Meditating on Sicily 
Portella della Ginestra, May 1, 2010, 63rd anniversary of the massacre
We ask you go up the responsibility dell'eccidio, if Julian, the mafia, Italian-American secret services. Let us reflect on our reality instead of Sicily, while evoking the Memorial Day this year: c’erano molti anziani, tra cui aderenti alle associazioni ANPI, alcune del Nord Italia, molti residenti dei comuni limitrofi, alcuni forse parenti delle vittime; molti giovani, da ogni parte della Sicilia e famiglie intere, con bambini piccoli, anche neonati. I medaglieri delle vittime della Resistenza si mescolavano con le bandiere rosse dei movimenti dei lavoratori (poche quelle di partito) e con quelle gialle, di associazioni cattoliche. Nell’aria una festa composta, quasi pensosa.
Ci viene subito in mente che era festa anche il primo maggio del 1947, quando da Piana degli Albanesi, da S. Cipirello e da San Giuseppe Jato, circa tremila contadini si erano mossi verso Portella della Ginestra con donne e bambini per tentare l’occupazione of uncultivated land, many walking, some riding on donkeys and mares. It was the feast of hope for a beautiful spring day in Sicily. On the fields near the mountain waiting for the start of a speech by the Secretary of the Socialist local section. At his first words: "Dear comrades, we are here to celebrate ..." a flurry of arms, from the first crags of the mountains and Comet Pizzuto, massacring 12 innocent men, women and children: a 12-year, one of only 8 . Fifty injured. He wrote a few years later, Carlo Levi: 'Mafia and bandits are not an oddity, a sudden illness and accidental, or derived from individual characteristics of race, but they are, so to speak, in a crevice in a fracture of a land with no continuity ... are crouched in a turn of history that many, many bands try to hide. What was missing, has always lacked and still lacks a middle class, but among the country people and the "stranger" has always been a chasm, a chasm, and therein lies crouched the Mafia '(The words are stones from 1955). In the light of what has happened since, from the dripping of the killers of activists and trade unionists on the left, they talked with a range of historic features writers such as Luigi Pirandello, Carlo Levi, Danilo Dolci, Vincenzo Consolo, until the most recent victims and martyrs excellent in spite of investigations, arrests, and trials that last sorry infinity, the crack appears to grow. But this may just be one of the causes of immobility and inefficiency of governments for sixty years Sicilian generate unemployment, economic decline and cultural, and perhaps you could also consider the success of the strange that some politicians from Sicily flow into the national government. But to better understand the fatalistic passivity that still afflicts the Sicilian people, its intellectuals, the unemployed, those who seek work elsewhere, it is essential to go further back in time.
not talk about the facts of Alcara Li Fusi and Bronte (1860), when the army crushed the violent motions Garibaldi to claim land by farmers to avoid jeopardizing the unification of the peninsula antagonizing the islanders ruling classes; remember, however, the Fasci Siciliani, 1892, Peace organizations in all of Sicily by the landowners claimed more just conditions of work and large industrial Sicilian sulfur mines in a more humane treatment. Peaceful demonstrations, except for the revolt of the miners of Aragon, dictated by the dire need, were bloodily suppressed by the Italian army on the orders of the Sicilian Minister Francesco Crispi. Once again we sent the Italian army to fire on unarmed, to quell the fears of the electorate, made up of large Sicilian owners, reminders of their interest and concern that the newly born Italian socialism, along with word of Karl Marx, immediately became popular among the dispossessed, they foment further unrest and rebellion. But it must be said, to return to 'crack' open even then, not only among the country people and those among the Sicilians, who considered a different race, but between Sicily and the North Sea, the Italian Socialist Party had taken in advance the distance from the movement of the Fasci Siciliani. In what happened then there is the same logic as the massacre of Portella, the only difference is that in 1947 moved from repression and darker plots involving the new Italian state, recently emerged from World War II to the intervention of the allies and the struggle of resistance, in the face of Sicily invaded by the army since 1943 in alliance with Italian-American mobsters follow-up and enticed by separatist temptations. Were equally strong, however, fears and interests: the interests of those who had left the war to manage capital, not always clean, and consensus, the fear that the renewed interest in the proletarian revolution, could destabilize the balance of power in aspired to the new ruling classes, then set out from the elections of April 1948. Our history books as soon as you mention, so that the younger generation, kept in the dark and dazed in the behavior and consumption by media propaganda, are struggling to understand the roots of such disaffection against adult civic engagement, and defense of their rights. Most likely unaware of many of those who filed past May 1, 2010 with flags and medals on the road traveled by farm workers in 1947 and stopped in the shrine moved soberly drawn on those mountains tormented by the piety of fellow peasants massacred. Certainly in the speeches from the stage, which strongly called for the respect of the Italian Constitution, born from the blood of so many deaths and suffering of an entire nation, it captures a good awareness of reality, past and present. Kikki Ferrara, secretary of the Chamber of Labour of the Plains Albanian heartfelt said: "Youth Without this land will have no future. Is taking over many of the perception that there's nothing left to do, and then there are the politicians who sell out our freedom. Not limit ourselves to the celebrations, being here is important, but if we fail to keep alive the values \u200b\u200bthat animated the heroes of the resistance of our dead and Portella, they will die in vain and we physically intellectually, morally, civilly. " Not felt bitterness of party or ideological camp, but the claim, by the powers of state, defense and promotion of the great collective rights: democracy, liberty, school, work. Of songs in the square he felt, beginning, only the national anthem sung by elementary school children. On the lawn the smiles of other children, some with non-mothers, and their intense gazes at a party who were not able to understand, but that was beginning to take place between their childhood memories.
