Umberto Eco.

Full back! “Hot wars” and populism in the media (collection)

Published under agreement with the literary agency ELKOST Intl.;

© RCS Libri S.p.A. – Milano Bompiani 2006–2010

© E. Kostyukovich, translation into Russian, 2007

© E. Kostyukovich, notes, 2007

© A. Bondarenko, design, 2012

© Astrel Publishing House LLC, 2012

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Walking doggy style

This book collects a number of articles and speeches written from 2000 to 2005. This is a special period. At its beginning, people experienced traditional fear of the change of millennia. The change happened, and September 11th struck, Afghan war and the Iraq War. Well, in Italy... In Italy, this time, on top of everything else, was the era of Berlusconi’s rule.

Therefore, leaving outside the scope of the volume other statements on various topics, I have collected only those reflections that affect the political and media events of those six years 1
This book was published before parliamentary elections, which took place on April 9, 2006 and brought victory to the center-left bloc. The government of Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936), which Eco so vigorously ridiculed, resigned. The victory of the opposition was facilitated, in particular, by the statements of authoritative representatives of the Italian intelligentsia in the form of speeches, articles and individual books, similar to this collection. ( Hereinafter notes by E. Kostyukovich. L. Summ participated in the selection of material for the notes. Translations of quotations, unless otherwise indicated in the footnote, were made by E. Kostyukovich.)

Step by step I followed the pattern described in the penultimate of the Minerva Cardboards. 2
Under this name on last page Eco magazine first publishes weekly (1985-1998), and subsequently twice a month (from 1998 to the present) notes on morals, issues of culture and ethics, and philosophical sketches. The name goes back to the now defunct Minerva matches, which were glued onto wide strips of cardboard. On cardboards, Eco made notes for future essays at meetings or on trips. A collection of these essays (Eco U. La Bustina di Minerva. Milano: Bompiani, 2000) in Russian translation was published in 2007 by the Symposium publishing house under the title “Cartons of Minerva. Notes on matchboxes."

That “Cardboard” was called “The Triumph of Lightweight Technology.” 3
Eco U. Il trionfo della tecnologia leggera// La Bustina di Minerva. Milano: Bompiani, 2000. P. 329.

It was a parody review of a fictional book by the fictional Crab Backwards. Pan Galaxy. Loop Press, 1996). There I wrote that in Lately I note many technological innovations that represent real steps backwards. So, difficult types of communication Since the 70s they started to get lighter. At first, the predominant type of communication was color television - a big box, it cluttered the room, puffed ominously in the darkness and rumbled to intimidate the residents of other apartments. The first step to facilitated communication did when they invented remote control. It became possible not only to reduce or eliminate the sound at will, but also to kill the color and change the channel. Jumping from discussion to discussion, looking at a black and white silent screen, the viewer receives a new creative freedom: life begins to the accompaniment zapping. Old television, transmitting everything in live, kept the viewer in slavery, forcing them to watch the programs sequentially. But live broadcasts are now almost obsolete, which means that television has outlived our dependence on it, and the VCR not only transforms television into cinema, but also allows us to rewind recordings, bringing us out of passivity and subordination.

At this stage, I think it is possible to remove sound from the TV altogether. Play mounted pictures to the soundtrack of a pianola, synthesizing music on a computer. And given that television often runs a ticker for the hearing impaired, there won’t be long to wait - programs will soon appear where they will show a kissing couple with the caption at the bottom of the screen: “We have love.” Thus facilitated technology will lead to the reinvention of the silent film of the Lumières.

The next step has already been taken - towards immobilization of images. When the Internet was born, users began to receive low-resolution still pictures, often in black and white, without sound; sound turned out to be superfluous: all information was displayed on the screen in text form.

The next stage of this triumphant return to the Gutenberg galaxy 4
Gutenberg galaxy - term in, introduced by the Canadian philosopher and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), author of the book “The Gutenberg Galaxy. The emergence of typographical man" (The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, 1962), along with the term Global Village - “global village”. McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy the first five hundred years of printing technology until 1844 - before the invention of the Morse telegraph. Modern electronic civilization has received the name “Marconi Galaxy”. See: Eco U. From Internet to Gutenberg. Lecture at The Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, November 12, 1996. Also: Eco W. From the Internet to Gutenberg. Text and hypertext. Public lecture, Moscow State University May 20, 1998

I said that, of course, the pictures would disappear. They will invent a box that can catch and transmit only sounds, and does not require a remote control: it will be possible to jump through channels, adjusting the settings with a round knob! I was joking when I suggested inventing a radio receiver. Now I see that I prophesied and invented the iPod.

In conclusion, I wrote that the last stage will be the abandonment of broadcast programs, where there is always some kind of interference, and the transition to cable television, using telephone and Internet wires. Thus, I said, the wireless transmission of sounds will be replaced by the wire transmission of signs - so we, having backed up to Marconi, will move back to Meucci. 5
Guglielmo Marconi(1874-1937) - Italian engineer and entrepreneur, considered in Italy to be the inventor of the radio receiver (1898). Antonio Meucci(1808-1889) – Italian inventor telephone (1857). Due to incorrect execution of documents, he lost the right to be called a discoverer, and A.G. enjoys this right. Bell, who patented the telephone in 1876

I was joking, but the ideas came true. That we are progressing backwards became clear after the fall Berlin Wall when it changed political geography Asia and Europe. Atlas publishers scrapped stocks from warehouses: they disappeared from world maps Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany and similar monsters. Maps began to be stylized as 1914, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Baltic states returned to them.

Progress topsy-turvy, it must be said, does not end here. In the third millennium we began to dance even more reverse steps. Examples please. After half a century " cold war“We finally unleashed a hot war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and again survived the attacks of the “insidious Afghans” on the Khyber Pass 6
Khyber(Khyber Pass) is a pass of strategic importance on the border of Afghanistan with Pakistan, the site of a battle where an entire British regiment was destroyed in 1839 by warriors of the Pashtun tribe.

Revived medieval Crusades, repeated the wars of Christianity against Islam. There are suicide assassins again, drilled in shelters by the Elder of the Mountain 7
Mountain Elder or Lord of the Mountains - Ismaili leader Hasan ibn Sabbah, founder of the mystical sect of Assassins (Hashishins, 12th century).

And the fanfare of Lepanto thundered 8
The naval battle of Lepanto (Greece) on October 7, 1571 and the victory of the Spanish-Venetian coalition ended the dominance of the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean.

And some newfangled books can be retold with one heart-rending cry of “Mommy, oh, Turks!” 9
This refers to the book by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), who after September 11, 2001, furiously brought down her anger on Islamic civilization, “Rage and Pride” (Fallaci O. La rabbia e l'orgoglio. Milano: Rizzoli, 2004. Rus. trans.: M.: “Vagrius”, 2004). The book is a model of political incorrectness, but has received an enthusiastic reception from millions of readers in Europe.

Christian fundamentalism, which was previously thought to have died out with the 19th century, has again raised its head, anti-Darwinian polemics have revived, and the bogey of the Yellow Peril looms before us again (so far frightening only by demography and economics). In our white families, colored slaves are again working, as in the novel " gone With the Wind", and the barbarian tribes are migrating again, as if in the first centuries of our era. And, as shown in one of the essays published here, the manners and customs that existed in Rome during the period of decline are being restored (at least in my Italy).

