It is not easy to find common points between Umberto Eco, the Italian writer, philosopher, linguist of world fame and Julian Assange, the enigmatic cyber anarchist.
However, two different protagonists are connected by high current events in this last month of 2010. Umberto Eko's new novel "Prague Spring" became a world bestseller. The novel has been translated and printed in about fifty countries, and it already has a huge number of readers.
Assange is the protagonist of another, very unusual bestseller, "Wiki Cyclone", as the material created by his WikiLeaks intrusion into secret American diplomatic networks is called.
Both of them, in a certain way, deal with the subject of secrets and demystification, the truth in two different eras, and, of course, with different means - Eco literary, Assange cyber pirate. Their various endeavors also raise eternal themes – the myth of secrecy that accompanies the inevitable conspiracy theories.
Dealing with the secrets of the Prague cemetery, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, where the famous "Protocol of the Elders of Zion" was supposedly created, Eco gave a kind of portrait of Europe in the second half of the XNUMXth century. (Danilo Kish wrote about the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the story "The Book of Kings and Fools".)
In Eko's latest work, all the characters, except for the main protagonist, really existed. But we will write more about the mystery of the creation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the favorite literature of Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, that is, about Eko's historical novel that was created exactly thirty years after his "The Name of the Rose", on another occasion.
If Eko's latest work, and according to the author himself, belongs to the genre of river novels, so popular in the XNUMXth century, Assange's portrait of diplomacy at the beginning of the XNUMXst century also continues in sequels, but this endless river of documents is not the product of the author's imagination, but the dispatches that have arrived in a conspiratorial way.
For ideological reasons, Lenin's Bolsheviks proclaimed the debunking of "imperialist diplomacy", which as "unpopular" was secret, immoral and in the service of the privileged classes
That's why WikiLeaks' spectacular action, especially because of the damage caused to America, was called "diplomatic September 11". The author of this phrase is the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Frattini, whose party leader Berlusconi was described in American cables as "incompetent, distracted and prone to parties."
Fratini's expression is quite debatable, but we understood, “nothing will be the same again” - to use another phrase that quickly gained global usage.
Staying with the "diplomatic September 11" metaphor, we will point out several such "diplomatic September 11s" in the XNUMXth century that may help us understand this last one.
By an unusual coincidence of history, somewhere near the end of the First World War, from two different sides, America and the emerging Bolshevik Russia, there was a demand for open diplomacy, which would mean the permanent abandonment of secret diplomatic channels and the conclusion of agreements behind the public's back. Woodrow Wilson, the 28th American president, who is remembered in history as an educated idealist, a democrat convinced that a combination of politics and ethics is possible, proclaimed the famous "8 points" in the American Congress on January 1918, 14.
Inspired by the American Constitution, Wilson defined the principles that should be applied in international life after the First World War with these points. The first point expressed the principle of forever abandoning secret diplomacy and concluding international agreements based on secret, immoral combinations. (In point 11 of this historical document of the first order, Wilson also mentions Montenegro.)
Quite independently of Wilson's democratic principle, Lenin's Bolsheviks, for ideological reasons, proclaimed the debunking of "imperialist diplomacy" which, as "unpopular", was secret, immoral and in the service of the privileged classes.
That is why the new Bolshevik government, immediately after the fall of the Kerensky government, decided to publish the secret treaties of Imperial Russia that were found in the Petrograd state archives. Thus, at the end of 1917, Trotsky, in charge of the Council of People's Commissars for International Relations, ordered the daily Izvesti to publish the secret agreements in continuations.
This is how the world learned for the first time about the contents of the Secret Agreement in London from April 1915, which testifies to how the main allies - Great Britain, France and Russia promised Italy many new territories, among others Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia. The Sykes-Picot agreement from May 1916 was also published, actually a secret British-French agreement on the division of territories, especially in the Middle East, after the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire.
Russia also joined this plan of division of the former Ottoman possessions, and thus the Eastern Great Game was completed. With the publication of these contracts, Izvestija became a great source of information, a kind of forerunner of "global" news in which strategic agreements of "big" ones were combined, but also interesting quirks, all behind the scenes.
Thus, thanks to Izvestia, the French public opinion became familiar with the documents of the Russian embassy in Paris, which very precisely state the sums of money that the embassy directed to a number of French newspapers for some joint propaganda projects.
