"I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism"
About this Quote
The line lands like a credential and a warning: don’t mistake me for a commentator who discovered courage in a newsroom. Fallaci compresses her origin story into a single, bristling image - “a little girl” and “partisan” jammed together to short-circuit any sentimental read of childhood. The point isn’t just bravery; it’s legitimacy purchased early, in conditions where politics wasn’t ideology but survival.
Fallaci’s intent is defensive and aggressive at once. She’s staking an unarguable moral authority against anyone who would dismiss her as merely provocative, merely rhetorical. If you fought Nazi-Fascism as a child, you don’t need to audition for seriousness later. That’s also the subtext: her famously combative voice didn’t come from ego; it came from being formed in a world where euphemism got people killed.
Context matters because “partisan” in Italy isn’t a vague synonym for “activist.” It evokes the Resistance - clandestine networks, sabotage, reprisals, the messy intimacy of civil conflict. By naming “Nazi-Fascism,” she yokes the German occupation to Mussolini’s regime and its collaborators, refusing the comforting fiction that fascism was an imported plague. The hyphen does rhetorical work: it insists on a shared machinery of terror.
It also foreshadows the hard edge that defined Fallaci’s later career. She often wrote as if history were a recurring emergency, demanding sides, not nuance. This sentence is the seed of that posture: a refusal to be neutral, and a reminder that, for her, neutrality was never an available childhood luxury.
Fallaci’s intent is defensive and aggressive at once. She’s staking an unarguable moral authority against anyone who would dismiss her as merely provocative, merely rhetorical. If you fought Nazi-Fascism as a child, you don’t need to audition for seriousness later. That’s also the subtext: her famously combative voice didn’t come from ego; it came from being formed in a world where euphemism got people killed.
Context matters because “partisan” in Italy isn’t a vague synonym for “activist.” It evokes the Resistance - clandestine networks, sabotage, reprisals, the messy intimacy of civil conflict. By naming “Nazi-Fascism,” she yokes the German occupation to Mussolini’s regime and its collaborators, refusing the comforting fiction that fascism was an imported plague. The hyphen does rhetorical work: it insists on a shared machinery of terror.
It also foreshadows the hard edge that defined Fallaci’s later career. She often wrote as if history were a recurring emergency, demanding sides, not nuance. This sentence is the seed of that posture: a refusal to be neutral, and a reminder that, for her, neutrality was never an available childhood luxury.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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