ctwayfarer

“This French Great Return was the precedent to more Great Christian returns, most notably the Italian Great Return to Libya in 1911: The average imagination can hardly fail to be struck by Italy's resumption of territories that formed a part of Roman Africa. It is the custom, in some critical quarters, to deny to modern Italy the proud descent from Imperial Rome which has been a natural inspiration to a reborn people; and, narrowly viewed, the denial has a sound enough basis. Ethnologically, no doubt, the modern Italians are far removed from the dominant people which founded and administered the greatest empire in history, and it may be the fact that of this race there are no true descendants. Yet, despite the admixture of foreign blood which gradually overwhelmed the original stock, the Roman tradition has inevitably persisted, and to admit the denial of Italian heirship would be to allow an unjustified predominance to the claims of strict heredity. In a sense, all nations have shared in the heritage of ancient Rome, but the legitimate heirs to its glories and traditions are those who, now weakened, now strengthened, by the infusion of alien blood, have occupied throughout the centuries the ancestral land. The Tripolitan provinces are rich in Roman remains, and history is full of allusions to the productivity of regions that are now desolate. In Roman times the Tripolitan coast strip and the Cyrenaican plateau must have been veritable gardens, and to-day the memorials of a vanished.’773”
― S.E al Djazairi Salah E, French Colonisation of Algeria: 1830-1962, Myths, Lies, and Historians, Volume 1