Charnel House Europa

1,585  words

Francesca Totolo
Le Vite delle Donne Contano
Altaforte Edizioni, 2024

(Italian version here)

Francesca Totolo is an Italian reporter with a significant presence on Italian social media. She has almost ten thousand subscribers on Telegram and over fifty thousand followers on X. Much of what she posts has to do with the decline of Italy, caused in no small part by the arrival of migrants from dysfunctional third world countries. In late August of this year, she published her fifth book, Le Vite delle Donne Contano. The English interpretation of the title would be “Women’s Lives Matter”.

Her book is a compilation of the numerous attacks on women in Italy and the rest of Europe which have occurred over the past ten years or so, and which were perpetrated by migrant men. It is a necessary book. So many of these crimes go underreported or unreported entirely, the names of the victims unsaid or forgotten, along with the names of the criminals. Totolo’s book reads much like a thread on X. It is mostly comprised of data. The date and grim details of a murder here, a rape there. The data is mostly conveyed in short paragraphs. Each paragraph tells the story of an act of crime against women, before moving onto the next paragraph which recounts another.

The composition of Le Vite delle Donne Contano recalls Douglas Murray’s 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, in particular the chapter entitled “Learning To Live With It”. Said chapter is a blow-by-blow account of some of the most gruesome crimes committed by so-called refugees and migrants to European lands. However, where Murray’s book featured personal stories and interviews with people from every stage of the migration process, along with Murray’s engaging prose, Totolo’s book is mostly just a report of cold hard facts. This could be considered a shortcoming. It’s been said that facts don’t care about feelings, but it’s worth remembering that feelings don’t care about facts.

We live in a data-obsessed age. Everyone likes to play armchair statistician. A quick glance across the Internet allows one to find all the information required to pretend to be an expert on something. In the end, all the percentages, charts, graphs, and data analysis amounts to nothing but noise. Most people just aren’t swayed by facts. When it comes to the consequences of Europe’s disastrous migration and open borders policies, cold statistics matter even less. A chart displaying the grotesque overrepresentation of Afghans in cases of sexual violence across Europe is nothing compared to the photo of a child “refugee” lying lifeless on a beach, drowned along with his hopes of reaching “a better life”. The nationalist right has failed to appreciate the power of feelings and of storytelling. Le Vite delle Donne Contano does feature a powerful emotional message, but it doesn’t come from Totolo’s words. It comes, rather, from Alessandra Verni, the mother of Pamela Mastropietro. Pamela was 18 years old when she was raped, murdered, and dismembered by a drug dealer from Nigeria with the irony-laden name Innocent Oseghale. In Verni’s postface, we are given a brief glimpse at the real human pain and suffering “refugees welcome” and other immigration delusions have caused.

Another shortcoming of the book is hinted at by the title itself. Totolo chose to focus exclusively on violence against women. All the men and boys (and there are many) who have been murdered, and raped too, by third world migrants are not mentioned. “Women’s lives matter” but do we really need to be told that? Our society already values women and girls higher than men and boys.

Allow me to share a brief anecdote. Upon the announcement of her book’s title in Francesca Totolo’s Telegram group chat, one of her followers asked, “And the lives of males? Do they not matter?” His question was met with a derisive response by someone, we’ll call him Marco, who mocked the very idea that men and boys were also victims of migrant crime. I observed their back and forth for a bit, and then decided to join in. While conceding that women and girls are more likely to be victims of sexual violence, I provided Marco with several examples of men and boys who have been murdered, some also raped, by third world migrants to Europe. Marco continued not only to wave these examples away, but he also laughed at them, replying with laughing emojis to every story of a boy’s death at the hands of a foreign invader. A young man being beaten, stabbed, or hacked to pieces is insignificant and unworthy of reporting, because, in Marco’s eyes, it’s so rare. The attacks on women are what really matter. He couldn’t be more wrong about this, but Totolo’s choice of title and subject will do nothing to change his mind and make him care about the lives of Europe’s sons.

