Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

CANNONS AND RUBBER BOATS

2006; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13698010600956071

1469-929X

Francesca Orsini,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Abstract Written in October 2001 as a ‘gut reaction’ to the attack on the Twin Towers, and published first as a long article in the daily Corriere della Sera and then in book form (in its original shape, twice as long as the article) in December 2001, Oriana Fallaci's pamphlet La rabbia e l'orgoglio (‘Anger and pride’) was in its twenty-sixth edition when I bought it in September 2004. Its follow-up, La forza della ragione (‘The force of reason’), has already sold 800,000 copies since its publication in 2004. Oriana Fallaci has emerged after 9/11 as the strongest and most vocal Italian representative of the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. This essay analyses the constitutive elements of her discourse (Italian nationalism, values instead of history and politics, and violent speech conflating Islam, terrorism and immigrants) and tries to understand its appeal and the sources of its authority in Fallaci's career, in order to outline the specific Italian version of the clash of civilizations theory. Keywords: clash of civilizationscontemporary ItalyIslamophobiaOriana Fallacirhetoric Notes 1Translated into English by the author herself as The Rage and the Pride, the booklet was published by Rizzoli New York in 2002. There exist also several web translations, i.e., by Letizia Grasso to be found at by Chris and Paula Newman to be found at ; and at 2Her previous reportage for Corriere della Sera had been on the Gulf War in 1991. 3Her novels, including Penelope alla guerra (1961), Gli antipatici (1963) and Insciallah (1990) were, at least initially, less successful, though Insciallah, which was first serialized in Corriere, won the SuperBancarella prize and has sold 600,000 copies (Zaccuri 1997). 4Translations from La rabbia e l'orgoglio and from other Italian sources are my own unless otherwise indicated. 5Giuliano Zincone, a columnist for Corriere della Sera, has spoken of an ‘explosion of sincerity’, by someone ‘who has seen many countries and many wars’ (Citation2001). 6Franco Cardini, a Catholic writer on the Middle Ages who belongs to the centre-right but believes that the enmity between Europe and Islam is a historical misunderstanding, wrote in his review of La forza della ragione that most of what Fallaci said was factually incorrect, ‘but she writes it with her heart, she writes it with extraordinary power, she writes, despite the occasional lapse, displaying extraordinary stylistic effectiveness. Oriana is not great for what she says because, as I tell her affectionately, she doesn't get anything right really. Oriana is great for how she can say such things, for the force she puts in, for the pride and the fascinating violence she is able to express’ (Cardini Citation2004; emphasis added). 7Some examples of idées reçues: Americans are all efficient (Italians are the opposite of Americans); Americans are all patriots (Italians are the opposite); America is a young country – in the nineteenth century it was still building its identity (Italy is an old country – its identity can no longer be modified); Ancient Romans ‘enjoyed watching Christians being mauled by lions’ but ‘a long time has gone by and we have become a little more civilized’; Christians ‘enjoyed watching heretics being burned at the stake’; ‘some’ Islamic immigrants work ‘because Italians have become so spoilt [signorini]’ (Fallaci Citation2001: 1, 2, 4, 5, 23, 24, 25, 26). 8Sangari writes in the context of Hindu right-wing mobilization in India, led by sadhus or holy women who perform this leadership function. 9Her statement that ‘to live side by side with an Italy where ideals lay on the rubbish heap had become too difficult’ is somewhat cryptic. The ‘moral question’, i.e., the critique of corruption and other signs of moral degradation in the Italian body politic, has a very long history in Italian politics, not least within the long-ruling party, Democrazia Cristiana. It is therefore amenable to many political viewpoints. 10Despite this, Lega Nord has passionately championed Fallaci's book, to the point of distributing it free during a demonstration against the proposal to give immigrants legally resident the vote in local elections, held in Milan on 6 November 2003 (see ). 11Fallaci's hero in October 2001 is New York's major Rudolph Giuliani, another Italo-American ‘with balls’ (2001: 65). 