the problem of hollow earth. I may have mentioned on this show before, you watch the movie Maribito, Japanese movie Maribito, if interested in this. But this novel by Bulwer-Leiten, Will, about inner earth, hollow earth, it became very important for theosophists and later for hippies of the type, how should I put which type, it became very important for esoteric Hitlerists, right, this kind of hippie.

So now you can outsource this problem to a Jessica Nobodyberg feminist lesbian, somebody who does critical studies, academic, to talk about the nexus of literature and music important for neo-Nazis, and to make a spaghetti chart conspiracy connections, perhaps between political populism and real hollow-earth legends of Agartha. This is possible, but you know, I don't think actually there's any connection between these two things. It's just a broad lighten, was what you might call politically classical liberal maybe, And Cola di Rienzo is just an exotic and unusual great man, elusive in many ways, hard to understand. So then you can see how he would be very attractive for connoisseurs of the exotic, which people

like Bulwer-Leiten was, and then Wagner picked up on that for different reasons. So I tell you something about Cola di Rienzo's life and who he was, and let me say a word first about conditions of Italy and Rome and Europe at a time when Cola dei Rienzo – and by the way, it doesn't matter if you say Rienzo or Rienzi, it's just different ways of saying it – in the 1300s, end of Middle Ages you can say, when this happens, already start of Renaissance, maybe in Italy almost, during the life of Petrarch, the great poet. And Schopenhauer has a very nice anecdote about Petrarch, always stuck in my mind after After I read it, let me read it to you, I'm quoting Schopenhauer now, and therefore one can well believe the anecdote told by Skwarzafiki in his life of Petrarch, taken from Joseph

Breivius, a contemporary of the poet, how once at the court of the Visconti, when Petrarch and other noblemen and gentlemen were present, Galeazzo Visconti told his son, who was then a mere boy, he was afterwards the first Duke of Milan, he told his son to pick out the wisest of the company. How the boy looked at them for a little while, and then he took Petrarch by the hand and led him up to his father, to the great admiration of all present. For so clearly does nature set the mark of her dignity on the privileged among mankind that even a child can discern it. Therefore, I should advise my sagacious countrymen, if ever again they wish to trumpet about for thirty years a very commonplace person as a great genius, not to choose for the purpose

such a beerhouse-keeper physiognomy as was possessed by that philosopher, Hegel, upon whose face nature had written in her clearest characters the familiar inscription, commonplace person." End quote. Isn't that great? from Schopenhauer's essay on physiognomy, and there at the end he's talking about Heger, man of plebeian visage. But Schopenhauer, very good, he says intelligence can be told by the physiognomy, but not moral character. And it's not that the genius is sexy and this, but almost always the genius will have an aura about the eyes and the bearing that even a child can recognize, yes. But yes, look, during the time of the great Italian patriotic poet Petrarch, some of you may not know him as a patriotic poet, but for his love poems, Petrarch sonnets,

for his unrequited love for Laura, beautiful sonnets to Laura. I think artiste accuses Petrarch of oneitis, you know, obsession with one girl that makes you overlook other opportunities, which is true, but Petrarch has the most noble oneitis. If you can turn your oneitis into poems like Petrarch composed for his beloved, then you are allowed to have oneitis, okay? But Petrarch also wrote beautiful work for Cola dei Rienzi and sent him many letters of encouragement. He placed great hopes in him as a reviver of Italian pride and nationalism. And even some say that Petrarch was his secret counselor and teacher. They spent some time together in Avignon, I'll tell you in a second. Kolodirian, he was a man born of humble origins, the son of an innkeeper and washerwoman, born

in a bad part of town, working class, the chronicler says next to the Jewish temple is not a good part of town. But he received a true liberal education despite these origins, you know, the son of an innkeeper. Not what goes by the name today, a liberal education meant education fit for a free man based in the study of the classics, of the Greek or Roman classics, whereas what you get now is you put a ring through your nose and a fist by Foucault. That's liberal education today. But he excelled at ancient studies and at rhetoric and Latin, and really, Coladirian's entire life is based on this, just amazing ability for oratory combined with what you might call crowd control or showmanship. He had a younger brother who was killed by a baron as the two of them were walking outside Rome.

