Palermo: Gathering at Ucciardone prison and poster in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito from Sicily
Written February 19t, 2023
Democracy always has a massacre behind it
In Sicily, even human geography is capable of bitter irony, of tricks of light and shadow. Portella della Ginestra is twenty kilometres – fifteen minutes by car – from the centre of Palermo. The largest city of the region, capital and stage of political power past and present, has behind it the site of the first massacre of the poor in republican Italy: 11 dead, including 3 children, 30 seriously injured. If it was the Giuliano gang to shoot, the motive was the convergence of interests of the ruling classes and the reason of State. The same reason of State that took out Pisciotta to save the good name of Scelba and Mattarella, as if it was enough to kill a man to eliminate the collective memory that the oppressed retain of their slaughterers and those who starved them. Alfredo’s story not only teaches us the difference between the dignity of an individual in struggle and the civilised barbarity of the bureaucracies of annihilation, but also reminds us how domination is still that mixture of ferocity, lies, idiocy.
They delude themselves that they are killing an anarchist and, with that, anarchy (i.e. the very possibility of rebellion being dreamt of… and sooner or later realised); they delude themselves that there are many who still believe in the holy war of the State against the Mafia, while those at the bottom know how the only real struggle is that of the rich against the poor, and vice versa; they pretend to move millions of people driven to the brink by the same banks and finance whose headquarters are being attacked by angry people; they delude themselves that they can save both the goats and the cabbages with a TSO* to Alfredo, as if for everyone life is just a mass of living cells, forced into obedience; they delude themselves that the spectacle of appearances will work forever, even if all social theatre has a massacre on its back.
They can perpetrate a thousand massacres and a thousand more, they have all the means, but Alfredo’s dignity is a monument to the smallness of statesmen, it is a fire in the conscience that will never be extinguished.
Against 41 bis, life imprisonment without appeal, TSO! Against the prison society!
Better one day of Cospito than a thousand of Nordio!
“I will not stand for it and I will not give up, I will continue my hunger strike for the abolition of 41 bis and life imprisonment until my last breath, to make the world aware of these two repressive abominations of this country.” Alfredo Cospito December 1st 2022.
*TSO – trattamento sanitario obbligatorio – a compulsory medical treatment, in order to proceed with forced feeding
“E u me cori
Dopo tant’anni
E’ a putredda
E’ ‘nta i petri
E’ ‘nto sangu
Di cumpagni ammazzati”
Ignazio Buttitta
Gathering at Ucciardone prison, Thursday 23rd February 2023, 17:30
At Alfredo’s side, against 41 bis, TSO and life imprisonment without parole. Fire to all prisons.