The Italian writer Umberto Eco will go down in history perhaps for being the author of the famous The Name of the Rose, but his legacy, especially in his country, goes far beyond a novel that is already a contemporary classic. He died in 2016, Italy mourned him as its greatest intellectual in the second half of the 20th century and his contributions also in the political and media spheres are countless.
This is the case of the term mud machine, which is in the news today in Spain for being the expression used by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in his letter to the citizens to define the harassment that his wife is suffering and that leads him to consider If it is worth continuing to lead the position. This is how Sánchez expressed it: “Without any shame, Mr. Feijóo and Mr. Abascal, and the interests that move them, have launched what the great Italian writer, Umberto Eco, called the mud machine. That is, trying to dehumanize and delegitimize the political adversary through accusations that are as scandalous as they are false.”
Before his death, Eco published one last novel, Number Zero, which had an important reception in his country and which constitutes one of his last great contributions to political language. A man of enormous experience in the journalistic field, in the last years of his life he became especially interested in the use of the press to destroy the public image of political rivals. That’s what his latest novel was about: the story of Colonna, an elderly journalist with an erratic career who, hired by a small media outlet, joins an editorial team whose practices involve defaming, creating montages and blackmailing members of political power. and economic in order to gain a foothold in that same power.
Written as a scathing and stark parody of the miseries of journalism, the novel is set in 1992, the same year of the Tangentopoli scandal, a famous judicial process (also called Clean Hands, by the way) that uncovered a political and economic corruption plot. far-reaching and that shocked Italian public opinion. The fruit of that operation, which devastated an entire political generation, was the first government of Silvio Berlusconi after the 1994 elections.
It is in Number Zero where Eco explores the concept of the mud machine, which is not only the idea of ??publishing montages to destroy the reputation of a political rival, but also has an important nuance: it involves telling or even hinting at intimate data, however minor they may seem, and try to overthrow the person in question for private matters and not for possible corruption that he may have committed in his political work.
In numerous interviews of the time, Eco maintained that just the mere revelation of aspects of one’s personal life was enough to begin to create a “shadow of suspicion,” and he pointed out that social networks, as amplifiers of these small “splashes of mud” could undermine anyone’s prestige. “There was a time when if you didn’t like a president, like Lincoln or Kennedy, you would kill him,” Eco said in an interview on Italian television. With Clinton he looked at what he was doing in the Oval Office or in bed. Since then he began to kill himself with delegitimization.
