Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Umberto Eco
Title Page
Steps Back
I. WAR, PEACE, AND OTHER MATTERS
Some Reflections on War and Peace
Love America and March for Peace
The Prospects for Europe
The Wolf and the Lamb: The Rhetoric of Oppression
Enlightenment and Common Sense
From Play to Carnival
The Loss of Privacy
On Political Correctness
On Private Schools
Science, Technology, and Magic
II. CHRONICLES OF A REGIME
For Whom the Bell Tolls: A 2001 Appeal for a Moral Referendum
The 2001 Electoral Campaign and Veteran Communist Strategy
On Mass Media Populism
Foreigners and Us
Revisiting History
The Revolt Against the Law
Pasta Cunegonda
Chronicles of the Late Empire
III. THE RETURN OF THE GREAT GAME
Between Dr. Watson and Lawrence of Arabia
Words Are Stones
Back to the Seventies
Kamikazes and Assassins
IV. THE RETURN OF THE CRUSADES
Holy Wars, Passion, and Religion
Negotiating in a Multiethnic Society
The Taking of Jerusalem: An Eyewitness Report
Beauty Queens, Fundamentalists, and Lepers
What Are We to Do with the Pre-Adamites?
V. THE SUMMA AND THE REST
The Roots of Europe
The Crucifix, Its Uses and Customs
On the Soul of the Embryo
Chance and Intelligent Design
Hands off My Son!
Those Who Don’t Believe in God Believe in Everything
Relativism?
VI. THE DEFENSE OF THE RACE
Are the Italians Anti-Semites?
The Plot
Some of My Best Friends
Some of Her Best Friends
VII. THE TWILIGHT OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM
A Dream
On the Shoulders of Giants
On the Disadvantages and Advantages of Death
Index
Copyright
Novels
The Name of the Rose
The Island of the Day Before
Foucault’s Pendulum
Baudolino
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Non-Fiction
Travels In Hyperreality
How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays
Serendipities
Kant and the Platypus
Five Moral Pieces
On Beauty
On Literature
On Ugliness
Hot Wars and Media Populism
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
Alastair McEwen
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407018744
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2008
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © RCS Libri S.p.A.
English translation copyright © Alastair McEwen 2006
Umberto Eco has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published with the title A Passo di Gambero by RCS Libri S.p.A., Milan in 2005
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2007
Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099503682
This book is a collection of articles and speeches written between 2000 and 2005.
The period was a momentous one. It began with anxieties over the new millennium; September 11 was followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and in Italy, we saw the rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi.
So I have decided to leave out many articles on various topics and include only those pieces that deal with the events in the world of politics and the media that occurred in those six years. This criterion was suggested to me by one of the last pieces in my previous collection of articles (published in Italy as La bustina di Minerva): “Il trionfo della tecnologia leggera” (“The Triumph of Light Technology”).
In the form of a fake review of a book attributed to a certain Crabe Backwards, I observed that recent times had witnessed technological developments that represented authentic steps back. I noted that “heavy communication” had entered a crisis toward the end of the seventies. Until then, the main means of communication was the color television, an enormous, cumbersome box that in the darkness emitted sinister flashes of light and enough sound to disturb the entire neighborhood. The first step toward “light communication” came with the invention of the remote control, thanks to which the viewer could not only turn down but even switch off the volume. The same device also made it possible to eliminate color and “surf” from one channel to another.
Skipping through dozens of debates, sitting in front of a black-and-white screen with the volume off, the viewer entered a state of creative liberty known in Italy as the “Blob phase,” after a television program (“Blob”) made up of hundreds of short clips cut and pasted to form a completely new narrative. Furthermore, old television, which broadcast events live, made us dependent on their linearity. Emancipation from live television came with the VCR, which not only marked the evolution of Television into Cinema but also enabled the viewer to rewind cassettes, thus completely freeing him from his passive and repressed role in the event being related.
At this point it would have been possible to eliminate the sound altogether and coordinate the random sequence of images with a pianola soundtrack synthesized by computer; and—given that TV channels, under the pretext of helping the hearing-impaired, had taken to inserting written captions commenting on the action—it would not have been long before we had programs in which a couple kissed in silence while viewers saw a word bubble with “I love you” inside it. And so light technology would have invented the silent films of the Lumière Brothers.
The next step was the elimination of movement from the images. With the Internet the user could save neural effort by receiving only low-definition stills, often in black and white, and no sound was needed, since the information appeared on the screen in alphabetical characters.
