05-29-2020, 03:47 PM
The Mafia has fronts that tell people that attacking mobsters with Italian surnames for being mobsters is an attack on honest, family-oriented, hard-working Italian-Americans who are in fact honorable people. The mobsters are heavily involved in hijacking, drug trafficking, prostitution, loan-sharking, and illegal gambling.
To this I say "Bullhist!" I have seen enough images of mobsters to recognize that they are anything but the honest, family-oriented, hard-working people that most Italian-Americans that I know are. Mobsters are lazy, destructive, conspiratorial thugs out for easy money and capable of killing anyone who gets in their way.
In the politically-correct word, the word Mafia is an ethnic smear. Is "Nazi" an ethnic smear when it refers to gangsters who took over a country and turned its state apparatus into a criminal enterprise?
OK. my favorite cinematic depiction of Italian-Americans is Moonstruck, which lauds successful businesspeople and Italian culture. No mobsters or sociopaths. Contrast Goodfellas, a great movie about the Mafia as told (supposedly) by the damnable Henry Hill who talks about "the Life" -- a life in a world full of morons in which people die if they get in the way or welch on promises (like paying off loan-sharks).
Trump is also heavily involved with the Russian Mafia.
To this I say "Bullhist!" I have seen enough images of mobsters to recognize that they are anything but the honest, family-oriented, hard-working people that most Italian-Americans that I know are. Mobsters are lazy, destructive, conspiratorial thugs out for easy money and capable of killing anyone who gets in their way.
In the politically-correct word, the word Mafia is an ethnic smear. Is "Nazi" an ethnic smear when it refers to gangsters who took over a country and turned its state apparatus into a criminal enterprise?
OK. my favorite cinematic depiction of Italian-Americans is Moonstruck, which lauds successful businesspeople and Italian culture. No mobsters or sociopaths. Contrast Goodfellas, a great movie about the Mafia as told (supposedly) by the damnable Henry Hill who talks about "the Life" -- a life in a world full of morons in which people die if they get in the way or welch on promises (like paying off loan-sharks).
Trump is also heavily involved with the Russian Mafia.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.