Limited Power Of Attorney For Study Abroad Frequently: Fill & Download for Free

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." - Aesop (620-560 BC)"Just because you (do not take an interest in politics)* doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." - Pericles (495-429 BC) (*)original Greek definition of a village idiot, according to JFK"The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors." - Plutarch"A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise." - Niccolo Machiavelli"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu 1641"The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." - Edmund Burke (1729-97)"...Neither body to jail nor soul to damn." - Lord Edward Thurlow (1731-1806) describing a new British invention, the corporation. One might add, nowadays, "nor conscience to pique, nor death to ponder.""Devil take the hindmost." - Colonial Record of Georgia (1742, when the majority of its population were slaves)"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." - Thomas Jefferson - "There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.""The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." - Patrick Henry"The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." - John Adams"Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." - Abigail Adams"[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benign' sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit." - John Quincy Adams, US House, 7/4/1821"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.""Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid ..., it is true that most stupid people are conservative." - John Stewart Mill (1806-1873) "I never meant to say that the conservatives are ... stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.""There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." and "There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity." and "Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.""The nose of a mob is its [dimmed] imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." - Edgar Allen Poe"You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - P. T. Barnum (1810-91)"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation." - Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85)"TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY.(title of a section in his book, Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter XV, 1835) ... In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them." - Alexis de Tocqueville - "The President ... may err ... Congress may decide amiss ... But if the Supreme Court is ever composed of imprudent or bad men, the Union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war." Bk 1, Ch 8."(Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition." Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, Savannah, March 21, 1861."Fear is the parent of cruelty." - James Anthony Froude (1818-94)"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - attributed to A.Lincoln, letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864."The great mistake of my life was taking a military education." - Robert E Lee"Let them eat grass." - Andrew Myrick, a white trader to the starving Sioux, at a meeting of US Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Indians and traders, in August 1862. Afterward Myrick was found dead with grass in his mouth."Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth." - Friedrich List (1789-1846) US Consul to Germany, describing the source of Britain's wealth in his book, The National System of Political Economy, 1841."There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey." - John Ruskin (1819-1900)"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." - Anatole France (1844-1924)"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." - attributed to Jay Gould, US railroad developer and speculator, circa 1886."The Commission is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, while at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal." - Richard Olney, railroad attorney and US Attorney General, circa 1889, re the first US regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission."No sport is wholesome in which ungenerous or mean acts which easily escape detection contribute to victory." - Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard (1869-1909) opposing football."To disagree with three-fourths of the public is one of the first requisites of sanity." - Oscar Wilde"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899"There are three ways in which we may rule, by force, by fraud, or by law. We have ruled by force, we can rule by fraud, but we want to rule by law." - Charles Aycock, white-supremacist soon to be Gov. of NC, to his supporters, 1900, later to pass a state constitutional amendment that would, in effect, disenfranchise most black voters."I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B Anthony"I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." Mark Twain, New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900."There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." - William Jennings Bryan, 1896"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them." - Paul Valery (1871-1945)"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1912 Platform of Progressive Party."Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist and you will sweep war from the earth." - Henry Ford"If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to." - Dorothy Parker"Things have come to a hell of a pass, when a man can't whip his own jackass." (i.e. Democratic Party) - Henry Watterson (1840-1921), editor Louisville Courier-Journal, US Congressman (KY-D)."We will get everything out of her that you can squeeze out of a lemon and a bit more.... I will squeeze her until you can hear the pips squeak. My only doubt is not whether we can squeeze hard enough, but whether there is enough juice." - Sir Eric Geddes (1875-1937), British Conservative politician, speech on German war reparations, 12/10/1918"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" 1919 - Woodrow Wilson - "If you want to make enemies, try to change something.""I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes." - Winston Churchill, in a letter about the Iraqi and Kurdish rebellion against British occupation, 1920"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - attributed to Sinclair Lewis"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization." - Sigmund Freud"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity." - George Bernard Shaw"There is always room at the top - after the investigation." - Oliver Herford (1863-1935) British born American writer"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that." - Thomas Edison, in conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, 1931"We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. But we can't have both." - Justice Louis Brandeis"...the very rich... are different from you and me." - F. Scott Fitzgerald"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." - Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler, simultaneously highest ranking and most decorated U.S. Marine, two Congressional Medals of Honor, for capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914, and for capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917, Distinguished Service Medal, 1919. Republican candidate for Senate, 1932. "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." "I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested." in 'Common Sense', Nov., 1935."It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." - Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936"The Democrats and the Republicans are equally corrupt where money is concerned. It's only in the amount (therefore extent) where the Republicans excel." - Will Rogers"The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury." - John Maynard Keynes, 1937"The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.... To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober." - Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), U.S. essayist"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles Beard (1874-1948), American historian."The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice." - Mahatma Gandhi - "I think it would be a good idea." when asked by a reporter for his opinion of Western civilization."The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking." - A.A. Milne (1882-1956)"Puritanism -- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." and "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office." - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) "Most people want security in this world, not liberty." and "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed ...by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." and "Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.""Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt - "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.""Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin, and the counting starts with who's most enabled to vote."The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)During troubled conditions experienced by large numbers of people "explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to." - Carl Jung"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, because it is a merger of State and corporate power." - attributed to Mussolini, 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana."The victor will never be asked if he told the truth." - Adolf Hitler - "The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it." and "The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all.""Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many... The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy (what they're told is) weakness wherever they see it." - Eric Hoffer - "It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil... attracts the weak.""Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), US theologian, 1944"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." - John T. Flynn (1882-1964, American writer), 1944"The people don't want war, but" they "can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." - Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials"The nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole." - Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975) in A Study of History, V.4, part B, p.6, 1948. - "Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.""Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services." - Article 25, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948"An honest public servant can't become rich in politics." - H. Truman, 1954"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing." - Dwight D. Eisenhower - "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time...I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing." 1953 press conference, about being presented with plans to wage preventive war to disarm Stalin's Soviet Union."If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." - Jean-Paul Sartre"Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens - and then everybody disagrees." - Boris Marshalov (1902-67) Russian observer, after visiting the House of Representatives in 1947."Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate." - Victor Lebow, retail analyst, a few years after WWII"Our willingness to part with something before it is completely worn out is a phenomenon noticeable in no other society in history... It is soundly based on our economy of abundance. It must be further nurtured even though it runs contrary to one of the oldest inbred laws of humanity - the law of thrift." J. Gordon Lippincott, industrial designer. 1947"Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium." - Cyril Connolly, British critic, 1951The American economy's "ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods." (not better health care, education, housing, transportation, or recreation or less poverty and hunger, but providing more stuff to consumers.) - Arthur F. Burns, Chairman of Pres. Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, 1953"It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have." - B. Earl Puckett, Allied Stores Corp. 1953"Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers." - Learned Hand (1872-1961), noted federal judge (1909-1951)."More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else. All our lauded technological progress - our very civilization - is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)"But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness--each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked--each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity." - Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) in Christianity, Diplomacy and War, p. 43 (1953)."You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy."