Italy: The Election Nobody Wanted
SENIGALLIA, SILVIO F.
COMMUNISTS UNDER FIRE Italy: The Election Nobody W^tntcQBY silvi° r senigalua PALMIRO TOGLIATTI Rome Every political leader in the country expressed firm opposition to early elections, yet uaiy...
...But this is reappraisal time not only for many ex-Communists...
...But that is common knowledge...
...COMMUNISTS UNDER FIRE Italy: The Election Nobody W^tntcQBY silvi° r senigalua PALMIRO TOGLIATTI Rome Every political leader in the country expressed firm opposition to early elections, yet uaiy s Parliament has been dissolved and the voters will go to the polls next June 3-4...
...The whole rather indecorous minuet did not fool anyone...
...The man who sells you a phony Patek Philippe is, simply, a crook...
...The authors, ex-Communist and now Left-wing maverick Ruggero Guarini and Socialist fellow-journalist Giuseppe Saltini, have chosen a provocative title, Primi delta Classe, whose flavor cannot be captured in English with the mere translation "head of the class...
...The extent of the bewilderment and sadness of the starry-eyed Italian Marxists, who, disillusioned with Moscow, had shifted their allegiance and ideological love to Peking and Hanoi, was revealed in early March by a radical Left-wing journalist...
...The indictment goes beyond conceit, bad taste and Cold War sectarianism...
...Stung to the core, a number of orthodox Left-wing intellectuals have reacted with fury and in some cases even venom...
...Finally there is the rather querulous Communist question implicit in the last point: Why this attack on the PCI and not on the other major parties as well...
...The all-Christian Democratic minority government, headed by Giulio Andreotti, required Communist support to stay alive, but would not go so far as to grant Cabinet posts to two highly respected Left-wing independents who had run on the PCI ticket in 1976—a compromise solution recommended by veteran Social Democratic leader Giuseppe Saragat...
...It is a somewhat Victorian expression describing the plodding, didactic, humorless students who get good marks but are justifiably disliked by both classmates and teachers...
...The authors have easily dismissed the first two objections...
...To be sure, they say, the DC is the party of misgovernment and corruption...
...The Communists (PCI) brought on the crisis by pressing for direct participation in the government to bolster their party's ebbing prestige, although they knew the Christian Democrats (DC) would not accede to their request...
...But the third point is not without validity...
...some present Leftists are having doubts, too...
...We were fools, but that does not mean that they were great...
...On the one hand, the politicians were aware of the public's negative feelings about the premature dissolution of Parliament for the third consecutive time (1972, 1976 and 1979...
...The apparent contradiction is not difficult to explain...
...Then he added, "Now I just feel like an orphan...
...Their work may well be imperfect and incomplete, but nothing of the kind is being attempted by Socialist and Christian Democratic men of culture...
...In attempting to rebut the documented contention that "PCI's postwar view of culture was vacuous, crude, ridiculous and intimidating," they have raised the following points: 1. The book is a culturally dishonest operation and deliberately biased...
...And in Pri-mi delta Classe Guarini and Saltini have indeed cut down to size the role played by the Communists in the cultural area...
...The catalyst was China's attack on Vietnam following Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia, following the inhumanity of the Cambodian regime...
...In a front-page article in the influential Milan daily Corriere delta Sera, whose views are not those of the reporter, Giuliano Zincone wrote, "Modest well being, immense freedom, unlimited hope, equality: this is what China used to mean to many of us...
...Moreover, the DC is snubbed by Italian intellectuals...
...Guarini confronts the issue head-on...
...A commentary as well as an anthology of Communist pronouncements over the years 1944-64, the work takes aim at the PCI's primi della classe—a long list of politicians and intellectuals, headed by the late prestigious leader Palmiro Togliatti...
...2. The statements quoted by the authors were made in a Cold War context at a time when the reaction to overwhelming American and Christian Democrat power needed the use of a bludgeon and not a foil...
