The lord of the ants. What the Braibanti trial doesn't tell
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Reflections by Luciano Ragusa, curator of Guado Cinema
A handful of months have passed since the film's participation in the Venice Film Festival (September 2022, 79th edition) The lord of the ants, directed by Gianni Amelio. Since one sheet relating to it, published in this space, has already been proposed, why go back to it?
What is missing from the previous article to justify the intention of rewriting about Aldo Braibanti? Does it help us, as the film states, to focus on the decade 1959-1969, to understand what forces were at work behind the philosopher? Was it really an inquisitorial, medieval trial, a vaudeville farce?
I am convinced that there are elusive elements when talking about the myrmecologist from Piacenza, as if there remains something inescapable about his human and procedural story to be decrypted: and that the conclusions reached by directors, journalists, intellectuals, politicians, yesterday as today, are arrived, do not take into due consideration the morphological complexity of the "Braibanti case".
The intent of this text, therefore, is not to sift through The lord of the ants in its technical and formal solutions, which are also appreciated and praised in the dedicated card, but insert, into the discussion, information that diversifies the perception of what happened to the Emilian writer. Let's go in order.
Aldo Braibanti was born in Fiorenzuola d'Arda on 17 September 1922, therefore Amelio's feature film pays homage to his figure in the centenary year of his birth. The son of a trained doctor, he usually follows his father on his home visits throughout the Piacenza countryside, a situation that facilitates a naturalistic and ecological approach, then development, to life.
In 1934 he moved to Parma to attend the Romagnosi classical high school, a path that would see him excel in all subjects and in 1939 give him some trouble with fascism. The reason for the dispute is a clandestine mimeograph addressed "to all living men", in which he takes a stand, and invites others to do so, against the dictatorship:
Friends, for some time now those whom society has elected as our superiors both in school and in life, abusing this duty, have been plotting to oppress us morally and materially, aiming to make us mechanical automatons. There is an attempt to kill the man within us by means of unhealthy principles, which today I accuse of being dead and no longer sustainable.
Friends, now in our souls I feel the trembling cry of protest of this illogical tyranny, contrary to the divine right of freedom, which is the right of every man, of every being, of every thing. And I welcome this cry not yet repressed and in the name of the common good, I propose that our fraternal union, our compact harmony, respond to this iniquity.
Friends, we who are the beating heart of all hope, gather our strength into a single force aimed at regaining our freedom, without overthrowing the most sacred principles of justice and honesty, without needlessly upsetting order and peace. Today, November 27, 1939, we young and strong men embrace the purest, most perfect, most noble society of which our soul is capable.
Friends, this society, which by its very nature will be secret, will try to replace isolated riots with a prudent and therefore more effective, orderly and therefore more overwhelming revolt. By means of agreements, meetings, pre-established laws and conventional secret signs, we will thus be able to achieve what a single individual never could. Remaining within the limits of good manners, however, we will not be cowards for this reason. Whoever is vile or unworthy, do not accept my conditions of honor, freedom, prudence, work.
But together we will continue to do all our duty and to obey, when obeying will not offend our conscience. In short, we will begin a controlled and secret reaction, but one that no enemy foothold will be able to affect, because the task we propose is based on fierce rectitude and honest justice. Membership signatures. (see https://senesonoandati-parma.blogautore.repubblica.it/2014/04/12/aldo-braibanti-quel-sei-in-condotta-al-romagnosi-di-un-intelletuale-scomodo/).
After classical high school he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy in Florence, where all his artistic, literary and scientific loves found an organic method: a circumstance that would make him appreciated by the entire world of post-war Italian culture. From 1943 he took part in the partisan resistance, contributed to the genesis of the first anti-fascist intellectual movements, and joined "Giustizia e Libertà", a liberal-socialist formation founded in 1929 in Paris by Rosselli and Lussu.
Shortly afterwards he chose to join the clandestine Communist Party, “[…] not so much because of ideological contrasts, but rather the desire to be part of a broader group, which carried the greatest weight of the struggle. But the communist ranks were above all made up of workers and workers in general, and I, who came from a different social class, wanted to make the forms and aims of the anti-fascist struggle my own, starting precisely from the urgent needs of the world of work. (S. Raffo, “Emergencies. Conversations with Aldo Braibanti”, Vicolo del Pavone, Piacenza, 2003, page 37).
