05/03/2022
The famous German philosopher Karl Marx, considered the father of socialist and communist ideology, in his writings dedicated an article to Sicily and the Sicilians, focusing on the historical-cultural aspects that contributed to making it what it is, or at least what it was until 1860, the year of publication of these words.
Here is what he wrote.
Karl Marx on Sicily and the Sicilians:
“In all the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered as terribly from foreign slavery, conquest and oppression, and no one has fought as indomitable for their emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians.
Almost from the time when Polyphemus walked around Etna, or when Ceres taught the Sicilians how to cultivate wheat, up to the present day, Sicily has been the scene of invasions and continuous wars, and of intrepid resistance. Sicilians are a mixture of almost all the southern and northern races; before the Aboriginal Sicans with Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and slaves from all over the world, imported to the island through trade or wars; and then of Arabs, Normans, and Italians.
The Sicilians, during all these transformations and modifications, have fought, and continue to fight, for their freedom.
More than thirty centuries ago, the aborigines of Sicily resisted as best they could the predominance of armaments and the military art of the Carthaginian and Greek invaders. They were made tributaries, but they were never completely subdued by either one or the other. For a long time Sicily was the battlefield of the Greeks and Carthaginians; its people were reduced to ruin and partly enslaved; its cities, inhabited by Carthaginians and Greeks, were the centers from which oppression and slavery spread within the island. These first Sicilians, however, never lost the opportunity to fight for freedom, or at least to take revenge as much as they could on their Carthaginian masters and Syracuse.
The Romans finally subdued the Carthaginians and Syracusans, selling as many as possible as slaves. In this way, 30,000 inhabitants of Panormo, modern Palermo, were sold all at once. The Romans worked the Sicilian land by countless teams of slaves, in order to feed the poor proletarians of the Eternal City with Sicilian wheat. In view of this, they not only enslaved the inhabitants of the island, but also imported slaves from all their other domains. The terrible cruelties of the Roman proconsuls, praetors, prefects are known to anyone with a certain degree of familiarity with the history of Rome, or with Cicero's oratory. Nowhere else, perhaps, did Roman cruelty reach such or**es. Poor citizens and smallholders, if they were unable to pay the overwhelming tribute required of them, were mercilessly sold as slaves, themselves or their children, by the tax collectors.
But both under Dionysius of Syracuse and under Roman rule, the most terrible slave uprisings occurred in Sicily, in which the indigenous population and imported slaves often made common cause. During the dissolution of the Roman Empire, Sicily was attacked by various invaders. Then the Moors took possession of it for a certain period; but the Sicilians, especially the original populations of the interior, always resisted, with more or less success, and step by step they maintained or conquered various small privileges.
From the Middle Ages to 1860

When the first lights had just begun to spread over the medieval darkness, the Sicilians had already obtained by arms not only various municipal freedoms, but also the rudiments of a constitutional government, such as then did not exist anywhere else.
Before any other European nation, the Sicilians established the income of their governments and their sovereigns by vote. Thus the Sicilian soil has always proved lethal for the oppressors and invaders, and the Sicilian Vespers remained immortalized in history.
When the house of Aragon reduced the Sicilians to the dependence of Spain, they knew how to keep their political privileges more or less intact; and they did the same thing under the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. When the French Revolution and Napoleon expelled the tyrannical ruling family from Naples, the Sicilians - incited and seduced by the English promises and guarantees - welcomed the fugitives, and supported them in the fight against Napoleon with blood and money. Everyone knows about the subsequent betrayal of the Bourbons, and the subterfuges or impudent denials with which England has tried and continues to try to hide the fact of having treacherously abandoned the Sicilians and their freedoms to the tender graces of the Bourbons.
Currently, political, administrative and fiscal oppression crushes all classes of the population; and these injustices are there for all to see. But almost all of the land is still in the hands of a relatively small number of landowners or barons. In Sicily the medieval rights of land possession are still maintained, except that those who cultivate are no longer a serf; it has not been so since about the eleventh century, when he became a free tenant. The conditions of the rent are, however, generally so oppressive, that the vast majority of farmers work exclusively for the benefit of the tax collector and the baron, barely producing anything more than taxes and rent, and remaining themselves or desperately, or at least relatively, poor. While producing the famous Sicilian wheat and excellent fruits, they live miserably on beans all year round.
Now Sicily is bloodied again, and England is the detached spectator of these new or**es of the infamous Bourbon, and of his no less infamous favorites, secular or clerical, Jesuits or men of arms. The noisy declaimers of the British parliament fill the air with empty talk about Savoy and the dangers of Switzerland, but have not a word to say about the massacres of Sicilian cities. Not a cry of indignation is raised throughout Europe. No head of government and no parliament calls for a ban on that bloodthirsty idiot from Naples (Francesco II delle Due Sicilie, editor's note).
Only Louis Napoleon, for this or that purpose - of course not for the sake of freedom, but to strengthen his family or French influence - can perhaps stop the butcher in his destructive work. England will cry out to perfidy, will spit fire and flames against Napoleonic betrayal and ambition, but the Neapolitans and Sicilians will ultimately be the winners, even under a Murat or any new ruler. Any change will only be towards the better. "
While these words of Marx were being published, Giuseppe Garibaldi was already preparing his Expedition of the Thousand, which began with the landing in Marsala on May 11, 1860. From there the story continued as we know it.
Source: Marx-Engels, Complete Works, Editori Riuniti, vol. XVII, pp. 375-377.
(Article and pictures source: https://www.palermoviva.it/cosi-marx-parlo-della-sicilia/)
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