... a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland." and "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." - Adlai E Stevenson"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." - Edward R. Murrow"For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based." - C. Wright Mills, Causes of World War 3, 1960."We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." and "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961"The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve." - Erich Fromm(A just society is the one in which a reasonable person would choose to live, without knowing, in advance, with what advantages he'd be born.) - John Rawls, Harvard philosophy professor"As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash." - Harper Lee"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality." and "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." - John F Kennedy"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon Johnson, 1960, to Bill Moyers."The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment." - Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), U.S. political philosopher. One-Dimensional Man, 1964"We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." - George Steiner, 1967On campaign contributions: "Money is the mother's milk of politics." - Jesse Unruh, Calif. Speaker of the House and State Treasurer - on lobbyists: "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and then vote against them you've got no business being up here.""The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this." - Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, MD (1928-1967) "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man.""I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." and "The time is always right to do what is right." - Martin Luther King Jr."In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." - Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus to those whom he'd just told of Martin Luther King's murder, at a rally in Indianapolis, April 4, 1968."If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide." - attributed to Aristotle by Robert Kennedy and others."All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Sergei Bondarchuk in 1968 film of "War and Peace"."In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club - the 'hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.' " - Spiro T. Agnew, 9/11/70, felon and Republican VP. (written for him by Wm. Safire, speechwriter for Pres. Nixon)"The less care they give them, the more money they make." - John Ehrlichman, describing Kaiser Permanente to Pres. Nixon, who replied "Fine." - White House tapes, 2/17/71. Kaiser and his family were Nixon supporters."Follow the money. Always follow the money." - Deep Throat"If they can get you asking the wrong questions,* they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon *such as "How do we get gov't off 'our' backs?"An historical record suggesting the US has fallen short of its "transcendent ideals" is "an abuse of reality," i.e., we must not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." - Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) (O yeah?)"In each cultural era, the medium in which information is recorded and transmitted is decisive in determining the character of that culture." - Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) - "Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.""The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that (if found to be lies, many) would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1976, p. 382."The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre." - Frank Zappa, 1977"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - GHW Bush, in FREE INQUIRY magazine, Fall 1988."Two party system like two geraniums in outhouse window, look pretty but still big stink." - Taiwanese proverb"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." - Thurgood Marshall (1908-93) US lawyer and Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court (1967-91)"It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril." - James William Fulbright (1905-95)"In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings." - Francis Jennings (1918-2000) American historian"I have seen the Octopus." - Danny Casolaro (1947-1991) to his family just before he died under mysterious circumstances."[T]he long-term political effects of a successful... health care bill will be even worse — much worse... It will revive the reputation of... Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class..." - William Kristol memo, "Defeating President Clinton's Healthcare Proposal" 12/93"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." - Alex Carey, Australian social scientist, 1995"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them (aggrieved or comfortable) to deceive themselves." - Eric Hoffer"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera"The greatest threat to democracy is the increasing concentration of major electronic media in ever fewer hands." - Rep. David Price (D-NC)"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." - Dick Cheney, 1998, when Hamid Karzai, working for Unocal, was negotiating with the Taliban for an oil pipeline from the Caspian through Afghanistan. Henry Kissinger also worked for Unocal. A.F.Sec. under GHW Bush, Donald Rice, was on Unocal's board of directors. Unocal has since merged with Chevron/Texaco."Here is a list of the countries that the U.S. has been at war with - and bombed - since the Second World War: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999), and now Afghanistan." - Arundhati Roy, Manchester Guardian, 10/23/01 (Extending this to the present, one sees our warring and bombing increased AFTER the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.)The future is "up for grabs". - Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, 1991."Liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." - DoD advisor Ken Adelman, 2/02."We need to execute people like John Walker (Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." - Ann Coulter, 1/02, applauded by NSA Condoleeza Rice, HHS Sec. Tommy Thompson, and Lynne Cheney (wife of the VP), all of whom were present."If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky - "Corporations, which previously had been considered artificial entities with no rights, were accorded all the rights of persons, and far more, since they are 'immortal persons', and 'persons' of extraordinary wealth and power. Furthermore, they were no longer bound to the specific purposes designated by State charter, but could act as they choose, with few constraints."(The Bible teaches and Christians believe) "...that government ...derives its moral authority from God. Government is the 'minister of God' with powers to 'revenge,' to 'execute wrath,' including even wrath by the sword..." - Justice Antonin Scalia, 5/02."An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head." - Eric Hoffer"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him." - GW Bush, 9/13/01 - "I don't know where he is and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." - 9/13/02 - "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." - 10/02 - "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties" to Pat Robertson, 2/03."Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" - Barbara Bush, ABC's Good Morning America, March 18, 2003."The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs and risks to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks (2003) Republican candidate for Senate from Maine and corporate governance adviser in the film "The Corporation"."We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens." - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, HAMDI et al. v. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, et al., on writ of certiorari to the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, 6/28/04"(Reagan) has the most fraudulent reputation of any who has ever served in public office. He was certainly genial, a decent guy, a 3rd rate actor that had his career revived by the advice by his new father-in-law, Dr. Davis (a supporter the John Birch Society) 'Go where the money is!' In other words flack for 20 Mule Team Borax and GE. This confused guy even voted for FDR four times by his own admission. He learned that it was 'good business' to give up a lifetime of supposed ideals. He was a quick study, but basically a 'dope' who was lost without a script. ... He even thought that the CO2 from a tree was equivalent to a car's emissions. He was a 'stiff' built up by his handlers. His last term was a disaster, and to cap it off, during the Poindexter and McFarlane Trials, he said under oath over 400 times that he did not remember! With a history of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Nixon I can understand easily that the 'flat-earth' luddites of the new GOP love to worship the memory of the 'Gipper' whose understanding of the problems of this country matched his inability to answer a question 'off the cuff.' Maybe that's why he ran out after every press conference yelling over his shoulder. They couldn't wait to get him away." - Richard J. Garfunkel, American Daily, Phoenix, AZ, 5/1/07"... leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings." - Norman Lear"Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them." - Alvin Toffler(Iraq has the third largest reserves of conventional oil in the world.) - Country Analysis Briefs (2007) US Energy Information Administration, and Gal Luft (2003) "How Much Oil Does Iraq Have?" The Brookings Institution.The invasion of Iraq caused a "seven-fold increase in jihadism." - the RAND Corporation"Alan Greenspan has proclaimed himself 'shocked' that 'the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity' proved to be an illusion... The Reagan-Thatcher model, which favored finance over domestic manufacturing, has collapsed. ... The mutually reinforcing rise of financialization and globalization broke the bond between American capitalism and America's interests. ...we should take a cue from Scandinavia's social capitalism, which is less manufacturing-centered than the German model. The Scandinavians have upgraded the skills and wages of their workers in the retail and service sectors -- the sectors that employ the majority of our own workforce. In consequence, fully employed impoverished workers, of which there are millions in the United States, do not exist in Scandinavia." - Harold Meyerson, "Building a Better Capitalism"], The Washington Post, March 12, 2009."If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care reform), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." - Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R) 7/09"Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly."- Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) summarizing the Republican health care plan, 10/6/09"It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." - Warren Buffett"I refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving." - Michael Moore"People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends." - Noam Chomsky, on new rebellions in Afghanistan, 2010."I doubt there's ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not." - Fran Lebowitz - "Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step -- it is an old business procedure." and "In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.""A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship." - Chalmers Johnson (1931-2010) UC professor and analyst for the CIA."I was involved deeply in a system of bribery - legalized bribery for the most part" that "still to a large part exists today." - Jack Abramoff, 2013"The poorest half of the population still owns nothing." - Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, Part III, 2014."No one has the guts to just let them wither and die." - John Johnston, GOP candidate for Indiana's 10th District, June 2014, referring to the poor."If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition." - Bernice Johnson Reagon"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu." - Elizabeth Warren"Can't govern people if you win by dividing them." - Obama, 10/19/17."A well-regulated militia will not come into our schools and kill our children." - LTE Raleigh News & Observer, 2/26/18."The promise of America, Jefferson thought, was that 'the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of the country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone.'" - Jill LePore's These Truths, 2018."Fascism = Crony Capitalism + Murder." - Antifa slogan, 2020.

My answer through articles includes your question.The Mafia in Europe: in Germany, silence that smells of compromiseby Giorgio Bongiovanni and Aaron Pettinari"Mrs. Merkel, remain unshakable!" is the title of the article that appeared in the online version of "Die Welt" by columnist Christoph B. Schiltz, in which the German government is asked not to give in to Italian demands on coronabonds because "the mafia is waiting for European aid".
We say it now. It is probable that the criminal organizations will try to insert themselves in the financing folds and intercept possible liquidity, but to use the argument to abandon Italy to its destiny in this very serious moment of emergency is a serious and extremely dangerous fact, because without the intervention of the State, also thanks to the contribution of the European Union, one would risk handing over a large slice of the country to the mafias. The contributions to companies, small and medium entrepreneurs, workers, and families, want to go against this eventuality: to prevent organized crime, thanks to the rivers of money they have at their disposal, to represent the new Welfare to cling to.