The young intellectual was arrested twice: the first in July 1943, together with the future republican secretary Ugo La Malfa, and released when, after 25 July, Pietro Badoglio gave the order to free teachers and students (while the adult communists would be shot by the Germans); the second in 1944 by the "Carità gang", the slang name of the "Special Services Department" of Florence, later renamed the "Investigative Police Office", dependent on the Volunteer Militia for national security, founded by Mario Carità.
The philosopher finds freedom during the Battle of Florence, when the various partisan components and the Allies liberate the city from the Nazi-fascist troops. However, all of Aldo Braibanti's writings up to 1940 were destroyed forever.
Thanks to the merits achieved in the field, the PCI appointed him head of the Tuscan communist youth in 1945, but, already in 1947, he abandoned active politics by resigning from all positions (in the meantime he obtained a degree in theoretical philosophy):
“After the liberation, that party struggled a lot to translate a war strategy into a peace policy: democratic centralism was the most clear example of its distrust towards the libertarian demands which were also at the origin of the communist movement. But despite the errors and distortions of Stalinism, the Communist Party has represented for years in Italy a bulwark in defense of the young democracy". (S. Raffo, page 28).
Not a goodbye, therefore, but a farewell. Until 1956, when, invited to participate in the VIII National Congress of the PCI, Braibanti intervened polemically on some aspects of Stalinism, primarily the invasion of Hungary, and accused a “a progressive bourgeoisification of the official left”. (S. Raffo, page 28).
Meanwhile, since 1947, the philosopher, together with other young intellectuals, including the Bussotti brothers, gave life to the community experience of the Torrione Farnese in Castell'Arquato: it was a series of multipurpose workshops, where everyone was invited to express and deepen your talent. The process lasts six years, when the relevant municipal administration does not renew the rental contract to the community.
For the intellectual from Piacenza, these were fundamental years, because he was able to deepen his theatrical and poetic interests, as well as build artificial anthills that would make him famous as a myrmecologist. From 1962 we find him in Rome permanently, where he collaborates with the young Carmelo Bene, the composer Vittorio Gelmetti, resumes working with Sylvano Bussotti, and assists for a short period in the genesis of the "Quaderni Piacentini", a quarterly political magazine founded in March of 1962 by Piergiorgio Bellocchio and Grazia Cherchi.
The narrative starts from here, according to which Braibanti occupies a prominent place in Italian "History", as if his participation in the Resistance, having spent himself in the birth, and subsequent growth, of community experiences, publications of poetic works and scripts for the theater , didn't make his life extraordinary as such!
CASUS BELLI
In 1959 Aldo Braibanti met Giovanni Sanfratello, the second son of a bourgeois Catholic family close to conservative thought, therefore very distant from the demands for change of which the sixties were the creators.
Beyond the antipathy that an "anarchic" intellectual arouses towards traditionalists, the philosopher from Piacenza is already talked about, that is, rumors are circulating about his sexual orientation, a situation that triggers a visceral hatred in the Sanfratello family.
Giovanni is an eighteen-year-old with a talent for drawing, forced into a cycle of classical studies, because in the eyes of his parents, being an artist means attacking the respectability of his class, discrediting them all. The young person, therefore, experiences relationships with close relatives with anguish, and finds in the myrmecologist an adult figure who does not judge him, but helps him to bring order to his personal "hodgepodge" of emotions.
Over time, the initial friendship becomes affection, then an intimate relationship. As mentioned, in 1962, Braibanti moved to Rome, and since Giovanni had reached the age of majority (21 years old at the time), he urged him about the possibility of following him to the capital and helping him in some artistic collaborations.
The invitation is accepted, with the clear hope of being able to lead a peaceful life and above all far from the ideological constraints of the Sanfratello family.
Naturally, between 1959 and 1962, the twenty-year-old's parents tried several times to prevent him from meeting Braibanti, and, in various situations, including trips to Umbria to visit relatives, one to Paris for a month with a missionary priest, Milan, Florence , the operation is successful.
After some research, they discover that the son and the philosopher are staying in Rome at the "Zuanelli" pension in via Montecatini 5, and the pressure on the young man to return home begins again. Therefore, the peaceful life hoped for by the couple turns into a chimera, and subsequently, hell.
On 12 October 1964, Ippolito Sanfratello filed a complaint against Braibanti with the Rome prosecutor's office: the accusation was plagiarism, that is, having physically and mentally subjected his son Giovanni.
