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April 4, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:31
BORDER MADNESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep303
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I want to talk today about how the Biden administration, after a very brief pause, is now reopening the border to let in, well, more criminals, more drug traffickers, more bad guys into the country.
I want to reflect on a former CIA chief taking credit for lying to put Biden in the White House.
We're about to get a verdict in the Whitmer kidnapping trial and I'll summarize the case for the defense, the case for entrapment.
And I'm going to continue my exploration of purgatory focusing on two families whose members ended up in very different places.
This is the Dimash D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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Joe Biden's open border policies were stymied a little bit by two decisions.
One was a remain in Mexico policy that was imposed by a Texas judge, and that slowed down Biden's open border enthusiasm.
And the other was Title 42 public health expulsions, which was the idea that because of COVID, There were policies that returned applicants for asylum to their home countries, again, stemming the tide of people coming into this country illegals.
Now, Biden is now lifting these Title 42 restrictions, which means there's going to be a lot more people coming into the country.
How many? No one knows for sure, but some estimates, this is in a recent article, perhaps 500,000 migrants arriving at the border.
Wow. Big number.
And this is not because COVID is gone or over.
On the contrary, it's because the Biden people feel emboldened to sort of start up, you know, kind of start up their engines again.
The driving force here is Mayorkas, Who basically wants to take a bad problem and make it worse.
In fact, he doesn't mind the fact that these border cases have clogged the courts.
See, when people file for asylum, they're assigned a kind of court case.
And there's a huge backlog, a 1.5 million people backlog.
So that means that it could be four to six years before your case comes up.
And what do the Biden people intend to do?
Well, they intend to release these people in the United States in the meantime.
Kind of like, show up in 2024 for your court hearing.
Now, some of them will show up, some of them won't show up.
But these guys don't care.
The Biden administration has no internal system of monitoring to make sure that they know where people are, make sure they show up for trial.
None of that. This is just part of a scheme to, in a sense, wreck the immigration restriction system and, in a sense, flout the law.
They're flouting the law in the name of the, quote, practical difficulties of enforcing the law.
So this is basically blatant lawlessness by the Biden people.
And think about it, all these guys are coming into the country, they're going to, at a difficult time when people are struggling to get back to work, people are struggling for housing, housing costs and difficulties in getting housing.
Of course, there's inflation, there's rising rent prices, America's dealing with issues of drug addiction, extended joblessness, some of which started in the COVID but hasn't abated ever since.
And Biden doesn't really care.
Why? Because they're looking at the political benefit of doing this.
They're essentially trying to corral more potential voters, at least down the road for the Democratic Party.
And a number of Republicans are sort of onto this.
In fact, they're pointing out, they're saying, listen, this is a deliberate scheme by Biden to flout the law.
It's a deliberate scheme to do this.
And Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, he goes, that's their whole plan.
And I think this is right on.
This is not incompetence on the part of Border Patrol.
This is a deliberate scheme by Biden and the left.
To change this country, wreck our immigration restriction system as long as they derive some political benefit out of it.
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So just to recapitulate, Hunter Biden left his laptop at a computer repair store.
He never picked it up.
And eventually the computer ended up in the hands of the FBI, but a copy of it was provided to the New York Post.
They broke the Hunter Biden story about the Hunter Biden emails.
Now shortly after that, 50 intelligence officers basically signed a statement in which they questioned the legitimacy of this Hunter Biden story.
They said that this may not have been Hunter Biden's laptop at all.
They implied that this was Russian disinformation.
Their story, their statement was quoted in an article by Politico that said it was Russian disinformation.
And now it turns out that Hunter Biden's laptop, in fact it was pretty well known even at the time, is real.
So now that the New York Times has confirmed it, the Washington Post has confirmed it, the New York Post went back to all these 50 intelligence officers and said, well, what do you say now?
And most of them were in hiding.
They won't return phone calls.
They have no statement to make.
But interestingly, one of them, this is John Seifer.
He's a former senior operations officer at the CIA. He wrote a recent post on Twitter that says this, I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump.
And when Republicans said, in effect, that he caused Trump, that this suppression of the Hunter Biden story and the credibility of these 50 intelligence officers saying, that's Russian disinformation, he goes, quote, this is Cypher, I lost the election for Trump?
