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

I have a white red and green flag from the 1800s. It is full of stains, stains of blood, all pink from mice. And despite the fact that it has the coat of arms of the House of Savoy in the center (though without Cavour and without Victor Emmanuel II and without Garibaldi who bowed to that coat of arms we would never have unified Italy), I hold onto it like gold. I treasure it as a jewel. Christ! We died for that flag! Hanged, shot, decapitated. Killed by the Austrians, by the Pope, by the Duke of Modena, by the Bourbons. We carried out the Risorgimento with that flag. And the unification of Italy, and the war in Carso, and the Resistance. My maternal great–great–grandfather Giobatta fought for that flag at Curtatone and Montanara and was horribly disfigured by an Austrian rocket. My paternal uncles endured every kind of pain for that flag in the trenches of Carso. My father was arrested and tortured for that flag by the nazi–fascists at Villa Triste. My whole family fought for that flag in the Resistance, and I did too. In the ranks of Justice and Liberty, with the battle name Emilia. I was fourteen. The next year when they discharged me from the Volunteer Italian Army Corps of Liberty, I felt so proud. Jesus and Mary, I had been an Italian soldier! And when I found out that along with the discharge went 14,450 lire, I didn't know whether to accept it or not. It seemed wrong to accept it for doing my duty to the Patria. Then I did accept it. None of us had shoes at home. And with that money I bought shoes for myself and my little sisters.

Obviously my homeland, my Italy, is not the Italy of today. The scheming, vulgar, fat–dumb–and–happy Italy of Italians whose only concern is getting their pensions by 50 and whose only passions are foreign vacations and soccer matches. The rotten, stupid, cowardly Italy, of little hyenas who would sell their daughter to a Beirut whorehouse in order to shake the hand of a Hollywood divo or diva but if Osama Bin Laden's kamikazes reduce thousands of New Yorkers to a mountain of ashes that seem like ground coffee they snigger contentedly good–it–serves–America–right. The squalid, faint–hearted, soulless Italy, of presumptuous and incompetent political parties that don't know how to win or lose but know how to glue the fat posteriors of their representatives into the seat of a deputy or minister or mayor. The still–Mussolinesque Italy of black and red fascists that make you think of Ennio Flaiano's terrible joke: "In Italy there are two kinds of fascists: fascists and anti–fascists." Nor is it the Italy of the magistrates and politicians who in their ignorance of proper verb tense commit monstrous errors of syntax while pontificating on television screens. (You don't say, "If it was," you animals! You say "If it were.") Nor is it the Italy of young people who, having similar teachers, are drowning in the most scandalous ignorance, the most excruciating superficiality, drowning in emptiness. So that they add errors of spelling to errors of syntax and if you ask them who the Carbonari were, who the liberals were, who Silvio Pellico was, who Mazzini was, who Massimo D'Azeglio was, who Cavour was, who Victor Emmanuel II was, they look at you with dulled pupils and dangling tongues. They know nothing or at most they know how to play the comfortable role of aspiring terrorists in a time of peace and democracy, how to wave black flags, hide their faces behind ski masks, the little fools. Inept fools.

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