Massimo Fini: "Difendiamo l'eroina della legalità"

[Tomás de Torquemada]

Dal sito http://ilrestodelcarlino.quotidiano.net/

Difendiamo l'eroina della legalità
di Massimo Fini

La notte del 13 agosto un killer, entrato nell’affollatissimo Roxy Bar di Mondragone, un centro vicino a Caserta, ha ucciso Giuseppe Mancone, responsabile secondo il clan locale dei La Torre di essersi messo a spacciare cocaina senza la loro autorizzazione. Come al solito nessuno ha visto nulla. Solo una ragazza, che era al Roxy con degli amici e delle amiche, ha avuto il coraggio di testimoniare e poi in Questura di riconoscere in una foto il presunto killer che, nei giorni scorsi, è stato arrestato. «E’ normale» ha detto la donna, che di mestiere fa la domestica «ho solo raccontato quello che avevo visto». Ma il Paese l’ha scaricata, a cominciare dagli amici («Ma sei matta? Ti stai scavando la fossa. Chi te lo ha fatto fare?») e intorno a lei si è creato un pauroso e significativo isolamento.
Il 25 settembre del 1984 in un paesino vicino a Catania fu assassinato a colpi di lupara, sotto gli occhi del figlio, Francesco Richichi, benzinaio quarantenne. Richichi aveva resistito ai molti tentativi di taglieggiamento della mafia locale, non si era piegato nemmeno dopo un incendio al suo distributore e quando due delinquenti erano arrivati per rapinargli l’incasso e dargli una lezione, minacciandolo con le pistole, lui e il suo giovane figlio erano stati più svelti e li avevano uccisi. Da allora sull’asfalto del chiosco erano comparsi una croce e, ogni giorno, per un lungo anno, dei fiori, una precisa e agghiacciante minaccia di morte. Nonostante ciò la Questura di Catania si era ben guardata dall’organizzare un qualsiasi servizio di protezione intorno al benzinaio, che era stato lasciarto solo con il suo coraggio fino all’inevitabile conclusione.
Se lo Stato non protegge adeguatamente la ragazza di Mondragone, come già non protesse Richichi, si fa complice, di fatto, della mafia, che non si combatte solo con le maxi-retate e le ambigue confessioni dei ‘pentiti’ ma, poichè prima che un’organizzazione criminale è una mentalità, si batte soprattutto non lasciandosoli e inermi quei pochi che hanno l’enorme coraggio civile di opporsi a questa mentalità e di non piegarsi ai suoi metodi e la cui incolumità acquista una fondamentale valore simbolico oltre che pratico. Lo Stato deve proteggerli dispiegando tutte le sue forze, sottraendole magari a quei tanti e inutili personaggi che in Italia godono di enormi e ridicole scorte più che altro per ragioni di prestigio.
Perché se dovesse accadere qualcosa di male alla domestica di Mondragone, come già al benzinaio di Catania, si dimostrerebbe nel modo più lampante che il vero potere, da cui il cittadino può aspettarsi protezione, non è lo Stato, estraneo e attento solo a lorsignori, ma proprio la mafia.

[Fenris]

A proposito di mafia, leggi cosa scrive un tizio sul Times, per presentare un nuovo libro su cosa nostra:

THE TIMES, 25/01/04

It's like this, Don ? there's a mafioso in every Italian

It is no wonder that Italy lurches from one scandal to another, corruption is ingrained in the national psyche, writes John Dickie

Say what you like about them, but the Italians are their own harshest critics. Within every Italian there also lies what they call an ?anti-Italian?. One commentator called his country a ?kleptocracy? ? a regime of thieves; the description stuck. A previous editor of La Repubblica, the leading centre-left daily, has defined his fellow citizens as ?individualistic, wily and deceitful?; they are attached to their mothers, he argues, and lack any morality or ?spirit of service?.

Now the Italians have something new to abuse themselves over: the Parmalat scandal. One of Italy?s biggest multinationals turns out to have engaged in a multi-billion-pound fraud. Coming on top of Silvio Berlusconi?s self-protecting antics as prime minister, the question is being asked again: are the Italians a nation of crooks?

Mafia is no longer a word that is used lightly in Italy. Not since 1992, that is, when the courts finally confirmed what the Sicilian mafia actually is. Far from being some vague penchant for sorting out problems without getting the law involved, far even from being a confused underworld of enforcers and favour-brokers, cosa nostra (as it likes to call itself) is a hierarchical association of elite killers; it has several thousand members all bound by a blood oath.

Top crime bosses were so enraged at this 1992 legal verdict that they momentarily forgot to pretend that cosa nostra did not exist: they blew up anti-mafia magistrates Falcone and Borsellino and launched a bombing campaign in Rome, Florence and Milan.

