Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia.moderato
Titolo: Ancora su  Canfora, "La Democrazia, storia di un'ideologia" -un commento polacco

[NB: sono a continuare una sorta di dossier sulla _querelle_ Canfora, via
via da me raccolto su questo newsgroup a partire dal 17 novembre scorso]
Vi propongo un articolo di Adam Krezminski [sessantenne editore del giornale
Polityka, dal1973, uno dei principali giornalisti polacchi e presidente
dell'Associazione Polacco-Tedesca di Varsavia] originariamente pubblicato in
poolacco sulla Gazeta Wyborcza del 31/12/2005, e tradotto in tedesco su
Perlentaucher il 15/03/2006; ora è disponibile anche in inglese, lingua
che -immagino- è maggiormente nota ai lettori di questo newsgroup, ed in
questo ultimo fornato (traduzione: Abby Darcy) sono a riproporvelo.
Il titolo di per sè è eloquente: "La scandalosa storia della democrazia di
Canfora" :-)
[inizio citazione]
Germany and Poland on the same side of a historical debate? That's the way
it looks for Luciano Canfora, the 63-year-old author of "Democracy in
Europe", which has already been published in Italy, France and Spain and
will soon appear on the British market. The Munich based publishing house,
C.H. Beck, however, has refused. Amongst other reaons, it cited Canfora's
comments on Poland, his analysis of the Hitler Stalin pact and his
interpretation of Stalin's politics as a possible third way alongside
western parliamentary democracy and fascism.
Canfora is a reknowned historian in Italy and author of a valued biography
of Caesar; his Italian publishing house and the press rallied to his
defence. The Germans were criticised for censorship, not because of Poland
but because Canfora compares the Adenauer years in Germany to General
Franco's Spain.
Detlef Felken, chief editor of C.H. Beck publishing house says these
allegations are nonsense. After all, C.H. Beck published Norbert Frei's
work, "Vergangenheitspolitik" (politics dealing with the past) about the
failure to come to terms with Nazism during the Adenauer period, a book
which was also well-known in Poland. And the decision had nothing to do with
censorship, in his opinion. Anyone who wants to publish Canfora's book, he
says, may do so. It's just C.H. Beck didn't want anything to do with it
because, he claims, the Italian has written a pamphlet against democracy.
"He criticises western democracies wholesale as a system of exploitation and
tries to rehabilitate the "people's democracies," seeing their degeneration
as a tragic failure or the result of external intervention."
Canfora is an Italian Euro-communist. He dedicates much space in his book to
the Paris Commune of 1871 and to the French torture of Algerians during the
Algerian war, but fails to even mention the Gulags or Stalin's purges. For
him, Stalin was a great statesman and he believes the communist "people's
democracies" developed a higher level of democracy than parliamentary
democracies. This is what he writes of the pact between Hitler and Stalin:
"We know that the Russians felt they had been cheated by the deliberately
inconclusive way in which the English and French conducted the negotiations.
They repeated the decision of Brest-Litovsk, so-to-speak in a totally
different political situation, extracting themselves from the coming war as
then they had come out of the anti-imperialist war. Over the years, a myth
has sprung up over the 'partition' of Poland by Hitler and Stalin, yet
another episode in the long history of partition. The truth is that in
1938/39 Poland was a hysterically anti-Soviet and compliant towards Hitler's
Germany, on whose behavior Poland's foreign minister Beck, modelled his own
(including withdrawal from the League of Nations on August 11, 1938). After
the Munich Agreement of September 1938 Poland played a part in the partition
of Czechoslovakia annexed by the Reich, receiving, as its share of the
spoils, the mining area of Teschen. Polish policy in the months leading up
to the Nazi-Soviet pact is described in the following terms by Hugh
Seton-Watson, the greatest Western historian of eastern Europe, in his fine
study 'Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 1918-1941'(1945). 'Confident of
their hold on army and police, "cleverly" playing off against each other the
different sections of the Opposition, the bosses of the regime prayed that
the crisis would last as long as possible, and meanwhile made small
preparations either on the home front or on the frontiers.' For its part the
USSR, through the pact, regained the territories it had lost in the peace
imposed upon it by Germany in 1918 (a loss which the Versailles treaty had
not remedied)." (quote taken directly from "Democracy in Europe", Blackwell
Publishing)
The absurdities and misrepresentations are really overwhelming. Canfora
doesn't only ignore the secret ammendment to the pact between Hitler and
Stalin, which defined the border of a further partition of Poland, he also
keeps quiet about the 1921 peace treaty signed in Riga and Stalin's breach
of the 1934 Non-Aggression Pact. He skims over the fact that Hitler was
determined to wage war against the USSR but Poland repeatedly rejected the
proposition. However, Stalin and Hitler's preparations for war against
Poland are depicted by the Italian professor as a "pre-emptive peace," which
created "a convenient framework for the expanison of Soviet influence."
