The appreciated fortnightly column edited by Longino continues, pseudonym of a very well-known person
FIFTH COLUMN
Of Longinus
New promises: The 80 euro; the guaranteed minimum income; the increase in minimum pensions; tax reduction, naturally; even bonuses for those who keep a pet at home. Along with the promises, cancellations: the Fornero law, the license fee in favor of Rai-TV; he Jobs Act; mandatory vaccines; the bag tax. More will certainly arrive in the coming weeks.
They promise everything and want to abolish everything. Except the Mafia. In the past few days, based on investigations by Nicola Gratteri, chief prosecutor of Catanzaro - one of the few in Italy who knows how to do his job - an operation called "Sphinx" was conducted: 169 people arrested between Italy and Germany, including some politicians, for the crime provided for by 416bis (mafia-type association). «It is the largest operation in terms of number of arrests in recent times 23 years", commented Gratteri. Those arrested would be part of a criminal holding company, 'Ndrangheta style, also branched into Northern and Central Italy, between Emilia Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy and Lazio.
Ilvo Diamanti is right, when he states, commenting on the DEMOS-COOP survey on the Mafia, always widespread these days, while politics deals with the Rai-TV license fee to grab a few more votes: «The geography of the mafia is not only reproduced by judges and policemen. It has now become 'common sense'". The survey data, Indeed, they are impressive. According to a third of those interviewed, as compared to 20-30 years ago - the times of almost daily massacres and murders - the influence of the Mafia would have remained unchanged. It is the voters of the League who perceive the most (43%) the degree of severity of the phenomenon, followed by the grillini (38%). He perceives it 50% of those interviewed from the North-East and even the 57% of those of the North-West, while in the South the level of perception tends to decrease. At least on this, a sort of equality between territories is ensured.
To expand in this way throughout Italy and to dominate people's lives, to become common sense, the Mafia not only found complicity on a political level, but he sowed and cultivated land of unthinkable environments and decent. Let's not say anything new. In the distance 1961, in his most famous novel, “The Day of the Owl”, Leonardo Sciascia wrote: «The Mafia is a 'system' that contains and moves the economic and power interests of a class that we can roughly call bourgeois; and it does not arise and develop in the 'vacuum' of the State (that is, when the State, with its laws and functions, it is weak or missing), but 'inside' the State (…). We should catch people in the den of tax non-compliance, come in America. We should, suddenly, fall on the banks: put expert hands in accounting, generally double bottom, of large and small companies; review the land registers. And all those foxes, old and new, who are wasting their nose, it would be better if they started sniffing around the villas, custom-built cars, the wives, the mistresses of certain officials: and compare those signs of wealth to salaries, and make the right sense of it".
From these words they passed 66 years, in which everything happened and everything remained as it was then. We're still talking about fight against the mafia o di electoral pact against the mafia. Empty words, to the wind, which mean nothing. I anti-mafia professionals, as Sciascia called them, there are still many. Last July, during a conference in Palermo, Raffaele Cantone, president of the National Anti-Corruption Authority, he stated: «Many people have improvised as champions of the anti-mafia and there has been no evaluation of their real work. The anti-mafia was used more as a brand for its own personal purposes. It occurred in Sicily as well as other regions. We need to question ourselves. All this ends up bringing disgrace to the real anti-mafia".
The electoral programs for the vote of 4 March? They will continue to take care of the protection of cats, of little dogs and canaries. It's simpler and more reassuring.