Anti-Semitism with its “Protocols” is triumphant, having reappeared, and we have fascists in our government (who call themselves “post...”, although among them are the same people who were directly called fascists). I look up from the layout of this book: on TV, an athlete greets fans with a Roman, that is, fascist, salute. Just like me almost seventy years ago when I was a balilla 10
Balilla(Opera Nazionale Balilla, 1926-1937) - under Mussolini, a fascist organization for teenagers from 9 to 14 years old.

And they forced me. What to say about devolution 11
Devolution– term of modern Italian politics: federalization of the country through transfer government functions regions. The slogan of the autonomist “League of the North” (Lega Nord).

Threatening to throw Italy back into pre-Garibaldian times.

Again, as in the post-Cavour years 12
The famous politician Count Camillo Benso Cavour (1810-1861) played a decisive role in the two wars of independence that led to the unification of Italy (March 17, 1861) and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel II. During the Third War of Independence (1866) and the conquest of Papal Rome (1870), Cavour was no longer alive. The Papal State was declared non-existent; During this “post-Cavour” period, the young Italian state had to resolve particularly painful issues of relations with the Catholic Church, which opposed the annexation of Rome to Italy. The papal state (within the Vatican) was recreated only under fascism, which Catholic Church provided approval and support, as a reward for which Mussolini signed the Lateran Agreements (1929), which gave the Vatican the status of a separate state.

Church and state are fighting with each other. To top off the déjà vu, the Christian Democrats, who were thought to be extinct (a mistake!), are being revived. 13
Christian Democratic Party of Italy (Democrazia Cristiana), founded in 1942 by Alcide De Gasperi, was dissolved on January 18, 1994 after a wave of scandals and trials, called “Clean Hands” (Mani pulite), when the most prominent representatives of this party and the government formed from it were put on trial. From the wreckage of “Christian democracy” three parties of different directions were born: left, right and center. Speaking of déjà vu, Eco means that in 2000 the core of the party under the leadership of Flaminio Piccoli was restored under traditional name Christian Democratic Party (Partito Democratico Cristiano).

It’s as if history, tired of the progression of two thousand years, curls up like a snake and dozes off in the blissful comfort of Tradition.

The essays included in this book examine different cases a throwback to the historical past. There are enough of them to justify the chosen name.

However, of course, there is something very new in the situation, at least for our country. Something that has never happened before. I mean a government based on populist demagoguery, reinforced by means unprecedentedly grouped in one hand mass media, a government created by one and only private company caring about its own private interests. Still unknown new option, at least in European politics. This new force is more cunning and more technically equipped than any of the populist elites and third world dictatorships.

Many essays are devoted to this very problem. They are dictated by anxiety and indignation in the face of Impudent Novi, which (at least on the day of writing these lines) is still unclear whether it will be possible to curb it. 14
The parliamentary elections held on April 9, 2006 brought victory to the anti-Berlusconi coalition of center-left parties. The victory was achieved by an extremely slight majority of votes, which further intensified the conflictual atmosphere in Italian politics recent years.

The second section of the collection is devoted to populist despotism (regime) in the media, and I have no hesitation in using this word in approximately the same meaning that medieval thinkers (not communists!) had in mind when they wrote de regimine principum.15
"On the Rule of Sovereigns" (lat.). The title of several medieval works (Thomas Aquinas, Aegidius of Rome, both from the 13th century) on propriety and necessity absolute monarchies. The idea goes back to Aristotle's treatise On Politics.

Speaking of “despotism,” and in general quite appropriately, I open the second section with an appeal that I published before the 2001 elections - it was reviled like few other things in this world. One famous journalist from the right, who, however, for some reason loves me, bitterly complained how this “ good man"(this is about me), may despise the opinion of half of the citizens of Italy (that is, why do I bully those who vote differently from me).

And recently I was criticized not from someone else’s camp, but from my own, for arrogance and an unsympathetic demeanor, which is supposedly characteristic of our dissident intellectuals.

I was so often upset when I heard people say that I try to be nice at all costs and with everyone in the world, that I was glad to see the definition of “unlikable” and even filled with pride.

However, I wonder what arrogance has to do with it. It's as if in due time (si parva licet componere magnis16
When the great is compared with the small (lat.). Virgil. Georgics. iv, 176. Trans.
S. Shervinsky.

) the Rosselli brothers, the Gobettis and dissidents such as Salvemini and Gramsci, not to mention Matteotti 17
Carlo (1899-1937) and Nello Rosselli(1900-1937) - Italian followers of G. Salvemini (see below), who published the underground anti-fascist newspaper “Non Mollare” and discovered the behind-the-scenes side of the murder of Matteotti (see below), were killed in France on the orders of Mussolini. Pierrot Gobetti(1901-1926) - Italian liberal thinker, founder of the magazine Revolucione Liberale. Persecuted by the Nazis, he emigrated with his wife Ada in 1926 and died in France. Gaetano Salvemini(1873-1957) - Italian historian, founder of the socialist movement philosophical thought, insisted on the need agrarian reforms in order to modernize the economy of Southern Italy. Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937) - one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, however, unlike Palmiro Togliatti, he was neither pro-Stalinist nor pro-Soviet. Author of the famous philosophical notes “Prison Notebooks” (1928). Giacomo Matteotti(1885-1924) - Italian socialist deputy who, on May 30, 1924, made a speech in parliament challenging the legitimacy of the elections that had taken place a month earlier, as a result of which Benito Mussolini came to power. “I made my speech. Now prepare a funeral speech for me,” he told his friends. Ten days later, Matteotti was kidnapped and brutally murdered. When his body was found, a political crisis erupted, threatening the very existence of the regime. Making a speech in parliament on December 3, 1925, Mussolini openly accepted responsibility for the crime.

They made it clear that they did not want to fall into the position of the fascists.

If someone fights for political changes(and in in this case I fight for political, civil and moral changes), then, without canceling the indispensable right-obligation of an intellectual to be ready to reconsider his positions, this fighter at the moment of action must still be convinced that he stands for a just cause, and must energetically brand an erroneous position those who behave differently. I can’t imagine how it’s possible to build an election campaign on slogans like “your position is stronger than ours, but we ask you to vote for ours, the weaker one.” During the election campaign, one must criticize the enemy harshly, mercilessly, so as to win over, if not opponents, then at least those who are wavering.

In addition, often the criticism that sounds unsympathetic is a criticism of morals. And a critic of morals (sometimes branding his own or his inclinations towards them in other people’s vices) must be a flagellant. Again I will refer to the classics: when criticizing morals - be Horace, write satires; and if you are more like Virgil, then write poems, the most beautiful poems in the world, but glorifying your superiors.

Times are bad, our morals are depraved, and even the work of critics itself (that which manages to squeeze through the censorship) is exposed to the people for reproach.

Well, then I will deliberately publish these essays under the sign of constructive unlikability, I will choose it as a flag.

All notes have been published before (sources are given), but many texts have been revised for this edition. Not, of course, in order to update and retroactively insert prophecies into published essays, but in order to remove repetitions (since sometimes in the heat of the moment you involuntarily return to obsessive themes), to edit the style, sometimes to cross out references to that momentary thing that is immediately forgotten by readers and becomes obscure.

I. War, peace and neither this nor that

A few thoughts on war and peace 18
Alcune riflessioni sulla guerra e sulla pace. Performance in Milan at the Society of St. Egidio, July 2002

In the early 1960s I was a co-founder of the Italian Committee for Nuclear Disarmament and a participant in several peace marches. Please keep this in mind. I will add that all my life I have been a pacifist (I remain one to this day). With all this, I inform you that in this book I intend to criticize not only war, but also peace. I ask you to be patient and listen to why we are scolding you.