The central knot that "Die Welt" pretends not to know is that that of the mafia is not an "Italian issue", but extends dramatically to the whole of Europe.Post-Berlin Wall investmentsIn Germany, silence on the subject has reigned for years, despite the numerous investigations conducted by both the Italian and foreign authorities, demonstrating how, precisely in Germany, the mafia has invested heavily "contributing" to the economic growth of the country. Because Cosa Nostra, 'Ndrangheta and Camorra continue to be flourishing also thanks to the money, coming from drug trafficking, laundered in Germany in the purchase of apartments, hotels, pizzerias and restaurants and have shares in German companies. The mafia bosses, in the nineties, were intercepted while talking about investments to be made in East Berlin. I also remember that in an interview, the collaborator of justice Gaspare Mutolo told me that already in the eighties there was an order to invest capital in German soil because they were informed that shortly afterward the Berlin Wall would fall. He also said so when he was heard before the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission: "When the law of Pio La Torre was being spoken about - the repentant tells the repentant referring to what then became the 416 bis - we are in the early months of 1982, Madonia (Nino, boss of Resuttana's sending, an ally of the Corleonesi, ed) advised me and Micalizzi, because he knew we were working at full speed with the heroine, not to take risks. He told us that if they approved this law, they would take the money away from us and propose to invest it in Germany where there was peace of mind". Those flows of money, which prominent members and intermediaries of the various mafia families invested massively in legitimate businesses, were instrumental in restoring the German economy from the meager Soviet experience. It did not matter if at the same time the law of the free market was being altered. Everything happened without any real control.The article published in Die WeltIn the book "The mafias on the rubble of the Berlin Wall" (ed. Diarkos), written with four hands by journalist Ambra Montanari and MEP Sabrina Pignedoli, Bernd Finger, former chief investigator of the BKA, tells how at the time: "They arrived with briefcases full of cash, they wanted to buy buildings and agricultural land. Officials thought it was a curious thing, but it was nothing illegal at the time. There were no investigations at the time, nothing that was recorded was illegal". Flows of money that never stopped.In 2014, the Attorney General of Palermo Roberto Scarpinato warned: "The mafia in Germany wants the Germans to think it doesn't exist. It no longer needs to be violent. It can seduce with capital. The world today risks being conquered by the mafia through the seduction of capital and countries like Germany are at high risk". And he continued: "When you don't try to understand the source of money, and you accept the indiscriminate entry of capital into your country, then it is the very morality of a people that are at risk. In times of crisis like today, the power of money and corruption can become an epidemic that shakes a society from its foundations. Germany must decide whether to welcome the mafia or fight it.The post "Duisburg massacre"All this, however, has never been spoken of in the German country despite, on August 15, 2007, the silence and mafia invisibility were ripped apart by the massacre of Duisburg, in which six boys were killed with 55 gunshots (Marco Marmo 25 years old, Francesco Giorgi 16 years old, Francesco Pergola 22, Marco Pergola 19, Sebastiano Strangio 38, Tommaso Francesco Venturi 18). The whole country woke up shocked and for the first time began to realize how much the mafia was permeated in the German social and economic system. But it was not enough. Since after that event, no other acts of violence were repeated, also because of the submersion carried out by the 'Ndrangheta, the German public opinion returned to underestimate the problem. But the truth is that the Calabrian organized crime in Germany can count on the settlement of about fifty active "locals". Here important families find the residence. Among these, the most influential is the Farao of Cirò Marina, the Giglio of Strongoli, the Maesano of Isola Capo-Rizzuto, the Mazzafferro of Gioiosa Jonica, the Morabito of Africo, the Muto of Cetraro, the Sanlucoti Nirta-Strangio, Pelle-Vottari (at war with each other) but in Germany also the business of the great drug traffickers, such as the Piromalli di Gioia Tauro, the Ursino di Gioiosa Ionica and the allied Sanlucoti Romeo (Staccu) - Pelle (Gambazza), Giorgi and the Mammoliti. Clans that, has emerged from several surveys, are present in almost all major German cities. In an interception, the young Vincenzo Farao, son of a Cyrò Marina boss, explains: "In Germany, we can do everything". In another Luigi Muto, a trait d'union with the German cell, stated without half measures that "Germany is a laundry". But also Cosa Nostra, Stidda, Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita have their "representations" in the territory. After all, it is no coincidence that in Germany, in recent times, several fugitives have been arrested. This is known to the Bka, the German Federal Police, who have sent an important report to the Catanzaro Public Prosecutor's Office, which has been included in the records of Operation Styx. In the pages of "Die Welt", however, these topics are not mentioned. Nor are the reasons why such infiltration into the country was possible.Absent regulationsAnd the reason is soon said. In Germany, as well as in the rest of Europe (except Italy, ed.), there is no regulation up to the task of countering the proliferation of the phenomenon. Suffice it to say that to date, there is no crime of mafia-type criminal conspiracy, which allows investigations to be opened even on the basis of a suspicion of belonging to a gang. The independent investigations, that is, not connected to a request for help in letters rogatory from Italy, in the rare cases in which they are made, in order to be successfully concluded, require that one be able to demonstrate guilt with respect to crimes provided for by the legal system of the Country - such as drug trafficking, money laundering, armed gangs, robbery and so on.Then there is the not insignificant problem of the law on the seizure of assets.Recently, the Deputy Prosecutor of Florence, Luca Tescaroli, explained it well: "The measures of patrimonial prevention are without recognition in Europe. An attempt is made to tackle the subject through the use of an instrument that is made available by a Convention of the Council of Europe signed in Warsaw, in 2005, on the laundering, search, seizure, and confiscation of the proceeds of crime.There is a rule, in Art. 21.1, which allows a request for action for the purpose of confiscation, but the concrete possibility of the use of the instrument, and therefore achieve the objective of freezing the property, is left to the will of the State to which it is requested. There are difficulties arising from the timing. Because there is no mechanism that allows immediate execution abroad and it is always necessary to go from letters rogatory with the complexity of the relationship with the requested State and the need for translations".Added to this are the investigation limits for investigators with the impossibility to carry out interceptions abroad or the numerous difficulties in enforcing letters rogatory in the verification of money laundering systems. In this way, one experiences a paradoxical situation in which the freedom of movement allows the mafia to act without difficulty, while the law enforcement action does not have the instruments and the timely ones which would be necessary to attack the mafia action.The Duisburg massacreThe Crim and the commitment to the single-textIn 2013, the CRIM Commission (on organized crime, corruption, and money laundering), then chaired by Sonia Alfano (daughter of the journalist Beppe Alfano, who was killed by the Mafia, ed), obtained in Strasbourg the approval of a single anti-mafia text in an attempt to harmonize standards at European level. In the document, in whose editorial staff the late Rita Borsellino also participated, they wondered: the introduction of the crime of mafia association in all Member States' legislation; the abolition of banking secrecy; the exclusion from tenders for companies condemned with a final judgment for crimes of organized crime, corruption, money laundering; the confiscation of assets, also through confiscation measures in the absence of conviction, and the reuse for public and social purposes of the confiscated assets; the crime of exchange voting that also includes intangible advantages; the provision of hypotheses of incandidability, ineligibility and disqualification from public office; much stricter codes of conduct for political parties (eg. control of public funding to parties) and greater protection for witnesses of justice. Since then, however, everything has remained virtually unchanged in the EU member states. If something had been done, if the Mafia problem had been dealt with as a European issue, perhaps there would have been far fewer problems today on the economic level and this "cancer", capable of conditioning a democracy and claiming as many victims as the coronavirus, would have been considerably weakened. A solution to such a global problem is clear that it cannot be found only by tightening the laws of a single country but must be tackled in a global way, as Giovanni Falcone has always asked, and for this reason there is an urgent need for legislation, at least at European level, to fill these gaps. German newspapers should talk about these topics, as well as local politicians who, like Salvini, Meloni and similar, are using the case to attack Germany and the European Union, without considering that the first ones who are opposing the sending of aid and the use of Eurobonds, because there is a mafia risk, are the so-called "group comrades in the European Parliament". Politicians are always ready to make propaganda, just as certain newspapers mix "the true with the false" to tell a half-truth. It is true that in Italy, corruption and the mafia, two sides of the same coin, have taken on a stronger form. The difference is that in our country, where there have been massacres and because of the mafias, magistrates, politicians, police officers, military, entrepreneurs, journalists, priests, and defenseless citizens have lost their lives, we have the instruments to find and hit certain criminals. Abroad, no.Before speaking, Europe, Germany first of all, should look in the mirror and break that wall of silence, on the subject of the mafia, which smells of compromise.The Mafia in Europe: in Germany, a silence that smells of compromise.Ndrangheta: the largest Italian mafia in GermanyFor German Interior Ministry in the country between 800 and 1000 affiliatesEditorial staff ANSA BERLINO June 02Th, 2019 – 02/07/2019(ANSA) - BERLIN, 2 JUNE - Between 800 and 1000 members of the ndrangheta are present and working in Germany: this is supported by the German Government in an answer to a question submitted to the Bundestag by the parliamentary group of the Greens, published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. According to the German Government, it is assumed that there are between 18 and 20 active bases of the Calabrian criminal organization in the country. The German security services have at the moment identified with certainty only 344 alleged members of the Calabrian mafia, so "it must be recognized that there are at least three times the number of members in local bases in Germany," said Irene Mihalic, Green spokeswoman for internal politics. "This is