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

What's more, it's a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Thomas Paines and the John Adamses and the George Washingtons and so on? These weren't the small–time lawyers ("avvocaticchi" as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren't the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it "Toscano".) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled "Of Crimes and Punishments." As for the self–taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution.

Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn't do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn't do it with the guillotine and massacres at Vandea. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty—or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. "We hold these Truths to be self–evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..." And that piece of paper that we've all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we've drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, "Communism is a monarchic regime, and it's an old–school monarchy. Because it cuts off men's balls. And when you cut off a man's balls, he's no longer a man." He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death.

Previous | Next | Introduction

Discuss in my forum