Musings: September 2, 2020.

I am not “pro” anything. Only crazy people define themselves (or others) PERSONALLY based upon their opinions about PUBLIC policy.

The film Parasite is not about “class”; it is about a man who stabs his benefactor in the heart with an axe over a question of smell. It is about psychosis, and if you sympathize with the protagonists by the end of the film, to the same extent as you pity them at the start of it, you are a danger to yourself and others. Simply put: no desperation excuses that level of depravity, and if you wish to help people, recognizing in your humility that you cannot save EVERYONE, then start with those you KNOW to be innocent, rather than those whose needs you deem arbitrarily to be greater.

It’s humiliating to admit, but that system which Karl Marx identified properly as the Devil in the nineteenth century has become at once our most deadly modern weapon and our last defence against utter savagery.

Dialectic Reasoning, especially in the Hegelian tradition, is not nearly as staunch and systematic as you might think; in many ways, it burnt our bridges with the archaic and inflated Aristotelian concept of logical “non-contradiction”. Hegel admits, in fact professes, that the more we analyze anything the more it is prone to internal contradictions and circular reasonings. He accepts this, and he urges us to take our thinking a step further in order to accommodate the fact.

Now contrast this with the contemporary attitude: once something no longer “makes sense”, people simply give up and act on what they already “know”. Who is the villain? Little Hegel is up in his study analyzing meticulously while the World burns. Is it his fault? No. He’s setting a fine example for us.

Now you might say: if “contradiction is good” (as per usual, boiling things down) and you are “pro-contradiction”, (while making things personal) then why are you calling US out on OUR contradictions? Simply put: it’s because contradiction isn’t the end. Hegel’s methods are supposed to resolve at least SOME contradictions which thought produces. In many instances, the simplest rational explanation for contradictions in human behaviour is “stupidity and moral feebleness”. It is BECAUSE most people do not practice Dialectical Reasoning that our society is so conflicted, as well as its constituents. Hegel helps us to understand ourselves. You are welcome.

How does one support immigration reform whilst challenging colonialism? The humanistic arguments are the same for both: that the simple fact of an established way of life does not preclude either the possibility nor the imperative for a new way of life, one intended to accommodate the needs of outsiders.

So: why should one group of immigrants restrict others? Simply put, needs are not enough. In order for a system to work, it must follow a code of ethics, usually one formalized in Law. The English colonists were not “illegal immigrants”, since no such formal, federal Law existed upon their arrival, except perhaps in England.

How ironic, therefore, that in appealing to their descendants, I found myself contending with the New Left!! To the liberals, you see, the matter of accommodating outsiders is a joke. There are no “others” to the new liberal; there are only white people, black people, and brown people, and we like white people least.

This is what the argument has degenerated into: fuck the buffalo. They were here first. Fuck science. They were here first. Fuck Law. They were here first. Fuck human rights, that all-too-recent European invention which silenced the archaic African invention we call slavery. They were here first.

May I append this? Fuck history, that means by which we can follow the development of ideas without subordinating ourselves to primitive myths and proto-Fascist ideologies. They were here first.

Don’t get me wrong: I love mythology as much as the next guy. I just hate people who take it literally, and there is no greater modern myth than the concept of Natural Human Rights. Everything which we take for granted as a Society is the product of that “White Man’s Burden” which seems so embarrassing in context. It is simply the nature of progress that one always looks back with shame, since it’s impossible to be constantly improving without always one-upping what came before.

[({DM.R.G.)}]

LAW:

It is no mystery when an act of police brutality is documented that the People experience a collective sense of righteous indignation. Objectively, three Ideals are subverted in such an instance: Life, Peace, and Order. While the valuation of each of these Ideals is restricted to the domain of philosophers, there can be no doubt that when a man dies at the hands of Law Enforcement, without Due Process, by inherently violent means, his Life has been cut short, and the violent miscarriage of justice upsets both Peace and Order. The question of his RIGHT to Life, Peace, and Order remains nebulous, in the sense that philosophers often joke about the meme of Inherent Rights, but this theoretical problem does not present a SOCIAL problem, since human beings are known for fabricating that which Nature does not provide; in the absence of any Natural Law that protects Individuals, human beings invent Laws of their own. These Laws remain, in our contemporary Day and Age, the only convention which is at once ubiquitous and readily understood.

While, clinically, most people tend to score low in terms of Moral Reasoning, most people, if asked to define the Law, would probably express considerable faith in the Institution, at least in terms of Spirit. What is or is not “legal”, while it is not always synonymous with what is or is not Right, remains a matter of common principle and understanding, often regarded as the best FORMAL approximation we have for such abstract concepts such as Justice and Freedom. It is because legislators, litigators, enforcers, and civilians agree to the social contract that at least the PURSUIT of an objective, transcendent Morality is possible. In the absence of any unifying Church, Political Party, or Syndicate that holds itself accountable to the Public in the manner that Law does, striving for the absence of bias, secular, contemporary Society relies upon Law for all questions of Authority which would otherwise be impossible to answer without appearing pretentious and partisan.

Presupposing that the simplest explanation is the most credible, so long as it is confined to the objective, we may dismiss the ominous factor of “race” from the equation. If one asks why more “white Americans” are not interviewed regarding their experiences with “racism”, it is not uncommon to suggest that they do not “go through it”, implying a subjective phenomenon without scientific basis, devoid of value. Having established this as a projection, it becomes imperative to regard acts of violence reported by the Mass Media as isolated incidents. One reason for this lies in the fact that Law not only empowers individuals by preserving their Rights, (which might not exist outside of Law, except as fantasies,) but that it holds individuals accountable for their own actions. As such, we do not require conjecture about the MOTIVATIONS driving any act of police brutality, which can be classified as street violence far more credibly than it may be classified as “Law Enforcement”. People die from violence every day; what sets police brutality apart lies in that we hold agents of enforcement to a Higher Standard. This remains, of course, an INDIVIDUAL Standard. To suggest that any one act of brutality is NOT the product of a [wo]man’s moral shortcomings but rather of some sort of conspiracy is not only absurd but demoralizing, since such a conspiracy would thereby become indistinguishable from Law Itself.

