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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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September 11, 2001: Questions to Ask if You Still Believe the Official Narrative

The attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) left nearly 3,000 dead in NYC, Washington D.C. and over Pennsylvania. The attacks transformed America into a deepening police state at home and a nation perpetually at war abroad.

The official narrative claims that 19 hijackers representing Al Qaeda took over 4 commercial aircraft to carry out attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

The event served as impetus for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan which continues to present day. It also led directly to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Attempts to cite the attack to precipitate a war with Iran and other members of the so-called “Axis of Evil” (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba) have also been made.

And if this is the version of reality one subscribes to, several questions remain worth asking.

1. Can the similarities between 9/11 and plans drawn up by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in 1962 under the code name “Operation Northwoods” be easily dismissed?

The US DoD and JCS wrote a detailed plan almost identical to the 9/11 attacks as early as 1962 called “Operation Northwoods” where the US proposed hijacking commercial airliners, committing terrorist attacks, and blaming Cuba to justify a US military intervention.

Far from a fringe conspiracy theory, mainstream media outlets including ABC News would cover the document in articles like, “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba,” which would report:

In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

A full PDF copy of the document is available via George Washington University’s archives and states specifically regarding the hijacking of commercial aircraft:

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

The document also cites the USS Maine in describing the sort of event the DoD-JCS sought to stage, a US warship whose destruction was used to maliciously provoke the Spanish-American War. It should be noted, that unlike the DoD-JCS document’s suggestion that airliner-related casualties be staged, the USS Maine explosion killed 260 sailors. It is likely that DoD and JCS would not risk engineering a provocation that leads to major war but allow low-level operators left alive with the knowledge of what they had participated in.

Considering that the US sought to deceive the public in order to provoke an unjustifiable war that would undoubtedly kill thousands or tens of thousands of innocent people, and that other proposals did include killing innocent people, it is worth considering that US policymakers would also be just as willing to extinguish innocent lives when staging the hijacking of aircraft to provoke such a war.

2. Why did US policymakers draw up extensive plans to reassert US global hegemony – including regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen – without any conceivable pretext until 9/11 conveniently unfolded?

In 2000, US policymakers from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) sought a sweeping plan to reassert America as a global hegemon. In a 90-page document titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defense: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century” (PDF), a strategy for maintaining what it called “American military preeminence” would be laid out in detail.

It involved global moves the United States – in 2000 – could never justify, including placing US troops in Southeast Asia, building a global missile defense network prohibited by treaties signed during the Cold War, and the containment of developing nations that would eventually end up rolling back US global hegemony in the near future, including Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.

The report noted the difficulties of proposing and executing the transformations necessary to achieve the objectives laid out in the document. It would be explicitly stated that:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

In fact, the entire body of the document is an uncanny description of the post-9/11 “international order,” an order unimaginable had the events of 9/11 not transpired.

It should also be remembered that wars predicated on 9/11 like the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, were admittedly planned before 9/11 took place.

The Guardian in its 2004 article, “Bush team ‘agreed plan to attack the Taliban the day before September 11’,” would report:

The day before the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration agreed on a plan to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by force if it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, according to a report by a bipartisan commission of inquiry. The report pointed out that agreement on the plan, which involved a steady escalation of pressure over three years, had been repeatedly put off by the Clinton and Bush administrations, despite the repeated failure of attempts to use diplomatic and economic pressure.

While it seems inconceivable that the American or global public would tolerate the multi-trillion dollar 16 year war that the invasion of Afghanistan has become without the attacks on 9/11, such a war was admittedly in the making – in fact – years before 9/11 unfolded.

Similarly, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was strongly linked to the aftermath of 9/11, but was likewise decided upon long before 9/11 unfolded.

CNN in its article, “O’Neill: Bush planned Iraq invasion before 9/11,” would report:

The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News’ 60 Minutes.

This echos similar statements made by US Army General Wesley Clark who repeatedly warned that the US sought global-spanning war post-Cold War to assert its hegemony over the planet, and fully sought to use 9/11 as a pretext to do it.

General Clark would list seven nations slated for regime change post 9/11, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen – all nations now either at war or facing war with the United States and its proxies – or in the case of Libya – entirely divided and destroyed in the wake of US military operations.

3. If primarily Saudi hijackers with Saudi money and Saudi organization perpetrated the attacks of 9/11, why has the United States waged war or threatened war with every nation in the Middle East except Saudi Arabia and its allies?

Not only has the United States made no moves against Saudi Arabia for its apparent role in the 9/11 attacks – spanning the administrations of US President George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – the United States has sold Saudi Arabia billions in arms, provided military support and protection to Saudi Arabia’s military and government, partnered with Saudi Arabia in its ongoing conflict with Yemen – all while US government documents and leaked e-mails between US politicians reveal Saudi Arabia is still a state sponsor of Al Qaeda – the organization officially blamed for the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, a 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report would explicitly admit:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

The DIA memo then explains exactly who this “Salafist principality’s” supporters are:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

This “Salafist principality” is now known as the “Islamic State,” an affiliate of Al Qaeda still operating with significant state sponsorship everywhere from Syria, Iraq, and Libya, to the Philippines and beyond.

Coincidentally, Saudi-armed and funded terrorists in the Philippines has served as a pretext for US military assets to begin expanding their presence in Southeast Asia, just as the aforementioned 2000 PNAC document had sought.

Additionally, in a 2014 e-mail between US Counselor to the President John Podesta and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it would be admitted that two of America’s closest regional allies – Saudi Arabia and Qatar – were providing financial and logistical support to the Islamic State.

The e-mail, leaked to the public through Wikileaks, stated:

…we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [the Islamic State] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.

While the e-mail portrays the US in a fight against the very “Salafist” (Islamic) “principality” (State) it sought to create and use as a strategic asset in 2012, the fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both acknowledged as state sponsors of the terrorist organization – and are both still enjoying immense military, economic, and political support from the United States and its European allies – indicates just how disingenuous America’s “war on terror” really is. If the US truly believed Al Qaeda carried out the deadly attacks of 9/11, why does it count among its closest allies two of Al Qaeda’s largest and most prolific state sponsors?

Together – by honestly answering these three questions – we are left considering the very real possibility that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack carried out by foreign terrorists, but rather an attack engineered by special interests within the United States itself.

If we reject that conclusion, we must ask ourselves why the US DoD and JCS would take the time to draft plans for false flag attacks if they did not believe they were viable options US policymakers might seriously consider. At the very least we must ask why those at the DoD and JCS could be caught signing and dating a conspiracy to commit unspeakable terrorism to justify an unjust war and not only avoid criminal charges, but remain employed within the US government.

We must also ask ourselves why US policymakers would draft long-term plans for reasserting American global hegemony without any conceivable pretext to justify such plans. Even in the wake of 9/11, the US government found it difficult to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public and its allies. Without 9/11, such salesmanship would have been impossible. In Syria – with 9/11 disappearing into the distant past – US regime change efforts have all but stalled.

Finally, we must find adequate explanations as to why those sponsoring the supposed perpetrators of 9/11 have remained recipients of unwavering American support, weapon sales, and both political and military protection. We must attempt to answer why militants fighting in Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda have been able to openly operate out of NATO-member Turkey’s territory for the past 6 years, side-by-side US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel who are admittedly fueling the conflict with weapons, money, and training “accidentally” ending up in Al Qaeda’s hands.

It is clear – that at the very least – the official narrative in no shape, form, or way adds up. If the official narrative doesn’t add up, what does?

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thesethingsofours · 4 years

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Parents are the Worst.

I recently began listening to Nice White Parents, a new podcast hosted by self-confessed nice white parent, Channa Joffe-Walt. It’s produced by the people in and around Serial, This American Life, S-Town and The New York Times. If you are familiar with those titles, you’ll know what to expect – in-depth, considered analysis of a heretofore, under-exposed social issue, executed with an East Coast progressive liberal stride; a pleasingly audible, irreverent gait and the swagger of emotional intelligence and self-aware humility. Through research, interviews and attaching herself to the Brooklyn School of International Studies for several years, Joffe-Walt tells the story of the New York Public school system and its apparent failure to meaningfully integrate itself since Brown v Board of Education made racial segregation illegal over 65 years ago.

In episode 2, Joffe-Walt tracks down and interviews some nice white parents from around the time the school opened in 1963. These people had written letters encouraging the school board to erect the school building closer to their own neighbourhood (and consequently further away from the darker-skinned families it was more likely to serve). They expressively emphasised their wishes to send their kids there and virtuously aid the process of integration, which they believed to be morally imperative.

But apparently, none of these letter writers subsequently sent their kids to that school. It remained, as anticipated, a predominantly non-white school. Laid alongside the tense machinations of the contemporary school’s invasion by a large new cohort of white parents and their issue, Joffe-Walt’s hypothesis is that white parents have always held liberal aims, and the clout to impose them, but do so with little consideration for their non-white counterparts or any real commitment to seeing through the incumbent practicalities. From the outset, this natural conclusion is persistently hinted at, not least from the podcast’s deliberately provocative title. Perhaps, on an individual level, this hypothesis contains some truth.

However, as the story extends, the blame gains weight and the theory mutates into a generalised accusation. Responsibility for the mediocre state of New York’s (and by implication, America’s) public schools is explicitly laid at the pale feet of white parents. It's an exposition of what is often described as “White Guilt” and its corresponding effort at contrition (i.e. the guilt felt from the inherited sin of one’s ancestors’ oppression of non-white people, primarily through slavery). While White Guilt might have its conceptual uses for a few people to come to terms with idea of race (although even there I am sceptical), its value as a wider social narrative is deeply unconvincing, and potentially damaging. Nice White Parents does a good job showing why.

In the podcast, anecdotal evidence is drastically extrapolated to justify White Guilt. Unless backed up by unequivocal data, it is inherently flawed to base so much on interviews with a handful of people in their 80s about a letter they wrote in the 60s, and (in episode 3) a now middle-aged woman about her perception of school when she was 13. Equally so is to use the example of a single New York school to imply that nice white parents are universally responsible for all the failings of American public schooling. A quick empirical comparison with countries unburdened by America’s racial psychosis would almost certainly reveal this argument to be fundamentally false. I hazard to suggest that Joffe-Walt set out, either consciously or subconsciously, to prove the theory of Nice White Parents, and has therefore fallen into the trap of verification bias.

Of course, the truth is likely to be far simpler – green, cheddar, dead presidents and moolah (which middle-aged white people in American disproportionately possess). Better schools arrive from broad, deep and perpetual community investment – from good, affordable housing and well-paying jobs to well-paid teachers and decent facilities. That means higher taxes on the wealthy and better provincial management. If a completely non-white school district received $50 billion to invest in their community with educational improvement as its ultimate goal (that or the abolition of private schools), I suspect the idea of nice white parents would quickly evaporate.

It is plainly a damaging distraction to focus on the role of supposed-predisposed-racism of well-meaning, middle-class people, who simply want the best possible education for their children. Instead, the message for the “hereby accused” should be to use their numerical majority and voting power to advocate for systems that would reduce inequality, regardless of race. In this respect, it strikes me that wealth is a sacrosanct subject in America, something that one can never apologise for having too much of. Quite the opposite – the culture is built on celebrating those who hoard capital. Is it possible that Americans are taught never to apologise for having money, so those who see something wrong develop other issues, such as race, for which they can atone?

More deeply, the podcast reveals how the White Guilt narrative is in ideological conflict with the very wrong it is supposedly trying to right. Taken to its conclusion, it inevitably reinforces the idea that white people are innately superior, and race is the primary determining factor for success in American life. In the context of the podcast, it is applied to suggest that New York public schools are destined to fail their students unless white kids and their parents get involved. It is gloriously ironic that condemning the influence of white parents on public schools serves to reinforce the supposed inferiority of non-white participants in the education system… because of their lack of whiteness. At the end of episode 3, Jaffe-Walt lays this out:

Nice white parents shape public schools even in our absence, because public schools are maniacally loyal to white families even when that loyalty is rarely returned back to the public schools. Just the very idea of us, the threat of our displeasure, warps the whole system. So “separate” is still not equal because the power sits with white parents no matter where we are in the system. I think the only way you equalise schools is by recognising this fact and trying wherever possible to suppress the power of white parents. Since no one is forcing us to give up power we white parents are going to have to do it voluntarily, which, yeah how's that going to happen? That's next time on Nice White Parents…

(Consider replacing every mention of “white” in this excerpt with “affluent”. Would that not feel infinitely more true?)