And this experience, of course, just defined much of his life because he swore vengeance. So now look at Europe during this time, Rome during this time, very turbulent period. The 1300s are a period of what is called the Avignon Papacy. Sometimes this is called the Babylonian captivity. What happened was Papacy basically left Rome and was based in Avignon for about 70 years I think in France from early 1300s on. And these were all French popes who refused to live in Rome and were basically selected and in part controlled by the French kings. And this was a huge blow to Rome, okay, to the prestige of Rome and to its finances because you can imagine the Papacy as travelers and the pilgrimages it brought and such.

This is all lost to the Romans now, not to speak, of course, the empire had been lost for a long time. It had become, you could say, the Holy Roman Empire, if you consider that a successor to Rome. So the Holy Roman Empire existed, of course, although during the 1300s, and especially when the story and the peak of Cola di Rienzo's life happens in the 1340s, the Holy Roman Empire was also in a weird condition where I think you had different claimants to the imperial throne. So it was a very unstable time, and this takes place during age where you had throughout Italy is a famous Guelph-Gibelline conflict, where the Guelphs were the party aligned with the Pope and the Gibellines were the imperial party.

So you had this tremendous quarrel and struggle between the papacy and the emperor within Christendom. Do you understand how much of this simple history that used to be known by all is forgotten or never learn by those who make pronouncements now about European civilization or white privilege or this, do you see this? But people who assume some kind of monolithic European conspiracy throughout history to suppress the other or something insane like this and who have no idea about these rifts within Christendom that in large part defined its character. I mean, tell me where else in the world you have this struggle between the secular emperor who claimed he was ruling according to necessity of state and of nature.

And on the other hand, the high priest and the clerical class that claim to answer to a different law. Tell me where else you have this. But in any case, during this time of mid-1300s, Rome experiencing serious decline as a city. And published, the papacy is in France in exile, the city poor and full of violence, with oligarchs and the barons, as they are called, constantly at each other's throats and full of contempt for the people. They were living in fortified palaces but making cellies to fight each other, to kill, to rob and despoil women, also to take women and girls indiscriminately. This what upset people the most. And many of the streets and neighborhoods of Rome were barricaded at times because of the quarrels of the nobles.

So Coladirienzo, as a young man, because of his great knowledge of the classics and the power of speech, he gets sent to Avignon as part of a delegation from Rome and there he meets the Pope and Petrarch. But look, I do not want to just recount events from his life and all the details. For this you must read the history. Simply recall, by the way, the life of Coladirienzi. You can find it online and it's written by an anonymous frog in the 1350s. At the time these events took place, a little after, or you can read instead the novel by Edward Bulward Lighten, but I will focus on this show, on the big things in his life that impressed me. I will be right back. This time when Rome is just in decay and is being torn apart by oligarchs who care only

about personal enrichment and nothing for the people or the city as a whole. Culadi Rienzor gets sent to Avignon as part of a delegation and there he begins speeches declaiming against the corruption of the barons, acquiring many enemies and also some friends. You know, this is how this happens. I know an old man, a very close friend, who is very right-wing in his case but in public He is very discreet and he sees it as part of his professional duty not to engage in political polemics or any of this kind of thing that's very old school. But of course all of his colleagues know he is very right wing so they all hate him in secret and they try to do him harm. But because he's not outspoken on his beliefs, he doesn't have many allies.

So there is a way in which being too discreet can harm you in this way. You don't get allies. On the other hand, I must emphasize that speaking out can only work. Only works. You spurts must understand. It can only work if you do it very well. And I'm actually all for people and I mean public people only. Taking positions like Tucker Carlson and even far more extreme than Tucker. Tucker's not extreme. He's a normal guy, but people should take extreme position, but you have to be able to argue it well, to make the case powerfully, to win argument, and that is very rare. Someone like Jonathan Bowden can do that. But the problem is that some of you think you speak well, or you cut a good figure talking in public, but in fact you do not.

And this is the problem, and I don't include myself in this judgement one way or another, but aside from Tucker at the moment, I can't really think of anyone, roughly, on our side who can make a good case in public. I consider myself a non, you should continue to be a non-frog, I believe this is good. Do not mix the two worlds. But anyway, where was I? So you look to Kolodirian, though he comes back to Rome from Avignon, and there he embarks on this project of restoration, of re-establishing the imperial republic. And he does it through powerful speeches, but also through wearing unusual and flashy clothing in public, weird hats and decent sort of crowds. The Chronicle goes into some detail on the use Rienzi makes of special capes and vestments.

