La rabbia e l'orgoglio
(Rage and Pride)
by Oriana Fallaci
Il Corriere della Sera September 29, 2001
Translated by Chris Knipp
You ask me to speak this time. You ask me-this time at least-to break
the silence that for years I have imposed upon myself in order that my
voice not get mixed up with the sound of the cicadas. And I will break
that silence-because I have learned that even in Italy some have
rejoiced as the Palestinians in Gaza did the other night on TV.
"Victory! Victory!" Men, women, and children. I assume that those who
do such a thing can be defined as men, women, and children. I have
learned that some high grade cicadas, politicians or so-called
politicians, intellectuals or so-called intellectuals, and others who
don't deserve to be called citizens, have behaved in the same way.
"Good!" they say, "The Americans deserve it!" And I'm very, very, very
angry. I'm angry with a cool, lucid, rational anger, an anger that
wipes out any detachment, any indulgence, that commands me to answer,
and finally to spit on them. And I do spit on them. The African-
American poet Maya Angelou, herself as angry as I am, yesterday roared:
"Be angry! It's good to be angry, it's healthy!" But whether or not
it's healthy for me I don't know. However I do know it's not healthy
for them-I mean whoever admires the Usama bin Ladens, whoever expresses
understanding, sympathy, or solidarity toward them. You've fired a
detonator that has too long wanted to explode, with your request.
You'll see. You've also asked me to explain how I myself experienced
this apocalypse. In sum, to furnish my own testimony. And so I shall
begin with that. I was at home-my house is in the center of Manhattan,
and at exactly nine o'clock I had the sensation of a danger that
probably would not touch me, but that certainly concerned me. The
sensation one feels in war-or rather in combat-which each pore of your
skin feels the bullet or the rocket coming in at you, and you prick up
your ears and shout to whoever is standing beside you "Down! Get down!"
I rejected it. I was certainly not in Vietnam. I was not in one of
those fucking wars that have made a torment of my life ever since the
Second World War. I was in New York, for God's sake, on a beautiful
September morning in the year 2001. But the inexplicable feeling
continued to possess me. Then I did something that in the morning I
never do. I turned on the television. Actually, the audio wasn't
working. But the screen was. And on each channel-here you have almost
a hundred of them-you saw one tower of the World Trade Center burning
like a gigantic matchstick. A short circuit? A little, careless plane?
Or an act of terrorism? I stared almost paralyzed and while I was
staring, while I was posing those three questions to myself, a plane
appeared on the screen. It was big and white. A commercial airliner.
It was flying very low. And, flying very low, it turned toward the
second tower as a bomber aims at its target-throws itself at its target.
And I understood. I understood also because at that moment the audio
came back, transmitting a chorus of wild shouts. Repeated, wild shouts.
"God, oh God! Oh, God! God! God! Goooooood!" And the plane slipped
into the second tower as a knife slips into a slab of butter.
It was now a quarter past nine. Don't ask me what I felt during
those fifteen minutes. I don't know; I don't remember. I was a piece
of ice. Even my brain was ice. I can't remember if I saw certain
things on the first tower or on the second. The people who in order not
to die by being burned alive threw themselves out of the windows of the
eightieth or ninetieth floors, for example. They broke the glass in the
windows; climbed over it; threw themselves out the same way you throw
yourself from a plane when you have a parachute on, and they came down
so slowly, waving their arms and legs, swimming in the air. Yes, they
seemed to be swimming in the air-and never arriving. Towards the
thirtieth floor, however, they speeded up. They began to gesticulate
desperately, regretful, I think, almost as if they were yelling
"Help...help!". And I guess maybe they really did yell. Finally they
fell like stones and, pow! You know, I was sure I had seen everything
in war. I've felt that I've been made immune to war, and in substance
I am. Nothing surprises me. Not even when I'm angry, not even when I
feel contempt. But In war I always saw people die from being killed. I
never saw people die by killing themselves, that is, by throwing
themselves from the windows of the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth
floors. Moreover in war I always saw something bursting. Exploding
fanwise. I always heard a great noise. Those two Towers, on the other
hand didn't explode. The first one imploded, it swallowed itself. The
second one fused, it blew itself apart. It fused because of heat, like a
slab of butter on the fire. And it all happened, or so it seemed to me,
in a tomblike silence. Is this possible? Was there really that silence,
or was it inside me? I also have to tell you that in wars I always saw
a limited number of deaths. With every combat, two or three hundred
dead. At most four hundred. At Dak To, in Vietnam, for example. And
when the combat ended and the Americans set about gathering them up,
counting them, I couldn't believe my eyes. At the slaughter of Mexico
City, in which I too took on my fair share of bullets, they collected
at least eight hundred dead. And when, thinking me dead, they hurled me
into the morgue, it seemed almost a flood of cadavers that I suddenly
found all around me. Well, almost fifty thousand people worked in the
Twin Towers. And very few of them escaped in time. The elevators
didn't work any more, obviously, and to come down on foot from the top
floors took an eternity. If the flames permitted. We'll never know the
number of dead. (Forty thousand, forty-five thousand?) The Americans
will never say this. So as not to underline the intensity of this
apocalypse. So as not to give satisfaction to Usama Bin Laden and not
to encourage other apocalypses. And then, the two abysses that absorbed
the tens of thousands of creatures are too deep. At most the workmen
will disinter little pieces of scattered limbs. A nose here, a finger
there. Or a kind of mud that seems to be coffee grounds but instead is
organic matter. The remains of bodies that in a flash were pulverized.
Yesterday Mayor Giuliani sent another ten thousand body bags. But they
have remained unused.
***
What do I feel for the kamikazes who died with them? No respect. No
pity. No, not even pity-I who in all circumstances have always ended by
giving in to pity. I've always disliked Kamikazes, that is to say people
who commit suicide by killing other people, beginning from the Japanese
in World War Two. I never considered them Pietro Micca, who set fire
to the ashes and burned with the city, Turin, to block the arrival of
enemy troops. I never considered them soldiers. And far less do I
consider them martyrs or heroes, as Mr. Arafat, screeching and spitting
saliva at on me, defined them in 1972. (That is, when I interviewed him
in Amman, the place where his officers also trained the Baader-Meinhof
terrorists). I consider them showoffs and nothing more. They are
showoffs who instead of seeking glory in the movies or politics or
sports seek it in their own death and the deaths of others. And, in
the case of those who pray to Allah, a place in the Paradise of which
the Koran speaks: the paradise in which heroes fuck the Uri. I bet they
are showoffs physically too. I have in front of me the photo of the two
kamikazes of whom I speak in my Insha'allah, the novel that begins with
the destruction of the American base (over four hundred dead) and the
French one (over three hundred fifty dead) in Beirut. They had it shot
before going to die, that photograph, and before going to die they went
to the barbershop. Look what a pretty haircut. What pomaded moustaches,
what beautiful beards, what fetching side-whiskers.
Ah, who knows how Mr. Arafat would sizzle with rage, listening to
me! There's bad blood between us, you know. He never forgave me either
the powerful differences of opinion we had during that interview nor the
judgment of him I expressed in my book Interview with History. As for
me, I never forgave him for anything. Including the fact that one
Italian journalist who'd been so unwise as to present himself as my
"friend" got a revolver pointed at his heart. Consequently, we don't
frequent each other's company any more. Too bad. Because if I met him
again, or rather if I were to grant him an audience, I'd shout in his
face who the martyrs and the heroes are. I'd shout: Distinguished Mr.
Arafat, the martyrs are the passengers of those four airplanes taken
over and transformed into human bombs. Among them the four-year-old
child who disintegrated in the second Tower. Distinguished Mr. Arafat,
the martyrs are the clerks working in the Towers and in the Pentagon.
