This is one of the first volumes in a series dedicated to the latest concept to be mythified on the Old World side of the Atlantic: the idea of “Europe.” The author, a respected economic historian, is (or was) a Marxist who, having lost his ideological bearings, feels uneasy about having to bow before the shrine of “Europe.” His little book is quite simply a short outline of European history that questions whether Europe was and is as superior as the new mythology pretends. He adopts the image of a “distorting mirror” to touch on different aspects of the historical past. Each “mirror” he discusses is considered as a means through which Europeans have “falsified world history.”
It is somewhat exaggerated to refer to the result as a reinterpretation, since there are no identifiable reinterpretations in these pages, and there is nothing that is new either in content or approach. The discerning reader will soon see that the presentation is very much the traditional Marxist one, albeit carefully pruned of the old vocabulary. European history, as “reinterpreted” here, was one of repression: by the church against the people and by the lords against the peasants. Popular revolts, says the author, reflected “aspirations of European lower classes seeking a more egalitarian society.” The whole account given here of the European conquest of colonies is also standard. Fontana writes of the “urge to rule and the conviction of a racial and moral superiority that has gone on serving to legitimize the extermination of savages, from Wounded Knee to Iraq and Somalia.” The examples, one should note, implicate the United States. Apart from three passing references, at no stage is Russia mentioned, perhaps because the author does not consider Russia a European country.
The most interesting aspect of this book is that it is really a dialogue of the author with himself. He uses “we” and “our” when he is patently talking about his own situation. “We need to get out of the hall of distorting mirrors in which our culture is trapped,” he says. We need to jettison our current style of writing history. Instead, we need to “replace it by another, better suited to analyzing the complicated structure of the various trajectories which link up, separate, and cross over each other.” Dare one suggest that the type of history he asks for, and which used to be called “dialectical materialism,” also had its own distorting mirror?
