I remember being in a mid-size city in Italy and walking past this great big abandoned 18th century building, surrounded by iron fencing, and a sign informing tourists that this was a prison during Bourbon rule of Sicily, and isn't it awful that this authoritarian government put

Anyway: read The Leopard

BTW: the idea that the mafia has roots dating back to medieval resistance against the Muslims is total crap. It came about under the liberal regime because rampant organized crime is what you get when you put a weak liberal government over a clannish population.

@pegobry_en At what point do we restore the kingdom of two Sicilies?

@The_WGD Goals

@pegobry_en Just not true. The mafia were a leftover of clan networks from the middle ages. Even Mussolini could only suppress them not eliminate them because of how old and ingrained they were. The mafia didn't fear the landowners, those were their victims, they fixed the price of food

@passageatarms Nope

@pegobry_en You act as if the landed aristocracy and the Church didn't operate in the same fashion as the mafia did. They didn't just decide to create the mafia overnight for fun. It was originally created to protect people from the corrupt tentacles of the aristocracy and the Church

@AnotherWolfwood Nope

@pegobry_en “I read a book. I’m an expert now”

@primoaudit

@pegobry_en To be fair to modern Italy, they did largely cripple Sicilian mafia by now and they have the best anti-mafia laws and methods in Europe. But yes the mafia has origins in the chaos following the unification, and can be traced back to "brigantaggio". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

@pegobry_en Crime is a choice

@pegobry_en Your thread is creating a buzz! #TopUnroll https://threadreaderapp.com/th... 🙏🏼@FERNAND75759385 for 🥇unroll

@pegobry_en All mafias are essentially stand in states. They can understand only the language of force.

@pegobry_en Large scale crime only occurs because it’s allowed to. In the US the murder of tens of thousands of black men every year is the cost of civil rights. This level of crime is allowed to occur because stopping it is deemed racist and unacceptable

@pegobry_en Every civilization is created by bordering out and suppressing the bad, to give the fragile good a chance to grow. But if it grows too much, it passes on its fragility to the civilization itself, leading to its destruction.

@pegobry_en If you read Norman Lewis' diary Naples '44, he witnessed the re-emergence of the mafia before his eyes, US supply dumps getting looted etc. His diary is utterly insane.

@pegobry_en There was mafia after the Boubons betrayed the Sicilians in 1817. Sicily basically rebelled non stop from 1817 to 1894. The rebellion was finally quelled in 1894-1914 by the salesmen who sold a million tickets for the city paved in gold: New York.

@pegobry_en Fascism is a solution to a problem that we've forgotten about because fascism is so effective at fixing the problem. Fascism is the political equivalent of an emergency amputation. It's very likely to cause death, but we forgot that the infection it was cutting out was going to

@pegobry_en When the power of the aristocrats declined, it created opportunity for the Gabellotto - and the mafia (cosa nostra) was born. https://wearepalermo.com/the-h...

@pegobry_en Giuseppe di Lampedusa examined the first half of this process in his novel The Leopard and at the time of his death was writing another novel about the rise of the Mafia to be called The Blind Kittens.

@pegobry_en Another interesting mafia origin story is that lemon trade (especially once it was discovered as cure to scurvy) led to windfall profits and need for private security

@pegobry_en It wasn’t even necessarily them being used as proxies mafia prisoners were marked down as political prisoners and in the chaos of the allies retaking Europe they just happened to free them all

@pegobry_en The overlooked part is that instead of policing the Mafioso, Italy took to falsifying their criminal history to enable them to emigrate to America - where the mafia would establish roots and despoil Italian-American communities for generation.

@pegobry_en Quite. The Sicilian mafia wasn’t born from feudalism or Bourbon decadence - it flourished in the bright, liberating sunlight of “progress.” Sweep away the old, organic order of Church and landed aristocracy, and you discover that nature abhors a vacuum—especially in Sicily. In

@pegobry_en The Italian mafia is, as always, jews. Southern Italians, from the shithole known as Sicily, are not Whites, they are jews. Just because they have a European nationality, it doesn't mean that they have any European blood.

@pegobry_en Japanese mafia has a similar genesis.

@pegobry_en Government and The Mafia? What's the difference? At least the Mob are good on favours.

@pegobry_en The mafia was forced out of Italy/Sicily, and came to the USA, via NYC in the very early 1900's. they saw all the rackets were already taken. so they fell back on their old friend, protection rackets. then they saw unions, and it was a perfect match. this is how they ended up

@pegobry_en The first part isn't accurate. Firstly "mafia" isn't a real term. Black Hand existed in New Orleans by mid to late 1800s and later came to NYC, being firmly established by 1890s. Noone knows when it started. Lansky cut a deal for Lucky with OSS.

@pegobry_en Of that era, one of the genuine badasses was Major Tony Lago, WW1 pilot and builder of the fine Talbot-Lago auto. Tony was having his lunch one day at a Rome trattoria when three assassins sent by Mussolini entered the establishment to kill him. He threw a hand grenade at them,