Today, you, representatives of the judicial arm of this republic, judge us by graffiti in the streets, by our words, by our books and newspapers, thus forcing anarchy to go underground. We are not the only ones, with a post-fascist government censorship and repression spreading to the entire social body, accelerating the transition from a totalitarian democracy to a tragicomic ‘operetta’ [without credibility, ridiculous -ndt] regime. Having said that, I must thank you: after a year of silence, thanks to your shameful and anachronistic persecution, I am allowed to express my thoughts publicly. Even if it is remotely, even if it is for the time that a flutter lasts, today I can tear off the medieval gag of 41 bis that a center-left government has applied to me a few years ago to silence an uncomfortable voice, however minority and irrelevant it may be, but undoubtedly an enemy of this democracy of yours. These two years of special regime have definitively opened my eyes to the true face of your law, of your constitutional guarantees, revealing to me a criminogenic [1] system of totalitarianism as obscene as it is crude and murderous.
Today we are being judged in an inquisitorial process based on an interview conducted through the ordinary mail of the prison, and not as the prosecution would have us believe, through a visit with my sister, brought to court for the mere fact of continuing to visit her undaunted brother. A classic strategy of all authoritarian regimes in the world, used regularly in 41 bis, to make a scorched earth of any affective link with the outside world.
In every visit I receive, it is representative to see the handprints of children on the armored glass that separates them from their fathers or mothers. But, after all, what can be expected from a democracy that puts children in prison?
Of course I take full responsibility for the interview, which is why today I am in 41 bis, just as I take responsibility for all my writings, the last one in chronological order being the small essay on the MIL in post-Franco Spain written under the High Security regime before being transferred to this tomb for the living and which I am sure that if it has not already been published, it will be published soon.
And therein lies the particularity of my judicial history. Put in this regime to silence me definitively with the accusation of a leading role, as you define my role in your twisted and convoluted language. A bad judicial precedent, with disturbing implications. Having managed to impose the thesis that an anarchist can play a leading role, an intrinsically authoritarian role, and therefore incompatible with what is the very thought of anarchy, opens wide the doors of 41 bis to anyone who makes power uncomfortable, be they individual revolutionaries or radical movements, in addition to facilitating anomalous criminal proceedings such as the one I have to witness today as a defendant. I say this because I firmly believe that my move to 41 bis and this trial itself are fundamentally an attack on freedom of thought and of the press. This is the heart of the matter, the heart of this judgment.
The danger of 41 bis cannot be reduced to an ‘operetta’ hierarch who sets a pathetic trap for an equally ‘operetta’ opposition (my heterodirected transfer two years ago from one section to another before the arrival of politicians from Rome to set up a little theatre with more useful extras). Its real danger is something much darker, a formidable potential repressive shortcut in the event of social conflict. What better way to silence the movements and the radical opposition to an already active and tested regime of exception. A state of emergency in which many rights are suspended, in which absolute censorship reigns, already tested during decades of practice on the ground. Who will be the first to experience this special regimen on their skin? The comrades who fight for Palestine? The anarchists who undaunted continue to talk about revolution? The communists who never gave up? Four of them have been proudly resisting this regime for decades in absolute isolation, never bowing down.
If the West’s imperialist war crosses the borders of Ukraine in reaction and breaks into our homes, if social conflicts exceed the sustainable limit of a shaky mechanism, or even if the smooth and gradual transition to a regime is not feasible, the 41 bis, thanks to its own veneer of legality, will be the ideal repressive tool for a forced social anaesthesia, a kind of castor oil to bring the recalcitrant back to heel, a gradual and legal coup d’état. And this would explain why an emergency regime is needed in the absence of a real emergency. For people to accept this force, this aberration of their own law, what better Trojan horse than the fight against the villains par excellence: the mafiosi. Indefensible people, made irredeemable by the same politicians who first used them for dirty work and then buried them here to avoid recriminations for favors done and never returned. An open secret that no longer surprises anyone.
With the excuse of fighting the mafias you have trampled your own laws, betraying the Constitution you have revealed its inconsistency and its true essence of Fig leaf [2]. With the excuse of fighting the mafias you have promulgated a kind of ethnic persecution. Here with me, only Calabrians, Campans, Sicilians, Apulians and, of course, Roma, the unpresentable children of a south populated by second-class citizens. People arrested sometimes only because of their surname. People who are denied theoretically inviolable rights in order to push them to repentance, which in your aberrant conception of law takes the form of denouncing one’s own father, mother, brother or sister. Lawyers accused of complicity when they do not allow themselves to be intimidated by the prosecutor Torquemada, armored visits without physical or human contact, in which the tattoos of relatives are covered with tape, they are filmed and searched in search of pretexts to arrest and interrogate them. A sword of Damocles that constantly hangs over their heads to terrorize those who, undaunted, still do not want to abandon their loved ones. A state terrorism that seeks to deprive the prisoner of the most natural solidarity, that of children, wives, husbands, mothers, which is the only solidarity that the people here can afford and understand. A repressive technique that dehumanizes by depriving human solidarity and empathy. At that point, anything can be done to the prisoner because he is no longer a human being, he is just a number from which to extract information. And in the event that a subject to be tortured does not bow down, depriving him of all hope with murderous isolation, he ergastolo ostivo until death.
A conception of law worthy of your ethics. This is the scourge you call civilization.
Alfredo Cospito
ndt
1- In Italian “generator of delinquency”, in sociological language a term used to refer to the phenomena of social pathology (such as the increase in delinquency, or more simply deviation) to factors internal to social institutions and formations (criminogenic institutions) or to the society itself (society c.) in which they occur. In this case, criminogenic system.
2- Fig leaf, in Italian foglia difico (with which Adam and Eve covered themselves in the book Genesis of the Bible) is an expression used as a metaphor to indicate the intention to hide, in the best of cases, a dishonest action, pretending to do one thing, but actually doing something very different from what one wants to make believe that one is doing.
– Ergastolo ostativo, life imprisonment without the possibility of reduction or any other rights enjoyed by other prisoners.