Distinguished Mr. Arafat, the martyrs are the employees who worked in
the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Distinguished Mr. Arafat, the martyrs
are the firemen who died trying to save them. And do you know who the
heroes are? They're the passengers of the flight that was to have been
thrown into the White House and instead burst into a wood in
Pennsylvania because they rebelled! They indeed deserve Paradise,
distinguished Mr. Arafat. The trouble is that you are a Chief of State
ad perpetuum. You play the monarch, you visit the Pope, you say you
don't like terrorism, you send condolences to Bush, and with your
chameleon-like capacity for lying, you'd be able to answer that I'm
right. But let's change the subject. I'm very ill, you know, and
talking to Arafat gives me a fever.
***
I prefer to speak of the invulnerability that so many, in Europe,
attribute to America. Invulnerability? What kind of invulnerability?!?
The more a society is a democratic and open one, the more it is exposed
to terrorism. The more a country is free and not governed by a police
regime, the more it undergoes or risks the hijackings or massacres that
happened for so many years in Italy and Germany and in other parts of
Europe-and that, grown gigantic, are happening now in America. It's not
by chance that the non-democratic Countries, governed by police regimes,
have always hosted and financed, and are assisting terrorists. The
Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's satellite nations, and the People's
Republic of China, for instance. Khaddafi's Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria;
Arafat's Lebanon; the same Egypt, the same Saudi Arabia of which Usama
Bin Laden is a subject; Pakistan; of course Afghanistan and all the
Islamic regions of Africa. In the airports and on the airplanes of
these countries I have always felt safe. The only thing I feared was
being arrested because I wrote bad things about terrorists. In European
airports and on European planes, on the other hand, I have always felt a
bit nervous. In American airports and on American planes I'm very
nervous. And in New York I'm extremely nervous. (Not in Washington, I
have to say. I really didn't expect a plane to hit the Pentagon.) In my
judgment, then, it was never a question of "if;" it was always a
question of "when." Why do you think that on Tuesday morning my
subconscious felt that worry, that sensation of danger? Why do you
think that, contrary to my usual custom, I switched on the TV? Why do
you think that one of the three questions that I asked myself while the
first tower burned and the audio wasn't working was about a plot? And
why do you think I got it as soon as the second plane appeared? Since
America is the strongest country in the world, the richest, the most
powerful, the most modern, we were almost all trapped by that snare.
Americans too, at times. But America's vulnerability comes precisely
from its strength, its wealth, its power, its modernity--the old story
of the dog that eats its own tail.
This grows out of the country's multi-ethnic nature too, out of its
liberalism, its respect for its citizens and its guests. An example:
about twenty-four million Americans are Arab-Moslems: And when a
Mustafa or a Muhammad comes, let's say, from Afghanistan to visit his
uncle, nobody forbids him from attending flight training school to learn
how to fly a 757. Nobody forbids him from enrolling at a university
(something that I hope will change) to study chemistry or biology-the
two sciences you need to begin a bacteriological war--not even if the
government fears that this son of Allah might hijack a 757 or throw a
vial full of bacteria into the water supply, bringing on a massacre. (I
say "if," because this time the government didn't know a damned thing,
and the CIA's and the FBI's foul-ups were infinite. If I were President
of the United States I would kick them all out for their foolishness.)
So let's come back to the original point. What are the symbols of the
strength, wealth, power and modernity of America? Certainly not jazz and
rock and roll, chewing hum and hamburgers, Broadway and Hollywood. They
are its skyscrapers, its Pentagon. It's science, its technology. Those
impressive skyscrapers, so high, so beautiful that when you look up a
them you almost forget the Pyramids and the divine palaces of our past.
Those gigantic, exaggerated airplanes, that now are used as once sailing
vessels and trucks were used, because now everything moves with
airplanes. Everything. The mail, fresh fish, we ourselves (And don't
forget that it's they who invented air war. Or at least developed it to
the point of hysteria). That terrifying Pentagon, that fortress that is
frightening just to look at. That omnipresent, omnipotent science.
That chilling technology that in a few short years has transformed our
daily existence, our age-old ways of communicating, eating, living.
And where did the Reverend Usama bin Laden hit them? On the skyscrapers,
on the Pentagon. How? With airplanes, with science, with technology.
By the way: know what impressed me most about this sad multimillionaire,
this failed playboy who instead of flirting with blond princesses and
acting crazy in nightclubs (as he did in Beirut when he was twenty) now
amuses himself by killing people in the name of Muhammad and Allah? The
fact that even his immense wealth derives from the earnings of a
corporation specialized in demolition, that he himself is a demolition
expert. Demolition is an American specialty.
***
When we met I saw how astonished you were by the heroic efficiency
and admirable unity with which Americans had confronted this apocalypse.
Oh, yes. America has many things to teach us; notwithstanding its
shortcomings which they and I myself throw in its face. (But those of
Europe and in particular of Italy are still more serious.) Concerning
heroic efficiency let me say a paean of praise for the Mayor of New
York: that Rudolph Giuliani whom we Italians should bow down to thank
on bended knee. Because he has an Italian surname and is of Italian
origin, he does us honor throughout the world. Rudolph Giuliani is a
great, indeed the greatest of mayors. I'm telling you this as one
who's never happy with anything or anyone, starting with myself. He's a
mayor worthy of another very great mayor with an Italian surname,
Fiorello La Guardia, and so many of our mayors should go to school to
him. They should go with bowed heads, better yet with ash on their
heads, and ask him, "Mister Giuliani, please tell us how it's done?" He
doesn't delegate his duties to the others, no. He doesn't lose his time
with plugs and greed. He doesn't combine his mayoral position with a
ministry or legislative duties. (Is there no one listening to me in
Stendhal's three towns-in Naples, Florence or Rome?). Having run
immediately, and immediately entered the second skyscraper, he risked
being turned into ash with the others. He was saved by a hair and by
chance. And in the course of four days he got the city back on its
feet. A city that has nine and a half million inhabitants, please note,
two million in Manhattan alone. I don't know how he succeeded in doing
it. He is as ill as I am, poor man. Cancer that comes and comes again,
also took him. Like me, he pretends to be healthy, goes on working
anyway. But damn it, I work at a table, remaining seated. He, on the
other hand.... He seemed like a general who personally takes part in the
battle. A soldier who throws himself into the attack with his bayonet.
"Come on people, come on! Let's roll up our shirt sleeves, fast!" He
could do it because those people were, are, as he is. People without
ostentation or laziness, my father would have said, and with balls. As
for the admirable capacity to unite, the almost warlike compact with
which Americans respond to horrors and to an enemy, well, I have to
admit that there and then it astonished even me. Yes, I knew that it
burst forth at the time of Pearl Harbor, when people rallied round
Roosevelt and Roosevelt went to war against Hitler's Germany and
Mussolini's Italy and Hirohito's Japan. I got a sense of it after
Kennedy's assassination, it's true. But this was followed by the war in
Vietnam, the terrible division caused by that war, and in a certain
sense that had reminded me of their Civil War a century and a half ago.
So when I saw white people and black people weeping and embracing -I
said embracing-when I saw democrats and republicans embracing as they
sang "God Save America," when I saw all differences canceled, I was
struck dumb. It was the same when I heard Bill Clinton (a person toward
whom I've never nurtured tender feelings) declare "Let's draw close to
Bush, let's have faith in our President." It was the same when his wife
Hillary, now the Senator from New York, repeated the same words. It was
the same when they were repeated by Lieberman, the ex-candidate for the
vice Presidency. (Only the defeated Al Gore kept a squalid silence.) It
was the same when the Congress voted unanimously to accept war, to
punish those responsible. Ah, if Italy might learn this lesson! It's
such a divided country, my Italy! So fractious, so poisoned by its
tribal meanness! They hate themselves within parties too, in Italy.
