By creating an Enemy we create Hell on Earth. 

The attack on an army base in Uri (read, not in isolation, instead along with the turbulent history of Kashmir) the vitriolic response of mainstream media, our fascination with an ‘enemy’, and the politics and vested interests that thrive on it; these are my reflections while reading Umberto Eco’s Inventing the Enemy.

It is politics; to pit one nation against another, divide people of different faiths and castes, draw boundaries on the basis of languages people speak…

This enmity has come to the fore in several recent murders and suicides in the state. The offspring of this enmity are words like `love jihad’ coined by the mainstream media. This enmity is what unfortunately overshadows the death of a murder case accused in Puzhal central prison lately. 

Most political outfits prosper by stoking the hatred for the ‘other,’ while mainstream media, overtly or covertly, plays an accomplice in this politics of hatred.

“Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth. So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one…And so we are concerned here not so much with the almost natural phenomenon of identifying an enemy who is threatening us, but with the process of creating and demonizing the enemy,” says Eco.

Unfortunately this is what we inculcate in our children in our households and institutions.

George Orwell, writes Eco, provides an excellent example of the intensive and continuous cultivation of the enemy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room….The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it as impossible to avoid joining in…A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. (part 1, chapter 1).

Eco concludes the Essay by quoting Sartre’s most pessimistic vision in this respect in No Exit. "We can recognize ourselves only in the presence of an Other, and on this the rules of coexistence and submission are based. But it is more likely that we find this Other intolerable because to some degree he is not us. In this way, by reducing him to an enemy, we create our hell on earth…”

-----------------ends