It's very strange, you see this in old books, they focus on things that are boring to us and you don't see in modern literature so much. And there's even an old movie, I think, Ivan the Terrible, the coronation scene where they pour jewels on his head and it's just very elaborate and very detailed, somewhat boring to maybe modern audience but very interesting to audience of medieval mind, let me put it to you that way. But the Chronicle goes into detail on Eusrean, the makes of, you know, visual propaganda. He himself draws or has drawn for him allegorical murals about the fallen condition of Rome or about the evil of the oligarchs. And although when you read about them it sounds maybe a bit silly, it's just a detailed description. Oh, here you have justice weeping in the river and this.

Apparently this was very powerful visual political propaganda. He had the mural painted and then he described what was going on in it to the people and They love this powerful means, you can say, that moves the people and greatly it angers the oligarchs. It works, this kind of visual thing, and he does it again and again. It was a kind of, perhaps, innovation of his. So it gets to this strange condition that the Chronicle doesn't describe too vividly, but Gibbon does. You know, Gibbon, who wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, also talks about this life of Kola, Koladerienzi. But it gets to this condition of where the barons know Koladerienzi and they respect on one hand his learning and keep him around as a kind of clown or buffoon, they are often annoyed by him.

But for the people, his rhetoric and his plans are not buffoonery. They come as deliverance, they sound as hope of salvation and they are taken very seriously by the people. I mean, you know, he wore green capes and all this flashy stuff, so it's like the people don't know what to think, they don't know what to make of him, but the Roman people are in a very difficult condition. And if I got anything from this chronicle, it's that revolution is basically going to take place only when people are afraid to go outside their homes, okay? That's what makes for a regime change. It's not really even extreme poverty or economic crash or this, but violence, extreme violence This is what happened in Brazil in 2018. This is why Bolsonaro was elected.

Bolsonaro is a guy much more extreme than Trump if you look at his past. He was representative from the state of Rio de Janeiro and the things he was saying are beyond anything that any politician in the West I think has said. The stuff you've shown to see on camera, I'm not even sure there's any public figure at all in America right now, who is equivalent to Bolsonaro in Brazil before 2018. But how did Bolsonaro get elected? Because even their media in Brazil was quite marxified. In some ways, at the time at least, even more annoying than American media. So how did he break through? And this was after two Labour administrations in Brazil were basically Lula and then the

Bulgarian whoa who followed Lula they were ex-communist terrorists. Okay, so this how it's strange that the election of Bolsonaro How did it happen seems to come out of nowhere? But it's because for a year or two before that election you could not go outside your house actually for longer than that You in the big cities even in nice neighborhoods people were afraid afraid to go to a bar or restaurant It was becoming ghost town anywhere. You looked every bankruptcy, of course, but people were afraid for their lives, and at that point people are ready to go for a Caesar figure to vote him in. Except in Brazil, they went for a guy who came out of the military like Caesar did, but who didn't actually end up having the military behind him the way Duterte does in the Philippines, maybe.

And this is the second thing I see in the life of Cola dei Rienzi, that ultimately the The condition of decay of the city of Rome, the power of speech, in the end it was not enough to correct that because it was not married in his case with a military virtue and not with enough military support as it was for Augustus, for Duterte now maybe. But as it is not also for Trump or for Bolsonaro which speaks to the precariousness of their situation but I'll get to this in a moment. So Coladirianzi, he ends up taking over Rome in a bloodless revolution in 1347. And he does get a number of armed men with him when he makes the proclamation, I think on May 20th. But it is mostly through an extremely showy public speech and a proclamation from a balcony,

actually, yes, from a balcony, is this fascist. But he does it from a balcony with much pageantry, a rally, you could say, where he rallies the the Roman people to their ancient greatness, and he proposes a set of laws and reforms that would chastise the oligarchs and bring order and prosperity back to the city. And the people who were already in love with him before this attempt because of his previous political activity and speeches, they all go for it, they enthusiastically embrace it towards the barons are left without an answer, they're really stumped, they're unable to respond in any way. What can they do? Kill everyone? He has the people, the most powerful force in the world, completely on his side.

