InvestigationA collective of far-left writers, hidden behind the pseudonym of Wu Ming and based in Bologna, could be, unwillingly, the source of the conspiracy theses that have flourished in Donald Trump’s America.
For months, a single letter has taken the alphabet by storm. It’s a very simple capital letter: the Q; but some staunch supporters of Donald Trump waved it so much in front of the cameras that it ended up occupying a special place. Cut out of cardboard, printed on T-shirts, signs or banners, it has become a symbol of the QAnon, these conspirators seeing in Mr. Trump the man who must deliver their country from a satanist and pedophile sect. located at the top of the state.
But what is behind this Q followed by an abbreviation referring to the word “Anonymous” ? What if this letter, often illuminated in the colors of the American flag, referred to a European source rather than to the United States?
This is the thesis defended by the Wu Ming, Italian far-left writers united under a collective pseudonym. For them, no doubt: QAnon is directly inspired by their first novel, Q, published in 1999 in Italy by Einaudi editions.
The great specialist in this story is Roberto Bui, alias Wu Ming 1. He is the author of an in-depth investigation into QAnon, which is due to appear in Italy on March 18 by Alegre under the title The Q di Qomplotto. Come le fantasie di complotto difendono il sistema (“Q for Qomplot: how conspiracy defends the system”).
But as a good collective the Wu Ming do not express themselves individually on the subjects that concern them all. So they met in the house of one of them to answer our questions. It is there, in a quiet street in Bologna, that they meet up to three times a week to work on their works. The windows look out onto a small garden, it’s freezing cold in the room and the atmosphere is studious.
It is that we do not laugh with discipline, at the Wu Ming. In Mandarin, these two characters can mean both “anonymous” and “five”, which is the number they were when they adopted this pseudonym, in 2000. Since then, one of them has given up the writing, and another was banned for non-observance of the common rule. If everyone can write under their own name, “What we do as Wu Ming must enter into the discourse and collective poetics”, announces Federico Guglielmi, the number 4 and youngest of the band.
The mystery character of the forum
They were still only four when they wrote Q, translated into French under the title The Eye of Carafa (Threshold, 2001). In this big novel published in copyleft (in other words free of reproduction rights), the Bolognese writers stage characters evolving during the second half of the XVIe century, when the Anabaptist revolts shook part of northern Europe.
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