As we well know in this forum....
- From: "henry alminas" <halminas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:02:53 -0700
For educational purposes only:
... they are still among us and working
mightily. In fact they are getting even
more (ahem) "productive".
Here is a review of another "history"
book - reviewed from a Polish
perspective.
I just love the term "pre-emptive peace".
That, I fear, is what did the Baltics in!
(Long)
Best - - Henry
From: Arts and Letters
Democracy of Europe" is Luciano Canfora's contribution to
the "Making of Europe" series initiated and edited by the
French historian Jacques Le Goff. But the book is creating
a scandal and the German publisher of the series has refused
to print it.
Canfora's scandalous history of democracy
Adam Krzeminski explains why Luciano Canfora's history
of democracy in Europe is a scandal not worthy of publication
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
rom 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
R""sener, 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.
*
The article originally appeared in Polish in the Gazeta
Wyborcza on December 31, 2005, and it was published in
German by Perlentaucher on March 15, 2006.
Adam Krzeminski was born in West Galicia in 1945 and
has been editor of the magazine Polityka since 1973. He is
one of Poland's leading journalists and chairman of the Polish-
German Association in Warsaw.
Translation: Abby Darcy.
.
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