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Forbes magazine tells us, “The death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini has sparked protests in Iran. Amini was arrested for breaking the country’s law that requires women to cover their hair with a headscarf and she later died while in police custody. Since Amini’s death, women and girls in Iran have been removing their headscarves as a form of protest. Now, all eyes are on Iran, with some equating women’s removal of their headscarves to the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Oriana Fallaci, were she alive, might have been in the midst
of the protests.
Fallaci, pretty much forgotten by postmodern journalists,
was a Florentine. The vital center of small “r” republican resistance to autocratic
regimes before and throughout the Renaissance was Florence, Italy, the home of
Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy and, let it never be
forgotten, the modern Italian language.
Fallaci turned to journalism in the
1960s and was likely the most feared interviewer in the business.
Henry Kissinger confessed that his Fallaci interview was
“the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the
press." Fallaci teased from Kissinger an explosive admission. The Vietnam
war, Kissinger said in the interview published in Playboy in 1972, was a
"useless war." And he described himself as "the cowboy who leads
the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse."
Something about the woman, her interviewing technique and
her remorseless passion, a byproduct of her involvement in Italy’s anti-fascist
movement, made her both an enticing and a fearful presence.
Fallaci’s book Interview
with History, Intervista con la storia in Italian, displays a wide range of
subjects: Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy
Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, South Vietnamese President Nguyễn
Văn Thiệu, and North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp during the Vietnam War.
She was a fearless war correspondent, always pushing to the
front of danger, rarely remaining in safe zones provided to correspondents. She
was shot three times by Mexican soldiers during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre,
dragged down a dark stairwell and left for dead. Her eyewitness account of the
brutality shred the pretense by the Mexican government that the massacre had
not occurred.
I mentioned her interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini in a
posting and column titled Lamont, Yale and the Alamo. This was the only
interview Khomeini had permitted with a Western reporter. She had been forced
to wear a chador as a condition of the interview:
Interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini shortly after the Shah
of Iran had been deposed, she teased him with this question: “How do you swim
in a chador?”
“Our customs are none of your business,” Khomeini retorted.
“If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because
Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.”
“That’s very kind of you, Imam,” Fallaci replied, “And since
you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She
threw off her chador and said, “I will not be imprisoned.”
It was said that Khomeini, the godfather of Iran’s irredentist
Muslim fundamentalist movement, laughed.
The American media seems hardly to have noticed the
widespread and popular eruption in Iran, and Sevil Suleymani, an Iranian expat
now living in the United States, thinks she knows why.
“This Mahsa Amini,” she said in an interview, “was a Kurdish
girl who was beaten to death by morality police because of the compulsory
hijab. This first tells us Iran is more than just being Persian, it's more than
one ethnic group, because she was from a Kurdish community that were like just
visiting Tehran and that's what happened. And then all the uprising started
from the marginalized groups surrounding Iran...between all the ethnic
minorities and started going to other regions of Iran. These stories, these
uprisings and this new revolution can tell us the multilayered story of Iran
that a lot of America does not know.”
Indeed, there is a good deal Americans do not know about
Iran. Many of them are reporters or diplomats now seeking to lift sanctions
imposed on Iran by former presidents in pursuit of unverifiable paper agreements
on nuclear weapons.
George Orwell, temperamentally a brother in arms with
Fallaci, told an indifferent West in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping
on a human face – forever.”
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