I checked now because I don’t remember exactly: the “fatwa” against Salman Rushdie was issued in 1989, and for some reason, to an Easterner completely out of sync with the rest of the world, it seemed more of a romantic story. It is known that poets are always “cursed”, they say unpleasant things, but not always important.

At that time, something else, more important, was happening: Stalin’s insolent statement “how many divisions does the Pope have” finally got a decent answer from the real Pope: “Don’t be afraid.”

People were no longer afraid, and almost instantly the communist world collapsed as if it had never existed… However, even Stalin’s monuments did not stand long enough to record this moment, except in a few places…

I was on a short trip last week when I heard about the attack on the writer with whom I started the text. I never got around to reading The Poems, instead I had a lot of trouble with Midnight’s Children, a complicated book (a little too complicated for our happy times) that taught me a lot about the world in which the independence of India and Pakistan was born. It doesn’t even matter why the Ayatollah decided to issue a fatwa specifically against him, when probably most books written at the time had at least one idea that contradicted the Koran…

From the above, it is clear how great the power of ideas really is.

Now for some reason this thing is considered outdated, we live in times of parallel universes and multiple truths. In my opinion, this ideology comes from a misinterpretation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but I don’t want to go further with this idea, it needs a separate discussion.

Of course, we are not the first generation to notice how great this power is; many have asked us the problem of how to use it. Communist and Fascist regimes had powerful propaganda tools, and probably much of their power derived from this. We don’t know how Hitler’s propaganda could have worked in the long run; we know about the communist one: it worked better the further it was from the source of objective truth. Until the 1970s, there were still convinced communists in Europe, but they were certainly more numerous than in the socialist countries. The 1950s was more than enough to enlighten anyone who encountered a particular version of ideals (of course, I mean believers, not speculators). Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro