UNPOPULAR MOVE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 September 1940, Page 6

UNPOPULAR MOVE

ITALIANS ANO THE WAR GAMBLER’S DESPAIRING THROW. FIGHT AGAINST DEMOCRACY. Italy’s declaration of war was an event which, like many others of recent weeks, had been abundantly foreseen, stated Viscount Sheean, on a Colombia broadcasting system programme. Many efforts were made to prevent it, including efforts by numerous Italians. That this event has taken place at all is due to the will of one man, Mussolini. Not long ago I was in Italy, a country I have known and loved for twenty years, where I have many where some aspects of life appeal immeasurably to anybody who values the culture of Western Europe and the United States. Italy, France and England are, in fact, the three countries which have created our culture. I don’t think anybody would wish to rule out the contributions ot the Germans nor of the Slavs to the general civilisation. And yet it is true that the peculiar character of the Western mind has been influenced very little by them. There was only one German in all history who talked our language, and his name was Goethe. If he were living today he would be either in a concentration camp or eking out a precarious exile. Mussolini has decided that the Italian nation which belongs by nature to our world shall fight against democracy. I’d like to testify that in my recent three weeks in Italy I met nobody at all who shared his view. I know lots of people in Italy, and plenty of Fascists among them. No matter how firmly they had supported Mussolini’s course in interior affairs, they did not like this German alliance and the war to which it was inevitably leading. I believe that there will be desertion, treachery and sabotage in the Italian army, navy and air force beyond anything hitherto known to the experience of men in war. lam quite positive that the ordinary people of the country will do everything they can contrive to help their alleged enemies to win. I have been told over and over again by Italians in recent weeks that they would desert at the earliest opportunity and bear arms if possible against their own country in the hope that this enterprise of Mussolini’s would be defeated. I heard the same story from Fascist officials, from people in Italian ministries, from people who presumably are the instruments of this policy. But the main source of my impression is the peasants and fishermen whom I have known for many years, who belong to no political party and care nothing whatever for power politics. They hate , war. They are an ancient and pro- ' foundly civilised people. They have never been a warlike people in the sense of desiring conquest. The theory that they are the heirs of ancient Rome with all its appetite for glory is one of the most foolish delusions of the Fascist delirium. They have never been warlike. The most important and significant fact about Mussolini is that he no longer knows his own people. He did have at one time an almost uncanny sense of what they felt and wanted, but for 18 years he has occupied the semi-godlike position in which he cannot talk in ordinary terms to ordinary people, and knows nothing whatever about them. I as an American, a foreigner, can get into the kind of talk with his people which he, the Duce, has no chance of finding ever again.

The Fascist organisation can carry its present desperate enterprise for a short time, I think a very short time. If it is possible for the Italian armed forces to carry out their programme in Southern France, Gibraltar, Tunisia and the Eastern Mediterranean within a comparatively short, time, they may possibly survive. If they have to light for a long period, they are in my opinion lost. Italy is at the present moment the most demoralised and anarchical country in Europe. I met nobody whatsoever of whatever rank in society who believed that this desperate plan of attack would succeed. What is more, I met nobody who believed that Italy would lie belter off if it did succeed. I am talking of all kinds of people, from fishermen to men or very high rank. Mussolini's will alone has pulled this (rick, and it was the last despairing throw of a ruined gambler. He was ruined whether he came in or stayed out, and he is playing everything he has on the chance of German victory in which he firmly believes. The great fact that German victory woidd be the end of Italian independence has been clear to all of his helpless subjects for a long time. It is apparently still not clear to him.