So the barons are forced to leave Rome and they retire to their castles, which Rienzi in due time plans to have demolished. And he establishes then a kind of stern justice in Rome, forbidding the barons from robbing the roads, punishing murderers with the death penalty, limiting amount of time for lawsuits, fighting for widows and orphans, public granaries, a kind of huey-long populist program. This collar ends first of the modern age, let's say, after the year 1000. First real, flashy populist politician. But of the 15 principle laws he proposes, most of them actually deal with the re-establishment of law and order. The fear of violence, I keep telling you, is the most powerful motivator. This is why Zog unleashed this year both the epidemic and the riots and the burning of

cities and police stations because they were hoping the people would be fearful of their lives and would blame Trump for the conditions, the disturbances. But it's a difficult case for them to make. And when they saw the ploy of their fake revolutionary movement wasn't working, somehow you see now most of the riots have died down or it's bad for polling so it disappears, isn't this nice? In other words, the violence has to be plausibly attributed to your opponent, otherwise it doesn't work. And everyone, by contrast, everyone in Rome knew the barons and their avarice and perfidy was the cause of the disturbances. And Kola solved this problem, but straight away his rule after this, it goes off rails, it goes off the course.

He starts immediately, after he has success, he starts to lose his mind with vanity and with overblown vices, with drinking and eating and such. With the example of Churchill, they try to tell you this doesn't matter, they've made you think it doesn't. They've made you think you can have an alcoholic glutton statesman who is still great. I'm not so sure about that is possible, but what happened to British Empire under Churchill as a result of his decisions? What was the condition of Europe and of British Empire after he was done? Was it smart to go to war over Poland? What happened to Poland? End of war? What happened to India? Was this a great achievement, Churchill? Not to me, I don't know, but in any case, I will be right back.

I need foot massage and I have here a Oaxacan dwarf girl, Maria, Maria, are you here? Look, it is tedious to me to recount all the events of history, so I have to skip over were much to give you just a gist of a story in such episodes. But Coladirianzi, after he sets up a quite successfully and orderly and lawful state in Rome, which was unheard of. The chronicler who recounts this story is just amazed that he got the Romans to be not so corrupt for a little while. But as soon as he does this, he starts making mistakes. He becomes too violent in some cases. At other times, in a civil war that ensues with the oligarchs, which he mostly wins, but after he wins it, he refuses to give a proper burial to the three leaders of the Colonna family, who are killed.

This family, by the way, still exists, and they are closely tied to the Papacy. They're one of the ancient families, noble families of Rome. But this gets the people quite mad at him when he refuses a proper burial to his enemies from the Kelowna family, it makes them sympathize with the Barons now. And then immediately upon victory in a battle against Barons, Cola Derienzi has some extravagant triumph, triumphal procession. And you know, you're not really supposed to have triumph in a civil war. This is a reminder, by the way, for the morons who want the equivalent now to tear down Confederate statues. point was that you don't rub defeat in the faces because they're your national brothers. But of course, not many of the Lincoln worshippers now had families that fought in the Civil

War, which is somewhat odd if you think about it. But anyways, this triumph, or soon after Cola de Rienzi has this triumphal procession which outraged the people, he then has his son publicly knighted in an especially blasphemous manner, And this truly upsets the Roman knights, who thereafter decide no longer to take up arms for him. This is crucial error. He loses military support. He forgets, you know, it's not just about flashiness and speech. And all these excesses are married to vice that makes him look ridiculous, such as wearing clothes that are too expensive, he starts to put on the airs of a rich man and to clothe his wife. You know, the women always drive men to vanity too when you have a wife like that, so she

starts wearing expensive outfits and it makes the people feel like he has abandoned them and other vanities that make the people sour on him, including also taxes that he keeps raising. People start forgetting the evil of the barons and they start blaming him. And then the Pope's legate denounces him as well, to the effect that during a relatively minor disturbance, when a rebellious baron in Rome barricades the neighborhood and the alarm is sounded, that formerly there was a kind of bell alarm sounded whenever Rienzi needed the people's help against the nobles. But now Rienzi, when the alarm sounded against this relatively minor uprising, Rienzi notices the people no longer show up to defend him. So in a panic, he prematurely leaves town, he abdicates, when probably he didn't have

to, he would have withstood the crisis, it was very minor. But he was prone to emotional reactions like this, and this is exactly what did him in the second chapter of his rule because he would return in 1354 after a stay in various monasteries at the court of King Charles in Prague also, and then with the Pope, he stayed again with the Pope in Avignon, but he stayed with the Emperor Charles in Prague, hoping to be received by him as an equal and as a scholar, but he was actually jailed for a while there, and then he was sent as a prisoner to Avignon where he was judged in a trial and absolved and he was then sent again to Rome by the next pope. The previous pope died and Pope Innocent came in and Pope Innocent wanted to chastise the