Since folkways, mores, and social conventions are often inane and ridiculous, peer pressure is a force reserved for perpetual adolescents. Civilians are just as likely to judge moral behaviour by hairstyle as by ideological conviction. Only the Legal System enables members of opposing groups to mediate conflicts. Hence any isolated incident of police brutality can never be symptomatic of an illicit conspiracy, since that conspiracy would have, by its very nature, to be the only truly objective standard by which we judge things to be either illicit or legitimate. “That’s messed up” doesn’t cut it, for it is nothing more than the expression of emotion. It is also absurd, since we know that Law is so ubiquitous that its agencies of enforcement are divided into autonomous precincts that only partially answer to any Federal Authority.

It is therefore important not ONLY to see the irony in acts of protest which in themselves become Violent, Disorderly, and Deadly, subverting the same Ideals which the initial tragedy threatened. It is just as important to regard these acts, too, as isolated incidents, for we must have Hope in that the average person, outside of the heat of the moment, would admit that such acts of protest are ALSO, equally and unequivocally, failures of enforcement and Miscarriages of Justice.

[({R.G.)}]

The IRONY of ANARCHY:

It’s always ironic when, in the aftermath of a publicized act of police brutality, some people find license to publicize their own gripes about law enforcement. Not only does this trivialize the tragedy, but it also engenders an even more dangerous prejudice than whatever it was that produced the brutality, unless of course we presume that all forms of brutality sprout from the same primeval Source.

There is of course a peculiar place that a lynching holds in the hearts and minds of ordinary people. All forms of street violence are disturbing, not only because they are threatening, but because they are insulting to Humanity. French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze described something known as the “shame in being human” we experience when we see people behaving with excessive harshness, as though we internalized their own guilt for them, by association within the species. In instances such as these, we witness a side of Human Nature which we do not customarily expect. What we see often incites rage within us, but only to the same extent that we are ourselves prone to it; Jungian Psychology refers to this as “Shadow Projection”; outside of this irrational rage we are confined to shock and indignation.

One sees a young man getting beaten up outside a Cleveland hotel in broad daylight as bystanders cheer his assailant on. Do they know what he did to deserve this? Or do they presume that he “had it coming”, much as women often presume that men who are single are single “for a reason”, thereby perpetuating those men’s condition? When one witnesses behaviour such as this, though it is not always tantamount to a child getting murdered by gangs, it reveals what could be called the “Natural” state of Humanity, as opposed to its purportedly Civilized State.

Lynchings are especially disturbing not because they are acts of murder, but because they are carried out by a mob, operating outside of Legal Due Process. Even if the victim is condemned by Law to Death, we expect Law to do more for him. What is offended is not only the Pride in Being Human; it is the expectation that Law will redeem us. When one witnesses an abuse of police power, the tragedy is only secondarily the loss of Human Life; people die on the streets every day, and their deaths are celebrated, often publically, by their assailants. This is Reality.

What sets acts of Police Brutality apart is in that they are errors of Enforcement. Intuitively, perhaps instinctively, we recognize the Law as one of our forms of Saving Grace. We EXPECT for Law to protect us from not only one another but ourselves, for we know that, without it, the State of Nature would prevail, and those who retained the luxury of civilized thought would swiftly fall prey to unimaginable acts of predation by the planet’s Leading Carnivore: Man. It is for this reason that we hold Agents of Enforcement to a Higher Standard; they represent all civilized interests.

When we witness an act of Police Brutality, it says nothing about the Police. What we are witnessing is thoroughly typical HUMAN Behaviour, carried out without the bounds of Due Process, but using the full force of Law Enforcement in its service. In the wake of such a tragedy, the only sensible recourse is to unify in SUPPORT of the Law and those who continue to enforce it with conscientiousness and dexterity. It is only by doing so that we preserve Individual Rights, which are, after all, social constructs, and it is only by doing so that we preserve Individual Accountability, thereby resisting the primal temptation to so identify with a group that these prejudicial reactions are likely to recur. It is therefore ironic that, in the aftermath of a publicized act of police brutality, and in the wake of a tragedy which is most properly called a Miscarriage of Justice, there are some of those among us who would think to supplant the Law Itself, as though the failure of People to live up to our own Civilized Standards were the product of Civilization and NOT intrinsic to Nature. No serious anarchist is without a gun and a vendetta.

[({R.G.)}]

PARAS!TE: FULL REV!EW.

THE ETHOS:

In the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, morality plays took a turn in favour of revolutionary views, the likes of which Marx and his followers adopted to varying degrees of success and atrocious failure in the centuries that followed. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is a prime example of this subversive trend; the librettist who wrote those ingenious lyrics which Mozart set to music later moved to the United States. Retelling the tale of Don Juan, the four-hour epic depicts an ignoble nobleman who terrorizes peasants who are extremely civilized. (Of course, our own Slavoj Zizek might take issue with the term “civilized”, but in so doing he represents part of the problem I describe.) Admittedly, most of what Don Giovanni does throughout those four hours might even pass for admirable achievement in our present day, but only because so many men are either self-absorbed or easily pushed over. His only sins that stand the scrutiny of time are rape and murder, though one must keep in mind that, according to the old morality, the former would be hardly worse than the remainder of his lechery, since personal consent was less important, even during the Enlightenment, than conformism to standards, and even the most radical Enlightenment thinker wouldn’t have dared to suggest that chastity, as a social imperative, was simply the product of envy.

By illustrating the poor in a noble light and the noble in a poor light, the greatest dramatists of the Enlightenment managed to draw a sharp distinction between social hierarchy and moral hierarchy. Nobility was not a quality either exclusive to nor guaranteed within the Nobles, even if it was in fact the Noble Class which had produced it as a standard. So long as you could romanticize peasants as behaving like chivalrous princes, contending with a lecherous rich man, you could not only expose the corruption which wealth is heir to but also you could begin to Universalize Nobility as a standard transcending social station. The Cardinal Virtues are not simply behaviours which the Priesthood adopts because the Church can afford to sponsor them; they are archetypes that live within the very Heart of Human Nature, planted there by God, available to any thinking man. Rafael, the Angel of Forgiveness, is no different in quintessence from Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is the avatar. Goodness and Evil transcend cultural boundaries, and they are untethered by the mortal norms of class.

