The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [55]
In the beginning I wanted to become either a surgeon or a journalist. And the only reason why I didn’t choose medicine was because we were too poor to afford six years of medical school. So then it seemed obvious for me to get a job as a reporter when I was sixteen. I gave up medicine because I was poor, not because I was a woman. What I never forget is that I was poor. And this is probably at the roots of my moralistic attitude that we were speaking about before. Not the fact that I was a woman.
I noticed that you dedicated your book to your mother. Was she a strong influence on you?
She pushed me. She pushed all of us. But my father did, too. I dedicated it to her more than to him because she’s dying from cancer, but I should have dedicated it to both of them, because the person who gave me my political ideas was my father. I’ve changed my mind about many things, but not about my belief in freedom, social justice and socialism—that came from him. And when we get to this point, it doesn’t matter whether one is a man or a woman.
We were speaking before of Golda and Indira. The feminists are wrong to say: “Ha-ha! Indira behaves the way she does because she lives in a society of men.” No, sir. She does it simply because she’s a person of power who wanted more power. She wasn’t ready to give it up and she acted as a man would have acted. At that point, it was the moment of truth—el momento de la verdad, as the Spanish call it. She could have said goodbye, sir, thank you very much. That means democracy to me. But instead she became a dictator, she demonstrated that being a woman makes no difference, she was no better because she was a woman . . .
I want to return to something I spoke to you about earlier—about my obsession with the fascist problem and how it relates to my family experiences. I’ve just said that I come from an antifascist family, and this was important for me because, to me, being fascistic means making antipolitics, not politics. The fascist—as I once told an interviewer—is someone who resigns, who obeys, who doesn’t talk or who imposes himself with violence and avoids the problematic. The antifascist, on the contrary, is a naturally political person. Because being antifascist means to fight though a problem by means of a discussion that involves everybody in civil disobedience. And this atmosphere of disobedience . . . I’ve breathed it since I was a little girl. My mother’s father was an anarchist—one of those who wore a black ribbon and the big hat. He was a deserter in World War I, and I remember my mother proudly saying: “My father was a deserter in the Great War”—as if he had won some kind of medal. In fact, he was condemned to death because he was a deserter, but they couldn’t catch him. And my father’s father was a Republican follower of Mazzini, when being that meant one was an extreme leftist. And my father was a leader in the Resistance. It’s really in the family.
What you’re saying reaffirms what I find most inspiring in your work—the fact that you stand on the side of those who have been abused and humiliated. As you state it so movingly in the introduction to your book: “I have always looked on disobedience toward the overbearing as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”
That’s socialism, Jonathan. Being a socialist, or wanting socialism, doesn’t mean just the distribution of wealth. It should work, but it doesn’t in the so-called socialist countries. And for sure not in the capitalistic regimes. Socialism means much more to me. One of the great victories has been what we call the spirit of socialism with its sense of equality. When I was a little girl, the reality of hierarchy was so strong—the teacher above the pupil, the rich above the less rich, the bourgeoisie above the proletariat. In Europe we had it, we still have it, but we have it much less. And this was brought about by socialists and is why, for me, socialism is synonymous with freedom.
Socialism is freedom. When I say this, I imagine that if I were a peasant of Chianti and you were a landowner,