RIP Oriana Fallaci

Fallaci understood the Left and Islam, and what they have in common.

From The Force of Reason, p215:

The Left is a Church. And not a Church similar to the Church which came out of Christianity, thus open to free-will. A Church similar to Islam. Like Islam it considers itself sanctified by a God who is the custodian of the Truth. Like Islam it never acknowledges its faults and its errors, it considers itself infallible and never apologizes. Like Islam it demands a world at its own image, a society built on the verses of its Prophet. Like Islam it enslaves its own followers. It intimidates them, it makes them feel stupid even when they are intelligent. Like Islam it does not accept different opinions and if you think differently it despises you. It denigrates you, it punishes you. Like Islam, in short, it is illiberal. Autocratic, totalitarian, even when it plays the game of democracy. For Christsake, isn't it revealing that ninety-five percent of the Western people converted to Islam come from the Left or the red-black Extreme Left?

...

Like Islam, finally, the Left is anti-West. And the cause why it is anti-West can be summarized with a passage of The Road to Serfdom: one of the important essays left to us by Friedrich Hayek, the Autrian economist who in the Thirties flew from Vienna and took refuge in England.

«It is not only the principles of Adam Smith and Hume and Locke and Milton which are being abandoned. It is also the bedrock of the civilization developed by the Greeks and the Romans and Christianity. Meaning, the western civilization. What is being relinquished is not only the liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, that is the liberalism which completed the civilization» it says. «It is the individualism which, thanks to Erasmus of Rotterdam and Montaigne and Cicero and Tacitus and Pericles and Thucydides, the western cvilization has inherited. In other words, the concept itself of individualism which through the teachings imparted to us by the philosophers of classical antiquity then of Christianity then of Renaissance then of the Enlightenment have made us what we are. Socialism is based on collectivism. Collectivism denies individualism. And anyone who denies individualism denies western civilization».