This flame was not so easily extinguished by modernity as we might suspect. While Breaking Bad might have set the stage for shows like Ozark, wherein every character is deplorable, its artistic achievement was twofold: that it not only presented a sympathetic villain, but it established such a stark contrast between his villainous fate and his heroic beginnings that viewers could not help but to end up blaming the same man they were rooting for. This was precisely Vince Gilligan’s goal: to teach viewers that “actions have consequences”. His genius was in creating villains so engaging that there was no sympathy left by the end; we had already expended it.

Even more successful artistically to this end, if not commercially, is the prequel Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill transforms into Saul Goodman, his stoic counterpart Mike becomes a hitman. The central themes are usually conveyed by Mike himself, who doubles as a Wise Old Man and as a Gatekeeper, eventually becoming a tragic hero. One of Mike’s earliest monologues, addressed to an upstart criminal named Pryce, (an I.T. specialist who decides to sell stolen pharmaceuticals for a profit,) is upon the difference between a “criminal” and a “bad guy”. “You took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit, which now makes you a criminal. Good one? Bad one? That’s up to you.” Mike recognizes that our moral standing in Life is independent of our legal standing. It follows logically that it is also independent of our economic standing, especially if economics can be reduced to social standing in an institution such as the Law. Mike repeatedly refuses money, even when his family’s in dire straits, when he believes that he has not earned it. This sets him apart from Ignacio Varga, who can sympathize with Mike’s robbery of a drug lord’s trucks, but not with the vendetta which motivated it. Nacho Varga doesn’t have the sorts of responsibilities which Mike has, since Mike acts also as a provider for his widowed daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, whereas Nacho’s father has always planned for Nacho to inherit a thoroughly decent family business. Mike simply retains his devotion to the Spirit of the Law, even after having quit his post as a cop in an extremely corrupt precinct. Ignacio, who has chosen to defy his father’s wishes by allying himself with the Cartel, ends up fending for life, enabling a string of murders and injuries in his wake. When he receives a blood transfusion from one of a pair of iconic Cartel twins, it represents both the duality of his nature and his transformation into a drug lord.

THE PATHOS:

By far, the evilest villain in the film Parasite turns out to have been the patriarch of the parasitic family. Not only does he do nothing to stop his family from committing the original con, acting as far less than the stoic source of moral fortitude and equanimity which his initial character foil, Mr. Park, exhibits, but his profound envy for this gentleman sparks a neurosis which, over a very short time, escalates into the most senseless act of murder. It is by no mistake that the two men wear the feathers of Native Americans at the climax of the film, for what they represent is that rage which, either robbed of civilizing grace or having never seen it, lashes out with infantile destruction at the alien world of wealth and sophistication. What the patriarch of the parasitic family represents is self-entitlement, expressed as the raw will to destroy that which it desires. Mr. Kim wants to live Mr. Park’s life; he even goes so far as to covet the wife. Yet it is his negligence, his heavy-handed arrogance, one alien to seasoned criminals, (the likes of which we see in Breaking Bad, for instance, or even Death Note,) that dooms his family, for when they have the perfect opportunity to plan their grand ascension to the plane of wealth instead they waste it, pilfering the secrets of their hosts, intoxicating themselves in a manner only native to the unaristocratic. They know neither the reserve to leave the door unanswered when the old housekeeper comes to knock, nor do they feel the shame and the disgust which would in such a matter warrant sympathy for her and her husband. It is because they fail to answer for their sins against the family, creeping about within the dark, that Kim bears witness to the act of love between Park and his blushing wife. Park and his wife are also envious, their act of love modeled after some fantasy of rundown life, but it’s a fantasy that has been planted by the daughter of the Kims, and they do nothing but to act it out in what they falsely think is privacy. The Parks are kind enough to hide their civilized disgust when they discover panties in the back of their own car, and it is nothing short of this that lands the parasitic patriarch his gig at the expense of someone younger and more qualified, if not yet “needy”, so to speak. Yet how can this Mr. Kim deplore them for what they should say in privacy? It is offense to which he only walks by his own secret path, rather than a directed insult. What he hates is not what his host DOES, but rather what the host PERCEIVES, and in that rests the seeds of a psychosis, for the narcissist, refusing to perceive his own foul stench, hates most the thought that others turn their noses up at it behind his back. It is for this reason that Mr. Kim winds up living down in the crawlspace, in the place of the same maniac who nearly killed his son and stabbed the hosts nearly to death. It seems that all is lost during the struggle between the recluse and the Kims’ son, but as it turns out it’s the early victim who will live to tell the tale. At that moment when the ritual of decency is interrupted by an act of madness, Mr. Park behaves the most responsibly, lifting the car keys from beneath the carcass of the man who nearly killed his wife and child. There is no question at this moment that Park is the Better Man, but as the stench of his assailant fills his nostrils Mr. Kim is so reminded of this stark superiority between them that he is possessed, as if by Cain, to kill the father right before the wife. Kim’s wife and son survive, but at that moment the Parks’ lives are over, where before there had been yet a feeble hope at dignity and even healing. Let us not forget that all of this went on without the Park’s say-so or knowledge; they had no idea, thinking themselves kind. Their one sin was living that one life which all the others wanted; their one error was permitting others even partial access to this life. A rational man would rejoice, knowing that at least someone kindly had been able to enjoy what he was yet to know. Yet madness works in other ways. Kim’s lust for “simple” Mrs. Park is clear when he first holds her hand, and hearing Mr. Park fondle her breast and all the while denounce his stink engenders jealousy the likes of which not even I can fathom. A True Man would sooner have confessed to all his sins in that one moment than to let the ruse go on. But the coward had no recourse but to crawl back into poverty, a circumstance that would arouse our pity but not our solidarity, for in that moment it was chosen by the victim. Kim had the capacity for murder then, but he had not the plan to do so, leaving it up to his son’s device. The women in the family, by this point, came to recognize the lodgers underground as equals, where before their senseless rivalry for ample resources had doomed them nearly to exposure. Yet the lies the daughter wove came back to haunt them, for just as the ladies of the family were ready to thus offer up their peace, the lady of the Parks came carrying a cake which had been baked not just to celebrate the birthday of her son but to help him to cope with trauma, a trauma fabricated by the Kims. It’s in this moment that their son tries to murder the lodgers, all for wanting what he had, just as his father kills their host for having only what they wanted. Hence the madman becomes the latter foil for Kim.

