Oriana's Latest (Rage and Pride)

Okay, I just got this text by email this (er, I mean, yesterday) afternoon and stayed up till now translating. Learned a fair amount of history and etymology in the process, as you'll see. God, can this woman write. She is the Cicero of this war, and one day these articles of hers will be compiled and read the way students used to read the Phillippics. Once again, I offer what follows with disclaimers: I am not authorized by or associated with Ms. Fallaci, and this is only a woefully inadequate attempt to convey to Americans the experience of her writing. It may also contain errors or misreadings, and if you notice any, tell me. But once again, I can't resist.

After the attacks by the Parisian press on “Rage and Pride”
I’m still not angry with France

Muscardine is a grave malady of the silkworm. If you’re a silkworm and you get muscardine, you die in the space of a single night. It is also the name of an avid rodent that belongs to the family gliridae and feeds on every kind of filth: Muscardinus Avallanarius, the dormouse. Besides that, it is also the name of a small mollusk--a small octopus to be precise--good to eat when fried like a third-rate enemy. (Just marinate it in egg batter, flour it, and throw it in oil that’s boiling at 280 degrees.) Finally, it is the name of an antique chewing gum, a candy made of spices, that they used to chew in the 1700s to hide bad breath. But, historically, it is the translation of the word Muscadin: a term saddled on the nouveaux-riches of the Jeunesse Dorée who during the second half of 1794 and 1795 -- that is after the fall of Robespierre -- were a big hit in the salons of Paris. In particular, in the salon of Madame Tallien. And who used to beat the Jacobins while singing the counterrevolutionary hymn la Reveille du Peuple --”the People’s Reawakening”.

The Muscadins were elegant, affected, soignés. It’s no accident that in current usage the word has the same meaning as fop, dandy, beau. They wore their hair long and loose on their shoulders, their ties green and knotted with a grotesque bow, their pants tight and their shoes pointed. They slurred their r’s, used lorgnettes, perfumed themselves to the point of nausea with essence of musk, and beat the Jacobins using a baton similar to the one Mussolini’s gangs would later use to beat antifascists in the the nineteen-twenties and thirties. (They called this “Le Notre pouvoir Executif,” “Our Executive Power”).

They came to a quick end. The people disdained them, the Directorate detested them, and even Madame Tallien swiftly tired of them. But, while they lasted, they did a lot of harm. And not by accident. Their leader, with his newspaper l’Orateur du peuple --”the People’s Orator”--was the notorioius Stanislaw Louis-Marie Fréron. He was the son of that Fréron who had been an enemy of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, a congenital opportunist and turncoat. Stanislaw had founded l’Orateur du peuple back when he used to collaborate with Danton and Marat. As a member of the Convention he had voted to send poor Louis XVI to the guillottine. As a servant of the Terror he had participated personally in the massacres of the Girondists and monarchists at Tolone and Marseilles. And together with the infamous Barras he had been the author of the 9 Thermidor, the fall of Robespierre. He came to a quick end too. And a squalid one. When the Muscadins disappeared he tried to stay afloat by seducing Pauline Bonaparte, the younger sister of the the rising star Napoleon, and failing to marry her he had to content himself with becoming underprefect at San Domingo. Here in 1802 he died suddenly, from what disease I don’t know, but I hope it was the silkworm disease. And now we get to the point.

Last March many people asked me whether I was angry with France, that France where without the police intervening and without the Minister of Culture lifting a finger to prevent it, the red fascists had assaulted with indecent insults the representatives of the Italian government at the International Book Fair, a fair in which Italy was participating as Guest of Honor. And they were stupefied to hear me respond: “No. I’m not angry with France. No.” They were even more stupefied when they saw me explode in indignation over the article that an Italian daily had dedicated to this unforgivable episode with the title “La merde de Paris.” Every paragraph of that article, in fact, began with the foul phrase “God damn the French”: a plagiarism of the foul motto “God damn the English,” coined during the Second World War by the black fascist Mario Appelius, and inscribed on the badge that the blackshirts used to display on the lapels of their jackets. Their wives, on the lapels of their tailleur.

