Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci
born June 29, 1929 in Florence, Italy
died September 15, 2006 Florence, Italy
Prize-winning journalist, author, and passionate defender of the West; a self-described Cassandra of the Islamic threat which looms over her beloved Europe now.
Always passionate and outspoken, she powerfully articulated the rage which has been so suppressed throughout the West; in spite of the constraints of Political Correctness, or perhaps also because of it, she became more harsh and more insistent in her later years.
Her voice was a much-needed one in an emasculated and passive Europe, and throughout the West. Of course her bluntness provoked controversy in a world which prizes 'sensitivity' and hypocritical niceness over truth, but her eloquence and passion spoke for many people whose voices are silenced in today's PC-strangled atmosphere.
Here is the London Times on her death.
As a mere teenager in Italy, during WWII, she joined an armed resistance group, 'Giustizia e Liberta'.
In 1950 she became a journalist, writing for the Italian paper Il mattino dell'Italia.
She was a war correspondent during the Vietnam War years.
During her career as a journalist and political interviewer, she interviewed public figures such as Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Moammar Gaddafi, Yassir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Haile Selassie, as well as celebrities and media figures like Sammy Davis Jr., Walter Cronkite and Sean Connery.
In recent years, her attention was focused on the Islamic threat to Europe and to the West, which became something of an obsesssion with her. The 9/11 attacks particularly distressed her, and motivated her book 'The Rage and the Pride.'
She said, of Islam:
The clash between us and them is not a military one. It's a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come."
And how right she has been proven to be. In this article by Tunku Varadjan, he says
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice. "Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't, for Christ's sake. They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!" -- a reference to Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the conservative father, with the radical Garibaldi, of Modern Italy. Ms. Fallaci, rarely reverent, pauses here to reflect on the man, and on the question of where all the conservatives have gone in Europe. "In the beginning, I was dismayed, and I asked, how is it possible that we do not have Cavour . . . just one Cavour, uno? He was a revolutionary, and yes, he was not of the left. Italy needs a Cavour -- Europe needs a Cavour."
She was so right; Europe needs a Cavour, and America needs the equivalent. But the world needs a Fallaci. If only there were more like her, to sound the alarms, to speak with furious urgency, to warn, to entreat, to exhort. Sadly there seems to be no one waiting in the wings to take her place. Perhaps she is too much a product of the old order of things, of the days when nation and culture and people and heritage meant something; when pride in one's origins and country were not disdained or denounced as 'hate.'
And Fallaci also represented a type which is becoming extinct today: a 'leftist' with principles; a leftist with a brain, who could employ impassioned reason in a cause. Today's leftists are often nothing more than spoiled, rebellious adolescents trashing everything they associate with Daddy and authority. Few leftists seem capable of a reasoned, intelligent argument, or of listening to differing views. Few leftists can find any love for country, nation, or tradition in their shriveled hearts; they have nothing but disdain and loathing for their origins. Fallaci, however, loved her place of birth, Tuscany, and her country, Italy, and she loved the Western civilization of which Italy (and she herself) were a part. Where are today's leftists who hold such love and loyalty and passion? How can one love an abstraction, like an ideology, or 'world citizenship' or 'a nation of immigrants'? No; the human heart and mind love the concrete, the specific, the natural bonds: those of family, kin, homeland, and heritage. Today's hollow leftists are driven by loathing, not love. Despite Fallaci's image as a 'hater' of Islam or a 'vilifier' (on which charge she was arraigned in Italy) she was motivated by love of her country and people and heritage.
Again, I say we need more like her, because without other such people with her fire and ardor, her intelligence and eloquence, her fearlessness, we don't have a chance, we in the West.
There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape." --Oriana Fallaci
Those of us who care intensely about the same things which commanded such loyalty and dedication from Fallaci should understand the quote above. I suppose my modest effort in writing this blog is motivated by the sense of urgency she cites in that quote.
As I said in a blog post some months ago, I sometimes lose heart for the struggle momentarily, but the sense of urgency returns. Being silent is not an option; all of us who share Fallaci's passion have no choice but to try to follow her blazing example.
The dust jacket of The Rage and the Pride says:
With her brutal sincerity she hurls pitiless accusations, vehement invectives, and denounces the uncomfortable truths that all of us know but never dare to express. With her rigorous logic, lucidity of mind, she defends our culture and blames what she calls our blindness, our deafness, our masochism, the conformism and the arrogance of the Politically Correct. With the poetry of a prophet like a modern Cassandra she says it in the form of a letter addressed to all of us.''
To all of us.

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