Some Reflections on War and PeaceIn the early sixties I contributed to the establishment of the Italian Committee for Atomic Disarmament and took part in several peace marches. I declare myself to be a pacifist by vocation and am to this day. Nonetheless, here I must say bad things not only about war but also about peace. So I ask the reader to bear with me. I have written a series of articles on war, starting with the Gulf War, and now I realize that each article modified my ideas on the concept of war. As if the concept of war, which has remained more or less the same (aside from the weapons used) from the days of Ancient Greece till yesterday, needed to be rethought at least three times over the last ten years.1From Paleowar to Cold WarIn the course of the centuries, what was the purpose of that form of warfare we shall call paleowar? We made war in order to vanquish our adversaries and thus profit from their defeat; we tried to achieve our ends by taking the enemy by surprise; we did everything possible to ensure that our adversaries did not achieve their ends; we accepted a certain price in human lives in order to inflict upon the enemy a greater loss of life. For these purposes it was necessary to marshal all the forces at our disposal. The game was played out between two contenders. The neutrality of others, the fact that they suffered no harm from the conflict and if anything profited from it, was a necessary condition for the belligerents freedom of action. Oh yes, I was forgetting; there was a further condition: knowing who and where the enemy was. For this reason, usually, the clash was a frontal one and involved two or more recognizable territories. In our times, the notion of world war, a conflict that could involve even societies with no recorded history, such as Polynesian tribes, has eliminated the difference between belligerents and neutral parties. Whoever the contenders may be, atomic energy ensures that war is harmful for the entire planet. The consequence is the transition from paleowar to neowar via the cold war. The cold war established what we might call belligerent peace or peaceful belligerence, a balance of terror that guaranteed a remarkable stability at the center and permitted, or made indispensable, forms of paleowar on the periphery (Vietnam, the Middle East, African states, and so on). At bottom, the cold war guaranteed peace for the First and Second Worlds at the price of seasonal or endemic wars in the Third World.Neowar in the GulfThe collapse of the Soviet empire marked the end of the conditions of the cold war but left us faced with the problem of incessant warfare in the Third World. With the invasion of Kuwait, people realized that it was going to be necessary to go back to a kind of traditional warfare (if you recall, reference was made to the origins of the Second World War: if Hitler had been stopped as soon as he invaded Poland, and so on . . .), but it immediately became evident that wa Excerpted from Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism by Umberto Eco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
