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
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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’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.
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".
> 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?
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
Ok, if you're actually from Latin America, I should apologize - I don't mean to say that those kinds of issues don't exist (and actually, I have seen some - Honduras) - I often assume I'm talking to someone from the states, and Americans have gotten insular and really out of touch, and most have no idea how much things have changed over the past 50 years.
That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.
And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.
Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.
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.
https://areasosta.com/faq/come-si-scrive-900-in-italiano
Take away: criminals are vain too.
By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr...
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.)
https://theconversation.com/citrus-fruits-scurvy-and-the-ori...
"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."
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.
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".
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.
ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.
(just as me :)
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/
The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing.
And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.
entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture...
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.
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.
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?
[1] https://www.archivioantimafia.org/sciascia.php
Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.
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)
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.
https://historycollection.com/the-mafias-secret-role-in-help...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborations_between_the_Uni...
> Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant.
I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief.
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.
A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal drugs, trafficked women, etc.
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.
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 :)
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
Ever been to a reservation?
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
That said, I'd rather live in middle lower class Latin America that Estados Unidos any day. The food is probably going to be better - too many places in the States Walmart is the only practical option now - health care won't bankrupt you, and people in Latin America are almost universally better educated and less depressed on social issues.
And I think a lot of that can be traced to a culture that's a bit less authoritarian, because people understand the history of why that doesn't work. Just going to war with the Mafia or the narcos is a trite answer, but it usually doesn't solve things in the long run.
Edit - also, you really should compare the poorer parts of the big cities you're talking about to Detroit or New Orleans or the Tenderloin. In my experience, people in Latin America can also have a skewed perspective. The world is a big place.