...3. If the intellectual and moral level of those who shaped and directed PCI's cultural policy between 1944-64 was as low as charged by the book, ex-Communists like Guarini, and ex-fellow travelers could not have toed the party line for years without being guilty themselves of intellectual and moral turpitude...
...It is this shibboleth, they maintain, that has prevented these self-appointed representatives of the workers' movement's culture from understanding, not to mention even facing, Fascism's most disturbing feature —namely, the masses' irrational behavior toward 20th century totalitarianism and their support of Mussolini's and Hitler's regimes...
...It is hard to see, he wrote in the Rome daily Tempo, how anybody could believe in the "immense freedom" of a country run by a single party—a party that reached power at the cost of several thousand lives and that does not tolerate any organized opposition...
...The writers explore what they call the basic weakness of Communist historiography, "that superficial Enlightenment looking at history as the long march of Reason through the centuries...
...Until this series of events, China and Vietnam were the last recourse for those eager to preserve their positive view of Communism...
...The book's critics, they observe, have not been able to disprove the authenticity of the quotations...
...The pummeling the Left is currently taking does not augur well for it in the coming election...
...He was absolutely right, but seemed to forget that for many Western gauch-istes the Soviet Union and/or China and Vietnam are countries that have existed mostly in their imaginations...
...After recalling the mesh of plots, purges, murders, escapes and rehabilitations that has characterized the struggle for power in Mao's and post-Mao China —and noting that not even the most favorable Sinologist ever denied the heavy restrictions on liberty "required" by the regime's reforms—Piccioni aptly recalled the great libertarian tradition of Western democracy...
...The Socialists (PSI), among the most vocal in opposing an early vote, actually were unwilling to support any formula unpalatable to the PCI...
...The PCI, in contrast, is "the party of Cultural Pride" and enjoys an undeserved reputation, hence the need to puncture the myth and set the record straight...
...On the other, the major parties were unwilling to make the concessions needed to keep the legislature going...
...Our past attitude, he admits, was shaped by a mixture of naivete, opportunism and self-deception...
...Careful study of old issues of the party daily, L 'Unita, and of the weeklies, Rinascila and Con-lemporaneo, has enabled the authors lo evoke the crude language and the absurd arrogance of a propaganda Silvio F. Senigallia reports regularly for The New Leader from Rome...
...Readers are reminded that Freud was vulgarly abused, Gide invited to stick to his homosexual neurosis, Orwell slighted as simply a "colonial cop," Si-lone described as a failure, and Sartre called a "fucking pig...
...But it is still too early to tell to what extent the Christian Democrats will be able to capitalize on the situation...
...presented as Communist culture...
...4. Communist historians are currently engaged in serious research on PCI history...
...Without doubting Zincone's disillusionment and grief, Catholic intellectual Leone Piccioni nevertheless challenged this "orphanhood...
...there is no sense in trying to console ourselves with the thought that he is an exceptionally clever swindler and that perhaps there is some gold mixed with the watch's cheap metal...
...As for the "Cold War context," they point out that if Communist utterances on art, history, philosophy, and science are solely dictated by considerations connected with the pursuance of political objectives, PCI's current reasonable language and moderate tone must be viewed as no less transitory and opportunistic than the 1944-64 crudeness and violence...
...Here, too, the authors' answer is sharp and direct...
...Today the dream is shattered...
...While the government crisis was proceeding hopelessly toward its inevitable conclusion, a book came out that challanged the myth of the supremacy of Communist culture in post-War Italy Its impact has been strong enough to shake the complacency of the Left-wing intelligentsia...
...The imminence of an electoral campaign has been in the air for some time, and no political expertise was necessary to sniff it...
...For if Togliatti & Co...
...were just a bunch of mediocre and sectarian bureaucrats, how could so many intellectuals be fooled so completely and for so long by such second-raters...
Vol. 62 • April 1979 • No. 9