Roman bearers for his own purposes and he thought that, well, this guy, Coladirianzi, he's useless here. We absolved him but he's laying about doing nothing. He would be good for the purpose of humiliating the Roman bearers. Once again they got apathy. But Coladirianzides returned to Rome as a senator himself, now he was proclaimed a senator on behalf of the Pope, which is to say foreign power, it was not the same as before. He was welcomed by the people with much fanfare, they hated the barons always, but there was no longer the enthusiasm, the idealism of this restoration of antiquity that had driven his earlier life. The revolution was already over and I almost wish he had stayed in exile. I'm sure so did he, because just a little later he was killed in a mob uprising.

It was instigated by some barons, but Rienzi did his part to allow and encourage it, again by repeating the same vices and mistakes of his previous rule. The chronicler says he became fat, he ate and drank too much and he grew a gigantic beard. You know, he raised taxes, he punished indiscriminately, and he punished even a mercenary who, this is a very violent mercenary, okay, he burned much of cities and so forth. But the chronicler has much respect for him, this mercenary that Coladirianzi ends up executing. And you can sense that this chronicler who wrote this story, he's not so much admirer of Cola di Rienzi as for what he represented, and what Cola di Rienzi represented for him and for many others including Petrarch, was the resurrection of ancient heroism.

And it is this that the writer of this life of Cola di Rienzi respects to the point where he compares this mercenary who Rienzi executes, but he compares him, he says he was the greatest man since the time of Julius Caesar. Very strange in a sort of biography of one guy. You pick a relatively minor character that he executes and you say that guy was the greatest one. Very strange. But not so strange when you see what this chronicle is really about because it's not so much just about the life of this man, but about the possibility of a resurrection of antiquity, which is also what has obsessed me for a long time. But Colavirienzi, in other words, end up acting like stereotypical tyrant with pointless excess of emotion and he died in the same way, irresolute.

When the mob was gathering outside his palace, he put on armour, ready to face the crowd and to die fighting, which would have been great, it would have been a glorious death. But then he became afraid for his life. The chronicler says, bitterly says this, he was just another man after all. And he tried to escape in disguise as a poor man with a wet rag on his face which failed because he was recognized in this. So then he was ignominiously stabbed multiple times and he was hung upside down with his fat entrails spilling on the ground and this is a disgusting thing. See this is what happens when you care about life too much. And the Kelowna then forced the Jews to burn the body. And it is said that after they burnt his body in his room they found magical mirrors with

inscriptions in his room, amazing inscriptions on the mirror, I mean. This is essential if you want to make the mob adore you. Please search Eric Jan Hanusen if interested. But this is a tale of heroism and wild ambition with a sorry end. It makes me mad because it comes with mistakes like this that were maybe entirely avoidable if he had taken part in military expeditions instead of avoiding them, which he did throughout his career and his tenure as a, whatever you may call him, he called himself a tribune but he was really dictator of Rome for this time. Not tyrant so much as dictator, turned into a tyrant at the end, but if he had had more physical courage and if he avoided pointless vices of eating, of luxury, of drinking and

vanity and it's not even, you know, it's the temptation here is if he had been more moderate But I don't believe that is so. If he had avoided excess, this is what a traditional virtue moralist might say. But I don't think so, but it's just this kind of let-down stuff he did. He should have been even more extreme in his love of liberty and love of antiquity and of heroism. He just did let-down stuff. It's not a matter of not engaging in excess, but of excess outside of his mission, pointless provocations like glorifying his son. But yes, the worst was his neglect of military matters, of the pay of the soldiers and such. And his death was a very bad one. And look, it's not me tearing him down about his death. It's the chronicler himself who dwells on this.

This is how the book ends, at least what survives of it, and who compares his ignominious death when he exchanged the glorious armor of an emperor in which he could have died, and he He exchanged that for the clothes of a poor man, of a poor wretch, to escape death. And the chronicler, the non-chronicler, he compares this to when the Gauls invaded Rome in the 300s BC, and the old men of Rome decided to sacrifice themselves to allow the younger men to survive the siege. And they went out to fight the Gauls in a kind of suicide charge, and they were dressed in all the most glorious attire of their offices. So a senator, a guy who had been senator in his past, would go out wearing the toga in this and the chronicler makes this comparison to how they died putting on fine clothes and

facing death resolutely and heroically, as opposed to Rienzi, who betrayed himself. He betrayed his heroic impulses and heroic mission to become what he was really not. Because if you look at the span of his life, he really was a great man who unfortunately gave in occasionally to misunderstandings of who he was, like this, gave in to the drop of plebeian blood in him, or compare his death to that of Mishima, which is more appropriate comparison than you think, because Mishima, like Mishima, Rienzi should have realized that his valor and his life was to survive more as a memory and a hope for the future of what could be reborn than anything else. But so like Wagner and others I think is better than to look at what was great in his life.

And as Gibbon says, this amazing thing about Rienzi I quote Gibbon now, that never perhaps has the energy and effect of a single mind been more remarkably felt than in the sudden though transient reformation of Rome by the tribune Rienzi. A den of robbers was converted to the discipline of a camp or convent. patient to hear, swift to redress, inexorable to punish. His tribunal was always accessible to the poor and the stranger. Anyway, I stop quoting now, but this Gibbon, he does an entire history of all of Roman Empire and he says about this amazing episode that never has the energy and effect of a single mind been more remarkably felt than this. So it's an amazing achievement. So you know what Gibbon goes on to say is that Arienzi affected a kind of change in

the natural type, a change in the character of the Italians or the Romans of this period, which is really… I think this is possible, but only through great enthusiasm or fanaticism even, to affect a change in national character in this way. But this may be temporary, I'm not sure. The chronicle of his life from which I've been reading is actually a very unusual book. It has asides on the natural explanation drawn from Aristotle of how dreams can tell you others' intentions, or how dreams can tell you the future. The book goes on very unusual tangents, and like many old such books, it's interesting observations about national character. And at one point, when he's talking about Rienzi's return to Rome, and how he was trying

to hire German mercenaries to accompany him, 16 companies of German cavalry to accompany him to retake Rome. The chronicle tells of their deliberations, the deliberations of the German mercenaries. And I want to read it for you, it's a very nice passage. I'm reading now from this very old book, a translation. German constables argued that they ought not to go, to be Cola di Rienzi's mercenaries. They advanced three reasons. The first, Romans are bad people, proud and arrogant. In this they are unequalled. The second, this man is a plebeian, poor, of vile condition. He will have nothing to pay us with, so whom shall we serve? The third, the Roman aristocrats are opposed to this man's government. If we displease them, they will become our enemies. Therefore, let us not take this job.

This work in Rome will do us no good." This indeed was the answer of the Germans and it was correct. Germans, when they first come down from Germany, are simple, pure and guileless. After they have worked among the Italians, they become astute masters, vicious and skilled in every evil. The Germans were opposed by a Burgundian constable, etc. He tells the story of how they were actually convinced to go fight in Cola di Rienzi's civil war. But isn't that great, that passage I just read you? Now this is way before nationalism was supposed to have existed, according to academic eggheads. Yet here you have this anonymous chronicler talking about the national character of the Germans versus the Italians in ways you'd recognize even today. So what this means?

You must beware in all your political plans about the material available to you, the human material. Rienzi thought he could resurrect the ancient Roman glory, but the Romans of his time were quite different people. And I say this in all love of the Italian people. I would choose to live in Italy over Germany myself, but he should have designed a plan better suited to their character. And in any case, he should have understood himself better, or at least if that's almost impossible for any man, but he should have embraced the life of the armed captain as much as that of the orator. This what Machiavelli says is most important for a prince, to practice military virtues, to practice patrol, to practice his military, because with military virtue and many soldiers

on your side and you leading them in battle yourself, you can achieve almost anything. This is a natural way that is returning. I think Caesar must have both the people and the army always with him. Peronism. Juan Perón. Peronism. Bap out.