Prosecutor Loiacono opened an investigation that would continue for 4 years, when the intellectual from Piacenza, on 5 December 1967, was arrested and taken to "Regina Coeli". Meanwhile, on November 1, 1964, the now twenty-three-year-old Giovanni was literally "kidnapped" by his father and forced, first to the mental hospital in Parma, then to Verona, to psychiatric treatments such as insulin shocks and electroshocks, forever undermining his mental balance. of the second born.
The first sentence arrived on 14 July 1968 by the Court of Assizes of Rome, and sentenced the accused to 9 years of imprisonment despite the general mitigating circumstances. It is stated in it that the type of crime exists, plagiarism, as the philosopher would have achieved absolute psychic dominion over passive subjects (in the plural because another young man, Pier Carlo Toscani, is heard, complacent in admitting to having been plagiarized) canceling their freedom to self-determine.
The subsequent sentence, dated 28 November 1969, issued by the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Rome, leaves the ruling at first instance unchanged, except for reducing the sentence to four years, of which two have already been served (1967-1969), two pardoned in as a former partisan.
The Court of Cassation will express its opinion on 21 October 1971, reiterating the previous interpretations of the contested crime. Aldo Braibanti is the only citizen of the Italian Republic to have been indicted for the infamous art. 603, introduced into the Criminal Code, we are in 1930, by the "Minister of Justice and religious affairs" Alfredo Rocco.
WHAT IS THE CRIME OF PLAGIARISM
As Umberto Eco points out in his essay dedicated to Braibanti, “[…] the key words of this investigation […] are not used with a referential but an “emotional” function; and which in this way are taken up by both investigators and judges, without ever making an effort to remove the verbal terms from their emotional aura, but rather taking advantage of this aura to exempt themselves from further checks".
(see U. Eco, “Under the name of plagiarism”, in The home costume, Edizioni Tascabili Bompiani, Milan, 2012, pag. 137).
What the semiologist states is not a question of wool, because what Rocco introduces, in the code that bears his name, is the equivalence between the historical concept of plagiarism with that of "brainwashing": so much so that even today, in common language, being plagiarized, for example by a religious sect, takes on the semantic nuance of mental manipulation of the unfortunate person.
The word plagiarism cannot be attributed to the former Keeper of the Seals, and derives from Roman law. Since the 3rd century BC “plagium” refers to the crime of someone who takes possession of another's slave, or makes a free man such.
The elaboration of the type of crime in Roman law is carried out with the "lex Fabia (III - II century BC), and includes both the case of those who present a free man as a slave, or the slave of others as their own, and those who deprive personal freedom, chain or sell, a freeman or a freedman. Therefore, for Roman law, and it will be so until the early Middle Ages, plagiarism means illegally enslaving.
The poet Martial (40-104 AD), in epigram 52, uses the word plagiarism in a figurative sense, drawing a similarity between those who copy other people's literary works and those who illegally enslave a free individual. Even today, in copyright disputes, we use the linguistic broadening of the Latin poet (remember the singer Albano against Michel Jackson?), so as to perfectly understand what literary, discographic, artistic plagiarism, and so on, is. .
It seems clear that in ancient law, until the beginning of the modern age, the crime of plagiarism pertains to individuals without legal personality, therefore, with the progressive acceptance of the principle of equality, and the abolition of the institution of slavery ( international convention of Saint-Germain, 1919, Geneva 1926 and 1956), the notion of plagiarism changes radically, no longer taking the form of a crime against the property of human beings, but exclusively against individual freedom.
In the first post-unification Italian penal code (1889, Zanardelli) plagiarism is contextualised in its historical meaning, and punished with imprisonment from 12 to 20 years "whoever reduces a person to slavery or other similar conditions" (art. 145 Zanardelli penal code).
The underlying principle is linked to physical deprivation, i.e. slavery as a state of law, in a country, Italy, in which the ownership of individuals is no longer foreseen. The legislator of 1930 takes a further step: it maintains the historical meaning of plagiarism in the art. 600 (still present today in the code), and introduces art. 603, which punishes those who “subjects a person to its power in such a way as to reduce them to a total state of subjection”. That is, the plagiarized person presents himself to all intents and purposes as if he were a slave, without this implying being sold to third parties or limiting some individual freedoms.