I wrote an essay about each new war, starting with the war in the Persian Gulf, and only after that I realized that from war to war I was changing the very essence of my idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwars. It seems that the concept of war, which has remained more or less constant from the time of the ancient Greeks to our time (regardless of the development of military technology), last decade changed its essence at least three times.

I will be repeating excerpts from the article “Making Sense of War,” published in the collection Five Essays on Ethics. 19
Eco U. Cinque scritti morali. Milano: Bompiani, 1997. Russian. Transl.: Eco U. Five essays on ethics. Corpus, 2012.

In the article we're talking about about the first Gulf War. Old thoughts take on a new dimension.

From right-wing war to the cold war

What has been the meaning of those wars, which we will call primordial wars, in all centuries? War was supposed to lead to victory over the enemy in such a way that his defeat would benefit the winner. The warring parties developed their strategies by taking their opponents by surprise and preventing their opponents from developing their own strategies. Each side agreed to suffer damage - in the sense of losing people killed - if only the enemy, losing people killed, would suffer even more damage. Every possible effort was made for this. Two sides took part in the game. The neutrality of the other parties, plus the condition that the neutral parties would not suffer damage from the war, but, on the contrary, would even receive partial benefits, were mandatory for the freedom of maneuver of the belligerents. Yes, here's another one. I forgot to mention the last condition. You were supposed to understand who your enemy was and where he was. Therefore, as a rule, conflicts were built on the principle of frontality and covered two (or more) identifiable territories.

In our century, the idea of ​​a “world war” capable of affecting even societies without history, such as the tribes of Polynesia, has given the result that it has become impossible to distinguish between neutral parties and belligerents. And since there are also atomic bombs, no matter who participates in the conflict, our entire planet will suffer as a result.

For these reasons, the right-wing war degenerated into a neo-war, having previously gone through the Cold War stage. The Cold War created a tension of peaceful belligerence (belligerent peace). This balance, based on fear, guaranteed a certain stability at the center of the system. The system allowed and even encouraged marginal right-wing wars (Vietnam, Middle East, Africa, etc.). The Cold War essentially provided peace to the First and Second Worlds at the cost of some seasonal or endemic wars in the Third World.

Neo-Gulf War

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the basis for the Cold War disappeared, but the never-ending wars of the Third World gained visibility. The capture of Kuwait was intended to demonstrate that it is simply necessary to resort to traditional war at a certain stage (as many remember, then they even argued this need with the example of the Second World War, that, they say, if Hitler had been stopped in time, Poland would not have been given to him, there would have been a world conflict did not have). But it soon became clear that the war is on no longer just between the two main parties. It turned out that the outrage against American journalists in Baghdad pales in comparison with the outrage against the many millions of pro-Iraq Muslims living in the countries of the anti-Iraq coalition.

In old-time wars, potential enemies were usually interned (or killed). A fellow countryman who aided the enemy from enemy territory ended up on the gallows at the end of the war. We remember how the British hanged John Emery, who opposed home country on fascist radio, and that Ezra Pound only worldwide fame and the intercession of the intelligentsia of the entire planet saved him from execution - he was not destroyed, but declared crazy.

What was the innovation of neo-war?

In neo-war it is difficult to know who the enemy is. All Iraqis? All Serbs? Who are we killing?

Neo-war is not frontal. Neo-war could no longer be structured frontally due to the very nature of supranational capitalism. Western factories supplied weapons to Iraq - not at all by mistake; and it was not by mistake that Western industry supplied weapons to the Taliban ten years after Iraq. The logic of developed capitalism led to this: the situation was no longer amenable to the control of individual states. I would like to remind you of one episode, seemingly unimportant, but typical. Suddenly it was discovered that our Western military planes had been throwing bombs at Saddam Hussein's tank or air base for a long time and had pulverized this base, after which it turned out that it was not a base, but a distracting model of a military facility and that they had produced it and sold it to Saddam, legally registering it this contract, Italian entrepreneurs.

The military factories of the countries participating in the confrontation profited from the right-wing wars. And multinational corporations, which have interests on both sides of the barricades (if, of course, the barricades can somehow be discerned), profit from neo-wars. But the difference is even clearer. In the ancient wars, gun manufacturers grew fat, and their super-profits covered the damage from the temporary cessation of trade exchanges. And the neo-war, although gun manufacturers are getting fatter in the same way, is bringing the aviation, entertainment, tourism and media industries to crisis (on a global scale!): they are losing commercial advertising - and generally undermines the industry of excess, the engine of progress, from real estate to cars. During non-war, some types of economic power come into conflict with other types, and the logic of their conflicts turns out to be more powerful than the logic of nation states.

It is for this reason, I said, that a non-war, in principle, cannot last long, because in its protracted form it is harmful to all sides and not useful to any.

But not only the logic of transnational industrial corporations during the neo-war turned out to be more significant than the logic of states. The needs of mass information with its specific new logic turned out to be equally priority. During the Gulf War, for the first time, a situation arose that became typical: Western mass media became the mouthpiece of anti-war propaganda, emanating not only from Western pacifists led by the Pope, but also from ambassadors and journalists from Arab states sympathetic to Saddam.

The media regularly provided microphones to opponents (when, in theory, the purpose of any and all wartime policies was to suppress enemy propaganda). By listening to the enemy, citizens of warring countries became less loyal to their governments (while Clausewitz 20
Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz(1780-1831) - Prussian general, military historian and military theorist. In his treatise “On War” he put forward the concept of total war.

He taught that the condition for victory is the moral unity of the combatants).

In all past wars, the population, believing in the goal of the war, dreamed of destroying the enemy. Nowadays, on the contrary, information not only undermines the population’s faith in the purpose of the war, but also evokes compassion for the dying enemy. The death of enemies turns from a distant, implicit event into an unbearably visual spectacle. The Gulf War was the first war in human history in which the population of a warring country pitied its enemies.

(Something similar was already planned during Vietnam, but then opinions were expressed in special, designated places, mostly peripheral, and they were expressed in America exclusively by groups of radicals. During Vietnam, the ambassador of the Ho Chi Minh City government or the press attache of General Vo Nguyen Giap 21
General Vo Nguyen Giap(b. 1911/12) – Vietnamese military leader and political figure, Commander-in-Chief of the North Vietnamese Armed Forces.

Didn't get a chance to rant on the BBC. At that time, American journalists did not broadcast live reports from a Hanoi hotel. And Peter Arnett 22
Peter Arnett(b. 1935) - American military journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War, who worked as an NBC correspondent in Baghdad in 2003 and was fired in March of the same year for expressing his assessment of US military strategy on Iraqi television : “The American war plan has failed.” On the same day, Arnett was hired by a British newspaper Daily Mirror.

During the Iraq War, he broadcast directly from a hotel in Baghdad.)

Information allows the enemy into someone else's rear. It was during the Gulf War that the world realized that everyone had an enemy in their rear. Even if you drown out all mass information, you cannot drown out new communication technologies. No dictator can stop the global flow of communication; it spreads across such technological mini-infrastructures, without which the dictator himself would be without hands. The flow of communication performs the same function that traditional wars carried out by the secret services: neutralizes the calculation of anticipation. What kind of war is this in which it is impossible to forestall the enemy? Neo-war legitimizes all Mata Haris and allows fraternization with the enemy.