The reader can't believe his eyes. 15 years after the collapse of communism
and here is Canfora fully embracing the basic principle of Stalinism;
everything that served the USSR was historically right. That's not very far
removed from Putin's comment that the break-up of the USSR not only spelled
disaster for the fate of Russia, but also for Europe.
Felken is completely right when he says that the afore-mentioned passages
from Canfora's book are "scandalous". He's also right to argue that calling
the anti-Russian (and anti-German) Poles hysterical is tantamount to
"ignoring the past experiences of the Poles as well as those still to come.
This hysteria was more than justified..."
Canfora's incredibly arbitrary excerpts from the history of democracy
concentrate on ancient Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany and
naturally Russia - from the "obscina" (traditional village community) to the
USSR. Not a word about the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth which lasted
centuries, with its tradition of freedom and tolerance and the nobles'
democracy. Not a word about the Sejm (Polish parliament) and the Polish
Constitution of May 3, which was in fact the first consitution in Europe.
The Italian historian doesn't recognise the fundamental dilemma at the heart
of the Tsarist system after 1815 - a liberal constitutional monarchy in the
kingdom of Poland and an autocracy in Russia. He pinpoints Mazzini and
Garibaldi as the fathers of democracy in the 19th century and disregards the
Polish and Hungarian freedom movements.
Another horrendous footnote must be added to the list of omissions and
distortions which the publishing house C.H. Beck initiated. In his book,
Canfora dedicated several pages of warm words to the polish Tito, Wladyslaw
Gomulka, but doesn't spare a thought for Solidarnosc (the Solidarity
movement), the strikes in 1980 or the roundtable talks in 1989. He lauds
Stalin but doesn't even mention Lech Walesa's name.
Even if the book is written with great effect, is has neither an
intellectual nor a moral justification. It's a scandal that it was
incorporated in the valuable international series "Making of Europe" which
is edited by the well-reknowned French Medievalist Jacques Le Goff.
In 1993, when Le Goff began the "Making of Europe" series, he wrote the
noble words, "Europe is being built. Borne on great hope. But the hopes will
only be fulfilled when they do justice to what has gone before. A Europe
devoid of history would have no past and no future." To date there have been
20 publications. Among the authors are reknowned historians, such as Hagen
Schulze, Joseph Fontana, Charles Tilly, Aaron Gurjewicz, Umberto Eco,
Massimo Montanari, Werner Rösener, Peter Brown... Their books are written
stuninngly, using daring hypotheses and razor-sharp argumentation.
Yet you'll only find references to central eastern Europe in the footnotes.
Listed in the index of names are a scattering of Poles and Hungarians. In
Hagen Schulze's "State and nation in the history of Europe" there's solely
Kosciuszko who pops up at the Vienna Congress to demand the restitution of
Poland. In "European Revolutions", Charles Tilly mentions Stenka Razin but
not Walesa. It's incredible how the revolutions in 1989 in central Europe
are classified - there was a revolution in the GDR but not really in Poland.
There is also a little information about Poland in Tilly's chapter on
Russia. The author writes that the Res publica had been aggressive in the
16th century, but had guaranteed Russia a comparatively stabile border to
the north-west.
These books are, on the whole, a legacy of the eighties when historiography
was dominated by a view of history that looked at events through the prism
of the great powers. But even then, Norman Davies was working on his book,
"Europe. A History" in which he took pains not just to include the centres
of power but also the countries and cultures on the peripheries who often
played the role of catalyst to European processes.
Then as now, historians are incredibly obstinate creatures. The publishing
house C.H. Beck deserves all the more recognition, as their refusal to
publish Canfora's book has drawn the attention of the western European
public to the drastic deficit in knowledge about the history of our part of
Europe and the downplaying of Stalinism.
[fine citazione]
Un saluto a tutti,
Nico

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