|
Phỏng
vấn Kissinger, nàng
đưa chàng vào bẫy, khi coi chàng là vú em của
Nixon, và đưa chàng lên mây, nhân dân Mẽo mê chàng, người hùng cô đơn,
chàng cao bồi đơn thương độc mã... và, bất thình lình, nàng [vén phứa
tượng lên, và hứ hứ cái mồm] ra đòn:
-Ông có khi nào nghĩ rằng, cuộc chiến Việt Nam vô dụng?
-Ô, về khoản đó, anh đồng ý với em.
*
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an
elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see
power as
an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.... I have always looked on
disobedience
toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been
born."
Trên Tin Văn, đã từng giới thiệu Fallaci, nay scan và dịch
bài viết trên Người Nữu Ước.
Đây là một bài viết tuyệt vời, về một người tuyệt vời, và về những hoàn
cảnh tuyệt bi mà bà đã trải qua, trong đó có, cuộc chiến Việt Nam.
Bất kể là
thằng cha nào, cho dù Tổng Bí Thư hay Tổng Thống do dân bầu, cho dù
Tướng Sát Nhân hay Nhà Lãnh Đạo Đáng Yêu, Người Cầm Lái Vĩ Đại, Cha Già
Dân Tộc.... tôi đều tởm, như tởm quyền lực, một thứ bất nhân đáng ghét.
Tôi luôn nhìn kẻ áp bức, thằng có quyền, bằng cái nhìn không thân
thiện, như thế đó, và coi đây là cách độc nhất để sử dụng tới phép lạ,
là được sinh ra ở trên cõi đời này.”
Và tất nhiên,
nếu mắc ỉa, thì ị ngay vào mặt chúng!
Fallaci
LIFE
AND LETTERS
THE
AGITATOR
Oriana
Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.
BY
MARGARET TALBOT
"Yesterday,
I was hysterical," the Italian
journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story
about a
local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in
front of
Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East Side.
Big mistake. "I no longer have the energy to get really
angry, like I used to," she added. It called to mind
what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing
her for
Playboy, in 1981: "For the first time in my life, I found myself
feeling
sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and
Kissinger-all
of whom had been the objects of her wrath-the people she described as
interviewing
`with a thousand feelings of rage."'
For two decades, from the
mid-nineteen-sixties to the
mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political
interviewers
in the world. Her subjects were among the world's most powerful
figures: Yasir
Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry
Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was "the
single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of
the
press," said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company
he'd be keeping as part of Fallaci's "journalistic pantheon." It was
more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects
unskinned.
Fallaci's manner of interviewing
was deliberately
unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness,
made
frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her
subjects with
bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous,
crafty
intelligence. It didn't hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with
straight,
smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails;
melancholy blue gray
eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable
Italian
accent. During the Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in
fatigues and
a helmet; her rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body
to the
Italian Ambassador "if K.I.A." In these images she looked as slight
and vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting
on the
student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police
with the
wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first
impulse
of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his
sweater, in
order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her essential
toughness
never stopped taking people - men, especially - by surprise.
Fallaci's journalism, at first
conducted for the Italian
magazine L’ Europeo and later
published in translation throughout the world,
was infused with a "mythic sense of political evil," as the writer
Vivian Gornick once put it - an almost adolescent aversion to power,
which
suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her
preface to
"Interview with History," a 1976 collection of Q & A.s,
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president,
from
a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and
hateful
phenomenon.... I have always looked on disobedience toward the
oppressive as
the only way to use the miracle of having been born." In Fallaci's
interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become known as
"Nixon's mental wet nurse," and lured him into boasting that
Americans admired him because he "always acted alone"- like "the
cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,
the cowboy
who rides all alone into the town." Political cartoonists mercilessly
lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger's memoirs, the quote
soured
his relations with Nixon. (Kissinger claimed that she had taken his
words out
of context.) But the most remarkable moment in the interview came when
Fallaci
bluntly asked him, about Vietnam,
"Don't you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it's been a useless war?," and
Kissinger began his reply with the words "On this, I can agree."