Well, then I feel pretty good about my influence.
So he could be here engaging in a little bit of boasting.
But I think what's really interesting is that here you have a guy, Who essentially used his title and the title of others like him.
They all prostituted their influence and their titles by testifying to something that is now known to be false and far from showing any sense of Devotion to the truth, integrity, a certain sense of, you know what, I didn't want Trump to win, but this was not the way to go about it.
Turns out that we made false statements about him.
The laptop was in fact legitimate.
No, this guy is actually celebrating the fact that his lies worked.
Kind of reminds me a little bit...
About when the Democratic majority leader, who was it, honey?
The guy who was making comments about Romney.
Wasn't it Harry Reid, I think it was?
Basically, he was lying about Romney.
And later, when his lies were exposed, he's like, well, it worked, didn't it?
Romney lost the election, didn't he?
So, here was Harry Reid in gangster fashion taking credit for lies.
And I think this guy, John Seifer, doing exactly the same thing.
And, and I think it shows the way in which a lot of these intelligence officers are untrustworthy characters.
And in this particular case, it's one thing if they use their kind of Machiavellian personalities to the benefit of the United States to our, to Fortify our defenses, I suppose.
In some ways, they're trained in lying.
That's what it means a little bit to be some sort of a spy.
But it's another whole thing when with a straight face and with no justification whatsoever, you lie to the American people themselves.
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The case is now before the jury.
There could be a verdict today, tomorrow, anytime soon.
And the real issue is what will the jury find?
Will they find these defendants guilty for participating in the kidnapping scheme or will the defense prevail?
As I hope it does, that these guys were entrapped by the FBI. Now, it's not very easy to prove entrapment.
I was listening to Judge Jonker basically give jury instructions, and he spelled out what you need to prove in order to show entrapment.
I'm going to read... What you need to prove.
A defendant is entitled to an entrapment instruction if there is sufficient evidence from which a reasonable jury could find entrapment.
The defense of entrapment has two elements.
One, government inducement of the crime.
And two, a defendant's lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal activity.
So, in order to warrant an entrapment, a defendant must come forward with evidence that supports both elements.
So, in other words, he has to show that the government did indeed induce the crime, and second, that the defendant or defendants themselves would not have gone ahead on their own.
Now, Adam Fox, the guy who supposedly led this plot, this guy was a broke...
He was an emotionally vulnerable addict who was apparently looking for company and looking for people who would affirm him and looking for people that he could sort of call friends.
And he ran into this guy named Big Dan.
Now, Big Dan, he didn't know.
This guy was a one-time Wolverine watchman, a kind of a militia guy.
But it turns out he had become an undercover informant for the FBI. And this is the guy who befriended Adam Fox, and at least according to the defense, led him into this plot.
So I want to quote here from defense attorney Christopher Gibbons from the statements that he was making to the jury in his closing arguments.
Because I think they're very resonant and actually accurately describe what was happening in the case.
He says, Adam Fox is not the leader the government wants him to be.
He never became a leader because he isn't a leader.
He didn't have the skills. He didn't have the equipment.
He goes on to point out that this guy, Adam Fox, was radicalized by Dan.
Dan is the one who sort of took him under his wing and together with another guy, another FBI handler, the two of them working in concert, sort of radicalized this poor guy, Adam Fox.
And Gibbons goes, this is unacceptable in America.
This is not how it works.
We don't make terrorists so that we can arrest them.
And I think this is really what's at issue.
Did the FBI, quote, make these guys into terrorists and then turn around and grab them?
By the way, I've suggested on the podcast...
That this is a scheme that the FBI started after 9-11.
They realized that more 9-11s aren't happening, so why don't we basically start creating terror plots and then busting them and then congratulate ourselves on the amazing job that we're doing.
And Gibbons, the lawyer, goes on to point out to the jury that Dan offered this guy Fox a free credit card.
He goes, yeah, you can use it as much as you want.
This guy Fox, by the way, was living in the basement.
He had no running water.
He had no toilet. He had to go brush his teeth in the Mexican restaurant next door.