For the first time in the world, Alfredo Rocco incriminates what would later be called brainwashing.
Braibanti aside, there are very few cases in which someone has been called to answer for the crime of plagiarism, such as the actor Maurizio Arena, who, around 1960, had a "love story" with Maria Beatrice di Savoia, fourth daughter of the king of Italy Umberto II. The royals tried to justify their daughter's affection towards Arena as plagiarism, but the matter was resolved in little less than a soap bubble.
More structured are the cases of Eugenio Siragusa, founder of the flying saucer cult "Cosmic Brotherhood", arrested in 1978 on charges of plagiarizing the Hooker couple, American followers and financiers, and acquitted in 1982; and Don Emilio Grasso, a charismatic Catholic priest, accused of distancing young people from their families and of having created, around himself, an exasperated cult of his own person.
Above all, the second case has a fundamental historical importance, as it is exactly in this context that the request for the unconstitutionality of the art is formulated. 603, so much so that the sentence of the Constitutional Court n° 96 of 1981, in which the illegitimacy of the article in question was declared, is simplified as the “Grasso Sentence”.
To put it briefly, the Constitutional Court recognizes two critical issues in the formulation of the crime of plagiarism: it violates Article 25 of the Constitution, because it lacks the clarity criteria necessary to limit the type of crime; and article 21, according to which everyone has the right to express their ideas through any means of dissemination.
BRAIBANTI AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT
Many are convinced that the "Braibanti case" was the classic straw that broke the camel's back, such that, after it, it seemed obvious that the crime implied in the art. 603 was declared illegitimate.
Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth! The Court of Cassation ruled on the myrmecologist on 21 October 1971, while 8 June 1981 was the date on which the Constitutional Court removed the article in question from the Criminal Code. The intellectual from Piacenza immediately requests a review of the sentence, on which the Constitutional Court expressed its opinion on 18 December 1981.
Well, the request is refused, with a thrilling reason: the philosopher is told that, even if art had never existed. 603, which sought to punish brainwashing in an unclear way, would have been condemned anyway, because it was much closer to the hypotheses of plagiarism discussed under the force of Italian legislation prior to 1930, therefore Zanardelli 1889.
According to the Court, the prosecution managed to demonstrate that Braibanti "enslaved", that is, plagiarized in its historical meaning, Sanfratello and Toscani. As we will see later, the political value of the Braibanti trial is very high, it affects figures who in the history of Italy intertwined their destinies with the extra-parliamentary right and the secret services.
Added to this is the homosexuality of the protagonists, the bugaboo that determines "emotionally", as Umberto Eco said, the entire dynamic, such that if they had been an adult man and a young girl, no one would have dreamed of bringing them face to face with a judge.
Aldo Braibanti, dies guilty, despite the birth of a homosexual liberation movement in Italy in 1971, despite the referendum victories on divorce and abortion, despite the conquests of feminism, despite, in 1981, the customs of Italians were completely different compared to 1964 , date on which the first report is filed.
The Braibanti case continues to be a gigantic distortion even today, because it is easy to conclude that the outcome of post-war Italy was still fascist, and that reactionary forces tried to prevent at all costs, see the strategy of tension, progressive changes in substance.
This is all true, but in 1981? Is it possible that the theorem according to which two men, or two women, could not freely choose to share their bodies, without inconveniencing plagiarism in its historical meaning, was still considered valid?
Without prejudice to the fact that homophobia influenced the trial, and also the judgment on the request for review of the sentence, I believe that other elements contributed to forming, unfortunately for Braibanti, the perfect storm.
IT'S NOT NECESSARY TO BE DISGUSTED
Classifying the crime of plagiarism as an instrument of a conservative power, with which to curb the desire for change, for self-determination, is somewhat reductive. Because the hypothesis, although true in a reactionary framework - and in Italy, between 1969 and 1980, it was full of similar forces - is not exhaustive, and there is a risk of bypassing phenomena that are impossible to exclude.
I fear that the point of view needs to be broadened, because to return to Eco's emotional quote, those who wrote about Braibanti, friends, intellectuals such as Moravia, Pasolini, Maraini, the Bellocchio brothers, and the interested party himself, have always underlined the the unreality of the accusation: in the film, addressed by Scribani, the philosopher replies that “This all seems like a farce to me”, something ancient, non-Enlightenment, so absurd that it cannot find rational justification.