There are so many powerful players at the table in neo-war times that the game is on according to the rules “all against all”. Neo-war is not one of those processes where the calculations and intentions of the players matter. Due to the number of power factors (the era of globalization was beginning), the Gulf War took on unpredictable aspects. The outcome could have been acceptable for one of the parties, but in general in that war Everyone lost.

By saying that the conflict at some stage supposedly ended in favor of one of the parties, we proceed from the idea that the conflict is generally “capable of ending.” But completion would be possible only if the war remained, according to Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means: that is, the war would end when the desired balance was achieved and it would be possible to simply return to politics. However, the two great world wars of the 20th century demonstrated that the politics of the post-war period is always and everywhere a continuation (by any means) of the processes begun by the war. No matter how the wars end, they will lead to comprehensive shake-ups, which, in principle, will not be able to satisfy all those who fought. So any war will continue in the form of alarming political and economic instability for many more decades, without ensuring any other policy than politics militant.

On the other hand, when has it ever been different? To assume that the wars of antiquity led to reasonable results (that is, to ultimate stability) is to believe, following Hegel, that history has a direction. Neither from history nor from simple logic does it follow that order in the Mediterranean after the Punic Wars or in Europe after Napoleon became more stable. This order may well be considered unstable, which could have been much more stable if war had not shaken it. So what if humanity has been using war as a panacea for unstable geopolitical conditions for tens of thousands of years? For the same tens of thousands of years, humanity has been using drugs and alcohol as a panacea for depression.

Events showed that my thoughts at that time were not idle. Let's see what happened after the Gulf War. Powers Western world liberated Kuwait, but then stopped because they could not afford to go so far as to completely destroy the enemy. The equilibrium that emerged after this was not so different from the situation that aroused the whole conflict. The same problem remained: eliminating Saddam Hussein.

Published under agreement with the literary agency ELKOST Intl.;

© RCS Libri S.p.A. – Milano Bompiani 2006–2010

© E. Kostyukovich, translation into Russian, 2007

© E. Kostyukovich, notes, 2007

© A. Bondarenko, design, 2012

© Astrel Publishing House LLC, 2012

Publishing house CORPUS ®

Walking doggy style

This book collects a number of articles and speeches written from 2000 to 2005. This is a special period. At its beginning, people experienced traditional fear of the change of millennia. The change occurred, and 9/11, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War struck. Well, in Italy... In Italy, this time, on top of everything else, was the era of Berlusconi’s rule.

Therefore, leaving other statements on various topics outside the scope of the volume, I collected only those reflections that affect the political and media events of those six years. Step by step I followed the pattern described in the penultimate of the Minerva Cardboards. That “Cardboard” was called “The Triumph of Lightweight Technology.”

It was a parody review of a fictional book by the fictional Crab Backwards. Pan Galaxy. Loop Press, 1996). There I wrote that lately I have noticed many technological innovations that represent real steps backwards. So, difficult types of communication Since the 70s they started to get lighter. At first, the predominant type of communication was color television - a big box, it cluttered the room, puffed ominously in the darkness and rumbled to intimidate the residents of other apartments. The first step to facilitated communication did when they invented remote control. It became possible not only to reduce or eliminate the sound at will, but also to kill the color and change the channel. Jumping from discussion to discussion, looking at a black and white silent screen, the viewer receives new creative freedom: life begins to the accompaniment of zapping. Old television, broadcasting everything live, kept the viewer in slavery, forcing them to watch the programs sequentially. But live broadcasts are now almost obsolete, which means that television has outlived our dependence on it, and the VCR not only transforms television into cinema, but also allows us to rewind recordings, bringing us out of passivity and subordination.

At this stage, I think it is possible to remove sound from the TV altogether. Play mounted pictures to the soundtrack of a pianola, synthesizing music on a computer. And given that television often runs a ticker for the hearing impaired, there won’t be long to wait - programs will soon appear where they will show a kissing couple with the caption at the bottom of the screen: “We have love.” Thus facilitated technology will lead to the reinvention of the silent film of the Lumières.

The next step has already been taken - towards immobilization of images. When the Internet was born, users began to receive low-resolution still pictures, often in black and white, without sound; sound turned out to be superfluous: all information was displayed on the screen in text form.

The next stage of this triumphant return to the Gutenberg galaxy, I said, would, of course, be the disappearance of pictures. They will invent a box that can catch and transmit only sounds, and does not require a remote control: it will be possible to jump through channels, adjusting the settings with a round knob! I was joking when I suggested inventing a radio receiver. Now I see that I prophesied and invented the iPod.

In conclusion, I wrote that the last stage will be the abandonment of broadcast programs, where there is always some kind of interference, and the transition to cable television, using telephone and Internet wires. Thus, I said, the wireless transmission of sounds will be replaced by the wire transmission of signs - so we, having backed up to Marconi, will move back to Meucci.

I was joking, but the ideas came true. That we are progressing backwards became clear after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the political geography of Asia and Europe changed. Atlas publishers scrapped stocks from warehouses: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany and similar monsters disappeared from world maps. Maps began to be stylized as 1914, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Baltic states returned to them.

Progress topsy-turvy, it must be said, does not end here. In the third millennium we began to dance even more reverse steps. Examples please. After half a century of the Cold War, we finally unleashed a hot war in Afghanistan and Iraq, again survived the attacks of the “insidious Afghans” on the Khyber Pass, revived the medieval crusades, and repeated the wars of Christianity against Islam. The suicide bombers started up again, drilled in shelters by the Elder of the Mountain, and the fanfare of Lepanto thundered, and some newfangled books can be retold with one heart-rending cry of “Mommy, oh, Turks!”

Christian fundamentalism, which was previously thought to have died out with the 19th century, has again raised its head, anti-Darwinian polemics have revived, and the bogey of the Yellow Peril looms before us again (so far frightening only by demography and economics). In our white families, colored slaves are again working, as in the novel Gone with the Wind, and barbarian tribes are again migrating, as if in the first centuries of our era. And, as shown in one of the essays published here, the manners and customs that existed in Rome during the period of decline are being restored (at least in my Italy).

Anti-Semitism with its “Protocols” is triumphant, having reappeared, and we have fascists in our government (who call themselves “post...”, although among them are the same people who were directly called fascists). I look up from the layout of this book: on TV, an athlete greets fans with a Roman, that is, fascist, salute. Just like I was almost seventy years ago, when I was a balilla and they forced me. What can we say about devolution, which threatens to throw Italy back into pre-Garibaldian times?

Again, as in the post-Cavour years, the church and the state are squabbling with each other. To top off the déjà vu, the Christian Democrats, who were thought to be extinct (a mistake!), are being revived.

It’s as if history, tired of the progression of two thousand years, curls up like a snake and dozes off in the blissful comfort of Tradition.

The essays included in this book examine various cases of rollbacks to the historical past. There are enough of them to justify the chosen name.

However, of course, there is something very new in the situation, at least for our country. Something that has never happened before. I mean a government based on populist demagoguery, amplified by an unprecedented mass media, created by a single private company looking after its own private interests. A new option that is still unfamiliar, at least in European politics. This new force is more cunning and more technically equipped than any of the populist elites and third world dictatorships.

Many essays are devoted to this very problem. They are dictated by anxiety and indignation in the face of Impudent Novi, which (at least on the day of writing these lines) is still unclear whether it will be possible to curb it.