So Gibbons says that the FBI has, quote, taken a vulnerable man and built him up with a fake militia.
So they try to tell him, hey, you can be part of a militia, but there's no real militia.
So the FBI guys themselves make up the militia.
Quote, the need for explosives was manufactured by the government.
The government's the one that says, oh, you're going to need some explosives, so we may as well go find some explosives.
Gibbons says that Big Dan and another FBI agent named Jason Chambers created the kidnapping plan.
So this is not a plan that these guys, the defendants, came up with on their own.
The FBI suggested the plan in the first place.
And apparently Big Dan once sent his supervisor agent at the FBI the following email.
If you need it to happen, I make it happen.
So what this guy is basically saying is, whatever you want to frame these guys on, I'll get them to do it.
I've got that kind of influence.
So this is what's going before the jury.
Now, juries in a lot of cases are very tempted to go with the prosecution because a lot of juries, particularly people who don't know what's going on in today's America, they take the view that, well, you know what, why would they charge him if they didn't do it?
You know, why would they have arrested him if he wasn't guilty?
So, a lot of jurors come in, even though they're supposed to adopt strict principles of, you know, innocent until proven guilty.
You've got to prove someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
It seems to me there's plenty of reasonable doubt in this case.
And so, I'm a little worried that the excessive sort of deference the juries give to the government, give to prosecutors, The idea that these guys are the law, and therefore they're only arresting people because these are bad guys who need to be locked up.
This is a very interesting moment in which, yes, the so-called Whitmer kidnappers are on trial, but the system itself is also on trial.
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Okay, I'm finally going to do a segment, although I assure you a brief segment on Will Smith.
When this first happened, this business with Chris Rock and Will Smith, I was like, this is silly.
I'm not even going to cover this.
I'm not going to say a word about it.
And I wasn't going to.
And then I see on television a woman named Professor Issa Nefertari-Ulin.
And this is the woman, she is, quote, the professor of African and diaspora literature at New York's Hunter College.
So, she's on TV. And she says that Will Smith's slap on Chris Rock was, quote, triggered by 400 years of black erasure and black silencing.
This was, like, too good to be true, so I had to fish out.
I had to go not just based on her clip, but an article that she's written, this woman in the Hollywood Reporter.
And, of course, it has all the usual circumambulatory nonsense.
We black folk often feel we are near drowning as we remain locked in a system that marginalizes us.
So let's pause to think about this, right?
She's describing why one black man slapped another black man.
And what are we getting? A recitation, this very typical, recycled, tedious narrative about the bad old days of the past.
Now, she does go on to say things like, Chris Rock should never, ever have let that joke come out of his mouth.
So, she's giving some justification, I guess, for Will Smith.
Then she goes, well, Will Smith shouldn't really have slapped him, and if he slapped him on the subway or someplace else, we really wouldn't stand for it.
Then she goes on to give a sort of a gender twist on this.
Quote, she goes, in his sudden decision to rise and approach Chris, the patriarchy's compulsory performance of strong manhood.
So she's now faulting Will Smith for engaging in patriarchal conduct.
She goes, in fact, the slap was, quote, a hyper-masculine response consistent with America's punitive justice system.
So... We have a punitive justice system, supposedly.
And that was being mirrored in Will Smith administering a slap.
And then she goes on, and this is the part that made me laugh out loud.
She starts talking about black women whose enslaved ancestors were required by law in some places and by custom in others to cover their hair in rags.
Blah, blah, blah.
What does this have to do with anything?
How does the actions of one black man and another black man We're good to go.
Here's a guy who made a joke about another guy's wife.
The joke was, I don't even think, really that funny.
It was kind of dumb.
And the other guy kind of took umbrage, took offense.
This could have happened among white guys.
It could have happened in pretty much any context.
And Will Smith clearly lost it, lost his cool, and kind of went nuts.
And that's kind of all there is to it.
But I guess what you have with the professoriate is the desire to sort of, oh yeah, hundreds of years of racial oppression.
I mean, it's not so much that that comes out of the incident, but it's really that professors like this Isar Nefertari, their life is based upon these recycled narratives.
Their job is based upon these recycled narratives.