Well: now many ask me whether I’m angry with that France where ninety-five percent of the Parisian press, widening disproportionately the path traced months ago by the Italian cicadas, attacks and denigrates La Rage et l’Orgueil. (Which is La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio translated into French and published by Plon.) They call it “abominable”, “detestible”, “abject”. Often, screaming that it should never have been published, they compare me to Céline. They defame me, they abuse me, they call me a “racist.” In order to call me a racist, they even pretend to ignore what I wrote in April on antisemitism. A text that went literally around the entire world and because of which the Wall Street Journal called me “the conscience of Europe” and the New York Post “the only voice raised in Europe to defend the Jews,” a painful sermon for which the Jews of every country have inundated me with messages saying Thank-you-Oriana, and after which the threats against my life multiplied and intensified. The daily newspaper Le Monde even dared to turn to the League Against Racism and Antisemitism to ask its president if he would denounce me, condemn me. And even so I answered the fatal question with another no.

No. I was not angry with France last March and I’m not angry now. Because the red fascists who behaved in such a despicable fashion toward the representatives of the Italian government and who now behave in such a despicable fashion toward me (some have even profaned the memory of my father, the bunch of ugly cowards and scoundrels) are not France. They are the Moscardins. The new Moscardins who with their long hair loose on their shoulders, their green ties, their tight pants, their pointed shoes and their slurred r’s, are a great hit in the salons of the new Madame Talliens. The new fops, the new dandies, the new dormouses who, led by the new Fréron (a petulant and conceited fool who would not even deserve to wind up underprefect at San Domingo) sing once again la Reveille du peuple. And while singing it they beat the Jacobins. They beat them with the baton of lies and bad faith this time, with the Pouvoir Executif of pseudointellectual terrorism, with the dictatorship of Political Correctness, that is with the Presumptuous Impudence of pretending to teach democracy to those who have fought for democracy since they were infants. But the Jacobins of today are not the ex-headchoppers who believe or believed in Robespierre: they’re people like me. People who believe in Liberty and who as a result don’t allow themselves to be intimidated by batons, by blackmail, by threats. People who reason with their own heads and who as a result call a spade a spade. People who don’t lick anyone’s feet and who as a result cry out like the child in Grimm’s fairy tale: “The Emperor has no clothes!” People who have a clean conscience and who as a result can permit themselves the luxury of fighting fascists whether they are black or red: of affirming that today the Right and the Left are two profiles of the same face. The face of cynicism and hypocrisy. People, finally, who have the courage to defend their own land. Their own country, their own culture, their own identity. People who don’t want invaders who, taking advantage of our tolerance, of our laws, of our hospitality, seek to impose on us the burka or the chador. To conquer us, to dominate us, as they conquered and for eight centuries dominated Portugal and Spain. Invaders who in Italy (in France as well?) go on television to order us to remove the crucifixes from the schools because “that cadaver on the cross frightens our Muslim scholars.” And who in Italy publish ungrammatical obscenties to invite their co-religionists to kill me in the name of the Koran. Islam-chastises-Oriana-Fallaci, the-old-woman-who-never-grew-up. Muslims-go-to-die-with-Fallaci.

The Moscardins stand with them. They stand with them in spite of laicism, progress, civility. And we well know why. It’s because they provide them with the electorate they lost when the “proletarian masses” rejected them, refused them. But woe to anyone who would identify the Moscardins with France. Woe! To do so would be to risk asking whether liberty of thought and opinion still exists in France, whether France is still the Republic of Marianne or whether it has become the French Republic of Islam. And that would be unjust, wicked.

Look me in the eyes, you petulant and vain Frérons: France is not the imaginary People you fill your mouth with when you sing your “People’s Reawakening” from your “People’s Orator.” It’s the people who don’t listen to you. The people who tyrannized by you and blackmailed by the lugubrious blandishments of the rancid Le Pen no longer have a Bastille to storm, given that in order to not vote Le Pen they have to vote Chirac... It’s also the people who don’t insult me. Who don’t defame me, don’t denigrate me, don’t profane the memory of my splendid father. And who read me. Reading me they recognize themselves in me, they feel less alone, they thank me. Just like the Jews who send me messages “Thank you Oriana”, “Merci Oriana.” In less than three days various bookstores of Paris ran out of La Rage et l'Orgueil. In less than seven, La Rage et l’Orgueil entered the bestseller lists. The editor Plon had to reprint it, and continues to reprint it; their typographers are working this weekend. This means that in France liberty of thought and opinion still exists, that France is still the République Française of Marianne, and that as far as the people are concerned you count a big nothing.

