Maurizio Zottarelli March 27, 2022
“pig face“. It is an insult as old as the world, at least the western one. An insult so old that it has entered children’s nursery rhymes and which we now hear echoing even in this absurd and terrifying war, precisely because it has ancient connotations.It all goes back to the initiative of the hacker group Anonymous who dusted off an old origami on Twitter: It’s a sheet of printed drawings of four pigs that, neatly folded, turn into Putin’s face. Below the four pigs is the riddle: “Where is the fifth pig?”. All also accompanied by a video tutorial just to make sure nobody misses the solution to the problem. The hackers call it “deplorigami” and address their challenge to the great enemy: “How many millions of these can we print and distribute throughout Russia?”.
A game, in short, a child’s taunt that might even make you laugh. And this is not new in history. The same game was used during World War II when the British Ministry of Information rained pamphlets into the skies of occupied Europe entitled ‘Where’s the Fifth Pig?’ In this case, of course, the pig faces reproduced those of Hitler. The discovery was then repeated during the Gulf War: back then, however, the pigs were four dinosaurs and the fifth fossil there Saddam Hussein. More recently, in the US, the game served to fuel the antiTrump campaign, and a few years ago the blog Anonymous Italia had “pigs” Matteo Salvini his nose and ears on photos of the Northern League leader accused of spreading lies in support of his propaganda. And then: “Pig face (you didn’t hurt me).”
THE PROPAGANDA
Here the propaganda. This is not about defending Putin’s honor as it is, like Saddam Hussein was, but about not getting dragged into the same dirty war as the Russian president. For years, the western world has denounced with horror the Kremlin’s relentless struggle for free information, the demonization of its opponents; For weeks we have been repeating that under the arms of the Putin regime there is the stifling of every free voice, the enslavement of people any mind that is not aligned. For weeks we have been claiming the value of critical thinking on which Western society is founded and on which our freedom and our democracies are nourished. War is of course barbarism “of blood and me **a”, even if it defends freedom and democracy. And by the way, in Iraq, for example, after the dinosaur Saddam, it was not an advocate of AngloSaxon parliamentarianism that rose from the ashes, but Al Qaeda. As the Pope said, every conflict is a defeat without victory, but if a catastrophe is seen as a possibility of salvation, this can also exist in the hope of showing the enemy a minimum of humanity in this wasteland of propaganda and bombing. In any war, one only begins to think of peace when the winds of hatred that transfigure the face of the enemy and reduce him to a ramshackle and childish “pig’s face” have died down. We cannot afford to disperse the reasons for the war, if there are any. Imagine drowning those of a possible peace in stadium chants.