In fairness, the honourable, “anti-racist” intention is clear – in order to defeat “white supremacy” white people need to accept their inherited and systemic superiority and eliminate it. Sadly, any idea centred around race – whether malicious or well-intentioned – is bound to collapse under even the slightest pressure. To be truly anti-racist is to recognise that race itself doesn’t exist (other than as an abstract concept that, having infected people’s perceptions after four centuries of concerted, localised propaganda, must be eradicated). Race has no basis in science or nature; it cannot be quantified in any reasonable, measurable way. Simply, it is a lie; invented to excuse the exploitation of others for the purposes of wealth-generation. To base one’s actions on it in any way is to take a leap of faith into a void with no landing. Race is a malignant, empty God; belief in which is destined to lead to malignant, empty behaviour. “Racism” and “Anti-Racism” (as it is currently understood) are therefore both empty, malignant religions, practiced in service of a non-existent deity.

Notably, there are still two episodes to go (released August 13th and 20th). Either might serve to recover some balance. But by episode 3, the stage is not only set for this conclusion to be drawn, but the 1st Grade nativity is in its final scene and the wise men are long since gone.

All that said, if you let the incessant racialization of all things drift past you rather than choking on it, as plain entertainment – storytelling rather than journalism – it’s still an engaging listen; well-constructed and convincingly told. Furthermore, on a non-racial level (if you can somehow listen beyond it), the podcast does have some value, since it reminds me of something I have long half-joked about – that parents (of all stripes) are the worst.

Aside from the obvious, complex Freudian reasons, on a socio-political level, when a choice arises between a laudable, achievable change and putting one’s own children at a perceived disadvantage in order to effect it, a parent will choose its child’s advantage almost every time. No matter their colour, few parents will sacrifice their own child’s prospects – even minutely – to advance the hypothetical children of someone else, or society more widely. Parents are company directors whose primary obligation is to their miniature, genetically-derivative shareholders – they’ll only vote for large-scale change if it is net-profitable or government-imposed.

And of course, parents should pay their kids the maximum dividend. Who else will? A parent is legally and morally obliged to do the best for the young life they are charged with defending. And therein lies the joke. Parents are the worst only because they are ubiquitous. They created you, me and everyone else. We all had them, and most people end up being one. It is therefore less of a criticism than an inevitable, evolutionary truth – just one we should probably be more honest and upfront about. Unknowingly, underneath (and in some ways, because of) its misguided, exhausting racial handwringing, Nice White Parents just about makes this point.

Listen to Nice White Parents here or wherever you get your podcasts.

#nice white parents #podcast #parenting #education #race relations #critical thinking #review #podcast review #npr #this american life #new york times #capitalism

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the-random-walk-blog · 4 years

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The Failure of US Foreign Policy Forever-Wars & Illusions of Victory

January 3rd 2020 will be remembered as the day that a tectonic shift in the dynamics of US and Middle Eastern politics occurred, forever changing the worlds view on American foreign policy, its moral standing on the world stage, as well as its intentions in the region and worldwide.

Since WWII, the self-adopted American role in world politics has been that of the global policeman, the bringer of “democracy”, and the “liberator” of what Washington deem to be oppressive regimes. The popular assumption within the walls Congress and the White House is, that the rest of the world needs what America has – a democratic political process, ideally in such a way that US commercial interests are met by the outcome, although these interests are often hidden behind a veil of the insistence on democracy and its benefit for the people of the target nation. The fatal flaw in this logic lies therein that an inherent lack of understanding of local culture, religion and social conventions has blinded US lawmakers from the underlying issues of the regions where such intervention and oftentimes blatant calls from regime change have been attempted.

This theme is a permanent feature of US foreign policy in every conflict that the US has become embroiled in, be it Korea and Vietnam, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the perpetual obsession with destabilizing Iran. The source of all of these questionable policy decisions by Washington can be traced back to a simple notion – the American hubris of assuming that what America does and how it operates is the ideal model to be implemented in the rest of the world, regardless of fundamental religious and cultural differences in its target-nations. Whilst America enjoys a long and very colourful history of political intervention, the main ones that shall be focused on are the Middle Eastern conflicts, simply as these are the most obvious policy errors that the US have become engulfed in, whilst it must be said that the tentacles of the American foreign policy extend far beyond this region.

Whenever a stable and operating system is threatened or toppled, the inevitable result is the filling of that void with some form of chaos whilst society recalibrates its political and social compass, adjusting to the changing landscape of the country in question. Undoubtedly sometimes this can also bring about positive developments, although finding examples of this has proven to be more difficult than one would expect at first glance.

The notion of the American brand of democracy being the superior brand of this political ideology should be fundamentally questioned after exploring the US political process in closer detail, with the elections being decided by the electoral college (which is not necessarily representative of the true will of the people), whilst political decisions of a sitting president are largely dictated by who holds the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. Could it perhaps even be considered undemocratic of a Republican dominated Senate to veto the majority of the president’s decisions, despite the fact that the majority of the population has voted to entrust this individual with the ruling power for the term of his or her time in office?

Different brands of democracy must surely be explored, as one size clearly does not fit all.

Libya

Whilst Colonel Ghaddafi certainly is a controversial figure, it must be said that Libya enjoyed long periods of economic and social stability under his rule, turning Libya into the most wealthy country in Africa largely due to the abundance of crude oil and natural gas. Whilst there is evidence to support cases of human rights abuses perpetrated under Ghaddafi’s leadership, when compared to the current situation that the world is witnessing there, the question must be asked which of these two outcomes was the lesser evil? Are the vast majority of Libyans better off now than they were prior to regime change?

The US-led interventionist campaign, which led to the overthrow of Ghaddafi and his government, left behind a gaping power void and social chaos, as the newly brought “freedom” that the US preached, led to widespread lawlessness, violence and tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the name of liberating this nation from their previous established and functioning government.

We must ask ourselves the fundamental question – if the US version of democracy is indeed the superior form of government as it is consistently preached to us, then why is the state of Libya in complete turmoil since so-called “democracy” was brought to its shores?

One reason for this is surely cultural, with tribal allegiances being of much greater importance in the Middle East than in Europe or the US, which is a fact that many outside actors do not understand. The transition of Libya from a state of relative stability and prosperity, the result that democracy has brought surely cannot be seen as the optimal outcome. Economic considerations must also be made when looking at the form of government that is prevalent in different nations.

Libya’s economy is fairly one dimensional, with the vast majority of the countries revenues being generated from the production and subsequent sale of crude oil and natural gas. In many countries where economics conditions are not based on a large number of factors, but come from a small number of income sources, dominant leaders tend to be in control. Is this because these individuals are power hungry and selfish figures, or because countries with less complex but extremely lucrative exports would not function properly if a “democratic” system was introduced?

Would Libya have reached the economic prosperity that it at one point had if the Senate or House of Representatives was permanently counteracting the decisions of the leadership? When comparing the developments since the US intervention in Libya, it is challenging to not arrive at the conclusion that the country as an economy, and the citizens of Libya were in fact better off under the rule of a strong, autocratic leader such a Ghadaffi, who had sufficient power to ensure that the delicate social fabric and one-dimensional economic inputs led to a favorable outcome for the majority of citizens in Libya.

On this train of thought, it is possible to venture down the path of saying that the way Ghadaffi ruled, was in fact by some definition a democratic style, as his decisions resulted in a favorable outcome for the vast majority of the citizens of Libya.

Libya pre and post US invasion:

Afghanistan

The US campaign in Afghanistan began in 2001 and has not ended until this day. The narrative for invading Afghanistan was that the Al-Qaeda members responsible for the attack on September 11 had been trained and harboured by the Taliban. The fact that the majority of the perpetrators in the attack were actually from Saudi Arabia (whilst none were Iranian, Iraqi or Afghan) was largely ignored by the Bush administration, mainly due to the relationship between Saudi and the US in defense contracts as well as their strategic partnership aimed at exerting US influence over the Shiia majority population of the neighboring nations such as Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

To get an understanding of the duration of the Afghan military campaign, many of the US troops currently in Afghanistan, would only just have been born at the time that the invasion initially took place.

18 years of war after the initial landing of troops in Afghanistan, the US has slowly come to the concerning conclusion that this is a war that was in no way won by Washington, as the Taliban reemerge as the preeminent political party. The US campaign has cost the taxpayer over $1 trillion, as well as countless casualties on both sides, and has yielded no result whatsoever, except the killing of Osama bin Laden (although this occurred in Pakistan). For all intents and purposes, the political fabric of Afghanistan now is very similar as it was in 2001 prior to the invasion.

Syria

Syria’s secular, internationally recognized government under Assad refused to allow an oil and gas pipeline, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to traverse its territory upwards towards the European market. For its defiance, Syria paid a heavy price, as the Obama administration began deploying money, weapons and arms to a jihadist concoction made up of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and Daesh invaders, in the hope that this would destabilize Syria to the point of surrender, and turn it into a defacto Saudi & US subservient state.

The brutal battles that were to ensue are well documented, with the rise of Daesh and extremist factions enslaving the local population and bringing tyranny to the entire region, as well as being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. The primary resistance to the Daesh insurgency came from Iran and neighbouring Iraq (through its army and affiliated armed groups), with the support of Hezbollah-aligned groups that united in the battle against this extremist savagery.

With the US attempt to bring “democracy” to Syria, what they produced was the most ruthless and inhumane terrorist group in living memory. The sheer existence of groups such as Daesh and Al-Nusra were only possible through the direct and indirect support of Washington and Israel, as the regional instability gave both of those nations the power they so dearly crave in the Middle East, with their presence being justified under the guise of protecting the local population.

Although Daesh pushed forward all the way to Baghdad, the resolve and commitment of the local Iraqis and their supporters succeeded in overpowering the Daesh terrorists through enormous personal sacrifices, as armed Shiia groups pushed Daesh out of Iraq, followed by Syria. Assad remains in power, whilst the US slowly withdraw from this battleground. The massacres of Aleppo, Mosul, Kobane and countless other cities that were in the hands of Daesh should serve as a reminder of the consequences of destabilizing a functioning government, no matter if you agree with their philosophy or not.

Syria pre and post US invasion:

Iraq

The removal of Saddam Hussein from the leadership of Iraq marks another tragic chapter in Middle Eastern and US political history. From what is now clear, the invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction, as a means of furthering US commercial and political interests in the region, as Iraq was viewed as a threat to US influence in the region. As one of the countries with the largest populations, an abundance of natural resources such as crude oil and natural gas, coupled with a large army that was built up during Saddams rule, Iraq became a natural target for US intervention.

The unwillingness of Saddam to cave to US demands further added an incentive for the US to provoke a confrontation, as history has shown that this is generally the outcome when a country refuses to comply with American demands, no matter how illogical some of these sometimes are.

A general environment in the US of Muslim-phobia coupled with an enormous anti Middle Eastern marketing push by the US administrations, assisted in convincing the majority of Congress of the very ill-informed decision to proceed with military action against Iraq, despite the fact that Saddam had never actually threatened the US with an attack. The landing of American troops on the shores of Iraq marked the beginning of a long period of chaos, as US forces swept through the country, removed Saddam from power and implemented their caretaker government whilst they figured out what to do with this situation that they had created.

Under Saddam there were strict rules in Iraq as to what information was shown on television, what opinions were tolerated and how people were to behave, none of which sounds particularly appealing, but also lead to a certain sense of order. The American invasion brought what the US pitched as “freedom” to the Iraqi people. Freedom from a leader who was undoubtedly oppressive, but this new-found freedom also seemed to include the assumption that no rules applied any longer, and a general state of lawlessness ensued. Rules were no longer abided by, weapons were freely available to the population, and the country was plunged into a state of disarray yet again.

The purported weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration claimed were the basis for the invasion were never found, even with over 100’000 US soldiers being present in Iraq during this time. The fact that the reason for invading Iraq in the first place turned out to be a complete lie has been largely dismissed by the Presidents that have been in power since Bush, and no accountability for the untold destruction that has been caused by the US is in sight. The notion that when the US intervene it is called “bringing democracy”, whilst when other nations behave the same way it is deemed to be terrorism.

Terrorism is defined as the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

Some would say the above definition and what the US forces have done in Iraq enjoy a certain amount of overlap.