The second section of the collection is devoted to populist despotism (regime) in the media, and I have no hesitation in using this word in approximately the same meaning that medieval thinkers (not communists!) had in mind when they wrote de regimine principum.

Speaking of “despotism,” and in general quite appropriately, I open the second section with an appeal that I published before the 2001 elections - it was reviled like few other things in this world. One famous journalist from the right, who, however, for some reason loves me, bitterly complained how a “good person” (this is about me) can despise the opinion of half of the citizens of Italy (that is, why do I bully those who vote wrong, like me).

And recently I was criticized not from someone else’s camp, but from my own, for arrogance and an unsympathetic demeanor, which is supposedly characteristic of our dissident intellectuals.

I was so often upset when I heard people say that I try to be nice at all costs and with everyone in the world, that I was glad to see the definition of “unlikable” and even filled with pride.

However, I wonder what arrogance has to do with it. It's as if in due time (si parva licet componere magnis ) the Rosselli brothers, the Gobetti spouses and such dissidents as Salvemini and Gramsci, not to mention Matteotti, were told that they did not want to become fascists.

If someone is fighting for political changes (and in this case I am fighting for political, civil and moral changes), then, without canceling the indispensable right-obligation of an intellectual to be ready to reconsider his positions, this fighter must still be convinced at the moment of action , which stands for a just cause, and must vigorously denounce the erroneous position of those who behave differently. I can’t imagine how it’s possible to build an election campaign on slogans like “your position is stronger than ours, but we ask you to vote for ours, the weaker one.” During the election campaign, one must criticize the enemy harshly, mercilessly, so as to win over, if not opponents, then at least those who are wavering.

In addition, often the criticism that sounds unsympathetic is a criticism of morals. And a critic of morals (sometimes branding his own or his inclinations towards them in other people’s vices) must be a flagellant. Again I will refer to the classics: when criticizing morals - be Horace, write satires; and if you are more like Virgil, then write poems, the most beautiful poems in the world, but glorifying your superiors.

Times are bad, our morals are depraved, and even the work of critics itself (that which manages to squeeze through the censorship) is exposed to the people for reproach.

Well, then I will deliberately publish these essays under the sign of constructive unlikability, I will choose it as a flag.

All notes have been published before (sources are given), but many texts have been revised for this edition. Not, of course, in order to update and retroactively insert prophecies into published essays, but in order to remove repetitions (since sometimes in the heat of the moment you involuntarily return to obsessive themes), to edit the style, sometimes to cross out references to that momentary thing that is immediately forgotten by readers and becomes obscure.

I. War, peace and neither this nor that

A few thoughts on war and peace

In the early 1960s I was a co-founder of the Italian Committee for Nuclear Disarmament and a participant in several peace marches. Please keep this in mind. I will add that all my life I have been a pacifist (I remain one to this day). With all this, I inform you that in this book I intend to criticize not only war, but also peace. I ask you to be patient and listen to why we are scolding you.

I wrote an essay about each new war, starting with the war in the Persian Gulf, and only after that I realized that from war to war I was changing the very essence of my idea of ​​\u200b\u200bwars. It seems that the concept of war, which has remained more or less constant from the time of the ancient Greeks to our time (regardless of the development of military technology), has changed its essence at least three times over the past decade.

I will repeat excerpts from the article “Making Sense of War,” published in the collection Five Essays on Ethics. The article talks about the first Gulf War. Old thoughts take on a new dimension.

From right-wing war to the cold war

What has been the meaning of those wars, which we will call primordial wars, in all centuries? War was supposed to lead to victory over the enemy in such a way that his defeat would benefit the winner. The warring parties developed their strategies by taking their opponents by surprise and preventing their opponents from developing their own strategies. Each side agreed to suffer damage - in the sense of losing people killed - if only the enemy, losing people killed, would suffer even more damage. Every possible effort was made for this. Two sides took part in the game. The neutrality of the other parties, plus the condition that the neutral parties would not suffer damage from the war, but, on the contrary, would even receive partial benefits, were mandatory for the freedom of maneuver of the belligerents. Yes, here's another one. I forgot to mention the last condition. You were supposed to understand who your enemy was and where he was. Therefore, as a rule, conflicts were built on the principle of frontality and covered two (or more) identifiable territories.

In our century, the idea of ​​a “world war” capable of affecting even societies without history, such as the tribes of Polynesia, has given the result that it has become impossible to distinguish between neutral parties and belligerents. And since there are also atomic bombs, no matter who participates in the conflict, our entire planet will suffer as a result.

For these reasons, the right-wing war degenerated into a neo-war, having previously gone through the Cold War stage. The Cold War created a tension of peaceful belligerence (belligerent peace). This balance, based on fear, guaranteed a certain stability at the center of the system. The system allowed and even encouraged marginal right-wing wars (Vietnam, Middle East, Africa, etc.). The Cold War essentially provided peace to the First and Second Worlds at the cost of some seasonal or endemic wars in the Third World.

Neo-Gulf War

With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the basis for the Cold War disappeared, but the never-ending wars of the Third World gained visibility. The capture of Kuwait was intended to demonstrate that it is simply necessary to resort to traditional war at a certain stage (as many remember, then they even argued this need with the example of the Second World War, that, they say, if Hitler had been stopped in time, Poland would not have been given to him, there would have been a world conflict did not have). But it soon became clear that the war was no longer just between the two main parties. It turned out that the outrage against American journalists in Baghdad pales in comparison with the outrage against the many millions of pro-Iraq Muslims living in the countries of the anti-Iraq coalition.

In old-time wars, potential enemies were usually interned (or killed). A fellow countryman who aided the enemy from enemy territory ended up on the gallows at the end of the war. We remember how the British hanged John Emery, who spoke out against his native country on fascist radio, and that Ezra Pound was saved from execution only by worldwide fame and the intercession of the intelligentsia of the entire planet - he was not destroyed, but declared crazy.

What was the innovation of neo-war?

In neo-war it is difficult to know who the enemy is. All Iraqis? All Serbs? Who are we killing?

Neo-war is not frontal. Neo-war could no longer be structured frontally due to the very nature of supranational capitalism. Western factories supplied weapons to Iraq - not at all by mistake; and it was not by mistake that Western industry supplied weapons to the Taliban ten years after Iraq. The logic of developed capitalism led to this: the situation was no longer amenable to the control of individual states. I would like to remind you of one episode, seemingly unimportant, but typical. Suddenly it was discovered that our Western military planes had been throwing bombs at Saddam Hussein's tank or air base for a long time and had pulverized this base, after which it turned out that it was not a base, but a distracting model of a military facility and that they had produced it and sold it to Saddam, legally registering it this contract, Italian entrepreneurs.

The military factories of the countries participating in the confrontation profited from the right-wing wars. And multinational corporations, which have interests on both sides of the barricades (if, of course, the barricades can somehow be discerned), profit from neo-wars. But the difference is even clearer. In the ancient wars, gun manufacturers grew fat, and their super-profits covered the damage from the temporary cessation of trade exchanges. And the neo-war, although gun manufacturers are getting fatter in the same way, is bringing the aviation, entertainment, tourism and media industries to crisis (on a global scale!): they are losing commercial advertising - and generally undermines the industry of excess, the engine of progress, from real estate to cars. During non-war, some types of economic power come into conflict with other types, and the logic of their conflicts turns out to be more powerful than the logic of nation states.

