Mafia and Camorra: who they are

Mafia and Camorra:
who they are, who's in charge
from "The Sicilians", March 1983

A first difference is essential between the Mafia and the Camorra. The mafia was born, that is conceptually formed in Sicily, a large island three thousand years old, raped by dozens of different invasions and that, despite wars, riots, rebellions, splendor and greatness, battles and revolutions all aimed to gain a dignity of the nation, not is practically never failed to be a state. The State were the others. The State were the conquerors. The State that administers, guarantees, requires, builds, draws, teaches, perceives, makes the laws, exercising justice, this State were the others, ie the enemies. Three thousand years the state was the enemy in Sicily, an entity that is almost always absent and that you only deal damage appalesava: taxes, tithes, enlistment, confiscations. Neither the unification of Italy gave this assurance of the State and this friend, if anything, to leave after repeated disappointments and this has made it more bitter loneliness. The political events for which the last forty years the capital Palermo was only colony of Roman power, the failure of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the bluff of the great public works ever made, collusion among increasingly bold summits of violence and politicians who have looted, divided, divided up, devastated, score power and economy, and ultimately frightening crisis of justice (Scaglione, Newfoundland, Coast, Ciaccio Montalto, four senior judges killed with impunity) gave a dramatic certainty in this sense that the State was absent, that this solitude of Sicily. We are before a given historical and cultural terrible but we must recognize and admit perfectly. The opposite would only imbecile lamentation and rhetoric.
From this historical fact must start to define what could be the social relationship - namely identity, simple resemblance, or what kind of diversity and differences - between the Mafia and the Camorra. In truth, according to image (second show we were about to say) and the Camorra mafia seem to possess the same criminal facies, ie the same immorality in the relationship between criminal clans and societies, and also the identical manner to commit a crime, that is, the anonymous power to achieve any offense and at the same time transform the crime into power. Finally also look identical objectives: the conquest passive (without offering in exchange that the only hypothesis of the death) of an increasingly large percentage of the economy of an area, especially the emerging economies, markets the most fertile, the most lucrative activities, are they legitimate (large contracts or commercial circuits in complete compliance with the law) or even outlawed as economic goods smuggling and prostitution. Again, the identity between the Mafia and the Camorra thus seems perfect.
In fact, beyond occasional alliances or contingent historical complicity, the two criminal phenomena are very different. One difference is that the cultural and political perfectly and we must therefore consider when you want to define the identity of one or other, and then figure out what are the most appropriate means to fight (defeat ever, historically it is no longer possible because we should destroy the human territory in the two regions) fight, we said, a phenomenon of violence that has become the most profound tragedy of the South, which leads to the squandering of trillions, which costs every year the lives of at least two thousand human beings, that is infecting virtually all the rest of Italy and, through a daily humiliation, often dismissive, always bloody, exacerbates the weakness of a state whose characteristics are already frailty, fear, stupidity.
In Sicily, therefore, for thousands of years without a nation state, and in Naples, a State which for centuries has at times overwhelmed and crashed the nation, prevaricandola, angariandola, trying to steal any business, idea, concept of the community. Naples is the city in which the clerical power even tried to appropriate the popular theater, denying spontaneity by imposing liturgies, themes, conclusions, and even dramatic rules. In the last centuries before the Spanish, then the French, and finally the Bourbons, and last the Piedmontese have imposed the obsessive presence of a state that was trying to run into the habits and soul of the people. The presence of the state in Naples have never been good laws, but the high walls, the police, the prisons, the halter. It is no coincidence that the Neapolitan soul has tried for centuries its freedom to exist in the one, the highest thing that no human power can never suppress the spirit of a people: the music. The Neapolitan music for this, it is a continual cry of love, beauty and freedom.
The Sicilian lived in a space of solitude in which the city had only cornerstones of hostilities. The Neapolitan is lived in one huge city that has been his only nation, its fantastic but cramped space and therefore also his prison. If you look good even in the literature, the great storytellers in Sicily, Verga, Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Brancati, Victorines, the same Sciascia, above all tell stories and dramas of individuals within society: the Neapolitans however, Marotta, Viviani, Eduardo, tell especially Naples, populated by a multitude of individuals.
In Sicily the Mafia, that the immense, tragic, dark criminal force arises as to replace the failing state to determine its own laws instead of those laws that the state can not impose, namely to establish an order in any case, even a barbaric rule of life. And if the state suddenly appalesa, it breaks down; and if someone tries to legitimately represent law and justice, corrupts it and makes it his own, otherwise it kills him.
In Naples the criminal force, which is not a determination of the infamous history and therefore does not have the tragic experience, size and cruelty, but it is above all a product of human misery, a dramatic need for survival, desperately trying to rebel against the State always present and abusive, and not being able to choose the armed uprising, trying to creep within a state that already exists, to conquer it from the inside with a work of erosion that began almost invisible from the bottom and necessarily involves almost the whole community. Thus, paradoxically, it happens that, in Palermo, a thousand big mafia established in almost all the top of the economic, political, bureaucratic, can dominate a city of one million inhabitants and the capital almost the whole island, in a contemptuous detachment from the rest of the population; and Octavian, a whole big town of ten thousand inhabitants, can live in a blind loyalty, absolute and especially evident in Cutolo and his organization Camorra.

Gradually, so for subsequent diagrams, the Mafia appears to be different from the Camorra. The Mafia State and has its colonies in Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples (Naples certain), Marseille, New York, Chicago; the Camorra of Naples is within the state wherever it extends. The mafia rules trillions, banks, drugs, large seizures criminals, national contracts, probably the election of certain MPs, sometimes even the designation of men in government; the Camorra fight yet and massacres for the proliferation of extortion, even the most miserable, smuggling of cigarettes and the tangents on prostitution. The mafia kills only those who are para before, the Camorra is especially massacre itself for the division of the spoils.
If five million Sicilians rebelled against the Mafia, it would not happen at all. At the mafia does not give a fuck. He has only one enemy that can beat the State true, rule of law, with the judges who really do justice, incorruptible officials, politicians willing to interpret their mandate with absolute morality. If three million rebelled Neapolitan Camorra, the mafia would die. We're talking about assumptions of science fiction, but they explain a difference perfectly historical, social, political, human, criminal, psychological, and ultimately, therefore, cultural, because everything happens inside a human society, for better or for worse, in art or violence, murder or philosophy, always belongs to the culture of a people.
Since then, the different origins of the two phenomena, the Mafia and the Camorra, while almost identical in the picture, must be different assessments of the struggle and the tools, especially the political and social issues. That in this historical time Mafia and the Camorra are allied and ever more deeply complicit in the deal criminal par excellence, the drug does not mean that one has over the other or is able to incorporate it. Woe to us if this happens. There would be a new, terrifying kingdom of the Two Sicilies, before which the battle of the Italian State would probably be lost forever.
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