THE LOGOS:

One of the peculiar qualities of the Park family which is typical of underdeveloped characters (in developed countries) is just how little we truly know about them. This fact renders it impossible to blame them without making irrational inferences from outside the text, which would be a major faux pas in the Post-Derridean contemporary world. For instance, we cannot call them “capitalists” in the Marxist sense any more so than we might call Andy Bernard’s ancestors “slave owners”; though neoliberal Oscar Martinez would love to be able to prove Nellie’s inflated claims to be factual, Bernard is accurate in describing his ancestors as “moral middlemen”: conscientious, hardworking participants in a corrupt Social Order which, by a Kantian estimation, required them to conform in spite of personal reservations and subjective doubts. As far as we are aware, the Host Family in Parasite is most likely tantamount to this, only because most people in their estimated income bracket (presuming upon the quality of their luxuries) are in the same position: they are not business owners, so they are not capitalists in the Marxist sense. If they were brought up in a “bubble”, they surpass in dignity those nouveau riche who have had to “work to get there”. While it is charming and sadly endearing to hear people from the ghetto share their dreams of wealth and power (and one often does, as I have, having spent a lot of time in urban sectors and encountered many locals,) one recalls that, were they better educated, they would not speak so proudly of their entrepreneurial dreams and realities. By the most economically left-leaning, liberal definition available, the one supplied by the notorious Karl Marx, those who manage to move up the social ladder by their will and work alone are in fact MORE corrupt than those who are born into “privilege”, since such upward mobility requires them to make a PROFIT, which Marx systematically proves to be directly proportional to and, in fact, synonymous with, exploitation, selling out their fellows in the process. This process of “selling out” is precisely what the Kim family demonstrates. Conversely, the Park family exhibits behaviours which are far more emblematic of another archetype, that of the Child: Innocence. While their patriarch exhibits the stoic condescension of his station, his actual choices, though they always portend unrelenting cosmic retribution, are invariably advantageous to the Kims, whom he grows to trust as much as his childlike wife does. The Parks, though they retain internal feelings of disgust, never allow these personal biases to skew their public behaviour, extending an attitude of trusting compassion even to their hired help, except for when they are MISLED, calculatedly, to make cancellations. While this ideal is one to which we might feel rightfully entitled, it’s not a frequent fact, so we ought to be grateful to the Parks, for they exhibit all these graces willingly and willfully. To the same extent as it is “easy” for them to be good, it is just as easy for them to be evil, and their choices therefore act as the definitive arbiter in the revelation of their character. If the Kim family finds within the depths of that character a private contempt, it is only because the Kims have betrayed the trust of the Parks by creeping into their private, innermost lives. When government entities in countries purported to be Leftist behave in this manner, Snowden supporters worldwide profess that the government betrayed both the People and its own Ideals for them.

If Parasite is a metaphor, then who are we to read it just one way? Are the Kims not, in fact, more akin to the capitalists in the works of Marx than the Parks are? Foremost anti-capitalist Slavoj Zizek holds a similar interpretation of subtext in The Sound of Music, insisting that the more subtle viewer will notice extremely proto-Fascist tendencies in the villagers who serve as that film’s protagonists, whereas the Germans they defy are tantamount to a Nazi’s conception of the Jewish Elite. If we can systematically demonstrate that the Kims exhibit the violent, sociopathic, and exploitative tendencies of a nineteenth-century Industrialist, then how can we continue to sympathize with them, as liberals?

Hidden Leeches: So, Who Were the Parasites?

Of course, here the director himself offers a counterintuitive interpretation of his own work, by suggesting that the Parks were Parasites as WELL. Of course, such an observation could never absolve either party of its crimes, for crimes are often crimes not just against an “exploited party” but also against an Overlying Law; if anything, being equated with the Parks in dignity gives Mr. Kim far less excuse for envy, unless he cares nothing for dignity itself. Yet such a degree of sophistication in moral calculation is probably lost already upon any class of people that calls the Parks “parasites”.

The most narcissistic delusion is that of Godhood, and since a God can deny his own delusions from a position of Divine Authority, any man who believes himself to be a God is the most hopeless case in this regard. What is the significance of Divinity? A Deity is like a genie without the shackles; he or she can will anything into existence, at least enough so as to satisfy his or her own needs. It is only in Buddhism that the Gods are considered unhappy in direct proportion to their power, and that is only because Buddhism rejects power.

A self-made man is a God Incarnate: an entity who fashions, by his or her own volition alone, the entirety of his or her own conditions. It does not take a Freud or Jung to see this grandiosity for what it is. Yet, somehow, when we see people relying upon other people, we treat them as though they were less than human, as though human beings were Gods and Goddesses. While cooking and driving are hardly metaphysical powers, (I, myself, possess at least one of them) it’s not a mark of shame to hire a private cook or a driver. This is because human beings are communal creatures; as Alasdair MacIntyre said, (and as I quote, quite shamelessly, for I agree with him*:) we are “dependent, rational animals”. The Parks are not exploiting the Kims by providing them with a source of income in exchange for a service. While the most cursory reading of Marx would call this “exchange-value” into question, the seemingly generous NATURE of the Parks, already exposed by their willful and “easy” goodness, leaves it up to them to decide how MUCH to pay the Kims, and it leaves it up to us to infer that it’s probably a “fair amount”, hardly synonymous with exploitation.

*Not only do I quote him because I agree with him; I am also unashamed in doing so, because I agree with him that there is nothing to be ashamed of herein.

Post-Shamanic Human Beings form societies based upon the division of specialized labour, and while this division lends itself to hierarchical structures it also makes possible a state of interdependence wherein ethics and commerce, working hand in hand, ensure both the production and the distribution of resources which possess Marx’s “use-value”. Yet the lingering credibility of Marx, especially in the current Zeitgeist, is not in his depth of research into the statistics of the prior centuries, an academic rigour the likes of which we do not find in millennials. It’s rather in the shocking accounts of factory conditions that Marx sets his morality play, in terms so plain and detached that they prefigure the ominous stylings of Realism and Modernist Theatre. At first blush, the Kim family’s living circumstances seem most reminiscent of these stark conditions. Yet no tragedy is complete without a villain and a tragic hero. In the case of the Kims, they are both, because of their choices.

