"The highly-documented analysis of criminality under the Mussolini regime by the English historian Christopher Duggan - Even in a democratic system it can happen that someone can derive personal profit from the fight against organised crime - Public servants who give lip service to their commitment in fighting the (Mafia, ed.) clans and neglect their administrative duties."

ABSTRACT: The author quotes twice from his books »Il giorno della civetta and »Ciascuno il suo (»The Day Of The Owl and »To Each His Own respectively, ed.) to clarify what he has always thought about the Mafia. He then cites a book that has recently appeared in Italian translation by an English historian who has studied the Mafia under Fascism, not so much from the standpoint of what it was in itself, but what others thought about it (Christopher Duggan, »The Mafia Under Fascism ). Unfortunately good books do little (not even his own two mentioned above) to help achieve "a painful and in some way active consciousness of the problem". Even his own may have been read at best by those going slumming and in search of a happy ending. Then, Don Sturzo (1) was succeeded by the Christian Democrats, a party that "to say the least is indifferent to the problem".

Historically, in Sicily, Fascism had a hard time arising anyplace where Socialism was weak. And the Mafia, which had blocked the development of Socialism, was already Fascism. So much so that it began to fear certain more intransigent and "revolutionary" signs of the Fascist sectors, of war veterans, of the young nationalists, etc. which were also feared by the agrarian Fascists of the North - as in the case of Alfredo Cucco, a Fascist of the radical-bourgeois line, who was arrested by the Fascists themselves. In Sicily there was an exchange of mutual advantage between the Fascists and the agrarians and sulphur industry: Fascism gave them security, but they had to free themselves from the criminal fringes. This was the work of the prefect Mori, a man who felt great responsibility towards the state. Thus the conservative Fascists were favoured rather than the more "progressive" ones. In short with Mori one has the paradox of an "anti-Mafia" as a "tool of power". Something of the kind can happen today too

: who would reprove a mayor who concerned himself with the Mafia while perhaps neglecting the administration of his city? In another field one must cite an episode that saw Dr. Paolo Borsellino get the better of an older rival in obtaining the post of the Marsala Public Procurator, because the latter had never been occupied with trials against the Mafia...

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, January 10, 1987)

Here are some self-quotations, to serve up to those who have short memories and/or long bad faith, and who belong to the species (very prevalent in Italy) to people given to heroic actions that cost nothing and which the Milanese, with reference to The Five Days (2), call the heroes of the sixth.

1) "This state of mind suddenly gave rise to wrath. The captain felt the restrictions within which the law obliged him to act. Like his non-commissioned officers, the captain yearned for exceptional power, exceptional freedom of action, and he had always condemned this very yearning in his marshals. An exceptional suspension of constitutional guarantees in Sicily for several months and the evil would be rooted out forever. But back to memory came Mori's repressive measures, Fascism, and he regained the measure of his own ideas, his feelings... Here it would be necessary to beard people in the dens of their fiscal crimes, as in America. But not only people like Mariano Arena and not only here in Sicily. It would be necessary to swoop suddenly down on the banks, put expert hands on the book-keeping, generally double entry, of large and small enterprises, revise the land registries. And all those foxes, young and old, who are wasting their sense of smell (...) would be better off sniffing around the villas, t

he custom-built cars, the wives, the lovers of certain officials, and compare those visible marks of wealth with their salaries and draw the proper conclusions." (Il giorno della civetta, Einaudi, Turin, 1961.)

2) "But the fact is, my good friend, Italy is such a happy country that when one begins to fight the indigenous Mafias, it means that a linguistic one has already been established... I saw something similar forty years ago. And it is true that an event, in large histories or small stories, that repeats itself, becomes farcical, whereas in the latter its occurrence is tragic. But I am perturbed all the same." (A ciascuno il suo, Einaudi, Turin, 1966.)

Having exhibited these credentials which, I repeat, are not necessary for attentive and honest readers, and having stated that I still think exactly the same things I thought then with regard to both the Mafia and the anti-Mafia, I would now like to talk about a book recently brought out by the publisher Rubbettino of Soveria Mannelli in the province of Catanzaro. The book is entitled »The Mafia Under Fascism and its author is Christopher Duggan, a young researcher at Oxford University and a student of Denis Mack Smith who wrote a brief introduction for it. In this he primarily emphasised the novelty and utility of the author's not being interested so much in "the Mafia itself" as in what "the Mafia was thought to be and why", which is a focal point of the question still today - for those, let it be understood, who are able to see, to think and to concern themselves; for those who are able to look beyond appearances and do not allow themselves to be bowled over by the national rhetoric which at this mo

ment is happy about concerning itself with the Mafia as it was happy before to ignore it, or at most, to subsume it as part of the picturesque, local colour, folkloristic detail.