A further stage in this triumphal return to the Gutenberg Galaxy would have been—as I said at the time—the radical elimination of the image. We would have invented a box that emitted only sound and didn’t even require a remote: you could surf simply by turning a knob. I was under the illusion that I had invented the radio, but I was only predicting the advent of the iPod.
That transmission over the airwaves, with all its attendant physical disturbances, was superseded by pay-per-view TV and the Internet, which marked the beginning of the new era of transmission via telephone cable, so we moved from wireless telegraphy to wired telephony, thus sidestepping Marconi and returning to Alexander Graham Bell.
Playful as these observations were, they were not so far-fetched. That things were going backward had already emerged clearly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the political geography of Europe and Asia was radically changed. Publishers of atlases had to pulp all their stock (made obsolete by the presence of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany, and similar monstrosities) and fall back into line with atlases published before 1914, complete with Serbia, Montenegro, the Baltic states, and so on.
But the history of steps back doesn’t stop here, and the beginning of this millennium has provided a generous number of examples. Let’s take a quick look at a few. After fifty years of cold war, Afghanistan and Iraq have marked the return of hot war, which has even included the replay of memorable nineteenth-century attacks launched by the “wily Afghans” on the Khyber Pass. The Crusades have also made a comeback with the clash between Islam and Christianity—complete with the Assassins, the suicide killers of the Old Man of the Mountains—and such medieval glories as the Battle of Lepanto. In fact, some successful political pamphlets of recent years could be summed up by the old cry from the days of the Barbary corsairs: Mamma li turchi! (“Oh Mother, the Turks are coming!”).
The resurgence of the anti-Darwinian polemic marks the reappearance of a Christian fundamentalism that seemed to belong to the chronicles of the nineteenth century, while the ghost of the yellow peril has risen again (albeit only in demographic and economic form). For some time now our families have once more been employing colored servants, as in Gone with the Wind, while great migrations are once more under way, as in the first centuries after Christ. And in Italy, some rituals and customs of the late Roman Empire are enjoying a revival.
Anti-Semitism has re-emerged vigorously with its Protocols, and in Italy we now have some Fascists (post-Fascists, if you will, but many are no different) in the government. As I correct these proofs, I learn that a football player gave the Fascist salute to a cheering crowd of fans. Exactly as I used to do as a member of a Fascist youth group almost seventy years ago—except for the fact that I had to. Then there is the problem of devolution, which would bring Italy back to the days before Garibaldi.
Also in Italy, the old row about church and state has come up again, and many other things are returning, like undeliverable mail— various forms of the Christian Democratic Party, for example.
Almost as if history, breathless after the leaps forward made in the last two millennia, is drawing back into itself, returning to the comfortable splendors of tradition.
Many such backward phenomena will emerge from the articles in this book, enough of them to justify the title if nothing else. But there is no doubt that something new has happened, something unprecedented: the establishment in Italy of a government based on a populism conveyed by the media and perpetrated by the interests of private enterprise. This experiment, new at least on the European scene, is far shrewder and technologically more aggressive than the populist movements of the Third World.
This theme lies at the heart of many of these articles, which sprang from disquiet and indignation about the advance of the new order, an advance that we still don’t know how to stop. If it can be stopped at all.
The second section of the book takes its title from the phenomenon of regime by media populism, and I have no hesitation in talking about a “regime,” at least in the sense in which the people of the Middle Ages (who were not communists) spoke of de regimine principum.
In this regard I decided to open the second section with an appeal that I had written before the 2001 elections and that was much reviled. A right-wing pundit, but one who evidently doesn’t dislike me altogether, was pained and surprised that a “good” man like me could deal so scornfully with that half of his fellow countrymen who had not voted for the same party as he had. Recently, and not from a right-wing source either, the kind of commitment I advocated was called arrogant—an attitude that makes much of opposition culture look disagreeable.
As I have many times been accused of trying to be agreeable at all costs, the discovery that I am disagreeable fills me with pride and virtuous satisfaction.
But this accusation is curious, as if in their day Italian political figures such as Rosselli, Gobetti, Salvemini, and Gramsci, not to mention Matteotti (if I may compare the small with the great), had been accused of disrespect to their adversaries.
If someone fights for a political preference (and, here, civic and moral preferences as well), apart from his duty to be prepared to change his mind one day, in that moment he must believe he is in the right and must vigorously expose the error of those in opposition. I cannot imagine any electoral campaign that could be waged under the banner of “You are all in the right, but vote for one who is in the wrong.” Criticism of the adversary must be severe and ruthless, in order to convince the undecided, if no one else.
