Gherardo Colombo was the first guest of the Italian Society of Trinity College Dublin for 2010/’11. He spoke to a packed Emmett Theatre about his career as one of Italy’s leading public prosecutor in the 1990s, when he was a member of the so-called pool di Mani Pulite or “Clean Hands Team”, a group of investigators based in Milan and who in 1992 uncovered a pervasive and widespread network of corruption involving leading politicians and the private sector. What followed appeared to be a complete renewal of the political establishment — powerful men who had been in power for years, sometimes decades, ended up in prison or fled abroad, where one in particular, several times Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, died, in exile.
What followed is history: in 1994, Silvio Berlusconi, who had managed to build a large private media network thanks to his close friendship with Mr Craxi, managed nevertheless, using said network, to convince the Italian electorate that he was a new man; someone who had built his own immense wealth — he was, already then, the owner of AC Milan — by dint of hard work; someone who had not risen from the ranks of “professional politicians” and represented therefore a new way of doing politics.
Gherardo Colombo resigned from the judiciary in 2007. As he told his audience today, he did so in protest, because he felt like a plumber who is asked to fix a fault with a secondary tap but is not allowed to fix the mains, where the problem originates. He has since devoted his time to what he considers a mission to educate people, especially young Italian students, about the importance of rules.
Dr Colombo started his talk by asking the audience whether rules are in place to help the individual to pursue happiness. A very straightforward question to which, after some hesitation, the audience answered more or less unanimously in the positive: rules allow people to be happy because they protect their freedom.
Colombo challenged this answer: have rules, he asked, always been there to allow people to be happy? Were rules meant to allow everyone to be happy before the French Revolution, for instance? Were rules meant to allow everyone to be happy when slavery was legal, or when women didn’t have the right to vote?
Gherardo Colombo’s core argument was that rules can only allow everybody’s happiness if we live in a horizontal society, in which every citizen has equal rights and obligations, but not in a pyramidal society, where people at the top have all the rights and people at the bottom all the obligations.
According to Colombo, the problem in Italy today is that its citizens see rules as a burden and individual happiness as more easily reached without that burden.
Is it because of the example set by the political establishment? Colombo disagrees. We are free, he argues, which means we are free to follow the rules of our own free volition, because it is convenient to do so, and we don’t need a positive example from above.
This is true, I think, at a very abstract level, and perhaps only for someone who already knows that rules in a democracy are there to ensure equal rights for every citizen. But if someone grew up in an environment in which this is not the consensus, where those who are law-abiding and pay their dues appear as naive because racketeers and tax dodgers are allowed to prosper, won’t they naturally consider rules to be an obstacle to happiness and a burden, and those who try to enforce the rules — the State, police — as their enemy? One member of the public, in particular, mentioned his own personal experience: being born in southern Italy, he was brought up in a society where everyone, upper to working class, lived by the very simple maxim: “F**k the State”.
Colombo seemed to disagree. As he put it, many Italians “prefer” to live by the rules of the Mafia and organized crime rather than by the rules of the State. “Prefer” is the term he used: as if murder and intimidation, and very often a State failing to offer adequate protection to its law-abiding citizens, had no role in their “choice”.
In Italy today, as Colombo himself pointed out, 50 percent of the trials involving top-level organized crime and politicians do not result in a sentence of either conviction or absolution due to increasingly restrictive statutes of limitations; numerous elected representatives, protected by parliamentary immunity, are or were suspected of dealing with mafiosi, or under investigation as mafiosi themselves; and many of the rules brought in by Italian lawmakers in recent years explicitly favour criminal behaviour or condone offenders — most notoriously the decriminalization of false accounting, which is now no longer a criminal offence but merely an administrative one.
In such a country, where citizens appear to have a high level of tolerance towards illegal behaviour — and, as pointed out by a member of the audience, society seems to be reversing from a horizontal back to a pyramidal model one step at a time — education is, according to Gherardo Colombo, the only admissible means whereby this drift can be stopped. Rules should not be broken — a reference to insurrection and the Arab Spring was thus dismissed — but changed, if unfair, through education.
Colombo’s talk suffered perhaps from an excess of didacticism — the mood that quickly settled in was very much a classroom mood, rather than a lecture-theatre one. At times, it felt as though the audience was being treated as if in secondary school, with a perhaps slightly patronising attitude on Dr Colombo’s part, who opted for a very interactive style, walking up and down the lecture theatre and addressing individual members of the audience. One of them, after answering a question in a way which obviously pleased Colombo, was treated by the latter to a rather surprisingly “give me five”. The person in question seemed absolutely delighted by this, but the impression Irish undergraduates got of this interaction was, I think, a bit puzzled.
Another amusing incident happened when Colombo was expressing the idea that in a pyramidal society people at the bottom are used as instruments by people higher up in the hierarchy. Colombo opted for the word tool and started saying that “in such a society women are tools (for men), children are tools (for adults), slaves are tools (for the free) etc.”, as the Irish undergraduates sitting in the front rows started looking at each other, desperately tried to suppress their laughters (see here for explanation) and Colombo immediately brought back to the Italians in the audience memories of their own primary school teachers by asking the undergraduates in question “May I know why you are all suddenly so amused?”
Tags: Gherardo Colombo, Italian Society, Mani Pulite, Non sono Stato io, rules, TCD