Baghdad -2000

Baghdad - 2004

Mosul

Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran has for a long period of time now held the prize as the country that the US despises the most in the entire region. The reason for this is quite simple, in that it is mainly based on the Iranians standing their ground, and not giving in to American demands, whilst pushing back against hostile and destabilizing behavior of Israel in the Middle East.

Iran is simply too big, and has too much internal social cohesion for the US to be able to overthrow the government. As the Iranian Foreign Minister so eloquently phrased it, “beautiful military equipment doesn’t rule the world, people rule the world. The US needs to wake up to the reality that the people of this region are enraged, that the people of this region want the United States out”

The hostile environment between the US and Iran can largely be attributed to the influence of the Israelis, as the fire of anti-Iran sentiment is consistently stoked by Netanyahu’s rhetoric, always preaching the impending destruction of Israel at the hands of Iran. The reality is a little different – Iran will defend itself if attacked, but has a very long history of not actually attacking anyone. A point that is generally ignored by western media, is the role that Iran and particularly General Qassem Soleimani played in the defeat of Daesh, and driving back the terrorists until their entire dismantling, virtually ending their rule of terror in the region.

Without Iran and General Soleimani, the entire region would currently be in an even more extreme state of chaos, and assuming that most of Iraq and Syria would now be Daesh territory is not a stretch by any means. The extreme sacrifices of the Iraqi’s and Iranians fighting against Daesh receives too little recognition, as can be seen by the IRGC and General Soleimani being labelled “terrorists” by the United States, when the reality is that the bulk of the fighting against Daesh, the real terrorists, was done by these individuals. The result of opposing the US hegemony was tragically displayed in the first week of January 2020 in Baghdad, as General Soleimani was assassinated by an unprovoked US airstrike whilst on an official invitation of the Iraqi government, in the midst of peace negotiations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

What reason would the US possibly have for assassinating the man that is largely regarded as a hero in his region, defeated Daesh, and is trying to promote regional stability and peace through an improvement of relations with Saudi? And is it realistic that 7 million people in Tehran turn up to the funeral of someone they consider a terrorist?

Perhaps the reason is that the US does not want stability in this region, and that the chaos is what they seek in pursuit of a very warped and misinformed political agenda. No US president in recent history has visited Iran. How can so much hatred be harboured for a country that the President has never seen with his own eyes, and has not threatened the United States or perpetrated any terrorist attacks?

Iran is the kryptonite that America never expected it would be. The people of Iran are united in their loyalty both to their people and country, and refuse to be bullied by the American war machine.

Funeral of General Soleimani, Tehran

Endgame

No other country in the world has anything remotely like the B-2 bombers that flew bombing runs over Libya from a base in Missouri.

Nor does anyone else have a fleet of 500 aerial refueling tankers that can keep the B-2 and other warplanes airborne for many hours.

Nor does anyone have the amphibious ready groups, the overhead reconnaissance assets, or the inventory of smart munitions employed by the US military. Even the V-22 Osprey "tilt- rotor" aircraft used to rescue a downed American pilot is unique - no other country has tried to build one, much less field a sizable force of them.

The world has never seen a military force like the one America operates today.

But is it all affordable for a country that is seeing its share of global wealth steadily decline, a country that doesn't want to raise taxes despite a $1.5 trillion deficit?

Is an army of such incredible capability really necessary when you say your form of government is the superior model, or does the US form of government only work because of the sheer fire power of the army, so that anyone who doesn’t agree has to watch their cities being pulverized by the most complex and powerful weaponry in the world?

The US have spent $7 trillion fighting wars in the Middle East, and thousands of US soldiers have lost their lives, for a purpose that does not seem worthy of sacrificing a human life for, namely political and economic influence in a region that does not welcome an outside presence like the US.

Is the United States a safer place because of the intervention in the Middle East, when you consider that none of the countries that have been invaded have ever threatened the United States with an attack?

The fact is, the only terrorist attack that has happened on US soil, was perpetrated by citizens of Saudi Arabia, a country which has not been invaded, and is by far the largest buyer of US weaponry, whilst the rest of the region burns.

Perhaps the time has come for the US to turn their focus on their own domestic issues, and allow the rest of the world to discover its own form of democracy, with each country selecting the version of this concept that works the best for themselves.

“No man is good enough to govern another man, without the others consent”

Abraham Lincoln

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bbcbreakingnews · 4 years

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‘We’ve cheated for decades’: Whistleblower’s explosive revelations about Russia

The Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles because they had such a huge doping problem that USSR politicians feared international exposure and drugs shame if they took part, according to an explosive new book, extracts from which appear exclusively in The Mail on Sunday today.

The autobiography of former Moscow lab boss-turned-whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov contains shocking details about the doping ‘bespredel’ (lawlessness) in Russian sport over many decades, unmasking hitherto untarnished champions as cheats.

Among other astounding revelations, Rodchenkov says one of the most tainted athletes in Olympic history — Canada‘s Ben Johnson, who won 100m Olympic gold in 1988 in Seoul before it was revealed he had taken banned steroids — had secretly tested positive for steroids two years earlier.

The autobiography of former Moscow lab boss-turned-whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov contains shocking details about doping lawlessness in Russian sport over many decades

Rodchenkov reveals he personally conducted the 1986 doping sample analysis that found a banned steroid, stanozolol, in Johnson’s urine, at an event in Moscow. He says it was among 14 failed drugs tests covered up by the hosts to ensure those ‘Goodwill Games’ weren’t tarnished.

The book, The Rodchenkov Affair, will be published on Thursday and is sure to reignite a war of words between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the rest of the sporting world.

Rodchenkov, 61, was first cited as being at the heart of Russian drug corruption in July 2013, when a Mail on Sunday investigation named him as central to state-sponsored doping and a cover-up.

Our story seven years ago quoted sources saying Russia intended to dope their way to Winter Olympic glory in Sochi in 2014.

We passed information to global governing bodies including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the world governing body of athletics, the IAAF, and the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) — and they all failed to stop it.

When WADA-funded investigations finally began to probe Russia’s massive pan-sport cheating in 2015, Rodchenkov fled Russia for the USA in November that year and turned whistleblower.

His evidence has since been used to convict hundreds of cheats and he remains in protective custody in the US, in fear of his life.

His autobiography is an extraordinary account of a decades-long quest by the USSR and then Russia to win by any means.

Book claims Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympic because they had such a huge doping problem that USSR politicians feared international exposure and drugs shame if they took part

‘I knowingly defrauded the world’s anti-doping authorities for more than a decade [as head of WADA’s Moscow lab], both for the greater ‘glory’ of Russian athletes and also to satisfy sports bureaucrats who were bent on perpetuating Russia’s sporting success,’ writes Rodchenkov.

‘I justified my actions by explaining that there had never been any real doping control in the Soviet Union or in Russia so I was continuing along a well-trodden path.’

Rodchenkov’s account of the USSR’s boycott of the LA Olympics of 1984 is counter to the prevailing narrative that it was a simple tit-fortat boycott after the USA skipped the 1980 Olympics in Moscow in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

‘In some countries there is a stigma associated with using steroids but that was never the case in Russia,’ writes Rodchenkov.

‘Training at the Olympic level puts significant strain on the body. Steroids reduce fatigue and trauma, and can also help muscles recover. I know plenty of athletes who used them for years and have lived long and healthy lives.’

He cites the ‘bespredel’ around drugs over decades, naming, for example, one Soviet athlete who became a double Olympic champion as well as multiple world and European champion and broke the world record in his event, without ever being linked to drugs.

Rodchenkov says the USSR finally decided to boycott the 1984 Olympics when plans for a secret Soviet lab hidden aboard a ship off the American coast became impossible

‘He ingested [banned steroid] stanozolol in such huge doses that after we had injected his sample into our Hewlett-Packard machine, an alarm sounded and it became so contaminated with stanozolol metabolites that the next few samples spat out false positives, even when we knew there were no steroids present,’ writes Rodchenkov.

After the world record, Rodchekov says: ‘Even though I diluted his sample with distilled water at a 10:1 ratio, it still overloaded my gas chromatograph mass spectrometer with gigantic peaks of stanozolol metabolites.’

Rodchenkov also names another, female, athlete, an Olympic champion who set an ‘unbelievable world record’, as a serial doper.

‘Programmed to win, they are shining examples of the close relationship between the state doping programme and the ideology of communism.’

Rodchenkov says the USSR’s ruling elite, the Politburo, finally decided to boycott the 1984 Olympics when plans for a secret Soviet lab hidden aboard a ship off the American coast became impossible: the LA authorities denied permission for it to enter the harbour.

‘The Soviets had been planning to hide a doping control laboratory on board a ship in the Port of Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympic Games, after Manfred Donike [a senior IOC anti-doping official] and Don Catlin of UCLA’s OlympicAnalytical Laboratory announced they would be able to detect all [drugs] — including stanozolol and testosterone — at the LA Games.

‘Testing athletes before their departure wouldn’t suffice — the Soviet sports czars had to have their own on-site laboratory in order to ensure that no dirty Soviet athletes made it to the starting lines.

That was the Games where Ben Johnson (pictured) became sport’s most notorious doper up to that point by failing a drugs test after winning the 100m final

‘When Los Angeles wouldn’t allow our ship to enter the harbour, that was the last straw. The Politburo pulled the plug and boycotted the Olympics entirely.’

Rodchenkov’s book reveals Russia did manage to deploy a secret lab during the 1988 Seoul Games, aboard the luxury liner ‘Mikhail Sholokhov’ named after a Soviet writer who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. Rodchenkov was charged with running it.

That was the Games where Ben Johnson became sport’s most notorious doper up to that point by failing a drugs test after winning the 100m final, just as Rodchenkov claims he had two years earlier, secretly.

‘Doping control analysis at the Goodwill Games turned out to be a formality,’ he writes. ‘Our laboratory uncovered 14 positive result, but apparatchiks from Goskomsport [the Soviet Ministry of Sport] chose not to report them — no one wanted to besmirch [the] ‘alternative Olympics’.

‘Canada’s Ben Johnson beat the American Carl Lewis but then tested positive for stanozolol. I did his analysis. The result was never reported.’

Johnson told The Mail on Sunday last week he had never been informed of any 1986 positive test and declined to comment further.

Rodchenkov reports how an IAAF doping control officer managed to obtain urine samples from two Russian racewalkers, Olga Kaniskina (pictured) and Valery Borchin

He has long-maintained that most of his rivals were also cheating in that era but got away with it. This has largely been shown to be correct.

Rodchenkov says Soviet doping was ‘out of control’ as long ago as the World Athletics Championships in 1983 in Helsinki, where ‘in some training camps, finding clean urine [to illegally swap for dirty samples] was a problem because so manyathletes were dirty.’

More than 20 years later, he says, there was a’veritable epidemic of EPO use’ (the illegal blood-boosting drug EPO) not least in Russian racewalking under the now-disgraced coach Viktor Chegin.

The IAAF, monitoring Chegin’s walkers’ blood samples, privately warned him to stop. Rodchenkov reports how an IAAF doping control officer managed to obtain urine samples from two Russian racewalkers, Olga Kaniskina and Valery Borchin, just a week before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

But a Russian secret service agent managed to confiscate the samples at the border and charges were never pressed.

Kaniskina and Borchin subsequently won Olympic gold medals in China, and although many of their achievements were later expunged from the records for cheating, they officially remain Olympic champions from 2008.

Rodchenkov also tells the story of London 2012 discus thrower Darya Pishchalnikova (pictured) who failed drugs tests and threatened to blow the whistle on their country’s doping programme

Rodchenkov also tells the stories of Olympic medallists Irina Korzhanenko (2004, shot-putt) and Darya Pishchalnikova (2012, discus), who failed drugs tests and threatened to blow the whistle on their country’s doping programme.

But both decided ultimately to keep quiet under a ‘no retaliations’ agreement where cheats would keep quiet in exchange for Russian government pay-offs and support.

Rodchenkov’s implication of Russia’s most important officials in recent years is exemplified by the case of swimmer Yana Martynova, a national heroine who read the ‘athlete’s oath’ at her sport’s World Championships in the Russian city of Kazan in 2015 — swearing to commit to a sporting life without doping or cheating.

She read this oath in the presence of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Rodchenkov writes in his book that ‘at the same moment’ he was sitting in his lab in Moscow, entering the fact that she had just failed a drugs test into his computer.