Yet even after all this bloodshed, the anti-Italians are still given, in their more pessimistic moments, to thinking of themselves as mafiosi under the skin. One recent diagnostician of the national malaise concluded that ?the mafia is only the extreme expression of a mentality that has deep roots in our country?.

For centuries Italians have lamented that lawlessness and dishonesty are inscribed in their psyche. Since Italy became one country in 1861, they say, those character flaws have been made manifest in the way the state is run. Back in the 1930s, even Mussolini was given to shrugging his shoulders in the face of the anarchic recalcitrance of his countrymen. ?Governing Italy is not difficult,? Il Duce once quipped. ?It is just futile.?

Italians do not have to look hard to find historical evidence to justify their anti-Italian streak. Scandal has been a constant of Italian life since the country was first unified. We now know the Sicilian mafia?s history began around then. The earliest evidence of cosa nostra?s initiation ritual, its court system, its business methods, its links to government and ?omerta? code (which originally meant ?humility?) date from soon after Italian unification. The history of the mafia and the history of Italy march in step.

Not that the past century and a half has been without its moments of hope. In the early 1990s, for a few brief years, it seemed that Italian society was going to cure itself of palm-greasing, embezzlement ? and even the mafia.

In 1992 the Operation Clean Hands investigations began when the administrator of a retirement home in Milan was caught flushing bribe money down the toilet. His confessions allowed magistrates to unravel a vast network of graft involving virtually the entire political leadership of the country, civil servants and the business elite. The parties that had ruled Italy since the second world war dissolved in the heat of the scandal.

Following cosa nostra?s bomb outrages, magistrates also scored unprecedented successes. Hundreds of men of honour defected, and two supreme bosses were captured within the space of two years.

And then, the unthinkable. For decades Giulio Andreotti had been Italy?s dominant politician. He had been prime minister seven times. But in 1995 Andreotti was indicted on two separate charges: of working for cosa nostra; and of having mafiosi murder a journalist who was blackmailing him.

Events since Andreotti went on trial seem to have proved the anti-Italians right. There has been no revolution. Last year Transparency International, the anti-sleaze watchdog, ranked Italy as the second most corrupt country in the European Union behind Greece; Italy has an honesty rating lower than Botswana, Taiwan, Uruguay and Qatar.

Berlusconi is a former member of the P2 masonic lodge who believes that Operation Clean Hands was a coup d?état by communist magistrates against legitimate parties. Recently the constitutional court threw out a law Berlusconi had rammed through parliament that would have made him immune from prosecution. But he has legislated to decriminalise false accounting and make it much more difficult for Italian courts to obtain evidence from offshore bank accounts.

The mafia also seems to be returning to normal. Since the bomb outrages cosa nostra has come to its senses again. Under a new boss of bosses, Bernardo ?the Tractor? Provenzano, it has abandoned so-called ?massacreism? and gone back to its traditional methods. Magistrates say it has ?submerged? and rebuilt its links with politicians and businesses.

And then, last year, after typically drawn-out trials, Andreotti was acquitted of the mafia charges though the judges concluded that Andreotti had ?made himself available to mafiosi in an authentic, stable and friendly way until the spring of 1980?.

More disturbingly the judges also found that Andreotti knew that the president of the Sicilian regional assembly was going to be killed by cosa nostra and yet did nothing to stop it. Nothing, that is, beyond going to Palermo and politely asking top bosses in person not to carry out the murder. The men of honour duly reminded him that they gave the orders in Sicily.

Andreotti was acquitted in large measure because of Italy?s statute of limitations: nobody can be convicted of crimes committed more than 22½ years ago. (The maths of this are so convenient that one cannot help but wonder.) Nevertheless, after being absolved on the other count ? of having the journalist murdered ? life senator Andreotti has proclaimed himself to be the victim of a conspiracy hatched between magistrates and left-wing politicians.

And now Parmalat. This is certainly not a mafia story. But it is thought that the dairy giant?s founder, Calisto Tanzi, has himself embezzled at least £345m And that only accounts for a fraction of the missing billions. Normale amministrazione, as the anti-Italians would say: ?Business as usual.?

Whether the truth about Parmalat emerges whole or only semi-skimmed from the judicial inquiries, many in Italy will take Europe?s biggest financial scandal as confirmation of the ?immaturity? of the country?s economic system. The former director of the country?s stock exchange regulatory body has already claimed that Parmalat is evidence that capitalism Italian style is ?pre-modern?, too based on family ties and cosy political friendships.

The finger will inevitably be pointed at the quality of Italian democracy, and even at the characteristics of the Italian people. Viewed with weary, anti-Italian eyes, the country?s history is no more than a compulsion to act out its underlying character flaws.