Since ethics remain ethics irrespective of personal conditions, and as we have demonstrated that the most liberally sound people are those who do not change social class, wherever they may be situated, it would be daft to agree with Mrs. Kim’s drunken assertion that the Park family’s kindness is inauthentic because it comes easily as a function of privileged wealth. Our only warrant would lie in an even baser presumption: that people only do good things to feel good, and only when it requires neither effort nor sacrifice. When you see how instinctive depravity is for the Kims, it’s unsurprising.

The Sins of Kim:

We know very little about the Parks, but we know almost all there is to know about the Kims. The son betrays his best friend in the first half hour of the film, if I am not mistaken, seducing a young girl whose death he eventually brings about, thinking only of his own alienation. This same son, an adolescent boy scarcely older than Yagami Light, takes it upon himself to murder a man far less fortunate than he, who in turn attempts to kill his “Gods” upstairs. The Kim family’s matriarch shows no recrimination in getting members of their fellow working class fired to make room for narcissistic dreams of upward mobility. Where is that sense of Marxist Solidarity in the Sub-basement, when for the first time the Kims have to confront the impact of their enterprise upon an even lower class? Are these the sorts of people to presume that wealth is heir to malice? If so, it’s clearly the poor characters who are living in a bubble, unaware of even themselves, for it would take just one look in the mirror (provided by the character foil of the Squatters) to see that, in this Universe, wealth is not inversely proportional to loyalty and kindness, but directly so. The poor people are the most murderous, the wealthy are the most generous, and if this were not so, we wouldn’t need to stoop to the childish claim that it’s “easy for them to be good”. Yes: it WOULD be easy, except that the Kims, simply by CONTENDING this, make no attempt to BE good, sealing by this excuse the fates of all involved. Their power is neither that of privilege nor labour, but of duplicity and ruthlessness. While it seems tautological at first to use their claims against them, since it was precisely that same claim about privileged morality that I sought to disprove, a simple accounting of willful immorality ought to expose that claim for what it is: a pragmatic LIE, one believed by the liar, as all narcissistic fantasies are. It’s iconic, therefore, that the one member of the Kim family who dies, rightfully, is the daughter, for of all of them this counterfeiter is the most blatant con artist, without whom none of the criminal enterprise would have worked. If you can be fooled into sympathizing with her family, you are among the naïve.

The Park Family is the only family which lives a Good Life, both morally and financially. Yet hundreds of years of progressive theater and Leftist economics prove that this is not always the case. Often, rich people suck, and poor people rock. Yet what you find in the Parks is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Critics who grow queasy at the sight of a Westerner interpreting Korean economics and reinterpreting Modern Korean Art would do well to recount the North Koreans who protest Modern Art; dissent can be manufactured under authoritarian regimes. While we DESERVE artistic license, Nature does not entitle us to it. By the same token, while Nature does not entitle everyone to the Good Life, financially, we all DESERVE it, insofar as we are willing to work towards it MORALLY. The Parks do not exploit anyone to get ahead, so they are not capitalists. Yet they use their wealth in a thoroughly moral fashion, suggesting, with dramatic irony, that it would be wasted upon their hired help, though they themselves never seem to believe this, even inviting their employees to their son’s birthday party. The Parks cannot be expected to give it all up to charity and to join a protest in the streets, and this is precisely BECAUSE they live in South Korea, whose closest neighbor to the North would gobble up a Leftist uprising in a jiffy. (Probably taking a full accounting of resistors to the fight, ensuring that their families would be cursed for future generations.) As a Moldovan citizen born in Moscow in 1991, believe me when I say that I am NOT just your typical white American in holding this position. The complacency of the Kims is only natural, and, in Asian fashion, they elevate Nature to an Art. If you still believe that they should be Marxists instead, consider how much sympathy the poorest of the poor characters – the Squatters – have for North Korean propaganda.

IN SUMMARY:

Bong Joon-ho’s submagnum opus Parasite is not a film about “class” any more so than the O.J. Simpson trial was about a red-handed glove. (Of course, that trial was hardly about “race” either, by the same token.) Parasite is a film about parasitism, envy, sociopathy, madness, and the murder of innocents for socioeconomic, ideological reasons. The truest tragedy is that the men who wrote and created the film don’t even seem to recognize what they have done. Mr. Kim bewails his own sin and resolves himself to his retribution. The lingering sympathy that conventional viewers apparently feel for him is symptomatic of a far more devious sociopathy.

[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]

PHARMACEUTICAL PHASHISM: (and the Cult of Mental Health.)

Every imperial society has at some point or an other led a sort of witch hunt. Jungian Psychology, one of the few remaining spiritual disciplines in the world that is still in practice, explains that in a codependent community, preserved by a common egocentric image, all of the negative, repressed traits that the majority of people do not wish to admit to are misattributed to a proverbial “scapegoat”.

Psychiatry is the only institution in the United States of America that can:

a.    Restrict a civilian’s Right to Bear Arms for five years based not upon the commitment of a crime but based upon suspicion.

b.    Give parents free license to forcibly drug their children, indefinitely.

c.    Give hospital staff free license to forcibly drug their patients, indefinitely.

d.    Promote for the lifelong imprisonment of an individual based upon suspicion of intent.

e.    Promote for the lifelong forced drugging of an individual even outside of the jurisdiction of a hospital.

f.      Perform experiments upon non-consenting human beings, with the ultimate intent of maintaining Social Order and Profits for Drug Companies.

g.    Deal amphetamines to children, calculating an addiction prior to the legal age of consent.

h.    Appeal to the egoism of a group in such a way that pits that group against an innocent scapegoat.

i.      Legislate what is or is not a legal form of “reality”.

j.      Administer punitive measurements against an individual based upon that individual’s religious eccentricities.

k.    Create an oppressive double-standard according to which any spontaneous act of protest (such as a victimless act of violence that does no harm to either person or property, except for producing the emotional response in others that was itself the cause for the protest [in whose case violence forces EMPATHY and JUSTICE]) is treated as an offense with a life sentence.

l.      Can achieve all of these ends by means of passing judgment NOT upon the victim’s ACTIONS but upon his SOUL, and based NOT upon hard evidence of wrongdoing (a Romantic pipe-dream for contemporary Law Enforcement) but rather upon theoretical discussion of what MIGHT have happened, as though the suspect were INCAPABLE of KNOWING.

m. Can appoint drug addicts to the systematic overseeing, exploitation, and abuse of mental deviants with “developmental disorders”, even without subjecting these de facto slave drivers to the same degree of scrutiny that these and other mental deviants are subject to.