They can't even stay together when they bear the same emblem, the same
symbol, for God's sake. They are jealous, bilious, vain, and petty. They
think of nothing but their own interests, their little careers, their
small glory, their own suburban popularity. For their own personal
interests they are spiteful, they betray one another, they accuse, they
disgrace themselves... I'm absolutely sure that if Usama Bin Laden blew
up Giotto's Tower or the Tower of Pisa the government would blame the
opposition party. The government bosses and the opposition bosses would
blame their own companions and comrades. And having said that let me
explain what the American capacity to stand united is born of.
It is born of their patriotism. I don't know if in Italy you saw
and understood what happened in New York when Bush went to thank the
working men (and the working women) who, digging in the rubble of the
two towers, tried to save some survivors but brought out only a few
noses and a few fingers. Without surrendering, all the same. Without
resignation, for it you ask them how they are doing they answer: "I can
allow myself to be exhausted, not to be defeated." All of them. The
young ones, the very youngest, the old, the middle aged. White, black,
yellow, brown, violet... Did you see them or didn't you? While Bush
was thanking them they did nothing but wave little American flags, they
raised their closed fists, and they roared: "U.S.A! U.S.A.! U.S.A! In
a totalitarian State I would have thought: "Wow, look how well the
rulers have organized this!" Not in America. In America you don't
organize these things. You don't manage them, you don't command them.
Especially in a disenchanted metropolis like New York, with workers like
the workers of New York. They're characters, the workers of New York,
freer than the wind. They don't even obey their own unions. But if you
touch the flag, if you touch the Patria... In English the word Patria
doesn't exist. To say Patria you have to put together two words.
"Father land." "Mother land." "Native land." Or you have to say
simply "My Country." But there is the noun, "patriotic." And apart
from France, I probably couldn't imagine a country more patriotic than
America. Ah! I was very moved to see those workmen clasping their fists
and waving their flags and roaring "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.," without
anybody ordering them to do it. And I felt a kind of humiliation.
Because Italian workmen waving the tricolor and roaring "Italy, Italy"
is something I can't imagine. In funeral processions and political
meetings I've seen them wave so many red flags. Rivers, lakes of red
flags. But I always saw precious few waving tricolors. Really not a one.
Badly guided or tyrannized by an arrogant left wing devoted to the
Soviet Union, they always left tricolors to their adversaries. And it
wasn't that their adversaries put them to good use, I wouldn't say.
They didn't waste them, thank God. And those who go to mass, ditto.
As for that boor with his green shirt and tie, he doesn't even know what
the colors of the tricolor are. I-am-Lombard, I-am-Lombard-He'd like
to take us back to the wars between Florence and Siena. Result:
today the Italian flag is something you only see at the Olympics if by
chance you win a medal. Or worse: you see it only in stadiums when
there is an international soccer match. It's the only time, moreover,
when you may be able to hear the shout, "Italy, Italy."
Oh, there's great difference between a country where the flag is
waved by hooligans in stadiums and that's all, and a country where the
flag is waved by an entire people. By, for instance, the unregimented
workmen who dig in ruins to pull out a few ears or noses of those
creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather up those coffee
grounds.
***
The fact is that America is a special country, my dear. A country
to envy, to be jealous of for things that have nothing to do with
wealth, etc. It's a special country because it was born out of a need
of the soul, the need to have a patria, and out of the most sublime
idea man has, the idea of freedom--or, better, the idea of freedom
wedded with the idea of equality. It's a special country because at
that time the idea of freedom wasn't in fashion. Nor was the idea of
equality. Nobody talked about these things but certain philosophers
called men of the Enlightenment. You didn't find them, these concepts,
anywhere but in a very expensive big book in installments called The
Encyclopedia. And apart from the writers and other intellectuals,
apart from princes and lords, who had the money to buy the big book or
the books that the big book inspired, who knew anything about the
Enlightenment? It sure wasn't something to eat, the Enlightenment! The
revolutionaries of the French revolution didn't even talk about it,
seeing that the French revolution was to begin in 1789, or thirteen
years after the American revolution which broke out in 1776. (Another
detail that the good-for-the-Americans-they brought-it-on-themselves
anti-Americans are unaware of or pretend to forget. Race of
hypocrites.)
It's a special country America, a country to be envied, moreover,
because that idea was understood by farmers who were poor and often
illiterate or at any rate were uneducated. The farmers of the American
colonies. And it was made real by a little group of extraordinary
leaders. By men of great culture and of great quality. The founding
fathers. Do you know who the founding fathers were, the Benjamin
Franklins, the Thomas Jeffersons, the Thomas Paines, the John Adamses,
the George Washingtons and so on? Better than the little lawyers (as
Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French revolution! Better
than the dark and hysterical executioners of terror, the Marats and
Dantons and Saint Justs and Robespierres! These were guys, the
founding fathers were, who knew Greek and Latin as Italian teachers of
Greek and Latin (granted that they don't exist any more) never knew them.
Guys who in Greek had read Aristotle and Plato, who in Latin had read
Seneca and Cicero, and they had studied the principles of Greek
democracy as not even the Marxists of my time studied the theory of
surplus value. (I admit that they really did study it.) Jefferson
even knew Italian. (He called it "Tuscan.") In Italian he spoke and
read with great speed. In fact with the two thousand grape vines and
the thousand olive plants and the musical chart that in Virginia was so
rare, in 1774 the Florentine Filippo Mazzei had brought him various
copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled Of Crimes
and of Punishments. As for the autodidact Franklin, he was a genius.
A scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor.
In 1752 he had discovered the electrical nature of lightening and had
invented the lightning rod. I'm sorry if that's not much. And with
these extraordinary leaders, with men of great qualities, the poor and
often illiterate or at any rate uneducated farmers rebelled against
England. They fought the war of independence, the American Revolution.
Well... notwithstanding the rifles and the gunpowder, notwithstanding
the dead that every war costs, they didn't make it with the rivers of
blood of the future French revolution. They didn't make the American
revolution with the guillotine or the massacres of the Vandea. They did
it with the sheet of paper that, together with the need of the soul, the
need to have a patria, concertized the sublime idea of liberty, or
rather liberty wedded with equality. The Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident. That all men are created
equal. That they are granted by our Creator certain inalienable Rights.
That among these Rights are the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness. That to secure these Rights Men must establish
governments..." And this piece of paper that, from the French
Revolution on, all of us have well or badly copied, or by which we have
been inspired, still constitutes the backbone of America. The living
sap of this nation. You know why? Because it changes subjects into
citizens. It changes plebes into a People. Because it invites--nay,
orders--them to govern themselves, to express their own individual
natures, to seek their own happiness. All of which are the opposite of
what communism did in prohibiting people from rebelling, governing
themselves, expressing themselves, or enriching themselves, and making
the State "His Majesty" in place of the usual kings. "Communism is a
monarchical regime, a monarchy of the old stamp. Whereby it cuts off
men's balls. And when a man has his balls cut off he is no longer a
man," my father said. He also said that instead of redeeming the plebes
communism transformed everybody into plebes. It left everyone dying of
hunger.
Well, in my opinion America redeems plebes. They are all plebes, in
America. White people, black people, yellow, brown, violet, stupid,
intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the most plebeian are precisely the
rich. In the majority of cases, sure peasants! Rude, uneducated. You
soon realize they have never read Monsignor Della Casa, they have never
had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication.
