Oriana Fallaci

La fuerza de la razón / The force of reason

  La autora italiana falleció en 2006.

[No es un caso aislado. Son muchas las mujeres que dan ejemplo de valor e independencia frente a los pusilánimes hombres que no dan la talla, pues son viles lacayos de intereses partidistas. Sirva esto de homenaje a esta gran mujer, periodista, escritora e intelectual de personalidad indomable e insobornable.]

Reading her reminds me of Jesus' words in Luke 9:50: 'If they are not against us, they are for us.' Fallaci calls herself a Christian atheist. An incongruity, it might seem, because He was (is) indeed God, or else he was completely crazy. Fallaci is a freelance Christian, who instead of relying on God, prefers to rely on her own reason. And that takes a lot of confidence, as much as valor, but that only comes at the price of rage, a heck of a lot of rage. She also claims not to sympathize neither with the Right nor the Left, and rejects any political classification other than a revolutionary (bloodless, I hope).

I sympathize with her. I understand her rage. From the very first page you will know that you are up to something special. This ain't no ordinary book. She is no ignorant person. She is a very cultivated reporter who knows what she's talking about, who suffered and sees the injustices around her but doesn't mince words. Oh. the rage! She is Achiles' intellectual counterpart.

Her message, her warning is a call to Europeans to stand up and defend our hard-earned Western civilization, our culture. We are giving in to Islamo-fascism, we are commiting suicide. The history that Fallaci pours in her book falls with the force of a mighty Niagara. One has to become sad reading this book. It reminds me also of Job, his complaining to his legalist friends about how innocent he is, about how unjustly he is suffering. He wants a fair trial with God, sure He will understand him and get him off the hook. Who is Fallaci calling on to? Nobody. We have no washingtons nor Jeffersons, and no Churchills anymore... now we got pampered anti-system rioters in expensive Nike shoes.

The letter she writes to an Italian Catholic prelate, a bishop who wouldn't bless the coffins of 19 soldiers killed in Irak, and said it pained him to witness the celebrations that took place in their honor, is well worth putting here: "If that Sunday Jesus Christ had had the misfortune to find himself [she doesn't capitalize Him] in the Caserta cathedral, his disdain for the temple's Pharisee merchants would have become a joke in comparison to his disdain for you. He would have kicked your ass and thrown you out into the square, and here he would have smashed so hard your face that day that you would not even be able to eat a tomato soup." No comments.

In lack of a proletariat to appeal to the neo-commies have found in the Arab masses their natural allies. This, in a few words, explains the tremendous success of the take-over of Islam in Europe, the craddle of both Socialisms (Nazi and Communist).

What does not amuse me is Fallaci's irreverent dismissal of religions in general. Here's one comment on account of Abraham, in his role as the Founder of Israel: "Who wants a Founding Father who is ready to slit his own son's throat for the glory of some God?" Inadvertently given herself the answer: It is not 'some' God; but otherwise her question -for a non-believer, is quite understandable.

There's a lot that she talks about in this book, but I think I understand her best when she points to "the presumption and assumption of holding the Truth (by the Left). Its dogmatism" as the unforgivable sin of the Left. Meaning this: They want to put us in an intellectual ghetto of inferiority, where freedom of speech would be irrelevant, useless, since we would be outside society altogether. It is a Holocaust of the soul.