Luigi Giuliano de Anna (born 3 August 1946 in Giovinazzo, Italy) is an Italian so-called “cultural historian” who works as a professor of Italian language and culture at the University of Turku (Finland); in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
De Anna’s university has a terrible reputation because it has been infected by the Denial for profit movement. De Anna’s colleague, senile Jyrki Kauppinen, decided to join the shameless, oil-financed gang of climate deniers who founded “Clexit”. Climate Exit (Clexit); a climate change denial group formed shortly after the UK’s decision to leave the EU. According to Clexit’s founding statement:
The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. One does not and cannot control the climate.
Climate Exit (Clexit)
Climate deniers have managed to get their dung papers “published” in inferior journals, and now they are activating their anti-science propaganda machine and their web of amateur denier trolls around the world. Climate deniers are so ignorant when they send their junk around in their echo chambers of idiot denier blogs, their right wing biased conspiracy sites and anti-science tribe catering ultra conservative libertarian propaganda outlets poorly drag-queened as “newspapers”.
SMOM yes-men
The university has also been infected by SMOM yes-men, like De Anna, pretending that the SMOM and the members of the so-called “alliance” descend from the original Order of Saint John, or Knights Hospitaller; a chivalric order of the Crusades and early modern period:
De Anna tells the reader a shameful lie. Neither the SMOM, nor the members of the “Alliance” can legitimately claim descent from the original Crusader order, because the Order was abolished on 11 August 1790. The SMOM was formed in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII.
The Alliance consists of the following self-styled Orders. None of them has anything to do with the Knights Hospitaller, although they falsely claim otherwise:
- The Johanniterorden (Balley Brandenburg des Ritterlichen Ordens Sankt Johannis vom Spital zu Jerusalem), or the “Bailiwick of Brandenburg of the Chivalric Order of Saint John of the Hospital of Jerusalem” formed 1852, based in Germany, as well as the non-German commanderies affiliated with the Bailiwick of Brandenburg, of which four have an autonomous status:
- the Johanniter Ridderskapet i Finland, based in Finland,
- the Association des Chevaliers de St. Jean, based in France,
- the Kommende der Johanniterritter in der Schweiz, based in Switzerland, and
- the Johannita Rend Magyar Tagozata, based in Hungary.
- The Johanniter Orde in Nederland, formed in 1909, based in The Netherlands.
- The Johanniterorden i Sverige, formed in 1920, based in Stockholm, Sweden.
- The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, based in the United Kingdom, started as a fake order in the 1830’s but gained a royal charter in 1888.
An American judge has put it correctly in a sentence against the SMOM:
The amounts of money each party has raised for charitable purposes are unimpressive, which leads the Court to believe that the members of both SMOM (…) are more interested in dressing up in costumes, conferring titles on each other and playing in a ‘weird world of princes and knights’ than in performing charitable acts.
Quoting the judge’s comments in the trial transcript, D.E. 144, 131:19–20
End of the real Knights Hospitaller
For the genuine Knights Hospitaller, the French Revolution was the beginning of the end. On 17 March 1790, all Church property in France began to be sold, be it buildings, lands, endowments, or moveable goods—a death blow to the commanderies of the Knights Hospitaller. On 11 August 1790, the National Assembly “decreed that those tithes possessed by secular and religious bodies, including the Maltese and other religious and military orders, were to be abolished;” in a single moment, most of the Knights’ revenue disappeared. The seizure of goods and endowments included the commandery of Manosque, the spiritual heart of the Knights Hospitaller and the burial place of Gerard, founder of the Order, including a lamp that had been maintained for centuries.
The Revolution gutted the Knights’ power base—those Knights who left France for Malta left without wealth or income to bring with them, and those who stayed ceased to be Knights. While financially devastating, the revolutionary disdain for the Knights Hospitaller also removed the protection, support, and training opportunities the French had provided them. The Knights’ best sailors had trained in the French fleet; French aristocratic families had provided the surest source of new knights in addition to some half of their total number; and the French fleet had routinely worked alongside the Knights in their various Mediterranean campaigns.
Sources
- Roderick Cavaliero, The Last of the Crusaders: The Knights of St John and Malta in the Eighteenth Century (London: Hollis & Carter, 1960), 6 (for the decline in crusading spirit and opportunity) and 11 (for the number of French knights–3 “Tongues” were in France: Provence, Auvergne, and France, with 272 commanderies, equaling roughly half the total number of Knights Hospitaller).
- Frederick W. Ryan, ‘The House of the Temple’: A Study of Malta and its Knights in the French Revolution (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne Limited, 1930), 174.
- Al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt. Edited with an introduction by Jane Hathaway. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009.
- Cavaliero, Roderick. The Last of the Crusaders. The Knights of St John and Malta in the Eighteenth Century. London: Hollis & Carter, 1960.
- Cole, Juan. Napoleon’s Egypt. Invading the middle East. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
- Scicluna, Joe. Malta Surrendered. Valletta, Malta: Allied Publications, 2011.
- Testa, Carmel. The French in Malta 1798-1800. Valletta, Malta: Midsea Books, Ltd., 1997.
Debunking the fake hunters 