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©©By Laura Collura
ITALY DAILY STAFF
The right-wing National Alliance drew accusations of wanting to censor freedom of expression on Friday, a day after the Lazio regional council approved the party’s proposal to create a panel that would investigate the alleged left-wing bias of history text-books used in many public schools. Under the proposal, submitted by regional National Alliance whip Fabio Rampelli, the regional government of Francesco Storace, also an official with the right-wing party, would appoint a panel of experts and charge them with "analyzing carefully the text-books used in classrooms and under-scoring any insufficiency or arbitrary reconstruction of events." On Friday, National Alliance officials in the Lombardy region — governed by the center-right like Lazio — announced they were drawing up a similar proposal for their own schools. The National Alliance, the main heir to the post-Fascist Social Movement, has long maintained that many high school textbooks are designed to give history a "Marxist" slant. Its com-plaints grew shrill after 1996, when the center-left won the general elections and a former Communist, Luigi Berlinguer of the Democratic Left, became education minister. According to Mr. Rampelli, some textbooks "distort the facts and omit entire historical periods with the mere aim of increasing the value of Marxist historiography." National Alliance officials in Lazio insisted that their main grievances were not necessarily over the history of World War II and the role of Fascism, noting they also objected to the presence of a left-wing bias in the rendition of numerous recent events. A list of alleged left-leaning slips included a quote from a textbook by historians Augusto Camera and Rena-to Fabietti, according to whom media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, who in 1994 entered politics as the head of the center-right coalition, "exasperated the political tensions in the countries by aggressively using the media and by repeatedly attacking the judiciary, anti-Mafia investigators, the Bank of Italy, the Constitutional Court and especially the president of the Republic." But to many, the mere idea of setting up a commission to review text-books smacked of autocracy and ominously recalled the censorship policies of Fascist times. Also, that a party which a decade ago still called itself post-Fascist would object to the main-stream vision of history was enough to raise immediate suspicion that the party may have further to travel before it attains indisputable credibility. Mr. Berlinguer, the former education minister who stepped down
last April, said Friday that the idea remind-ed him of the "Minculpop," the acronym used to describe the Culture Ministry of fascist times, used as an instrument of political propaganda. Mr. Berlinguer’s successor, Education Minister Tullio De Mauro, also blasted the National Alliance’s idea as "absolutely to be condemned." Mr. De Mauro pointed out that under recently passed legislation, each school is an independent entity and as such has the right to select its own textbooks. As a result, no government — be it national or regional — has the right to interfere with a school’s decisions. "In Italy, we have free, autonomous schools, in which free communities of teachers discuss, examine and decide, freely, which books they want to use," Mr. De Mauro said. As the local initiative swelled into a nationwide debate, it became clear that the National Alliance was tread-ing on thin ice and that what appeared as a clever attack on the cen-ter- left might turn into a boomerang. Party leader Gianfranco Fini stepped in personally to defend his local associates, but also to accuse the center-left of trying to exploit a legitimate initiative in a narrow-minded way. "The furious reaction of the center-left proved that it is desperately using verbal violence to insult its political adversaries and to offend history," Mr. Fini said, adding that when the Lazio council voted the motion to create the commission, "no center-left councilor had objections to make." Mr. Fini also invited left-wing politicians to participate in the commission, challenging them to "endorse those historical falsehoods." For Leone Paserman, the president of Rome’s Jewish Community, Mr. Fini’s remarks only made matters worse. "I’m not surprised that local members of a political party that is not yet mature for democracy prove they are incapable of withstanding the difficulties of democracy and free debate," he said, "but I worry when I hear the national leader of a party represented in Parliament say that [the local officials’] decision is indisputably right." The dispute appeared to embarrass the National Alliance’s allies in the center-right coalition, which in recent weeks faced allegations of being intolerant and xenophobic after one of its partners, the Northern League, staged a march in Lombardy to protest the building of a mosque. Giuseppe Pisanu, Parliament’s lower house whip for Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, the largest in the coalition, called the idea of setting up a panel "inappropriate," and added: "[The National Alliance] has identified the illness, but they have come up with the wrong cure. The problem is finding the right cure." Even Francesco D’Onofrio, a centrist politician who in 1994 served as education minister in Mr. Berlusconi’s seven- month government, said: "I defend the teachers’ independence, so I believe it is impossible for any political body to determine which books are good and which are bad. In my view," he went on, "that many textbooks have a left-wing slant … is certainly a problem, and it must be faced. But this is part of a political and cultural battle, not of an institutional dispute." But Mr. Storace, the president of Lazio, refused to budge. "The commission will be set up, and it will have to be composed of high-level experts," he said. "We are not going to allow the day-after lamentations of professional hypocrites to intimidate us."
‘I believe it is impossible for any political body to determine which books are good and which are bad.’
© Italy Daily/IHT 2000
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