R.I.P.

Oriana Fallaci was a throwback to an earlier, romantic generation of journalists. She was smart, tough-minded, tough-talking, courageous and beautiful. She hated power and its abuses, regardless of who was doing the abusing, whether the fascists were Italian or Muslim. That, plus a gift for words, is a useful equation for what constitutes a journalist – a long-forgotten formula. Fallaci must have been a difficult person and probably exhausting to know, but that’s hardly unusual among truth-tellers. An English translation of her Interview with History was published in 1976, and much of it reads today like an international roll call of monsters from the 1960s and 1970s – Henry Kissinger, Yasir Arafat, Ali Bhutto, General Giap and the Shah of Iran, among others. Words she wrote in the Preface might serve as her epitaph:

“…to the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality. I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of being born. I have always looked on the silence of those who do not react or who indeed applaud as the real death of a man or woman.”