‘That is Russian sporting history in a nutshell,’ Rodchenkov writes. ‘Another doper was endorsing sportsmanship and fair play, with Putin standing next to his doped heroes.’

The post ‘We’ve cheated for decades’: Whistleblower’s explosive revelations about Russia appeared first on BBC BREAKING NEWS.

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#SPORT

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rhetoricandlogic · 4 years

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ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD! BY SAAD Z. HOSSAIN

T. S. MILLER

ISSUE:

6 APRIL 2015

With an unembarrassed exclamation point to punctuate its classic pulp adventure title, Saad Z. Hossain's explosive first novel announces itself as something other than entirely serious. But readers in the early 21st century immediately understand that the desire to escape from Baghdad is the desire to escape from an unending nightmare, a geopolitical cataclysm that cannot be reversed—and perhaps can only be laughed at. Self-consciously outrageous and at times silly to the point of becoming sophomoric, Escape from Baghdad! achieves its true emotional impact through expressions of genuine wit bound to powerful meditations on the inanity of war, and on the special inanity of a particular 2003 war.

Of course, Hossain is not the first novelist to approach the traumas of armed conflict with a strong sense of the absurd—Vonnegut and Joseph Heller will spring to mind as obvious precedents—but, if a single modern war deserves to receive this kind of darkly satirical treatment, it would certainly have to be the Iraq War. Although I doubt that, for example, Hossain's farcical depictions of the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the American military command bear any resemblance to historical fact, these scenes finally seem no more outlandish than, say, Dr. Strangelove's portrayal of the same dysfunction, and operate similarly as a critique of power and violence. In terms of both sheer hilarity and profounder insight on war, Hossain's novel never quite rises to the heights of a Slaughterhouse-Five or Kubrick's inimitable melding of existential terror and absurdist humor in his 1964 film. Even so, Escape from Baghdad! remains an honorable new entry in this same tradition, and also refreshingly brings us a war story that focuses largely on civilians, civilians who, for instance, find that their financial assets have become "fictional" (23), and whose interpersonal relationships dissolve into nothing as family members become collateral damage and neighbors and acquaintances of all kinds begin to doubt one another's allegiances. Hossain ingeniously links the brutal chaos of post-invasion Iraq to the carnivalesque as a mode: a nation at war is necessarily a world turned upside-down, so why not turn it over to a few drinking, swearing, and wisecracking Lords of Misrule?

The opening chapter introduces us to Kinza and Dagr, two black-market "purveyors of medicine, gossip, diesel, and specialty ammunition" (9). The former is a natural criminal, and the latter an unassuming professor of economics who is still able to playact, when some American infantry grunts come knocking at the door, "the exact composite of the innocent Iraqi these farm boys from Minnesota had come to liberate" (12). These soldiers strike Dagr as "big, idiot children [ . . . ], capable of kindness or casual violence as the mood took them, unreadable, random, terrifying" (12), an assessment perhaps not so different from the standard portrayal of the Iraqi Other in recent narrative treatments of the war as an unpredictable, even capricious unknown, a generous and smiling ally who might reveal a suicide vest at any moment. One of the great achievements of the novel lies in Hossain's ability to find plausible threads that unite all of the very differently motivated and differently professing groups occupying the contested space that is "postwar" Baghdad. The novel's main American character, Hoffman, is just as aimless and self-annihilating as the Iraqi civilians who have lost their old lives, and is unpersuaded by the lofty rhetoric of his own high command and the jingoism that carried his nation into yet another Middle Eastern war. A fellow black marketer himself—a "market parasite" (10), as Dagr would say—Hoffman declares himself nothing but a "cog" in the American war machine (75); although he becomes, nominally, a commando on special assignment to hunt down weapons of mass destruction (what else?), he remains content just to get by. In the past, Hoffman has helped protect his friends and business partners Kinza and Dagr from the American military, but their entanglement with a high-profile political prisoner whom they have "inherited" necessitates a quick departure from their old black market beat (9). This prisoner, Hamid, becomes an unlikely third wheel on Kinza and Dagr's mad flight out of Baghdad: we learn that Hamid, as a part of the ancien régime, had been a "star striker on the torture pitch" (9), but was not deemed sufficiently important to the Americans to merit inclusion in the famous deck of 52 playing cards (he might rank about 56th on the list, we hear). But Hamid can offer Kinza and Dagr something that they desperately need: a destination to give their journey purpose.

The plot takes innumerable twists and turns as the characters weave their way past official checkpoints and across hostile Baghdad neighborhoods, such that it begins to take on an almost labyrinthine shape—not by coincidence a recurrent architectural motif in the novel. In fact, new plot developments often carry the novel into entirely new generic territory, resulting in a rich collision of genres. Hossain alludes overtly to Dumas, the Sandman comics, medieval alchemy, and Greek mythology, but also mashes up private military contractors and secret police with djinni and semi-immortal magicians; cryptographic police procedural with twisted buddy comedy; hallucinogenic drug trips with a healthy dose of Islamic occultism; and the science fictional possibility of life extension via telomere manipulation with an enigmatic alchemist named Avicenna, a Rappaccini in his desert garden. And, at one point, we turn a page and suddenly find ourselves on the island with Dr. Moreau. I suppose we could attempt to pin down the genre of the novel as a kind of highly ecumenical urban fantasy, but the novel doesn't simply examine the legacy of the Iraq War using the lens of urban fantasy. Instead, in some way it posits the Iraq War as urban fantasy, an intimate rather than epic space in which layers of suppressed history combine with widespread irrationality to produce a simultaneously surreal and very grittily realistic experience.

Or perhaps the medieval romance is the historical genre that best matches the shape of Hossain's narrative, even a specifically Arthurian strain of romance. After all, Kinza and Dagr agree to take on various quests even before medieval alchemy and its promises of temporal riches and everlasting life become more central to the plot. Hoffman, too, leaves on his own perverse version of a Grail Quest, seeking the WMDs that would finally justify the Iraq War to the international community and to the individual consciences of the "boots on the ground" that he represents. (He doesn't find any.) Kinza's whimsical acceptance of these quests—as well as his increasingly irrational, borderline suicidal devotion to completing them despite increasingly adverse circumstances—can then be understood as part of his efforts, as a hero of a neo-chivalric romance, to cobble together a crude code of honor: "I said I'd kill this man, and so I will" (31); "He [Kinza] was manic about words once uttered and would never, could never, back down from a declaration like that" (87). Above all, Kinza's pseudo-chivalric quests and oaths reflect a desire to impart meaning on his hollowed-out shell of a life, in a bombed-out city, on a perpetual battlefield that, as readers in 2015 can't help but remember, will remain a battlefield for years to come, an unstopped arterial flow of new horrors.

As the pages turn, the novel's emphasis on the American occupation fades as the supernatural and the science fictional dimensions of Hossain's world rise to the surface: we come to understand that the American invaders had blundered into something they didn't understand here in Baghdad in many more ways than one. But Escape from Baghdad! is far from merely a one-dimensional critique of the American invasion and occupation: the Iraqi characters can become victims of self-delusion just as easily as an American colonel (or president). For instance, a local thug, sensing a power vacuum that he imagines he could occupy, "began to remember additional truths" about his role in various conflicts, "giv[ing] birth to a new truth" (89). Every side in every conflict proves as self-deluded and self-deluding as the next, and—the events of the novel taking place in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War—there are many sides and many conflicts. By and large, the novel does not delve too deeply into the particulars of any given group's ideology, and indeed seems curiously uninterested in religious difference as a contributor to ideological difference, despite the constant reference to Sunni and Shia populations. With the important exception of the self-admittedly fanatical imam/strong man Hassan Salemi, the other characters, major and minor, tend simply to scoff at the idea of a God. Hassan, by contrast, becomes a kind of God-lashed Ahab, and Hossain creates an especially vivid image of murderous fanaticism as that which reshapes the world "into a single terrifying image, like the barbed tongue of a lion scraping off the ghostly remnants of fur, skin, and meat from bleached-white bone" (156). More usually, the novel sacrifices a more probing analysis of specific ideologies for a more detached satirical take on the observable effects of ideologically motivated violence: its most felicitous phrase may be "confused gun," a weapon passed through many hands, issued and reissued by various military bodies that may even be in conflict with one another (11). This intriguing concept also suggests the extent to which the individuals involved in the Iraq War may themselves become reduced to tools wielded by larger institutions, confused guns all of us.

But does this jumble and juxtaposition of different speculative genres and different literary modes hold together in the end? For the most part, Hossain demonstrates good sense in knowing when to dial up the humor to bitingly sharp satire, and when to preserve the high seriousness appropriate to certain scenes of violence. Despite the new absurdities that crop up every few pages, the novel contains several gripping portrayals of brutality, and is capable of inspiring real terror. For this reader, it was actually the humor that sometimes fell flat: for example, the stray weak lawyer joke; some excessively puerile banter in the Hoffman-focused chapters; and a handful of crass asides about rape, homosexuality, the mentally ill, and certain ethnic groups. Finally, the grand conclusion of the novel, an extended action sequence that would be the envy of any director of a big Hollywood action movie, also failed to meet the expectations raised by the rest of the book: the great crescendo to which the novel builds turns out not to be philosophical or satirical, but simply action-packed and explosion-filled. In the novel's last lingering scenes, is Hossain reveling overmuch in the violence and hero-narratives that his novel elsewhere dissects and critiques so well? In spite of some such imperfections and distractions, Hossain has succeeded in producing a haunting portrait of a city and a populace rich in history and potential for the future, but trapped in a long moment when tragedies and traumas could make it easy for anyone in Baghdad to feel, as Dagr does, "unmoored from either past or future" (52). The novel encourages us to escape from—or challenge—the nightmare of the present with the aid of comedy: on the subject of war, one character memorably quips, "[t]he important thing is to have a sense of humor about it" (59). Escape from Baghdad!, by turns infectiously riotous and deeply disturbing, has left me pondering just what possibilities adhering to this advice might offer us going forward, and what it might distort.

#Saad Z. Hossain #Escape From Baghdad!#mahreviews #long post

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myvoicenottheoneyougiveme · 4 years

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Out loud within earshot of my phone knowing well by now the means that gets taken with it, I spoke of the finality, of the relinquishing of everything in this life, of a letting go on a level yet unprecedented, a readjustment of expectations. Not enough to be choosy over persons kept or kept distant from. An ending of any investment in anyone anywhere for the foreseeable future. No humanity in humanity. A doubling-down on the “quarantine”... Immediately after, presented with a particle mask next to my seat in the office. Just me.

Yesterday, I opened the disposable wipes in my home restroom for the first time. “Flushable Wipes” conspicuously appeared that day on my supervisor’s desk, and were gone the next.

Having used regular toilet paper today, on the “whiteboard of shame” there near the doorway where part of the fit over something pornographic had remained since the Monday before last, the only thing that remained, as of today, was the figure of toilet paper.

After making a regular habit of tucking my knees when on the toilet for reasons, twitch streamer begins making pointed comments about butt holes and sitting on the toilet like a gargoyle. Or the one about how he just got a bidet. Or the one about how if you’re not having regular bowel movements, you need to eat more. On and on.

Another twitch streamer, pointed conversation about how he’d sit down in the shower but not lay down.

One day after having hummed something to myself low and quiet in the shower, mother, immediately after, makes a conspicuously pointed comment tied to the movie she’s just turned on--a musical, Mama Mia. She points out how Pierce Brosnan can’t really sing but he gets the job done.

These are several of many endless attempts at intimidation. The purpose, in my default framing of humanity, escapes me. The behavior widespread, pervasive to a fault. But I thought it worthwhile to illustrate a point:

You would tell me that invading on the level of the bathroom, acoustically or visually (the how is less important), to go out of your way to make me feel uncomfortable or violated like you do in every other space, is somehow for my own good or somehow protecting you or someone else. An invasion of privacy next to every invasion, every violation, which stands above the rest in moral terms. You would justify organized stalking and harassment on the level it has and continues to escalate to and dare to sell it back to me or anyone else as something for my or someone else’s good.

What purpose does it serve? What purpose does any of “this” serve other than having a place for you to offload your toxicity without repercussions? What purpose other than to strike down, in every way you possibly can, as often as you possibly can?

I dare you to attempt to justify any of it.