Further, many criticisms deemed disagreeable are those of social mores. And the critic of social mores (who in railing against the vices of others rails against his own, or his own temptations) must be caustic. In other words, if I may refer once more to the great, if you want to chastise social mores, you must be like Horace; if you are like Virgil, then you write a poem, maybe even a beautiful one, in praise of the ruling deity.
But the times are murky, the mores corrupted, and even the right to criticize, when not smothered by censorship, elicits popular disapproval.
I therefore present these writings in the name of the positive disagreeability I claim for myself.
In each text, I refer to the source, but many pieces have been reworked. I revised not for the purpose of updating them, or to insert prophecies that later came to pass, but to prune them of repetitions (it’s hard to avoid returning doggedly to the same topics), to correct the style, or to eliminate a few references too bound up with the current events of the time, by now forgotten by the reader and thus incomprehensible.
I
WAR, PEACE, AND OTHER MATTERS
In the early sixties I contributed to the establishment of the Italian Committee for Atomic Disarmament and took part in several peace marches. I declare myself to be a pacifist by vocation and am to this day. Nonetheless, here I must say bad things not only about war but also about peace. So I ask the reader to bear with me.
I have written a series of articles on war, starting with the Gulf War, and now I realize that each article modified my ideas on the concept of war. As if the concept of war, which has remained more or less the same (aside from the weapons used) from the days of Ancient Greece till yesterday, needed to be rethought at least three times over the last ten years.fn1
In the course of the centuries, what was the purpose of that form of warfare we shall call paleowar? We made war in order to vanquish our adversaries and thus profit from their defeat; we tried to achieve our ends by taking the enemy by surprise; we did everything possible to ensure that our adversaries did not achieve their ends; we accepted a certain price in human lives in order to inflict upon the enemy a greater loss of life. For these purposes it was necessary to marshal all the forces at our disposal. The game was played out between two contenders. The neutrality of others, the fact that they suffered no harm from the conflict and if anything profited from it, was a necessary condition for the belligerents’ freedom of action. Oh yes, I was forgetting; there was a further condition: knowing who and where the enemy was. For this reason, usually, the clash was a frontal one and involved two or more recognizable territories.
In our times, the notion of “world war,” a conflict that could involve even societies with no recorded history, such as Polynesian tribes, has eliminated the difference between belligerents and neutral parties. Whoever the contenders may be, atomic energy ensures that war is harmful for the entire planet.
The consequence is the transition from paleowar to neowar via the cold war. The cold war established what we might call belligerent peace or peaceful belligerence, a balance of terror that guaranteed a remarkable stability at the center and permitted, or made indispensable, forms of paleowar on the periphery (Vietnam, the Middle East, African states, and so on). At bottom, the cold war guaranteed peace for the First and Second Worlds at the price of seasonal or endemic wars in the Third World.
Neowar in the Gulf
The collapse of the Soviet empire marked the end of the conditions of the cold war but left us faced with the problem of incessant warfare in the Third World. With the invasion of Kuwait, people realized that it was going to be necessary to go back to a kind of traditional warfare (if you recall, reference was made to the origins of the Second World War: if Hitler had been stopped as soon as he invaded Poland, and so on …), but it immediately became evident that war was no longer between two sides. The scandal of the American journalists in Baghdad in those days was equal to the (far greater) scandal of the millions and millions of pro-Iraqi Muslims living in the countries of the anti-Iraqi alliance.
In wars of the past potential enemies were interned (or massacred), and compatriots who from enemy territory spoke in favor of the enemy’s cause were hanged at the end of the war. You might remember John Amery, who attacked his country on Fascist radio and was hanged by the English. Ezra Pound, thanks to his renown and the support of intellectuals of many countries, was saved, but at the cost of a full-blown mental illness.
What are the characteristics of neowar?
The identity of the enemy is uncertain. Were all Iraqis the enemy? All Serbs? Who had to be destroyed?
The war has no front. Neowar cannot have a front because of the very nature of multinational capitalism. It is no accident that Iraq was armed by Western industry, and likewise no accident that Western industry armed the Taliban ten years later. This falls within the logic of mature capitalism, which eludes the control of individual states. And here it is worth mentioning an apparently minor but significant detail: at a certain point it was thought that Western aircraft had destroyed a cache of Saddam’s tanks or aircraft, only to find out later that they were decoys produced and legally sold to Saddam by an Italian factory.
