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©I TA LY DA I LY, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27 , 2 0 0 0
©©By Salvatore Sechi
SPECIAL TO ITALY DAILY
The way some Italian publishers treat contemporary history can be said to smack of an authoritarian regime.
This is due to numerous influences that span the political spectrum the ferocious anti-Fascism of the Partito d'Azione, which dissolved in 1948 but left a rustproof cultural matrix, the post-Fascism of the Italian Communist Party, and the juggling acts of the Christian Democrats.
The president of the region of Lazio, former Fascist Francesco Storace, is right to denounce the conformism and falsification of the past found in Italy's history textbooks.
Very few of them tell the truth about the scarce popular participation in the Italian Resistance of 1943-1945, preferring instead to propagate a posthumous legend created around the partisan story, replete with a burlesque form of anti-Americanism, repetition of the Communist credo that the postwar world was nothing but a conservative desert subordinated to Washington's orders, right-wing coups and conspiracies—with the wicked CIA poking around everywhere.
Two simultaneous facts made possible this one-sided representation of republican Italy. First of all, the state's monopoly on schooling prevented any real debate from taking place between historians on the right and the left, thus canceling any real push for innovation Secondly, school boards have acted as a form of social control on those teachers who didn't identify with the left.
It is true that the choice of textbooks has fallen on the boards, teachers and parent groups. However, the one-sided atmosphere characterizing the meetings where these choices are made has made it difficult to select any books other than the ones bearing the "progressive" imprint of publishers Zanichelli, La Nuova Italia, Laterza and Bruno Mondadori.
In regions like Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Umbria, once fanatically Fascist and then fanatically Communist, any teacher daring to disagree by choosing politically moderate textbooks risks isolation.
Unfortunately, public schooling, which provides for over 95 percent of education in Italy, is about conformity and not liberty when it comes to teaching. Freedom to teach is a feeble theoretical proclamation of the bigots of state education bureaucracy, and serves as a purely ideological screen over the enlightenment legend of a school for everyone.
My own political and cultural formation had a left-leaning, liberal socialist tone, and involved some militancy—against my family's tradition—in the Italian Communist Party, or PCI.
But when as a university professor I assigned works by so-called revisionists like Zeev Sternhell, Andreas Hillgruber, Raymond Aron, Renzo De Felice and François Furet in order to balance the versions of leftist historians not always of the highest caliber, I was treated as if I were the victim of the plague.
Cultural pluralism, the need to hear the sounds of different bells, is not the rule in Italian school, but a bitter exception. Those engaging in it are not openly discriminated against, but quietly isolated by colleagues armed with furtive smiles.
What Mr. Storace doesn't realize is that even the most severe book review commissions — which he suggests should examine the texts in use today —would end up playing the dirty roles of censors.
At any rate, the holy war declared against rotten history books is more or less like jousting against windmills. Beginning next year, use of standard texts will decrease because of new university reforms.
Professors will no longer teach a single lesson to all their students. Instead, they will break up their teaching into periods, topics or important figures— Communism in southern Europe; political imagery during Fascism and the New Deal; Nazi architect Albert Speer; Fiat executive Vittorio Valletta.
The history books that stirred up so much controversy will wither on the vine.
Even the generation that uses the Resistance as a smokescreen to hide the PCI's former political servility to the Soviet Union and the terrorist nature of communist regimes around the world, portraying U.S. foreign policy as a kind of planetary imperialism, has become an increasingly awkward presence inside the center-left Ulivo coalition.
Up until now, the decision as to what went into history books was the prerogative of publishers, who tended to adapt themselves to the left-leaning form of Italian political correctness that pervaded the nation's schools as well as the culture desks of newspapers, magazines and state television.
But lately, new forces have appeared on the political and cultural scene—liberal democratic, ex-Fascist, federalist movements, all with their different ideologies and interests.
The intellectual bases of these new players are simply not present in today's history books, or, when they are, they are lumped together into a blob of vague, para-Fascist neo-liberalism. It is no longer possible to exorcise these movements by summarily branding them as "anti-Communist." That's less and less a derogatory term in Italy. The cloak of anti-Fascism that hordes of democratic and non-democratic forces have worn is slowly unraveling, revealing what a horrible destiny countries such as Italy and France would have met had they not had anti-Communist leaders like Alcide De Gasperi and Charles De Gaulle, not to mention allies like the United States.
True scholars who have always fought against today's dominant approach are the most appropriate candidates to write the books that tell Italians their history free of the resentment and posthumous - revenge sparked by the civil war and, later, the Cold War. But that will require teachers who, instead of holding rallies and preaching, learn to conceive of historiography as something other than a soliloquy.
Instead of criminalizing dissent over the crucial moments in our nation's history, differing opinions should be taken as the rule of the game for historians and for the principle of national reconciliation.
Mr. Sechi is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Ferrara.
© Italy Daily/IHT 2000
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