Fallaci's interview with
Khomeini, which appeared in the Times
on October
7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most
exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled
to Qum to try to secure an interview
with Khomeini, and she
waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions
from the
new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah's home barefoot and
wrapped
in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions
about the
closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran's
Kurdish minority, and the
summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended
these practices,
noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the
Shad,
Fallaci demanded, “It is right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman
who is
unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?" The
Ayatollah
answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. "If your finger suffers
from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the
body,
become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings
corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like
the weeds
that infest a field of wheat."
Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the
treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did
Khomeini
compel women to "hide themselves, all bundled up," when they had
proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic
revolution?
Khomeini replied that the women who "contributed to the revolution
were,
and are, women with the Islamic dress"; they weren't women like
Fallaci,
who "go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men”. A
few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question:
“How do you swim in a chador?”. Khomeini snapped: “Our customs are none
of your
business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear
it.
Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women." Fallaci saw
an
opening, and charged in. "That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you
said so, I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now."
She
yanked off her chador.
In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said
of Khomeini, "At that
point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as
a cat,
an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left
me. In
fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him
again
and conclude the interview." When Khomeini let her return, his son
Ahmed
gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she'd
better not
even mention the word "chador." Fallaci turned the tape recorder back
on and immediately revisited the subject. "First he looked at me in
astonishment," she said. "Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in
a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile.
And
finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was
over,
Ahmed whispered to me, `Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I
think you
are the only person in this world who made him laugh."'
Fallaci recalled that she found
Khomeini intelligent, and
"the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the
`Moses' sculpted by Michelangelo." And, she said, Khomeini was "not a
puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the
Islamic
world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king - a real leader. And it
did not
take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he
represented the
Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would
poison
the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet.
Worse: a
God."
Upon leaving Khomeini's house
after her first interview,
Fallaci was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she'd
been in
the Ayatollah's presence. “The sleeves of my shirt were all torn off,
my
slacks, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without
Khomeini,
we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him,
his
mother did not choose to have an abortion."
*
Today, Fallaci believes, the Western world is in
danger of
being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has
written
three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, 'The
Rage and
the Pride" and "The Force of Reason," have been translated into
idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult
relationships
with translators in the past.) A third, "The Apocalypse," was
recently published in Europe, in a
volume that
also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim
immigration is
turning Europe into "a colony of
Islam," an abject place that she calls "Eurabia," which soon,
"end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in
place
of the mini-skirt." Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on
Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century,
and the
brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire
in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary
immigration
from Muslim countries to Europe
amounts to the
same thing- invasion – only this time with "children and boats"
instead of "troops and cannons." And, as Fallaci sees it, the
"art of invading and conquering and subjugating" is "the only
art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled." Italy, unlike America,
has never been a melting
pot, or a "mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship.
Because
our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we
cannot
bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us ... who,
on the
contrary, aim to absorb us." Muslim immigrants - with their burkas,
their
chadors, and their separate schools - have no desire to assimilate, she
believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism,
have made
absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed
for
identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when
Muslim
men violate the law by taking multiple wives or and the stoning of
adulterous
`women.)
According to Fallaci, Europeans,
particularly those on the
political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double
standard. "If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic
Church, on
the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches
your `right
of thought and expression.' But if you do the same with Islam, the
Koran, the
Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic
blasphemer who
has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a
Chinese
or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing
happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you’. But if
under the
same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a
Nigerian
or a Sudanese, you get lynched." The rhetoric of Fallaci's trilogy is
intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first
volume, she
writes that Muslims "breed like rats"; in the second, she writes that
this statement was "a little brutal" but "indisputably accurate."
She ascribes behavior to bloodlines-Spain, she writes, has been
overly
acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because "too many Spaniards still have
the Koran in the blood" - and her political views are often expressed
in
the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one
point in
"The Rage and the Pride" she complains about Somali Muslims leaving
"yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the
Baptistery" in Florence. "Good Heavens!" she writes. "They
really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in
hitting
so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards
distant from
their urinary apparatus?" Six pages later, she describes urine streaks
in
the Piazza San Marco, in Venice,
and wonders if Muslim men will one day "shit in the Sistine Chapel."
