Two Notorious Terms
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 10, 2020
Two notorious terms have emerged out of the debates that happened during this health emergency. It was obvious that their only purpose was to discredit those who kept thinking in defiance of the fear that paralysed all thought. These terms are “denier” and “conspiracy theorist”. It is not worth saying much about the first term. Those who use it incautiously equate the current epidemic with the Holocaust, demonstrating (consciously or not) the antisemitism that runs rampant in both Left and Right discourse. As some rightly offended Jewish friends of mine have suggested, it might be opportune for the Jewish community to comment on this ignoble terminological abuse.
It is, however, worth pausing over the second term, which demonstrates a genuinely surprising historical ignorance. Those who are familiar with historiography know that the stories that historians retrace and narrate are, by their nature, often the result of the plans and actions of individuals, groups, and factions who pursue their goals using all means available to them. Below are three examples from among thousands. Each of them has marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new historical period.
In 415 BC, Alcibiades deployed his prestige, his riches, and every possible expedient in order to convince the Athenians to embark on an expedition to Sicily. That expedition would later reveal itself to be a complete disaster, and it coincided with the end of Athenian supremacy. For their part, Alcibiades’s enemies — taking advantage of the vandalisation of the statues of Hermes that had occurred a few days before the expedition — hired false witnesses and conspired against him in order to condemn him to death for impiety.
On the Eighteenth Brumaire (9 November 1799), Napoleon Bonaparte — despite his oath of fidelity to the Constitution of the Republic — overthrew the Directory in a coup and was proclaimed First Consul with full powers, thereby ending the Revolution. Days before, Napoleon had met with Sieyès, Fouché, and Lucien Bonaparte so that they could fine-tune their strategy against the anticipated opposition of the Council of Five Hundred.
The March on Rome by approximately 25,000 fascists took place on 28 October 1922. In the months leading up to the event, Mussolini (who prepared the march with the future triumvirs De Vecchi, De Bono, and Bianchi) initiated contact with the Prime Minister (Luigi Facta), with D’Annunzio, and with figures from the business world — according to some, Mussolini even met secretly with the King — so as to probe possible allegiances. In a sort of rehearsal, fascists militarily occupied Ancona on 2 August.
In each of these three cases, individuals gathered in groups or parties and acted resolutely to achieve their goals, considering various possible circumstances and adapting their strategies accordingly. Chance undoubtedly played a role, as in every human event, but trying to explain history through chance is meaningless, and no serious historian has ever undertaken such a pointless endeavour. This does not mean that it is always necessary to speak about “conspiracies”. But anyone who labelled a historian who tried to reconstruct in detail the plots that triggered such events as a “conspiracy theorist” would most definitely be demonstrating their own ignorance, if not idiocy.
It is even more astonishing, in this light, that such attitudes persist in a country like Italy, where our recent history is nothing if not the result of intrigues, secret societies, ploys, and conspiracies of all kinds, and to such an extent that historians cannot get to the bottom of many of the decisive events of the last fifty years — from the Piazza Fontana bombing to the murder of Aldo Moro. This is, in fact, so true that Francesco Cossiga, a former President of the Republic, declared that he was an active member of Gladio, one of these secret societies.
As for the pandemic, serious research has shown that it did not arrive unexpectedly. As Patrick Zylberman’s book Tempêtes microbiennes (Gallimard, 2013) crucially documents, the World Health Organisation suggested a scenario similar to the present one as early as 2005 (during the bird flu), and it furthermore proposed it to governments as a way of ensuring citizens’ unconditional support! Bill Gates, who is the WHO’s main financier, has made his thoughts on the risks of a pandemic known on many occasions: he warned that a pandemic threatened to cause millions of deaths and that it was therefore necessary to guard against it. As a result, and in the context of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security organised in 2019 a simulation exercise for the coronavirus pandemic called “Event 201”. This exercise gathered experts and epidemiologists to prepare a coordinated response in the event of a new virus appearing.
