They are all right | The battle for Cospito’s life and the horror of the slogan “Free Alfredo”

In the debate about Cospito there is a first fundamental discriminant: those who call him Cospito and those who call him Alfred. The former are interested in settling the question of whether or not the application of the prison regime 41 bis is just with respect to his personal legal case and whether or not it is a duty for the State to prevent the death of a prisoner on a prolonged hunger strike, even if it is almost incredible to have to ascertain that in the latter case there may be someone who claims that yes, Cospito dies even if he believes, because, as one says not by chance, the former prosecutor Piercamillo Davigo, “for the State, respect for the rules”. But it is of the latter that I would like to speak here, and not of those few dozen so-called insurrectionary anarchists, who share ideas and objectives with Cospito, but of that slightly wider area – movements, social centres, university collectives, intellectuals, artists – who doesn’t just show solidarity with him on the fight against the 41 bis and dangerously tends to represent him as a kind of political prisoner.

“Freedom for Alfredo”, so read the posters hanging in many Italian cities, is a wrong and ambiguous slogan, because Cospito is not in jail for a judicial error. The sincere guarantors are struck by the disproportion between the fact for which he is detained today (two low-potential bombs near a police station which caused no deaths or injuries, but they could have) and the charge which earned him a sentenced to 20 years for “massacre against the security of the state”. But Cospito was and remains a terrorist. Not an antagonist, an idealist, a son of Bakunin or a hothead. A terrorist. Someone who practiced and still claims armed struggle, already convicted, as is known, also of having shot in the legs of an Ansaldo-Finmeccanica executive, an attack he himself claimed in a chilling letter that appeared years ago on the network of sites in the area : “That May 7th 2012 – Cospito wrote – for a moment I threw sand into the gears of this megamachine, for a moment I lived to the fullest making a difference. That day I was not an old Tokaref, my best weapon, but the ‘deep, ferocious hatred I feel against the techno-industrial society”. In that letter Cospito claimed his being “anti-social”, his contempt for the society that surrounds him and for “civilisation”. Of his victim, the manager of Ansaldo-Finmeccanica Roberto Adinolfisaid: “We have seen him smile slyly from the television screens posing as a victim. We have seen him giving lessons in schools against “terrorism”. But I wonder what is terrorism? A shot fired, an intense pain, an open wound or the constant threat of a slow death that eats you from within?

Adinolfi’s fault? Being head of a company with nuclear projects: “To me – Cospito always writes – it occurred to me to strike the greatest perpetrator of this massacre in Italy: Roberto Adinolfi, managing director of Ansaldo Nucleare. It didn’t take much to find out where he lived, five stakeouts were enough. There is no need for a military structure, a subversive association or an armed gang to strike, anyone armed with a strong will can think the unthinkable and act accordingly”. This is Cospito and the years of incarceration haven’t changed it. The 41 bis was applied to him because while in prison he kept contacts with the outside world considered dangerous.

The battle in defense of the rule of law can always be shared and must be supported. The cartoonist Zero limestone has produced a cartoon on the Cospito case which, in my opinion, captures the heart of the matter, namely a point dear to both liberals and “radicals”: to what extent the State is entitled to impose a prison regime that runs counter to the re-education of the sentence, provided for by the Constitution, as well as with the principles of humanity? To what extent is it right to do so even in front of “monsters” (the hyperbole is from Zerocalcare)? And isn’t it really towards them that the State has the duty to apply fair rules, to guarantee everyone, given that tomorrow it can be a perverse and deviated authority to establish at its whim who is a “monster” and who is not? Quite different is occupying a classroom in the Faculty of Letters of the La Sapienza University in Rome, as happened yesterday, effectively putting on the role of “comrade in struggle” in Cospito. Quite different is the off-centre appeal signed by some artists (Jasmine Trinca, Valerio Mastandrea, Michele Riondino, Paolo Calabresi, 99 Posse), where Cospito’s criminal curriculum is summarized with serious superficiality (“They accuse him of an attack which however did not cause neither dead nor wounded”) and he is described as an “anarchist prisoner”, as if to suggest that he is in a cell for his ideas rather than for his crimes.

It is quite different to invoke “free Alfredo”, as the ineffable professor of Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome did, among others, Donatella Di Cesarealready infamous for the thesis according to which the borders of nations are a twentieth-century wreck and therefore why worry so much if Russia invades Ukraine and dismembers it (the existential and age crises of many veterans of the seventies are always decided at a crossroads: there are those who buy the Porsche and those who re-enroll in Avant-garde workers).

So let’s start with the basics: let’s call him Cospito and save his life. “Alfredo” cannot become a symbol of the democrats and, above all, he cannot be free.