A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived
thetimes.com102 points by Thevet 6 days ago
102 points by Thevet 6 days ago
https://archive.md/bzPSR
Sciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact. If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay. It's not a typo. In Italian, we call the nineteen hundreds the nine hundreds in speech. So when we write it, we use '900s. As 900s without it would be the actual 900s Truly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme. As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space.
Thanks for the recommendation! I thought I had replied to you, but somehow I ended up replying to Antirez's original comment. See my other comment Nit: I suppose you mean 1900s, not just "'900". I mean, one could reasonably suspect that good writers existed in Italy in early 10th century, too. Reminds me of the story of Andre Camara, who photographed a favela drug war in the mid 80s. Take away: criminals are vain too. For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time. I have to rewatch what, been a decade. From 2002. It's crazy how happy I was to have 360p mpeg rips back then. I'm gonna have to re-pirate it tonight. Same thing with the Taliban: https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2021/10/4/taliban-portraits By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr... Why wouldn't an up and coming government administration want to take professional photos and engage in all the other trappings of legitimate government? One interesting thing about the situation is that Islamic religious authorities used to have conflicting views on permissibility of portraits and depictions of living beings in general, which is also why so much Islamic medieval art is abstract. Abstract art was religiously safe. Ubiquity and practicality of photography basically destroyed the restrictive side of the conflict. As you can see, even the Taliban seems to be on the permissive side now. (IIRC some of the most extreme forms of Islamic State in Syria/Iraq tried to ban photography of humans and animals.) I agree. Syria’s new leader, a former Al Qaeda, put on a suit and got a major glow up: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250508-syrian-interim-preside.... Macron embraced him warmly. News orgs gave him positive coverage. Then Trump said what everyone was thinking: he looks pretty good in a suit: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ahmad-a.... I have no idea why you’re being downvoted, since what you say is objectively true. I always thought it was fascinating how the Sicilian mafia started. Basically the English demand for lemons to prevent scurvy grew much faster than any institutions to control it. Protection rackets rose to control the trade. https://theconversation.com/citrus-fruits-scurvy-and-the-ori... The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity. where is it mentioned? ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia. My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia: "Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia" I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned: "The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved." Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility. What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight. It's... a bit more complicated than that. That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found). Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach. Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics. In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima... > the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US. Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb". There's carabinieri in every 600 inhabitants village. Them being involved isn't any kind of big deal. I think people who don't live in italy and have no understanding about italy are allowed to not comment on things they don't know. Do all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else? In America some non-Italian mafias do get labeled as "a mafia" by the FBI. Generally the distinguishing factors between a "gang" and a "mafia" in FBI nomenclature is scale, sophistication, and organization structure/principles. In general, it being a "family operation" (trusting blood family over government or family as government) is a large factor, and often the "omerta" principle is a requirement (that's a strong, core collective binding to secrecy; "omerta" if held as a strong principal "breaks" the prisoner's dilemma game as a law enforcement tool). The Cornbread Mafia, taken apart by the FBI in the 1980s, is one interesting example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornbread_Mafia There used to be, but afaik modern networks are largely led by Balkan groups across the whole of Europe. Most just call them the government. Does the government engage in human trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking, illegal gambling, racketeering, identity fraud, etc? Is this a serious question? human trafficking? yup. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/how-to... prostitution? yup. https://www.awakenjustice.org/is-prostitution-a-choice drug trafficking? yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca... gambling? yup. https://www.powerball.com/ racketeering? yup. https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/rico/ That was a serious question, thank you. I think of mafia as providing services that a government/legitimate private entities cannot provide. Human trafficking - yup, I should have thought of that. In the counties listed in the link the governments does serve that mafia function. I was US centric in my thinking. Prostitution - no. It can be legal, but the government does not engage in it. Drug trafficking - I am sure some governments do it. I wouldn't put US in that list. Both the government investigations and the newspaper investigations found the allegations unsupported, according to the given link. I would say it could happen incidentally but organized crime does not need to worry about the government as a competitor in this space. Gambling - the lottery is not illegal gambling. But you can argue that is tautologically true. Racketeering - I don't see where in that link it says that the government engages in racketeering. Rico is a law that makes prosecuting racketeering easier. Modern version has spawned TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano Saviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about. Sciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s. It's not about the year of birth, it's about the role. Saviano creates his own career with mafia and now is acting as opinionist to any other option (i.e. now about the constitutional referendum that "will enforce the mafia"). Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career. This is an unrealistic argumentation, usually deployed to paint contemporaries in a bad light by comparing them to "saints" who are, conveniently, always dead. And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". Falcone also got extremely close to becoming the national anti-mafia czar, because his career had been defined by that very subject. Both were killed precisely because they specialised in this area and refused to move elsewhere. Sciascia was 67 when he wrote that column, and was likely just aggrieved by the fact that national response to the mafia was escalating to levels before unseen (for a number of reasons). He might have had a point about another name-checked personality, the politician Leoluca Orlando, who survived those terrible times and ended up ruling Palermo for more than 20 years - something a lot of people see as realistically incompatible with actually being the anti-mafia hardliner he is supposed to be. Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist. > And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". If you read the original article from Sciascia [1], you can understand that he was complaining about the risk of judge appointments drived by anti-mafia positions, more than competence. > Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist. If Saviano is only a specialized journalist, why is invited in many public talk-show where the topic is different from Mafia? Because that's just how media works. It's like asking why sportsmen and scientists are invited to Big Brother VIP. > ou can understand that he was complaining about the risk of judge appointments drived by anti-mafia positions But if you read it all, you can clearly see that he was mostly pissed off at the risk of identifying the entirety of his beloved Sicily with the mafia; and in this context, that everything about the island would be judged in relation to that phenomenon. In addition, he was worried at the fact that many in the ruling political party had started using antimafia as a shield; that's a veiled reference to Giulio Andreotti, who around that time shifted his positions and passed antimafia laws to shore up his support in the party (which is why the mafia moved their votes to the Socialist Party in '87). People obviously misread that column (willingly or otherwise) and proceeded to use it as a bat to beat any specialized anti-mafia figure, starting from the very person mentioned in it, Borsellino, who would end up isolated and assassinated by the mafiosi. Maybe it’s lost in translation but my argument is semantic. Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one. Off topic, but I'm always amazed by Archive.md/.is/whatever. To this day I don't understand how they manage to bypass a lot of paywalls. The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing. I assume they just pretend to be the Googlebot so the site just gives the text. Won’t work for any popular site. You can try that easily by using extensions to set the user agent. If you are not checking the public list of IPs that Google publishes for the crawler you are doing it wrong. I think archive has mostly news, random articles and such. And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news. Given to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised. There has been some dns resolver issues, some DNS resolvers wont return the address to the sites like archive.is or sites like Annas Archive Maybe they have a paid account? I don’t think there’s much magic behind Publications could use watermarking to encode the name of the account an article is being served to, but they don't seem to. I wonder why. thetimes.com has a paywall if you visit it from the UK, and full content if you are in the US. entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well: https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture... It angers me that Fascist Italy could push the Mafia to the brink of extinction but Democratic Italy can’t. They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy. by "they" do you mean Mussolini? What exactly Leonardo Sciascia mean in his "Porte Aperte" is the fascism merely "anesthetize" the mafia rather than eradicating it (gaining temporary Sicilian consent through illusionary repression) The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run. Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments. To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t. Does it need to be centralized? After a bit of thought, no it doesn’t. Actually a better way is to have strong citizens than a strong central government. Did they? I’m pretty sure that’s just political propaganda of the regime. I don't think they actually pushed the mob out, but evidently they did succeed in pissing off the mob enough to make the mob happy and willing collaborators with the Allies. I learned about it in the article. > Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant. I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief. With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia. How about America? And what about Trump? America doesn’t have bribery! It has “lobbying”. This has been a problem long before Trump made it shameless. This. We do't have bribery have made the bribery above the table to "legitimize" it and make the useful idiots and enablers simp for it. The "pure" act of lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all sorts of incestuous revolving door and distasteful but not illegal dealigns between government and the industries government favors. If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars being spend on <obvious handout bullshit with negligible positive impact on anything> then you should go vote about it" or "if you do't like the govermet squashing <something> at the obvious behest of <entrenched interest> just vote harder" comment I'd be rich enough to buy an entire train worth of boxcars to put those comment's authors on. There's corruption, and then there's corruption. Yes, lobbying does look a lot like bribery, but it's a matter of degree, and the difference in the degrees matter. I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay. They can, they just don’t do it. This is the case in every western „liberal democracy“. Why does that anger you? Democracy is fundamentally unable to solve such issues. Nearly every democratic country in the world is a counter example to this, what do you mean exactly? Not true. Organized crime operates largely where people have money, i.e. in Europe, it's mostly UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden...etc. I’m no expert on global crime stats, but it feels like organized crime used to be way more 'in your face.' Back in the day, the countries you mentioned including Eastern Europe, you’d hear about car bombings, public shootouts, and blatant protection rackets. Doesn't the relative disappearance of that kind of chaos suggest things have actually improved? Look at the UK, for instance the fact that average police officers patrol without firearms feels like a pretty strong indicator of a more stable society, doesn't it? Organized crime doesn't like publicly visible violence. That's bad for business. They only resort to that when they feel they have no other choice. They do shit like bomb judges and get into shootouts with the police when they have to exert their power, not when they feel secure and business is good. A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc. But aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?