n.    Can outright lie to hospital patients.

o.    Can forcibly inject someone who is not a convicted felon, often with drugs that are still in an experimental stage.

p.    Exploit legal loopholes by appealing to Public Fear.

q.    Diagnose someone with an invented disease that is by its very nature “mental” and has no physical proof a priori, but is only perpetuated as a prejudicial pop culture myth by the exploitation of the Scientific Method (which by virtue of its falsifiability enthrones Theory as Fact in place of any sort of Absolute Ground, and which precludes the possibility for the diagnosed patient to appeal to the existence of such an Absolute Ground once the diagnosis is being made).

r.     Systematically restrict intelligence and lie about the ostensibly “Rational” nature of Human Life and Beings, effectively dehumanizing people who are disillusioned in any capacity.

s.     Make its diagnoses based upon only a subjective interpretation by a nurse of the subjective account of the patient, rendered “objective” only by arbitrary association with a set of traits (appearing on a checklist) which can be applied to any individual at any time in any place with the same precision.

t.      Diagnose differences of ethical opinion as though they were physical disorders.

u.    Diagnose physical symptoms as though they were ethical infractions.

v.    Treat both physical symptoms and ethical opinions as though they were crimes, creating a de facto criminal outside of de jure jurisdiction.

w.  Deny that a criminal is being charged with a crime.

x.    Force an agenda by stripping chosen deviants of human rights and pitting laypeople against one an other for suspicions of madness.

y.    Totally isolate and marginalize a human person, misrepresenting the peculiarity that comes with Ability as Disability, redefining Disability to mean “Threat”, creating the very environment for suicide and other forms of violence under the false auspices of preventing it, and invalidating any testimony on the part of the Oppressed by virtue of the SAME ISOLATION and ALIENATION OF MIND that the system itself had created.

AND

z.      Can do all of this not only for the Common Good of Society, but for the individual’s Own Good.

And those were just the few that I could fit into the English Alphabet.

FASCISM IS REAL. WAKE UP. NOW.

Dm.A.A.

HUXLEY on PACIFISM.

This article is reproduced from: http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/people/pp-huxley2.html

Ends and Means

The blocked road
If what you want to achieve is good, does it matter if the things you do to achieve it aren't good? That problem - 'do the ends justify the means?' - has been debated by thinking human beings for a very long time. Aldous Huxley used it to provide a title for 'Ends and Means', a collection of essays about us: human beings and their behaviour.

This book was published in 1937, when it was clear to many worried people that the world was heading towards another world war. Aldous Huxley was a lifelong pacifist, but it was in the 1930s that he was a particularly active one. He spoke at public meetings and debates, organised events, wrote pamphlets (you can read one on this website), and joined the PPU's campaign to put an end to war. He was already a famous writer; and 'Ends and Means' sold 6,000 copies within days of publication. It is still respected today.

As Huxley says at the beginning of 'Ends and Means', most people in our civilisation have agreed on what they want: a world of 'liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love'. But what they haven't been able to agree on is how to get it. The rest of his book is about why that is so and what might be done about it.

There is a whole chapter on the subject of war alone. That's not surprising: 'Every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, by preparations for war'. Now, in the 21st century, the roads are still blocked. It's time we paid attention to Aldous Huxley's wake-up call.

A great deal of what he says is either still true, or prophetic: he wouldn't be surprised by the state of the world today, though he would certainly be saddened by it. But there's still time to learn from the man called 'one of the great culture-heroes' of his time. 

Here is a summary of what Aldous Huxley wrote about war in 'Ends and Means'.




The nature of war
'War is a purely human phenomenon'. What's more, 'man is unique in organising the mass murder of his own species'. Some people still suggest that war is 'nature's way' of culling our species. The fittest will survive, and so therefore will the human race. Nonsense, says Huxley: 'war tends to eliminate the young and strong'; there's no evidence to show that war-like people are the ones who survive. 'War is not a law of nature, nor even a law of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist....It is enormously difficult for us to change our wishes in this matter; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible.'

Sadly, all western civilised societies, so far, have been warlike. Huxley suggests that this tendency began when groups of people gathered round leaders, mostly men, who wanted domination and even a kind of life after death: the hero's 'immortal fame'.

But it's interesting, Huxley remarks, to see how differently various civilisations have regarded war. 'Europeans have always worshipped the military hero' and have found 'justifications for national aggression'. Not so the Chinese, who aspired to 'an ordered and harmonious society' for many centuries. 'It is one of the tragedies of history that the Westernisation of China should have meant the progressive militarisation of a culture which, for nearly 3,000 years, preached the pacifist ideal.' In India, however, Buddhists still learn and teach 'ahimsa': 'doing no harm' to living beings. 'Alone of all the great world religions, Buddhism made its way without persecution, censorship or inquisition. Its record is enormously superior to that of Christianity, which made its way among people wedded to militarism.' 




Some causes of war
Huxley suggests a number of reasons why people have wanted war to exist. For some, it has provided a purpose which their lives lacked. Others, tempted by crime, have found the lawlessness of war attractive. For many it has, quite simply, made life more interesting. But these are the reasons of non-combatant civilians; and they belong to the past, when wars were carried out by relatively small professional armies on, mostly, distant battlefields. Armies in the field and non-combatants back home were not yet threatened by the weapon that changed war for good: the bomber aircraft. 

Nowadays the causes of war affect both soldiers and civilians. Nationalism, for one. People 'like to have excuses to feel pride and hatred'; military leaders like to have excuses to use their men and machines. The making and owning of armaments itself leads to war, creating 'fear, suspicion, resentment and hatred' between countries. Such feelings are also aroused by people's desire to spread and defend political - or religious - ideals.

Politically powerful minorities, pursuing their own interests, also take their countries into war. They may be looking for new territory on which to build, or for raw materials (precious stones, minerals, oil, trees) to exploit. But the most dangerous minority interest is, again, the arms trade. To make and increase their profits, arms makers and dealers may be tempted to do whatever they can to ensure that wars take place - and that disarmament never does. 'What is needed,' says Aldous Huxley firmly, 'is the complete abolition of the arms industry'. And, he says, it is possible: simply, 'abolition will come when the majority wish it to come.'

