The Rage and The Pride (La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio) by Oriana Fallaci
English | Italiano

And I felt a kind of humiliation. Because I can't even begin to imagine Italian workers waving the tricolor and roaring Italia–Italia. Oh, I've seen them wave plenty of red flags in the marches and rallies. Rivers, lakes, of red flags. But never very many tricolor flags. None at all, actually. Ill–led or tyrannized by an arrogant left devoted to the Soviet Union, they always left the tricolor flags to their adversaries. Not that the adversaries made very good use of them, I'd say. Nor did they waste them either, thank God. And those who go to Mass, ditto. As for that yahoo with the green shirt and tie, he doesn't even know what colors make up the tricolor. I–am–Lombard, I–am–Lombard. That guy wants to take us back to the wars between between Florence and Siena. So the result is that today you see the Italian flag only at the Olympics if you happen to win a medal. Worse: you see it only in the stadiums, when there's an international soccer match. Which is also, by the way, the only time you'll ever hear a cry of Italia–Italia.

Well let me tell you something. There's a big difference between a country in which the flag is waved only by hooligans in a stadium and a country where it's waved by the entire population. Waved, for example, by indomitable workers who dig in the ruins to come up with an ear or nose of the creatures slaughtered by the sons of Allah. Or to gather the ground coffee.

The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It's special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It's special also because the idea of liberty wasn't fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so–called Enlightenment. You couldn't find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn't something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn't start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti–Americans of the good–it–serves–America–right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)

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