In this case, as has indeed occurred throughout history, there are people and organisations pursuing licit or illicit objectives and then trying to realise those objectives by any means necessary. For those who wish to understand what is happening it is vital to know and think about these tendencies. For this reason, speaking of a conspiracy adds nothing to the reality of facts. Defining anyone who seeks to know historical events for what they really are as a “conspiracy theorist”, however, is plain defamation.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 10, 2020
Two notorious terms have emerged out of the debates that happened during this health emergency. It was obvious that their only purpose was to discredit those who kept thinking in defiance of the fear that paralysed all thought. These terms are “denier” and “conspiracy theorist”. It is not worth saying much about the first term. Those who use it incautiously equate the current epidemic with the Holocaust, demonstrating (consciously or not) the antisemitism that runs rampant in both Left and Right discourse. As some rightly offended Jewish friends of mine have suggested, it might be opportune for the Jewish community to comment on this ignoble terminological abuse.
It is, however, worth pausing over the second term, which demonstrates a genuinely surprising historical ignorance. Those who are familiar with historiography know that the stories that historians retrace and narrate are, by their nature, often the result of the plans and actions of individuals, groups, and factions who pursue their goals using all means available to them. Below are three examples from among thousands. Each of them has marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new historical period.
In 415 BC, Alcibiades deployed his prestige, his riches, and every possible expedient in order to convince the Athenians to embark on an expedition to Sicily. That expedition would later reveal itself to be a complete disaster, and it coincided with the end of Athenian supremacy. For their part, Alcibiades’s enemies — taking advantage of the vandalisation of the statues of Hermes that had occurred a few days before the expedition — hired false witnesses and conspired against him in order to condemn him to death for impiety.
On the Eighteenth Brumaire (9 November 1799), Napoleon Bonaparte — despite his oath of fidelity to the Constitution of the Republic — overthrew the Directory in a coup and was proclaimed First Consul with full powers, thereby ending the Revolution. Days before, Napoleon had met with Sieyès, Fouché, and Lucien Bonaparte so that they could fine-tune their strategy against the anticipated opposition of the Council of Five Hundred.
The March on Rome by approximately 25,000 fascists took place on 28 October 1922. In the months leading up to the event, Mussolini (who prepared the march with the future triumvirs De Vecchi, De Bono, and Bianchi) initiated contact with the Prime Minister (Luigi Facta), with D’Annunzio, and with figures from the business world — according to some, Mussolini even met secretly with the King — so as to probe possible allegiances. In a sort of rehearsal, fascists militarily occupied Ancona on 2 August.
In each of these three cases, individuals gathered in groups or parties and acted resolutely to achieve their goals, considering various possible circumstances and adapting their strategies accordingly. Chance undoubtedly played a role, as in every human event, but trying to explain history through chance is meaningless, and no serious historian has ever undertaken such a pointless endeavour. This does not mean that it is always necessary to speak about “conspiracies”. But anyone who labelled a historian who tried to reconstruct in detail the plots that triggered such events as a “conspiracy theorist” would most definitely be demonstrating their own ignorance, if not idiocy.
It is even more astonishing, in this light, that such attitudes persist in a country like Italy, where our recent history is nothing if not the result of intrigues, secret societies, ploys, and conspiracies of all kinds, and to such an extent that historians cannot get to the bottom of many of the decisive events of the last fifty years — from the Piazza Fontana bombing to the murder of Aldo Moro. This is, in fact, so true that Francesco Cossiga, a former President of the Republic, declared that he was an active member of Gladio, one of these secret societies.
As for the pandemic, serious research has shown that it did not arrive unexpectedly. As Patrick Zylberman’s book Tempêtes microbiennes (Gallimard, 2013) crucially documents, the World Health Organisation suggested a scenario similar to the present one as early as 2005 (during the bird flu), and it furthermore proposed it to governments as a way of ensuring citizens’ unconditional support! Bill Gates, who is the WHO’s main financier, has made his thoughts on the risks of a pandemic known on many occasions: he warned that a pandemic threatened to cause millions of deaths and that it was therefore necessary to guard against it. As a result, and in the context of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security organised in 2019 a simulation exercise for the coronavirus pandemic called “Event 201”. This exercise gathered experts and epidemiologists to prepare a coordinated response in the event of a new virus appearing.
In this case, as has indeed occurred throughout history, there are people and organisations pursuing licit or illicit objectives and then trying to realise those objectives by any means necessary. For those who wish to understand what is happening it is vital to know and think about these tendencies. For this reason, speaking of a conspiracy adds nothing to the reality of facts. Defining anyone who seeks to know historical events for what they really are as a “conspiracy theorist”, however, is plain defamation.
(English translation by Valeria Dani)
George Seeley, Conspiracy, 1910. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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