It is for this reason, I said, that a non-war, in principle, cannot last long, because in its protracted form it is harmful to all sides and not useful to any.

But not only the logic of transnational industrial corporations during the neo-war turned out to be more significant than the logic of states. The needs of mass information with its specific new logic turned out to be equally priority. During the Gulf War, for the first time, a situation arose that became typical: Western mass media became the mouthpiece of anti-war propaganda, emanating not only from Western pacifists led by the Pope, but also from ambassadors and journalists from Arab states sympathetic to Saddam.

The media regularly provided microphones to opponents (when, in theory, the purpose of any and all wartime policies was to suppress enemy propaganda). By listening to the enemy, citizens of the warring countries became less loyal to their governments (while Clausewitz taught that the condition for victory was the moral unity of the belligerents).

In all past wars, the population, believing in the goal of the war, dreamed of destroying the enemy. Nowadays, on the contrary, information not only undermines the population’s faith in the purpose of the war, but also evokes compassion for the dying enemy. The death of enemies turns from a distant, implicit event into an unbearably visual spectacle. The Gulf War was the first war in human history in which the population of a warring country pitied its enemies.

(Something similar was already planned during Vietnam, but then opinions were expressed in special, designated places, mostly peripheral, and they were expressed in America exclusively by groups of radicals. During Vietnam, the ambassador of the Ho Chi Minh City government or the press attache of General Vo Nguyen Giap did not have the opportunity rant on the BBC. Back then, American journalists did not report live from a Hanoi hotel. Peter Arnett broadcast directly from a hotel in Baghdad during the Iraq War.)

Information allows the enemy into someone else's rear. It was during the Gulf War that the world realized that everyone had an enemy in their rear. Even if you drown out all mass information, you cannot drown out new communication technologies. No dictator can stop the global flow of communication; it spreads across such technological mini-infrastructures, without which the dictator himself would be without hands. The flow of communication performs the same function that the secret services performed in traditional wars: it neutralizes preemption. What kind of war is this in which it is impossible to forestall the enemy? Neo-war legitimizes all Mata Haris and allows fraternization with the enemy.

There are so many powerful players at the table during neo-wars that the game follows the rules of “all against all.” Neo-war is not one of those processes where the calculations and intentions of the players matter. Due to the number of power factors (the era of globalization was beginning), the Gulf War took on unpredictable aspects. The outcome could have been acceptable for one of the parties, but in general in that war Everyone lost.

By saying that the conflict at some stage supposedly ended in favor of one of the parties, we proceed from the idea that the conflict is generally “capable of ending.” But completion would be possible only if the war remained, according to Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means: that is, the war would end when the desired balance was achieved and it would be possible to simply return to politics. However, the two great world wars of the 20th century demonstrated that the politics of the post-war period is always and everywhere a continuation (by any means) of the processes begun by the war. No matter how the wars end, they will lead to comprehensive shake-ups, which, in principle, will not be able to satisfy all those who fought. So any war will continue in the form of alarming political and economic instability for many more decades, without ensuring any other policy than politics militant.

On the other hand, when has it ever been different? To assume that the wars of antiquity led to reasonable results (that is, to ultimate stability) is to believe, following Hegel, that history has a direction. Neither from history nor from simple logic does it follow that order in the Mediterranean after the Punic Wars or in Europe after Napoleon became more stable. This order may well be considered unstable, which could have been much more stable if war had not shaken it. So what if humanity has been using war as a panacea for unstable geopolitical conditions for tens of thousands of years? For the same tens of thousands of years, humanity has been using drugs and alcohol as a panacea for depression.

Events showed that my thoughts at that time were not idle. Let's see what happened after the Gulf War. The forces of the Western world liberated Kuwait, but then stopped because they could not afford to go so far as to completely destroy the enemy. The equilibrium that emerged after this was not so different from the situation that aroused the whole conflict. The same problem remained: eliminating Saddam Hussein.

The fact is that the neo-Gulf War led to foreground the question is absolutely new, not characteristic not only of logic, not only of dynamics, but also of the very psychology of legal wars. The normal goal of right-wing wars was to destroy as many enemies as possible - with the consent that quite a few of their own would also lose their lives. The great generals of the past would go out on nights after battles onto battlefields strewn with dead bones, and not the least bit surprised that half of the fallen were their own soldiers. The death of their own soldiers was celebrated with awards and touching ceremonies, and a cult of the glory of fallen heroes was created. The death of opponents was perceived as a holiday. The civilian population in their homes should have rejoiced and reveled in the news of every enemy soldier killed.

During the Gulf War, two new principles took shape: (i) the death of none of our own is unacceptable and (ii) it is desirable to destroy as few enemies as possible. Regarding the destruction of enemies, we remember that there was a fair amount of affectation and even hypocrisy, since Iraqis still died in huge numbers in the desert, but the fact that they were not shown with triumph and joy is in itself remarkable. One way or another, it has become typical for neo-wars to try not to exterminate the population, well, except by accident, because if you kill too many civilians, you will run into the disapproval of the international media.

Hence the idea of ​​“smart bombs” and the celebration of them. To young people, such a humanitarian sensibility probably seems natural: young people have been brought up by five decades of peace, thanks to the Cold War. But imagine such sentiments at a time when V-1s were hitting London and the Allied bombing was leveling the city of Dresden.

As for the death of its soldiers, the Gulf War was the first conflict in which the loss of even one serviceman began to seem unacceptable. From now on, the warring country no longer shared the right-wing logic, namely: the sons of the fatherland are ready to lay down their bones for a just cause. Where there? When a single Western warplane was shot down, it was seen as a tragedy. Television screens showed prisoners who, in order to save their lives, voiced the enemy’s propaganda slogans. They were shown with sympathy. Poor things, they were forced to do so. Forgotten sacred rule that the captured patriot is silent and under torture.

According to the logic of the right-wing war, they should have been publicly humiliated or at least concealed the pathetic incident! But no, on the contrary, everyone tried to enter into their position, they were shown solidarity, they received, well, if not military awards, then warm encouragement from the mass media for the fact that, by hook or by crook, they managed to find a way to preserve themselves.

In short, the neo-war was transformed into a masterpiece of mass media, and in the end Baudrillard, a lover of paradoxes, declared that wars did not exist in reality at all, they were only on television.

Mass media, by definition, sells happiness, not sadness. The mass media are obliged to introduce into the logic of war the principle of maximum happiness or at least minimal unhappiness. By this logic, a war that is not associated with unhappiness and respects the principle of maximum happiness should be short. By virtue of this logic, the mass media was short and the war in the Persian Gulf was short.

But it was so short that it was essentially useless. So useless that the neocons again turned to Clinton, and then to Bush, so that America would continue to persecute Hussein. The neo-war gave the opposite result to what was expected.

This book was published before the parliamentary elections that took place on April 9, 2006 and brought victory to the center-left bloc. The government of Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936), which Eco so vigorously ridiculed, resigned. The victory of the opposition was facilitated, in particular, by the statements of authoritative representatives of the Italian intelligentsia in the form of speeches, articles and individual books, similar to this collection. (Hereinafter, notes by E. Kostyukovich. L. Summ participated in the selection of material for the notes. Translations of quotes, unless otherwise indicated in the footnote, were made by E. Kostyukovich.)

