Posted on 07/03/2003 7:55:14 AM PDT by decimon
ROME The specter of communism has long dominated the discourse of Silvio Berlusconi, who casts himself as Italy's last line of defense against a tenacious scourge.
It has also had a leading role in his legal stratagems, which portray the prosecutors who have charged him with corruption as left-wing zealots wielding hammers and sickles.
But the prime minister's fear of the Red Menace has crept unexpectedly into a new sphere of Italian life, and some of his political opponents are wondering how it got there.
The evils of communism appear front and center in one of the themes that hundreds of thousands of Italian high school seniors could choose to write about in graduation exams given this month. That topic invited students to ponder "terror and the political repression in the totalitarian systems" of the 20th century and gives brief descriptions of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and communism in the former Soviet Union and other countries.
Communism is blamed for the executions of about 100 million people, five times greater than the killings attributed in the exam to Nazism.
In the wording of the topic, it takes one sentence to denigrate fascism. It takes four to vilify communism.
Some historians and teachers have complained that the balance of the question is out of whack. "I teach my students that of course communism must be seen in a negative light, but the goal of Nazism was to kill people, and the goal of communism was to unite them," said Giuseppe Costantino, 61, who teaches history in a high school in Naples.
A few of Berlusconi's political opponents have suggested that he or his allies might be trying to mold young minds. "There's been an increase - a boost - in historical revisionism since the center-right came to power," said Enzo Carra, a center-left member of Parliament who follows education issues.
Piero Fassino, the liberal leader of one of the principal opposition parties, asked when Italians could expect to see the "free distribution in schools, to all students, of all the works of Berlusconi."
Fassino's statement was prompted by another of more than half a dozen essay options on the test, called the maturita, or maturity, exam. That topic was the importance of water to agriculture and development, and one of the pivots that students were given was a remark to that effect by "the president of the council of ministers." In other words, the prime minister: Berlusconi.
His opponents have raised enough concern about the exam that the education minister, Letizia Moratti, is scheduled to appear in Parliament next week. Ministry officials said that the fuss was ludicrous and that the exam was put together as it had always been, by scores of education experts. The prime minister was not involved, they said.
Valentina Aprea, an undersecretary in the ministry, said the essay on totalitarianism "was just one of many themes that the students had a choice to write about."
Students had to write just one essay from among the topics offered, including totalitarianism and the importance of water. The essay section was a quarter of the exam.
"If a student picked that question, they could have written much more about fascism than communism," Aprea added. "We don't dictate the balance in the answers."
In regard to the essay on water, another official with the education ministry said most students would not connect the quotation that was provided to Berlusconi, who is not explicitly named.
Berlusconi is the country's richest man, and his holdings include three of the seven national television networks. Three others are owned and operated by the state, which means that he has indirect influence over them as well.
He also owns one of Italy's biggest publishing houses, Mondadori, which several years ago released "The Black Book of Communism," a harshly negative appraisal of the ideology's legacy. He once distributed hundreds of copies at a political rally, and it is mentioned - and quoted - in the essay topic on totalitarianism.
Verena Gioia, 25, who manages an Internet chat room for high school students, said she sensed from the electronic conversations there that most students avoided the totalitarianism topic.
They found it politically loaded, Gioia said, and they realized they could not guess the biases of whoever would grade their exam.
Many chose the essay option on water, she said, apparently not realizing what they were wading into.
"I didn't do the one on the dictatorships because it seemed too skewed and based on a distorted historical vision," a student wrote in a chat-room missive. "Now I find out that I did the question based on what Berlusca says," the student added, using a derogatory nickname for the prime minister. "Everywhere you turn, that dwarflike president appears. We have to do something. We must do something."
True everywhere.
I thought it a pretty good article. People tend to be unrealistically soft on what communism has "accomplished" and that is reported here.
Oh what hoot...so they not know what Stalin said about education? His numbers off...Nazies kill almost 40 million in 7 years...Stalin 30 million in 30 years mostly in 30's. Mao 60 million more, Khemer Rouge, N. Korea etc more. But he right to show what it is...Nazie also want to unite...difference, communism kill for politics, nazies kill for politics AND RACE.
At least the deaths are being talked about. That's an improvement over the standard sanitized treatment of communism.
Berlusconi rocks BTTT
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