And it is curious that in the present awareness (doubtlessly preferable to the preceding effective indifference, even if flooded in rhetoric) two elements fuse of a confused racist resentment with regard to Sicily and the Sicilians. One even has the impression at times that one is unwilling to forgive Sicily not only for the Mafia but also for Verga, Pirandello and Guttuso.

But to come back to my argument, I do not even delude myself that my two books containing the passages I have already mentioned have been of any use - except to the twenty five readers as Manzoni thought (which was not reverse hyperbole dictated by modesty, since it is believable that not more than twenty five good readers in any generation enjoy a book) - have been of any use to the many, the very many who have read it to help achieve "a painful and in some way active consciousness of the problem". I believe that it has mostly been read by those going slumming as it were at that time and I don't know how they are read today. It is true that at the time happy endings - and if not happy, edifying ones - were in the air to transmit power to that culture which shared it even if only marginally - as in the film »In nome della legge (In The Name Of The Law, ed.) in which happiness announced itself in the final reconciliation of the outlaw to the law.

And exemplary is the drama »La Mafia by Don Luigi Sturzo. Written in 1900 and put on in a little theatre in Caltagirone, its fifth and concluding act could not be found among Sturzo's papers after his death. So Diego Fabbri wrote it in a vulgarly Pirandellian manner and with an edifying conclusion. Later, when Sturzo's sketches for the fifth act turned up one discovered why the author had called the piece a drama (which name should have been warning enough for Fabbri not to finish it with the triumph of the good): It ended badly and with the victory of evil in a way consistent with what Luigi Sturzo saw and knew. A Sicilian from Caltagirone, a town whose boundaries at that time the Mafia only sporadically crossed, one must grant him the merit of having very clear notions of the phenomenon and its structure, implications and complicity, and of having felt it to be so vast, urgent and painful a problem as to venture upon giving an "essemplo" (an old word for "example", ed.) - a word dear to St. Bernardin

o - of it on the stage of his small theatre. And there is certainly no mystery about the way in which his popular party turned into Christian Democrats who were, to say the least, indifferent to the question. But this will demand of historians a study and an analysis of no small difficulty. And time will be needed for it, at least as much time as was needed for this accurate study and reasonable analysis of Christopher Duggan's on the Mafia and Fascism.

The idea and the ensuing behaviour that early Fascism had with regard to the Mafia can be summed up in a syllogism: Fascism has a hard time arising anyplace where Socialism is weak. In Sicily the Mafia had blocked the development of Fascism. The Mafia itself is already Fascism. The idea is evidently not unfounded, only that it was necessary to incorporate the Mafia into real and true Fascism. But the Mafia, like Fascism, was also already other things. And among those other things Fascism was, there was the somewhat vigorous course taken by the revolution of war veterans, of the youths from Federzoni's national party who passed naturally, almost by osmosis, to Fascism, or transmigrated to Fascism without entirely denying their Socialist and anarchist yearnings. In Sicily Fascism was haggard minorities, but which, though at first easily trampled upon, took on a role entirely disproportionate to their numbers - an encroaching and fearsome role - with the invigoration of Fascism in the North and the permiss

iveness and protection which it was given by prefects, police chiefs and commissars and almost all the state authorities and due to the fear it inculcated in the old representatives of democratic order (at that point disorder). They were feared by Fascism itself which - born in the North in response to the interests of the landowners, industrialists and entrepreneurs of those parts, and at least in this placing itself precisely in the

tradition of the Risorgimento's interests - would have gladly done without them in order to negotiate more easily with the Sicilian landowners and thus with the Mafia. And in fact it freed itself from them and consolidated its power just after the Matteotti (3) affair. And the definitive sign of this was the arrest of Alfredo Cucco (a personality in Fascism on the island of a progressive and radical-bourgeois line, as Duggan and Mack Smith denote him, who in this obtains, rightly I think, that re-evaluation which he vainly hoped for from the Fascists who only during the Saḷ Republic reinstated and promoted him in their ranks).

And it is not as if that syllogism entirely vanished once Fascism, now swaggering and sure of itself, took power. But as Fascism had in Sicily to free itself of the "revolutionary" fringe in order to negotiate with the landowners, the sulphur industrialists, these others now had to free themselves of the most disquieting and conspicuous criminal fringe if Fascism were to be guaranteed at least the appearance of having restored order.

And it is not without meaning that in the fight Mori led against the Mafia the leading role would be taken by the "campieri" (who Mori was solemnly decorating for civil valour in

the "Mafia" villages), the guardians of the feud, who were first

the irreplaceable mediators between the landed proprietors and the Mafia and, at the time of Mori's repression, became the irreplaceable element for making the negotiations efficient and efficacious. Mori, says Duggan, "was authoritarian by nature and strongly conservative", had "great faith in the state" and "a rigorous sense of duty". Between 1919 and 1922 he considered it a duty to make the Fascists too respect the law, for which reason he was removed from his posts when Fascism first took power, but perhaps that period of leisure was useful to him for writing his memoirs of the fight against criminality in Sicily with its sentimental title »Tra le zagare, oltre le foschie (Among The Orange Blossoms, Beyond The Mists, ed.) which certainly helped to make him look like the right man to repress virulent Sicilian criminality by conferring emergency powers on him.