If it wasn't for these recycled narratives, these people would have to teach math.
Or teach anthropology.
They would have to teach some subject that required them to learn something.
But instead, they can casually evoke all this history and try to interpret current events in the light of things that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a young woman named Hana Ratnam.
She's a Christian filmmaker of Pakistani origin.
She has a film company called Supernatural Stories Limited.
It's based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
She's won a number of film awards.
And she has had a remarkable life story and some remarkable experiences I want her to share with you.
Hannah, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks very much for joining me.
Probably most of our viewers and listeners won't be familiar with you, so can you begin by telling a little bit about your story?
Where were you born? Talk a little bit about your family.
First of all, I'd like to thank you and Debbie and the whole team who has been coordinating and giving me this opportunity.
This is really honored for me.
Thank you so much. Absolutely.
Thank you. I'm born and brought up in Pakistan.
I'm from Karachi.
I lived all my life in Karachi and I left 2000 permanently saying that I will never go back.
So that was my end of the story for Pakistan.
I also been married to a Pakistani.
My husband is Indian and I never wanted to go back to Pakistan.
Never ever. So we are seven brothers and sisters, including myself.
And my mother was a very, very spiritual woman, very near to God.
And my father was also a very strong man, very educated, very well established.
But the persecution in Pakistan is too much.
So my mother said, whoever got whatever chance, leave.
So I just kept somehow from Pakistan.
There was an opportunity.
I was doing my MBA at that time.
And somebody told me that there is an exhibition happening in Dubai.
Would you like to go?
I said, yes, I will go.
So they arranged everything for me.
I took the cottage industry, represented Pakistan in international market, and I left.
and I never went back.
Now, let's talk about Pakistan for a while.
It's the Islamic state of Pakistan.
At one time, I mean, I'm actually somewhat familiar with Pakistan.
My mother was born in Pakistan, actually very close to Karachi, so I had some family on the Indian side and some family on the Pakistani side.
Pakistan was, in its origins, pretty secular.
In other words, it wasn't founded as a sort of radical Islamic state, but it appears to have moved in that direction, maybe beginning with the Pakistani premier named Zia and now continuing over the subsequent decades.
But it sounds like you experienced in your family kind of a suffocating environment as a Christian in Pakistan.
Talk a little bit about that.
In what ways are Christians harassed in Pakistan?
I don't know what people think here about Pakistan.
It's a big mess.
It's such a big mess.
I have anything you name it, it's persecution.
Either you're in school, they discriminate you with your name, they also bully you with very bad names, especially with women.
It's such a bad treatment.
I myself had experienced so many things in my childhood, in my youth, my neighborhood, my School, college, university, anywhere and anything, you name it, they'll pursue.
Even if you sit in the bus, they do such things, which is, I don't feel good to talk about that.
They just touch you different parts.
They just touch you different names.
They call you with names.
It's horrible. And we are called in Pakistan, sweepers.
Wow. Now, Hannah, what sort of inspired you to go into the film business, you might say, is you have a film that's called Hannah's Dream.
So, explain to people who won't know, what is your dream and what made you think about turning it into a film?
I had a dream on 19 September 2013.
I always had dreams.
Age of nine I had first dream and every dream between three days and one year it used to come to pass and my mom knew that this is my calling but then when I had this dream I saw a white colored church And in that church, the beautiful decorated kind of Christmas event.
Children are singing with white dresses.
There are a lot of women preaching, teaching, beautiful worship happening.
And I was there present at that time.
And I saw two men running towards the church and they're holding big guns.
And they're saying, we are going to kill everybody.
And I heard them saying that.
And I got scared and I was worried and I start screaming and I said, close the doors, close the windows, these guys are getting in and they're going to kill everybody.
The moment I said this and one of the security guard got up to close the door, one of them got in the church.
And he suicide himself.
So he was the first bomb blast inside the church.
And then there was so much, oh my God, so much blood, so much body parts all around the walls, hanging on the trees, on the floor.
The whole building was like red with blood.
And then another bomb blast happened right after that.
And then I was one time in the hospital taking care of the people.
One time I was in the graveyard.
One time I'm in the church.
It was so hard for me to understand that dream.
