The specious controversy of the Anpi with Valditara on the collapse of the Berlin Wall

The arrival of Giorgia Meloni the government made us discover with great surprise, after thirty-three years, that even the collapse of the Berlin Wall has become “divisive”. The Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditaraon the occasion of Freedom day established by the Parliament, sent a letter to the students to reflect on the“Symbolic event of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, of the end of the Cold War and of the reunification of Germanfia and Europe ”. Valditara writes that “communism was one of the great protagonists of the twentieth century … and to minimize or trivialize its immense historical impact would be a serious intellectual error”, but where it managed to establish itself it led “Annihilation of individual freedoms, persecutions, poverty, death”. In this sense, the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 it means the arrival of freedom for the half of Eastern Europe which was “suffocated by despotism” and therefore that date “It can only be a celebration of our liberal democracy”.

The minister was attacked by the Democratic Party, who with the president of the senators Simona Malpezzi he accused him of making “propaganda” with “an instrumental reading of the fall of the Berlin Wall”. But with more vehemence than the opposition, the Anpi has railed against the minister. The president of the association of partisans, the former Cossuttian Gianfranco Pagliarulo, said that the letter from Valditara “It is a learned anti-Communist manifesto”. As if being anti-communist, specifically against the Soviet dictatorship, were indecent. Furthermore, Pagliarulo accused Valditara of not having also remembered that “November 9 is the world day against fascism and anti-Semitism”, as the anniversary of the Nazi pogrom of the Crystal night of 1938.

The attack is specious for two reasons. The first is that this omission, the failure to also remember the Night of the crystals, has never been reproached either by the Anpi or by others to the presidents of the Republic, from Sergio Mattarella to Giorgio Napolitano just to stay at the last two, for their commemorations of the fall of the Wall. Both recalled the importance of this anniversary for the advance of freedom, the defeat of communist totalitarianism and the democratic unity of Europe. None of them ever mentioned the 1938 pogrombecause there are other occasions when institutions commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, the fight against anti-Semitism and Nazi-fascism (January 27 And 25 April). On November 9, 2016, for example, the President of the Chamber Laura Boldrini she celebrated the Day of Freedom, certainly without great condemnations of communism and the Soviet dictatorship as did Valditara (a matter of different political sensibilities, probably), but she did not remember the Night of the crystals either. Yet on that occasion there are no press releases or indignant reactions from the Anpi against Boldrini’s “removals”.

But the reason why the indignation of the Anpi is pretext is that if the accusation against Valditara is that he only remembered one of the two anniversaries, it would be assumed that the Anpi has recalled both. And instead on November 9th the Anpi did not remember either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Night of the crystals. In short, the suspicion arises that the Cossuttian Pagliarulo simply annoyed the condemnation of communism. And that’s the problem.

• Luciano Capone

• Grew up in Irpinia, in Savignano. Studies in Milan, Catholic University. Freelancer by training, journalist by deformation. Al Foglio first as a reader, then a collaborator, and finally an editor. I mainly deal with economics, but also with politics, inquiries, culture, various and possible ones