The Mafia, a Sicilian-Italian criminal gang that moved to the USA in the late 19th century along with much larger numbers of law-abiding immigrants, has become the stuff of romantic Hollywood glorification and demonic media fables. These are a part of grossly over-simplified American mythology about immigrant minorities bringing crime and violence to America’s shores, or delightful multi-cultural social excitement, while avoiding the fact that the overwhelming majority provided cheap foreign labor far more profitable to capital than an American working class.
But just as all stereotypes are based on verifiable facts which are then grossly exaggerated, the existence of this crime cartel, especially its subsidiary called “Murder Inc,” has become a synonym used for governments or enemies likened to a “mafia” as though that label settled the case that they must be evil and therefore worthy of American disdain or worse. But a global Murder Inc existed long before these immigrants arrived on our shores and has been infinitely more menacing than this over-dramatized small crime business, relative to the worldwide massacres of conquest and exploitation of its mother country: The USA.
The men in what was called Murder Inc were cold-blooded killers who didn’t mind getting rid of anyone who might stand in the way of their pursuit of profit. Sound familiar? But where these criminals, and contrary to much folklore they were Jewish as well as Italian, were limited to local and at best national domination of only some businesses, the nation to which they or their parents had migrated was about much bigger victims. More important, when it comes to inflicting violence, the actual Mafia amounts to a pacifist humanitarian NGO by comparison to the massive bloodletting of capital’s greatest organized crime syndicate: the U.S.A.
It began with the nation’s origins as a colonial outpost of foreign wealth, an unexpected result of an early capital financed voyage to find trade routes to the east stumbling upon an entire continent previously unknown to Europeans. The Chinese had arrived years earlier, glanced about and left without disturbing the inhabitants or the terrain.
It continued through the establishment of a land that became a colossus among nations and a homeland to first Europeans, later Africans, Asians and others, all arrivals after being dumped by their native lands as poor and rejected masses or sold in markets and arriving in physical chains as well as economic bondage. The upside was the progress that resulted to the wealthy owners, some of which was then “trickled down” to the previous poor so that they eventually became a working class of people able to survive at higher material standards than any previous generations, though never remotely close to achieving the comfort level of their rulers.
That situation of having enough survival material, or at least enough drugs, meds, alcohol or debt, to enable dreams of slightly better life for common folk, has presently reached a point of no return both in America and in the wider world. The system treating earth and its people as simple commodities of profit and loss at something called a “free” market where nothing is available for free nears its end or humanity’s, whichever comes first.
The massive slaughter of the indigenous people who’d lived here for thousands of years, followed by conquests of the rest of the continent, killed more people in a day than Murder Inc amassed during their brief careers in the crime market. And it got worse as our warlords were given mightier tools to conduct mass murders beyond the imaginations of all but some of the inventors, agents and perpetrators of these crimes.
After two world wars of the 20th century which left most of Europe and Asia in varying stages of destruction, the USA was placed in a position of global dominance, actually having prospered from both those massive international massacres by remaining totally free of their dreadful carnage at home. It remained in that position only by constant subversion of dominated nations which proposed to break from its control, doing so militarily or politically and keeping a majority of ruling powers in foreign countries under its domain. On the one hand, helping wrecked societies by financing—at great profit—their rebuilding, and on the other, by collecting interest and resource payments from colonial properties and helping fake democracies elect, in pretense of our own minority rule, a class of leaders performing as puppets and lap dogs, while selling out the interest of their own people in obedience to a global minority getting richer while most of the world and especially their nations grew poorer.
The death toll inflicted on humanity in all wars may amount to astronomical, if unknown numbers, but we can arrive at close to real results of massive bloodlettings like our own 19th century “civil” war, which, we are told, killed some 500,000 of us under the direction of a great man named Abraham Lincoln. This, as opposed to an alleged 500,000 murdered in a 21st century “civil” war in Syria, we are told, led by a terrible monster named Bashir Al Assad. Who runs the nation doing the killing and whether it commits positive or negative murder is decided by those that rulers employ in the labeling class who are of the scholar – propagandist job title. However we may have been led to think of past mass murders and mindful of the fact that distortion of reality is the job of a stenographer class employed by ruling wealth to control mass consciousness, we can compare numbers from many sources and arrive at something close to what actually happened. In the Second World War, for instance, and counting only three bombing raids, we killed more than 200,000 in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had British accomplices in Dresden while we performed the slaughter of the Japanese all by ourselves. And we only dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in order to save lives, since the invasion of Japan would have killed many more people. Or so we were told by the propagandist-scholars. In fact, when we saw how many lives we’d saved by killing 85,000 in Hiroshima, we dropped another bomb on Nagasaki only three days later and killed another 50,000. Since we only had two atomic bombs at the time, who’s to say how many lives we could have saved by dropping still more bombs and killing more evil Japanese? Who later turned into great friends and profit makers for our banks as we loaned them money to finance their rebuilding, along with Germany’s.
America’s participation was in that collective war which is said to have killed as many as 60 million but we went on conducting massive blood baths mostly on our own in Korea, Vietnam and currently in the Middle East where millions more lives were taken. And billions in profits were accrued.
At the present moment, when some liberals surpass conservatives in foaming at the mouth over an alleged threat to our freedom originating in Russia and China, two nations which lost more than 40 million lives in War Two and whose combined military spending at present is less than half of our own, we place weapons and finance troops on Russia’s borders and parade our warships off the coast of China, complaining of their alleged menace while doing so. The USA lost nearly a half of one percent of lives compared to Russia and China in that massive massacre so we can well understand its sensitivity.
The cold-blooded killers of Murder Inc, were they alive now, might become hysterical and need a priest, rabbi or secular therapeutic helper at confronting the monstrous crimes committed by their adopted country, our great democracy. They could probably never conceive of such massive brutality as destroying entire cities and hundreds of thousands of people. But they were just ordinary small-time killers who knew nothing about the defense of freedom, justice, and most importantly, the profit margin, on a national, let alone global basis.
Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.
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