Paleowars worked to the advantage of the armaments industries of each of the belligerents, but neowar works to the advantage of multinationals whose interests lie on both sides of the barricades (if real barricades still exist). But there is more. While paleowar enriched arms dealers, and such gains compensated for the temporary cessation of certain other forms of trade, neowar not only enriches the arms dealers but also creates a worldwide crisis in air transport, entertainment and tourism, the media (which lose commercial advertising revenue), and in general the entire industry of the superfluous—the backbone of the system—from the building sector to the car industry. Neowar brings some economic powers into competition with others, and the logic of their conflict outweighs that of the national powers.
I noted in those days that neowar would typically be short, because prolonging it would benefit no one in the long run.
But if individual states must submit to the industrial logic of the multinationals, they also must submit to the needs of the information industry. In the Gulf War we saw, for the first time in history, the Western media voicing the reservations and the protests not only of the representatives of Western pacifism, the pope first and foremost, but also of the ambassadors and journalists of those Arab countries that supported Saddam.
Information services continually permitted the adversary to speak (whereas the aim of all wartime politics is to block enemy propaganda) and demoralized the citizens of the combatant countries with regard to their own government (whereas Clausewitz pointed out that a condition for victory is the moral cohesion of a country).
Every war of the past was based on the principle that the citizenry, holding it to be just, were anxious to destroy the enemy. But now the media were not only causing the citizens’ faith to waver, they also impressed on them the death of their enemies—no longer a vague, distant event but an unbearable visual record. The Gulf War was the first one in which the belligerents sympathized with their enemies.
In the days of Vietnam, some sympathy was evident, even though it took the form of discussion, held on highly specific, often marginal occasions by groups of American radicals. But we didn’t see the ambassadors of Ho Chi Minh or General Giap speechifying on the BBC. Nor did we see American journalists transmitting news from a hotel in Hanoi the way Peter Arnett did from a hotel in Baghdad.
The media puts the enemy behind the lines. The Gulf War established that in modern neowar, the enemy is among us. Even if the media were muzzled, new communication technologies would maintain the flow of information—a flow that not even a dictator could block, because it uses minimal infrastructures that not even he can do without. This information carries out the functions performed by the secret services in traditional warfare: it rules out any sneak attack. How can you have a war in which you cannot surprise your enemy? Neowar has institutionalized the role of Mata Hari and thus made “enemy intelligence” generally available.
By putting so many conflicting powers into play, neowar is no longer a phenomenon in which the calculations and intentions of the main actors determine the issue. This multiplication of powers (which actually began with globalization) means that their respective influence was unpredictable. The outcome may prove convenient for one of the contenders, but in principle neowar is a loss for everyone involved.
To state that a conflict has shown itself to be advantageous for someone at a given moment suggests an equation of the momentary advantage with the final advantage. You would have a final moment if war were still, as Clausewitz put it, the continuation of policy by other means—that is, the war would be over upon the attainment of a state of equilibrium that permitted a return to politics. But the two great wars of the twentieth century made it clear that postwar politics always continue (by any means) the premises posed by war. However the war goes, because it causes a general reorganization that does not correspond fully with the will of the contenders, it must be extended by dramatic political, economic, and psychological instability for decades to come, a process that can only produce the politics of war.
On the other hand, were things ever any different? Deciding that classic wars have produced reasonable results—a final equilibrium—derives from a Hegelian prejudice according to which history has a direction. There is no scientific (or logical) proof that the political order in the Mediterranean after the Punic Wars or the political order in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars was one of equilibrium. It could be, instead, an imbalance that would not have come about if these wars had not occurred. The statement that for thousands of years humanity has made war as a solution to states of imbalance can no more be proved than the statement that during the same period humanity solved psychological imbalance by turning to alcohol and other drugs.
That these reflections of mine at the time were not pipe dreams is shown by the events following the Gulf War. The Western forces liberated Kuwait but did not proceed to the annihilation of the enemy. The resulting state proved no more balanced than the one that led to the conflict, so the question of destroying Saddam Hussein was repeatedly tabled.
The fact is that the Gulf neowar led to the emergence of a problem that was absolutely new, not only to the logic and dynamics of paleowar but also to its governing psychology. The aim of paleowarfare was to destroy as many of the enemy as possible, accepting that many of one’s own men had to die too. After a victory, the great military leaders of the past would pass by night through battlefields sown with thousands and thousands of dead, and they weren’t surprised that half of them were their own soldiers. The commemoration with medals and moving ceremonies of the death of one’s own soldiers gave rise to the cult of the hero. The death of the others was publicized and gloried in, and civilians at home were expected to rejoice at their elimination.