a huge risk to the security of the country with respect to which the attention of the institutions must be revived.The ndrangheta would be the largest Italian criminal group in Germany. Cosa Nostra Siciliana would be "represented" in the Country with 123 members. Furthermore, there are the branches of the Camorra from Campania with 94 members and the clans of the sacred united crown, which in Germany have 18 members.The Italian mafia, explains the German government, has "a high degree of organization and professionalism" compared to other criminal groups present in the Country. To hide, they have recently renounced violent actions and concentrate their activity on the influence of exponents of the political and economic world. (ANSA).Ndrangheta: in Germania è la mafia Italiana più numerosa - EuropaMafia, here is the german-connection between Cologne and LicataWho said there's no Mafia in Germany? Irpi's reporters tell of the investigation by the German and Italian police who have unveiled a network that embraces construction, drugs, and political corruption.The mafia doesn't exist. Least of all in Germany. This is what the German government says, which the citizens take at their word. But the official figures are inaccurate and the truth is sadly the opposite. The Mafia is increasingly present in Germany. And it's strong, very strong. It is only by analyzing the judicial papers of investigations still in progress, carried out in collaboration by the Italian anti-mafia pools and the German Federal Criminal Police, the BKA, that the overall picture emerges. On balance, in Germany, there could be even more than 1200 members ascribable to organized crime in our country. A small army or, if you prefer, a social network.So there is the mafia. But you'll only find it in the statistics if you look for it. "Organized crime from Italy to Germany has infiltrated every sector. From construction to alternative energy, from waste management to the shareholding of large companies or banks. They buy votes and influence elections through corruption," says Roberto Scarpinato, Attorney General of the anti-mafia pool in Palermo.One of the most striking examples of the strength of the mafia in Germany is "Operation Scavo", which began as an investigation into tax evasion, but which shows that crimes committed across the Alps are much more important. The operation begins on January 17, 2013, when 17 people are arrested. Some in Germany, some on international letters rogatory in Licata, a small town in the Agrigento area. It seemed only an operation against tax evasion, construction companies opened by Sicilians in Germany who did not pay taxes. But soon it was discovered that there was much more to it.Thanks to documents obtained exclusively by FUNKE Mediengruppe and joint research carried out by editor-in-chief David Schraven and journalists from the Irpi center of investigative journalism in collaboration with the Agrigento newspaper Grandangolo, Wired can now tell a new story.Someone, one day, must have commissioned Gabriele S., originally from Licata and a frequent visitor to Cologne since the 1990s, and Rosario P., from Riesi but in Germany since 1972, to manage what German investigators have dubbed the Baumafia, the "construction mafia". Gabriele P. in Cologne, Rosario P. in Dortmund. What was in between, namely Essen and Bochum, was divided according to business and moments.The two had to coordinate the so-called 'pretender hunters', who had to find among relatives and friends in Sicily poor devils who would sell themselves for a few thousand euros. The procurers were undoubtedly the accountant Massimo E., Biagio S., Agatino F., Vincenzo S. brother of Gabriele S. and Salvatore V.. (until he decided to start cooperating with the German authorities). After that, among the arrested and investigated are Domenico I., Giuseppe C., Lisa Maria F., Giovanni D., Salvatore A., Fabrizio R., Antonio C., Angelo C., Michele F., Antonio D., Giuseppe M., and Gabriele F.Using these prenames, Gabriele S. and Rosario P. opened a series of construction companies that had the sole purpose of operating as "shell companies", i.e. as recycling boxes. The mechanism worked like this: the money was transferred to the current accounts of the companies in question to pay false invoices, which did not correspond to any construction service. At that point, the loan-owner withdrew the money in cash. The 90% of the money was returned to the entrepreneur who had bought the false invoice, 10% went to the "managers" Gabriele S. and Rosario P., who used them to pay the accountants, the loan sharks, and the big cars for themselves.A brilliant system. From millions of money transferred legally, they create millions of black funds, reproachable in the same Baumafia, to corrupt politicians or to finance other illegal activities. A money transfer that is first "dirtied" and then promptly cleaned.This, it emerges from the BKA investigations, was done for at least 430 companies. Certainly, Gabriele S. - flunked three times in primary school - is not the creator of this system.Gabriele S. and Rosario P.'s "Baumafia" was a "disorganized" crime. The two discussed practically every day, and often, meetings were scheduled to resolve disputes. The discussions had to take place in some specific meeting places: the Bistrot in Dortmund, and the bar Italia90 in Cologne, run by Mario G.Bars are important. Gabriele S. himself had been running a bar in Cologne since the end of 2011, the Jolly Bar, also a Baumafia meeting point. I had had the test bench from 2009 to 2010 in Licata when he also ran a bar there. More than a bar, explain the Carabinieri, a black hole in the cocaine traffic. A business, that of cocaine, that Spiteri had also imported in Germany, and more precisely, in his bakery in Cologne, the Pasticceria Centro Italia.Customers ordered cocaine by telephone: "pasta in Bianco without sauce". Or, in the case of large quantities, we talk about white cars. One hundred, two hundred grams of coke a week sales.But Gabriele S. is a consumer himself. A vice that he also brings home to Sicily, during the parties he gives in Licata, in the villa - now seized - which was built thanks to the earnings of years of alleged illegality in Germany."Gabriele S. consumed as much cocaine as the entire Colony," he tells investigators Calogero D. di Ravanusa, born in 1963. Arrested together with the S. brothers he is, for the German investigators, a collaborator of the trafficker. Yet he is called whenever there is a problem to be solved and - they add the investigations - he seems to be the one with the highest contacts.For those who know the mafia mechanisms, it is evident that neither Gabriele S. nor Rosario P. acted on their own. The two had been put there, with precise orders, and they had a handsome mastiff on their heels, Calogero D. precisely.Calogero D. tells the Germans that he is not mafia: "Some years ago the Italian authorities were wrong, but everything was clarified". Not exactly. Calogero D. was released in 1994 after two years and four months in prison for having taken part in a mafia murder. At the time, known by the nickname of Lillo Aglialuoro, he was the shoulder-guard of Vito Mirabile, a man belonging to the boss Angelo Ciraulo, who was later killed by Giuseppe Falsone in a power war that shifted the command of the send from Ravanusa to Campobello di Licata for many years.After Ciraulo's death, Calogero D. decides to collaborate with the justice system and finds an arsenal. But his repentance is considered partial by the authorities, who do not consider him reliable. Although at first 'condemned to death' by the remaining Calogero D. bosses, he is left to live and, evidently, grow up. In the shadows, he must have made a career until he arrived in Germany. In fact, he goes to Cologne as soon as he manages, at the end of the nineties, to get out of prison.There he made his way by opening a cleaning company and then gave himself to Baumafia. The German police file on Calogero D. thickens. He's convicted of tax evasion, extortion, robbery, fraud, assault. The file also reveals contacts in the world of drug trafficking and prostitution.But who gave Calogero D. the power to act within the Baumafia? A suggestion emerges thanks to a curious episode that takes place around the Jolly Bar of Gabriele S. in Cologne, in mid-January 2013. Just before the snapping of the handcuffs. It's January 14th and in an interception Gabriele S. talks to Biagio S. about the new arrival, a boy, Angelo B., born in 1977, from Gela. Most likely a new frontman. The police intervene. This is the moment when the arrests are made for all 17 Baumafia. Angelo B is also arrested, questioned, and released. But a few hours later he is stopped again, while in a special car. A car registered in the name of Angelo O...Angelo O. is not just any man. Born in Licata in 1954, Angelo O. has a much more significant criminal record than Calogero D. Already at the end of the '80s, according to the DIA, Angelo O. operated in Germany in very close relations with Carmine Ligato, an influential boss of the 'Ndrangheta. The referent of all the commercial operations between the Agrigento Mafia and 'Ndrangheta, Angelo O. was already under the radar of the German police in 1997.In Sicily, he was Giuseppe Falsone's man, and it seems that it was the Agrigento boss himself who indicated him as head of Licata in his name.Angelo O., together with Pasquale Cardella, had taken control of the town after the quadruple murder of Brunco-Lauria-Greco-Cellura. In 2011, Angelo O. ends up in jail for extortion, and Cardella tries to keep the mandate for himself. Shortly after Angelo O. gets out, but his reference, the boss Giuseppe Falsone, fugitive for many years, had been captured. At that point, Angelo O. aims to bypass his partners and take control of Licata for himself, going to ask for the blessing of Canicattì's then head of the command, Calogero D. (homonymy with the Calogero D. of Baumafia, n.d.r.).Why his car was at the disposal of the young Angelo Bugiada is not clear, but the presence of Occhipinti in Germany could indicate him as the head of Cologne. And it would explain who answers Calogero D., and the whole "Squadra Scavo" of Cologne.Gabriele S. owes his life to the BKA, the German anti-crime unit. Because for behavior comparable to his own, cocaine abuse and unreliability, in the past, someone much more important than him had been eliminated."Yes, the mafia today as a rule no longer kills, since we follow the mafia pax mafia and the "business model" dictated by Matteo Messina Denaro", says a former killer of Cosa Nostra heard exclusively from the Mafia project in Deutschland. "But if things get bad, he kills himself. And of course, you don't do it in Germany, where it's important not to arouse any suspicion."Murder is therefore a solution of extreme reason but always used if it serves to protect the business. This is clearly stated by two recent and brutal murders of Manneheim's palmesi, both wanted in Sicily. One, that of Calogero Burgio, riddled with blows in Palma, under the house, as a warning. The other, shortly afterward, a typical white wolfhound, for the unfortunate Giuseppe Condello and Vincenzo Priolo. The latter only a driver, but the other, Condello, no less than the head of Mannheim.But why was Condello eliminated?We are told exclusively by the former killer of the Cosa Nostra in Trapani, who had met the two dead people killed in the past and met them again in Germany."Condello was the head of the Mannheim assignment. They are stiddari, but now Stidda and Cosa Nostra are the same things. Since Matteo Messina Denaro commands, the rule is one: business. Today you don't shoot anymore unless it's strictly necessary. And Condello's death sentence has been discussed among all the other leaders of the Agrigento. No