These books have brought Fallaci,
who will turn
seventy-seven later this month, and who has had cancer for more than a
decade,
to a strange place in her life. Much of the Italian intelligentsia now
shuns
her. (The German press has been highly critical, too.) A 2003 article
in the
left-wing newspaper La Repubblica called her "ignorantissima,"
an "exhibitionist posing as the
Joan of Arc of the West." A fashionable gallery in Milan recently showed a large
portrait of her
beheaded. After the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published the
long
article that became "The Rage and the Pride," La Repubblica ran a
reply from Umberto Eco, which did not mention
Fallaci by name but denounced
cultural chauvinism and called for tolerance. "We are a pluralistic
society because we permit mosques to be built in our own home, and we
cannot
give this up just because in Kabul
they put evangelical Christians in jail," he wrote. "If we did, we
would become Taliban ourselves."
Fallaci has repeatedly fallen
afoul of some of Europe's strict laws
against vilifying religions or
inciting racial hatred. (In Europe,
the
prevailing impulse toward certain kinds of outré pinions is to ban
their
expression.) In 2002, a French group, Movement against Racism and for
Friendship between Peoples, tried unsuccessfully to get "The Rage and
the
Pride" banned. The following year, Swiss officials, under pressure from
Muslim groups in that country, asked that she be extradited for trial;
the
Italian Minister of Justice refused the request. And she currently
faces trial
in Italy,
on charges that amount to blasphemy, of all things. Last year, Adel
Smith, a
convert to Islam who heads a group called the Muslim Union of Italy,
and who
had previously sued the government to have a crucifix removed from his
sons'
classroom, persuaded a judge in Bergamo
to allow him to charge Fallaci with defaming Islam. A Mussoliniera
criminal
code holds that "whoever offends the state's religion, by defaming
those
who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment."
Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been
successively amended in the past ten years, so it encompasses any
“religion
acknowledged by the state”. The complain against Fallaci marks the
first time
that the code has been invoked on behalf of any religion but
Catholicism. (In
January, Fallaci's supporters in the Italian Senate pushed through an
amendment
to the code, reducing the maximum penalty to five thousand euros.)
Yet Fallaci's recent books, and
the specious trial that she
is facing as a result - her books may offend, but it is no less
offensive to
prosecute her for them - have also made
her a beloved figure to many Europeans. The books have been
best-sellers in Italy,
together
they have sold four million copies. To her admirers, she is an aging
Cassandra,
summoning her strength for one final prophecy. In September, she had a
private
audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer
residence outside Rome.
She had
criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not
condemning
terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The
meeting
was something of a scandal in Italy,
since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently,
she has
called herself a "Christian atheist," out of respect for Italy
s
Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented
her with a
gold medal for "cultural achievement."
Fallaci's arguments appeal to
many Europeans on a visceral
level. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the "honor
killings" of young women in England and Sweden, and the controversy in
France over whether girls may wear head scarves to school have
underscored the
enormous clash in values between secular Europeans and fundamentalist
Muslim
immigrants. In Holland,
immigration officials have begun showing potential immigrants films and
brochures that detail certain "European" values, including equality
of the sexes and tolerance of homosexuality. The implicit suggestion is
that in
order to live in Europe you must
accept these
ideas. Such clumsy efforts betray the frustration and confusion that
many
Europeans have felt since the riots that broke out in the suburbs of Paris last fall-perhaps the most spectacular sign
that the
assimilation of Western Europe's
fifteen
million Muslims has stalled in many places, and never started in
others.
Some European intellectuals have
given Fallaci credit for
offering an enraged, articulate voice to people who are genuinely
bewildered
and dismayed by the challenges of assimilating Islamic immigrants. In
2002,
writing in the Italian weekly Panorama, Lucia Annunziata, a former
foreign
correspondent and columnist, and Carlo Rossella, then the magazine's
editor,
argued that "The Rage and the Pride" had "redefined Italy’s
conception of the current conflict between the Western world and the
Islamic
world.... Oriana Fallaci has confronted the issue with ironclad
simplicity: We
are different, she has said. And, at this point, we are incompatible."
The
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, writing in Le Point, said that
Fallaci
"went too far," reducing all "Sons of Allah to their worst
elements," yet he commended her for taking "the discourse and the
actions of our adversaries" at their word and -in the wake of September
11th, the execution of Daniel Pearl, the destruction of Buddhas in
Afghanistan,
and other atrocities committed in the name of Islam - not being
intimidated by
the "penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that
which
victimizes it."
