Paolo Mieli’s book on the West’s self-deceptions, from Alcibiades to Putin

Along the limes that runs alongside the Rhine and the Danube, the Germanic peoples – a race of immense stature and with a memory stretching back through the ages – observe from on high those stocky, dark-skinned soldiers, clad in helmets and armour, and pass on to their grandchildren a memory so distorted that the legions of Rome, a few centuries later, resurface in the sagas of the north as bearded, industrious dwarves, and from there find their way into Tolkien’s pages to dig mines. This conjecture comes from the historian Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, and Paolo Mieli embraces it in “The Great Deception” (Rizzoli) with the delight of a collector who has found the missing piece, for in that borderland misunderstanding one can see, in miniature, the blueprint of the entire volume – and perhaps of European history – namely, the nonchalance with which people view their own era and extract from it the version that suits them best. It is often said of Mieli that he writes clearly, and little else is noted, because his clarity is not a practical virtue but an intellectual stance. His sentences remain short, adjectives are placed where they are needed, and the irony – which is at times tragic – almost never appears in the vocabulary itself, but rather in the juxtaposition.

The structure of "Il Grande Inganno" is built upon this rule; it is a masterful montage of voices – the Greek scholar Bettalli, the Byzantinist Breccia, the medievalist Carpegna Falconieri – who appear in Mieli’s pages as distinguished guests, discussed and brought into conversation with one another despite the distance between them, and without ever meeting, they emerge illuminated by that extra light that only an infinite readership can bestow. Alexander the Great conquers Tyre and is celebrated for a triumph that coincides with the ruin of a hub of trade and knowledge. Alcibiades, Pericles’ natural successor, treats Athenian democracy like a theatre audience, a type of figure that political chronicles never tire of repeating. The result is a gallery of illusions, arranged with the patience of a historian and the shrewdness of a great journalist observing contemporary reality. Even Putin, after all – portrayed for years as a somewhat rough-edged moderniser – was nothing more than a misunderstanding.

The greatest deception, in fact – the one that gives the book its title – is close at hand and almost domestic; it is the conviction, which took hold after 1989 amidst toasts in government offices and glittering conferences, that history had drawn to a close with the twentieth century and that humanity could finally settle into a century of peace, or perhaps even two. Instead, as we know, there are currently sixty-five active wars – the highest number ever recorded – and Mieli’s book offers a glimpse of a global anarchy in which no state is any longer able to impose a world order, not even when it presents itself under the banner of a peacemaking alliance. Hobsbawm’s ‘short century’, when examined closely, thus reveals itself to be an endless century, a guest who has crossed the threshold of the new millennium without even taking off his overcoat.

The idea that the fall of the Wall heralded an era of peace was not, of course, a lie imposed by anyone, but a convenience that the West concocted for itself, to the extent that it continued to celebrate eighty years of European peace whilst, just a two-hour flight away, Yugoslavia was descending into the horrors of war. Even then, we were observing from the wrong bank of the river, like the Britons, and seeing only dwarves. Hence Mieli’s conclusion, sober to the point of harshness: set aside theories about world harmony, and be prepared for delusions, which return without fail. Reading Mieli, si parva licet, one is reminded that the same pattern holds in Italy, the land of comedy, where misunderstanding even wears the regulation uniform. Knights, ‘Rottamatori’, Captains, Generals, Advocates of the People – and each time, it was obviously ‘the right time’. All one great (self-)deception.