Canfora the visionary and Putin the saviour

It is not a newspaper’s role to settle the disheartening dispute between the government and publishing houses over whether Minister Valditara’s suggestion that Laterza withdraw its textbook "Trame del tempo" is a good idea. There is freedom to publish, but also a responsibility to monitor – not necessarily to punish – what enters schools. But the issue is, unfortunately, broader and more serious than a single school textbook. We are inundated with books that we might call “Trame oscure del tempo” and which contain “entirely manipulative and unreliable claims”. And authoritative newspapers such as the Corriere even offer him a two-page preview (which, in any case, will be read more widely than a Laterza textbook), just as they did for Luciano Canfora and his new pamphlet against the ills of the West, Il Male dell’Occidente, entitled: “Parlare è meglio di tacere. Why don’t we agree to share our prosperity?”. This echoes the usual tirade that the classical philologist – formerly pro-Soviet and later pro-Putin – has been repeating for years against “the world that calls itself Western”. This time his inspiration comes from migrants, who are treated badly and with ‘no substantial difference’ by all the countries that ‘are doing well’. Against this warmongering selfishness that we call the West, there is, fortunately for Canfora, ‘the only aspect that still keeps the communist movement alive: that important part of Lenin’s thought which theorises the “resurgence of Asia”’. Not even D’Alema. And above all, his obsession: “Ever since 1917, the year of the October Revolution, but in reality even since 1905… Russia has been the leader of that Third World we are talking about and is certainly not part of the West”. Russia, which today is fighting for the freedom of peoples against “Ukrainian President Zelensky, the puppet of Kyiv, is armed to the teeth by a vast Western coalition waging a proxy war”. Yesterday in *Il Fatto*, Lucio Caracciolo wrote the very same things, with even less imagination: “Europe has so far sabotaged peace. What does it expect now?”