Notwithstanding the money they squander on clothes, for example, they
are so inelegant that by comparison the queen of England seems chic.
But, by God, they're redeemed. And there is nothing in this world
stronger and more powerful than redeemed plebes. You always break your
horns against the redeemed Plebiscite. And they all broke their horns
against America. The English, the Germans, the Mexicans, the Russians,
nazis, fascists, communists. Last but not least the Vietnamese broke
them when after their victory they had to get down on all fours so that
when an ex-president of the United States goes to make them a little
visit they touch the sky with a finger. "Bienvenu, Monsieur le President,
bienvenu." The trouble is the Vietnamese don't pray to Allah. And with
the sons of Allah it will be hard, very long and very hard. Unless the
rest of the Occident stops being afraid. And does a little thinking and
gives them a hand.
***
I'm not talking, obviously, to the hyenas that enjoy seeing the
images of the slaughter and sneering "Good! The Americans deserved it."
I'm talking to people who without being bad or stupid still take refuge
in reserve and doubt. To them I say: Wake up, people, wake up!
Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the tide, that is,
of seeming racist (a wholly inappropriate word, because we're talking
not about a race but a religion), you don't understand, or don't want to
understand, that what's under way here is a reverse crusade. Accustomed
as you are to playing a double game, blinded as you are by myopia, you
don't understand or don't want to understand that what's under way here
is a religious war. Wanted and declared by only a fringe group of that
religion perhaps, but nonetheless a religious war. A war that they call
Jihad. Holy War. A war that doesn't envision the conquest of our
territories, perhaps, but certainly envisions the conquest of our souls.
The disappearance of our liberty and our civilization. The
annihilation of our way of living and dying, our way of praying and of
learning. You don't understand or don't want to understand that if we
don't oppose this, don't defend ourselves against this, don't fight,
Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that, good or bad, we've
succeeded in building, changing, improving, and making a little more
intelligent, i.e., less bigoted or even without bigotry. And with that
it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morality, our
values, and our pleasures... Christ! Usama Bin Laden feels authorized
to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because
you don't wear a long beard or a chador, because you go to the theater
and to movies, because you listen to music and sing songs, because you
dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, because you wear
miniskirts or shorts, because at the beach you go naked or almost naked,
because you make love when you like and where you like and with whom you
like. Doesn't this even interest you, you fools? I'm an atheist, thank
God. And I have no intention of allowing myself to be killed because I
am.
For twenty years I've said it-twenty years. With a certain mildness,
not with this passion, twenty years ago I wrote an in-depth article on
all this business for Il Corriere. It was the article of someone used
to being with all races and beliefs, a citizen used to fighting all
fascisms and all intolerances, a lay person without taboos. But it was
also the article of a person indignant with those who didn't smell the
stink of a coming Holy War and were a bit too forgiving of the sons of
Allah.. I presented an argument that went more or less like this,
twenty years ago. "What sense does it make to respect those who don't
respect us? What sense is there in defending their culture or presumed
culture when they despise ours? I want to defend ours, and I wish to
inform you that I like Dante Alighieri more than Omar Khayyam." Open,
ye Heavens! They crucified me. "Racist! racist!" Well. They were the
same progressives (at that time they called themselves communists) who
crucified me. I suffered the same indignities when the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan. Remember those bearded men with robes and turbans who
before firing off mortars-actually every time they fired one off-sang
the praises of their Lord? "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" I remember
them well. And seeing the linkage of the word God with mortar fire made
me tremble. I felt like I was in the Middle Ages and I said "the
Soviets are what they are. But you have to admit that in fighting that
war they're also defending us. And I thank them." Again, open ye
Heavens! "Racist! racist!" Because of their blindness they didn't even
want to hear me tell about the monstrous acts the sons of Allah
committed against military prisoners. (They sawed off their arms and
legs, do you remember? A little vice they'd already given in to in
Lebanon with the Christian and Jewish prisoners.) No, they didn't want
me to speak of that. And to play the progressive they applauded the
Americans who, made foolish by their fear of the Soviet Union, loaded up
the "heroic Afghan people" with arms. They trained the bearded ones, and
along with the bearded ones the very most bearded one, Usama bin Laden.
Russians Out of Afghanistaaaan! The Russians Must Get Out of
Afghanistaaaaan! Okay, the Russians got out of Afghanistan-are you
happy? It gets worse: now here they're discussing the next attack
that will hit us with chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear weapons.
They say the next massacre is inevitable because Iraq is supplying the
materials. They're talking about vaccinations, gas masks, plague.
They're asking when it will come. Are you happy?
Some are neither happy nor unhappy. They just don't give a damn.
America's so far off. Between Europe and America there's an ocean...
No, no, my dears. NO. There's a thin thread-line of water. Because
when the destiny of the West is at issue, the survival of our
civilization, we are New York. We are America. We Italians, we French,
we English, we Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles,
Scandinavians, Belgians, Spaniards, Greeks, Portuguese. If America
falls, Europe falls, The West falls. And not only in a financial sense
which, it seems to me, is what preoccupies you the most. (Once when I
was young and naive I told Arthur Miller "Americans measure everything
in terms of money, they think only of money!" Miller answered, "You
don't?") We're falling in every direction, my dear. And we find
muezzins instead of church bells, chadors instead of miniskirts, camel's
milk instead of shots of cognac. This too you don't understand? This
too you don't want to understand? Blair understood it. He came here
and brought to Bush, or rather renewed with him, the solidarity of the
English. It's not a solidarity expressed through gossiping and
complaining. it's a solidarity based on hunting down terrorists and on
military alliance. Chirac didn't do this. Last week as you know he was
here on a formal visit.
It was a visit scheduled some time before, not an ad hoc visit. He
saw the ruins of the Tower, he learned that the number of dead is
incalculable, nay inadmissible, but he didn't give weight to this.
During his interview on CNN my friend Christiana Amanpour asked him four
times in what manner and to what extent he intended to align himself
against this Jihad, and four times Chriac avoided giving an answer. He
slithered away like an eel. You wanted to shout at him: "Monsieur le
President! Do you remember the debarkation at Normandy? Do you know how
many Americans died there to drive the Nazis out of France?" Apart from
Blair, furthermore, I don't see any other Richard the Lion Hearteds
among the Europeans. Least of all in Italy where the government hasn't
located or arrested a single accomplice or suspected accomplice of Usama
bin Laden. Dear Lord, my good sir! Dear Lord! In spite of war fears
some accomplices of Usama bin Laden were identified and arrested. In
France, in Germany, in England, in Spain... But in Italy where the
mosques of Milan, Turin and Rome swarm with rogues who sing hymns to
Usama bin Laden, with terrorists waiting to blow up the dome of St.
Peter's, no one. Zero. Nothing. No one. Help me understand, my good
sir, are your honorable police officers and carabinieri so inept? Are
your secret services such buffoons? Are your bureaucrats such fools?
Are they such plaster saints, are they such strangers to what has
happened and is happening, the sons of Allah who are our guests? Or is
it that in carrying out the proper investigations, in identifying and
arresting whoever up to now you haven't identified and arrested, you
fear the usual racist-racist blackmail? I don't, you see.
Christ! I don't deny anyone the right to be afraid. Only an idiot
doesn't fear war. Anyone who wants to make you think he's not afraid of
war--I've written this a thousand times--is both an idiot and a liar.
But in life and in history there are times when it is not allowed to be
afraid. Times when it's immoral and not a civil act to be afraid. Those
who avoid this tragedy because of weakness or a lack of courage or the
habit of fence sitting, it seems to me, are masochists.
