The Age Of Exterminations (II) — How to Exterminate the Young
In 2018, I published a book titled The Shadow Line of Memory.” It was the biography of an Italian intellectual, Armando Vacca, who did his best to fight for peace at the beginning of the Great War. He was eventually defeated and punished by being sent to the most dangerous frontline of that time, where he survived for no more than a couple of weeks. This book led me to study the story of how propaganda managed to win the hearts and minds of the Italians in 1914-15, leading the country to attack Austria. The ensuing disaster is not usually listed as an “extermination,” but the Italian losses amounted to something close to one-third of the young men of military age at that time. If this was not an extermination, what was it? And I think there were deep reasons for it to occur. I thought I could propose this story to you now. You may find something in it that may help you understand a few apparently unrelated things that are happening nowadays.
The power of propaganda is immense. It is so strong especially because people don’t realize that they are embedded in it and the things that propaganda makes them do look like the most natural and obvious ones. It was Baudelaire who said, “the devil’s best trick is to convince people that he does not exist.”
So, here is a story of a triumph of propaganda: how it convinced most Italians in 1914-15 that it was a good idea to go to war against their neighbors, the Austrians in one of the greatest follies of history, what our ancestors called, rightly, “The Great War.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
