Culture, Gratteri and Nicaso present their book ‘Don’t call them heroes’ in Scilla

by time news

One on the stage in Piazza San Rocco, the other live streaming from Toronto, Canada. The public prosecutor at the Court of Catanzaro Nicola Gratteri and the teacher and expert on mafias and organized crime Antonio Nicaso presented yesterday during the first evening of the prequel of the third International Annual Meeting SudeFuturi III – (R) innoviamo il Mezzogiorno their latest effort literary written by four hands: “Don’t call them heroes”. Fourteen stories of victims of the mafia, starting, of course, from those of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Interviewed by the journalist Paola Bottero, who opened the conversation to three in a Piazza San Rocco packed with attentive spectators, many even standing once the seats are exhausted, who have not lost a single word of what was said on stage and they often underlined with long applause the most significant passages of the interventions of Nicaso and Gratteri. “Socrates used to say that it takes love to become heroes – Bottero began. How did the idea of ​​this book come about, which in my opinion is the most beautiful of those you have written, which tells the stories of people who, even if they are no longer there, are always with us? “.

“Thirty years after the death of Falcone and Borsellino – explained Nicaso – we decided to write portraits of those who persisted in remaining themselves despite the ferocity of the mafia. The message is that we too can do something for our land. In writing the book we started from an aspect that has often been underestimated: the mafias have created successful myths and exploited the concept of chivalry, religiousness. In this book we have made a new contribution: we have deconstructed the myth of men of honor, who are cowards, shoot in the back, kill women and children. The real narrative of the mafia is completely different from the traditional one, which has also been seen in some films or in some fiction. Ours is a small cultural operation: if we remove the trappings, the king is naked in front of everyone. The mafia have never been on the side of the weakest but on the side of the strongest “.

Speaking of innocent victims, reference is inevitable with what is happening in these days in Afghanistan. To speak is Nicola Gratteri: “This war, like all wars, did not help. If in 20 years the West has failed to build an Afghan army, it is a great defeat. And it is a great defeat for the United States, which often has an invading approach. Usually, those who invade tend to impose their own culture. But let’s think of the Romans: even when they ruled, they included. They made the populations of the conquered lands participate in public, social and economic life. Evidently, the strategists who handled this situation in Afghanistan have not studied history ”.

Clear opinions also regarding the narration of the events: “We knew that the internal area of ​​the country was in the hands of Isis and the Taliban, but the press did not mention it. They told us of an Afghanistan under control, but in reality the Taliban dominated the area with opium. We were aware of tens of tons of heroin piled up in the Afghan desert and now there is an annual increase of 2-3% in the use of heroin, which costs very little, 25 euros per gram. Heroin that is no longer injected but is taken like cocaine and this war will increase its consumption ”, concludes Gratteri.

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