The Sicilian Way doesn't work in the Anglo-Saxon world

Rating: 8/10 (20 April 2013)

If you lived in Sicily over the last 3,000 years you'd be pretty used to death and devastation by now. Sicily is bang smack in the middle of three prominent pre-Christian empires: the Greek post-Alexander Hellenistic empire, the Roman Empire and the Carthagian-Lavantine Empire. All three of them fought tooth and nail for 3 centuries to control Sicily. And I haven't mentioned yet the tyrants who used to rule Sicilian cities such as Syracuse, for whom the Greek engineer Archimedes worked. Then came the bully-boy, Normans, the Hapsburg Empire, Napoleon, Mussolini, the Nazis...oh where does it end?
In other words, dying, or threatening others with death, is just something else to do on a Sunday afternoon in Sicily. The Sicilians also learnt how to barter with their masters of the day, and how to subjugate their own.
Transfer all of this to a quiet neighbourhood of New York City, and it's like trusting King Kong into the city to clean the windows of the Empire State Building.
The Godfather, adapted from Mario Puzo's novel, shows how capable the Sicilian Mafia are at subduing the authorities to run their own profiteering rackets. But what's interesting is how after the Godfather was shown, how the authorities decided they had had enough of being manipulated by Sicilians. It wasn't long before they put every effort into suppressing these usurpers. The US authorities regained the role the Greeks, Romans and Carthagians had once held.
Sicilian management is impressive, but not as impressive as good old Dutch-Anglo-Saxon mastery of all things profitable.
A point of interest, the decapitation of the horse-head scene in this movie has its foundation in Roman Chariot racing on The Field Of Mars. One of the winning horses would be sacrificed, it's blood mixed with the bodies of the unborn children and its head nailed to the door of the Forum.