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Inventing the Enemy
By Umberto
Eco
https://medium.com/@richardjones_42477/inventing-the-enemy-5a53ff923c4c
SOME YEARS AGO in New York
I found myself in conversation with a taxi driver whose name I
had difficulty in placing. He was, he explained, Pakistani and
asked where I came from. Italy, I replied. He asked how many of
us there were and was surprised we were so few and that our
language wasn’t English.
Then he asked me who our
enemies were. In response to my “Sorry?” he explained patiently
that he wanted to know who were the people against whom we have
fought through the centuries over land claims, ethnic rivalry,
border incursions, and so forth. I told him we are not at war
with anyone. He explained that he wanted to know who were our
historical enemies, those who kill us and whom we kill. I
repeated that we don’t have any, that we fought our last war
more than half a century ago — starting, moreover, with one
enemy and ending with another.
He wasn’t satisfied. How
can a country have no enemies? Getting out of the taxi, I left a
two-dollar tip to compensate him for our indolent Italian
pacifism. And only then did it occur to me how I should have
answered. It is not true that we Italians have no enemies. We
have no outside enemies, or rather we are unable to agree on who
they are, because we are continually at war with each other —
Pisa against Lucca, Guelphs against Ghibellines, north against
south, Fascists against Partisans, mafia against state,
Berlusconi’s government against the judiciary. It was a pity
that during that time the two governments headed by Romano Prodi
had not yet fallen; otherwise I could have explained to the taxi
driver what it means to lose a war through friendly fire.
Thinking further about the
conversation, I have come to the conclusion that one of Italy’s
misfortunes over the past sixty years has been the absence of
real enemies. The unification of Italy took place thanks to the
presence of Austria, or, in the words of Giovanni Berchet, of
the irto, increscioso alemanno — the bristling, irksome Teuton.
And Mussolini was able to enjoy popular support by calling on
Italy to avenge herself for a victory in tatters, for
humiliating defeats in Abyssinia at Dogali and Adua, and for the
Jewish plutodemocracy, which, he claimed, was penalizing us
iniquitously. See what happened in the United States when the
Evil Empire vanished and the great Soviet enemy faded away. The
United States was in danger of losing its identity until bin
Laden, in gratitude for the benefits received when he was
fighting against the Soviet Union, proffered his merciful hand
and gave Bush the opportunity to create new enemies,
strengthening feelings of national identity as well as his own
power.
Having an enemy is
important not only to define our identity but also to provide us
with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values
and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth. So
when there is no enemy, we have to invent one. Look at the
generous flexibility with which the skinheads of Verona would,
just to identify themselves as a group, choose anyone not
belonging to their group as their enemy. And so we are concerned
here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of
identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process
of creating and demonizing the enemy.
.........
Hitler proceeds with a
greater delicacy, bordering almost on envy: “In regard to young
people, clothes should take their place in the service of
education . . . If the beauty of the body were not completely
forced into the background to-day through our stupid manner of
dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to
be led astray by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked
waddle” (Mein Kampf, 1925, translated by James Murphy).
From facial appearance to
customs: this brings us to the Jewish enemy who kills young
children and drinks their blood. He appears very early, for
example, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where there is a story,
much like that of Saint Simonino of Trento, of a young boy
seized while passing through the Jewish quarter while singing “O
alma redemptoris mater.” His throat is slashed and his body
thrown into a pit.
The Jew who kills young
children and drinks their blood has a very complex genealogy:
the same model existed earlier in Christianity, in the creation
of the enemy within — the heretic. A single example is enough:
In the evening, when we
light the lamps and commemorate the passion, they take young
girls initiated into their secret rites to a particular house,
they snuff out their lamps as they wish no one to witness the
indecencies about to take place, and give vent to their
licentious practices on whomever it might be, even upon sister
or daughter. Indeed they believe they are pleasing the demons by
violating the divine laws that forbid union with those of the
same blood. Once the ritual is over, they return home and wait
for nine months to pass: when the time comes for the godless
children to be born of a godless seed, they assemble once again
in the same place. Three days after the birth, they seize the
wretched children from their mothers, cut their tender limbs
with a sharp blade, fill cups with the blood that spurts forth,
burn the newborns while they are still breathing by throwing
them on a pyre. Then they mix blood and ash in cups to obtain a
horrible concoction with which they contaminate food and drink,
secretly, like someone poisoning mead. Such is their communion.
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