***
Masochists--yes, masochists. Do we want to face this discussion on
what you call the Conflict Between Two Cultures? Well, if you want to
know, it irritates me even to talk about two cultures-to put them on
the same plane as if they were parallel realities, of equal weight and
equal extent. Because in our civilization there's Homer, Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle-there's Phydias, for God's sake. There's ancient
Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. There's
ancient Rome with its grandeur, its laws, its concept of the Law. Its
sculptures, its literature, its architecture. Its palaces and its
amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges, its roads. There's a
revolutionary, Christ, dead on the cross, who taught us (and forgive us
if we have not learned it) the concept of love and justice. There's
also a Church that gave me the Inquisition, I grant you, that tortured
and burnt me a thousand times on the pyre, I admit. That for centuries
oppressed me and restricted me to sculpting and painting only Christ and
Madonnas, that nearly killed Galileo. It humiliated me and silenced me.
But it also made a great contribution to the history of thought-is that
true or isn't it? Behind our civilization there's the Renaissance.
There's Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, there's the music of
Bach and Mozart and Beethoven. And on and on all the way up to Rossini
and Donizetti and Verdi and Co. That music without which we wouldn't
know how to be alive, which in their culture is forbidden. Woe to you
if you whistle a song or hum a chorus of Nabucco. And then there's
science, for God's sake. Science, which has understood many illnesses
and found the cures for them. I am still alive, for now, thanks to our
science-not that of Muhammad. Science which has invented marvelous
machines. Trains, automobiles, airplanes, spaceships in which we've
gone to the moon and mars and soon will go who knows where. Science,
which has changed the face of this planet with electricity, radio,
telephones, television, and, by the way: is it true that the holy men
of the Left don't want to say what I've just said?!? God, what worms!
They'll never change. And now here's the fatal question: behind that
other culture, what is there?
Ha! Looking and looking I find nothing there but Muhammad with his
Koran and Averroes with his scholarly accomplishments. (The
Commentaries on Aristotle, etc.) Arafat also finds there numbers and
mathematics. Again screeching at me, again covering me in spit, in 1972
he told me his culture was superior to mine, much superior to mine
because his grandfathers had invented numbers and mathematics. But
Arafat has a poor memory. For this reason he changes the subject and
contradicts himself every five minutes. His grandfathers didn't invent
numbers and mathematics. They invented the numerical symbols which even
we infidels adopted, and mathematics was conceived almost simultaneously
by all the ancient civilizations. In Mesopotamia, China, India, Greece,
Egypt among the Maya... Your grandfathers, distinguished Mr. Arafat,
left us nothing but some mosques and a big book with which for fourteen
hundred years they have been disturbing me more than the Christians have
with the Bible and the Jews have with the Torah. And now we see the
qualities that set the Koran apart. Are they really qualities? Since
the sons of Allah have semi destroyed New York, the Islamic experts have
done nothing but sing the praises of Muhammad: they explain to me that
the Koran preaches peace and brotherhood and justice. (Moreover Bush
says this, poor Bush. And it goes without saying that he has to placate
the twenty-four million American-Moslems, convince them to blab whatever
they know about Usama bin Laden's relatives or friends or devotees.)
But then how do we fit this with the history of An Eye for an Eye and a
Tooth for a Tooth? How do we fit this with the business of the chador or
the veil that covers the face of the Moslem women, so that to get a
glance at whoever's next to them these unfortunates have to look through
a tightly woven net up to their eyes? How do we fit that with polygamy
and the principle that women have less worth than camels, must not go to
school, must not go to a doctor, must not be photographed, etc.? How do
we fit that with the veto of alcoholic drinks and the death sentence for
anyone who drinks them? This is in the Koran too. And it doesn't seem
to me at all just, at all fraternal, at all peaceful.
So here's my answer to your question about the conflict between the
two cultures. I say that in the world there's a place for everyone.
Everyone can do what they like at home. And if in certain countries
women are so stupid as to accept the chador or the veil from which you
look through a tightly woven net up to the eyes, too bad for them. If
they're stupid enough to accept not going to school, not going to a
doctor, not having their pictures taken, etc., too bad for them. If
they're so moronic as to marry an oaf who'd take four wives, too bad for
them. If their men are so silly as not to drink beer and wine, ditto.
I won't be the one to stop them. That would be the last thing I'd do. I
was schooled in the concept of freedom and my mamma said "The world is
beautiful because it's full of variety." But if they're seeking to
impose the same things on me, in my home... And that is what they're
seeking to do.. Usama bin Laden says the entire earth must become
Moslem, we must convert to Islam, good or bad he'll convert us all:
it's for that end that he has massacred us and continues to massacre us.
And this cannot be pleasing to us-no no. It must fill us with a great
desire to turn the tables, to kill him. However, things are not
resolved, it's not all finished, with that--with the death of Usama bin
Laden. Because by now there are tens of thousands of Usama bin Ladens,
and they're not only in Afghanistan and the other Arab countries.
They're everywhere, and the most highly trained among them are precisely
in the West. In our cities, our streets, our universities, in the nerve
centers of our technology. That technology that any dullard can
manipulate. The Crusade has been under way for some time. And it works
like a Swiss watch, sustained by a faith and a perfidy comparable only
to the faith and perfidy of Torquemada when he carried out the
Inquisition. Clearly to negotiate with them is impossible. To reason
with them, unthinkable. To treat them with indulgence or tolerance or
hope, suicide. Whoever believes the contrary is deluded.
The person who's telling you this is one who's come to know that
type of fanaticism very well in Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Libya, Jordan and at home--that is, in Italy. She's come to
know it, and also--through trivial, indeed grotesque, personal
incidents--has had it chillingly confirmed. I never forget what
happened at the Iranian Embassy in Rome when I requested a visa to go to
Teheran to interview Khomeini and I presented myself with red painted
fingernails. For them, a sign of immorality. They treated me like a
whore who should be burned at the stake. They ordered me to remove the
red at once, or else... Nor shall I forget what happened to me in Qom,
Khomeini's holy town, where as a woman I was rejected by all the hotels.
To interview Khomeini I had to wear the chador, to put on the chador I
had to take off my jeans, to take off my jeans I had to withdraw from
sight, and naturally I could have performed the whole operation in the
car I'd come to Teheran in. But the interpreter prevented me from doing
that: "You're-crazy-you're crazy-if-you-do-such-a-thing-in-Qom-you'll-
be-shot." He preferred to take me to the ex royal palace where a kind
hearted custodian took us in, loaned us the ex throne room. Actually I
felt like the Madonna who, to give birth to the baby Jesus, took refuge
in a stall with a donkey and an ox to warm them. But among those people
a man and a woman who aren't married are forbidden to be off by
themselves behind a closed door and-alas!-all of a sudden the door
opened. The mullah assigned to maintaining morality burst in screeching
"shame-shame, sin-sin," and there was only one way not to wind up
getting shot: for the two of us to marry. To sign a short-term
marriage contract (expiration: four months) that the mullah waved in
front of our faces. The trouble was the interpreter had a Spanish wife,
a certain Consuelo not in the least disposed to accept polygamy, and I
didn't want to marry anyone. Especially not an Iranian with a Spanish
wife not in the least disposed to accept polygamy. At the same time I
didn't want to end up shot, nor did I want to lose the interview with
Khomeini. I was struggling with this dilemma and...
