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.”

One 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 novel raises with a shocking answer that comes towards the end: Yes, we have become numb.

The media has a big role in creating and sustaining that numbness. Throughout the novel, Eco shows us how the media creates or manipulates facts for various purposes, mostly to support certain political parties.

“The newspapers lie, the historians lie, now the television lies,” we are told right in the beginning of the novel. We can’t trust anything. The protagonist says, “I’d lost all faith in everything, except the certainty that there’s always someone behind our backs waiting to deceive us.”

Deception is what our governments do. Deception is what our religious leaders do. Deception is what you get even in your courts of justice. The latest controversy in India is about the gross deception that the country’s Chief Election Commissioner perpetrated on the country during elections.

And the media? They are the worst. Eco shows us again and again how the media manufactures news, distorts facts, and falsifies anything at all for their own vested interests which are the interests of those in power. Have you ever wondered why just two individuals in India, namely Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, collectively control 40 major news channels and numerous digital platforms? When you realise that India is governed by them indirectly, you understand why they need so much media with them, deceptive media.

“Mao killed more people than Stalin and Hitler put together,” Eco’s protagonist informs us. But the world didn’t get to know that because “It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news.” Look at the newspapers in today’s India and you’ll readily agree with Eco’s protagonist. They have made a god out of the country’s Prime Minister.

Approximately 28 journalists have been killed and hundreds arrested or attacked in India since 2014 (the year of Modi’s ascension to the throne in Delhi). Now India is ranked 157^th out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index.

“The world’s a nightmare, my love,” a woman in Eco’s novel tells the protagonist. “I’d like to get off, but they tell me we can’t, we’re on an express train.”

So they, the protagonist and his lady love, decide to look for “a country with no secrets and where everything is done in the open.” There are plenty of them in Central and South America, they understand. Nothing’s is hidden in those countries. “You know who belongs to which drug cartel, who runs the bands of revolutionaries. You sit in a restaurant, a group of friends passes and introduces you to the man in charge of arms smuggling, all neatly shaved and perfumed, dressed in a starched white shirt that hangs loose from his trousers, the waiters address him reverently… They are countries that hold no mysteries, everything is done in the open, the police demand to be bribed as a matter of right, the government and the underworld coexist by constitutional decree, the banks make their living through money laundering, and you’ll be in trouble if you don’t have other money of doubtful provenance, they’ll cancel your residency permit. And they kill, but only each other, they leave tourists in peace…”

Eco wrote this novel in 2015, just a year after India started moving in a different direction. Today Eco is no more there (he died in 2016) to see that India could have been another ideal place for his protagonist and his girl.

I reviewed Eco’s novel in 2016. Here’s the post: Numero Zero.