When I saw the title of Umberto Eco’s final novel, I felt a brief pang in my chest. I had just visited Prague and its cemetery. Both Prague as a whole and the Old Jewish Cemetery provide a magnificent backdrop for fear, mystery, and all kinds of fantastical literature. After The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, this book could have been a treasure I wouldn’t be able to put down.
The book was good—rich and flavorful—but it wasn’t what I had imagined. The protagonist hadn’t even seen the The Prague Cemetery; he had only read about it in a book he came across in a library. This is much more of a political work. It tells the story of how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fabricated and staged. In fact, it shows how political conspiracies and slanders have been manufactured from that period onward.
What’s required is a bit of imagination, a bit of conspiracy theory, and a bit of literature. One must use grandiose language when speaking about subjects people don’t truly understand. One must invent secret agendas for so-called conspirators.
And for this to work, what you need above all is a public that doesn’t like reading, is ready to believe anything it hears, is ignorant—and prefers remaining ignorant rather than making the effort to access information—while looking for other people or groups to blame for its own inadequacies and failures in life. When all of this comes together, using the same methods, it becomes possible to knit plots around Freemasons and Jews a century ago, and around Ergenekon or nationalists today. Every few years—or every few decades—it’s enough to reheat the same fairy tale.
Every August, newspapers and online forums revive the claim that Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been for centuries or millennia and that it will be visible in the sky. Astrological interpretations follow. It’s something like that. Even though people have access to a source of information called the internet at their fingertips, they still can’t be bothered to make the effort to reach refined, reliable knowledge. And then in comes the Illuminati, out goes Ergenekon…