How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco [Eco, Umberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Philosophy, History, Writing, Fascism, Nazism, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781473585485
Google: 7UrgDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53293368
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-08-12T23:00:00+00:00

Translated by Alastair McEwen

Censorship and Silence

Those of you who are younger may think that veline are pretty girls who dance about on television shows, and that a casino is a chaotic mess.fn1 Anyone of my generation knows that the word casino used to mean ‘brothel’ and only later, by connotation, did it come to mean ‘somewhere chaotic,’ so that it lost its initial meaning, and today anyone, perhaps even a bishop, uses it to indicate disorder. Likewise, once upon a time a bordello was a brothel, but my grandmother, a woman of the most upright morals, used to say, ‘Don’t make a bordello,’ meaning ‘Don’t make too much racket’; the word had completely lost its original meaning. The younger ones among you may not know that, during the Fascist regime, veline were sheets of paper that the government department responsible for controlling culture (called the Ministry of Popular Culture, shortened to MinCulPop – they didn’t have sufficient sense of humour to avoid such an ambiguous-sounding name) sent to the newspapers. These sheets of thin copy paper told the newspapers what they had to keep quiet about and what they had to print. The velina, in journalistic jargon, therefore came to symbolise censorship, the inducement to conceal, to make information disappear.fn2

The veline that we know today – the television showgirls – are, however, the exact opposite: they are, as we all know, the celebration of outward appearance, visibility, indeed of fame achieved through pure visibility, where appearance signifies excellence – even that kind of appearance that would once have been considered unseemly.

We find ourselves with two forms of velina, which I would like to compare with two forms of censorship. The first is censorship through silence; the second is censorship through noise; I use the word velina, therefore, as a symbol of the television event, the show, entertainment, news coverage, and so on.

Fascism had understood (as dictators generally do) that deviant behaviour is encouraged by the fact that the media give it coverage. For example, the veline used to say ‘Don’t write about suicide’ because the mere mention of suicide might inspire someone to commit suicide a few days later. This is absolutely correct – we shouldn’t assume all that went through the minds of the Fascist hierarchy was wrong – and it is quite true that we know about events of national significance that have occurred only because the media have talked about them. For example, the student protests of 1977 and 1989: they were short-lived events that sought to repeat the protests of 1968 only because the newspapers had begun saying ‘1968 is about to return.’ Anyone involved in those events knows perfectly well that they were created by the press, in the same way that the press generates revenge attacks, suicides, classroom shootings – news about one school shooting provokes other school shootings, and a great many Romanians have probably been encouraged to rape old ladies because the newspapers told them it is the exclusive speciality of immigrants

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