The Normalisation of Evil
The Normalisation of Evil A Reading of Umberto Eco’s Numero Zero Illustration by Gemini AI “You can go around saying that the Pope slits the throats of babies and eats them, or that Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the one who put the bomb on the Munich train, and people will say, ‘Oh, really? Interesting,’ and they’ll turn round and get on with what they were doing.” O ne of the main characters in Umberto Eco’s last novel Numero Zero [2015] says that after a BBC documentary titled Operation Gladio made certain shocking revelations about some secret networks which manipulated world politics. In the novel, Mussolini and the Vatican including the Pope are intertwined with the networks and their manipulations. But the documentary didn’t shake the world at all. Even the insinuation that Pope John Paul I was killed by certain cardinals in the Vatican doesn’t generate any ripple. Have we become numb to political corruption and social evils? This is one of the questions that the ...
