When I went to live – and work – in London, my friend Peter Quaglia, a man of refined intelligence and impeccable pronunciation, rivaled only by the BBC announcers of the time, head of global Communications (140 countries) at New Holland, gave me lessons in Englishness to help me enter the world of British top management.
The world of English business and management was adjacent to that of the Crown. Imagine, by gifting a tractor to the farming Queen, Elizabeth, we became members of the Royal Box at the Polo field of Windsor Castle. There are even a couple of photos on record where I hand over, at the end of the championship, to then Prince Charles, now King, the first prize of The Queen’s Cup. I had entered a world of crêpes destined over time to become embarrassing ethical-social cracks. But there I met the first cardboard cutout of my long life: Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, I learned on the ground to think in scenarios, decide by counter-intuition, write and speak in metaphors, and to accentuate my basic irony (IDEA in pure form).
Peter had an endless collection of ironic anecdotes about Winston Churchill. “You are a fool, Prime Minister,” a citizen shouted at him on the street. The police arrested him. The next day in the Commons, a Labour MP asked Churchill if it was right to imprison someone for an insult. Churchill, serene, replied, “They didn’t arrest him for insulting me, but because he revealed a state secret!”
Meanwhile, all the leaders who came to power after World War II had died one by one. The English had coined the phrase power behind the Throne. Defining these as cardboard Presidents, and studying them as such, seemed obvious to me: they all were, West and East alike, and all referred to the three cardboard figures heading the Three Empires. Today Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin.
All three had both the physique du rôle and imperial communication skills. They hated each other, but supported one another; they were at once prisoners and wardens of a political-cultural model that, in words, rejected them but could not survive without them. An Epstein Club of depraved politics, rather than depraved sex.
Curious what happened in Iran. The Donald was supposed to start the war on the day and hour decided by those behind the Throne, above all he was supposed to end it, singing victory, when protocol demanded it. When official data become available for historians in a few decades, we will know that it was the first war conducted by a private joint venture made up of some of their digital companies, masters of the nervous system that guided the entire operation. They had already rehearsed in Venezuela, applying video game techniques, while here the Supreme Leader and the entire General Staff were killed in their private meeting room. All of them, within minutes.
This time, however, what the algorithm had programmed did not happen: the People’s Revolt! Days pass and no one takes to the streets. Oh dear, what’s happening? A terrible suspicion assails me. What if the young people who went out were not the poor, the destitute, as Western media had sold us, but simply the children and grandchildren of the ruling establishment inspired by the well-known Western format OWS (Occupy Wall Street)?
Suddenly, rewinding the memory tape, I recalled that in fact in all previous cases, from our legendary ’68 to the Arab Springs to those in ex-communist countries (Maidan included), the streets were always filled only by young patricians disguised as the people, of Pasolinian memory. Result? America & Israel in Iran have failed, because they spent monstrous sums simply to rejuvenate the theological-Pasdar leadership.
If this is so, we publishers and journalists devoted to information must rid ourselves of the ideological confusion that blinds us and work on the concept of cardboard figures: there lies the future of journalism.
Studying the IDEA organizational model applied to politicking, it emerges, for example, the need to separate leaderships designed to win votes (first-level cardboard figures) from leaderships to manage the government of the country (second-level cardboard figures). Think about it, people…
