Dangerous Times: Europe's New Crypto Cults Don't Hate Islam

By James Lewis and Justine Aristea

There is something strange about the fast-rising European "crypto fascist" movements. They are peas in a pod -- with similar political programs, and similar nationalist and anti-capitalist rhetoric. They all hate the two Satans of Iranian propaganda, Israel and America. Yes, the Persian Gulf supplies 40% of Europe's oil and therefore has vast political power in all the countries where the cryptos operate. But they are realy monomaniacal about Israel, which has nothing like the power of the oil states. Most peculiarly, all those anti-foreigner movements don't have a bad word to say about 50 million Muslims who now populate the capital cities of Europe. 

Not one bad word.

All the cryptos use the web to recruit and direct their followers. Just as the invention of radio led to Mussolini's and Hitler's mass appeal, the web is doing so for Giuseppe Grillo and all the others. Some of the cryptos therefore want the voting age to be lowered to 16, so they can catch 'em while they're young.

These movements recruit many thousands of grossly ignorant teens, surfing the web. They use mystery names -- Golden Dawn, Red and Black, Five Stars -- as if they came from a single cookie cutter. They all try to absolve the faded Nazi and fascist parties of the 30s and 40s.

But most important, while the crypto cults rage against foreigners, none of them criticize mass immigration of Muslims. They treat Muslim immigration the way the U.S. media treat Obama.

This is too much of a coincidence. Human beings are not all alike. When we act like carbon copies, something else is going on. The Communist International (Comintern) has run look-alike parties in Europe since 1900. Local communist parties never criticized Comrade Lenin or smiling Uncle Joe. You could tell their loyalties by their blind spots.

It's seems likely that the crypto cults are recruited, paid, trained, advised and controlled by some Muslim power center, like Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the Pentagon recently estimated to have 30,000 agents around the world.

Our bet is that the Iranians are running a new Comintern. With the global web all it takes is money, time, a huge expatriate population to hide in, and a ruthless network of controllers. Tehran runs a ruinous domestic economy for ordinary people, but it does those things very well.

Take our favorite crypto cult leader, Giuseppe (Beppe) Grillo, who imitates Mussolini every chance he gets. A few months ago Grillo's party got only one percent less than Il Duce did in 1922. Mussolini parlayed those first election results into 65% only three years later, using bullying, threats and intimidation. Italy's political center collapse under his assault, and Duce ran the place until Italy itself collapsed at the end of the war.

Following in Duce's footsteps Beppe Grillo tried his own "march on Rome" a couple of weeks ago, but was stopped by the cops and military. Opposition parties finally united in a grand coalition against his movement. But Grillo isn't giving up.

Iranian links to Grillo are too obvious to ignore.

Go back 20 years.

In 1992 Grillo was a minor comedian. That year he meets his internet guru, Gianroberto Casaleggio. Today they are the two commanders of the Five Star Movement, which is run like an army, from the top. Twenty years ago nobody had heard of them.

Four years after Grilo and Guru meet, in 1996, Grillo marries the very wealthy daughter of a multimillionaire Iranian highway builder, NosratollahTajik, who indoctrinates him in Middle Eastern politics. "Everything I know about the Middle East I learned from my father in law" is Beppe's way of saying it. That is why he consistently kisses Iran's tail on his blog -- one of the 10 most visited blogs in the world. On the Satan side of things he smears the Jews, Israel, and America, which are all the same, because the Jews run Israel and America. Got it? Poiltics for morons.

All this good fortune comes to Grillo from Parvin Tajik and his Iranian daughter, who make Grillo a wealthy man, with two Ferraris, several villas, and a big motor yacht. What a lucky guy.

In 1998 Grillo's blog presents his Message to Humanity (Messagio a l'Umanita). You can read it there today. Grillo's Messagio rambles through a lot of disconnected phrases and paranoid ideas. But his full-fledged program is there already in 1998, fourteen years ago. With the help of his web guru, Grillo's blog is popularized under Italy's political radar. Nobody in politics takes him seriously, but millions of kids are becoming Grillinis. Today they vote for Grillo. They are a cult, with primitive and indefensible beliefs, a shared monomania, a split vision of the world into Good and Evil. In terms of real politics, economics, and history they are militantly ignorant.

All that started in the mid-90s as a full-blown play script. The good guys, the evil guys, the fantasy of World War III followed by pure internet democracy, the glorification of Beppe Grillo and his web guru.

Nobody knows how the Movement is funded. It's run by only two people, both of them oddballs. But -- Beppe is a comedian! No political party took him seriously. If he wants to imitate Mussolini, maybe it's just a parody. Parody is free speech. He operates under light cover until early this year.

There is now a whole fantasy universe of Grilloid beliefs about the international bankers, the real history of the Jews (who come from Kazakhstan, not that other place), the way chemotherapy is made to kill you, vaccines make you homosexual, aerial contrails are spreading poison in the skies, on and on. This is a real fascist cult, and many thousands of followers live in that universe. It's all they know.

This year Grillo's Five Star Movement comes out of nowhere and gets 24 percent of the vote -- not much by American standards, but neck and neck with Mussolini's first election. If Grillo plays tough he can block the formation of a government, like Duce did in the 20s, and threaten and intimidate his way to a majority. Mussolini got 65% in his second (and lastl) election. Grillo says he wants 100%.

Today Beppe Grillo is forging an alliance with the far left. As a bloc the radical left owns 18% of the vote. Grillo can take their 18% to get 42% of the Parliament. Some Grillo appointee can then become Prime Minister of Italy.

Remember the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938? By looking for allies on the far left Beppe is trying to recreate the Red-Black alliance of the 30s.

Ole' Beppe is also reaching out to other nativist parties, like France's National Front. In Hungary Viktor Orban's crypto party has just taken power. In Greece, Albania, Spain, look-alike parties are making gains. Ordinary people are desperately unhappy because of the bad economy. They have been lied to by the ruling classes. They were promised peace and prosperity forever, and now they want a scapegoat. In the East some yearn for the Soviet years, when they had work and bread to eat.

Some of these countries have rarely seen a centrist government. Democratic conservatism exists, but less widely than in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and even India, where Prime Minister Singh is a free market economist. When Europeans think "left wing" they think communist. "Right wing" is fascist. The democratic center is always under attack.

If you think the United States is in trouble today from a radicalized left, imagine if both wings were extremists, European style.

Last week the Iranian propaganda agency PressTV published an opinion column denouncing Beppe Grillo as a tool of Goldman-Sachs and the State Department. The Iranian regime is all out to put the blame for Grillo on somebody else.

We wonder why.