The Gulf War established two principles: (1) none of our men should die and (2) as few enemies as possible should be killed. Regarding the death of our adversaries we saw some hypocrisy, because a great number of Iraqis died in the desert, but the very fact that no one emphasized this detail is an interesting sign. In any case neowarfare typically tries to avoid killing civilians, because if you kill too many of them, you run the risk of condemnation by the international media.
Hence the employment and celebration of smart bombs. After fifty years of peace due to the cold war, such sensitivity might strike many young people as normal, but can you imagine this attitude in the years when the V1s were destroying London and Allied bombs were razing Dresden?
As for our own soldiers, the Gulf War was the first conflict in which the loss of a single man seemed unacceptable. The country at war would not have tolerated the paleomilitary logic that required thousands and thousands of its sons to be prepared to die in order to win the day. The loss of a Western aircraft was perceived as extremely painful, and we even came to lionize, on television, those captured soldiers who, in order to save their lives, agreed to act as mouthpieces for enemy propaganda. “Poor souls,” people said, “they were tortured into doing this”—forgetting the sacred principle that a captured soldier must not talk even under torture.
The logic of paleowarfare would require such men to be held up to public scorn—or at least a compassionate veil would have been drawn over their misfortune. Instead they were accorded understanding, enveloped in a warm sense of solidarity, and rewarded, if not by the military authorities, by media curiosity, because after all they had managed to survive.
In brief, neowar became a media product, so much so that Baudrillard was able to say, paradoxically, that it didn’t actually take place but was merely shown on television. By definition, the media sell happiness and not suffering: they had to take the logic of war and maximize the good—or at least minimize the sacrifice. A war that involves little sacrifice and strives to safeguard the principle of maximum happiness must necessarily be brief. And so it was with the Gulf War.
But it was so short, it was largely useless, otherwise the neocons would not have been obliged to urge both Clinton and Bush to give Saddam no quarter. Neowar was by then at loggerheads with the very logic that had fueled it.
Neowar in Kosovo
With the war in Kosovo, all the characteristics of neowarfare that had emerged at the time of the Gulf War reappeared in an even more intense form.
Not only did Western journalists stay on in Belgrade, the Italian government was sending aircraft to Serbia and at the same time keeping up diplomatic and commercial relations with Yugoslavia. The television stations of the NATO countries told the Serbs hour by hour which NATO aircraft were leaving the Italian base at Aviano; Serbian agents supported their government’s position—and we heard and saw them doing so on our television screens. But we weren’t the only ones to have the enemy in our backyard. The Serbs were in the same position.
Many Italians will remember that a Serbian journalist, Biljana Srbjanović, sent in anti-Milošević pieces to Italy’s newspaper Repubblica on a daily basis. How can you bomb a city whose inhabitants were sending letters of friendship to the enemy and showing hostility toward their own government? Of course, in 1944 the city of Milan was full of anti-Fascists waiting for aid from the Allies, but this did not prevent the Allies—for irreproachable military reasons—from launching ruthless bombing raids on Milan. Nor was there any protest from the dissidents, because they thought that this was right. But the bombardment of Belgrade was marked by a form of persecution complex on Milošević’s part, on the part of the anti-Milošević Serbs, and on the part of the Westerners who were doing the bombing. Hence the publicity accorded to the use of smart bombs, even when they proved to be not smart at all.
Again, during this second neowar, no one was meant to die. In any event, fewer died than in Iraq, because Serbs are as white and as European as the people who were bombing them, and then they had to be protected from the Albanians, although the conflict had begun to protect the Albanians from the Serbs. This war certainly had no front: the contending parties were separated not by a straight line but by a series of interwoven zigzags.
There had never been a war based so much on the principle of maximum happiness and minimum sacrifice, which is why this war too was very brief.
Afghanistan
September 11 turned the logic of war on its head once more. It is worthy of note that this event did not mark the beginning of the war in Afghanistan but the confrontation, still in progress, between the Western world—more specifically, the United States—and Islamic terrorism.
If September 11 was the start of a conflict, in this new phase of neowar the front completely vanished. Even those who see the Western world and the world of Islam clearly set against each other know that the conflict is no longer territorial. The infamous rogue states may be hotbeds of terrorism, but terrorism has no borders. It is also present in Western countries. This time the enemy really is behind the lines.