In fact, another shortcoming of her book is that it’s not even really about the violence against Europe’s daughters. Le Vite delle Donne Contano cites several examples of foreign men killing or maiming their foreign wives or ex-girlfriends. Sorry, but I don’t care that an Indian man set his Indian wife on fire. I only care that it happened in Italy. Neither the husband nor his wife should be in any European country. I certainly don’t care more about an Indian woman than I do about a German boy beaten to death by migrant gangs. Totolo’s book ignores Arthur Leven, Thomas Perotto, Dominque Bernard, the Austrian boy raped in a public bathhouse, and so many others, in order to tell us about the suffering of Pakistani and Sri Lankan women at the hands of their spouses.

Perhaps from Totolo’s perspective, the accounts of these foreign women serve to strengthen her overall point, which is that Italy and the rest of Europe have imported genuinely misogynistic people into their societies en masse. This is not exactly groundbreaking. Totolo’s book makes frequent reference to Ayan Hirsi Ali. Ali is one of many conservatives who base their opposition to mass immigration on the treatment of women in Islamic culture. It’s a relatively safe way to oppose immigration without touching the third rails of racial differences and demographic replacement, thereby ensuring that you’ll still be invited to cocktail parties with Chris Rufo and Jordan Peterson.

I don’t want to come across as being too hard on Francesca Totolo or her book. Totolo is very good on her social media accounts. She is well aware of the sostituzione etnica happening in Italy and all of Western Europe and does not shy away from denouncing it. She is also aware of the cases of migrants killing and maiming boys. It’s precisely because of that that I was disappointed by the contents and style of her book.

Le Vite delle Donne Contano seeks to impart information. On that front, it is successful. I was surprised to learn that, due to mass immigration from the Islamic third world, Italy’s legislature had to introduce prohibitions against forced marriages.

A common thread uniting so many of the cases of rape and murder is the foreknowledge and impotence of the police and Italian justice system. On more than one occasion, a foreign man who would go on to kill a woman was reported, sometimes by his own family, to police. The police would respond by saying that, until the man commits a crime, there is nothing they can do.

Another commonality in several cases is the brutally violent end young European women meet at the hands of their foreign boyfriends. Totolo never says anything explicit. She lets the data do the exposition, but the message couldn’t be clearer: do not let your daughters go out with men from Africa, the Middle East, or the Indian subcontinent.

I was not surprised, but still appalled, to learn that 39% of the inmates in Italian prisons come from North Africa, the same Maghrebi countries from which the majority of recent migration into Italy originates. At the level of juvenile crime, it’s even more alarming. As of January 2024, 51% of juvenile detainees are foreign. Of that 51%, 77% are from North Africa. These percentages will not include North Africans who have obtained Italian citizenship and are therefore classified as Italians.

Totolo also does a very good job taking Italy’s feminists to task for their wilful blindness and repulsive hypocrisy. Indeed, she goes so far as to hold feminists directly responsible for so much of the carnage in Europe. She is, without a doubt, correct to do so.

One of the most disgusting examples is the case of Iris Setti, a 61-year-old grandmother who was sexually assaulted and then killed by a Nigerian named Chukwuka Nweke.

Before murdering Mrs. Setti, Nweke had already committed a rash of crimes. The local magistrate, a woman named Viviana Del Tedesco, determined that Nweke did not deserve jail time and instead released him back onto the streets. She explained this decision by saying that Nweke “was collaborative”, a “well-behaved person”, that he “had such a spectacular physique” and “should have gone to Olympics”.

Seven years on from The Strange Death of Europe, it is a mix of absurd and enraging that books like Le Vita delle Donne Contano still can and must be written. It seems no amount of blood sacrifice will appease the open borders and diversity zealots. Until they are stopped and punished, and the human detritus they have allowed to waft into our homelands is collected and disposed of, more grandmothers, daughters, wives, and sons, will continue to be butchered.