Oriana Fallaci, Bold and Irreverent Journalism
JESUS HERNANDEZ CUELLAR
During the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was shot three times in her body by Mexican soldiers and dragged downstairs by her hair. She was abandoned in her apartment believing that she was dead. By that date, October 1968, Fallaci was already recognized for her war reports. His testimony served to deny the official version that the killing of young people had not occurred. It is estimated that there were between 300 and 400 dead and more than a thousand wounded.
His book Interview with History, possibly his most important, is a compilation of in-depth interviews, many of them very daring, with Prime Ministers Golda Meir of Israel and Indira Gandhi of India, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Also appearing in the book are her meetings with the Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giáp, and his enemy, the South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
In his long career he has also interviewed the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the American film director Alfred Hitchcock, the Polish union leader Lech Walesa, the mastermind of China's transformation, Den Xioaping, and the terrifying and radical Ayatollah Roullah Khomeini, The greatest figure in the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. In a disagreement with the latter during the interview, for which she was forced to wear the chador —a veil over her head—, Fallaci removed her veil, calling it a "stupid medieval rag." . Khomeini had first offended her by telling her that she didn't have to wear it, as it was only for "respectable young women." To understand the audacity of this act by Fallaci, one must know that after the Islamic revolution, Khomeini held 52 US citizens hostage for 444 days.
Oriana Fallaci with the chador on her head in Tehran, Iran, in 1979.
Her work as an interviewer and reporter was developed mainly in the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s of the last century. Her career began thanks to an uncle of hers, Bruno Fallaci, also a journalist, after she carried out dangerous work as a member of the Italian resistance against the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and fascism, through the Giustizia e Libertà movement.
In early 1967, he worked as a war correspondent in Vietnam, the Indo-Pakistani War, the Middle East, and South America.
There are many frontline women journalists, but Fallaci is a point and apart. She was able to extract unthinkable confessions from the world leaders she interviewed. Kissinger, for example, told him that Vietnam was a "useless war" and that he felt like a "cowboy pulling a trainload of wagons" all by himself on his horse. Kissinger later admitted that this had been "the most disastrous conversation" he had ever had with anyone in the press.
Fallaci's books, articles, and interviews have been translated into 21 languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Persian, and German. This feat was not something easy to achieve for a woman journalist, Italian and immersed in the conflicts of a troubled time, led mainly by men. Without internet, without social networks, without smart cell phones.
An unexpected twist
Late in her career, the Italian chronicler, who had led a remarkably liberal life as a left-wing intellectual, took conservative positions. Nobody expected it. He opposed abortion except in cases of rape, euthanasia, same-sex marriages, and adoptions by homosexual couples. But above all, he developed an extremely critical behavior of the Islamic presence in Europe, to the point of renaming the Old World with the word Eurabia.
He used to say that Muslims were colonizing Europe through immigration and high fertility. That the passivity of the European left in the face of the dangers that it saw would soon turn the continent into "a colony of Islam."
Many years earlier, in the 1960s, when she was traveling the world to gather information for her book Useless Sex, she had come to the conclusion, and so she wrote, that Islamic countries were women's prisons.
There is no doubt that both World War II and the terrorist attacks of September 2001 in New York and Washington marked his life intensely. Between one event and the other, she had done a long journalistic tour in many parts of the world, and had seen with her own eyes things that political theories, loaded with promises and beautiful words, cannot or do not want to explain.
In August 2005, he had an audience with Pope Benedict XVI at the Castel Gandolfo retirement home and expressed admiration for the pontiff's essay entitled "If Europe hates itself." Throughout her life she was an atheist, but in her book The Force of Reason she said, perhaps ironically, that she was a "Christian atheist".
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Numerous sentimental relationships have been attributed to this woman, but the best known was the one she had with Alexandros Panagoulis, an important figure in the Greek resistance against the dictatorship that was installed in Greece in 1967, and one of her most prominent interviewees. Panagoulis was captured, brutally tortured, and imprisoned for the attempted assassination of dictator Georgios Papadopoulos. The rebel leader died in a suspicious manner in 1976, and Fallaci lived convinced that he had been assassinated by sympathizers of the dictatorship. This relationship produced his book Un Uomo (A Man), inspired by Panagoulis,
One of the many ways to understand this woman is through the book Oriana Fallaci - The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend, by her biographer Cristina De Stefano, who had long conversations with the journalist and had almost unlimited access to your files. De Stefano wrote the book together with Marina Harss, a translator and researcher.
Throughout his life, Fallaci received numerous awards and recognitions, and it was even proposed that the 20-euro bills bear his image, something that has not happened.
She died of cancer at age 77 on September 15, 2006, in Florence, Italy. His remains rest in a cemetery in that city along with those of his relatives and next to a modest monument carved in stone in memory of Panagoulis.
(Hernández Cuéllar, author of the Cafe Impresso column, is the director and editor of Contacto Magazine, a magazine he founded in July 1994 in Los Angeles, California. He is also the author of the book ¡Última hora! - Manual para el consumidor de news of the digital age. Since 1981 he has worked in all types of media: press agencies, newspapers, radio, television, weeklies, the internet, magazines and social networks. He was a writer for the EFE agency in Cuba, Costa Rica and the United States, as well as metropolitan editor of the newspaper La Opinión of Los Angeles, California, and journalism instructor at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA).
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