With the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano and the subsequent police operations, Cosa Nostra has not only suffered a severe operative defeat, but with every probability has had to register the end of an era: the Sicilian mafia has not been eliminated with the capture of its most long-lived fugitive but, most certainly, the new mafia of tomorrow will be quite different from the old one.
To understand the “Provenzano system”, we submit an analysis of those “pizzini” (written messages through which the boss managed Cosa Nostra) which offer an inside view of the daily life within the mafia. From this analysis, interesting clues give rise to reflection on the cultural anthropology of this criminal “tribe” and, it is hoped, useful indications will appear which could prevent its “restructuring”.
However, Cosa Nostra, is not the only organized delinquency structure present in our country, For this reason, in the Forum, we propose a reflection on a phenomenon – deriving from globalization and immigration – with which we have to learn to face: the foreign mafias which are active in Italy and their impact on our society and on the archipelagos the other forms of European criminality.
In the field of historical and present day analysis on subversion and rebellion at home, we treat in three differently styled articles, but singly convergent in the conclusions, the theme of the new ideological and operative forms which the various souls of political and social subversion are assuming in the face of the obsolescence of the 20th century ideologies.
The “international” section of the Review concentrates on the difficult dialectic between progress and conservation in the political and institutional Islam; on the theme of Islamic “martyrdom” and on the “China phenomenon”. In this last, we shall examine an aspect which merits attention: the military development which accompanies (and supports?) the economical growth of the largest country in the world.
The difficult coexistence of the fight against terrorism and respect for individual freedom to which the West is anchored, is treated from a juridical and sociological point of view in an article which is rendered even more cogent by the sentence, last June, in which the American Supreme Court repudiated the “Guantanamo system”.
It is a reflection which continues our analytical commitment on a theme which we feel to be fundamental and which we have treated since the first issue of “Gnosis”: how can a democracy defend itself without losing itself and its identity? We do not pretend to offer sure answers to a debate which is not yet finished. However the United States Supreme Court has already offered a landing point: democracies must react to the terrorism offensive with measures adopted not on the spur of the moment emotional reactions, but with the support of dialectic processes aimed at finding rational and well directed answers. (The titles I, II, and III of the Patriot Act are in appendix).
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