Under this name, on the last page of the magazine, Eco first published weekly (1985-1998), and subsequently twice a month (from 1998 to the present), notes on morals, issues of culture and ethics, and philosophical sketches. The name goes back to the now defunct Minerva matches, which were glued onto wide strips of cardboard. On cardboards, Eco made notes for future essays at meetings or on trips. A collection of these essays (Eco U. La Bustina di Minerva. Milano: Bompiani, 2000) in Russian translation was published in 2007 by the Symposium publishing house under the title “Cartons of Minerva. Notes on matchboxes."

Eco U. Il trionfo della tecnologia leggera // La Bustina di Minerva. Milano: Bompiani, 2000. P. 329.

The Gutenberg Galaxy is a term coined by the Canadian philosopher and communications theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), author of the book The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Emergence of Typographic Man" (The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, 1962), along with the term Global Village. McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy the first five hundred years of printing technology until 1844 - before the invention of the Morse telegraph. Modern electronic civilization has received the name “Marconi Galaxy”. See: Eco U. From Internet to Gutenberg. Lecture at The Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, November 12, 1996. Also: Eco W. From the Internet to Gutenberg. Text and hypertext. Public lecture, Moscow State University May 20, 1998

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) was an Italian engineer and entrepreneur, considered in Italy to be the inventor of the radio receiver (1898). Antonio Meucci (1808-1889) – Italian inventor of the telephone (1857). Due to incorrect execution of documents, he lost the right to be called a discoverer, and A.G. enjoys this right. Bell, who patented the telephone in 1876

Balilla (Opera Nazionale Balilla, 1926-1937) - under Mussolini, a fascist organization for teenagers from 9 to 14 years old.

Devolution is a term in modern Italian politics: the federalization of the country by transferring government functions to the regions. The slogan of the autonomist “League of the North” (Lega Nord).

The famous politician Count Camillo Benso Cavour (1810-1861) played a decisive role in the two wars of independence that led to the unification of Italy (March 17, 1861) and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel II. During the Third War of Independence (1866) and the conquest of Papal Rome (1870), Cavour was no longer alive. The Papal State was declared non-existent; During this “post-Cavour” period, the young Italian state had to resolve particularly painful issues of relations with the Catholic Church, which opposed the annexation of Rome to Italy. The Papal State (within the Vatican City) was only re-established under Fascism, to which the Catholic Church gave approval and support, in reward for which Mussolini signed the Lateran Agreements (1929), which gave the Vatican the status of a separate state.

The Christian Democratic Party of Italy (Democrazia Cristiana), founded in 1942 by Alcide De Gasperi, was dissolved on January 18, 1994 after a wave of scandals and trials, called “Clean Hands” (Mani pulite), when its most prominent representatives were put on trial this party and the government formed from it. From the wreckage of “Christian democracy” three parties of different directions were born: left, right and center. By talking about déjà vu, Eco means that in 2000 the core of the party, under the leadership of Flaminio Piccoli, was restored under the traditional name of the Christian Democratic Party (Partito Democratico Cristiano).

The parliamentary elections held on April 9, 2006 brought victory to the anti-Berlusconi coalition of center-left parties. The victory was achieved by an extremely slight majority of votes, which further intensified the conflictual atmosphere in Italian politics in recent years.

. “On the reign of sovereigns” (lat.). The title of several medieval works (Thomas Aquinas, Aegidius of Rome, both 13th century) on the appropriateness and necessity of absolute monarchies. The idea goes back to Aristotle's treatise On Politics.

Carlo (1899-1937) and Nello Rosselli (1900-1937) - Italian followers of G. Salvemini (see below), who published the underground anti-fascist newspaper "Non Mollare" and discovered the behind-the-scenes side of the murder of Matteotti (see below), were killed in France by order of Mussolini. Piero Gobetti (1901-1926) - Italian liberal thinker, founder of the magazine "Revolucione Liberale". Persecuted by the Nazis, he emigrated with his wife Ada in 1926 and died in France. Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957) - Italian historian, founder of socialist philosophical thought, insisted on the need for agrarian reforms in order to modernize the economy of Southern Italy. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, however, unlike Palmiro Togliatti, he was neither pro-Stalinist nor pro-Soviet. Author of the famous philosophical notes “Prison Notebooks” (1928). Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924) was an Italian socialist deputy who, on May 30, 1924, delivered a speech in parliament challenging the legitimacy of the elections that had taken place a month earlier, as a result of which Benito Mussolini came to power. “I made my speech. Now prepare a funeral speech for me,” he told his friends. Ten days later, Matteotti was kidnapped and brutally murdered. When his body was found, a political crisis erupted, threatening the very existence of the regime. Making a speech in parliament on December 3, 1925, Mussolini openly accepted responsibility for the crime.

Eco clearly quotes Jean Baudrillard's propositions (see below), in this case from the essay “Under the Mask of War” (Le masque de la guerre. Libération, March 10, 2003): “The abolition of “Evil” in all forms, the abolition of the enemy , which, in essence, no longer exists (after all, it is simply erased from the face of the earth), the abolition of death. “Zero casualties” is the main slogan of the global security service.” (" Domestic notes", 2003, No. 6. Per. V. Milchina.)

. "Vau" (from German: Vergeltungswaffe, "weapon of retaliation") is a long-range guided missile weapon. From June 13, 1944, London was bombed with V-1 cruise missiles, and from September 8, 1944, with V-2 ballistic missiles. The British responded by bombing German cities and in February 1945 practically destroyed Dresden.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) - French cultural scientist, philosopher, political scientist and sociologist, postmodernist and poststructuralist. His essay “Necrospective” on the wars that shook the 20th century says: “In the end, we logically ask ourselves a stunning question: “In general, did all this really happen?”” (Baudrillard J. Transparency of Evil. M. : Dobrosvet, 2000. P. 136. Translated by L. Lyubarskaya, E. Markovskaya).

Umberto Eco resists these trends in every possible way, creating novels whose meaning is the affirmation of rationality and morality in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Eco considers it his duty to express the same thing in direct words. Collection "Full Back!", composed of articles and public speaking from 2000 to 2005, devoted to the analysis of modern...

The meaning of the name: attention! The world is progressing - and the world is moving backwards! “The Middle Ages Return” was the title of an article by Umberto Eco in 1994. This dystopian image was picked up by the press around the world. And the third millennium demonstrates: time is looking backward, because in developed societies morality does not keep pace with advancing technology. War, a proven absurdity, is still a means of implementing politics. Hatred of the “other” is still the best lever for uniting the masses. Advances in technology increasingly contribute to the enslavement of people and the propagation of ignorance. Superstitions, as a primitive explanation of the world order, increasingly influence attempts to interpret the world.
Umberto Eco resists these trends in every possible way, creating novels whose meaning is the affirmation of rationality and morality in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Eco considers it his duty to express the same thing in direct words. The collection “Full Back!”, compiled from articles and public speeches from 2000 to 2005, is devoted to the analysis of modern reality, its most obvious and therefore difficult to correct evils.

Umberto Eco - Italian scientist-philosopher, medievalist historian, semiotics specialist, literary critic, writer. His debut novel, The Name of the Rose, amazed readers and critics with its depth, ambiguity and philosophical significance. Each next piece Eco opens up new boundaries of the author's talent. " Full back!" is a collection of a number of articles and speeches written from 2000 to 2005.