Piergiorgio Bellocchio himself, in the “Quaderni Piacentini”, notices the solution of continuity:
If all this could happen with impunity, up to the crazy sentence of conviction, the press is gravely responsible for this [...] But we too must do self-criticism [...] We couldn't conceive the hypothesis of a conviction. We were furious and humiliated that a friend was in prison for a non-existent crime and had to endure the gratuitous torture of a trial, but we concluded: “They will never be crazy enough to convict him.” We were in a hurry to get out of this nightmare." (P. Bellocchio, Why was Aldo Braibanti convicted, “Quaderni Piacentini”, VII, number 35, 1968, page 92).
Even more explicit in the preface of the aforementioned “Emergencies. Conversations with Aldo Braibanti”, where we read:
The case was sensational, caused a scandal and met with the unanimous disapproval of public opinion. However, it mobilized too late for such a well-planned and directed conspiracy to be dismantled. A public opinion taken by entirely different events (it was the height of '68) and almost incredulous in the face of that anachronistic and apparently absurd "monstrum". Even his friends, who had moved promptly, were incredulous. And the conspirators ended up taking advantage of this disbelief to bring the operation to a successful conclusion. My sense of guilt - remorse and debt - also derive from this, from the awareness of not having been alarmed, of not having feared enough and therefore not done enough. (S. Raffo, page 1).
The trial was not a farce, and, probably, the Emilian intellectual paid for it, for the impossibility of believing that one could be convicted in 1968 for a crime that had transmigrated from the fascist code to the republican one.
The indignation has no legal value, and it matters little, as the myrmecologist's defenders did, to state before the judge that the last trial against homosexuality was carried out in the previous century to the detriment of Oscar Wilde. Even those who know “the affair”, they are amazed that an adult could be kidnapped, locked up for 15 months, subjected to psychiatric violence, released with the threat of new confinements in a mental hospital, and forced to read readings whose publication was no more recent than 100 years.
Why didn't anyone ask the question that perhaps it could be legal? Giovanni Jervis, Basaglia's collaborator psychiatrist, was the only one who did not fall into the emotional trap of indignation, as Moravia, Pasolini and many others did.
For us, children of all-out self-determination, it is inconceivable that anyone, even a close family member, could interfere in our private life. But as Jervis pointed out, again in the “Quaderni Piacentini”:
Invero, tutto l’affare Braibanti non deve stupirci. Sostenere, come facciamo, la “normalità” dell’istruttoria, del dibattimento e della condanna non significa né scartare l’identificazione di responsabilità personali, né ritenere che tutto sia stato preordinato nei piani alti del potere […], e neppure affermare che tutti i processi, in Italia, vanno a questo modo: ma semplicemente riconoscere che un certo “iter” di violenza ha potuto seguire vie già sicure, ben battute, anche se poco note.
Il fatto che per iniziativa e testimonianza dei famigliari un individuo possa venir rapito, sequestrato, sottoposto a terapie di shock, giudicato “definitivamente” malato di mente, […] non ha nulla di abnorme, ma rientra nell’esperienza di tutti i giorni per chi lavori negli ospedali psichiatrici. (see G. De Matteo alias G. Jervis, “Quaderni piacentini”, VII, fascicolo 36, 1968, pag.78).
Nel 1964 la Legge Basaglia è ancora lontana, e, a dirimere situazioni di questo genere, provvedeva la legge 36 del 14 maggio 1904, secondo la quale era sufficiente un certificato medico e un atto di notorietà per rinchiudere una persona in manicomio.
Dunque, come fa notare Jervis, sebbene agli occhi di tutti la distonia appariva evidente, era pratica comune. Negli ultimi anni, grazie a studi approfonditi, sono emerse storie incredibili di donne rinchiuse grazie alla legge 36, perché incapaci di sussumere la loro libertà al corpo dello stato fascista. (cfr. A. Valeriano, “Malacarne. Women and mental asylums in fascist Italy", Donzelli, Rome, 2017).
To avoid any misunderstanding, I am not stating that kidnapping Giovanni Sanfratello was right, but legal, yes, therefore, being disdainful of the methods, as many intellectuals did, meant not knowing the country in which one lived; and it matters little if at the trial the young man claimed that he had not been plagiarized by Braibanti, because his statements became a lethal weapon to demonstrate that the subjugation was so profound that it did not allow even the most popular psychiatric practices to cure him .
