C'mon Charles! We all know that The Mafia is indeed the highest stage of capitalism!
How about the US-sponsored mobocracy in Italy from 1945 onwards? The CIA's been messing about with Italian fascists and Sicilian mobsters for the past 50 years just to prevent any left-wing government from ruling Italy....
pir.org
Excerpt:
Back in 1936, Lucky Luciano, the boss of Mafia drug and prostitution rackets in New York City, was finally convicted as a result of Thomas Dewey's prosecution, and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. But in 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence asked Meyer Lansky to seek Luciano's assistance in getting New York waterfront workers to watch out for enemy agents and activity. Soon Luciano's friends in Sicily, who had been severely repressed by Mussolini, were helping with the American invasion there. In 1946 the ONI appealed to Luciano's parole board. He was released from prison and deported to Italy --where he built up a heroin syndicate.
The immediate postwar problem in places like Italy and France, from the point of view of both the CIA and entrenched interests such as the Mafia, was that many Communists had been anti-fascist Resistance fighters, and as such were attractive to voters. The Marshall Plan aimed not merely to rebuild a war-torn Europe; it aimed to rebuild Europe in such a way that no Communists could ever win an election. To this end, the CIA played a major role in administering Marshall Plan aid.
In Italy the CIA spent money to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs in Marseilles, which together exported nearly five tons of heroin to the U.S. during that year.[1]
Heroin trafficking shifted in the 1960s and 1970s from the Turkey-Marseilles connection to the Asian connection. For decades until the 1950s, the opium trade was sanctioned by colonial administrations in Asia. By the early 1960s, the mountain areas of Southeast Asia -- the Golden Triangle region -- produced most of the world's opium. Northeastern Burma was particularly productive.
In the case of Burma, production before 1945 was insignificant -- as a province of India under the British, most of the opium traded in Burma was produced in India. But in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Forces retreated from Mao's army to the mountains of northeast Burma. The CIA helped maintain these troops, and sponsored two invasions of China. During their stay in Burma, the Nationalist Chinese exacted opium quotas from Burma's peasants; failure to pay was punished by the cutting off of fingers, hands, and feet. By the time the Nationalists fled in 1961, Burma had gone from producing about seven tons of opium per year to producing as much as a thousand tons, or about sixty percent of the world's production.[2]
In French-occupied Indochina, meanwhile, the Corsican syndicates were operating the opium trade out of Saigon under the protection of French military intelligence. When France withdrew in 1955, the U.S. inherited France's colonial politics and infrastructure. The U.S. worked with the same peoples -- the Hmong in Laos -- that the French had used. And again, the American Mafia was involved through their Corsican contacts. From Tampa, Florida, Santo Trafficante ran the Marseilles connection in Cuba during the 1950s. In 1968 he visited Saigon to meet with Corsican syndicate leaders. After 1970, Asian heroin began showing up in the U.S.
After the Cuban revolution, Trafficante's Mafia foot soldiers were mainly Cuban exiles.[3] In a 1982 interview, former CIA commando leader Grayston Lynch described what had once been the largest CIA station in the world, located south of Miami from 1961-1964. This station issued orders to 400 case officers and 2,000 exiles, dispersed in "safe houses" from Miami to Tampa. Lynch concedes that after the CIA cut off support, many of these exiles, trained in covert operations and smuggling, turned to narcotics trafficking.[4] Given that the CIA had worked with Trafficante to assassinate Castro in 1961,[5] the agency lacked sufficient ethical intelligence to worry that these Trafficante-associated exiles might pose a criminal problem. They were considered merely a "disposal problem," an institutional nuisance. [...]
More background material:
americanatheist.org
copi.com
The Independent
September 24, 1995, Sunday
ALL THE PRIME MINISTER'S MEN
Did Italy's former prime minister give a kiss of loyalty to the Mafia's boss of bosses? Did he consent to murder? Giulio Andreotti, and post-war Italy, go on trial in Palermo this week
BYLINE: ALEXANDER STILLE
IN 1990, the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, hosted a luncheon for former President Gerald Ford at which he lamented that the United States discarded its leaders too hastily. Andreotti had reason to pity his old friend. Since losing the 1976 election, Ford had been working on his golf game, while Andreotti remained at the centre of power, as he had throughout his nearly 50-year career. Indeed, Andreotti was the symbol of the Christian Democratic Party's seemingly permanent grip on power. He had been in the Cabinet of the first post-war government, in 1947, and had occupied virtually every important post since then: Minister of Finance, Budget, Industry, Defence, Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Prime Minister a record seven times. Commentators called him the Eternal Giulio, or Giulio the God.
Now Andreotti - a man who has dealt on equal terms with world leaders like de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Thatcher, Mitterrand, Reagan and Gorbachev - stands accused of collusion with the Sicilian Mafia. Prosecutors in Palermo and Perugia claim that for more than 20 years Andreotti used his power to fix organised-crime cases and met with Mafia bosses, and that he commissioned - or, at least, consented to - two murders. Andreotti insists that the charges are absurd - that they are the Mafia's vendetta for his government's firm stand against crime. Rather than dismissing them, however, a Palermo judge has ruled that Andreotti must stand trial, in a case set to begin this week.
Perhaps no peacetime Western leader has fallen so low from such a height. Indeed, by prosecuting Andreotti the Sicilian magistrates are effectively placing Italy's entire post-war political order on trial. "Given the length and centrality of his career, the Italian Republic itself is in the dock," says Giuliano Ferrara, who is a member of Parliament and was a minister in the recent centre-right government. "The trial of Andreotti is the trial of our own history."
[snip]
alternatives.com
But then again, unlike Russia, Italy didn't develop nuclear capacities....
Sow the fascistic wind and reap the neofascistic whirlwind.... |