You're laughing, I'm sure. These seem jokes to you. Well, then I
won't tell you the conclusion of this episode. To make you cry I'll
tell the one about the twelve impure youths whom I saw executed in Dacca
when the Bangladesh war was over. They executed them in the playing
field of the Dacca stadium with thrusts of bayonets in their chests and
their stomachs in the presence of twenty thousand of the faithful who
applauded in the name of God. "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" they
roared. I know, I know: in the Coliseum the ancient Romans, those
ancient Romans my culture continues to take pride in, were entertained
watching Christians die by being fed to the lions. I know, I know: in
every country of Europe Christians, those Christians whose contribution
to the history of thought I recognize despite my atheism, were
entertained watching heretics burned. However some time has passed,
we've become a bit more civilized, and even the sons of Allah should
have understood that some things aren't done. After the twelve impure
youths they killed a child who to save his brother condemned to die had
beaten his executioners. They crushed his head with their army boots.
If you don't believe this, well: reread my account or the account of
the French and German journalists who, as horrified as I, were there
with me. Better: look at the photos that one of them shot. However
the point that I wish to underline is not that. It is that at the end
of this scene of slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of them
women) left the stands and went down onto the field. Not in a
disorderly, raggle-taggle way-no. In an orderly, solemn manner. Slowly
they prepared a funeral procession and always in the name of God they
walked over the cadavers. Always roaring "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!"
They destroyed them like New York's Twin Towers. They reduced them to a
blood-oozing carpet of crushed bones.
Oh, I could go on forever. Tell you things never told, things to
make your hair stand on end. About that dotard Khomeini, for example.
After our interview he held a meeting and he said I accused him of
cutting off women's breasts. Out of that meeting he made a video and
it was broadcast on television for months in Teheran so that, when the
following year I returned to Teheran, I was arrested the minute I got
off the plane. And it was ugly for me, you know, really ugly. It was
the period of the American hostages...I could tell you about Mujib
Rahman who, again in Dacca, ordered his warriors to eliminate me as a
dangerous European, and lucky for me there was an English colonel who
risked his own life to save me. Or I could tell you about that
Palestinian named Habash who for twenty minutes held a machine gun to my
head. Oh, God what people they are! The only ones I was treated
civilly by were poor Ali Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan, who
died by hanging for being too much a friend of the West, and the very
brave king of Jordan, King Hussein. But those two were no more Moslem
than I'm Catholic. However, I want to give you the conclusion of my
argument. A conclusion that won't please many, given that defending
one's own culture, in Italy, is becoming a mortal sin. And given that
they're so intimidated by the word "racist" that everyone is as quiet as
a mouse.
***
I don't go to raise tents in Mecca. I don't go to sing Our Fathers
and Hail Marys at the tomb of Muhammad. I don't go to pee on the marble
of their mosques, I don't go to make caca at the feet of their minarets.
When I find myself in their countries (something I never derive
pleasure from), I never forget I'm a stranger and a guest. I'm careful
not to offend them with clothes or gestures or behavior which for us are
normal and for them inadmissible. I treat them with dutiful respect,
dutiful courtesy. I apologize if through carelessness or ignorance I
infringe one of their rules or superstitions. And this cry of pain and
indignation I have written you not always with the apocalyptic scenes
with which I began my piece before my eyes. At times instead of those I
saw an image that for me is symbolic (and therefore infuriating), of the
great tent with which for three months a summer ago the Somali Moslems
disfigured, defiled, and outraged the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. My
city. It was a tent raised to blame, condemn and insult the Italian
government that played host to them but didn't grant them the necessary
papers to run around Europe and didn't let them bring hordes of their
relatives into the country Mammas, daddies, brothers, sisters, aunts and
uncles, pregnant sisters-in-law and even relatives of relatives. It was
a tent situated near the beautiful Archbishop's Palace and on the
sidewalk outside it they put the shoes or the slippers that in their
countries they line up outside the mosques. And together with shoes or
slippers, empty water bottles they used to wash their feet before prayer.
A tent set up in front of the cathedral with the dome by Brunelleschi,
beside the baptistery with the golden doors of Ghiberti. A tent, in
fine, furnished like a sloppy flat: chairs, tables, sofas, mattresses
to sleep or to fuck on, cook stoves to prepare food and befoul the
square with smoke and stinking smells. And thanks to the usual
insensitivity of the ENEL, which cares about as much about our works of
art as it cares about our landscape, it was furnished with electric
light. Thanks to a radio-tape player, it was enriched by the tortured
voice of a muezzin who regularly exhorted the faithful, deafened the
infidels, and drowned out the sound of the church bells. And together
with all that, the yellow lines of urine that profaned the marbles of
the baptistery. (Good God! They have a long stream, these sons of
Allah. How do they manage to hit a target separated from the protective
railing and therefore almost two meters away from their urinary organ?)
With the yellow lines of urine was the stink of their shit which blocked
the gate of San Salvatore al Vescovo: the exquisite Romanesque church
(A.D. 1000) which sits on the shoulders of the Piazza del Duomo and
which the sons of Allah had turned into a shithouse. You know it well.
You know it well because it was I who called you, begging you to speak
of it in Il Corriere, remember? I also called the mayor who, I must
concede, kindly came to my house. He listened to me, he said I was
right. "You're right, you're really right..." But the tent wasn't
removed. He forgot about it or couldn't manage. I also called the
Foreign Minister, who was a Florentine, indeed one of those Florentines
who speak with a very Florentine accent, not that he was involved in the
matter. And he too, I concede, listened to me. He said I was right:
"Ah, yes, You're right. Yes." But he didn't raise a finger to remove
the tent and as for the sons of Allah who urinated on the Baptistery and
shat upon San Salvatore al Vescovo, he soon made them happy. (As far as
I know the daddies and mammas and brothers and sisters and aunts and
uncles and cousins and pregnant sisters-in-law now are wherever they
want to be.) That is, in Florence or other cities in Europe. Then I
changed my strategy. I called a friendly cop who runs the security
office and said, "Dear officer, I'm not a politician. When I say I'm
going to do something, I do it. Moreover I have war experience and I'm
wise to certain things. If you don't remove that frigging tent tomorrow,
I'll burn it. I swear on my honor that I'll burn it, not even a
regiment of carabinieri will be able to stop me, and I want to be
arrested for this. Handcuffed and carried off to jail. I'll wind up
in all the papers as a result." Well, being smarter than the others, in
the course of a few hours he took it away. Where the tent had been
there was nothing left but a huge disgusting pile of garbage. It was a
Pyrrhic Victory. In fact it didn't in the least influence the creeps
who for years have been wounding and humiliating what was the capital of
art and culture and beauty. It didn't in the least discourage the other
very arrogant guests of the city: Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese,
Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistani, Nigerians who with such fervor
contribute to the drug trade and prostitution, apparently not prohibited
by the Koran. Oh, yes: they're all still where they were before my cop
took away the tent. In the courtyard of the Uffizi Gallery, at the foot
of Giotto's tower. In front of the Loggia dell'Orcagna, around the
Loggie del Porcellino. In front of the national library, at the
entrance of the museums. On the Ponte Vecchio, where every so often
they stab or shoot each other. Along the Arno, where they've sought
and been granted financial support from the municipal government (yes,
ladies and gentlemen, financial support). On San Lorenzo's church
square where they get drunk on beer, wine, and liquor, race of
hypocrites that they are, and where they utter obscenities to women.
