Lollobrigida’s “ethnic substitution” seen from biology: an absurdity

Of nonsense about the Italian national identity, as expected, in the last period if they are hearing a lot. One of the latest, coming from a minister who is rather recidivist in terms of useless and pernicious definitions of identity, concerns a hypothetical process of “ethnic replacement”, a sad combination used by the worst racists and extremists of the modern global right. What is the origin of such a binomial, which has gone to systematize previous and centuries-old fears of invasion of every sedentary population against external immigration, has been well explained in an article that appeared in the Post, which brings this formulation back to the delusional ideas of the French Renaud Camus and the Austrian Gerd Honsik; here, however, I am interested in making some clarifications from the point of view of biology, my direct field of expertise. Meanwhile, although they are often used as interchangeable synonyms precisely by those who speak of “ethnic replacement”, the two concepts of ethnicity and race must be kept distinct: while the first has an original sense of cultural distinction, inherent above all to food, marital customs, religion etc., the idea of ​​race, despite being a social construct invented for obvious purposes of domination, has its reference in an alleged biological distinction within the various human populations.

Having made this difference, and taking the last nonsense we have heard literally, we must infer that there would be a danger for citizens deriving from an alleged process of cultural substitution, a crossbreeding of identity due to migratory phenomena; but the confusion between race and ethnicity of those who fear this risk is then manifested in the proposed remedy, which should consist in encouraging and supporting the motherhood of Italian women – which, of course, fully reveals the racism of those who would like to face a phenomenon etymologically cultural with a remedy based on the increase of a non-existent race of citizens of our peninsula. Now, disregarding the confusion underlying the proposed solution to the feared danger, let us pretend for a moment that we are genuinely concerned in the terms set forth by the minister mentioned above. Unless he is a Neanderthal, there is one important first point: we are all African invaders, arrived in different waves and by different roads to supplant a pre-existing human population that had not only its own ethnicity and race, but also a very different genetic heritage; and, unlike the populations still residing in Africa, we are all genetic mestizos deriving from the invasion that our ancestors made at the expense of the Neanderthals.

Furthermore, for millennia, migratory flows from the Middle East continued to affect our peninsula, and the ensuing crossbreeding – both genetic and cultural – is well documented by archeology and by examining the DNA of even the most ancient inhabitants of Italy; and the very first time our country was reunited, under the Roman eagle so fashionable among certain groups anxious to defend our identity, it was then that Rome, even more than the whole country in the previous ten thousand years, became what it has been defined as a “genetic crossroads” of the Mediterranean. At the same time, what we could technically call an “ethnic substitution”, referring to the cultural phenomenon, was constantly taking place: thus Cato launched himself unsuccessfully against the customs of the Greeks, then followed in terms of cultural appropriation by those of the Egyptians – o tempora, o mores ! – up to the umpteenth “ethnic replacement” established due to the change of cultural paradigm of Christianity. Rome’s strength was precisely its ability to appropriate and amalgamate the cultures it encountered, according to taste and need; with this system, it lasted over 1000 years, without pretending to defend itself against “ethnic replacement”, but rather by absorbing and mediating.

In my DNA, I was able to verify, there are genetic variants common among Far Eastern, Minoan, Greek, Lombard populations and who knows how many others; this despite the fact that I can demonstrate an uninterrupted line of descent from residents of Italy dating back to before the year 1000. I gladly offer myself to verify what genetic miscegenation can be found in the DNA of any Italian minister: I’m sure there would be no shortage of surprises, and, of course, it would be all too easy to demonstrate how many stratified “ethnic replacements” each of us is a child of, probably far more than a modern Central African population. So let’s stop playing around and playing Italians with certain amenities, which would be better left in the cages of the zoo of the extremists of white superiority; because otherwise the suspicion is that, in reality, these continuous shootings today on “ethnic replacement”, yesterday on “synthetic meat” and the day before yesterday on the “foreigners” used by the administrations are actually an uninterrupted string of fireworks , which serve to raise our eyes not to see some big stumbling block we are about to run into as a country.