Goudie gaffe shows disdain for Italy

Chuck Goudie's column (June 21) on "Chicago's Dark Knight" seems to imply that Italy's current crime rate is so egregious that the government had to send troops there to control it.

What Goudie is probably referring to is the recent garbage crisis in Naples, where thousands of local residents openly protested the re-opening of the Pianura waste disposal plant.

Local police and waste workers were prevented from doing their jobs, resulting in the piling up of mountains of trash.

Order was restored, and a clean-up was undertaken, once a small mobile unit of officers were sent there to accompany local authorities.

Goudie's gaffe is fairly typical of the disdain with which the American media tends to treat foreign nations (especially Italy) as a Third World nation.

Interestingly, Italy has used troops twice in the past, both in dealing with the Sicilian mafia: During the Fascist era, where Mussolini's prefect Cesare Mori effectively wiped them out (though the U.S. and the Allies "reintroduced" the mafia during World War II by using thugs as key advisors), and in the early 1990s after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Italy, a democracy, has remained true to the rule of law while dealing with the monsters in their midst.

Meanwhile, young children continue to be murdered in Americas cities and suburbs at an alarming ratewhile our politicians dither, paralyzed either by political correctness or bygood old-fashioned American self-denial.

Bill Dal Cerro

National President

Italic Institute of America

Floral Park, NY