And I got out of it scared and I said, Oh my Lord, what this happened?
I don't know where this is happening.
I don't know. So Hannah, what you're saying is that you had some earlier dreams that appeared to then be fulfilled in reality, and now you describe this sort of unbelievably vivid dream of a bombing of a church.
Well, did that in fact come to pass?
After three days it happened.
And where were you when that happened?
I was in Vancouver.
I see. I came back from, actually, I was so sad for three, four days.
So my husband said, let's go out.
And we went to watch a movie.
And during the movie, it was Salman Khan's movie.
And I was watching and I could see the bomb blast is happening as if it's happening in Pakistan or somewhere.
I don't know where. And I just told Ratnam, I see these people are mine.
I can feel, I can see their faces.
I have seen their clothes.
I think these are my people.
And we came back and I said, I don't know what's going on.
Just don't disturb me.
And I said, can I watch the TV? Can I spend some time quiet?
And the moment TV was off, this was the news.
Now, Hannah, let me have you draw, if you can, the significance of what you're saying, because there will be people who will be sympathetic to your story, but they're going to say, well, listen, the idea that one could somehow, through dreams, anticipate real future events, I mean, that's just not normal.
Would you agree that it's not normal?
Are you saying that you have...
Perhaps a gift of prophecy or of insight that has enabled you to sort of experience this before it actually happens?
What is for you the significance of this dream?
I'm not a filmmaker. I don't have education in film or anything in writing or doing anything like that.
It is purely God thing.
When I had this dream, I prayed for five years for these people and I said, Lord, I don't know what to do for them.
I don't know where to go.
I'm new to Canada. I'm not even settled.
How am I going to help these people?
And I heard a voice from God after five years, Habakkuk 2.2.
And in that, I read in my Urdu Bible, and it says, write on big plates.
So people from far, those who are running, can see.
And I said, Lord, what kind of plate is this?
In this world, I don't know what you're talking, and I don't understand.
Can you explain to me?
And I kept that verse and I kept praying for that verse for almost two years.
And then I was not able to do anything and I said, Lord, I don't know where to go.
And these cry and these people hurt.
I can still see their wounds.
The body parts are still in my eyes inside me.
What do I do? And then I was praying again and I heard another voice and God says, Christian media.
And I googled Christian media and there was a conference happening.
I went there.
Everybody told me, write a script.
Because what you're telling, people will not understand.
The way it just is said.
People won't understand what you're talking.
I'm sorry. No, that's quite okay.
Well, I think...
I think this is something that people should check out further.
I find it very intriguing.
I don't quite know what to make of it.
I've got to confess, Hannah, but I wish you all the best in your journey.
And I want to mention your website.
It's hannahratnam.com.
Will people be able to find out more about your story if they check it out?
Sure. There's everything there.
Okay. All the best to you, Hannah, and thanks for coming on the podcast.
And folks, you're welcome to check her out at hannahratnam.com.
Thank you so much.
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We're now with Dante the Pilgrim in Anti-Purgatory, the sort of purgatorial waiting room.
And Dante runs into a couple of very interesting characters, and I'm going to talk in this segment about two of them.
The first one is a guy named Manfred.
And Manfred is a Ghibelline commander, a warrior, A guy who was actually killed in battle, killed in 1266 in the Battle of Benevento.
And Manfred, it turns out, was also the son of the Emperor Frederick II. Now, you might remember Frederick II is in the circle of the heretics in hell.
So, we have from Dante this very interesting phenomenon.
Families aren't all in the same place.
Frederick is in hell. His son Manfred is evidently in purgatory.
But... What makes this kind of a puzzle is that Manfred himself has been doing many, if not most, of the bad things that Frederick was doing.
In fact, we read in the footnotes that this is a guy who apparently is said to have murdered his brother Conrad and two of his nephews and tried to murder another nephew.
This is a guy who killed a lot of people on the battlefield.
So let's look at what happens in Dante's description.
Here's Dante in the outer portals of Purgatory, and he says, he sees this man, a handsome patrician he was, although a sword wound cut through one eyebrow.
So you can see a gash right on his face.
And then Dante says, when I confessed I did not recognize him, he said, look!