His sense of duty to the state intact, which was now a Fascist state, and this sense of duty being nourished by the sympathy a non-liberal conservative could not help feeling for the conservative direction which Fascism was beginning to take, the undeniable successes of his repressive actions (there was not one arrest that I remember made by Mori's squads in the province of Agrigento which created doubt or disapproval among the populace) all also hid the game of a vast conservative Fascist faction against another that can approximately be called progressive and was weaker.

From all this one can conclude that the anti-Mafia was at that time the tool of a Fascist faction for reaching an unopposed and incontestable power. And it was incontestable not because the regime was axiomatically incontestable - or not only for this reason - but because the restoration of public order appeared so undeniable that opposition to it, for whatever reason and under whatever form, could easily be labelled "Mafioso". This is the moral so to speak that we can extract from this fable (highly documented) that Duggan relates. We must keep in mind the anti-Mafia as a tool of power. It could easily happen in a democratic system too with the help of rhetoric and a lack of critical spirit.

And we have some symptoms, some forewarnings. Let us take, for example, a mayor who begins to show himself off as a Mafia fighter, either because of his character or from calculation, in television and scholastic interviews, in assemblies, conferences and parades. Even if he spends all his time in these exhibitions and finds none to dedicate to the problems of the village or town under his administration (which are many in every village and town, from the lack of water to the abundance of refuse) he can consider himself in an impregnable position. Perhaps someone may dare to reprove him very timidly for his scarce attention to the administrative problems, and someone on the outside. But on the inside who is going to dare propose a no-confidence vote, an action that will give him minority support and lead to his replacement. Perhaps, in the end, someone will do this, but at the risk of being branded a Mafioso along with all those who support him. And one must add that the awareness of this risk, this pe

ril circulates in particular among the Christian Democrats, and for the reason I tried to explain earlier. This is a hypothetical case, but here is a real and effective one. It is to be found in the "Notiziario straordinario" no.7 (September 10, 1986) of the High Council of Judges. It deals with the appointment of Dr. Paolo Emanuele Borsellino to the post of Marsala's State Prosecutor and among the reasons given for assigning the post to him this one leaps to the eye: "Having established, among other things, that with regard to the candidates who have precedence over Dr. Borsellino with regard to seniority, objective evaluations impose themselves leading to the conclusion that the other candidates do not to differing degrees possess the requisites of a specific and particular professional competence in the field of organised crime so that despite the difference in seniority the younger aspirants' application must be given favour." This passage cannot be considered a model of Italian prose, but certain delic

acies of expression must be appreciated such as "the difference in seniority", which means the lesser seniority of Dr. Borsellino, and "given favour" which means the rejection of the other candidates whose greater seniority entitles them more to be given that post. And priceless is the comment with which the writer interrupts the reading of the proposal in which he explains that Dr. Alcamo - who seems to be the first in regard to seniority - is "a magistrate of excellent qualities" and can be unhesitatingly described as a "gentleman judge" also because he clearly and honestly recognised a lack "which is absolutely not his fault" - that of never having been appointed to preside over Mafia trials. A circumstance, "however, which can in no way be ignored" even if one cannot demand that Dr. Alcamo should desire "the assignment to this type of procedure since among other things it is entirely alien to his character". And we do not know if Dr. Alcamo appreciated these evaluations regarding the promotion he was exp

ecting.

The readers, however, should note that nothing is worth more in a magistrate's career in Sicily than the fact of having taken part in Mafia trials. And then, with regard to the designation as "a gentleman judge", this leaves us astonished. Are they trying to suggest that there could be even one judge who is not?

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Sturzo, Luigi - (Caltagirone 1871 - Rome 1959) - Priest and politician, in 1919 he founded the Italian Popular Party whose secretary he remained until 1923. In exile from 1924, first in London and then in the United States. After returning to Italy in 1946 he tried to create under pressure from Pope Pius XII to a centre-left electoral block which however had no success.

2) The Five Days - A Milanese insurrection against the Austrians held March 18-22, 1848 and which ended with the retreat of the Austrian troops under Radetzky.

3) Matteotti, Giacomo (1885 - 1924) - Politician, secretary of the United Socialist Party and anti-Fascist, he was kidnapped by a Fascist squad and shot, bringing about the "Aventine" schism or abstention from voting by the Fascist opposition in Parliament.