More precisely, in order to justify the large state loan that Russia received from French banks, the Russian embassy financed newspapers in order to use texts to convince French citizens, primarily bank depositors, of the rationality of Russian projects, especially the construction of a large railway line, from Russia's western borders to Vladivostok.
In short, thanks to the media-class operation of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, many secret contracts appeared that inevitably caused political scandals in Western countries.
Obviously, this "diplomatic September 11" started in Petrovgrad had its own big echoes, until the Bolshevik government noticed that diplomatic secrets are not a matter of either right or left ideology, but a very practical matter in the conduct of state policy.
The insistence on public diplomacy in the Soviet state lasted for a short time, approximately in the "days that shook the world".
Another "diplomatic September 11" happened in June 1971 in America with the publication in the New York Times of the so-called The Pentagon Papers, secret documents on the Vietnam War
Wilson's democratic principles and Lenin's ideological decrees were soon forgotten in the countries where they originated, so diplomacy quickly returned to its vocation, that is, secrets, in the good and bad sense of such a tradition.
The prevailing philosophy is that the "public" favors the success of negotiations, and that diplomacy as the "art of negotiation" should be a dominantly secret activity. Arguments for such a thesis can certainly be found, just as history, including the most recent one, shows many examples of abuse of the principles of secret diplomacy, among other things, due to the avoidance of personal responsibility for serious failures.
Another "diplomatic September 11" happened in June 1971 in America with the publication in the New York Times of the so-called The Pentagon Papers, secret documents on the Vietnam War. And that event has its own history. Sometime in 1967, then US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided to collect key secret documents related to the Vietnam War.
Whether due to an encounter with history or his conscience, McNamara founded a state commission that created a secret collection, a kind of White Book, made up of 4 of the most important documents from the Pentagon and the White House. The number of persons who had the right to view these documents was very restrictive.
Among the users was Daniel Elsbeg, a Pentagon official, a man who worked in Vietnam for two years, before becoming an opponent of the continuation of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg photocopied the documents and handed them to Neil Sian, a reporter for the New York Times. The first document was published in a New York newspaper on June 13, 1971.
The effect of the publication of secret documents was enormous in America, but also in the whole world. It is believed that their publication had a significant impact on domestic public pressure for America to withdraw from the Vietnam War, which claimed 58 American lives. President Nixon obtained the consent of a federal court to prohibit the New York Times from publishing these documents.
The White House argued that the release of the documents threatens American interests and national security. Actually, two Americas collided. America, politicians in power, protagonists of "closed actions" and America of Jefferson and high democratic ideals from the constitution. The matter went to the Supreme Court, which only two weeks later, decided that New York newspapers could publish the delicate Pentagon Papers, albeit in a somewhat reduced volume.
The American court made it clear that it holds more to the American constitution, which once inspired Wilson in his doctrine of open diplomacy, than to the argument of the American government. Namely, the court gave priority to the principle of freedom of speech, so the operation to block information failed.
The main protagonist of the Pentagon Papers affair, Elsbeg, is now almost 80 years old, is a tireless pacifist, has his own famous blog, and is a fierce supporter of Assange. In one blog, he wrote: "If I still had WikiLeaks..."
From Wilson's open diplomacy to openlix, a little less than a century has passed. It is about a "short life" whose mysteries have largely been revealed, at least where it was wanted and possible. Today, the online generation does not think that it is necessary to storm a Winter Castle in order to discover that the emperor is gone. It is enough to try on the Internet. The scope of the web revolution, in fact, has not yet been seen enough.
However, the mysteries of history remain, along with the secrets of forgers. Umberto Eco deals with one of them, and one of the biggest ones, in his novel.
On the occasion of further history and the topic of secret and public in it - another reminder. When Gutenberg discovered the press in the XNUMXth century, many conservative groups turned against him - royal, feudal, church, cultural... Obviously, a lot of time has passed since the time of Gutenberg to the Internet and the web revolution. Some insist that history somehow repeats itself...
The main protagonist of the Pentagon Papers affair, Elsbeg, is now almost 80 years old, is a tireless pacifist, has his own famous blog, and is a fierce supporter of Assange. In one blog, he wrote: "If I still had WikiLeaks..."
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