Oriana Fallaci – the Italian Daphne?

There are many points where the life of Oriana Fallaci comes to resemble that of Daphne Caruana Galizia, except of course the fact that Daphne was murdered whereas Fallaci died a natural death, of cancer.

For most of her life Fallaci had police protection, as also the antiCamorra writer Roberto Saviano. Daphne refused to ask for police protection.

Otherwise both women exhibited extreme personal courage despite the risks. And both were very good writers, although Daphne never wrote books. Her output, though, especially in her extremely popular blog, must have surpassed in word count at least, that of several books.

And both women were, in their own way, journalists.

What follows is a short account of Fallaci’s life.

She was born on 29 June 1929 in Florence.

Her father, Edoardo, a cabinet maker, was a political activist struggling to put an end to the dictatorship of Fascism and Benito Mussolini.

During World War II she joined the Italian anti-fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Liberta for which she later received a certificate of valour from the Italian army.

She later wrote: “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 have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”

Fallaci began her career in journalism during her teens. Then from 1967, she worked as a war correspondent covering the Vietnam War, the Indo-Pakistan War, the Middle East and in South America.

For this she was almost killed. In Mexico City, during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, she was shot three times by Mexican soldiers, dragged downstairs by her hair and left for dead. Her eyewitness account later helped disprove the government’s denial that a massacre had taken place.

In the 1960s she began conducting interviews, first with people in literature and cinema (later published as Gli Antipatici) and later with world leaders (Intervista con

la storia).

In the early 1970s, she had a relationship with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship, having been captured, heavily tortured and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on dictator Georgios Papadopoulos.

Panagoulis died in 1976 in a road accident but Fallaci always believed he had been assassinated and wrote A man to state her case.

During her 1972 interview with Henry Kissinger he stated that the Vietnam War was a “useless war” and he compared himself to “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse”.

Kissinger later claimed that it was “the single most disastrous conversation that I have ever had with any member of the press”.

After interviewing Sheik Mujibur Rahman, she described him as “one of the most stupid men I’ve ever met in my life, maybe the most stupid”.

During her 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, she addressed him as “a tyrant” and even unveiled herself from the chador in his presence.

Fallaci retired to New York and to a house she owned in Tuscany. She also lectured at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University and Columbia University.

After 11 September 2001, Fallaci wrote three books critical of Islamic extremists and of Islam in general claiming both in writing and interviews that Europe was “too tolerant of Muslims”.

The first book was The Rage and the Pride, initially a four-page article on the Corriere della Sera in which she called for the “destruction of what is now called Islam”.

She wrote that “sons of Allah breed like rats” and in a Wall Street Journal interview in 2005 claimed that Europe was no longer Europe but “Eurabia”.

The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason both became bestsellers, the former selling over one million copies in Italy and 500,000 in the rest of Europe.

Her third book in this series was The Apocalypse – Oriana Fallaci interviews herself sold two million copies globally, the three books together selling four million copies in Italy.

Her writings have been translated into 21 languages.

On 27 August 2005, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo.

Although an atheist, Fallaci had great respect for the Pope and expressed admiration for his 2004 essay titled If Europe hates itself.

Despite being an atheist, in The Force of Reason she claimed that she was also a “Christian atheist”.

Fallaci died on 15 September 2006 in her native Florence from cancer. She was buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the southern suburb of Florence Galluzzo alongside her family members and a stone memorial to Alexandros Panagoulis, her late companion.

In 2024 the biographical novel Oriana, a Novel of Oriana Fallaci

was published by author Anastasia Rubis based on the true story of Fallaci’s career and personal life.

Fallaci twice received the St Vincent Prize for journalism (1967, 1971). She also received the Bancarella Prize (1970) for Nothing and So Be It; the Viareggio Prize (1979) for Un Uomo and the Prix Antibes 1993 for Inshallah.

Fallaci received much public attention for her controversial writings on Islam and European Muslims. She considered Islamic fundamentalism to be a revival of the fascism she fought against in her youth and that politicians in Europe were misunderstanding the threat of Islam in the same way that their 1930s equivalents had misunderstood the threat of German fascism.

Cristina De Stefano has argued that “the centre of her political ideas and her obsession was not Islam – it was fascism. For her, the first stage of fascism is to silence people, and for her political Islam is another form of fascism”.

On 3 June 2005, Fallaci published on the front page of the Corriera della Sera a highly controversial article urging women not to vote for a public referendum about artificial insemination.

In her 2004 book Oriana Fallaci Intervista se stessa, Fallaci expressed her opposition to samesex marriage, arguing that it “subverts the biological concept of family” calling it “a fashionable whim, a form of exhibitionism” and also against parenting by same-sex couples, declaring it a “distorted view of life”.

She also asserted the existence of a “gay lobby” through which “homosexuals themselves are discriminating against others”.

In the June 2006 issue of Reason, American libertarian writer Cathy Young wrote: “Oriana Fallaci’s 2002 book The Rage and the Pride makes hardly any distinction between radical Islamic terrorists and Somali street vendors, who supposedly urinate on the corners of Italy’s great cities.”

And Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Atlantic, called the book “a sort of primer on how not to write about Islam”, describing it as “replete with an obsessive interest in excrement, disease, sexual mania and insect-like reproduction, insofar as these apply to Muslims in general and to Muslim immigrants in Europe in particular”.

Bibliography

• The Seven Sins of Hollywood

(1958)

• The Useless Sex (1961)

• Penelope at War (1962)

• The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews (1963)

• If the Sun dies. About the US Space programme (1965)

• Nothing and Amen. A report on the Vietnam War based on personal experience (1969)

• Interview with History. A collection of interviews with 16 political figures (1974)

• Letter to child never born. A dialogue between a mother and her eventually miscarried child (1975)

• A Man. A novel about a Greek revolutionary hero who fights alone and to the death for freedom and truth (1979)

• Inshallah. A fictional account of Italian troops stationed in Lebanon in 1983 (1990)

• The Rage and the Pride. A post9/11 manifesto (2001)

• Followed by The Force of Reason (2004)

• Oriana Fallaci Intervista Oriana Fallaci. Not translated into English (2004)

• Un Cappello pieno di Ciliegie. A novel about her ancestors, published two years after her death Fallaci worked on it for 10 years, until 9/11 and her books inspired by that

• Le radici dell’odio. La mia verita sull’Islam (2015)