And he revealed a gash above his breast.
Now, here's something interesting, because if we think back to Dante...
In hell, people in hell kind of demand to be recognized.
Don't you know who I am?
Don't you know who my ancestors are?
But notice here, you've got a very important man, Manfred, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor.
And when Dante doesn't recognize him, he doesn't really mind.
He instead bears his breast and shows a big gash on his chest.
Now back to the text.
Then with a smile he said, Manfred, I am...
And for centuries, really, scholars have talked about this Manfredian smile, because Dante gives no explanation at all as to why Manfred is smiling.
And a number of scholars have pointed out, and I agree with this, that Manfred is smiling because he's saying to Dante...
You know what? You probably didn't expect to find me here.
Guess what? This is a big surprise.
I was just as much of a bad guy as Frederick.
But I made it.
And I'm happy I made it.
And that's why I'm grinning and that's why I'm smiling.
And then Manfred tells us what happened.
He's on the battlefield.
He's dying.
Quote, So there it is.
What differentiates people in purgatory is repentance.
And repentance is available to all who seek it.
And then Manfred says something very interesting.
He says, the church's curse is not the final word, for everlasting love may still return if hope reveals the slightest hint of green.
Now what Manfred is referring to here is the fact that he had been excommunicated by the Pope.
The Pope threw him out of the church.
And Dante, for one, does not believe that excommunication is meaningless.
Yeah, if you're excommunicated, you are in fact severed from, you may say, the body of Christians on the earth.
You are thrown out, and Manfred was.
But, says Dante, and this is a critical point, that while excommunication can deprive you of the fellowship of fellow Christians on earth, at least in Dante's view, it doesn't deprive you of the fellowship of the saints in heaven.
In other words, it doesn't have that kind of a power.
If Manfred repents, as he does, you know what?
He has to go through purgatory because he does have to be purged, but at the same time he is on his way, inevitably, to heaven.
Let's turn now to the other guy that we find pretty much in the same part of the purgatorium.
And this guy's name is Buon Conte Montefeltro.
Now, if this strikes a little bit of a chord, rings a bell, it should, because this guy Buon Conte is the son of a guy we talked about in Inferno, Guido da Montefeltro, one of the fraudsters, one of the false counselors.
And with Buonconte, his story is very similar to Manfred.
He says he's on the battlefield.
He was actually fighting for Arezzo against Florence.
He gets killed in a battle that actually restores the Guelphs to power in Florence.
And here's Buonconte talking.
He goes,"...I made my way, my throat and open wound, fleeing on foot.
There I went blind.
I could no longer speak." But he goes, but as I died, I murmured his name, which is to say God's name.
And then something really quite remarkable happens, which is, he now says, God's angel took me up, and hell's fiend cried, O you from heaven, why steal what is mine?
Now, if you think about this, this is a beautiful Dante-esque inversion because if you remember with Guido da Montefeltro, St.
Francis came down to get Guido's soul and at the last minute the devil showed up and go, leave him alone!
He's mine! And he snatches Guido and takes him down to hell.
Here's the exact opposite.
Here you have Buon Conte, a bad guy, and the devil is waiting to get him.
But because he repented at the last moment, even though his throat was slashed, because he reached out to God, at the last minute it's not the devil, but God's angel comes down and goes, basically, this one is mine.
And then the devil is angry and gnashes his teeth and goes, oh, you Dante, once again, through this kind of beautiful parallelism, making the point that what distinguished Guido from Buon Conte isn't that one was a good guy and one was a bad guy.
They were really both bad guys in their lives.
They both committed a lot of sins.
The difference? Guido tried to outwit God.
And oh, to think it could have worked.
Buon Kante didn't do that.
He reached out to God.
And that alone made all the difference.
In the last segment, I discussed the fate of two interesting characters, Manfred and Buonconte da Montefeltro.
And in both cases, we were introduced to larger families.
Manfred, the son of the Emperor, Frederick II, Buonconte, the son of Guido da Montefeltro.
And while Frederick and Guido are in Hell, in Inferno, Here are Manfred and Buonconte in Purgatory.
And we see here Dante dealing with the issue of family.