one made up their mind. But Condello was now a mad dog using too much cocaine and out of control, he was no longer reliable." Condello dog-crazy had annoyed the boss of bosses, Denaro tells us the ex-killer: "What did he tell the Agrigento bosses: I'll take care of it."And so, the death sentence has been signed. At the end of January 2012, Condello was killed together with Priolo and stuffed into a water drain in the countryside of Palma di Montechiaro.Condello was shuttling back and forth, despite a restrictive measure, following the Mafia logic that requires, first of all, a constant presence in the Italian army, and, secondly, in his German reflection.But what counts is not the murder itself, but that under Matteo Messina Denaro the Mafia changed its face, and made a pact, perfectly working in Germany, between various Mafia provinces. We speak of Trapani, which holds the reins, Palermo and Agrigento.This has also been confirmed by our research. In particular, it emerges from the ties that the German company CEON had with some of the companies in the Calogero D. galaxy in Germany. This company is controlled by B-P. family, very close relatives of Matteo B., sentenced to 23 years for international drug trafficking. The B. Family, from Partinico, is recognized to be close to Vitale, the bosses of that area of Palermo.How wrong it is to think that the Baumafia is only a small group of self-organized criminals, confirmed to us by the statements of a new repentant. We speak of Giuseppe Tuzzolino, an architect who - notwithstanding the investigations of the DDA of Palermo still conceal most of the details - has been discovered to have been Condello's right-hand man in organizing millionaire scams in the very Municipality of Palma di Montechiaro. Fraud, however, Tuzzolino assures, goes well beyond the Municipality of Palma. In fact, they would go all the way to Germany, in the network of millions of black funds that the BKA has nicknamed Baumafia.There is no lack of connections with politics. The Baumafia of North Rhine-Westphalia seems to have understood how to find support even beyond the simple mafia affiliates. He understood that to better hide his face, he must also work on politics. And he does it in two ways. First of all, he tries to permeate the German one: either by corruption or by buying and selling votes.In Nuremberg a few years ago, a real mafia strategy for buying and selling votes was developed. Italians in Germany could vote for the chosen candidate and earn 50 euros in exchange, a well-known practice in Sicily.The second method that seems to have been adopted is that of supporting Italian politicians in Germany, at least judging by the countless business cards of Italian politicians, all close to Berlusconi's right, that Calogero D., the leading man of the 'excavation team', had in his agenda seized.Contacts with Italian politicians in Europe.Questioned by the investigators, the Baumafioso says: "It was only politics". A great civic sense, that of Calogero D., who, he says, was in charge "of pulling upvotes for Italian parliamentarians abroad". And he did it also for the Sicilian pidiellino (PDL):The People of Freedom was a center-right political party in Italy. The PdL, launched by Silvio Berlusconi on 18 November 2007, was initially a federation of political parties, notably including Forza Italia and National Alliance, which participated as a joint election list in the 2008 general election.Massimo Romagnoli, during the last electoral campaign. He was a certain success. In 2006, in fact, Romagnoli was elected to the Chamber of Deputies with 8,700 votes from abroad. Most of these had been collected in Cologne.It is possible that Massimo Romagnoli did not suspect at all who Calogero D. was doing with, but the latter also mentioned him during his interrogation with the German BKA. He tells the investigators that he had a request for help from Massimo E., the accountant of the Baumafia when he was in prison in Germany. He needed a passport. Calogero D. says he thought of Romagnoli. Then, he says he "moved on with my contacts, and in four weeks I got it to him."Massimo Romagnoli denies ever having received such a request. "I know Calogero D., he helped me with the election campaign," he explained to Irpi, "he had a cleaning company. But this Massimo E. is the first time I've heard of him.""Personally I have never received requests of this kind" continues Romagnoli, currently engaged with Forza Italia in the election campaign for the European elections "neither from Calogero D. nor from anyone else".Roberto Scarpinato, Attorney General in Palermo, is categorical when he speaks of the power of seduction inherent in Cosa Nostra. "The Mafia in Germany wants the Germans to think it doesn't exist. It no longer needs to be violent. It can seduce with capital. Of course, there's still a violent face of the Mafia in Italy, but it only shows itself when the power of persuasion of money is not enough. In reality, the world today risks being conquered by the Mafia through the seduction of capital, and countries like Germany are at high risk. When you do not try to understand the source of money, and you accept the indiscriminate entry of capital into your country, then it is the very morality of a people that are at risk. In times of crisis like today, the power of money and corruption can become an epidemic that shakes a society from its foundations.Germany must decide whether to welcome the Mafia or fight it."La Mafia in Germania: il pm Lombardo spiega il livello alto della 'Ndrangheta in Europa - The Mafia in Germany: the pm Lombardo explains the high level of the 'Ndrangheta in EuropeTesto unico antimafia in Europa: un cambiamento epocale - Unique anti-mafia text in Europe: a momentous changeLa mafia è un fenomeno mondiale! The Mafia is a world phenomenon!Magistrati e poliziotti tedeschi a lezione di lotta alla mafia a Palermo - German magistrates and policemen in the fight against the mafia in PalermoGerman magistrates and policemen at a lesson in the fight against the mafia in PalermoPRESSDetails Published: 04 November 2019of AMDuemilaAlso present is the Minister of Justice Peter Biesenbach.Scarpinato: "Germany has underestimated the problem for a long time."The mafia, ça va sans dire, is now present, in various forms, within most of the member countries of the European Union. Italy before any other nation on the continent has had to learn how to defend itself and how to fight back. For this reason, today prosecutors, judges, and journalists from Europe and beyond are studying the methods of their Italian colleagues to learn their strategies in this difficult fight against organized crime. This morning, for example, a large German delegation of magistrates and policemen, led by the Minister of Justice of Westphalia, Peter Biesenbach (photo), met the Attorney General of Palermo, Roberto Scarpinato, and the Attorney General of the Republic, Francesco Lo Voi. "Our judicial system is not efficient to fight the mafias. - said Biesenbach - In our history, we have had no attacks or murders against judges. It is a question of culture, of approach: we have always been accustomed to investigating individual crimes or people. But we have to change our point of view and focus on organizations and learn a new method of investigation". The German judges explained that in Germany there are "many organized crime groups, for example from North Africa, the former Yugoslavia, which are particularly violent". "Finally the public opinion has understood that there is a problem - the Minister explained again - For this reason, we take advantage of this moment to re-launch our project to modify our legislation taking as an example the Italian one for a more effective fight against the mafias". "We need new laws and means to face this challenge. For two years we have modified our law on conspiracy to commit crimes - said the minister - this allows us to deal also with criminal groups to hit them".During his speech, the pg Scarpinato denounced that in Germany "the problem of the mafia has been underestimated for a long time. The German public opinion considered that the presence of a few hundred Mafiosi as extortionists could be reduced. Then, they became aware of the existence of the mafia in Germany after the Duisburg massacre". "Last October 23, I participated in a conference organized by the German Police on the subject of recycling in Germany - he continued - and I was very impressed by the Minister's in-depth knowledge of the problem of the mafia and recycling", Scarpinato said again. "They became aware after the massacre of Duisburg in 2007, but since after that event, other acts of violence have not been repeated - said Scarpinato - also because of the submersion of the 'ndrangheta, the German public opinion has returned to underestimate the problem of the mafia, which is a problem which manifests itself in all its gravity from the point of view of recycling".You've come to the endDIANA KRALL Peel Me a Grape Sessions at West 54th. 1999

Today, ancient Athens is popularly seen as the ideal, original democracy that all other democracies should strive to imitate. For instance, an information page about Athenian democracy maintained by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which comes up in the first page of results when I search for “Athenian democracy” in Google, declares:“Of the many gifts passed down to us by the Athenians, including philosophy, theater, painting, sculpture, and architecture, none is more significant than their chosen form of government: democracy, rule by the people. Indeed, it can be convincingly argued that all the other achievements depended first on how the city was governed, on the open and free society that respected the dignity, rights, and aspirations of the individual.”This line of thinking is deeply misguided. For one thing, contrary to popular belief, ancient Athens was not the first democracy. Furthermore, Athenian democracy was deeply flawed in ways that are, unfortunately, often overlooked. Notably, the vast majority of the Athenian population was excluded from participating in the democracy. Athens was also aggressively imperialistic and routinely sought to dominate and oppress other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states) and, on several occasions, democratic Athens even committed outright genocide.Athens: not the first democracyFirst of all, I should debunk the popular misconception that Athens was the first democratic polity anywhere in the world. This is verifiably false. Even if we ignore the possible examples of democratic states in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient India, Athens was not even the first ancient Greek polis to adopt a democratic constitution.The eminent classical historian Eric W. Robinson (who also happens to be one of my professors at Indiana University Bloomington) has written a couple books specifically debunking the misconception that Athens was the first Greek democratic city-state: The First Democracies: Early Popular Government Outside Athens (which was first published in 1997 and is unfortunately now out of print) and Democracy Beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age (which was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press and is still in print).Robinson concludes that, by the time the Athenian lawgiver Kleisthenes conducted his reforms in around 508 BCE that are generally considered to mark the beginning of full Athenian democracy, at least seventeen Greek poleis had probably already adopted democratic constitutions of their own: Achaia (and its colonies), Akragas, Ambrakia, Argos, Chalkis, Chios, Knidos, Kos, Kyrene, Elis, Herakleia Pontika, Mantineia, Megara, Naxos, Samos, and Syracuse.While it may be possible to argue that some of the Greek poleis discussed by Robinson were not really democracies before 508 BCE, there can be no doubt that at least some of them really were. It is also worth emphasizing that some of the democratic poleis discussed by Robinson were very politically and culturally important—especially Syracuse and Argos.