Last year, a support committee
for Fallaci collected some
letters that it had received from people across Italy
and presented them as a
testimonial to her. A Florentine couple wrote, "Brava, Oriana. You had
the
courage and the pride to speak in the name of most Italians (who are
perhaps
too silent) who still have not sold out the social, moral, and
religious values
that belong to us.... If [immigrants] do not share our ideas, then why
do they
come to Italy?
Why should we endure arrogance and interference by those who have no
desire to
integrate into our system and who are darkened by anti-Western hatred?
We
welcome them as guests, but immediately they act like the owners."
Another
fan wrote, "In this tragic and historic moment, only one voice has been
raised high to speak for the conscience of most Westerners.... That is
why we
are impotently witnessing the breakdown and decline of a civilization
whose
values are now ridiculed by those who are in charge of protecting
them....
Thank you, Oriana."
*
Fallaci owns an apartment in Florence
and has an estate in the Tuscan
countryside. But she spends most of the year in New York, where she leads a fairly
solitary
life and, necessarily, spends a lot of time visiting doctors. In
November, when
she delivered an acceptance speech for an award given by the
conservative
Center for the Study of Popular Culture, it was a rare public
appearance.
"Darling," she growled over the
phone the first
time we spoke, "as you well know, I never give interviews." Strictly
speaking, this isn't true. Over the years, she's given many of them,
sometimes
with embarrassing results in Scheer's 1981 Playboy
interview, she complained about homosexuals who "swagger and strut and
wag
their tails" and "fat" women reporters who didn't like her. When
I visited her on a rainy Saturday afternoon in April, and again the
next day, I
found her voluble and dramatic, capable of leaping to her feet to
illustrate a
point, and shouting when she felt the point warranted it which was
often. She
smoked little brown Nat Sherman cigarettes; smoking, she believes,
"disinfects" her.
Fallaci's New York
residence is a handsome nineteenth-century brownstone, painted white,
with a
walled garden in the back. She had longed for such a house since
childhood; as
a young girl in Italy during the Second World War, she'd found a
Collier's
magazine in a care package dropped by U.S. military pilots, and fallen
in love
with a photo essay about American houses. "It's funny to say that, with
the marvelous architecture we have in Italy, I desired a house
like
this," she said. "I grew up with this obsession of a white house with
a black door." Inside, the second-floor rooms, where we talked, had a
scholarly, slightly worn elegance. The bookshelves held translations of
Fallaci's books and leather-bound early editions of Dickens, Voltaire,
and
Shakespeare. There were eighteenth and nineteenth-century oil paintings
on the
walls; an old-fashioned cream-colored dial phone sat on a small table
with a
stained-glass lamp. It was the sort of setting where you could imagine
retired
professors sipping port and sparring genially over Greek participles.
It was
not the sort of setting where you expected to find a woman of Fallaci's
age
yelling "Mamma mia!" and threatening to break various people's heads
and blow things up.
We sat down next to a table piled
with newspaper clippings from Italy,
which
chronicled Fallaci's anti-Islamic crusade: articles by her and articles
about
her, often on the front page. The Italian press is, as she puts it,
"ob-sess-ed" with her. One article, "Reading Oriana in Tehran," which had run in La Stampa, claimed that
Fallaci was a legend among independent minded women in Iran.
"That's damn good!" she said. Fallaci's earlier books are widely
available in Iran,
but the trilogy has been banned. "You know what these women did?" she
said. "They got copies in English and in French, and they photocopied
them, chapter by
chapter, and distributed them to others. They can go to jail for that."
The reporter for La Stampa had mainly found women who admired Fallaci
for her
earlier work: two female university students noted that Fallaci had
been
equally tough on the Shah and on Khomeini, and that she'd shown up to
get her
Iranian visa wearing nail polish and jeans.
On the day I visited, Fallaci was
dressed like a refined European lady: tweed skirt, leaf-green sweater,
handsome antique jewelry, suede pumps. She wore her hair tied
neatly at the nape of her neck rather a
than long and loose, as she used to, but she still looked beautiful -
she has a
perfect oval face and robust cheekbones. She put on a pair of
jewel-rimmed
reading glasses as she brandished another clipping, and said with
satisfaction,
"Ah, this is the scandal!" The conservative newspaper Libero had
campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Fallaci to be made a Senator for Life,
an honor
conferred by the Italian President. According to the paper, the
outgoing
President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, had considered giving Fallaci the
title, but
lost his nerve. "To me, in a sense, it was a relief,” ," Fallaci
said. "I didn't want to be Senator for Life, and stay in Rome. I would
not know where to sit."
