uglabeep's Full Review: Oriana Fallaci - The Rage and the Pride
Days after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist living in New York City, wrote an essay for an Italian newspaper, which she later rewrote (and translated into wonderfully awkward English) as this little red book which can be read in one pleasant sitting. Ms. Fallaci, who looks like an extra from La Dolce Vita in the black and white photograph on the dust jacket, is indeed full of rage and pride, a white hot rage over Islam's savage attack on the Western culture she is so proud of.
The essay is one long, winding rant against Islam, Not against "islamism" or "radical Islam," or against those who would pervert what is essentially a religion of peace into one of bloodlust, but against the religion itself and the threat, in forms both benign and deadly, that it poses to the Western world.
Religion is frequently protected in polite conversation against this sort of attack. Any idea, no matter how offensive to reason or common sense, when garbed in the solemn robes of religion, is granted an immunity from criticism. Were I to tell someone, for example, that I have a friend who is really three people, whose mother is a virgin, who was murdered but then came back to life, who asked me to eat his flesh and drink his blood, I would rightly be viewed as mad. But were this friend Jesus, and I simply told someone that I was a Catholic, this statement would be accepted calmly.
Ms. Fallaci is too angry to be polite. Her thesis is elaborated upon at length, but at heart is very simple: Islam is a stupid, vulgar, violent, ugly and savage religion. It is at war with the secular West, and the very openness and tolerance of the West (toward religion, toward immigrants) is the weakness that it's adherents seek to exploit. With a nod to some poems, some architecture, a few scholarly works, she spits venom at all things Muslim, and calls on her Western brethren not to allow their superior culture to fall to the barbarians at the gate. She meets Islam with a defiant scowl, sunglasses on, cigarette hanging from her lips. Terrorism, she argues, is merely the most severe manifestation of the jealous hatred that the uncivilized Islamic world has for the superior West. She hates terrorists, obviously, but reserved even greater hatred for those who support them, those who take to the streets in the thousands to cheer them on, to shout "death to America." Her greatest bile spews forth against those Orwellian doublespeakers in Europe, and particularly in her Italy, whose false relativism and false liberalism are an invitation to their destroyers.
Ms. Fallaci fights dirty, in a back alley, with broken bottle and bicycle chain. Islam is a religion of dirty, smelly savages who beat their women, who sully the beautiful ancient cities of Europe. International terrorism, misogyny and poor hygiene are all part of a whole that she despises. She calls for war against those who would wage war against the Western world that she loves, the world that westerners have forgotten even exists. She rhapsodizes about Shakespeare and Voltaire, and particularly about her beloved Italy. Her prose is offensive, hysterical, exhilarating, exaggerated, histrionic. She seems on the verge of madness at times, choked with anger and sadness at what she sees may be the end of the world, the fall of the west. The book is alive with her hatred. Read it, and read it again next September 11.
With The Rage and the Pride, Oriana Fallaci breaks a silence that has lasted for ten years. She breaks it in the wake of the apocalypse that, on the m...More at HotBookSale
With The Rage and the Pride, Oriana Fallaci breaks a silence that has lasted for ten years. She breaks it in the wake of the apocalypse that, on the m...More at HotBookSale
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