Italian MPs threaten to censor textbooks
Umberto Eco leads campaign as spectre of fascism is invoked
Philip Willan in Rome
Wednesday December 18, 2002
The Guardian
A proposal by the Italian parliament aimed at eliminating alleged leftwing bias from school history books has prompted a massive and furious reaction from the country's academics.
The parliamentary culture committee has called on the education ministry to exercise direct control over which history books are used in schools.
A motion approved by the committee last week invited the ministry to ensure that textbooks were scientifically rigorous and objective, especially when they dealt with events of the recent past.
In response, 6,000 people expressed support for an appeal by the writer Umberto Eco, called Hands Off Our Textbooks, within 48 hours of it being put on the internet, organisers said yesterday.
Eco expressed disquiet at the possibility that official censorship - once the prerogative of the fascist regime's ministry of popular culture
- might be on the agenda once again. The warning is being promoted by the newly founded Freedom and Justice Association.
Messages of support came from around the world, among them more than 60 from Britain, including from academics working at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Manchester.
The document drafted by Eco, the author The Name of the Rose and a professor of semiotics at Bologna university, says any government attempt to control school history books is unworthy of a democratic country.
Signed by fellow academics, teachers and ordinary citizens, the appeal says the government's proposal is reminiscent of "the still not distant times when the fascist, Nazi and Stalinist regimes exercised such a right of censorship."
The culture committee's motion was drafted by members of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, but it appears to have caught the government by surprise.
Carlo Giovanardi, the minister for relations with parliament, went as far as to say the government considered it "unacceptable", and he was personally convinced that vetting the objectivity of history books was not a task for the executive.
However, the prime minister himself has appeared to be sympathetic to the idea. "Our children must no longer study history books with Marxist deviations," Mr Berlusconi said two years ago, when presenting his political programme.
The governing centre-right House of Liberties coalition appears determined that textbooks should stiffen their criticism of communism, go a bit easier on fascism and refrain from attacking Mr Berlusconi.
A prime mover behind the culture committee's initiative is the Forza Italia MP Fabio Garagnani, who has drawn up a 36-page dossier on supposed leftwing bias in textbooks.
Among the books that have offended the would-be censors are Elements of the History of the 20th Century, by Augusto Camera and Renato Fabietti, criticised for defending communism as an ideology in search of equality and freedom. One passage which has caused offence says that the gulag was not the result of the communist ideal, but of Stalin's conversion to traditional imperialism.
Also frowned on is Francesco de Franchis' Italian-English Juridical Dictionary, which criticises the "vulgarity" of the ministers in Mr Berlusconi's first government, and a legislative programme "worthy of the [Nicaraguan] Somoza regime".
Simona Peverelli, the coordinator of the Freedom and Justice initiative,
said: "There is a massive response from the academic world, and from many parents who say they are worried about how their children will learn history in the future."
"I find it shocking that members of parliament could have even discussed this idea, and clearly many other citizens agree with me."
Among the messages of support posted on the Freedom and Justice website was one from a volunteer working with Médecins Sans Frontières in Sri Lanka.
"Berlusconi already controls everything, but the fact that he wants to rewrite history as though he was in possession of the Truth frankly makes my stomach turn," the supporter wrote.
Many Italian historians, including luminaries such as Lucio Villari and Franco Cardini, have also rejected Mr Garagnani's proposal.
Professor Cardini told the Corriere della Sera that a ministerial committee might, at most, make pronouncements on the scientific quality of historical works.
"It could be like a consumers' organisation that dispenses a badge of quality, but it shouldn't have the final say," he said.
The rightwing historian Marcello Veneziani was among the few professionals to back Mr Garagnani, agreeing that Italian history books still bear the influence of the ideologies in vogue in the 1970s. "It's not a question of censorship but of freeing ourselves from censorship," he said.
Ms Peverelli said the messages of support would be delivered to the education ministry.
Eco, for his part, hopes that the culture committee's proposal "simply remains in the limbo of evil intentions." But the very fact that the issue could have been raised, he wrote, was a cause of serious worry "for the state of health of our democratic system".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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