A jury rules in favour of La Russa. Ponzani and history bent to suit politics

Let’s start with the reasonable viewpoint expressed by Valter Vecellio on HuffPost, who urged Ignazio La Russa not to sue the historian Michela Ponzani: “A lawsuit is a delicate matter; it should be handled with care”, especially by the second-highest-ranking official in the state. “I would have resorted to a jury of honour,” Vecellio says. Fair enough, although it is not clear why, should La Russa win the case, there would be a “suspicion” that “the President of the Senate is more ‘equal’ than others”. That said, it is also difficult to ignore La Russa’s reasons. Ponzani had said on television: “I believe that if, on 12 April 1973, a security decree such as the one being discussed and approved today had been passed, we probably wouldn’t have a President of the Senate today because on 12 April 1973 – and this is history, not just news – La Russa was leading an unauthorised MSI demonstration during which a police officer was killed.”

Since La Russa was acquitted of all responsibility for that incident, it is clear that invoking his role by linking it to the murder of a police officer does not constitute historical or scientific work – as Ponzani claimed, whilst refusing to apologise to La Russa in order to avoid a lawsuit: Ponzani’s words constitute a political judgement, or worse, a political distortion of a historical fact. In Domani, the professor attempted to defend the legitimacy of her approach, invoking the freedom of historical work in the service of democracy (citing Marc Bloch and Orwell, come now, is a tad exaggerated). But she is wrong. Quite apart from the fact that La Russa would still be legitimately in his post today, even if the infamous ‘security decree’ had been in force at the time, the point is that the logic of the connection drawn by Ponzani is clear. She writes that ‘the rigour of the historian also lies in recognising what the sources do not allow us to assert’. But in doing so, she commits the very same blunder as those magistrates who presume to use court rulings to rewrite history, or to use ‘history’ against court rulings. Bad history and a questionable jury.