A lot of studies show that people very rarely change their beliefs - like very few people even in the U.S. changed from Republican to Democratic or back - states changed their colours mostly due to demographic changes - red and blue population had different age breakdown, birth and death rates, and different migration/naturalisation patterns which mostly determine changes in voting outcomes. This is even more true in case of such much much deeper rooted thing like this one. It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people.
Mafia isn't about people being literally forced to do something with the fear or death - such an approach totally doesn't scale, even Sicily is not a Nazi death camp. It's about deeply rooted tradition to say, "respect your village elders" and "don't put your family to shame by exposing issues". And people don't even realise they have those beliefs, everyone taken separately just acts "normally", letting the whole society be exploited. Just reducing proportion of people having these beliefs in the first place - to some percentage giving "herd immunity" from them because these informal links need to be able to sufficiently propagate - solve the problem.
>It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people.
That is social engineering (not the security term, the historical), and is associated with the worst totalitarianism (closely related to genocide and ethnocide). At the very least it's Machiavellian. And it's even more illegal than brainwashing!
This "solution" sees the population from outside, as assets to be replaced, manipulated, etc to solve an abstract problem.
But the problem is not "how to have Calabria without mafia" (that has several trivial solutions, from the suggested population replacement to nuking the area to a totalitarian government that maintains absolute control against the mafia).
The problem is rather, "how the population of Calabria can get rid of mafia".
In other words, e.g. Calabria is not just a named piece of land (for someone to rule as they see fit and do whatever to it, including removing the population) - it's first and foremost population and a culture.
If the culture can't change easily (or at all), tough luck. But replacement of the population is not a solution (at least not this side of Stalin).
Well the problem is cultural. As i said, mafia doesn't exist because of some "boss" scares everyone into obedience, but because whole local culture is permeating it. If the culture is no longer shared by majority of people, mafia turns into just a sort of crime, and then it can be tackled by policing alone, as it was successfully done with Italian mafia in the U.S. (although not without some trial and error).
What's bad about getting to that point by mixing/diluting the population?
Back to ethnic cleansing, i think categorically criticising it is an utter hypocrisy. All stable European states are products of ethnic cleansing done at some point. And while it is ancient history for Western Europe, in case of Central and Eastern Europe e.g. Poland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, it was done after 1945, mostly by decisions pushed by U.S. itself. Ethnic cleansing is good for everyone as long as it's done without too much violence. Middle East is just an example of region where formation of ethnic nationalities - process that predates ethnic cleansing - is not yet complete. There is little else fundamentally broken about Middle East - apart from territories being fragmented sometimes down to village level onto fractions of population divided by ethnic, religious and political lines with and hating each other - a process which must eventually result in some of them being butchered and others amalgamating into nations, divided by political borders and united by... something better than just force. In a piece of land where people who have nothing in common have to coexist, there is either a brutal dictatorship coercing them into bearing with each other, or unlimited all-on-all bloodshed (see pre-2011 and post-2011 Syria). Nothing can fix it apart from thorough ethnic cleansing.
Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).
> Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).
There are two Polands since at least 2015. The right-winged, covertly pro-Russian, nationalist Poland, and the pro-EU Poland. The ruling party is using divide&conquer strategy on its own people (as opposed to on enemies, as practiced by ancient Romans).
> And, you can't be a Catholic and pro-Russian at same time.
It's more being anti-EU than pro-Russian, but the geopolitics of Poland are brutal enough that these are both almost one and the same. And being a Catholic, at least of the variety we have here, pretty much requires you to be anti-EU. The effect is that, the warlike rethoric notwisthstanding, the right-wing Catholic nationalists are working hard to benefit Russia. I think this is where the word "covertly" comes from in the GP.
That's fine. It's the same as to say, claim that Brexiters are "covertly pro-Russian", and it's fine when half the people are against EU, coz if everyone was thinking the same, it's same as no one thinking at all.
Great Britain is an island. It's not between Germany and Russia. If you're a country between powerful neighbors with history of waging wars on you, you either need to be very powerful, or you need an alliance. Poland is far from powerful. It's not going to get powerful in the foreseeable future. Therefore it needs an alliance.
1. Polarization among politicians is normal. Political polarization in the society, where family members often don't talk to each other because of opposing political views, is very unhealthy. Most people on either side of the political divide don't read each others' media. People don't disagree, people hate each other.
2. Of course you can. Church hierarchs in Poland are very conservative and often pro-Russian.
* 2007 - "Homosexuality - the plague of 21 century", a conference in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, attended by Protoiereus Aleksandr Grigoriew
* 2012 - patriarch Ciril (former KGB agent, codename: Michajłow/Mikhailov) meets Polish archbishop Józef Michalik
* 2013 - Polish Church starts a campaign against "gender", by the Russian playbook.
* 2015 - archbishop Jędraszewski uses the word "plague" to describe homosexuals, women, and the liberal left.
* 2019 - the archbishop calls the LGBT movement "plague".
Tadeusz Rydzyk has been running a pro-Russian "catholic" radio station for a few decades now. The initial 10000 Swiss franks for the radio mast came from a mystic (Vassula Ryden) who keeps saying Russia will be elevated by God and will rule other nations. Russian diplomats showed up on the radio's 8th anniversary. The radio has transmitters in Ural and operates on frequencies used by the Russian army. Tadeusz Rydzyk is de facto the head of Polish Church. Rydzyk is notorious for criticizing the West.
Grzegorz Rzeczkowski has recently written a book "Katastrofa Posmoleńska", about how the plane crash in 2010 was used to sow dissent and divide. One of the major points of contention was a catholic cross illegally placed in front of the presidential palace to honor the dead. There were pilgrimages, pious crowds, angry people insulting the new president, etc.
Ordo Iuris is a para-legal branch of the Brasilian sect TFP. It successfully campaigns for strict law based on catholic orthodoxy - for example abortion punishable with jail, next up: no divorces. Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro supports it. It has support from other politicians, like Grzegorz Braun and Krzysztof Bosak (his wife is in OI). That it's not "real" catholicism doesn't matter, because the society at large can't tell the difference. The resemblance is where their power comes from.
> It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people... so have to replace people.
This makes no sense at all. The government exists to serve those people who are getting replaced, so if you fix their problems by replacing them then nothing has actually been solved. You’re putting the importance of the government and the region over the people which is backwards.
Mafia isn't about people being literally forced to do something with the fear or death - such an approach totally doesn't scale, even Sicily is not a Nazi death camp. It's about deeply rooted tradition to say, "respect your village elders" and "don't put your family to shame by exposing issues". And people don't even realise they have those beliefs, everyone taken separately just acts "normally", letting the whole society be exploited. Just reducing proportion of people having these beliefs in the first place - to some percentage giving "herd immunity" from them because these informal links need to be able to sufficiently propagate - solve the problem.