At the reality principle of the trial, the press, the writers, the poets, the myrmecologist's lawyers, preferred to orient themselves towards the principle petition, for which mental manipulation does not exist. Moravia (see A. Moravia, ed., “Sotto il nome di plagio”, Bompiani, Milan, 1969), rightly insists on the possibility that religious people, teachers, and many other categories could have been considered plagiarists, but this , for the purposes of the trial, was useless, because the art. 603 "bivouacked" in the code since 1930, unless the Constitutional Court was asked to rule on its legitimacy. Which happened in 1978 for Emilio Grasso and which led to the declaration of cancellation in 1981, while Braibanti remained at stake, bound to an absurd sentence which is still debated.
THE INTERNATIONAL DEBATE
The prosecution had 4 years (1964-1968) to draw up a solid procedural line, using all the weapons available: including that of an article, 603 of the Criminal Code, which guaranteed wide margins of interpretation by the judges , and a global discussion on mental manipulation techniques, which, especially in the United States, Russia, but also in China, involved important academics.
Reconstructing the interesting debate, which is not yet concluded, on the different positions at play is not possible, because each scholar who has dealt with the matter offers a particular nuance, depending on whether he is a psychiatrist, a philosopher or a psychologist, belonging to one school of thought rather than another.
The real problem, as happened in Italy, materializes to the extent that the legislator offers space for amendments with illiberal content, as he is convinced, perhaps in good faith, that he is serving a just cause. After all, the twentieth century, with psychoanalysis and the question of the possibility of conditioning the unconscious, the use of hypnosis in various fields, Pavlovian theories, all totalitarianisms with the personal objective of generating new men, has created at least dystopian scenarios .
The American terror over the spread of communist ideas in the 1950s, thanks also to manipulative methods, was such as to generate a phenomenon like McCarthyism, certainly not a clear page in the history of "made in the USA".
Between the army and the secret services of the respective countries involved in the conflicts of Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War in general, serious investigations were circulating on the state of mental health of the prisoners returned home: the greatest fear concerned the hypothesis that someone they may have suffered "brainwashing" - a term coined by Edward Hunter, American journalist, propagandist, author of books that became famous in the 1950s/60s - turning into potential internal enemies.
A final example to summarize and simplify the international debate is the MK-ULTRA project, born in 1953, clandestinely by the CIA, with the aim of carrying out experiments on men with the use of specific drugs, torture techniques, ways of manipulation, to extort information. The program was canceled only in 1973, after twenty years of violence against Canadian and American citizens.
Poor Giovanni Sanfratello is a sort of Italian response to the attempts at mental de-programming that were played out in other scenarios: otherwise insulin shocks, electroshocks, and who knows what else could not be explained on a twenty-three-year-old boy whose only fault is to converge emotionally with a male human being.
Not to mention all those women and men, who in the silence of the media outcry, suffered the same treatments and emerged devastated. Therefore, if in 1964 I am an ultra-conservative parent who discovers his son's homosexuality, I possess knowledge at every level, I have a law, n° 36, which allows me to kidnap him, the connivance of the psychiatrists' association, an adult little more that forty-year-old, former partisan, with ideas attributable to Marxism in its advanced form, to be accused of psychological plagiarism, the theorem is packaged!
Far from being a medieval trial, as many, out of laziness, still think.
For information purposes, I would like to point out that in Italy, the discussion on the crime of psychological subjugation has never subsided. The day after the Constitutional Court's ruling, great jurists, such as the former "Minister of Justice" Giovanni Maria Flick, spoke out against the "Grasso Sentence", underlining the legislative void caused by the cancellation.
The first attempt to legislate in favor of plagiarism occurred in 1988, and the bill bears the names of Rosa Russo Jervolino and Giuliano Vassalli, politicians certainly not attributable to the anti-democratic camp.
Closer to us is the parliamentary effort made by Senator Elisabetta Casellati and Senator Renato Meduri, when, in 2005, they proposed an article, 613-bis, with the serious intent of circumventing the hypotheses of unconstitutionality put in place in 1981.