But stereotypes, especially those that nations are most fond of repeating about themselves, are never an explanation of history. They are, instead, a product of history. Take the notion that all Sicilians, even all Italians, have a bit of mafioso in them. Recent research on the history of the mafia shows that the man most responsible for propagating this stereotype was Giuseppe Pitre, a late-19th-century professor of folklore.

Something of a local celebrity in his day, this apparently harmless egghead would tour Sicily in a battered carriage hoarding customs and proverbs as he went. Pitre liked to believe that the mafia was not a secret criminal association but a rebellious sense of individualism shared by all Sicilians.

But then he would say that. Pitre worked closely in local government with the most notorious mafia politician of his era. In 1901 he even repeated his theory in court during the man?s murder trial. It was the mafia?s own PR.

All the anti-Italian stereotypes are weapons in the political battle. And they are all symptoms of Italy?s traditionally weak and fragmented state.

Power in Italy is dispersed. Political scientists like to talk of its ?power centres?. One of those power centres today is undoubtedly the magistrature. Since the magistrates got their own autonomous governing body in the 1960s, they have often tried to target corruption. Nowadays they are certainly more effective in exposing sleaze than their counterparts in France. That is why Italy probably has a worse reputation for corruption than it deserves; and France a better one. And it also suggests that Berlusconi will never be able to set up the kind of quasi-dictatorship that some doom-mongers fear.

Rather than being a ?ship of state?, Italy often looks more like a fleet of small boats carrying official and unofficial bodies, parties, lobbies and cliques. Each boat is piloted according to a different chart; each competes for access to the most favourable winds; yet each is afraid of being isolated from the other craft. And when the water gets rough, the crews all complain, putting their own shrewd political spin on the anti-Italian clichés.

That said, Italy?s conditioned anti-Italian reflexes are often a positive sign. Although the state is weak it is a powerful ideal that causes Italian public opinion to be so hard on itself. That ideal is strong enough, as I have learnt, to fuel the heroism of those who have fought the Sicilian mafia since its genesis in the middle of the 19th century. It remains to be seen whether it will be strong enough, even with the financial world watching, to learn the lessons of the Parmalat affair.

© John Dickie 2004

Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia by John Dickie is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20. Copies can be ordered for £16 + £2.25 p&p from the Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585

[corneliu zelea]

Dear Mr. John Dickie,
caro sig. john dickie

please never forget that our ancestors had laws and courts and lawyers and trials when yours were still drinking water into puddles.
spero che le sovvenga che mentre i nostri antenati si recavano al foro ove trovavano avvocati che discutevano di legge, i suoi erano ancora usi bere l'acqua dalle pozzanghere.

best regards.
cordiali saluti

[Mr2]

peccato oggi non sia molto lontano dal vero il contrario

[Fenris]

In origine postato da Mr2
peccato oggi non sia molto lontano dal vero il contrario

Eccolo qua l'immancabile disfattista anti-italiano... basta che una parola di critica arrivi dall'estero, diventa immediatamente oro colato. L'unica espressione anglo-sassone che a queste persone proprio non vuole entrare in testa è la perla di saggezza: "Right or wrong, my country". No, questa è proprio l'unica che gli entra da un orecchio e gli esce dall'altro.

[Mr2]

A me sembra di essere stato estremamente oggettivo: l'Italia (come entità geografica) sarà stata a suo tempo "patria del diritto", ma certo l'evoluzione del sistema giudiziario oggi non è certo merito nostro, che ci limitiamo al più a copiare le scelte degli altri paesi in ogni materia.

[Arancia Meccanica]

Prego tutti i camerati di evitare di postare in inglese su questo forum

[Fenris]

In origine postato da Mr2
A me sembra di essere stato estremamente oggettivo: l'Italia (come entità geografica) sarà stata a suo tempo "patria del diritto", ma certo l'evoluzione del sistema giudiziario oggi non è certo merito nostro, che ci limitiamo al più a copiare le scelte degli altri paesi in ogni materia.

Ma che sciocchezza... giusto per fare un esempio, la proposta di legge sule impronte digitali da prendere agli immigrati è stata da copiata dagli spagnoli subito dopo che ne è stata data notizia. Perchè compiere queste generalizzazioni sempre a nostro sfavore?

[Fenris]

In origine postato da Arancia Meccanica
Prego tutti i camerati di evitare di postare in inglese su questo forum

Concordo con te, arancia, ma è un articolo molto interessante, del quale non è disponibile traduzione in italiano, per questo l'ho postato.

[Tomás de Torquemada]

In origine postato da Fenris
Concordo con te, arancia, ma è un articolo molto interessante, del quale non è disponibile traduzione in italiano, per questo l'ho postato.

Infatti, non è il caso di essere troppo fiscali...

Il forum in lingua straniera, all'occorrenza, lo abbiamo ... ma talvolta appare opportuno o necessario riportare anche qui fonti in lingua originale... Come nella fattispecie...