Cagliostro and the Charlatan State
Egidio Mattina
In the south, groups of brigands like the Camorra and
the Maffia had organized, seeking to imitate as best they
could that group of brigands which composed the
State.
. . .
-G. A.
BoRGESE
THE
SICILIAN IMMIGRANT
b"ughl with him to thi, country, •mong otho
things, the so-called Southern Question. Essentially it presents the same
features here modified by industrialism, that it did in
pre-fascist
Italy. For
Mussolini has solved the Southern Question as far as Italy is concerned;
i.e., he has made Southern criminalism as nationalistic and patriotic as
Piedmontese militarism and Roman clericalism. The latter two did not
acquire their nationalistic bias either until comparatively late in Italian
history. The lack of patriotism among the military was one of the loudest
complaints of Machiavelli, and of the patriots after him, until Piedmont,
the most provincial of the Italian provinces, set itself up to furnish the
nation with its first truly Italian army. The Maffia and the Camorra were
the supreme expression of the Southerner's anti-Piedmontism: at their
best the heroic reaction to the militarism and bureaucratism of the North.
They suffered the fate of all outlaws, degeneration and corruption. At this
point the State, recognizing a kindred soul, took them into its arms. ...
•
The
1
ewish usurer is a familiar historical figure. A similar role, in
other fields, has been played by other peoples as well. The American
Negro's talents are kept within a spiritual ghetto: eventually the colored
man with ambition beyond being a white man's valet ends up a white
man's clown. (If Mazzini had worn motley instead of black, Carlyle's
England could have understood him better, and would have worshipped
his Italian Soul.) ... In the same way the system which mercilessly
oppressed and brutalized the peasant set him up as a fool and laughed at
him. (The English word clown has a Marxist history.) And so just as the
good American consoles himself for all the raping and murdering he com·
mits on the black by laughing at him, Northern and other respectable
Italians picture Naples as the clown of Italy, and Sicily as its whimsical
murderous boor. Bergamask Arlecchino, grown fat and prosperous, laughs
at Neapolitan Pulcinella,. still hopelessly in cap and bells.
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