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Old December 14th, 2014 #1
Karl Radl
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Default Umberto Eco, the Prague Cemetery and the Protocols of Zion

Umberto Eco, the Prague Cemetery and the Protocols of Zion


In a previous article (1) I have discussed the ideas of the Italian novelists and literary theorist Umberto Eco on the infamous Protocols of Zion, which are found in his book 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods'. In that article I pointed out the essentially disjointed and ultimately self-defeating nature of Eco's analysis of the Protocols. In so far as he trumpets a now-debunked theory of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, being the originators of the document [in spite of this idea having been decisively critiqued several years earlier by Henri Rollin and more recently by Cesare de Michelis] and suggests that he can 'detect' almost innumerable 'literary borrowings' in the Protocols.

The problem with that, as I have pointed out in detail elsewhere, (2) is that these numerous supposed literary borrowings in the Protocols that have been identified by Eco and others reduce their own case against the Protocols to nonsense in this respect. Since are we to seriously believe that the author (or authors) of the Protocols sat down and literally copied all these nice passages and plot ideas from the novels of the likes of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue?

No: this is not only unlikely.

It is simply ludicrous.

What Eco is identifying is more what you might call linguistic convergence in so far as there are only a limited number of expressions available (and which become even more limited when you introduce the need to make an expression positive, negative or neutral) in any given language to make a point. So when you make a point, especially one with very few expressions available, then you are likely to use the same expression in a similar way to someone else who has written on a similar subject.

The point is that such similarities can be overtly misleading as to their being 'literary borrowings' unless we have non-textual evidence to support such a case and since with the Protocols: we do not know who the author was. It means we cannot attribute 'literary borrowings' to the Protocols unless we can demonstrate direct plagiarism as opposed to the similarity of a few sentences or an idea to another work, which proponents of the plagiarism hypothesis (of whom Eco is one, while Cohn and Ben-Itto are others) have singularly failed to demonstrate.

That however doesn't stop Eco from basing in his newest novel, 'The Prague Cemetery', (3) on the premise that the Protocols were constructed by a clever forger in France with a literary background. In said novel we find continual allusions to the works that Eco (and others) have argued were the wellspring of the ideas and text of the Protocols and how the main character (who is either Captain Simonini or Abbe Dalla Piccola depending on which day it is [as he is schizophrenic]) is a well-read literary type who gets along in the world by forging documents and relieving other people of their money.

Indeed Simonini (which is how I will refer to him) is portrayed as having received the genesis of the idea of the Protocols from his grandfather who was a sincere Catholic and believer in Abbe Augustin Barruel's famous hypothesis about the Illuminati. He taught Simonini (the latter's father and mother are curiously absent) about the threat to France and Christianity posed by jews, Freemasons, Satanists and leftists. All of this teaching Simonini readily imbibes as well as garnering his own deep contempt for women. In the story he oft refers (directly and indirectly) to them as temptresses, prostitutes and feels manifest disgust at his own sexual urges that he sates by purchasing the services of ladies of the night.

It is implied by Eco that part of the reason for this is the fact that Simonini seems to have been sexually molested by a Catholic priest who was a friend of his father's in his youth. We are never told why Simonini is the way Eco portrays him, but to me it is clear that this clerical sexual abuse is absolutely key to it.

This negative portrayal doesn't end there, but rather Simonini (along with Catholic clerics, nationalists, anti-Semites, Christians generally and simple conservatives) are painted as being absolutely creduluous in that they feed off of each others paranoia, don't know anything in particular about the targets of their ire and are often the very things that they allege their enemies to be (i.e. homosexuals, murderers, rapists, misogynists, child molesters, intolerant bigots, capitalists, communists, traders in consecrated wafers etc).

The essence of this portrayal by Eco is that conservatives and nationalists in general who oppose liberal-leftist ideas are the purveyors of the very filth that they ardently profess to fight. This is basically a form of political pornography for the establishment liberal-left (of which Eco is part) in that the liberal-leftist reader can intellectually masturbate to the idea that conservatives are basically irrational social scum who have varying kinds of mental issues, which in turn conforms to, and confirms, their prejudices in this direction.

By not attributing any substance to conservative/nationalist critique of the liberal-left's ideas (in regard to both their origin and substance) Eco is simply misrepresenting his intellectual opponents for the sake of providing rather tasteless mental chewing gum to the chattering classes.

I say tasteless because 'The Prague Cemetery' is not a book that, to my mind, can actually be read, let alone understood, if you don't have a fairly good knowledge of the research on, and debates around, the Protocols of Zion.

The reason for that is that it is so chock full of allusions and characters out of the Protocols backstory (such as Madame Justine Glinka) as well as important anti-Semitic writers such as Edouard Drumont and Jacob Brafmann as well as known hoaxers like Leo Taxil. You just won't understand what Eco is saying unless you know them and their backgound (Eco tries to remedy this by providing a very short and intellectually dubious overview of the background and origin of the Protocols [for example he presents Cohn's claims as being purely factual and accepted by the majority of scholars, which is simply a fabrication and wishful-thinking of Eco's part]).

This plays into my point about 'The Prague Cemetery' being liberal-leftist political pornography, because while it is difficult for the uninitiated to actually comprehend what Eco is saying: its basic message is simple and clear. Conservatives and nationalists are irrational socially-deviant mentally-ill scum: who should be marginalized and for preference locked up.

As such this can be said to account for the rave reviews that 'The Prague Cemetery' received in the literary world (probably as much for the fact that Eco is a 'must read novelist' for literary snobs as for the political pornography the work contains), which I note with some amusement basically just generally praise the book rather than actually engage with what it is saying.

All this indicates that 'The Prague Cemetery' is simply pseudo-intellectual rubbish rather than a clear statement of the ideas that Eco espouses (such as the 'Open Work') and deserves to be tossed on the rubbish heap where it belongs.


References


(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...onal-case.html
(2) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...d-lies_06.html
(3) Umberto Eco, 2012, 'The Prague Cemetery', 1st Edition, Vintage: London

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...etery-and.html
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