At the time of the conflicts in the Gulf and in Kosovo, the enemy agents acting on our home ground were known (and in fact they made television appearances), but the strength of international terrorists is that (1) they remain unknown, (2) our media cannot monitor them the way Peter Arnett monitored life in Baghdad during the Western bombing raids, and (3) they are not only people from foreign backgrounds who have infiltrated our territory but also our own countrymen. The envelopes containing anthrax were most likely put into circulation not by Muslim kamikazes but by Yankee sectarian groups, neo-Nazis, or other fanatics.
Moreover, the role played by the media was very different from that played in the two preceding neowars, where at most they gave voice to the opinions of the adversary.
All terrorist acts are carried out to launch a message that, obviously, spreads terror or at least anxiety. The terrorist message destabilizes even when its impact is minimal, particularly when the target is a “strong” symbol. What was bin Laden’s aim in striking the Twin Towers? To create “the world’s greatest catastrophe,” one never even imagined by catastrophe movie makers, to give a visual impression of the attack on the very symbols of Western power, and to show that even the most important sanctuaries of that power could be violated.
Bin Laden’s aim was to impress world public opinion with that image, and accordingly the mass media talked about it, showed the dramatic rescue operations, the excavations, and the mutilated skyline of Manhattan. Did they have to repeat this news item every day, for at least a month, with photographs, film clips, and the endless eyewitness reports, broadcasting over and over the images of that wound before the eyes of all? It is hard to give an answer. Sales of newspapers with those photos went up, television channels that offered continuous repeats of those film clips enjoyed improved ratings, the public wanted to see those terrible scenes replayed, perhaps to feed its indignation, perhaps sometimes to indulge an unconscious sadism. Maybe it was impossible to do otherwise, but the fact remains that in this way the media gave bin Laden billions of dollars’ worth of free publicity, showing every day the images he had created, sowing bewilderment among Westerners, and giving his fundamentalist supporters a reason for pride.
Hence while the mass media reproved bin Laden, they were also his best allies, because it was with their help that he won the first round.
Attempts to censure or tone down the communiqués that bin Laden sent through Al Jazeera failed. The global information network was stronger than the Pentagon, and so it reestablished the fundamental principle of neowarfare, whereby the enemy talks to you in your own home.
In this case, neowar placed not two native lands in opposition but several powers in competition with one another. In the two preceding neowars, these powers worked to shorten the conflict; this time they risked prolonging it.
In an interview with Repubblica some months ago, the exdirector of the CIA said that the enemy to bombard ought to have been offshore banks, like those in the Cayman Islands, and perhaps the banks of the great European cities.
A few days before, on an Italian TV program hosted by Bruno Vespa, member of parliament Gustavo Selva, when faced with a challenge of this kind (but weaker, coming not from the former director of the CIA but from a member of the antiglobalization movement), reacted indignantly, saying that it was insane and criminal to think that the great Western banks were playing the terrorists’ game. Which shows how a politician well over retirement age cannot conceive of the true nature of neowar. Someone in Washington did understand it, and we know that in the first phase, from September 11 to the beginning of operations in Afghanistan, the United States considered waging the conflict as if it were a great spy war, by paralyzing the economic centers of terrorism. But it was necessary to assuage immediately the feelings of the American public, who had been deeply humiliated, and the only way to do that was by paleowar.
Hence the war in Afghanistan was one based again on territory, involving pitched battles and traditional tactics, to the extent that it was reminiscent of the nineteenth-century British campaigns in the Khyber Pass, thus returning to some of the principles of paleowarfare:
The Afghan paleowar may have solved the problem it set itself (i.e., the Taliban were driven from power), but it didn’t solve the problems of the third-phase neowar from which it sprang. The aim of the Afghan war may have been to eradicate Islamic international terrorism and neutralize its operational centers, but clearly they continued to exist elsewhere, and the problem then was where to make the next move. Or if the aim was to eliminate bin Laden, it is by no means clear that that was accomplished; and even if it had been, we might have discovered that bin Laden was a charismatic figure but not the solution to fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.
Shrewd men like Metternich knew that sending Napoleon to die on Saint Helena would not eliminate Bonapartism, so Metternich tried to get the most out of Waterloo through the Congress of Vienna, but it wasn’t enough, as the history of the nineteenth century demonstrated.
The neowar that began on September 11 was neither won nor lost by the Afghan war—and I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or how Bush could have done anything differently, but this is not the point under discussion. The point is that, when it comes to neowars, there may be no military leaders capable of winning them.
The contradiction is now at its peak, as is the ensuing confusion. On the one hand, the conditions that make it possible to wage a war have ceased to exist, given that the enemy is completely hidden. On the other hand, to show that in some way we are still engaging the enemy, we must construct simulacra of a paleowar, which allow our citizens to think that the country stands firm and to forget that the enemy is not where we are bombing but right here among us.