It seems to me there always be someone who thinks he can get more money by leaving a group and creating one of their own or some other group trying to expand revenue and territory > aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime? Check out the Japanese Yakuza. Yes, they are in decline, but even at the peak of their powers they didn't really do that sort of thing. Gangsters can be pretty private. Besides, gangsters are not stupid. By now, Hollywood has produced tons of material about the rise and fall of criminals, with increasing realism; effectively, they educated the newer generations into not being as stupid as Tony Montana. Not necessarily. Intra-gang violence can be done in more private ways, public terrorism is a choice but not an inevitability. Gang splits are also less likely to occur when the government is corrupt and working with some gangs but not others; the intra-gang violence can be disguised as law enforcement action and the overwhelming power of the government makes them a powerful ally that deters competition from even trying. Interesting take. I think I have lived in an environment that makes it harder for to imagine stuff like that can happen Hell, Belgium is basically a narcostate at this point. If you think Belgium is a narcostate - oh my :) People lose touch with reality when life becomes too rich and comfortable, and they become too focused on security. You miss all the other corrosive influences on society. I've travelled the entire United States, multiple times over, and seen quite a bit of Europe and South America, and I'm in Colombia now. Latin America, and Colombia in particular would be far more of a "narcostate" according to the popular Northern definition - but perception often isn't reality. I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. The fabric of society functions pretty well - health care and healthy food is far more available, far less conflict with government apparatuses (try walking into a DMV anywhere in the states, vs. walking into a government office in Latin America - I think you'll find it enlightening). The security-obsessed mindset in the United States and Europe leads people to want to stamp out the mafia and cartels, but if you look at the actual outcomes I think it's pretty clear that that approach fails in the long run. Look at Mexico for the worst example of what can happen - being next to the United States the pressures have been high, and it hasn't worked, and cartel violence is absolutely ludicrous. When people have more of a "live and let live" approach, things tend to stabilize in unconventional arrangements that are on the whole much less toxic to society. So Colombia, which does have cartels, doesn't have the same level of warfare or violence that affects the average person as Mexico does - where you'll regularly see a half dozen army/swat guys on patrol in a pickup with M-16s. Even so, you don't feel the same level of tension about that in Mexico vs. seeing a LEO presense in the United States, where that often means outright harassment for the populace. There's a lot more to having a functional society than just eliminating elements that run contrary to "popular order". And Belgium is great :) > I've never seen the gripping poverty and desperation that's common in the United States anywhere in Latin America; even the poorer communities here tend to be vibrant and well functioning, with families and little farming communities everywhere that are living life well. with all the respect but what a naive paragraph. i suggest you to go away from touristics places or get into a poor part of any big city in Latin america. the stuff is nasty. what you are comparing is relatively stable rural families that would be an akin to a rural medium class on the USA... you can almost say in 100% of the cases a medium class North American is equivalent of someone from the upper class here. in term of goods/comfort, not work. and if you still romantize as a traveler these poor communities on the backcountry, i suggest to try a week or 2 of their work. just take the routine of a +40 y/o man to check what being 'medium class' is about. being on the hunger line with a bare house is poverty and Latin America has many examples Have you seen the poorer parts of the United States? Or walked around the Tenderloin? Or seen what meth has done to parts of the rust belt, and the farming communities that have been hollowed out and eviscerated across the midwest? Ever been to a reservation? you are comparing a marginalized demographic against people who belong to the middle class on Latin America. it's totally out of sense. we also have cracolandia and favelas and people dying of diarrhoea and dying of hunger in some regions. please, don't visit a country with probably tourist type of visit and sum up a whole continent on socioeconomics or whatever category your empirical sociologic observation was edit: since ur in Latin America and if ur not reading anything, i recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Veins_of_Latin_America
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