Building the Enemy - Umbero Eco

Building the enemy

A  Pakistani taxi driver in NYC asked me: who's your enemy?

Different kinds of enemies

THE PATTERN
The first patterns of the Enemy

Early years of  Christianity >> enemy >> The Anti-Christ


The same pattern is observed to make the enemy archetypically repugnant. That's the same pattern for the muslim enemy or for the jewish enemy.

Conspiracy & Paranoia & The Novel

The universal conspiracy is a PLOT that was never discovered...so it can be used ad infinitum. It is the secret is empty it is continual.

For two people to keep a secret one must be DEAD

A secret in itself cannot contain itself. If it is empty it is protected forever

There was a plot to kill Julio Cesar (conspiracy)
There was a plot to ruin the French monarchy

You can invent an universal conspiracy.
Conspiracy exists
Business men are plotting

Are conspiracies INEVITABLE? Human beings are always plotting against one another.


The universal conspiracy is aINDISPENSABLE in order to deny to yourself or to your people  that you are the responsible.

The eternal problem of the scapegoat - somebody else is charged with the entire responsibility.

Needing and inventing and constructing the enemy.
We need a enemy
Why do we need an enemy? To re-inforce our identity.

In the "Prague Cemetery" YOU (Eco) have told us a story with a character Simonise constructed the vilest, horrendous, the most immoral, racist,  horrible, despicable human being.

A Conversation with Umberto Eco.
Umberto Eco in conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Director of LIVE at the New York Public Library.Their wide-ranging conversation will in part focus on Eco's latest work of fiction, The Prague Cemetery. The book is an historical pseudo-reconstruction set in a 19th-century Europe teeming with secret service forgeries, Jesuit plots, murders and conspiracies, and covering everything from the unification of Italy, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It has been criticised by both the Vatican-backed newspaper the Osservatore Romano and the Chief Rabbi of Rome.