In the Island of Power

“This is Sicily, island of power and of the pathology of power.” Judge Giovanni Falcone, 1991 Photo credit: Letizia Battaglia

Karl Marx wrote that people make their own history but not in the way that they intend. Marx subscribed to the Sicilian obsession with u destinu (destiny). A nation that in less than a single generation (1900–20) lost half its population to overseas emigration surely cannot claim to have mastered its own destiny.

What is more, Marx’s simplistic cliché invites questions for which our immigrant parents and grandparents…