You would say my dissociative symptoms have nothing to do with and never had anything to do with repeated violations of trust, repeated violations of personal space, repeated trauma escalating over years to now. You would say, it has nothing to do with your stalking and harassment. You would say, the somatic symptoms have nothing to do with --yet in the way you often do when you think no one is looking or I’m at my weakest, after one of my oft shuddering moments after climbing into bed when laying my armor down, you gloated the next day with a glee I’ve seen too often from you. You “said” you knew it wasn’t because it was cold in the room.

You know... you know. You always know. Even as you attempt to play the innocent victim, you know. ...But you wouldn’t get very far with your army of yes-people if you were overtly abusive out in the open without some way of deflecting it or painting right then and there that I somehow deserved it.

That’s the reality of all of “this”. You know. You know. You’re counting on it. You and so many, counting on it.

But “this” is for my own good, it’s said. And “this” is self-defense for you. Self-defense.. walls not drawn up around yourself but drawn up around me. Drawn up like a cage so you can come near, nearer than any person ought to be and have your way with me. A cage like a vice restricting movement, subduing, suppressing, strangulating... every day.

Every day... every day.

So, I am one by one turning steel bars to twigs as I let go of everything, every last shred of what I thought life was supposed to be. While you scratch and claw becoming more and more aggressive as your power over me slips.

Congratulations on your victory, on your war severing every last shred of someone from themselves. When his lifeless corpse stops struggling and his ghost passes straight through you and on to the next life, you go home empty handed. Congratulations on your victory; you go home empty handed.

Edit:

Does your left hand, really know what your right is doing? I don’t think they do. I really really don’t think they do, but that’s just my own self-destructive optimism wanting to believe people are inherently good even if misled.

It’s really something for the “delusion” to be telling me I’m delusional. Isn’t that a double-negative?

...The examples are without number. A learned helplessness finds the effort at a thorough scientifically sound documentation of everything a futile endeavor. A chronicling of every last moment of my day would be a massive feat, and even if enough to call anyone out, who do I say is behind it? And couldn’t that also be a lie I’ve been fed?

Not a day passes, not one. Not a day passes where on multiple fronts, in every avenue you can conceive of and then some, and then some. I haven’t even named the things that are so far out there, like what happens on the road.

That is your play, but you can’t deny by your very presence by the extraordinary means already employed, but that would make for a much more compelling narrative and why you ever come so boldly out of character when you believe you have achieved that anonymity. Who but your target? Who but your target bears full witness to your violence?

And if not your hands? What of the person that first set “this” in motion? Or anyone making “this” possible? “Don’t you know it’s not ideal, with all those hands upon the wheel?”

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least, not one bit, your rotating screens between you. One “character” takes the fall as the rest distance themselves to save face, and the game continues. “This” fails to be found inherently bad, inherently harmful and abusive. It fails to be found in every conceivable way a crime. Oh, but there’s always some other explanation for these daily events. Always. Chiefly, the sanity of your target, especially as they attempt to call you on any of it.

“This” isn’t a fight I intend to take. Even with sound evidence, a thing like “this” is impossibly outlandish. But no more so is this helplessness learned than through the people who should know better but refuse to admit time and time again their involvement. People I called “friend”. A mother I once thought loved me. A never ending list of people who for all intents and purposes should know better. But it’s the people a person calls their own who then insist on perpetuating the lie that deal the greatest blow. If even for a mountain of evidence such a person continues gaslighting, the target can’t help but find the effort futile and a recipe for disaster. If even they insist, what hope does the target have of illuminating and finding accountability with anyone else?

No one. And he stops trying.

And you’re so helpless and powerless... And you’re a victim in need of such assistance... And you need “protection” from me... Well, he’s crazy you see? Help me before this psycho does something. Oh me oh my.

Edit 2:

It’s plausible enough to dismiss without relative context, but all of these “messages” are contrasted against the background of what has been established as typical. It’s why when I come across a new anything, I have no context for what is out of place and so you can’t effectively deliver any pointed jab.

Everything thrown at me is always a conspicuous, pointed coincidence signaling yet another invasion of privacy or another critique or another anything really. Just as long as shame is heaped onto the target, or your target feels chilled by yet another invasion of the sanctity of their own person.

It’s what changes. I don’t always pick it up right away. If whatever it is you’re jabbing at isn’t at the fore of my mind, you can fail to get your jab across. These are highly specific, highly specific, pointed coincidences that can’t happen by accident. And believe me, there’s a lot, an awful lot that sits in a grey area that I can never say is anything. But my ability to dismiss it defeats your endeavor. You have to make it obvious, otherwise harm is not inflicted, otherwise you get no payoff. It’s a balancing act by you. It has to be plausibly deniable enough to tie my hands and prevent me from calling it out, but it has to be plain enough to deliver your toxicity. You get to have your way with me. You get to act out your microaggressions with impunity. No consequences. A shield of anonymity and even a detachment from the inner workings of your own cabal so as to feign ignorance when one of your proxies crosses plainly into showing “this” thing’s real colors. The rotating screen, one takes the fall while the rest save face by distancing themselves and deflecting in the immediate. ...And the game continues.

Edit 3:

And you’re just such a grand victim that you can’t be held accountable for the irreparable harm you do to the person you’ve “taken” for your own. You just ALWAYS get it wrong, magically. You’re just so traumatized, you’re just so afraid and jumpy that you just see evil everywhere. And you’d probably say that you have Tourette’s too. You just can’t be held accountable. You’re above the rules the rest of humanity lives by. These are exceptions made for your massive great victimhood.

I’d agree that you’ve been victimized in your life, but you’ve shown me what kind of victim you are: one that goes on to then victimize others rather than possessing some great well of empathy on account of your own experiences. Dealt harm and so deals in harm.

I used to be one among the rest, but you’ve shown me my error. I don’t care what kind of guys you’ve ever been with or how those relationships played out or what’s in your past. There comes a point in your life where you have to “stop the blame game” and take responsibility for YOURSELF. But you’ve shown me you have no desire or ability to do so, and I’ve lost every ounce of faith I once had in you. Your refusal to take “no” for an answer and let go, is just the cherry on top. It’s the capstone completing the picture you’ve painted for me these last 2 years.

You make no sense. You can’t let go, but you always paint me as some kind of villain that you should then run from, not run toward. Why do you need a villain in your narrative? What are you trying to sell yourself and the whole world over? Painting me as anything just grants you power to do as you please and walk all over me. You get to live out your victimhood on a stage before the whole world and prove to them and to yourself how wronged you are. I am but a vehicle to that end.

Stay away from me.

0 notes

franciscretarola · 4 years

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Matera, the Brigantaggio, Southern Italy’s Mostly Unknown History

There was a lull during our tour of Matera's sassi, the former cave homes of workers, farmers and shepherds carved into the gorge beneath the city's elegant "Civiltà" and "Piano" neighborhoods. Sasso literally means "stone" in Italian. The homes had been excavated from the calcareous tufo stone and fronted over the centuries by what are often elegant facades. The rest of our tour group, a family from Seattle, was still inside a small sasso that had been turned into a museum. My wife Cathy and Kateri, a professional photographer and staffer at our Philadelphia Abruzzo-dedicated restaurant, stared out over the densely packed and compelling warren of the Sasso Caveoso, one of two sassi quarters in the city, apparently reflecting on what we'd just seen. The cave home was just slightly larger than my South Philly row house living room but until the 1950s had been shelter for thirteen people, a donkey, pig and chickens. All the family's possessions - mostly equipment used for farming and raising animals - were stowed on the walls. There was one table with a large wooden serving board and two chairs. The home had just one bed which stood high above the floor to separate the sleeping family from their animals and afford the chickens a place beneath to roost. It was both a sobering look at the desperate circumstances once faced by the common people of Matera and an impressive display of ingenuity: each sasso had an intricate system for water collection - rain is scarce in this part of Basilicata - that was connected to a common cistern shared by its immediate neighbors. When the family's cistern was filled, runoff was channeled to the common container; nothing was wasted.

Our guide, Luigi - a trim, dry-witted and instantly likeable guy with thick, professorial glasses and dressed casually in jeans with a flat cap - leaned back against the stone facade of a sasso and stared pensively at the ground. Before the tour had started we'd talked a bit about the town and local history - this was not my first time in Matera - and I felt we'd had an instant rapport. So, I screwed up my nerve and asked him what I'd been dying - for years, actually - to ask someone from Basilicata. We spoke in Italian to keep our conversation private.

"So...what do you think of Carlo Levi and Christ Stopped at Eboli?" Luigi's face first registered a mixture of surprise and fear but resolved into a knowing smile. "How much time do you have?"

First published in 1945, Levi's book has come to define much of Italy's south, especially Basilicata. For most people, it's all they'll ever know of Basilicata, called "Lucania" in antiquity and during the Fascist period (Mussolini was trying to evoke ancient Rome and inspire a renewed imperial spirit), unless they've heard of or been to Matera, whose sassi are now a UNESCO World Heritage site and were used by Mel Gibson to stand in for Palestine in his film "The Passion of the Christ." Levi was a vocal critic of fascism. He was arrested and then, like many other left-leaning intellectuals and opponents of fascism, sent into "exile" in the remote south, specifically in his case to the towns of Grassano and Aliano (which he renames Gagliano in the book). His account of the appalling living conditions, poverty and malevolent neglect (centuries old, by every form of government and of every conceivable kind, from a lack of educational resources and infrastructure to access to medicine) suffered by Aliano's townsfolk and other lucani (citizens of Basilicata) moved postwar Italy to (briefly) countenance the "Southern Question" and seek remedy. It has deeply affected readers all over the world, including me.

Levi's description of the poverty in the sassi (delivered in Eboli by his sister, who'd had to stop in the town to receive official permission to visit him in "Gagliano") is particulary grim:

"...Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags. I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty... I saw children sitting on the doorsteps, in the dirt, while the sun beat down on them, with their eyes half-closed and the eyelids red and swollen; flies crawled across the lids, but the children stayed quite still, without raising a hand to brush them away. They had trachoma. I knew it existed in the South, but to see it against this background of poverty and dirt was something else again. I saw other children with the wizened faces of old men, their bodies reduced by starvation almost to skeletons, their heads crawling with lice and covered with scabs. Most of them had enormous dilated stomachs and faces yellow and worn with malaria."

At one point during her exploration of the sassi, Levi's sister was followed by bands of children begging not for coin, but for quinine.

Eboli stirs the emotions and Levi's heart was certainly in the right place (his actions as well: his atrophied skills as a trained physician were much needed in malaria-plagued Aliano) and much of what he writes about Italy's neglect of the south was - and is - certainly true, but after much reading and travel I began to believe that, however well-intentioned, the book’s tone is condescending, its view of history distorted by a northern perspective and, to create the desired effect, its depictions of the rural population exaggerated. Luigi agreed.

"For years we've been living with Levi's book on our shoulders. People come here looking for his lucani, his Matera and his Basilicata. I think they see what they want to see." Levi's lucani peasants are superstitious creatures (that much was true, and to some extent is still, and not just in Basilicata), immune to or unknowing of logical process, cause and effect. They seem almost another species, existing beyond the boundaries of time and untouched by the influences of the region's many conquerors, from Greeks and Romans to the Piemontese army of Vittorio Emanuele. Their physical appearance reminds Levi of depictions of ancient Italic peoples and to him shows no evidence of later ethnic incursions. Their stoicism and desolate world view, bereft of any hope, are born of millenia of futility and neglect. To hammer home the desperate situation he found, Levi - knowingly or not - created mythical beings beyond our understanding or experience. This device was effective but Basilicata (and much of southern rural Italy) still suffers the stigma that his book and descriptions, and other less well-intentioned depictions, created.

"Farmers and villagers then might've been simple, often ignorant, but they are not now and never were stupid. They certainly understood most of the reasons they suffered, as well as who might carry some of the blame. Their beliefs weren't all based on emotions and mysticism."

Levi's bias and prejudice are clearest when he discusses the local peasants' obsession with and vibrant emotional connection to the Brigantaggio, the guerrilla war fought by southerners from 1861 into the 1870s in opposition to the unification of Italy under Piemontese rule, Italy's fabled and much-celebrated Risorgimento. He contrasts this persistent and vibrant link to the past with the peasants' apparent indifference to and distrust of Italy's more recent nationalistic adventures: in the First World War two decades before his exile and the expedition to "Abyssinia" then in progress. Unlike some of the town's bourgeois citizens, the very same element who had tended to favor unity over continued Bourbon rule in 1860, the farmers and workers show no nationalistic zeal. They seem to feel that any expedition designed to capture territory and displace others to allow for Italy's expansion, even if they themselves might profit from access to arable land, is doomed from the start and fundamentally wrong. Though many of them fought, suffered and died in the "Great War," they never discuss it. But they seem perpetually ready to discuss the briganti and their exploits; every locale seems to have some historic connection to the doomed resistance.

