The Mafia: Some Comments, Comparisons and Contrasts

[RonPrice]

GOING INTERNATIONAL: OUT OF OBSCURITY

During 77 days in 1971 while I was getting ready to come to Australia, flying to Australia from Canada and settling in to a teaching job in a primary school in Whyalla South Australia, The Godfather was filmed.1 By 1971 the Mafia had been reported on in the print and electronic media on a number of fronts while a vast Mafia-connected international heroin trafficking network was developing.2 The narrative base of The Godfather spanned the years 1945 to 1955, the pre-narcotics phase of the post WW2 resurgence of the Mafia. Also in 1971 another Mafia-related film, The French Connection, the first R-rated movie in cop genre to win an academy award, took cop movies into a grittier, faster and more violent direction. The storyline in The French Connection was the world’s largest narcotics seizure in 1962, the year I began my pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community. This film was released in October 1971, three months after I arrived in Australia from Canada as an international pioneer.

During these post WW2 years from 1945 to 1979 in the history of the Mafia, I grew from early childhood well into the years of early adulthood, that is, from the age of one to thirty-five. In those years, too, I knew little to nothing of the Mafia and took little interest in it when it was mentioned in the media. Even the FBI took little interest in the Mafia until November 1957. Illegal heroin involving the Corsican Mafia was first discovered in 1937 in France right at the start of the Baha’i Seven Year Plan, an international pioneering venture of significant magnitude. Like the Mafia, the Baha’i Faith was an organization, a movement, that held little interest to the print and electronic media. It was virtually unknown then in popular or academic culture. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, 25 March 2008; and 2 A.W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia, 1972.

It took many years before
any public recognition came
our way or your way even
though our histories were
drowned in blood all the
way back to the middle of
the 19th century....yes.......

.....murder, rape, prisons,
executions, crimes—they
traversed sombre skies with
bitter hostilities: vindictive,
relentless, heated, prolonged
controversy, betrayal, discipline,
toughness, nerve, streets running
with blood, severed heads, horrors
of unimaginable dimensions.........

And when we and you went into
international arenas the horrors
went on in our homelands, although
on the international front very few
knew anything about us or you.....

As the 1960s became the 1970s
and on and on into the millennium
our public profiles gradually escaped
the obscurity in which they languished
for a century and a half since their origins
as far back as Darwin who had told us
our world went far back beyond 4004 B.C.
on 31 October at 7:35 in the morning.

Ron Price
26 March 2008

[RonPrice]

MAFIA

In watching the ABC TV’s four part series “Mafia: Mafia? What Mafia,” screened on Monday evenings at 9:35 to 10:30 p.m. from 25 February 2008 to 17 March 2008, I could not help but notice the stark contrast between two organizations that had their origins in the mid-nineteenth century but with psycho-ethnic-national-spiritual-historical roots that are obscure and complex even to the specialist. One of these organizations I belonged to and one I had heard about, read about and seen discussed in the media for half a century, from my youth in the 1950s and 1960s until just yesterday. After watching yet another discussion of the mafia on ABV TV, I felt moved to write this mostly prose-poem of contrast and comparison, two threads in my life: one a thin one I only experienced in the print and electronic media and the other that had become part of my inner life for over half a century.

At the end of the 19th century The Sicilian ethnographer, a Palermo physician, Giuseppe Pitre wrote: “the mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of ideas or interests.”1 Beginning with this consciousness, this paradigmatic psychology, an entrenched culture or “industry of violence” had developed in Sicily by the mid-19th century. Leopoldo Franchetti described the mafia in Sicily in 1876, in one of the first written reports on the mafia, as a culture, a way of life, an industry of organized destructiveness and terror deeply rooted in the institutions of mid-19th century Sicily. By the 1960s this culture had become embodied in an international organization whose direction of development was logical, indeed, hardly surprising given its embryonic origins and ethos. -Ron Price with thanks to Nancy Triolo, “Mediterranean Exotica and the Mafia "Other" or Problems of Representation in Pitre's Texts,” Cultural Anthropology,Vol.8 No.3, pp.306-316.

At the end of the 19th century the well-known Cambridge University Orientalist Edward Granville Browne in 1890 met Bahá'u'lláh, the successor to the Báb whose teachings had been both popularized and anathematized in the 1840s in an Iranian bloodbath far more extensive than anything that occurred in Sicily. By 1890 Bahá'u'lláh had been a prisoner and an exile from Iran for almost 40 years. His teachings were at first shrouded in obscurity but gradually came to light in a vast literary output and exegisis by His successors. His followers were and still are considered heretics in Iran. Some 20,000 Babis, Baha’u’llah’s precursors, and Baha’is were brutally exterminated in the half century 1844 to 1894.

Today Baha’u’llah is recognized by several million of His followers around the world as the Divine Teacher for this age. According to Bahá'í belief, such Teachers have included: Moses, Abraham, Christ, Muhammad, Krishna and Buddha, among others. They have appeared at intervals throughout history to found the world's great religious systems. They have been sent by a loving, mysterious, unknowable Creator to enable us to bring human civilization to ever higher levels of achievement. –Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 5 March 2008.

A lot can happen in 150 years,
on this earth, this veil of tears.
It has been a century & a half
of endless fear....still it is near.