She hopped up to demonstrate, pointing to the left and the right sides
of an
imaginary aisle - she belonged to no political side. Nevertheless, with
evident
delight, she noted that Ciampi's "wife was infuriated at him" for the
decision. "For some time, she didn't speak to him. Three days after
Christmas, she managed to have me receive a bouquet of white flowers.
That was
cute."
I visited Fallaci on the day
before the Italian election, in
which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was defeated by the center-left
candidate, Romano Prodi. Fallaci told me that she had not sent in an
absentee
ballot. She loved referenda: "Do you want the hunter to go hunting
under
your window? No! Do you want the Koran in your schools? No!"
"No" was something Fallaci was happy to say. But Berlusconi and Prodi
were "two fucking idiots," she said. "Why do the people
humiliate themselves by voting? I didn't vote. No! Because I have
dignity....
If, at a certain moment, I had closed my nose and voted for one of
them, I
would spit on my own face."
Many of the clippings on
Fallaci's table focussed on Adel
Smith's lawsuit against her. She said that she would not attend the
trial,
which is scheduled for later this month. Although she is no longer at
risk of
incarceration, she invoked the possibility. "Because, you know, I am a
danger to myself if I get angry," she said. "If they were thinking to
give me three years in jail, I will say or do something for which they
give me
nine years! I am capable of everything if I get angry."
*
I'd always thought of Fallaci as an icon of the
nineteen-sixties-one of those women who had lived an emancipated life
without
ever calling herself a feminist, an insouciant heroine out of "The
Golden
Notebook" or "Bonjour Tristesse." She denigrated marriage, got
thrown out of nice restaurants for wearing slacks, and hung out with
Anna
Magnani and Ingrid Bergman. Her autobiographical novel "Letter to a
Child
Never Born" (1975) was a free woman's despairing confession of
ambivalence
about bearing a child. "A Man" (1979) was a fictional tribute to her
great love, the Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, who
died in a
suspicious automobile accident in Athens
three years after they met. Panagoulis had been imprisoned, and endured
torture, for his failed attempt on the life of the Greek junta leader
George
Papadopoulos, in 1968. "I didn't want to kill a man," he told Fallaci
in an interview. "I'm not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a
tyrant." As a political prisoner, Panagoulis was defiant toward his
captors and wrote poetry in his own blood; Fallaci considered him a
model of
what it is to be a man. I thought of her as a product of that heady
time when
big and bloody political matters were still at stake in Europe
(dictators ruled Spain,
Portugal,
and Greece),
but small, sophisticated
cultural rebellions (movies, hair styles, poetic manifestos) made life
chic and
interesting. There's some truth to this image, but Fallaci's
sensibility is a
product less of the sixties than of the forties, and the struggle
against
Fascism in the Second World War.
Fallaci was born in Florence
in 1929, to a family with a long history of rebellion. Her mother,
Tosca, she
said, was the orphaned daughter of an anarchist "and I tell you those
were
people with balls! With balls! And they were the first ones to be
executed." On both sides of her family, she said, she had relatives who
fought for the Risorgimento - "people who were always in jail."
Fallaci was an avid reader as a child (her parents lived modestly but
splurged
on books), and a favorite author was Jack London. His tales of brave
acts in
the face of savage nature inspired her to become a writer. She
describes her
father, Edoardo - a craftsman who became a leader in the anti-Fascist
movement
in Tuscany,
and who served time in prison for it - as a sweet man. "Heroes can be
sweet," she said, adding that Panagoulis had been that way, too. But
both
of Fallaci's parents prized courage and toughness in their three
daughters. In
"The Rage and the Pride," she tells a story about the Allied
bombardment of Florence
on September 25, 1943. She and her family took refuge in a church as
the bombs
began to fall. The walls were shaking - the priest cried out, "Help us,
Jesus!" - and Oriana, who was the eldest, at fourteen, began to cry.
"In a silent, composed way, mind you," she writes. "No moans, no
hiccups. But Father noticed it all the same, and, in order to help me,
to calm
me down, poor Father, he did the wrong thing. He gave me a powerful
slap - he
stared me in the eyes and said, `A girl does not, must not, cry."'