12It was the sweeping quality of her belief that alienated even someone like Magdi Allam, vice-editor ad personam of Corriere della Sera, who otherwise admired her and felt honoured by her friendship (Allam Citation2005). 13For a detailed reply to Fallaci's assertions, see El Sebaie (Citation2004a). 14‘Toasting the horror’, like Marie Antoinette's mot about croissants, is an urban myth: Italians also are said to have rejoiced in a similar way, a falsehood that was pointed out by another participant in the debate, Dacia Maraini. 15Sherif El Sebaie (Citation2004b) carefully refutes the claim that Islamic culture contributed nothing to Italy by pointing to the many Islamic artefacts in Italy. 16As Luciano Andreotti has astutely pointed out, ‘Fallaci's method of presenting “our civilization” through indiscriminate lists of great names suggests only occasional familiarity’ and recalls Furio Jesi's definition of what he called the ‘exoteric’ or ‘profane’ Right's approach to art. For the ‘profane’ Right, artworks and authors do not provoke problematic self-questioning or critical approaches. They are ‘valuable stuff’ (roba di valore), with no internal, historical or sociological difference. This attitude towards art ‘is characterized by the repulsion for history that is camouflaged as veneration for a glorious past’ (Jesi Citation1979; cited in Andreotti 2002). 17This section is based on Renzo Guolo's excellent book Xenofobi e Xenofili: Gli Italiani e l'Islam, which deserves to be translated into English. 18Associations and centres are divided into those representing ‘state Islam’ (mainly of Saudi Arabia and Morocco), Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, some Jihad groups which have used some Italian mosques and Islamic centre as hiding places (as Fallaci also recounts), Italian converts to Islam who often play a prominent role in associations as they can be legitimate interlocutors for the Italian state, and finally ‘phantom’ Islamic representatives (like the convert Adel Smith) who have been created by the media and acquired a fame disproportionate to their real significance. Guolo views most of the demands of organizations like the Unione delle Comunità e Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (UCOII) – i.e., freedom of religious practice, halal butchers, religious presence in army barracks and hospitals, the possibility for Muslim women to wear the veil in official (i.e., passport) photographs – as unproblematic and easy to realize in practice. What he finds problematic are demands connected with family law (i.e., polygamy) and for community mediation in the relationship between the state and Muslim individuals, and the issue of representation (Guolo 2003: ch.1). 19Although after one of the Somali suspects of the London bombings was arrested in Rome, the local Somali immigrant community (overwhelmingly Christian) was keen to emphasize not only the different, and older, history of their immigration, but also the fact that Christians and Muslims in Somalia had lived together for centuries, explicitly offering themselves to Italians as a model of peaceful coexistence (Rai 3, evening news, 6 August 2005). 20Guolo gives a very interesting analysis of Lega Nord's Islamophobia in its political homeland in the Italian industrial north-east, where entrepreneurs require immigrants for their workforce and where Lega Nord's critique of immigration, and of the globalized economy that produces it, goes against its own political and social base. Many former Lega Nord voters have since moved to Forza Italia, but Lega Nord's continued Islamophobia finds echoes within them and produces confusion in the local political system, while pragmatically local entrepreneurs need (for example) to build homes for immigrant workers, who in that work-rich region need houses more than jobs (Guolo 2003: 76–9). 21For example Giovanni Sartori, professor of political science, is critical of multiculturalism and believes that acquiring citizen status does not automatically entail integration: instead immigrants should be ‘acculturated’ into Western values, most realistically not in the first generation but in the second generation, through schooling (Guolo 2003: 101–4). The priest-cum-political scientist Gianni Baget Bozzo instead opposes Islam as an essentially anti-Christian religion, a view shared by a significant part of the Italian Church, as we have seen (ibid.: 108). A notable exception is the medieval historian and prolific author Franco Cardini, who believes that the enmity between Europe and Islam is a historical misunderstanding and that Islam can in fact provide an antidote to a secular West that is adrift (ibid.: 114).