Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism

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After the Cold War, the 'Hot War' has made its comeback in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exhuming Kipling's "Great Game", we have gone back to the clash between Islam and Christianity. The ghost of the Yellow Peril has been resurrected, the nineteenth-century anti-Darwin debate has been reopened, right-wing governments predominate. It almost seems likehistory, tired of the big steps forward it has taken in the past two millennia, has gone into reverse. With his customary sharpness and wit, Eco proposes, not so much that we resume a forward march, but at the very least that we cease marching backwards.

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Umberto Eco is the author of four bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino and, most recently, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. He is also the author of On Beauty. A Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco lives in Italy.