Fallaci
says that she's never cried since - not even when Panagoulis died. As a
teen-ager, Fallaci did clandestine work for the
anti-Fascist underground she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia, and she
carried
explosives and delivered messages. After Italy surrendered, in
September,
1943, and American and British prisoners began escaping from prison
camps, one
of her tasks was to accompany them "past the lines" and to safe
refuge. Fallaci was chosen because she wore her hair in pigtails and
looked
deceptively innocent. "It was so scary, because there were minefields,
and
you never knew where the mines were," she recalled. "When my mother
read that in a book later, she said, to my father, `You would have
sacrificed
newly born children! You and your ideas.' And then she said, Well, but
I had a
feeling you were doing something like that."'
Fallaci's parents looked upon the
Americans as their
particular friends, and when she was in high school they insisted that
she
learn English when her classmates were studying French. It was the
beginning of
a lifelong affinity for America,
even when, as during the Vietnam War, she was sharply critical of its
policies.
"In my old age, I have been thinking about this, and I have reached the
conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral
courage,"
she said. "Physical courage is a great test." She added, "I know
I have courage. But am not alone. My sister Neera was like me. And my
second
sister, Paola, too. It came from the education my parents gave us."
She proudly told a story about
her mother, which, like other
recollections, sounded as if it might have been polished over time.
"When
my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him, so she went
everywhere for two days and finally she found him, at the house of
torture. It
was called Villa Triste. They killed people there. And the Fascist
major was
named Mario Carita - Major Charity. Mother - I don't know how she did
it - she
went to the office of Major Charity, passing a room that was full of
blood on
the floor, the blood of three men who had been arrested and tied
together, and
one of them was my father. Carita says, `Madam. I have no time to lose.
Your
husband will be executed tomorrow morning at six. You can dress in
black.' My
mother got up - and I always imagine the scene this way, as if she were
the
Statue of Liberty - and my mother said, Mario Carita, tomorrow morning
I shall dress in black, like
you said. But if you are born from the womb of a woman, ask your mother
to do
the same, because your day will come very soon.' You could think for a
year
before you came up with something like that - to her, it came." Her
mother
was pregnant at the time, Fallaci went on. "She mounted on her bicycle,
and all at once she had pains so terrible. She entered into a beautiful
building and, in the atrium, she lost the child. She put it in, I don't
know, a
handkerchief or something. She mounted the bicycle again. She rode
home. I
opened the door, and there was mother, as pale as snow. And before she
entered
she said, `Father will be executed tomorrow morning at six, and
Elena'-that was
the name she had given the baby-`is dead.'
No tears." In the end, Edoardo Fallaci was spared, though he spent
additional time in jail. Fallaci's sister Neera became a writer, and
died of
cancer; Paola is a perfectionist gardener - imagine a cross between
Martha Stewart
and Oriana - who raises prize-quality chickens on Fallaci's property in
rural Tuscany.
Fallaci sees the threat of
Islamic fundamentalism as a
revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She
told me,
"I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the
same
as in 1938, with the pact in Munich,
when England and France
did not understand a thing.
With the Muslims, we have done the same thing." She elaborated, in an
e-mail, "Look at the Muslims: in Europe
they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs.
They go on
with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating
their wives
and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose
their
culture, or so-called culture, on us.... I reject them, and this is not
only my
duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my
civilization. It is
not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward
freedom and
toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a
partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With
Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is
possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And
those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide
of the
West."
Fallaci refuses to recognize the
limitations of this
metaphor-say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an
annexation by
another state. And although European countries should indeed refuse to
countenance
certain cultural practices - polygamy, "honor killings," and anti -
Semitic
teachings, for example - Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices
of
Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly,
European
countries have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating
Muslim
residents. In Germany,
where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be offered
in
schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained that
the
Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam. The
result,
the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington, is
that "Islam as taught in
Turkish schools is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of
Islam, and
Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast." (This is
a
good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious
instruction out of
public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci's objections,
however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her,
hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany
– she does her own wailing imitation – is a form of oppression. Yet
such
examples do not raise the level of argument that she wants to make,
which is
that the native Culture of Italy
will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating. "
They live at our expense, because
they've got schools,
hospitals, everything," she said at one point, beginning to shout.
