Fallaci the Fearless

I just read the first five pages or Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason (only just now translated into English) over on Tigerhawk. As some readers of this site will recall, I have long been a great fan of Fallaci’s (A Man is an extraordinary political love stories) and it is clear from these five pages that, even wracked with cancer, she has not lost her ability to write with force. Of course she is hated by the very people who used to adore her. Once the heroine of the left who faced down dictators for an interview (a far more intelligent and far more beautiful Amanpour), she had the courage to question the orthodoxy of European pseudo-progressivism, became despised and continued on nevertheless through her illness to write more and say more. They think she has changed, but she is the one who has remained true to her ideals, to the Enlightenment. Her critics are the ones who have betrayed them. Those critics themselves have not so much changed as retreated in panic, hiding behind a masquerade of hypocritical belief, a cultural relativism of convenience that only encourages their self-immolation. Viva Fallaci.