Full back! "Hot Wars and populism in the media (collection)" Umberto Eco

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Title: Full Back! “Hot wars” and populism in the media (collection)
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Year: 2013
Genre: Foreign educational literature, Foreign journalism, Books on philosophy, Cultural studies, Journalism

About the book “Full Back! “Hot wars” and populism in the media (collection)” Umberto Eco

The meaning of the name: attention! The world is progressing - and the world is moving backwards! “The Middle Ages Return” was the title of an article by Umberto Eco in 1994. This dystopian image was picked up by the press around the world. And the third millennium demonstrates: time is looking backward, because in developed societies morality does not keep pace with advancing technology. War, a proven absurdity, is still a means of implementing politics. Hatred of the “other” is still the best lever for uniting the masses. Advances in technology increasingly contribute to the enslavement of people and the propagation of ignorance. Superstitions, as a primitive explanation of the world order, increasingly influence attempts to interpret the world. Umberto Eco fully resists these trends, creating novels whose meaning is the affirmation of rationality and morality in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Eco considers it his duty to express the same thing in direct words. The collection “Full Back!”, compiled from articles and public speeches from 2000 to 2005, is devoted to the analysis of modern reality, its most obvious and therefore difficult to correct evils.

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It was a parody review of a fictional book by the fictional Crab Backwards. Pan Galaxy. Loop Press, 1996). There I wrote that lately I have noticed many technological innovations that represent real steps backwards. So, difficult types of communication Since the 70s they started to get lighter. At first, the predominant type of communication was color television - a big box, it cluttered the room, puffed ominously in the darkness and rumbled to intimidate the residents of other apartments. The first step to facilitated communication did when they invented remote control. It became possible not only to reduce or eliminate the sound at will, but also to kill the color and change the channel. Jumping from discussion to discussion, looking at a black and white silent screen, the viewer receives new creative freedom: life begins to the accompaniment of zapping. Old television, broadcasting everything live, kept the viewer in slavery, forcing them to watch the programs sequentially. But live broadcasts are now almost obsolete, which means that television has outlived our dependence on it, and the VCR not only transforms television into cinema, but also allows us to rewind recordings, bringing us out of passivity and subordination.

At this stage, I think it is possible to remove sound from the TV altogether. Play mounted pictures to the soundtrack of a pianola, synthesizing music on a computer. And given that television often runs a ticker for the hearing impaired, there won’t be long to wait - programs will soon appear where they will show a kissing couple with the caption at the bottom of the screen: “We have love.” Thus facilitated technology will lead to the reinvention of the silent film of the Lumières.

The next step has already been taken - towards immobilization of images. When the Internet was born, users began to receive low-resolution still pictures, often in black and white, without sound; sound turned out to be superfluous: all information was displayed on the screen in text form.

The next stage of this triumphant return to the Gutenberg galaxy, I said, would, of course, be the disappearance of pictures. They will invent a box that can catch and transmit only sounds, and does not require a remote control: it will be possible to jump through channels, adjusting the settings with a round knob! I was joking when I suggested inventing a radio receiver. Now I see that I prophesied and invented the iPod.

In conclusion, I wrote that the last stage will be the abandonment of broadcast programs, where there is always some kind of interference, and the transition to cable television, using telephone and Internet wires. Thus, I said, the wireless transmission of sounds will be replaced by the wire transmission of signs - so we, having backed up to Marconi, will move back to Meucci.

I was joking, but the ideas came true. That we are progressing backwards became clear after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the political geography of Asia and Europe changed. Atlas publishers scrapped stocks from warehouses: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany and similar monsters disappeared from world maps. Maps began to be stylized as 1914, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Baltic states returned to them.

Progress topsy-turvy, it must be said, does not end here. In the third millennium we began to dance even more reverse steps. Examples please. After half a century of the Cold War, we finally unleashed a hot war in Afghanistan and Iraq, again survived the attacks of the “insidious Afghans” on the Khyber Pass, revived the medieval crusades, and repeated the wars of Christianity against Islam. The suicide bombers started up again, drilled in shelters by the Elder of the Mountain, and the fanfare of Lepanto thundered, and some newfangled books can be retold with one heart-rending cry of “Mommy, oh, Turks!”

Christian fundamentalism, which was previously thought to have died out with the 19th century, has again raised its head, anti-Darwinian polemics have revived, and the bogey of the Yellow Peril looms before us again (so far frightening only by demography and economics). In our white families, colored slaves are again working, as in the novel Gone with the Wind, and barbarian tribes are again migrating, as if in the first centuries of our era. And, as shown in one of the essays published here, the manners and customs that existed in Rome during the period of decline are being restored (at least in my Italy).

Anti-Semitism with its “Protocols” is triumphant, having reappeared, and we have fascists in our government (who call themselves “post...”, although among them are the same people who were directly called fascists). I look up from the layout of this book: on TV, an athlete greets fans with a Roman, that is, fascist, salute. Just like I was almost seventy years ago, when I was a balilla and they forced me. What can we say about devolution, which threatens to throw Italy back into pre-Garibaldian times?

Again, as in the post-Cavour years, the church and the state are squabbling with each other. To top off the déjà vu, the Christian Democrats, who were thought to be extinct (a mistake!), are being revived.

It’s as if history, tired of the progression of two thousand years, curls up like a snake and dozes off in the blissful comfort of Tradition.

The essays included in this book examine various cases of rollbacks to the historical past. There are enough of them to justify the chosen name.

However, of course, there is something very new in the situation, at least for our country. Something that has never happened before. I mean a government based on populist demagoguery, amplified by an unprecedented mass media, created by a single private company looking after its own private interests. A new option that is still unfamiliar, at least in European politics. This new force is more cunning and more technically equipped than any of the populist elites and third world dictatorships.

Many essays are devoted to this very problem. They are dictated by anxiety and indignation in the face of Impudent Novi, which (at least on the day of writing these lines) is still unclear whether it will be possible to curb it.

This book was published before the parliamentary elections that took place on April 9, 2006 and brought victory to the center-left bloc. The government of Silvio Berlusconi (b. 1936), which Eco so vigorously ridiculed, resigned. The victory of the opposition was facilitated, in particular, by the statements of authoritative representatives of the Italian intelligentsia in the form of speeches, articles and individual books, similar to this collection. ( Hereinafter notes by E. Kostyukovich. L. Summ participated in the selection of material for the notes. Translations of quotations, unless otherwise indicated in the footnote, were made by E. Kostyukovich.)

Under this name, on the last page of the magazine, Eco first published weekly (1985-1998), and subsequently twice a month (from 1998 to the present), notes on morals, issues of culture and ethics, and philosophical sketches. The name goes back to the now defunct Minerva matches, which were glued onto wide strips of cardboard. On cardboards, Eco made notes for future essays at meetings or on trips. A collection of these essays (Eco U. La Bustina di Minerva. Milano: Bompiani, 2000) in Russian translation was published in 2007 by the Symposium publishing house under the title “Cartons of Minerva. Notes on matchboxes."

Gutenberg galaxy - term in, introduced by the Canadian philosopher and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), author of the book “The Gutenberg Galaxy. The emergence of typographical man" (The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, 1962), along with the term Global Village - “global village”. McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy the first five hundred years of printing technology until 1844 - before the invention of the Morse telegraph. Modern electronic civilization has received the name “Marconi Galaxy”. See: Eco U. From Internet to Gutenberg. Lecture at The Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, November 12, 1996. Also: Eco W. From the Internet to Gutenberg. Text and hypertext. Public lecture, Moscow State University May 20, 1998