And... You find these families dispersed.
There's a very interesting family in the Divine Comedy, and this is the family called the Donati family.
Forrese Donati is a poet, a friend of Dante's, and Dante will later bump into him among a group of poets in Purgatory.
But Faresi, Donati's ancestor, was a guy that we've come across.
I didn't really mention him.
He's a minor character, but there he is in hell.
And later, as we get to paradise, we find Picarda Donati, Faresi's sister.
So the brother is in purgatory, the sister is in heaven, and one of the ancestors is in hell.
And so you see here Dante recognizing that each soul is...
Is judged, you might say, on its own relationship to God.
This is not a case where family might count on earth.
Aristocratic families may fend for each other.
They may belong to the same political party.
But in heaven, says Dante, it's not like that.
And now we turn to a very minor character who nevertheless is in her own way unforgettable.
And her name is Pia.
So Dante is now in Canto V, and he's about to finish the Canto, and a woman speaks to him, and she says only this.
She says, oh please, when you are in the world again and quite rested from your journey here, she says, remember me, I am Lapia.
And then she says, I'll come back to what she says in a moment, but I want to pause for a second because who are we talking about here?
We're actually talking about a woman And apparently, her name is Pia Ptolemy of Siena.
And she's a woman who was apparently surprised by her husband in an act of adultery.
So right away, we remember that this is almost a remake of what we found in Inferno 5.
Inferno 5 was Paolo and Francesca.
Notice, by the way, that this scene we're talking about is in Purgatory 5.
So, in other words, this is not some kind of an accident.
Dante has very carefully placed this incident right here.
And even though the action seems to be the same, woman in adultery, subsequently killed by her husband...
There couldn't be a bigger difference between Pia and Francesca.
First of all, they both speak with a certain kind of gentleness and courtesy.
But here's the difference. While Francesca is very much focused on herself, she says to Dante, oh, you've come through the underworld to see me.
And then she goes into great length about who she is and what her feelings are and so on.
What's striking here is the brevity of Dante's exchange with Pia.
Pia says almost nothing and what she says is only about Dante.
She cares not about herself.
She cares about Dante.
Oh please, when you are in the world again and are quite rested from your journey here.
It's a long journey. The first thing you need to do, almost like a sister or with maternal affection, you need to rest.
And then she does want to be remembered.
But she says this. This is actually a line, very beautiful in the Italian, and not so good in the English.
It's translated here as, Siena gave me life, Maremma gave me death.
But in the Italian, it's more like, I was made in Siena, I was unmade in Maremma.
Something more like, I was made in New Mexico, unmade in San Francisco.
So there's a kind of a, there's a rhyme sequence going on here.
But All that Pia is basically saying is that I was born here.
I died over here.
When you get back, I'd like you to remember me.
So, what's touching about all this is that apparently the difference between Pia and Francesca is that for Francesca, she was the center of the universe.
Whereas with Pia, it's not like that.
Pia recognizes she has to make some atonement for her sins, and that's why she's right here in purgatory.
She has a mountain, in fact, seven-story mountain to climb before she's going to get to heaven.
But there must have been, Dante doesn't even go into it.
He doesn't go into the circumstances, but there must have been some repentance at the last moment, which reconciles Pia with God, which conveys her repentance, which is why she's in purgatory and she's not in hell.
And then she says, interestingly, remember me.
And what's interesting is I probably read this the first time when I was 24 years old, and I remember her all the way through.
Even though there's no description of her, Dante gives no sense of whether she was tall or short, whether she's blonde or brunette.
You know nothing about this woman, not even how old she is.
But she says, remember me, and this is the immortality of Dante's poem, that by her saying that, and even though she makes, you can almost call it a cameo appearance, Here in Purgatory, she is, because of Dante's hand, an unforgettable character,
and we understand her better by contrasting her with her moral, you might say, immoral counterpart, which is the exhibitionistic Francesca in Canto V of the Inferno, Dante wants us to read the poem this way.
Notice that what we're doing is we're reading forward, but we're constantly pulling backward, and we're revising our understanding and deepening our understanding of characters, even in the inferno, as we go through Purgatorio and ultimately on to Paradiso.
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