Which means we, the citizens, have to think about our own attitudes. 'The manufacturers of armaments are not the only merchants of death. To some extent we all are.' In western democracies, who votes for governments dependent on arms trade taxes? The people do. Who consents to government's 'economic, political and military imperialism'? The people do. That's not all. 'Even in so far as we behave badly in private life we are all doing our bit to bring the next war nearer.' The rich and powerful among us, of course, do more than a bit: 'the peace of the world has frequently been endangered in order that they might grow a little richer.'



The experiment that failed
The League of Nations was founded in 1919, after the First World War. Its aim was to preserve international peace and security, and it hoped to do that by preventing disputes, or at any rate settling them peaceably, and promoting disarmament. In 1937, Aldous Huxley wrote sadly that the high hopes placed in the League of Nations had been disappointed. He suggests several reasons why the League failed to achieve world peace. One was that the USA refused to join, and Russia and 'enemy' nations (such as Germany) were at first kept out. But its chief fault, in Huxley's view, was that the only eligible members were communities which had their own armies: it was a league of societies which were organised for war, and as such a military league. He also criticised the ways in which the League operated, including providing outside military help to a victim of aggression. 

'No government,' says Huxley, 'has the right gratuitously to involve its subjects in war.' Indeed: 'War is so radically wrong that any international agreement which provides for the extension of hostilities from a limited area to the whole world is manifestly based on unsound principles. Modern war destroys with the maximum of efficiency and the maximum of indiscrimination, and therefore entails the commission of injustices far more numerous and far worse than any it is intended to redress.' 

'Those who prepare for war,' he says grimly, 'in due course get the war they prepare for.'

(The League of Nations was replaced after the Second World War by the United Nations. It could be said that hopes have been disappointed there, too.) 

An international police force? A misleading term, says Huxley. 'The police act with precision; they go out and arrest the guilty person. But nations and groups of nations act through their armed forces, which can only act with the maximum of imprecision, killing, maiming, starving and ruining millions of human beings, of whom the overwhelming majority have committed no crime of any sort.' He, perhaps not consciously, foresees the time when people refer to 'collateral damage' instead of 'civilian deaths', or use such contradictions in terms as 'peace-keeping troops': 'We shall never learn to think correctly unless we call things by their proper names. The international police force would not be a police force. It would be a force for perpetrating indiscriminate massacres.' In any case: 'How is such a force to be recruited? How organised? How armed? Where located? Who is to decide when it is to be used and against whom? To whom will it owe allegiance and how is its loyalty to be guaranteed? How can nations be persuaded to contribute men and materials to it? Should their contributions be equal? If not, and a few great powers supply the major part, what is to prevent those powers from establishing a military tyranny over the whole world?' The idea of such a force, says Huxley with scorn, 'combines all the moral and political vices of militarism with all the hopeless impracticability of a Utopian dream'. (But despite Huxley's warnings, the world's states have chosen to place their faith in international forces, deployed all over the world and in some places for decades. We have also seen the development of poorly-controlled local militias moving in to carry out policing functions with violence. appalling brutality and little respect for human rights. And 'military tyranny'? - for all the talk of good versus evil, and of 'humanitarian' aims, that tyranny is there.) Peaceful settlements that last? Huxley has no doubt: 'War cannot be stopped by more war. All that more war can do is widen the area of destruction and place new obstacles in the way of reaching a just and humane settlement of international disputes.' In Huxley's day, just as in ours, procedures and skills for negotiation, co-operation and reconciliation existed. But, as he says, 'a machine may be exquisitely ingenious and of admirable workmanship, but if people refuse to use it, or use it badly, it will be almost or completely useless. This is the case with the machinery of peaceful change and international co-operation. Wherever "national honour" and "vital interests" were concerned, governments have preferred to threaten or actually make use of violence. Even in cases where they have consented to employ the machinery of peaceful settlement, they have sometimes displayed such bad will that the machine has been unable to function.' 'Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.' Nonviolence The chapter of 'Ends and Means' called 'War' ends with a description of how nationalism, communism, religion and other 'idolatries' can give people a misleading sensation of meaning and purpose. People have been ready, as a result, mistakenly 'to make sacrifices, accept hardships, display courage and fortitude - and indeed all the virtues except the primary ones: love and awareness'. Without these crucial qualities - genuine humaneness and caring - we are doomed to stay on the wrong road, the road that leads to violence and war. In his next chapter, 'Individual Work for Reform', Huxley makes it clear that a peaceful future depends on what private individuals - you, me, us - do on our own, or, better still, in groups. He begins with a reminder: 'the only effective methods for carrying out large-scale social reforms are nonviolent methods. Violence produces the results of violence. The attempt to impose reforms by violent methods is doomed to failure'. In fact, 'society cannot become better unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified.' Huxley knows that's a tall order. 'Governments are not willing to undertake these tasks', for a start. Nor are many private individuals prepared to tackle them on their own. 'If the work is to be done, it must be done by associations of individuals' with the vision and energy 'to break the new ground that nobody else will break'. To give us some encouragement Huxley goes on to give some examples of what has already been achieved by nonviolent action - you can find examples of these and many more on this website. 'Nonviolence is so often regarded as impractical, or at best a method which only exceptional men and women can use. It is essential to show that - even when used sporadically and unsystematically - the method actually works.' Huxley adds (with some characteristic bite) that nonviolence 'can be used by quite ordinary people and even, on occasion, by those morally sub-human beings, kings, politicians, diplomats and the other representatives of national groups, considered in their professional capacity.... Out of business hours these beings may live up to the most exacting ethical standards.' Huxley was well aware that technology was here to stay. 'The question is whether it is to stay as an instrument of slavery or as a way to freedom.' 'Curing the world of obsession with money and power' needs to be done in the modern world; but even a modern hi-tech world can be humane. So: Huxley's ideal 'associations of individuals' should set about making experiments to solve a number of problems. How can the working population be effectively self-governing? How can they bring a sense of responsibility and commitment to what they do? How can the temperaments and talents of each individual be best used? How can the wealth created in a technological society be best distributed? What is the best kind of communal government? What are the best kinds of local communities? What are the best ways of using leisure? What is the best education for children and self-education for adults, and how may both be got? And how can natural gifts of leadership be used without 'the temptation of ambition or the lust for power'? Another tall order. And other, new, problems have arisen in western society since the 1930s. But the aim - the 'end' - is sincere and true: start with individual people and build a life, a community, a world, in which we want not only peace but also the things which make peace possible. The belief that underpins all that Aldous Huxley has to say is simple: 'It is enormously difficult to change; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible.' Look round this website - there are plenty of ideas and stories to show that achieving a world without war is, without doubt, possible. Difficult, yes; but we're working on it.
Dm.A.A.