Faced with this bewilderment, public opinion (of which demagogues have made themselves the interpreters) is trying desperately to dust off the image of paleowar, and the metaphor it has found is that of the Crusade, the clash between cultures, a new battle of Lepanto between Christians and infidels. If the little Afghan war was won, why can’t we win the global neowar by turning it into a global paleowar, we whites against the Moors? Put in these terms, it’s like something out of a comic book, but the success of Oriana Fallaci’s books tells us that it is a comic book read by many adults.
The supporters of the Crusade have not realized that a Crusade is still a form of paleowar, which cannot be waged in a world that has created the conditions and the contradictions of neowar.
Scenario for a Crusade
We imagine a global confrontation between the Christian and Muslim worlds—a frontal clash, therefore, as in the past. But in the past the borders of Europe were well defined: the Mediterranean lay between Christians and infidels, and the Pyrenees ensured the isolation of the Western part of the continent that was still partly in Arab hands. The clash could take two forms: attack or containment.
The attack was the Crusades, but we know what happened. The only Crusade that led to an effective conquest (with the establishment of Frankish kingdoms in the Middle East) was the first. After less than a century, Jerusalem fell once more into the hands of the Muslims, and the following one and a half centuries witnessed another seven Crusades, none of which solved anything.
The only successful military operation came later, the Reconquest of Spain, but this was a struggle for national reunification and not an overseas expedition. Nor did it eliminate the clash between the two worlds; it merely shifted the border between them. As for containment, the Turks were stopped at the gates of Vienna, the Christians won the battle of Lepanto, towers were erected along the coastline to keep a lookout for Saracen pirates—but the confrontation remained.
Then, after waiting for the East to grow weak, the West colonized it. As such operations go, that was certainly a success, and one that lasted a long time, but the results can be seen today. The confrontation has not been eliminated; it has been sharpened.
If we were to revive the frontal clash today, in what way would it differ from those of the past? In the days of the Crusades, the military power of the Muslims was not unlike that of the Christians: both sides had swords and siege engines. Today the West is in the lead as far as military technology is concerned. It is true that Pakistan, in the hands of fundamentalists, could use nuclear weapons, but at best it could raze Paris to the ground, and its nuclear reserves would be instantly destroyed. If the Americans lose a plane, they can make another; if the Syrians lose a plane, they will have trouble buying another from the West. The East razes Paris, and the West drops an atom bomb on Mecca. The East spreads botulism by mail, and the West poisons the entire Arabian desert by spraying, as one sprays pesticides over the boundless fields of the Midwest, and even the camels die. This wouldn’t take long, a year at most, then everyone would carry on with stones, unless one side, getting the worst of it, gave up.
There is another difference with respect to the past. In the days of the Crusades, the Christians did not need Arab iron for their swords, nor did the Muslims need Christian iron. Today even our most advanced technology depends on oil, and they have the oil— most of it, at any rate. Left to their own devices, if their oil wells were bombed, they would be unable to extract it, but we would be without it too. The West therefore should restructure all its technology to eliminate the dependency on oil. Since we still haven’t managed to make an electric motor vehicle that can do over 80 km/h and doesn’t need a whole night to recharge its batteries, I don’t know how long such a conversion would take. Even if we used atomic energy to drive our planes and tanks and feed our electric power stations, without taking into account the vulnerability of these technologies, the process would take a long time.
It will be interesting to see if the Seven Sisters go along with this.fn2 I wouldn’t be surprised if some Western oilmen—provided they can carry on making a profit—would be prepared to accept an Islamized world.
But that’s not the whole story. In the good old days the Saracens stayed in their lands overseas, and the Christians in theirs. But today’s Europe is full of Muslims, who speak our languages and study in our schools. If some of them have already taken sides with the fundamentalists of their original countries, imagine what it would be like if a global conflict broke out. It would be the first war in which the enemy not only lives in your own country but also has the right to national health insurance.
Note, however, that the Islamic world will face the same problem, because its lands contain Western industries and even Christian enclaves, as in Ethiopia.
Since the enemy is bad by definition, all the Christians living overseas must be given up for lost. War is war. Right from the start, they are as good as dead. Then we’ll canonize them all in St. Peter’s Square.
But what do we do at home? If the conflict sharpens and another two or three skyscrapers fall, or even St. Peter’s, then a Muslim hunt will begin. A kind of St. Bartholomew’s Night, or the Sicilian Vespers: people will grab anyone with a mustache and swarthy complexion and cut his throat. Millions of people would have to be killed, but the mob will see to that without any need to trouble the armed forces.
