Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) has been one of the great Italian writers of history, also far from Italy, famous for the novel I Promessi Sposi [Novios, not published in Basque, translator's note]. Manzoni lived long before having social media, at a time when newspapers were also something new. But I was an excellent observer of society, and I would dare to say that it was one of the early creators of science, of spreading memes or ideas that we call today memetics.

The story of the black death that Manzoni told in 1629-1631 was written in the novel Los novios and later in the historical essay The Column of Shame. In the past, the famine and the disaster of the 30-year war hit a weakened society, the plague wiped about half of the population. The people who lived it fell into the claws of despair and believed that the plague had been caused by the malignant people called “untori”.

Untore [en plural untori] is a word known in Italian but difficult to translate into English. With this word, people were called poison or the things they thought were added to people to spread the disease, and that's why we could translate it into other languages as a pest propagator. [Many believed then that the rabbit rubbed with a kind of fat or ointment that carried in itself the plague the things that were going to touch both people and different subjects, the marathons of the doors, the shooters of the corners and others, so that the plague could infect as many people as possible, a warning from the translator] The rulers were supposed to have taken the trouble for being trapped by demon politicians.

In the novels and essays of Manzoni we can read how the meme of the untors spread among the inhabitants of Milan, to the extent that some guilty people stuck in the street. Others were reported, tortured and raped to confess their alleged crimes. And then there would be trials, which were basically nothing but witch hunting (in this case, pets). Some were executed and, in one case, raised a stone column in memory of the execution of two of them, the Column of Shame.

In this story we can immediately know our world: a classic example of face news is the most evil propagator of the plague. Every day we are seeing the violent reaction of people in our social networks, although hopefully people have not been lynched in reality (until now). Among the fictional characters drawn by Manzoni is especially interesting Don Ferrante, a mediocre intellectual who when his popularity option starts to say that there are no pests and that if there are they it is not contagious, because it is due to a star alignment. In this character, we can meet some of today's climate deniers, because they say similar things about climate change. Let us say, by the way, that Don Ferrante refused to suffer the plague, but he continued to deny his existence until the end, he died cursing the stars!

There are things that have always existed, without looking at whether it was the Internet or there were no printed media. But today, without a doubt, the Web can spread hate and fake news at an incredible rate. The Covid-19 epidemic in Italy has arrived a few days ago and the social media are already overflowing in a wave of hatred against today’s new untors: Greens, Government, Communists, immigrants, Africans and in general against “Buddhists” or people well, because they do nothing to cope with the spread of the pandemic when it is still possible to stop it.

The threat of coronavirus cannot be compared from afar with the black death, but the reaction of many people is similar: they want blood. They say this openly in their answers (here is one of the examples I have read these days: “I am a mother and if my children catch the coronavirus, you Communists will die sooner”). It is curious, they are the same ones that often reproach climate scientists to be “alarmist.”

At first, it seemed that the leaders of the Italian right wanted to put the centre-left government on the wave and collapse it. But then they've gone a little backwards and left the flames dared their toughest followers. It is better for cold heads to come and not to see them accusing people of being a rabbit (although we have seen some physical attacks on Chinese people, without causing victims, for the time being). But the situation is changing rapidly and we will see what is happening in the coming days.

This article from the chemist and climate expert Ugo Bardi has been translated from his blog Cassandra's Legacy. In the ARGIA Larrun supplement "Peak civilisation": What can sink us like the Roman Empire? "Yes, it's true," he said.