THE BEAST AND THE PIG:

Salvatore "Salvo" Riina /ˈriːnə/ (born 16 November 1930), called Totò 'u Curtu (Sicilian: '"Totò the Short"'; Totò is another nickname for "Salvatore"), is an Italianmobster and the former chief of the Sicilian Mafia, known for a ruthless murder campaign that reached a peak in the early '90s, when the deaths of Antimafia Commissionprosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino caused widespread public revulsion and led to a major crackdown by the authorities. He was also known by the nicknames la belva ("the beast") and il capo dei capi (Sicilian: 'u capu di 'i capi, "the boss of the bosses").

Riina succeeded Luciano Leggio as foremost boss of the Corleonesi faction of the criminal organization in the early 1980s and achieved dominance by a campaign of violence, which caused police to target his rivals. As a fugitive Riina was less vulnerable to the law enforcement reaction to his methods, and police removed many of the older type of boss, who had operated by influence peddling and bribery. Favoured assassin Giovanni Brusca estimated he murdered 100-200 people on Riina's orders. Riina also advocated, in violation of traditional Mafia codes, the killing of women and children, and killed uninvolved members of the public solely to distract law enforcement. Although his scorched-earth policy neutralized any internal threat to his position, Riina increasingly showed a lack of his earlier guile by bringing his organization into open confrontation with national authorities. After decades living as a fugitive he was captured, which provoked a series of indiscriminate bombings of art galleries and churches. Riina is currently being held on the stringent Article 41-bis prison regime, one of several measures that resulted from his defiant strategy.

Giovanni Brusca (born 20 February 1957 in San Giuseppe Jato) is a former member of the Sicilian Mafia. He murdered the anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone in 1992 and once stated that he had committed between 100 and 200 murders but was unable to remember the exact number. He was sentenced to life in prison in absentia, captured in 1996 and started to cooperate with the authorities.

A pudgy, bearded and unkempt mafioso, Brusca was known in Mafia circles as "U' Verru" (in Sicilian) or Il Porco or Il Maiale, (In Italian: The Pig, The Swine) or "lo scannacristiani" (people-slayer; in Italian dialects the word "christians" often stands for "human beings"). Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia turncoat who had cooperated with Falcone’s investigations, remembered Giovanni Brusca as "a wild stallion but a great leader."^[1]

Capture and arrest[edit]

Riina reprimanded Balduccio Di Maggio, an ambitious Mafioso who had left his wife and children for a mistress, telling him he would never be made a full boss. Knowing Riina would order the death of subordinates whom he considered unreliable, Di Maggio fled Sicily and collaborated with the authorities. At the entrance to a complex of villas where a wealthy businessman who acted as Riina's driver lived, Di Maggio identified Riina's wife. On 15 January 1993, Carabinieri arrested Totò Riina in Palermo. He had been a fugitive for 23 years.^[19][20][21]

"Personality and profile[edit]

Due to his habits of secrecy and evasiveness, Riina's personality remains enigmatic. An informant, Antonino Calderone, described Riina as being "unbelievably ignorant, but he had an intuition and intelligence and was difficult to fathom ... very hard to predict". He said Riina was soft-spoken and a dedicated father and husband. Riina was highly persuasive and often highly sentimental. He followed the simple codes of the brutal, ancient world of the Sicilian countryside, where force is the only law and there is no contradiction between personal kindness and extreme ferocity. "His philosophy was that if someone's finger hurt, it was better to cut off his whole arm just to make sure", Calderone said.^[35]

One of the more bizarre anecdotes Calderone related was that of Riina giving a tearful eulogy at the funeral of Calderone's murdered brother, even though Riina himself had ordered the killing. Calderone also said that, when Riina set his sights on marrying his sweetheart, Ninetta, the young lady's family objected to the union. Calderone quoted Riina as saying "I don't want any woman other than my Ninetta, and if they [her family] don't let me marry her, I'll have to kill some people." Ninetta's family soon dropped any opposition to Riina's matrimonial plans.

Giovanni Brusca claimed that, during 1991 and early 1992, Riina contemplated acts of terrorism against the state to get it to back off in its crackdown against the Mafia, including acts such as bombing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In fact, during the months after Riina's arrest, there was a series of bombings by the Corleonesi against several tourist spots on the Italian mainland, resulting in the deaths of ten people, including an entire family. Brusca also quoted Riina as declaring that the children of informants were legitimate targets. Brusca subsequently tortured and killed Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 11-year-old son of Santo Di Matteo, an informant in a failed attempt to silence the boy's father, who had been giving testimony against Riina." 

Riina was a Scorpio. His favoured hitman was on the notorious Cusp of Sensitivity (Pisces and Aquarius).

Baldassare Di Maggio was likewise a Scorpio. It was the same disloyalty that Riina had criticized in him that had acted in accordance with Justice against Riina. The police had been of little help up until this point.

The public's delight at Riina's arrest (one newspaper had the sensationalistic headline "The Devil" pasted over Riina's mugshot) was dampened somewhat when it was revealed that, during his thirty years as a fugitive, Riina had actually been living at home in Palermo all along. He had obtained medical attention for his diabetes and registered all four of his children under their real names at the local hospital. He even went to Venice on honeymoon and was still unspotted. Many cynically declared that the authorities only arrested Riina because they were under public pressure to do so after the Falcone/Borsellino murders, and saw the ease with which Riina had evaded justice for so long as an example of what many regarded as the apathetic – if not actually complicit – attitudes of the Italian authorities to the Mafia.

Giovanni Brusca – one of Riina's hitmen who personally detonated the bomb that killed Falcone, and later became an informant after his 1996 arrest – has offered a controversial version of the capture of Totò Riina: a secret deal between Carabinieri officers, secret agents and Cosa Nostra bosses tired of the dictatorship of the Corleonesi. According to Brusca, Bernardo Provenzano "sold" Riina in exchange for the valuable archive of compromising material that Riina held in his apartment in Via Bernini 52 in Palermo.^[24][25]

Dm.A.A.