Reason might prevail. No one gets his throat cut. But when the Second World War began, even the highly liberal Americans, albeit most humanely, put all their Italian and Japanese residents into concentration camps, even those born in the United States. So (and let’s not bother too much about the subtleties) you identify everyone who might be Muslim—if they are Ethiopian Christians, never mind, God will take care of his own—and you put them somewhere. Where? With all the non-EU immigrants now loose in Europe, to set up prison camps will require space, organization, surveillance, food and medical care, all at an unaffordable price, not to mention the fact that such camps would be powder kegs.
Or you take them, all of them (not easy, but you can’t leave one behind, and it must be done in one fell swoop), you put them on a fleet of merchant ships, and you unload them … where? “Excuse me, Mr. Gadhafi, excuse me, Mr. Mubarak, will you please take these three million Turks I’m kicking out of Germany?”
The only solution is the one commonly adopted by certain unsavory types who run illegal immigrants into Italy by boat: you toss them in the sea. A final solution reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany. Millions of corpses afloat in the Mediterranean. I want to see the government that could do such a thing. The desaparecidos would be nothing in comparison. Even Hitler massacred in stages, and in secret.
As an alternative, because we are civilized, we let them live peacefully in our country but have a secret police keep an eye on each and every one. Where do we find all these agents? Should we recruit them from among the non-EU immigrant community? And what if you begin to suspect—as happened in the United States, where airlines intent on cutting costs put airport security in the hands of Third World immigrants—that these workers are not trustworthy?
Naturally a reasonable Muslim on the other side of the fence might make all these reflections. The fundamentalist front could not be entirely victorious; a series of civil wars would lead to much bloodshed and horrible massacres in their countries; the economic repercussions would hit them too; having even less food and medicines than the little they have today, they would die like flies. But if we are considering a frontal clash, we mustn’t worry about their problems but our own.
Within the ranks of the West, pro-Islamic groups would be formed not out of faith but out of opposition to the war, and new sects would arise that reject the West, Gandhians who would put down their tools and refuse to collaborate with their governments, fanatics like the Davidians in Waco who (without being Muslims) would unleash terror campaigns to purify the corrupt Western world. In the streets of Europe, processions would form of desperate, passive supplicants waiting for the Apocalypse.
But such lunatic fringes aside, would everyone accept a reduction of electrical energy without even being able to fall back on oil lamps? A disastrous blackout of communications and therefore no more than one hour of television a day? Travel by bicycle rather than by car, the closing of movie theaters and nightclubs, long lines at McDonald’s for a daily ration consisting of a slice of bran bread topped by a lettuce leaf? In other words, the cessation of an economy of prosperity and waste? What would an Afghan or Palestinian refugee care about living in a war economy; for them nothing would change. But what about us? What crisis of collective depression and lack of motivation would we find ourselves up against?
How much would the blacks of Harlem, the underprivileged of the Bronx, or the Chicanos of California still identify with the West?
Finally, what would the Latin American countries do, where many people, not Muslims, feel resentment against the gringos? And in fact, after the Twin Towers fell, there were some down there who whispered that the gringos had it coming to them.
In short, the global war could reveal an Islam less monolithic than we think, but it would also reveal a fragmented and neurotic Christendom, where only a tiny few would offer themselves as the new Templars or kamikazes of the West.
This is a science fiction scenario that I would never want to see come to pass. But it’s worth describing in order to demonstrate that, if a global war were to happen, no one would win. Hence a third-phase neowar, even by transforming itself into a global paleowar, would lead to no result other than its perennial continuation against a desolate backdrop straight out of Conan the Barbarian.
In the era of globalization, a global war is impossible—that is, it would lead to defeat for everyone.
Peace
When I was writing my reflections on the neowar in the Gulf, the conclusion that war had become impossible brought me to the idea that perhaps the moment had come to make war universally taboo. But now I realize, after what followed, that this was a pious hope. Today my impression is that, since neowar has no victors and no vanquished and paleowar settles nothing except on the level of the psychological satisfaction of the temporary winner, the result will be a form of permanent neowar with lots of peripheral paleowars forever breaking out and forever being ended temporarily.
I imagine that this notion will not please many people, because we are all fascinated by the ideal of peace. That the uselessness of neowar might lead to a serious consideration of peace was a fine thought but unrealistic. The fact is that the very concept of neowar makes us reflect upon the equivocal nature of peace.