Passages: Oriana Fallaci

From the introduction to Interview With History, Oriana Fallaci’s 1976 collection of (sometimes belligerent) interviews with notable figures of the time:

Those who determine our destiny are not really better than ourselves; they are neither more intelligent nor stronger nor more enlightened than ourselves. If anything, they are more enterprising, more ambitious. Only in the rarest cases did I have the certainty of finding myself face to face with a person born to lead us or to make us take one road instead of another. But these cases involved men who were not themselves in power; in fact, they had fought it, and fought it at the risk of their own lives. As for those whom I liked or who charmed me in some way, the moment has come to confess that my mind remained reserved and my heart dissatisfied. Deep down I was sorry that they were sitting at the top of the pyramid. Since I was unable to believe them as I would have liked, I could not judge them innocent. So much the less as traveling companions.

Perhaps it is because I do not understand power, the mechanism by which men or women feel themselves invested or become invested with the right to rule over others and punish them if they do not obey. 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 may be mistaken but the earthly paradise did not end on the day that Adam and Eve were told by God that from now on they would work by the sweat of their brows and bring forth children in sorrow. It ended on the day that they realized that they had a master who tried to keep them from eating an apple, and, driven out over an apple, placed themselves at the head of a tribe where it was even forbidden to eat pork. Of course, to live in a group requires a governing authority; otherwise there is chaos. But the most tragic side of the human condition seems to me precisely that of needing an authority to govern, a chief. One can never know where a chief’s power begins and ends; the only sure thing is that you cannot control him and that he kills your freedom. Worse: he is the bitterest demonstration that absolute freedom does not exist, has never existed, cannot exist. Even if it is necessary to behave as though it existed and to look for it. Whatever the price.

I feel I should warn the reader how much I am convinced of this, and also that apples are born to be picked, that meat can even be eaten on Friday. Still more to remind him or her that to the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality. I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born. I have always looked on the silence of those who do not react or who indeed applaud as the real death of a woman or a man. And listen: for me the most beautiful monument to human dignity is the one I saw on a hill in the Peloponnesus. It was not a statue, it was not a flag, but three letters that in Greek signify No: oxi. Men thirsting for freedom had written them among the trees during the Nazi-Fascist occupation, and for thirty years that No had remained there, unfaded by the sun or rain. Then the colonels had eliminated it with a stroke of whitewash. But immediately, almost magically, the sun and rain had dissolved the whitewash . So that day by day the three letters reappeared on the surface, stubborn, desperate, indelible.

There has been a great swell of tributes to Fallaci since her death. Ironically, the Internet is glutted with praise from conservatives who, a few decades earlier, would have been pronouncing anathema on her for being so skeptical and combative in her talks with leaders like Henry Kissinger. But because she became a militant and rather bigoted critic of Islam in her later years, Fallaci was praised by the likes of David Horowitz, who would otherwise have denounced her as a leftist firebrand.

Reading Interview With History as a teenager, I was electrified by Fallaci’s fearlessness, her utter refusal to bend the knee to the powerful.

While prospecting for links to Fallaci’s books, I noticed that used copies of Interview With History are now going for over thirty bucks apiece on Amazon. No doubt the price will keep rising. A lot of people who never heard of Fallaci are realizing they missed something important. Fortunately, they can now catch up.