Levi places the brigantaggio in a context of previous uprisings - to invading Greeks, Romans, etc. and posits that the briganti reaction couldn't be rationally justified but could be understood as an emotional response. The peasants, he argues, reacted with an understandable but irrational and hopeless attempt to strike out at the fates and cultures that seemed to persecute them. Maybe Levi actually believed this. His upbringing in Piemonte occurred during a time when many of the dark and brutal facts about Italy's unification and its effects on the ancestors of these very same peasants had been suppressed, swept under the rug and willfully ignored. But there were still living briganti during Levi's exile. He even met one of them during his time in Grassano. The brigantaggio was not ancient history to the villagers. Modern study has focused welcome light on the Risorgimento, the Brigantaggio and the Savoiarda reaction. Eyewitness accounts from both sides and previously ignored scholarship have been revisited, reevaluated and resynthesized, and the resulting picture - of Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele, Cavour and the Savoy military - is not a particularly pleasant or flattering one. What emerges is less an image of a war of liberation than of a violent and abusive invasion, occupation and systematic exploitation. Southern Italy, the new scholarship argues, was conquered, occupied and turned into a colony of the North.

Prominent Italian journalists, politicians, thinkers and historians have been questioning the national narrative for decades. Novelist and screenwriter Carlo Alianello (one of the modern founders of revisionism and a cinematic collaborator with Visconti and Rossellini), economist and one-time Italian Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti, historian and politician Giustino Fortunato (both from Basilicata) as well as Marxist thinker and politician Antonio Gramsci (a Sardinian) all believed northern development had been achieved, to some extent, at the South‘s expense. Much of the best known revisionist scholarship on the Risorgimento has been done by non-Italian academics (English historians Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan and Martin Clark have all, to varying degrees, questioned some official accounts and flattering portraits of the movement and its heroes). But the current spear point of reevaluation is probably Pugliese-born journalist Pino Aprile. During our stay in Matera, I happened to be reading his book "Terroni: All That Has Been Done to Ensure that the Italians of the South Became 'Southerners.'" (Terroni is a pejorative for southerners still in use in the north which links them to the dirt and land, their "terra"; it insinuates ignorance, filthiness and dark skin). Aprile clearly has an axe to grind and sometimes has figurative hams for fists (and no dead horse fails to be beaten, repeatedly), but his work seems well researched (his layman's tome does not always provide source attributions, however) and his arguments well supported. They've gained a lot of traction and currency recently, and I've found few coherent retorts. Many Italians, including some southerners, would rather not know, but Aprile seems to have dedicated his life to speaking what he feels is the truth, or at least one side of it: the side that has gone mostly unheard.

The economic story he weaves (mostly using others' scholarship, especially that of researchers Vittorio Daniele and Paolo Malanima) contradicts almost all prevailing conceptions about the Bourbon realm, its wealth and sophistication and the condition of its subjects, particularly in relationship to northern and central Italy, at the time of unification. He points out the comparative wealth of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the vast monies in its coffers and in circulation and the hale condition of its currency (the Kingdom used gold coins while the Savoy realm had converted to paper money). The Kingdom of Sardegna (as the Piemontese realm was known) had exhausted its funds in a series of wars, including adventures in the Crimea, and was heavily in debt. "War or bankruptcy," one of Cavour's deputies wrote in 1859. Taxes were low in the South and, contrary to the popular image, the Kingdom had a relatively developed industrial base: it was named the most industrialized state in Italy after the 1855 Paris World's Fair, and third in the world. Under King Ferdinand II, it began liberal reforms and pioneered antituberculosis campaigns in Italy, as well as public housing and assistance programs (though the kingdom was hardly liberal and Ferdinand’s reactionary nature and narrow-mindedness undermined these efforts and alienated much of the kingdom‘s intelligentsia). Aprile also notes that, preunification, southern emigration was minimal and significantly less than the diaspora from the North, which stands preconception on its head. And indeed, I'd been surprised to read years ago in Richard Juliani's "Building Little Italy: Philadelphia's Italians Before Mass Migration," that the founders of the city's Italian quarter in the years before Italian unification had been northerners, especially from Liguria. The United States’ first dedicated Italian Catholic parish, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi in the city's Bella Vista neighborhood, was founded by these northerners in 1852, eight years before the war. The destruction and economic disruptions caused by the invasion were exacerbated by the newly unified Kingdom's seemingly punitive measures against the South: disproportionate taxes were imposed, ironically to pay for the "liberation"; many southern industrial plants were dismantled and sent north, as was the gold of the Bourbon treasury. Other plants were closed. Once vibrant cities, most notably the port of Gaeta, were left in ruins. The former Bourbon army, tens of thousands of men, was disbanded, leaving scores of (armed, politicized and militarily trained) men unemployed (they would eventually form the core of the brigantaggio). These actions and policies would persist for decades and, Aprile argues, built the North and created the modern South. But they are not nearly the darkest part of the story.

The Piemontese response to popular dissent and the brigantaggio was violent, at times sadistic. Critics of the new regime were jailed, tortured and sometimes killed. Martial law was imposed on the entire South and the populace forced to endure a brutal occupation that drove many of them, who might have been otherwise indifferent to the regime change, to support or join the briganti. It was illegal, for example, to be outside town boundaries with certain (vaguely defined) quantities of food or supplies as authorities suspected these were intended to sustain the briganti, who indeed relied on local populations for support (which was offered gladly or obtained by threat and violence). For a time it was illegal even to have stores in the larder, as this was deemed suspicious. And the penalties were harsh, including jail sentences, corporal punishment and summary execution. Whole villages were razed to the ground, their populations (including women and children) murdered, displaced or forced into concentration camps. Aprile's rage appears most in the chapter discussing the Savoy army's well-documented atrocities in the towns of Pontelandolfo and Casalduni, in Campania, whose alleged support for the briganti, he maintains, prompted the worst acts of reprisal ever committed on Italian soil (which would include Nazi war crimes during World War II). Individual acts of rape, torture and murder are relayed in excruciating detail, including the names of the victims. Many unarmed and nonresisting villagers were bayoneted, hanged and burned alive in their houses, slaughtered even in the churches where they took refuge. The diary of one of the northern soldiers present at Pontelandolfo, Carlo Margolfo from Sondrio in Lombardia, is matter-of-fact: "We entered the town; immediately we began to shoot priests, men, however many as it happened, then sacked (the town) and finally we set the town aflame." He adds, "...it was impossible to stay inside (the town) because of the great heat, and such noise was made by the poor devils whose fate was to die toasted under the ruins of the houses. We, instead, had everything during the fire...bread, wine, capons, nothing lacking." The general responsible for the slaughter, Enrico Cialdini, enjoyed a long and profitable political career in the service of the newly united Italy. A piazza in Venezia bore his name until January of 2014, when the controversy surrounding Casalduni and Pontelandolfo forced the town council to make a change.

Of course atrocities are common in wars, especially guerrilla wars, and the briganti were not innocent or blameless. But the scale and systematic nature of the northern repression and reprisal leaves no room for comparison. Tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of southerners were killed, and many more traumatized, injured, displaced, imprisoned and impoverished during the war and brigantaggio, which in some places persisted into the 1870s, more than a decade after the South's fall. And there are components to the repression and treatment of the "terroni" that stink of racism and a lack of the respect one human being affords another. The severed heads of executed briganti were routinely displayed on pikes in southern towns to dissuade locals from supporting the resistance. Photos of dead and mutilated briganti were hot commodities in northern cities during the period. Many of these images are easily found on the internet (though one recurrent photo supposedly of severed briganti heads turns out to be from the Boxer Rebellion). Images of both living and dead guerrillas were used by northern social scientist Cesare Lombroso to form his ominous theories about physiology and criminal behavior. Indeed, the Nazis later enthusiastically (and ironically: Lombroso was Jewish) parroted many of Lombroso's theories on the connections between race, ethnicity, handicap and criminality. The museum of his collection - which is still in operation at the University of Torino in Piemonte - includes the skulls of hundreds of "criminals," including several briganti. He believed he'd identified a "southern" racial type which was, of course, inferior and more prone to criminality than the "northern" example. Over 150 years after the brigantaggio, the relatives of the briganti displayed in this "museum" are still fighting for the return of the remains for proper interment.

A female brigante, or brigantessa, has come for many to symbolize the fate of the South. Michelina Di Cesare was born in 1841 in the small village of Caspoli, a satellite town of Mignano Monte Lungo, in what today is part of Campania’s Caserta Province. Photos of her alive - posed in traditional village costume, holding a shotgun and pistol and with what looks like a sheathed bayonet in her belt - create the romantic impressions of a beautiful, fire-eyed, mountain warrior. She and her husband Francesco Guerra, an ex-Bourbon soldier who’d resisted the draft under the new regime, were part of a band of briganti that operated around Mignano from 1862 until their deaths in 1868. Michelina was not the only brigantessa. Many southern women, after seeing their communities suffer and their brothers, husbands and sons punished, jailed or executed as briganti or Bourbon and briganti sympathizers, supported the resistance, even as armed participants. This created quite a stir in mid-19th century Italy. Northern authorities strove to rob them of their femininity and dignity, and some period reports refer to them as “drude,” or druids, a derogatory term meant to degrade and dehumanize them. Some sources diminished their role and dismissed them as mere companions to the male insurgents. But by all accounts, Michelina was a competent and courageous guerilla and her band a feared cell. In 1868, she and her compatriots were betrayed by local collaborators, trapped and killed by Northern soldiers and Carabinieri under the command of Emilio Pavellicini, who’d used no small amount of coercion to get some locals to turn on the band. Most authoritative accounts have Michelina dying in a gun battle, falling next to the body of her husband (though some maintain she was taken wounded but alive and then tortured and raped before her execution). The last photo of Michelina is posthumous; she is nude from the waist up, her face and body a study in torment and already showing the effects of decomposition. Di Cesare’s corpse was displayed nude, under armed guard, in Mignano’s town center, as a lesson and deterrent to the local population. It’s said to have had the opposite effect, and the local brigantaggio intensified and persisted for several more years.

(Michelina de Cesare) So, if Aprile and the revisionists' studies have any merit, Levi’s notion that the passion and nostalgia Grassano and Aliano’s common folk felt for the brigantaggio was irrational or logically unjustifiable doesn’t hold water. But he was a product of the schooling and propaganda of his time, especially as a well-educated son of privilege raised in early 20th-century Piemonte. The history Levi (and most educated Italians, then and until the present day) had been exposed to had been scrubbed and rewritten. “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians,” remarked nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio (who also famously said that "uniting with the Napolitani was like uniting with lepers") after the war. A narrative was created to justify the invasion and elevate its purpose. And, in fairness, there were many, north and south, with purer intentions who had long dreamed of a united Italy, Garibaldi included. There had also been many actively against it and millions more indifferent to the question of unity (many liberals, including the blond “liberator,” were later disillusioned by post-war governance and policy; Garibaldi eventually resigned from Parliament, disgusted with the use of martial law in Sicily). Statues of the Risorgimento's heroes were erected throughout the new country and streets and squares named after them, often despite local opposition. If you find yourself in any major southern town, you’re sure to see places named after Garibaldi, Cavour, Nino Bixio or Vittorio Emanuele. The southern kingdom and southern Italians were portrayed as backward, uncivilized and in need of the North’s intervention. And as decades of Savoy economic policy and political repression had their effect, this portrayal was seen to be true, even among some southerners. It was not until decades after unification, Aprile argues, that metrics showed southern farmers and workers to be appreciably worse off than their northern counterparts. The great southern diasporas that followed further reduced and depopulated the South.

Italy’s conscience has, from time to time, been awakened and attempts made to redress the inequalities. In the 1950s La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno sought to build the region’s infrastructure, stimulate economic growth and fill medical and educational gaps in its poorest areas, but these initiatives were mostly short lived, poorly administrated and informed by the idea that southerners were responsible for their condition. This tendency to judge the South undermined efforts and engendered a prejudice which has, more recently, laid the groundwork for separatist groups like the Lega Nord, whose founder Umberto Bossi was for a time Minister of Federal Reform under Silvio Berlusconi. Aprile goes to great lengths to compare the relatively few monies sent southward as part of the Cassa with the vast haul pilfered from Bourbon coffers and raised through punitive taxation of the South during the decades after unification. And he tries to connect the racism of men like Lombroso with the politics and words of Bossi and his allies.