(Last summer, on that church square, they did that to me, who am by now
an old woman. It goes without saying they brought more harm upon
themselves. Oh, they brought more harm on themselves! One is still
there moaning over his genitals.) In the historic streets where they
bivouac with the pretense of selling "goods." By "goods" you must
understand pocketbooks and suitcases copied from models protected by
patents, and therefore illegal, and carvings, pens, African statuettes
which ignorant tourists think are sculptures by Bernini, and "stuff to
smell." ("Je connais mes droits," "I know my rights," he hissed at me,
on the Ponte Vecchio, one I'd seen with his "stuff to smell.") And too
bad if a citizen protests, too bad if he responds with "go exercise
those rights at home." "Racist! Racist!" Too bad if by walking
between the goods blocking a passage way a pedestrian damages a so-
called Bernini sculpture. "Racist! Racist!" Too bad if a city
policeman approaches and attempts an "Honorable son of Allah, sir, would
you very much mind moving aside just a hair so people can get by?"
They eat him alive. They menace him with a knife. At the very least
they insult his mamma and his progenitors. "Racist! Racist!" And
people endure with resignation. It has no effect even if you yell at
them what my dad shouted during Fascism: "Doesn't dignity mean anything
to you? Don't you have a little pride, pigs?"
It happens also in other cities, I know. In Turin for instance.
Turin which made Italy and now doesn't even seem to be an Italian city.
It seems more like Algiers, Dacca, Nairobi, Damascus, Beirut. In Venice.
Venice where the doves of Piazza San Marco have been replaced with
little rugs with "goods" and even Othello would feel ill at ease. In
Genoa. That Genoa whose beautiful Palaces Rubens admired so much have
been sequestered by them and are wasting away like beautiful raped women.
In Rome. Rome where the cynicism of the politics of every lie and every
color courts them in the hope of obtaining their future vote, and where
to protect them there's the Pope himself. (Your Holiness, why in the
name of the One God don't you take them into the Vatican? Provided that
they don't befoul even the Sistine Chapel and the statues of
Michelangelo and the paintings of Raphael: be firm.) Bah! Now I'm the
one who doesn't understand. Because sons of Allah in Italy they call
"foreign workers." Or "needed work force." And of the fact that some
of them do perform some work I have no doubt. Italians have become such
little lords. They vacation in the Seychelles, come to New York to buy
sheets at Bloomingdale's. They're ashamed to be laborers and peasants,
and you can no longer associate them with the proletariat. But those
I'm talking about, what workers are they? What work do they do? In
what way do they provide the workforce needs which the Italian ex
proletariat no longer provides? By camping out in the cities pretending
to be "selling goods"? Wandering about and disfiguring our monuments?
Praying five times a day? And there's another thing I don't understand.
If they're so poor, who gives them the money for the voyage by ship or
rubber raft that brings them to Italy? Who gives them the ten million
per head (a minimum of ten million) necessary to buy themselves the
ticket? Doesn't Usama bin Laden who gives it to them to carry out a
conquest which is not only a conquest of souls, but also a conquest
territory?
Well, even if he doesn't give it to them, I'm not sure about this
situation. Even if our guests are absolutely innocent, even if among
them there's no one who wants to destroy my Tower of Pisa or my Towers
of Giotto, no one who wants to put me into a chador, no one who wants to
burn me at the stake in a new Inquisition, their presence alarms me. It
fills me with discomfort. And anyone is wrong who takes this situation
lightly or optimistically. Anyone is wrong who compares the wave of
migration that has hit Italy with the wave of migration that poured into
America during the second half of the nineteenth century, not to mention
the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Now I'll tell you why.
Not long ago I happened to catch some words spoken by one of the
thousands of Council presidents Italy has been blessed with over the
last few decades. "Hey, even my aunt was an emigrant! I remember when
my uncle left for America with cardboard luggage!" Or something of the
kind. Hey, no, my dear. No. It's not at all the same thing. And it
isn't for two quite simple reasons.
The first is that during the second half of the nineteenth century
the wave of migration into America didn't happen in a clandestine
fashion or due to the power of those carrying it out. It was the
Americans themselves who wanted it, solicited it. And through a
specific Act of Congress. "Come, come because we need you. If you come
we will award you with a nice piece of land." The Americans have made a
movie about it too, the one with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and I was
struck by the ending, the scene of the unfortunates who raced to plant a
white flag on land that would become theirs, with the result that only
the youngest and strongest could manage. The others were left with
nothing and some died in the chase. This I know, that in Italy there
has never been an act of Parliament inviting and indeed urging our
guests to leave their countries. "Come, come, we need you so much, if
you come we'll give you a farm in the Chianti region." They came on
their own initiative, in those cursed rubber rafts and in the face of
police who tried to send them back. More than emigration it was an
invasion conducted under a cloak of secrecy. A secrecy that is
disturbing because it is not mild and suffering. It's arrogant and is
protected by the cynicism of the politicians who close one or both eyes
upon it. I'll never forget the meetings with which last year the
illegals filled the city squares of Italy seeking residence permits.
Those twisted, evil faces. Those raised, menacing fists. Those angry
voices that took me back to Khomeini's Teheran. I'll never forget
because I felt offended by their presumption in my home and because I
felt myself mocked by the ministers who told us, "We want to repatriate
them but we don't know where they're hiding." Bastards! In those
squares there were thousands, and they weren't hiding at all. To
repatriate them it would have sufficed to line them up, "Please, sir,
this way," and accompany them to a door or an airport.
The second reason, dear nephew of the uncle with the cardboard
suitcase, any schoolboy would understand. To make this reason clear
it's sufficient to clarify two elements. First, America is a continent.
During the second half of the nineteenth century--that is, when the
American Congress opened the way to immigration--this continent was
almost unpopulated. The bulk of the population was concentrated in the
states of the East or in the states of the Atlantic region, and in the
Midwest there were fewer people. California was almost empty. Well,
Italy is not a continent. It's a very small and anything but
unpopulated country. Second, America is a very young country. If you
remember that the War of Independence took place at the end of the
1700's, you can deduce from this that it's barely two hundred years old
and you will understand why its cultural identity is not yet well
defined. Italy, on the contrary, is a very old country. Its history
goes back at least three thousand years. Its cultural identity is,
therefore, very precise, and pay attention to this: it has a lot to do
with a religion that calls itself the Christian religion and a church
that calls itself the Catholic Church. People like me have a nice
saying: "With the catholic church I'm not involved." Alas, I'm
involved, oh yes. Whether I like it or not, I'm involved. And how
could I not be? I was born in a country of churches, convents, Christs,
Madonnas, saints. The first music I heard coming into the world was the
music of the church bells. The bells of Santa Maria del Fiore which
during the tent period were drowned out by the twisted screeching of the
muezzin. And with that music, in this landscape, I grew up. Through
that music and this landscape I learned what architecture, sculpture,
painting, and art are. Through that church (later rejected) I began to
ask myself what good and evil, and...my God...
There: do you see? Again I wrote "my God." For all my secularism,
for all my atheism, I'm so imbued with Catholic culture that it's a
direct part of my way of expressing myself. Oh God, my God, by God, my
Jesus, thank God, my Lord, "Madonna mia," Christ this, Christ that.