Here's Meryl Yourish's take on this controversy.

Comparing cultures or, Neener, neener, neener!

Foreign Policy magazine reviews Oriana Fallaci's latest book, La Rabbia e L’Orgoglio (The Anger and the Pride). The reviewer is also Italian, and for some reason, I don't think Marco Belpoliti likes either Oriana or her book (emphasis added):

Fallaci declares that she, too, is a patriot. And while espousing the superiority of her own culture, Fallaci accuses Muslims of fanaticism and, above all, of despising women. She accuses Muslims of attempting to “annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying and not praying, our way of eating and drinking, and wearing clothes, and having fun, and finding things out.”
...
The deepest instincts of this book lie in its nationalism, xenophobia, and chauvinism, all of which are major pieces of the political culture of the Italian middle and lower-middle classes, epitomized by the fascist regime of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This enduring fascism—what Eco called Italy’s “eternal fascism”—is one of the clearest elements of Fallaci’s own cultural makeup and that of her book. But readers should be careful not to judge. Her fascism is not totalitarian in nature. On the contrary, the paradox of Fallaci’s writing is that her fascism presupposes an extreme cult of personal freedom. But regrettably, it is a personal freedom opposed to the freedom of others, including Muslims.
For Fallaci, freedom does not mean tolerance of others but superiority of her own culture, religion, and traditions. Italy’s cultural identity, Fallaci writes, “cannot withstand a wave of immigrants made up of people who in one way or another wish to change our way of life. . . . And even if there were a place for such things, I wouldn’t give it over. Because it would be like throwing out Dante, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Rafael, the Renaissance, the Risorgimento, the freedom we have won . . . [and] the democracy we have created.”

Love the way he says the reader shouldn't judge, right before and after he judges her. So, um, Marco--what's your point? That she's a fascist because she thinks it's wrong for Muslim fanatics to debase women the way that they do? That she's a fascist because she says militant Islam wants to force the rest of the world to change to its way of life or die? Or is she a fascist because she thinks individualism and personal freedom is a good thing? Now that's the weirdest charge of fascism I've ever heard. Personal freedom is fascistic? Uh--how? From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

Main Entry: fas·cism
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian fascismo, from fascio bundle, fasces, group, from Latin fascis bundle & fasces fasces
Date: 1921
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

Belpoliti thinks that by warning of the threat of militant Islam, Fallaci is to be equated with Mussolini. And here is his reasoning, apparently: "For Fallaci, freedom does not mean tolerance of others". Well, probably not. Because that's not the definition of freedom. Tolerance of others is called--well--"tolerance." Freedom means, "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". Which is rather the opposite of what Islamofascists believe. But Belpoliti's assertion is a typical EU philosophy. Freedom equals tolerance of others, refusing to acknowledge that any culture is superior to any other--it's the typical Euroweenie mindset.

But his line of thinking got to me, and I came up with a litmus test we can apply when trying to decide whether one culture is superior to another:

What has that culture given the world in the past 50 years? Has it contributed advances in science, technology, medicine, philosophy, art, dance, music, literature? Has it started any wars? Is it now involved in any wars? For what reasons does the culture fight? Does this culture have suffrage? Equality for women? Are there free and fair elections? Is the culture based on the rule of law? (Shari'a and other religious law doesn't count.) Is the concept of a free press basic to this culture? Does this culture oppress minorities that dwell within it?

For all the jokes we make about the various European nations, as far as I know, all of Europe passes the cultural litmus test. Even France. Do any Muslim nations? Hey, we'll give them a bye and take out the free and fair elections and the free press. They still fail.

Well, then. Oriana isn't a fascist. She's just plain right.

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