In this regard, the stenographic report, dated 8 November 2011, of the 268th session of the II Justice Commission is very interesting, where Professor Antonio Pagliaro, emeritus of criminal law at the University of Palermo, maintains that the most recent version (the senator's bill Caruso, 2011) is a decisive step forward to overcome the obstacles represented by articles 25 and 21 of the Constitution. Fortunately, even in this circumstance, nothing happened. (see https://www.senato.it/service/PDF/PDFServer/DF/278999.pdf)
The need to legislate in this sense is proportional to the increase in the phenomenon of pseudo-religious sects, in which criminal lawyers believe they find margins for misleading psychic identity, which an "ad hoc" law could compensate for. But the problem remains, because incorrect use of this tool could punish the quality of the ideas, rather than a type of crime.
THE HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
In 1979, Felix Cossolo, director of the magazine "Lambda", asked and obtained an interview from Braibanti in which he asked about the trial:
Q: In your opinion, what is the real reason why they convicted you?
A: I think it is the inevitable consequence of a certain type of barrier: they wanted to block what was believed to be a wave of rebellion and destruction of institutions. The trial was nothing more than an attempt to save the barons. Let's not forget that it happened before the fight against divorce, against abortion and above all that the possibility of putting plagiarism back into operation could be useful to a certain Italy. (see https://www.culturagay.it/saggio/144, quote from “Lambda” magazine, year IV, n° 20, January – February 1979).
Aldo Braibanti is right, although, from my point of view, he is a close approximation. The Italy that the crime of plagiarism served is that of never clarified complicity, of occult powers and secret services: the people who revolve around the intellectual from Piacenza are the same who in the following years will have leading roles in the massacre trials, such as Bologna or Piazza Fontana.
Judging the philosopher in 1968 was Orlando Falco, to whom Valpreda would be entrusted the following year, unjustly accused of having planned the massacre at the Banca dell'Agricoltura (the temporal convergence, 12 December 1969, between the reading of the second sentence degree to the myrmecologist and Piazza Fontana is shocking).
Of great importance is the figure of Aldo Semerari, professor of criminology at "La Sapienza" in Rome, director of the institute of forensic psychopathology and highly regarded expert in the Italian courts. Well, Professor Semerari follows all the psychiatric reports of the trial, providing, where needed, the best possible interpretation to maintain the siege on Braibanti.
An ambiguous character, the criminologist has linked his name to the darkest events in Italian history, such as the Bologna massacre, the kidnapping of the Christian Democrat Ciro Cirillo, the Mino Pecorelli crime; thanks to compliant technical consultancy, he was able to make use of criminal labourers, including the "Magliana gang" and the historical mafias. It will be a Camorra feud that will decree the death of the forensic expert, found decapitated in his car in front of the home of Vincenzo Casillo, Raffaele Cutolo's trusted man.
Other professionals of the "mind" helped the Sanfratello family to create the accusatory theorem, such as Romolo Rossini, a psychiatrist from a private clinic in Modena who was the first to apply the electrodes to poor Giovanni's brain. Followed by Cherubino Trabucchi, director of the Provincial Asylum of Verona, brother of Giuseppe Trabucchi, Minister of Finance between 1960 and 1963, as well as deputy mayor of Verona. As Jervis points out in the “Quaderni Piacenza,
The case is exemplary for another reason. It clearly demonstrates that the "technical" authority of the psychiatrist has no practical autonomy, just as it has no scientific autonomy. This authority is simply the continuation, under the guise of academic respectability, of family and state repression.
Giovanni Sanfratello was considered mentally ill when this label and this procedure were the only ones that could serve to radically take him away from his friends and return him, after a suitable period of isolation and reconditioning, to his family; and he was considered "not ill" and "never ill" by the experts, when the operation was now completed and when this thesis served excellently to demonstrate that the abnormalities of his behavior were to be attributed to Braibanti, and not to mental illness.
In both circumstances, psychiatrists proved to be not at the service of power, but an integral part of power itself. (see G. De Matteo alias G. Jervis, “Quaderni Piacentini”, VII, issue 36, 1968, page 78).
If Jervis' intuition is correct, why not extend it to other sectors of the state which in turn are in solidarity with a repressive system? Isn't it that "the Braibanti case", in a few decades, will be considered, given the coincidences of some dates, as the last unarmed attempt at a strategy that will soon bloodied Italy?
I realize that the provocation makes the wrists tremble, and that it should be specified better, but, the more one delves into the matter, the greater the sensation that the philosopher from Fiorenzuola d'Arda was the victim of a dress rehearsal, an obligatory step to test the system. But why his figure? Easy to target for two reasons: his being untied to any political party and to a highly representative publishing chain, and his homosexuality, a condition that tickled the creeping homophobia of many compatriots, beyond his profession.