"And they want to build damn mosques everywhere." She spoke of a new
mosque and Islamic center planned for Colle di Val d'Elsa, near Siena. She vowed
that it
would not remain standing. "If I'm alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara you
know, where
there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the
explosives.
I make you juuump in the air. I blow
it up! With the anarchists of Carrara.
I do not want to see this mosque - it's
very near my house in Tuscany.
I do not want to see a twenty-four-metre minaret in the landscape of
Giotto.
When I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their
country! So I BLOW IT UP!"
*
The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates,
it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to
abortion,
unless she "were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a
Zarqawi." She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage ("In the same way
that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like
us all to
become homosexuals"), and suspicious of immigration in general. The
demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past
few months
"disgust" her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag.
"I don't love the Mexicans," Fallaci said, invoking her nasty
treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. "If you hold a gun
and
say, `Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,' I have
a
moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have
broken my
balls."
In "The Rage and the Pride,"
Fallaci portrays the
attacks of September 11th as a thunderclap that woke her from a quiet,
novel-writing existence and transformed her, almost unwillingly, into
an anti-Islamic
rebel. But Fallaci's distaste for Islam goes way back. Reasonable
worries about
the rise of Muslim fundamentalism were combined with a visceral
revulsion and
the need for a new enemy, in the post-Fascist, post-Communist world.
Her
interviews with Yasir Arafat (whom she loathed), Qaddafi (whom she also
loathed), and even Muhammad Ali (whom she walked out on, she says,
after he
belched in her face) all fuelled her antipathy toward the Muslim world.
So did (whom she walked out on, she says, after he belched in her
face) all fuelled her antipathy toward the Muslim world. So did her
experiences
in Beirut
during its disintegration, in the nineteen-eighties the basis for her
1990
novel, "Inshallah."
I started wondering if Fallaci
would tolerate any Muslim
immigration, or any mosque in Europe,
so I
asked her these questions by e-mail, and she sent back lengthy replies.
"The tolerance level was already surpassed fifteen or twenty years
ago," she wrote, "when the Left let the Muslims disembark on our
coasts by the thousands. And it is well known ... that I do not accept
the
mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good
Islam
and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And
the Koran
says what it says. Whatever its version. Of course there are
exceptions. Also,
considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good
Muslims
must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and
secularism.
But, as I say in the `Apocalypse,' ... good Muslims are few. So
tragically few,
in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards." (Here she mentioned
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament,
whom
Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her
citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.)
She wrote
that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques
in Europe "insidious" and
"offensive,"
because it "aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during
the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and
of Jesus
Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the
Bolshevik
Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used
the
churches as warehouses. Really, no honest person can suggest that my
ideas
belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the
struggle for
freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle
for
freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the
Muslim
religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose
its 'Mein
Kampf,' its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one
thousand and
four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other
religion,
slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently."
*
My second meeting with Fallaci was a less inflammatory
encounter. She is an excellent cook, and she made us lunch - cotechino sausage, polenta, mashed
potatoes, and delicious little tarts with pine nuts and dried fruit -
and
served champagne. I'd never seen anyone approach certain kitchen tasks
with
such ferocity. "I must CRUSH the potatoes," she declared. At one
point, we spoke about populist leaders in Latin
America,
and the political left's romance with them over the years; I mentioned
Hugo
Chavez, the President of Venezuela. "Mamma
mia!Mamma mia!" Fallaci shouted from the kitchen. "Listen,"
she said more calmly. "You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with
an
ignoramus." When I left, she insisted on giving me a bag of chestnut
flour
and dictating a recipe for a dessert that she says children love. "If
you
make a mistake, you spoil everything," she instructed, adding, "Get
the good olive oil - not the kind they do in New Jersey."
Fallaci was wearing a sweater and
skirt again that day. Late
in life, she realized that skirts are more comfortable than the pants
she had
favored as a young woman. Besides, she wore pants when other women
didn't because
she was " person who had always gone against current," certainly
since she started her writing career, at age sixteen, as a beat
reporter for a
Florentine newspaper. Now that everybody wore pants, what was point?
She had
some evening dresses up stairs, relics from a brief period in her early
thirties when she'd been a little less serious. But now they
felt to her "like monuments"; where would she wear them? We talked
about the historical novel that she had set aside after September 11th,
when
"this Islam business kidnapped me," her regrets that she's never had
children, and her long illness. One of her doctors, she said, had asked
her
recently, "Why are you still alive?" Fallaci responded,
"Dottore, don't do that to me. Someday I break your head." She added,
"Another day, I smiled and said, `You tell me you are the doctor.' See,
I
got offended. `I don't want to come here to hear about my death. Your
duty is
to speak to me about life, to keep me alive."'
She surprised me with a charming
story about being a young
writer in New York
in the nineteen-sixties. At the time, she recalled, she'd had a chance
to
interview Greta Garbo - a mutual friend wanted to set it up. But
Fallaci
admired Garbo's fierce and elegant privacy, and didn't want to pursue
the matter.
And then one winter evening Fallaci was shopping at the Dover
Delicatessen, on Fifty-seventh
Street,
and Garbo happened to be there: "You couldn't not recognize her. She
was
Greta Garbo. She was dressed like Greta Garbo - with the hair, the
glasses. And
she was choosing chicken with extreme care. She would look at a leg and
toss it
back, then the breast, and so on. And I felt ashamed of myself that I
was
observing her. I went in the other aisle, and I remember I got a lot of
things,
because I wanted her to go out and not go by me." It was a rainy night
and
Fallaci had no umbrella. She recalled that Garbo, on her way out the
door,
stopped and held it open. "She said, `Here, Miss Fallaci.' I looked
like a
poor, pitiful bird." They walked together, under Garbo's umbrella, to
the
corner of Third Avenue,
and Fallaci - in a rare moment of restraint - barely said a word.
After I had interviewed Fallaci,
I discovered two great
examples of her journalism that I had not read before. In a witty 1963
article
about Federico Fellini, Fallaci describes with wary, nervy thoroughness
the
many times and places that the great director kept her waiting. When
she finally corners him, she begins by saying, "So
then let us brace ourselves, Signor Fellini, and let us discuss
Federico
Fellini, just for a change. I know you find it hard: you are so
withdrawing, so
secretive, so modest. But it is our duty to discuss him, for the sake
of the
nation." She goes on in this vein until Fellini cuts her off, saying,
"Nasty liar. Rude little bitch." In her introduction to the
interview, she writes, "I used to be truly fond of Federico Fellini.
Since
our tragic encounter, I'm a lot less fond. To be exact, I'm no longer
fond of
him. That is, I don't like him at all. Glory is a heavy burden, a
murdering
poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare."
Equally
absorbing, in a different way, was the section of her 1969 book,
"Nothing,
and So Be It," in which she describes the events of October, 1968, in Mexico City,
when
soldiers shot and bayonetted hundreds of anti-government protesters.
Fallaci
was detained with a group of students, and was ultimately shot three
times.
"In war, you've really got a chance sometimes, but here we had none,"
she writes. "The wall they'd put us up against was a place of
execution;
if you moved the police would execute you, if you didn't move the
soldiers
would kill you, and for many nights afterward I was to have this
nightmare, the
nightmare of a scorpion surrounded by fire, unable even to try to jump
through
the fire because if it did so it would be pierced through." Dragged
down
the stairs by her hair and left for dead, Fallaci was ultimately taken
to a hospital,
where she underwent surgery to remove the bullets. One of the doctors
who cared
for her came close and murmured, "Write all you've seen. Write it!"
She did, becoming a crucial witness to a massacre that the Mexican
government
denied for years.
These pieces showed Fallaci in
her prime. In her e-mail,
however, she told me that she didn't really remember the interview with
Fellini-only that she didn't like him. And her memories of Mexico City in
1968 had largely devolved into
a dislike of Mexicans. Fallaci's virtues are the virtues that shine
most
brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the
willingness to
say anything, that can amount to a life force. But Fallaci never
convinced me
that Europe's encounter with
immigration is
that sort of circumstance. Not that it would matter to her. "You've got
to get
old, because you have nothing to lose," she said over lunch that
afternoon. "You have this respectability that is given to you, more or
less. But you don't give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom.
And things
that I didn't used to say before-you know, there is in each of us a
form of
timidity, of cautiousness-now I open my big mouth. I say, `What are you
going
to do to me? You go fuck yourself - I say what I want."'
The New Yorker
June 5 2006
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