They come to me so spontaneously, these words, that I'm not even aware
of uttering them or writing them. Want me to tell all? Even though
I've never forgiven Catholicism for the infamies it's imposed on me for
centuries beginning with the Inquisition, which burned my grandmother,
poor grandma, to the priests I can't quite agree with and their prayers
I wouldn't know quite what to do with, the music of the church bells is
something I love so much. It caresses my heart. I even like those
Christs and Madonnas and painted or sculpted saints. Indeed I have a
thing about icons. I even like those monasteries and convents. They
give me a sense of peace; at times I envy those who dwell there. And
then, let's admit it: our cathedrals are more beautiful than mosques
and synagogues. Yes or no? they're also more beautiful than protestant
churches. Look, the cemetery of my family is a protestant cemetery. It
accepts the dead of all religions but it's protestant. And one of my
great-grandmothers was Valdese. A great aunt was evangelical. The
great-grandmother I never knew; the great aunt, I did. When I was a
child she always took me to meetings of her church in Via de' Benci, in
Florence and... God how bored I was! I felt so alone with those men of
faith who only sang hymns, that priest who wasn't a priest and only read
the Bible, that church that didn't seem like a church to me and that
apart from a little pulpit had nothing but a big cross. No angels, no
Madonnas, no incense... I even missed the stink of incense, and I'd
rather have been in the Basilica di Santa Croce where you had those
things. The things I was used to. And I add: in my house in the
country, in Tuscany, there's a tiny chapel. It's always closed. Since
mamma's death nobody goes there. Still, sometimes I go there, to dust,
to check that the mice haven't made a nest there, and despite my secular
education I feel at ease there. Despite my anticlericalism, I move
there comfortably. I think the overwhelming majority of Italians would
confess to you the same thing. (Berlinguer confessed this to me.)
Sweet Lord! (We're having a laugh.) I'm telling you that we
Italians aren't in the same situation as Americans: a mosaic of ethnic
groups and religions, a grab bag of a thousand cultures, at the same
time open to any invasion and capable of repelling it. I'm telling you
that, precisely because it has had a very precise definition for many
centuries, our cultural identity cannot support a wave of migration
composed of persons who in one way or another want to change our way of
life. Our values. I'm telling you that where we are there's no room
for muezzins, minarets, for fake teetotalers, for their frigging Middle
Ages, for their frigging chadors. And if there were, I wouldn't give it
to them. Because that would be equivalent to throwing out Dante,
Michelangelo, Raphael, the renaissance, the Risorgimento, the freedoms
that we have well or badly achieved, our Patria. It would mean to give
them Italy on a platter. And I don't want to give them Italy on a
platter.
***
I'm Italian. Those who think I've become American by now are
foolish and wrong. American citizenship is something I've never sought.
Years ago an American ambassador offered it to me on Celebrity Status,
and after thanking him I replied, "Sir, I've always had ties with
America. America for me is a lover-no, a husband-to whom I'll always
remain faithful. So long as it doesn't dishonor me. I'm very fond of
this husband. I'll never forget that if it hadn't inconvenienced itself
in making war on Hitler and Mussolini, I'd be speaking German today.
I'm very fond of it and it appeals deeply to me. For example I like the
fact than when I arrive in New York and hand over my passport with the
residence permit, the customs agent says to me with a big smile:
'Welcome home.' It seems to me such a generous, affectionate gesture.
Furthermore I remember that America has always been the Refugium
Peccatorum of people without patria. But I have a patria already, sir.
My patria is Italy, and Italy is my mamma. Sir, I love Italy. It would
seem like denying my mamma to take American citizenship." I also told
him that my language is Italian, I write in Italian, it's translated
into English--and that's the end of it. In the same spirit in which I'm
translated into French, feeling it to be a foreign language. I told him
that when I hear the national anthem I am moved. Hearing "Brothers of
Italy, Italy awakens," dum-te-dum, dum-te-dum, dum-te-dum, I get a lump
in my throat. It doesn't even occur to me that as a hymn it's a bit on
the ugly side. Moreover I even get a lump in my throat seeing the white,
red, and green flag blowing in the wind. Apart from the hooligans in
the stadium, you must understand. I have a white, red and green flag
from the nineteenth century. Full of spots, spots of blood, all pink
from mice. And even if it has the shield of Savoy in the middle (but
without Cavour and Vittorio Emanuele II and Garibaldi who bowed down to
that shield, we'd never have unified Italy), I treat it like gold. I
take care of it like a jewel. We have died for that tricolor, Christ!
We were hung, shot, decapitated, killed by the Austrians, the pope, the
Duke of Modena, the Bourbons. We carried out the Risorgimento with that
tricolor. The unification of Italy, the war in Carso, the resistance.
For that tricolor my maternal great-grandfather Giobatta fought at
Curtatone and Montanara, was horribly disfigured by an Austrian rocket.
For that tricolor my maternal uncles endured every hardship in the
trenches of Carso. My father was arrested and tortured at Villa Triste
by Nazi-Fascists for that tricolor. For that tricolor my entire family
fought in the resistance and I fought in it too. In the ranks of
justice and liberty, and with the battle name, Emilia. I was fourteen.
When the year after that I was released with a certificate of service
from the Italian Army-Body of Volunteers for Freedom, I felt so proud.
Jesus Mary, I was an Italian soldier! When I was informed that the
certificate of service carried with it a pension of 14,540 lire, I
didn't know whether to accept it or not. It seemed unjust to accept it
for having done my duty for the Patria. Finally I did accept it. At
home we were all without shoes. With that money I bought shoes for me
and my sisters.
Naturally my patria, my Italy, is not today's Italy. The pleasure-
loving, self-centered, vulgar Italy of Italians who like to retire
before the age of fifty and whose only passions are foreign holidays and
soccer matches. The bad, silly, cowardly Italy of little hyenas who
would sell their daughter to a bordello in Beirut just to get to shake
hands with a Hollywood movie star. But if Usama Bin Laden's kamikazes
reduce thousands of New Yorkers to a mountain of ashes that look like
coffee grounds, they guffaw with contentment-"good--the Americans
deserve it!" This squalid, unwarlike, soulless Italy of presumptuous
and incapable political parties that don't know how to win or lose but
know how to glue the fat behinds of their representatives to the seats
of a deputy's or minister's or mayor's armchair. An Italy still
Mussolini-esque, of black and red fascists, who invite you to remember
Ennio Flaiano's terrible line: "In Italy fascists are divided into two
categories, fascists and anti-fascists." Nor is my Italy the Italy of
the magistrates and politicians who, knowing nothing of classical
rhetoric, pontificate from television screens with monstrous errors of
syntax. (You don't say "If it was," animals! You say "If it were.")
Nor is it the Italy of youths who having teachers of similar ability
drown in the most scandalous ignorance, in the most flagrant
superficiality, in a void. Whereby to errors of syntax they add errors
of spelling and ask who the Carbonari were, who the liberals were, who
Silvio Pellico was, who Mazzini was, who Massimo D'Azeglio was, who
Cavour was, who Vittorio Emanuele II was; they look at you with blank
eyes and hanging tongue. They know nothing; at the most they take on
the easy role of aspiring terrorists in a time of peace and democracy,
they wave black flags, hide their faces behind watch caps, silly little
dopes. The unfit. Least of all my Italy is not the Italy of the
cicadas who, after reading these notes will hate me for having written
the truth. Between spaghetti parties they'll speak ill of me, wish me
killed by their favorite, Usama bin Laden. No, no: my Italy is an
idealized Italy. The Italy I dreamed of as a little girl, when I was
pensioned from the Italian Army-Body of Volunteers for Liberty, and I
was full of illusions. A serious, intelligent, dignified and courageous
Italy, and therefore an Italy worthy of respect. And woe to you who
touch it, this Italy--an Italy which exists, however it may be shushed
or laughed at or insulted. Woe to those who steal it from me; woe to
those who invade it. Because whoever invades it, whether Napoleon's
French, or the Austrians of Franz Joseph, Hitler's Germans, or Usama bin
Laden's accomplices, for me it's all the same. Whether to invade it
they use canons or rubber rafts, it's the same.
With this I salute you affectionately, my dear Ferrucio, and I warn
you: ask nothing more of me. Never more to participate in brawls or
vain polemics. What I had to say I have said. Rage and pride have
commanded me. A clear conscience and my age have allowed me to say it.
But now I must go back to work. I don't want to be disturbed. Here I
stop: it's done.
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