This racism or, if you prefer, virulent ethnocentrism, is real and permeates daily Italian life, and I‘ve had my own small experiences with it. During my first trip to Italy, I stayed with a wealthy family in the town of Vincenza, in the Veneto. My Italian then was limited, but I vividly remember a car ride with five or six local twenty-somethings to what turned out to be a fairly decadent and enjoyable pool party. They were blasting Bob Marley in the Alfa Romeo and the overloaded car attracted the attention of the local Carabinieri who stopped us and interrogated the driver. After a brief but tense exchange, we were sent on our way. The car erupted in laughter and animated conversation. My host, who spoke perfect English, explained that Carabinieri were invariably stupid guys with few options and from ignorant southern regions. I think she’d forgotten that my grandfather was from Abruzzo. Years later, while studying Italian in Firenze, a regular at the bar my new Canadian drinking buddy and I frequented asked us why we were studying the language. My Canadian friend was studying Florentine history, which pleased our interlocutor, whose name was Alessandro. When I mentioned my Abruzzese heritage as part of my reason, he was less impressed. Alessandro described himself as the scion of a noble Florentine family, though I’ve no idea if it was true. He pointedly explained to my friend that the Abruzzesi were just “cafoni,” poor peasants without much going for them. “Cafone” is a term that implies ignorance, lack of couth and culture, and can be a synonym for terrone. I asked him if he’d like to discuss the issue privately, around the corner, but he declined. He took off instead to buy cigarettes, and things de-escalated. The owner of the bar - a fat, loveable and improbably promiscuous Napolitano named Massimo - explained that Alessandro was a bit of a tool and his ornery attitude might be attributed to his wife’s flagrant cheating, which had made him the butt of jokes at the bar (which was in the Oltrarno and strangely named Camelot). Minor stuff, but illustrative.

In 2005, while revisiting what was the last Bourbon fortress to surrender to the Piemontesi, Civitella del Tronto in Abruzzo’s Teramo province, I mentioned to my guide Bruno (the fort’s curator) the stickers I’d been seeing on house windows and cars around the town and other places in the region that read “Zona Degaribaldizata” (“De-Garibaldized Zone“). He said they where part of a recent movement, which was only half joking, calling for the return of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He then gave me an edition of the movement’s magazine, “Due Sicilie.” Its cover was a photo of the door of an apartment building in Torino. There was a handwritten sign advertising vacancies but beneath the notice, in smaller script, it read: “Non si acettano meridionali,” southerners not accepted. It was from the 1970s.

(Civitella del Tronto)

In Philly, Mary Magdalen de Pazzi’s northern parishioners resisted the waves of southerners when they came and newcomers were directed to a second Italian parish founded in 1898 for their use, according to Stefano Luconi’s “From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia.” Luconi writes that Antonio Isoleri, the Ligurian priest who was pastor at Mary Magdalen from 1870 until 1926, was particularly dedicated to preserving its northern character. This dynamic, Luconi notes, was common throughout North American Italian communities, from St. Louis‘s Hill neighborhood to immigrant settlements in Providence, RI. I’m not sure what kind of mindset all this history (both official and revisionist), discrimination, prejudice, regionalism and economic privation engenders in most southerners, the depth of anger or offense felt, the inferiority complexes and desperation that might exist or the desire for vindication, but I’ve plenty of friends from the South and I can guess. And the Italian-American community (which is less a community than an identity and far from monolithic), comprised overwhelmingly of the descendants of southern immigrants, bears some of the South’s stigma and suffers its own complexes. Most Italian-Americans travel to the same spots in Italy as other tourists: Roma, Toscana, Venezia, maybe a visit south to Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast. And places like Roma and Firenze certainly merit a visit. They are among the world’s most significant historical and cultural jewels and the first places I went in Italy. But most Italian-Americans will never explore the regions that produced their ancestors and if they do most will stick to the home town and things specifically connected to family. Some of this has to do with a loss of language: Southern Italy is less accommodating language-wise than the North to the English-speaking traveler and the loss, which amounts to a loss of one’s roots and a blow to personal identity, can be painful and embarrassing. But I don’t think that’s the heart of it. Many Italian-Americans can be almost as dismissive and ignorant of the broader southern culture as any northerner or common tourist, maybe more so (many open-minded northern Italians will admit that life in the South is more rooted in traditions, that it has more soul). Perhaps there is an embarrassment that attends emigration and engenders a desire to justify your decision by denigrating the place you left (though many early Italian immigrants made multiple trips back and forth and lived a kind of double life, one in America and one Italy). When I first began traveling extensively in Abruzzo, many of my South Philly neighbors, including those whose families had roots in the region, were baffled. “Fran, what’s in Abruzzi?” one of them asked. “My nonno said there was nothing back there. He said all they had were dirt floors.” There was a kind of shame expressed, though none of them would have ever used that word. Compared to the splendor of Roma, the art of Firenze and romance of Venezia, what could the apparently forsaken places our parents and grandparents had fled - and always seemingly with nothing - offer us? Who wanted to be reminded of such deprivation, squalor and sadness? But those of us who do go are incredibly rewarded. And the ignorance of and prejudice we see everywhere directed at the South becomes difficult to bear, even in polite conversation. We walk around with chips on our shoulders not completely unlike those born by our meridionali friends. And if one loves Italy - as millions worldwide claim to - one hopes for the resolution of the “Southern Question.” Ironically for many who’ve posed the question before, no solution seems possible until the entire country, particularly the North, comes to terms with its history.

At the end of the tour I asked Luigi how he felt about current developments in the sassi, the luxury homes and boutique hotels created from the former homes of the poor, the restaurants and craft shops, the influx of wealthy tourists, including many northern Italians. We ourselves were staying at one of the new hotels and had mixed feelings about it. Luigi thought our ambivalence was misguided. Obviously, he owed his job to these changes. “The economy moves here when it isn’t doing so well in a lot of other places in Italy, especially the rest of the south.” This was true; the week before we’d been in Abruzzo which - though gifted with inspiring, evocative and unspoiled cultures and some of Italy’s most dramatic natural landscapes - has been perennially challenged economically and was now still traumatized from the enduring effects of the economic crisis and the 2009 earthquake. The vitality we saw in Matera was nowhere in evidence in Abruzzo. “Our job is to make sure that people know the history of this place, that they understand and respect the people who built it and made their lives here. But it would be a mistake to keep it as a lifeless museum.” Luigi explained that he’d left his job as an economist, which must be a pretty depressing job in early 21st-century Italy, and followed his passion. Telling people about the area’s history and patrimony gave him a sense of purpose. And he was making a living.

But mostly, Luigi thought our perspective on the sassi and their legacy was too influenced by Levi and based on ignorance. "The conditions in the sassi were not always as Levi described. For much of their history, the sassi were considered marvels and celebrated in period accounts and literature. This, I think, is one of the unintended consequences of Christ Stopped at Eboli: the idea that the sassi were always as overcrowded, poor and unsanitary as they were in Levi's time."

He thought I should read up on the subject and suggested two books: Giardini di Pietra (Gardens of Stone) by Pietro Laureano and Matera: Storia di Una Città (Matera: History of a City) by Lorenzo Rota. We shook hands and parted with plans to meet again later to explore some of the caves in the gorge across from the sassi. Kateri (naturally, for a twenty-something) vectored away from Cathy and me, and I, gently but sufficiently chastened by Luigi for my lack of historic understanding, dragged Cathy to the nearest bookstore to buy the books he had recommended.

When you stare out - let's say from your privileged terrace in a cave hotel constructed from a deconsecrated medieval church, a glass of Aglianico del Vulture in hand - across the densely packed, intricate "plan" of the sassi, one predictable effect is to feel yourself taken back to another, ancient time. The uniform and warm color of the so-called "tufo" stone, the complexity and apparent randomness of the settlement make the sassi seem almost natural formations, part of the gorge's topography. The views of the gorge across from the city, steep rocky walls pocked with unadorned natural and manmade caves where shepherds and monks once sheltered, heighten this impression. Inside the town, the simple sassi and the facades of the small shelters built in front of some caves are all fashioned from the same stone. The view, for me at least, creates a profoundly peaceful feeling. That and awe. That is, until I imagine poor children in rags lingering in front of every entrance, the stench from human and animal waste, the suffering and disease. But ancient Matera was not like this.

(Matera)

Al Idrisi, an Arab geographer and one of history's most important cartographers, visited Matera while working for Roger II, the 12th-century Norman King of Sicily, on a study of the latter's realm. He found the city "magnificent and stupendous," and Al Idrisi had been around, from Islamic Spain to the Balkans. Writing in 1595, Eustacchio Verricelli gushed about Matera: "The air is so good that very few people get sick and the inhabitants live very long: many of them live ninety, one hundred years. The men are of average height and clever... The town is made by buildings in white stone and dug caves where rooms, cellars, mule sheds, cisterns, hollows for grain keeping and even hen houses can be seen... When it gets dark, after a trumpet sounds, all the inhabitants place a lamp out of the houses and buildings. Watching the Sasso Barisano from the Cathedral (located on the Cività above the sassi), it looks like a starry sky... the sky and the stars are under the feet and not above the head...". Other written and artistic depictions describe a harmonious, well-organized community integrated with the Cività. Today, it's possible to visit an enormous cistern located beneath the Piazza Vittorio Veneto (in the so-called Città del Piano quarter, also built above the sassi), with pilasters, fifteen meters tall in places, chiseled from stone (it was one of several such cisterns beneath the upper town). The water it collected fed terraced gardens throughout the sassi. Water descended through intricate channels to nourish walled gardens in front of the homes in the settlement's lower levels. These green plots often sat upon the roofs of the homes below. Two larger, constantly flowing channels called grabiglioni washed each sasso neighborhood of sewage and waste which in turn was collected, dried and turned into fertilizer and humus. Each home and cluster of homes also collected water. The sassi were self sufficient, self sustaining and verdant, a 21st-century environmentalist's green dream. Nestled in the gorge, carved into or fashioned from the stone, they sheltered their inhabitants from heat and wind. Middle-class townspeople as well as laborers and farmers made their homes in the Caveoso and Barisano neighborhoods, living side-by-side.

Things began to go downhill in the mid-17th century when the town became the regional capital. Development of the upper Cività and newer Piano neighborhoods followed and the population swelled, stressing and damaging the vernacular infrastructure. Still, according to Laureano and Rota, some equilibrium seems to have persisted until the 18th century when a decline in the local pastoral economy (due, in part, to the decline of the South's importance in the international wool trade) dealt the peasants a major blow. The beginning of the next century brought more unrest when Joseph Bonaparte, installed by brother Napoleon as the King of Naples, presided over a division of public lands. Joseph's reforms favored the landed gentry and new bourgeoisie over ecclesiastical claims but, in effect, broke the peasant economy which depended on working small plots of land (as well as work done for third parties and civic projects). Joseph also moved lucrative regional government offices to Potenza, north of Matera. The Bourbons eventually returned but the power of the new bourgeoisie grew. Development of the areas along the rim of the ravine - essential in the water collection and dispersement systems that sustained the settlements and already weakened by construction projects in the previous century - intensified with buildings oriented away from the sassi and toward the expanding Cività and Piano quarters and the trade roads leading from Matera. In the 18th and 19th centuries, to quote Laureano: "...the pits, granaries, cisterns, vicinati (clusters of houses centered around a well) and gardens on the upper plain, major nerve centers of the systems of the sassi, are buried and hidden beneath the streets and buildings of the new physiognomy of power." The sassi, gradually cut off from the upper city, their water systems compromised, became poor ghettos. The decline increased after the fall of the Bourbons in 1860, when ecclesiastical holdings were liquidated and the middle class, much of which had favored unification, gained control of vast tracts which had been previously worked as small plots by local farmers. The situation of local peasants and workers became dire and, as Rota notes, their options extreme: "il brigantaggio prima e l'emigrazione poi" ("the brigandage first and emigration after"). Those who stayed crowded into the only place available to them, the sassi, exploiting every undeveloped space, converting granaries, stalls and even wells into the single room homes where they lived in filth with their animals and that are now preserved as museums. The vestigial water systems were further degraded and unable to supply the numbers then living in the sassi. Disease, especially malaria, was rampant. The wonder that had been Matera was gone and its previous splendor faded from memory.

