di Umberto Eco - Haaretz 27 febbraio 2003
Evil begets evil. I'm not saying anything new if I say the ultimate objective of any terrorist act or organization is to destabilize the society it hits. To destabilize means to panic people, to render them incapable of reacting calmly, to sow suspicion among them.
When all is said and done, neither the terrorism of the right or the left has managed to destabilize our country [Italy], for example. In this it was thwarted, at least in its initial and most fearsome offensive. But this was only a provincial phenomenon, after all.
The terrorism of Osama bin Laden, and of the broad fundamentalist current that he represents, is evidently much more diffuse, capable and efficient. It succeeded in destabilizing the Western world, after September 11, evoking the ancient specters of a clash of civilizations, of a religious war on a worldwide scale.
And now it is obtaining an even more satisfactory result. Having deepened the rift between the West and the Third World, it is beginning to open deep rifts within the West itself. We cannot kid ourselves. Conflicts - of a moral and psychological, but non-military, nature - are increasingly emerging between America and Europe, as are a number of rifts within Europe.
Latent French anti-Americanism has become more vocal and, who would have imagined it, but in America, the derogatory old term "frog eaters," used to refer to the French, is coming back in fashion.
Before we get carried away, it is first of all necessary to remember that these rifts are not setting the Americans against the Germans, or the British against the French. When we support the anti-war protests that are spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, let us bear in mind that it is not true that "All Americans want war" or that "All Italians want peace."
Formal logic teaches that if just one inhabitant of the globe hates his mother, that precludes our being able to say correctly, "all men love their mothers."
Within the bloody but not yet bleeding rifts, every day one hears pronouncements that, by their nature, are essentially racist, assertions such as: "All those who fear the war are allies of Saddam," or "All those who maintain that the use of force is vital are Nazis." Can't we be more reasonable about it?
A few weeks ago, a British reviewer wrote a mostly favorable article about my book Cinque Scritti Morali ("Five Moral Pieces"), which had recently been translated in his country. But when he got to the page where I wrote that war should become a universal taboo, he commented sarcastically: "Go tell that to the survivors of Auschwitz." He was implying that if war were universally deplored, neither the defeat of Hitler or the salvation - unfortunately, only of "some" - of the Jews imprisoned in the extermination camps would have occurred.
Now this argument seems to me unfair, to say the least. I can, and do, maintain that murder is an unacceptable crime and that I would not ever like to murder anyone, but if a knife-wielding thug entered my house aiming to kill me or one of my loved ones, I'd do what I could to stop him by hitting him over the head with a chair - and if it killed him, I wouldn't feel the least remorse. Similarly, war is a crime and the criminal who unleashed the World War II was called Adolf Hitler.
A less paradoxical form of objection is this: "So, do you acknowledge it was a good thing that the United States intervened militarily to save Europe and to prevent Nazism from erecting extermination camps in Liverpool and Marseilles as well?"
Of course they did the right thing, I respond, and I vividly recall the emotion I felt at age 13, when I went out to greet the first regiment of American liberators (which included a regiment of blacks) that arrived in the town to which I had been evacuated. I quickly became friends with Corporal Joseph, who introduced me to chewing gum and Dick Tracy comic books.
But, after my response, this objection is followed by another: "So, the Americans did well to smother the fascist Nazi dictatorship at birth!" The truth is that not only the Americans, but also the English and the French, did not exactly quash the two tyrannies at birth. Up until early 1940, they tried to contain fascism, to appease it and even accepted it as a diplomatic partner.
The United States hesitated warily, because it did not feel adequately prepared and also because it had to overcome some (famous) Nazi sympathizers of its own. President Roosevelt had to proceed very cautiously as he led his nation into this battle. The United States intervened only after being attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, and we tend to forget that, after Japan, it was Germany and Italy that declared war on the United States and not vice-versa.
Were France and England wrong to wait, in the hope that they could still halt the German expansion, until Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia? Perhaps, and Chamberlain's desperate efforts to save the peace have been roundly disparaged. We learn that while one may err out of excess caution, one should also make every possible effort to save the peace, and that, in the end, it was Hitler who started the war and thus he who bears the entire responsibility for it.
I therefore find uncalled for the front-page photo in an American daily of the cemetery where the brave Yankees who fought to save France - which is true - are buried, under a headline saying France has forgotten its debt to America. France, Germany and all those who say the time has not yet come for a preventive war to be carried out in Iraq are not renouncing their solidarity with the United States just when America is beset by international terrorism.
They are only arguing that an attack on Iraq would not defeat terrorism, but probably - in my opinion, definitely - increase it by inducing many who are currently wavering to enter the terrorist ranks. They believe that terrorism will attract adepts who live in the U.S. or in European countries, whose money is not deposited in Baghdad banks and who could obtain weapons, chemical or otherwise, from other countries.
Imagine if, before the landing at Normandy, Charles De Gaulle, because he had his troops in the North African colonies, had instead called for a landing on the Cote d'Azur. The Americans and the British would probably have opposed it on various grounds, such as that, in the east, German troops still controlled the Italian coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, at least in the Gulf of Genoa, or that it would be a lot simpler to transport troops across the English Channel than to have them navigate the entire Mediterranean.
Would we then have said that the U.S. was stabbing France in the back? No, it would have been no more than a strategic disagreement and I believe that it was, in fact, wiser to land at Normandy. The U.S. and England would have brought all their weight to bear on De Gaulle to avoid a fruitless and dangerous operation. No more than that.
Another common objection is the following, which was recently posed to me by a very eminent man who is well-deserving of respect for his years of work on behalf of peace efforts: "But Saddam is a cruel dictator and his people are suffering under his bloody rule. Shouldn't we be thinking about the wretched Iraqis?" Yes, we are thinking about them, but are we also thinking about the wretched North Koreans, and about those who live under the clutches of all those African and Asian dictators, and about those who lived under the right-wing dictatorships that were given aid and support in order to prevent a leftist revolution in South America?
Did anyone ever think of using a preventive war to liberate the poor citizens of Russia, the Ukraine, Estonia or Uzbekistan whom Stalin sent to the Gulag? No, because the price of waging war on every dictator, in terms of blood and the nuclear risk, would be enormous. And so, as usual in politics, which is pragmatic even when inspired by lofty ideals, temporizing was the rule of the day, as the attempt to attain the maximum by non-bloody means continued.
This turned out to be a winning choice, as the Western democracies eventually managed to eliminate the Soviet dictatorship without launching atomic weapons. It took some time, and some were killed meanwhile, which is regrettable, but we did save several hundreds of millions of dead. The situation that we find ourselves in does not allow for clear-cut divisions or condemnations like, "if that's what you think, then you are our enemy."
That would also be fundamentalism. It is possible to love the United States, its tradition, its people and its culture, with all the respect due the country that has earned the title of the most powerful country in the world; and one can be utterly horrified by the terrible blow that it suffered over a year ago, without shrinking from warning it that its government is about to make a faulty choice, and that it should hear our frank dissent and not construe it as a betrayal.
Otherwise, it is the right to dissent that will be trampled. And that would be precisely the opposite of that which the liberators of 1945 taught us youngsters back then, after years of dictatorship.