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of ruined portions of the ancient Greek polis of Argos, surrounded by the modern cityIn other words, it seems that, compared to other ancient Greek poleis, Athens actually adopted democracy relatively late. Athenian democracy is not significant because Athens was the first polis to adopt democracy, but rather because it was one of the most populous, one of the most politically and militarily powerful, and by far the best documented.In the fifth century BCE, the total population of Athens and the surrounding countryside was probably somewhere between roughly 250,000 and 300,000 people. This may not sound impressive by modern standards, but, by the standards of the ancient world, it was a sprawling megalopolis.The only ancient Greek polis that rivalled Athens in terms of population size was probably Syracuse, which probably also had a population of between 250,000 and 300,000 people. For comparison, at the same time, Sparta (which is known today as Athens’ greatest rival) probably had a total population of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people.In addition to being extremely populous by ancient standards, Athens was also arguably the most powerful polis in Greece in the fifth century BCE. I will talk in greater depth about Athenian military aggression later in this article, but it is important to note at this point that Athens managed to build hegemonic control over most of the Aegean Sea and maintained that control for a large portion of the fifth century BCE.Finally, Athens is also the polis that produced the vast majority of surviving ancient Greek sources. This is partly a result of the fact that Athens was such a huge city and it had a thriving literary culture, so it naturally produced a lot more literature than other ancient Greek poleis. Even many famous writers who weren’t originally born in Athens moved to the city and lived there for many years, including the historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and the philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE).The overrepresentation of Athens in our sources is also, however, partly a result of the fact that, as I discuss in this article from January 2020, the vast majority of the texts that survive from classical Greece survive because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by the Greek-speaking Byzantine Romans, who, as it happens, preferred reading works that were written in the Classical Attic dialect—the dialect that was spoken in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The Byzantine Romans therefore tended to copy works that had been written in Athens while ignoring works that had been written by authors from other places.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Athenian AkropolisAthenian citizen womenIn addition to not being the first democracy, classical Athens was also not nearly as democratic as modern people often imagine it to have been. People often forget that the vast majority of the people living in Athens during classical antiquity had absolutely no voice in the democratic process. Only free adult male Athenian citizens were even allowed to participate.All women—even free Athenian citizen women—were totally excluded from all official political processes. They were not allowed to take part in the Assembly; they were not allowed to hold any form of public office; and their rights were extremely limited. “Respectable” Athenian citizen women were traditionally expected to stay in the home at all times and take care of the household.Of course, just because this was the ideal doesn’t mean that all women followed it. Many poor Athenian citizen families could not afford to own slaves, meaning the women of the household often had to leave the house as a matter of necessity simply to fulfill their daily tasks. Aristotle—who, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, was a rather notorious misogynist—notably remarks in his Politics 4.1300a that no one can keep the wives of poor men from doing things outside the home. This statement probably reflects reality.Archaeological evidence also clearly demonstrates that, despite the expectation for Athenian citizen women to remain in the home, many women worked low-paying jobs outside the home to support their families. For instance, Attic vase paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE sometimes depict ordinary women working as street vendors.ABOVE: Detail of an Athenian red-figure pelike dating to between c. 480 and c. 470 BCE, depicting a woman working as a street vendor. Some Athenian women apparently did work outside the home.It’s probably also a mistake to assume that Athenian women were completely politically irrelevant. In many cases, the wives and daughters of male Athenian citizens undoubtedly exercised some degree of unofficial influence over their husbands and fathers. In fact, in some cases, it was possible for certain women to gain substantial political influence behind the scenes.The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) alludes in his comedy The Acharnians to the influence that the metoikos woman Aspasia of Miletos (lived c. 470 – c. 400 BCE) was believed to have possessed over her partner, the prominent politician Perikles. The philosopher Plato mentions Aspasia’s influence over Perikles in his dialogue Menexenos, even going so far as to claim that Aspasia personally wrote some of Perikles’s speeches for him.As I have mentioned, though, women’s influences invariably took place outside the formal channels established by the Athenian democratic constitution. Women like Aspasia never had the opportunity to take part in formal debates in the Assembly, they never had the opportunity to cast votes on political matters, and they never had the opportunity to run for political office. The Athenian constitution denied them these rights.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek herma depicting Aspasia of Miletos, the partner of Perikles who reportedly exerted substantial influence over Athenian politics in the late fifth century BCEEnslaved peopleCitizen women were not the only ones excluded from participating in Athenian democracy. At any given time, a very large proportion of all people living in the city of Athens were enslaved. These people had been brought to Athens from all regions; most of them were fellow Hellenes captured from neighboring poleis, but some of them were captured from the land of Thrake to the north, or even the far-off Skythian lands to the north of the Black Sea.As I discuss in this article from August 2020, although conditions for enslaved people in ancient Greece varied considerably and some enslaved people were better off than others, life for them in general was quite brutal and unpleasant. The comedies of Aristophanes are full of jokes about slaves being beaten and abused. For instance, The Knights, which was first performed in Athens in 424 BCE, begins with a scene of two slaves complaining about how their new overseer sadistically beats them and tortures them.In The Frogs, which was first performed in 405 BCE, two characters who are believed to be enslaved compete to see which of them can bear the most strokes of the whip. These jokes only make sense if the people in the audience were accustomed to seeing slaves beaten and tortured on a relatively routine basis.Other slaves were even more brutally mistreated, such as the slaves who worked in the silver mines at Laurion at the end of the Attik peninsula. These people were forced to work long hours in unbearably hot, cramped, and unsafe conditions underground. Their lives were, by all accounts, short and miserable—far worse than even the lives of chattel slaves.One thing that all ancient Athenian slaves had in common was that they had no say in the political process. Slaves were not allowed to participate in the Assembly or hold public office. Indeed, the testimony of a slave was not even legally admissible in court unless it had been extracted via torture, because it was thought that slaves were all inveterate liars who needed to have the truth tortured out of them. With only a few very rare exceptions, even if they managed to acquire their freedom, slaves could virtually never become citizens.ABOVE: Attic black-figure neck-amphora depicting people (probably slaves) harvesting olives. At any given time, a very large proportion of Athens’ total population was enslaved.MetoikoiAthens also had a large population of resident foreigners who had come to Athens from abroad, mostly from other Greek poleis. These people were free, but they lacked citizenship. The Greek word that is used to describe members of this class of free non-citizens is μέτοικοι (métoikoi). The word is formed from the preposition μετά (metá), which indicates change, and the noun οἶκος (oîkos), which means “home.” The word therefore literally means “one who has changed their home.”Athenian citizens and metoikoi freely associated with each other and there was no social disadvantage to being a metoikos. Nonetheless, as a result of not having Athenian citizenship, metoikoi had extremely limited legal rights. They were not allowed to participate in the Assembly, they were not allowed to run for any kind of political office, and they were not even allowed to own property unless they had an Athenian sponsor or a special dispensation from the Assembly. Some metoikoi were able to become very wealthy, but they lacked the political and economic security that came with citizenship.Essentially the only way a non-citizen could acquire Athenian citizenship was by receiving a special dispensation from the Assembly—something which only happened on very rare occasions. Citizenship laws only grew more restrictive over time. In 451 BCE, with the support of the politician Perikles, the Athenians passed a law restricting Athenian citizenship to individuals who could prove that all their ancestors on both the paternal and maternal sides were Athenian citizens and that they had no foreigners in their family history whatsoever.Under this new law, anyone in Athens who claimed to possess Athenian citizenship could have their ancestry questioned at any time and be required to prove that all their ancestors going back perhaps as far as five generations had been Athenian citizens. The law made it so that, even if a person had a parent who was an Athenian citizen, they had been born in Athens, and they had never lived anywhere outside Athens, they were still considered a metoikos.Ironically, this law later came back to bite Perikles in the behind. Perikles cohabited with the metoikos woman Aspasia of Miletos for many years and possibly eventually married her. The couple had a son together named Perikles the Younger. Perikles the Younger, however, was not an Athenian citizen because his mother was not an Athenian citizen. Ultimately, after both of Perikles’s sons by his first wife, Paralos and Xanthippos, died during the Great Plague of Athens in 429 BCE, the Assembly granted a special dispensation to make Perikles the Younger—Perikles’s only surviving son at that point—an Athenian citizen.ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BCE Greek bronze sculpture of the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was a metoikos, or resident foreigner, in Athens; he never had Athenian citizenship.The makeup of the Athenian populationUnfortunately, there are no precise, reliable statistics of any kind pertaining to the demographic makeup of ancient Athens. Ancient people don’t seem to have kept track of that sort of information. Nonetheless, the classicist John Thorley estimates in his book Athenian Democracy, on page 74, that out of Athens’ total population of between 250,000 and 300,000 people, somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people were enslaved. An additional 25,000 people were metoikoi. Of the people who were actually citizens, it is safe to estimate that roughly half were female.Thorley estimates that Athens’ total population of adult male citizens was probably somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. This means that, at the very best, fully enfranchised adult male Athenian citizens made up approximately one sixth of the overall population. It also means that, at any given time, there were always more people in Athens who were enslaved than people in Athens who could vote.This really lays bare the problem of just how exclusive Athenian democracy really was. Athens was certainly more democratic than some other ancient Greek poleis, such as Sparta, which, as I discuss in this article from November 2019, was definitely not a democracy (although its constitution did include some democratic elements). All the same, if we were to judge Athens by contemporary standards, we might fairly question whether it was ever truly “democratic” at all.Athens’ deeply flawed judicial systemIn addition to excluding most of the population, Athenian democracy had a number of other serious flaws. One of the most serious problems with Athenian democracy was its judicial system, which often functioned as essentially nothing more than a tool that extremely elite male citizens could use to enact petty vendettas—mostly against their political rivals.As I discuss in this article from August 2020, the closest thing to a police force in ancient Athens was a group of publicly-owned slaves of Skythian ethnic origin who were armed with bows and arrows. These people were known as τοξόται (toxótai), Σκύθαι (Skýthai), or Σπευσίνιοι (Speusínioi). Their job, however, was simply to maintain public order, prevent riots, and occasionally apprehend people who had already been identified as criminals; they did not investigate crimes or hunt down criminals.Likewise, there were no professional attorneys whatsoever—not even a district attorney who could press charges against people who had been accused of crimes. Instead, all crimes had to be prosecuted in person by private citizens. In theory, any adult male Athenian citizen could accuse any person (including any woman or non-citizen) of any crime at any time and thereby bring the person to court.This system naturally placed poorer citizens who had less personal knowledge of the legal system and less time available to spend on litigation at a massive disadvantage. It placed women and metoikoi at an even greater disadvantage, since these groups of people were not legally permitted to prosecute cases at all. If a woman or metoikos wanted to prosecute someone, they needed to convince a male Athenian citizen to prosecute the case for them. Enslaved people had no voice in the judicial system whatsoever.ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix depicting a Skythian archer, painted by Epiktetos, dating to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCEThere were two main kinds of court cases in ancient Athens. The more common kind was a private case, in which an adult male Athenian citizen would make a claim that someone else had personally wronged him. Only the victim of the crime himself was allowed to prosecute the case—unless, of course, the crime was murder, in which case the surviving family members of the victim were expected to prosecute.The other kind of court case in ancient Athens was a public case, in which any adult male citizen could accuse someone of a crime and prosecute them on behalf of the state itself. The most famous surviving speech written for a public suit is probably Against Meidias, which was written by the famous orator Demosthenes in around 353 BCE for a planned lawsuit against his political rival Meidias.The speech is extraordinarily longwinded even by the standards of Greek oratory. In it, Demosthenes accuses Meidias of the crime of hubris (i.e., wanton violence, usually committed out of arrogance) for having allegedly slapped him in the face publicly. He declares that this was a heinous crime of unspeakable proportions, that Meidias’s misdeeds are a threat to the entire Athenian state, and that Meidias deserves to be put to death. Ironically, for all this bloviating, Demosthenes seems to have settled the case out of court and may have never delivered his speech in court at all.ABOVE: Roman marble statue of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, based on a Greek original from around 280 BCE or thereaboutsThe Athenians didn’t have anything resembling modern forensic science, meaning court cases were forced to rely heavily on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. Speakers also routinely made use of hearsay and character evidence in ways that a modern court would never allow. Ancient sources frequently imply that jurors tended to decide guilt or innocence not on the basis of solid evidence, but rather on the basis of superficial factors, such as speaking ability or personal likeability.Women were not allowed to speak for themselves in court, so, if a woman was brought to court, she had to be defended by one of her male relatives. Meanwhile, the testimony of a slave was only admissible in court if it had been extracted via torture, because it was believed that slaves were all inveterate liars who needed to have the truth tortured out of them.All ancient Athenian juries were extraordinarily large by modern standards—far larger than any British or American jury in modern times. Private cases are generally thought to have had juries composed of between two hundred to four hundred jurors. Public cases were considered more important and therefore had much larger juries, which seem to have usually been composed of over five hundred jurors at the very least. We know of at least one ancient Athenian trial in which the jury was composed of no fewer than 1,501 members.The Athenians preferred such outlandishly large juries because they believed that having so many jurors would make it impossible for anyone to bribe enough people to influence the outcome of the trial. Unfortunately, as a result of the fact that juries were so huge, verdicts were not required to be unanimous. In order for a defendant to be found guilty, it was only required for the majority of the jurors to vote in favor of conviction. This means that it was much easier for a person to be convicted in an ancient Athenian court than in a modern American court.All trials were required to be completed within the span of a single day or less. As a result, trials were often rushed. Jurors were expected to cast their votes almost immediately and they were given very little time to think about the arguments they had just heard.All votes were cast anonymously using tokens. A token with a hole signified that the juror believed that the defendant was guilty and a token without a hole signified that the juror believed that the defendant was innocent. Then, once all the jurors had placed their tokens, the tokens would be counted to decide whether the defendant would be convicted or acquitted.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of surviving ancient Athenian jurors’ tokens on display in the Ancient Agora Museum in AthensAn uneducated populaceIn order for a democracy to be successful, the majority of members of the voting population must be adequately informed about the political issues and controversies. When voters are ignorant about the issues, they tend to make uninformed and dangerous decisions. Unfortunately, if the ancient sources are anything to judge by, most adult male citizens in ancient Athens were uneducated and many were ignorant of the political issues that were being discussed.Allow me to give a famous example of this. The Athenians had a rather unusual custom known as ὀστρακισμός (ostrakismós). Every year, they would hold a vote in which every adult male citizen would write on a potsherd the name of an adult male citizen whom he wished to have banished from the city for ten years. The votes would then be counted and, if any single man received more than six thousand votes, he would be banished from the city for ten years.The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) records an anecdote in his Life of Aristeides 7.5–6 about an incident that supposedly happened when the prominent aristocratic politician Aristeides (lived c. 530 – c. 468 BCE), who had a reputation as the most honorable man in Athens, was ostracized. Here is what Ploutarchos writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:“Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka [i.e., potsherds], it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristeides, and asked him to write Aristeides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristeides had done him. ‘None whatever,’ was the answer, ‘I don't even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called “The Just.”’ On hearing this, Aristeides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back.”Whether this incident really happened or not is unclear; Ploutarchos was writing centuries after the events he describes allegedly occurred and, as a wealthy aristocrat himself, he naturally had a motive to portray Aristeides as an honorable and educated man who was hurt by the caprice and ignorance of the masses.Nonetheless, even if this particular anecdote is apocryphal, elite male ancient Greek writers certainly believed that voter ignorance was a very real problem and I’m inclined to think that it probably really was. The ancient elite writers, of course, believed that people who are not rich are inherently ignorant and that the solution to voter ignorance is to prohibit people who are not rich from having any significant role in government.I think that the real problem, however, is clearly not that people who are not wealthy are inherently ignorant, but rather that, in Athens in the fifth century BCE, people who were not wealthy were denied access to education. The solution, then, shouldn’t be to disenfranchise people who are not rich, but rather to democratize knowledge itself by ensuring that people who are not rich have access to education. The problem is too little democracy—never too much.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ostrakon with Aristeides’s name inscribed on it, on display in the Ancient Agora Museum in AthensAthenian imperialism and brutalityEven if we leave aside the problems with democracy within Athens itself, even greater problems arise when we examine Athens’ conduct overseas. In 477 BCE, two years after the Greeks expelled the Persians from Europe, Athens and a group of other city-states founded the Delian League, a military alliance with three explicit purposes: to prevent the Achaemenid Empire from expanding, to gather Persian booty to rebuild the Greek cities, and to wreak revenge against the Persians for their invasion.Initially, the treasury for the Delian League was kept on the island of Delos, which was sacred to the god Apollon. The League’s decision-making was to be handled by the Assembly of the Delian League, in which each member city-state had one vote. Athens, however, was designated the leader of the Delian League and Athens was assigned with the responsibility of handling the League’s treasury.About 150 Greek city-states voluntarily joined the Delian League at the time of its founding. All members of the Delian League were required to either contribute a certain number of ships to the navy of the Delian League or pay a tribute of a certain number of silver talents to the treasury of the Delian League.ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the extent of the Delian League at the time of the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Athens itself is shown in pink; Athens’ “allies” (a.k.a. vassal states) are shown in yellow.Unfortunately, it was not long before Athens started treating the other member states of the Delian League as subjects, rather than allies. In around 471 BCE, the island of Naxos attempted to leave the Delian League. The Athenians forced Naxos to rejoin the League, took away Naxos’s vote in the Assembly, and took away Naxos’s fleet of ships. Thus, it became apparent that joining the Delian League was a bit like joining the mafia; you could join voluntarily, but, once you were in, you weren’t allowed to leave.In 465 BCE, the island of Thasos attempted to rebel against the Delian League. Athens laid siege to the island for two years and forced it to rejoin. The walls of Thasos were torn down and all of Thasos’s lands, mines, and ships were confiscated and given to Athens. Thasos also lost its vote in the Assembly and, from then on, it was forced to pay additional fines to the Delian League as punishment for its rebellion.In 454 BCE, the Athenians moved the treasury of the Delian League to Athens. At this point, Athens was practically openly admitting that the Delian League was not really an alliance, but rather an empire ruled by Athens, and the members of the Delian League were not really allies, but rather Athenian vassal states.In 428 BCE, the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos attempted to secede from the Delian League, but the Athenians invaded and, in 427 BCE, forced Mytilene to issue an unconditional surrender. The Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) records in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 3.212–222 how, at the urging of the demagogue Kleon, the Athenians voted to slaughter all the male citizens of Mytilene and sell all the women and children into slavery. The Athenians sent out ships to execute these orders.The next day, though, the Athenians realized how unprecedently brutal their previous decision had been, so they held another meeting to reconsider their decision. A man named Diodotos, son of Eukrates, spoke up in the Assembly and argued that it would be more beneficial to Athens to spare the people of Mytilene and instead only execute the leaders of the rebellion, because executing all the male citizens of Mytilene would permanently blacken Athens’ reputation.Diodotos argued that, if they did such a thing, the Athenians would be seen as horrible tyrants, which would only prompt further rebellions. The Athenians held a vote in which the majority of the citizens voted to spare the Mytilenians. They therefore dispatched ships to recall the first set of ships they had sent out. Thus, the people of Mytilene were spared and only the leaders of the rebellion were executed.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the city of Mytilene as it looks todayThe slaughter of the MeliansThe Mytilenians lucked out, but, unfortunately, others did not. In summer of 416 BCE, the Athenians laid siege to the island of Melos, demanding that the Melians either pay tribute to Athens or face uttermost destruction. Their excuse for making this demand was that the Melians were a Doric people with cultural ties to the Spartans, with whom the Athenians were at war.At the time, the Melians were not openly supporting the Spartans in the war and were instead remaining neutral. Nonetheless, the Athenians feared that the Melians might join the war effort. The Athenians also wanted to expand their hegemony. Melos made a prime target for Athenian aggression, since it was one of the very few Aegean islands that were not under Athenian authority.In around January 415 BCE, the Melians surrendered. The Athenian democratic Assembly voted to slaughter all the Melian men and sell all the Melian women and children into slavery. This time, the Athenians did not back down; they slaughtered all the Melian men and took all the women and children as slaves. What the Athenians did to the Melians was a horrifying massacre that no doubt sent shockwaves across the Greek world. Modern commentators have described the slaughter of the Melians as nothing short of an act of genocide.Even many Athenians seem to have been horrified by their own city’s cruelty. Just a few months after the slaughter of the Melians, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) staged his tragedy The Trojan Women in Athens at the City Dionysia. The play depicts the suffering of the women of the Trojan royal family after the fall of Troy. Their husbands, fathers, and sons have all been slaughtered and they themselves have been taken as slaves by the Greek victors.The Trojan Women has traditionally been seen as a harsh condemnation of the Athenians’ brutality and cruelty towards the defeated Melians. This interpretation, however, has been questioned in recent years, with many scholars arguing that, by the time the slaughter of the Melians actually took place, the play must have already been fully written and in the late stages of rehearsal and production. Nonetheless, Euripides surely could have predicted what was going to happen to the Melians months in advance, since the siege of Melos had begun the previous summer.ABOVE: Illustration of the killing of Astyanax, the infant son of the Trojan prince Hektor, an act portrayed in Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan WomenThoukydides describes the events leading up to the slaughter of the Melians in his book The Histories of the Peloponnesian War 5.84–116. In a scene that has now become famous, Thoukydides attributes the following startling words to an Athenian emissary:“…ἐπισταμένους πρὸς εἰδότας ὅτι δίκαια μὲν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης ἀνάγκης κρίνεται, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.”The most famous translation of this passage comes from the Welsh scholar Richard Crawley:“…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”We know from surviving ancient sources that many readers of Thoukydides’s history were greatly shocked by this passage. Notably, the later Greek historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – after c. 7 BCE) wrote a book review of The Histories of the Peloponnesian War, in which he declares that such words were the sort of thing one would expect to hear from an eastern despot seeking to subjugate Greeks, but not at all from the great democratic Athenians, who liberated the Greeks from Persian tyranny.I strongly believe that Thoukydides wrote this passage with the intent to horrify his readers and to show them the extent to which the Athenians had fallen into depravity.ABOVE: Fictional illustration intended to represent the historian Dionysios of HalikarnassosWait… it lasted how long?Another thing that is often forgotten about Athenian democracy is how disappointingly short-lived it was. Athenian democracy is traditionally said to have been established in around 508 BCE by the lawgiver Kleisthenes. Athens had already had democratic tendencies before that, but, for our purposes we will take the reforms of Kleisthenes as the starting point for Athenian democracy.Further democratic reforms took place in the late 460s BCE, under the leadership of the archon Ephialtes of Athens. Ephialtes greatly diminished the power of the Areios Pagos, the Athenian aristocratic court. He also reduced the requirements for property ownership for elected officeholders and introduced the practice of paying holders of public office, thereby allowing Athenians who were not as wealthy to hold those offices.In 411 BCE, there was a coup in Athens and the democratic government was replaced with a short-lived oligarchy known as the “Oligarchy of the Four Hundred.” This oligarchy was swiftly replaced with another oligarchy which included more people, known as the “Oligarchy of the Five Thousand.” The Five Thousand ruled Athens until around summer of 410 BCE, when the oligarchy was brought to an end and democracy was restored.ABOVE: Modern fictional bust intended to represent the ancient Athenian lawgiver Kleisthenes, from the Ohio StatehouseAfter the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, the Spartans ended the Athenian democratic government and imposed a brutal, pro-Spartan oligarchic regime. The highest authority in this regime belonged to a group of thirty pro-Spartan aristocrats, who eventually became known as οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι (hoi triákonta týrannoi), which means “the Thirty Tyrants.” The leader of the Thirty Tyrants was Kritias, who was a former student of the philosopher Socrates and a maternal relative of the philosopher Plato.During their roughly eight-month-long rule over Athens, the Thirty Tyrants executed anyone whom they suspected of dissent. It is estimated that, during their brief reign of terror, they executed somewhere around 1,500 Athenian citizens without trial—amounting to perhaps as much as one twentieth of the total adult male citizen population. It was a horrific bloodbath.Eventually, in 403 BCE, an uprising led by the general Thrasyboulos overthrew the Thirty Tyrants and restored democracy. Immediately after the restoration of democracy, the archon Eukleides initiated a series of reforms. Athens remained an independent democracy until early August of 338 BCE, when an alliance of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes was defeated by the forces of King Philippos II of Makedonia in the fateful Battle of Chaironeia.Although Athens was allowed to remain nominally a democracy at first, it was forced to join the League of Corinth, which was led by Makedonia, making it effectively a Makedonian territory. Ultimately, democracy in Athens was suppressed in 322 BCE when Athens was brought under the rule of a governor appointed by Antipatros, the regent of Makedonia.All in all, from the reforms of Kleisthenes until the suppression of democracy under Antipatros, Athenian democracy only lasted 186 years—and that’s not even considering all the temporary coups I just mentioned or the fact that, for the last sixteen years of that time, Athens was basically being ruled by Makedonia.For comparison, the present Constitution of the United States went into effect on 4 March 1789, meaning, as of January 2021, the United States Constitution has been in effect for nearly 232 years—nearly half a century longer than Athenian democracy existed. Also, the United States has never had the government successfully overthrown and an oligarchy imposed—unlike democratic Athens, which had three different oligarchies imposed over the course of a much shorter time period.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze portrait head of King Philippos II, the king of Makedonia who defeated Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaironeia and imposed Makedonian rule over AthensConclusionClassical Athenian democracy was unoriginal, incomplete, riddled with flaws, and ultimately short-lived. We should not regard it as an ideal, perfect model to be imitated, but I don’t think we should dismiss it as entirely worthless and irrelevant for the current age either. Instead, I think that we should see Athenian democracy as one of many flawed early prototypes for democracy—a system of government which still has not yet been perfected.The thing about democracy is that it is never perfect. It is never complete. There is always something left to fix, something left to improve. Nonetheless, I would argue that its ability to improve is one of democracy’s greatest strengths. Many other forms of government tend to encourage, if not outright demand, conformity and conservativism, but democracy allows for progress and social change.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)