Jervis concludes his article thus:
However, it is legitimate to express dissent when we read in the same sentence that it was a backwards battle. It may be that defending Braibanti is a backwards battle, but here it is not so much a question of defending a person, but of understanding and attacking a system, and the battle against the system and its mechanisms of violence is never backwards. (see G. De Matteo alias G. Jervis, “Quaderni Piacentini”, VII, issue 36, 1968, page 79).
CONCLUSIONS
I realize I exaggerated, nine folders of "words" are a lot for an article created to be published on the web. I assure you that sadism has nothing to do with it! Rather, the desire to contribute to the discussion participates, because I am convinced that "the affair"Braibanti does not only have to do with a gang of priests, psychiatrists, conniving judges, but is the mature fruit of a country which, if on the one hand it claims the right to accuse someone of plagiarism, on the other hand it renounces defend it by screaming intellectual scandal.
As I have tried to highlight, the perfect storm has broken out around the myrmecologist, made up of debates on brainwashing at an international level, by a right incapable of incorporating any form of social change, and, last but not least, the inability to transform indignation in a strategy useful to the philosopher.
The press in general, as well as the intellectuals, the Radical Party in the voice of Marco Pannella, have sided in favor of the petition of principle, the freedom of adults to self-determine, forgetting that trials are very often played on technicalities dialectics, on the defense's ability to dismantle accusatory theorems.
And this was not done, because in post-unification Italy, after Zanardelli, a crime against homosexuality no longer existed, therefore it was useless, as can be seen from the documents of the trial, and from the newspapers, to underline that what was being punished it was Braibanti's sexual orientation, in addition to his being a former partisan and communist.
The alleged crime was plagiarism, enslaving Giovanni Sanfratello and Pier Carlo Toscani. And unfortunately, the ruling of the Constitutional Court, which in December 1981 rejected the request for revision of the sentence formulated by the poet from Piacenza, is very clear on this. Why was there also a lack of disappointment among the learned and wise at this juncture?
Webography
Fundamental to understanding the crime of plagiarism is the "Grasso Sentence", in which the historical meaning of the same is reconstructed in its entirety. It concludes with the declaration of illegitimacy of art. 603 of the criminal code
https://www.gazzetta ufficio.it/eli/id/1981/06/10/081C0096/s1.
To understand the parliamentary attempts to legislate in favor of plagiarism after 1981 it is useful to consult the shorthand report (Tuesday 8 November 2011) of the Second Permanent Commission (Justice), in which Professor Antonio Pagliaro tries to demonstrate that the perplexities expressed have been overcome in the “Grasso Sentence”.
https://www.senato.it/service/PDF/PDFServer/DF/278999.pdf.
The “Quaderni Piacentini”, a quarterly political-social genre, published from March 1962 until 1984, are now entirely digitized and available for consultation on the following site:
https://bibliotecaginobianco.it/?e=flip&id=37&t=editore-flipping-Quaderni+Piacentini.
Quotations in the text of the Piacenza notebooks:
https://bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/QPC/07/3500/#92.
https://bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/QPC/07/3600/#72.
The quote relating to the interview with Braibanti in the magazine “Lambda” is taken from the site:
https://www.culturagay.it/saggio/144.
All issues of the magazine are being digitized and can be consulted at:
https://www.wikipink.org/index.php/Lambda_(magazine).
The mimeograph "to all living men" written by Aldo Braibanti can be found here:
Bibliography
– A. Braibanti, “The state prisons”, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1969.
– U. Eco, “Il costume di casa”, Bompiani, Milan, 1st Pocket Edition, 2012.
– G. Ferluga, “The Braibanti trial”, Silvio Zamorani Editore, Turin, 2003.
– M. Introvigne, “Brainwashing: reality or myth?”, Elledici, Turin, 2002.
– A. Moravia [et. al], “Under the name of plagiarism”, Bompiani, Milan, 1969.
– S. Raffo, “Emergencies. Conversations with Aldo Braibanti”, Vicolo del Pavone, Piacenza, 2003.
– G. Rossi Barilli, The Gay movement in Italy, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1999.
– A. Valeriano, “Malacarne. Women and mental hospitals in fascist Italy", Donzelli, Rome, 2017.