Monday,
July 02, 2007
Garibaldi: Revolutionary, Sex symbol,
Global celebrity, Romantic hero; Bicentenary Celebration
The
ANNOTICO Report
Garibaldi
is my Hero!! But never did I realize how Constant and Enduring a Hero he was/is
to so many people Internationally.
You
must read the full article below. It justifies him not only as
However,
I had always thought his handing over all of Southern Italy and
But
then, since Garibaldi, on All other occasions showed
such incredible Political astuteness, and was the First to display uncanny
Media savvy, there is probably something he knew, that we don
However,
I am not pleased with Prof Riall who seems very
confused or conflicted, since she both admires and scorns the same traits of
Garibaldi, at different times. I don
Thanks to Dr Giorgio Iraci of
Garibaldi: The First
Global Action Hero
The Independent,
UK - June 30, 2007
Garibaldi, as
every schoolboy used to know, was the chap who marched up and down
Alas, such is the
preoccupation of the modern world with revisionism and debunking, you are not
to be allowed to be content with this iconic stub of information. For this year
is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great revolutionary fighter, and a
recent book by Professor Lucy Riall suggests there
may be more to our hero than meets the eye....
Some things she
is not disputing. This handsome swashbuckler, with the regal bearing, long
hair, full beard, burning eyes and trademark red cape cut a swathe through
European politics during the mid-19th century. For
three decades, Giuseppe Garibaldi was involved in every major battle in Italy,
provoking revolution in Sicily, bringing about the collapse of the Bourbon
monarchy, the retreat of the Austrian empire, the overthrow of the Papal
States, and the creation of the Italian nation. And he did so with the glamour
of a latterday Robin Hood. At one point the Pope put
a large bounty on his head, but not one Italian betrayed him.
Such was the
romance of his story that Garibaldi was at one point possibly the most
famous man in the world.
But he was not a
selfless, straightforward lionheart of the old
school, says Professor Riall in her book
"Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero". Rather, he was the first of a
new kind of "charismatic" political figure who self-consciously
manipulated his public image to turn himself into a global brand, representing
strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness and a spirit of adventure. He was the
world
He had plenty of
raw material to work with. As a soldier, Garibaldi
did not only show early mastery of the techniques of guerrilla warfare; he also
demonstrated personal bravery bordering on recklessness - leading ferocious
uphill bayonet charges against vastly superior opponents and literally
over-running the enemy.
As a political
radical he was well ahead of his time. He was a republican who called for the legal
and political emancipation of women, racial equality and the abolition
of capital punishment. This was rooted in his early association with a
mystic band of Christian communards, the St Simonians,
whose creed, long before Marx, was "from each according to his capacity:
to each according to his works; the end of the exploitation of man by man;
and the abolition of all privileges of birth." But he was a tireless
combatant against the clerical power of the Catholic Church, which he saw as
the bastardisation of religion.
He was a
privateer off the coast of the Americas, whence he had fled after his first unsuccessful
coup in
He had a
prodigious sexual appetite. In
"Most of
what is written is about him has either been either very pro or very
anti," said Professor Riall yesterday. "I
wanted to say something more complicated: that he was extraordinary, but
that he also had a very astute eye for putting his own heroism on display. He was
the first modern political figure. He used the popular press - which was
just emerging at the time with a huge appetite for a different kind of material
to appeal to the wider class of less educated readers." The new scribblers
wanted politics and history as living theatre, and that required heroes and
villains.
Garibaldi
himself was not the inventor of this new political spin. Credit for that can
go to Giuseppe Mazzini, the theoretical mind behind the move for an Italian
nation. "Mazzini, who lived in
But if Mazzini
started it, Garibaldi himself soon proved an imaginative pioneer of the
manipulation of the press. In 1860, when he drove the massive Bourbon army
out of
Garibaldi
shrewdly amended his image according to circumstances. Sometimes, his beard
ragged and wearing a red poncho, he was the revolutionary cowboy bandit of the
South American plains. Other times, his beard trimmed and clad in the blue
uniform of the Piedmontese, he was the responsible
army officer and the heart-throb of metropolitan
The highpoint
of his reputation came with that invasion of
It was one of
history
Garibaldi
became the first contemporaneously famous international hero. A master seaman, he travelled to Rio de Janiero,
In
On this
triumphal tour he met everyone except Queen Victoria, to whom, like other
political conservatives, Garibaldi was the Osama bin Laden of his day. "Garibaldi - thank God - is gone!"
declared the Queen on his departure from
The romance of
Garibaldi has endured ever since. The fascist dictators of the 20th century
extolled him. So did Zionist guerrillas in the 1950s and the Marxist
revolutionaries of the 1970s, until Che Guevara
supplanted him as an icon.
More recently
bedfellows as unlikely as the Italian media magnate Silvio
Berlusconi, the Euro-racist writer Oriana
Fallaci and the brutal Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev have
been united in their glorification of Garibaldi. "Unhappy the land
that is in need of heroes," Bertolt Brecht once
said. Looking at Garibaldi you can almost understand what he meant.
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