A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived
thetimes.com
thetimes.com
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.
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.)
ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.
(just as me :)
https://theconversation.com/citrus-fruits-scurvy-and-the-ori...
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/
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.
"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 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".
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.
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.
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 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.
Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant.
I did some googling and seems like this is a popular belief.
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.