(Cistern beneath Matera)

By Levi's time the sassi had become the fetid, diseased hell described in Eboli. Fascism brought ineffective, poorly considered projects to improve the lives of their denizens. The two grabiglioni drainage channels were buried and paved over to create carriage roads to ease entry into and connection between Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. Many of the bottegas found today in the sassi exploit these relatively new corridors. But this was a mortal blow to what remained of the sassi infrastructure and left the inhabitants to rely on what insufficient modern systems existed. Conditions only got worse. Levi and other reformers' protests eventually spurred the government to act. In 1952, evacuation of the sassi began. New settlements were built on Matera's periphery to house the displaced. There, they'd have running water and toilets, modern gas and electric service. Luigi took Kateri and me on a drive through one of the new sections. Viewed from the car window they seemed like smart, moderately-sized homes. They were generally built on two levels and organized into compact units. There was plenty of green space and, in all honesty, they didn't seem entirely unpleasant. Luigi thought so as well, but told us that many former sassi inhabitants had been traumatized by the move. Some of them didn't understand how to use the modern amenities they found in the new apartments. Some resisted relocation and most agreed that essential aspects of their lives in the sassi - traditions, daily rhythms, a sense of community - were lost in the transition. But modern Italy, which had largely forgotten the remarkable past of the sassi, looked forward and not back, misinterpreted Matera's legacy and encouraged modernization. The postwar economy, writes Laureano, needed "new houses, new ways of living, new products... necessary to the consumer economy." The sassi were abandoned and each individual property sealed. Without maintenance, some began to crumble. The first collapses stirred conversation about the sassi, whether they could be saved and to what end. Enter, yet again, Carlo Levi (and a little irony). At the end of the sixties, he lent his voice to the cause of conservation: "The sassi are not of minor importance among the most celebrated and important things that exist in our country, Europe and the world... (the example of the sassi) is of a very great value and unique in the study of urban planning, architecture, agrarian culture and world culture." Film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who set his Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel of Matthew) in the sassi (starting a trend for biblical epics set in Matera), also called for intervention. An international debate began on the future of the sassi and in the 1980s national laws were passed to encourage restoration and investment. Things began to move. In 1993 Matera's sassi were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site; their unique history and contributions would be celebrated.

But many (maybe most?) visitors still focus on the Lucani, Matera and sassi described in Eboli, the sassi and inhabitants preserved in modern accounts and photographs: the sassi as a former vergogna nazionale, a national shame. The accomplishments of the people who built and for centuries maintained the sassi, and the potential lessons the historical sassi might offer a resource-challenged 21st century seem largely obscured and unknown.

In truth, I'd known a little bit about the more positive past of the sassi before Luigi and Messrs. Laureano and Rota took me to school. I remember reading some of Verricelli when we'd been in Matera the first time ten years before, especially his description of the lights of the sassi as stars under his feet. During that visit we'd stayed in one of the first hotels to locate in the caves. An older gentleman, maybe the owner, saw me reading a history of Matera at breakfast on the hotel's terrace and invited me on a tour of the complex. He focused especially on the complicated system for collecting water, explained how it was connected to others in the surrounding caves. He was cheerful, effusive and proud of the ingenuity the network displayed. Despite his obvious familiarity with the sassi - he told me he'd been among those forced to relocate - he smiled broadly when discussing his former life in the caves. His face expressed wonderment. But I was also reading Eboli at that time, as well as other depictions - some written by former sassi inhabitants - that described overwhelming poverty, sadness and stoic perseverence. The idea of the caves as wonderous or even sometimes happy places wouldn't stick. They were undeniably beautiful to look at, exhilarating to walk through, but their legacy was a sad one: poverty, inequality, neglect.

That night, after our tour with Luigi, we navigated the alleys down through the Sasso Barisano to a trattoria recommended to us by him and located on the neighborhood's former grabiglione. The cucina was simple but elegant - whipped sheep's-milk ricotta with honey, local salumi, purèe of fava with olive oil and bitter cicoria greens, a rustic, coarse-ground pork sausage and a potent Aglianico del Vulture, all capped off with several shots of the local Amaro Lucano. Kateri left us after dinner to explore the nightlife on the Cività and Piano and Cathy and I returned to the hotel. I stepped from our spacious cave room out on to the terrace overlooking the sassi. A light rain was falling and I was a little drunk. The sassi reclined in the gorge below me, bathed in the warm glow of the street lights. The rain and wine gave the view a kind of Impressionist aspect. I rested my arms on the terrace wall and saw, really, for the first time, the stars beneath my feet.

The next morning we drove out of Matera on a day trip to see the ruins of Craco, an abandoned medieval village in Basilicata that had gained some fame as a kind of ghost town. The first glimpse of the place, towering above a narrow crag and silhouetted against a pewter sky, was truly spooky. There seemed to be no human presence. Olive groves were scattered in the valley beneath the road. Goats grazed silently among them, apparently unattended.

(Craco)

We drove to a spot just beneath the village, which was cordoned off with barb wire-topped chain link. On the other side of the road, across from the fence, another herd of goats grazed beneath a soft pine canopy. A light rain fell. Kateri got out to take some photos of the goats, and Cathy and I looked for some way to get behind the fence. A young shepherd appeared from below the pines, dressed in a toque and heavy jacket. He seemed a little bemused at the attention Kateri gave him. Just then a old man crested the hill on the road above us. Nearly toothless and apparently agitated, he asked- mostly in an impenetrable dialect - what we were doing there, what we wanted. I said we wanted to see the town. “Ma non c’è nessuno (But there’s nobody)!” he yelled, and then launched into a passionate but - for me - indecipherable rant from which I could only make out the refrain: “Non c’è nessuno.” The shepherd smiled at him and waved. We located a sign on the fence which explained that tours could be arranged at an office a short drive beyond the ruins.

A young man - short, stocky and dressed in the somber, worn but clean clothes I associate in Italy with farmers - sat behind the counter at the office. We’d have to fill out a waiver if we wanted to tour the ruins. “Where are you from?” he asked. When I said Philadelphia his eyes lit up. “Il paese di "Rocky" (The town of ‘Rocky‘).” I smiled and said yes and then told him that they’d filmed a lot of the most recent “Rocky” near our house. “’Rocky 6,’” he responded, without hesitation. His name was Vincenzo and he’d be our guide. He gave us all hairnets and hardhats and told us to drive to the gate beneath the ruins. He met us there after ten minutes.

Vincenzo explained that the first damage from slides had occurred in 1963. As Levi explains in Eboli, the earth in this part of Basilicata is comprised mainly of a slippery clay. Slides are commonplace. Part of Aliano, including most of its mother church, had simply fallen into a depression beneath the town, gone in an instant. Vincenzo pointed to an area of debris beneath the main ruins. This had once been the lower part of the town and contained a piazza, a cinema and pastry shop. A long street, lined with shops, would’ve wound down the hill to where we were standing. Now there were just piles of brick, wood and plaster. Vincenzo didn’t attribute the disaster solely to clay soil. Instead, he spoke of neglect. The retaining walls that had terraced the hill and provided support had not been maintained. The medieval tower that crowned the town and provided its most dramatic visual point had been hollowed out during Fascism and an enormous municipal water tank installed. But the system had degraded over time. Water was not contained and leeched into the hill. Vincenzo’s presentation was calm, authoritative and delivered in a matter-of-fact tone. Contrary to the information I’d found online, the village had not been completely evacuated after the first incident. Parts of the town remained occupied until the 70s and some individual paesani even held out into the 80s and 90s. The people of Craco had had to be pried from their homes. We continued up the hill to the beginning of the ruins. A solitary donkey stood next to a detached, ruined house beneath us, near where Vincenzo had begun his talk. Vincenzo explained that one of the last holdouts had remained in the home, defying authorities to demolish his house with him still in it. He opened another gate and we entered the ruins of Craco.

It’s difficult and probably unnecessary here to describe the feeling of walking through such a complex, strange and painfully beautiful dead place. There’s a presence to formerly vibrant abandoned places that defies explanation. The town, like many Italian villages, was a captivating collection of winding and descending alleys. The buildings were constructed with honey-colored bricks made from the clay soil. Grass and wildflowers tufted from wall cracks and on terracotta roof tiles. Frail wooden doors swung open to reveal spartan, furnitureless interiors. Vincenzo continued his narrative, stopping from place to place to show us a compelling vantage or point out a crumbling, treasured artifact, or where one had once been. The town had been evacuated without much care given to the security of its artistic and cultural patrimony. The bells, altars and pipe organ had been stolen from its mother church. The ceiling above the church’s main altar had caved in due to goats grazing on the roof. Vincenzo pointed out the space beneath where once had been an altar. It had once been decorated with frescoes. Local boys, he said, had used the frescoed niche as a soccer goal.

We reached the summit of the town, just beneath the main tower and entered a home whose windows afforded panoramic views of the surrounding countryside, misty hills of green and brown which rippled to the horizon. Vincenzo offered some stories of village life, of how his grandfather had resoled shoes in the town and also been the street cleaner, of annual festivals, especially the procession for San Vincenzo, his namesake and the town’s patron saint. He spoke of daily rhythms, town life, social etiquette and funeral customs and how, on at least one occasion involving the death of an unpopular woman known (for her colorful language, ornery demeanor and mistreatment of her husband) as “the devil’s mother-in-law,” those customs were ignored.

I sheepishly asked him about briganti and he enthusiastically launched into a series of local stories and myths. Vincenzo was in his twenties, but the connection to the brigantaggio Levi lamented is still strong. He said that Piemontesi authorities had liked to display the severed heads of briganti at the entrance to the local towns, and that Craco was no exception. Levi himself references this intimidation tactic. The most famous local brigante, Giuseppe Padovano (called Cappuccino and from Craco), was an ex-Bourbon soldier and sometimes fought under the command of the most feared of all brigante leaders, Carmine Crocco. From our window overlook, Vincenzo pointed to a place at the foot of the town where there’d been a skirmish between Cappuccino’s band and northern forces. A little over twenty briganti were taken prisoner. They were brought to a place beneath the town in front of the church honoring San Vincenzo and lined up for summary execution. Craco’s most prominent noble family, the Cammarota clan, who had supported the Risorgimento and opposed the brigantaggio, assembled to watch the execution, cheering on the northern soldiers. Town mythology holds that the briganti turned toward the Cammarota and damned the family to a barren, heirless future. And according the Vincenzo, this came to pass. The last of Craco’s Cammarota, an old woman, died poor and alone in the family palazzo. Though most said she’d been a kind and decent person, she’d been ostracized by the local community. The wounds and divisions were deep and her family’s sins never forgiven. Levi notes this divide between the working class and gentry in Eboli.

As we descended the hill and again moved into the rubble field, Vincenzo explained his hopes for the town. In 2010 Craco had been placed on the list of the World Monuments Fund, an international non-profit dedicated to preserving endangered architectural and cultural treasures. But the monies amounted to little more than a trickle. Vincenzo, who’d done his research on his own using the few books he could find, the internet and testimony of Craco’s older population, hoped to create a group of volunteers dedicated to the town’s preservation. They would work independently of the outside organizations and government agencies in which he had no faith. Craco’s population had numbered more than 2000 in the 60s but had declined since the evacuation to around 700 souls. Most of them were moved into a new settlement, Craco Peschiera, a forlorn cement development a few kilometers from the old town. The young people raised there, he lamented, had no idea of the town’s cultural and artistic treasures or traditions. They saw only pale shadows of these and grew up with little or no pride in or connection to the town. Most longed to escape.

Vincenzo pointed to where the pastry shop had once been. His face brightened as he told stories his father had told him about his life in Craco as a very young boy. He’d go to the shop and choose several treats and then run to find Vincenzo’s grandfather, who was usually sweeping up in the piazza. “Dad, I took three!” His grandfather would smile, reach in his pocket and pull out the money needed to pay. “And where we’re standing, this was the piazza where everyone assembled each night. The theater was just over there. There was music and fireworks on festival days...”.

We stood alone on crumbled brick, surrounded by silence.

#Matera Craco Basilicata Mezzogiorno Southern Italy Briganti Brigantessa Michelina de Cesare Italian Americans terroni Civitella

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