Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1940. ITALY AND MUSSOLINI.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 December 1940, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1940. ITALY AND MUSSOLINI.

COMMENTING on the resignation of Marshal Badoglio from the post of Chief of the Italian General Staff—now only one, though doubtless the most important, of a shoal of resignations of hi Mi military and naval officers in Italy, the London “Times” has stressed the extent to which the personal position of Mussolini is thus undermined, and the dilemma in which the Dnee finds himself placed. The loss of Marshal Badoglio (“The Times” observes), is bound to bewilder, if. not depress, the Italian people, who held him in high respect. Mussolini’s prestige is now more than ever bound up with the Greek war. It would be a confession of abject failure to accept German help at this stage. This is true enough as far as it goes, but it leaves untouched the more important issues now raised in and regarding Italy. Mussolini obviously is in process of being exposed as,a reckless criminal and incompetent, gamester who has led his country into ruin and disaster. The difficulties in which Mussolini is encompassed and the fate, that is likely to overtake him are, however, of minor importance. Vastly more important is the question’ of what prospects Italy has, not merely of getting rid of Mussolini and his abominable tyranny, but of getting out of the terrible predicament in which she is involved under bis leadership.

It has to be said that these prospects, at an immediate view, are by no means brilliant. Italy’s fortunes and future are shadowed much less today by the defeats she has suffered at the hands of the Greeks than by her so-called alliance with Germany—an alliance which makes her in fact the slave of the Nazi dictatorship. If the people of Italy were free agents, the refusal of her leading military and naval chiefs to be associated any longer with the policy Mussolini has imposed on the country a policy which combines blundering with brigandage—might well be expected to give the .signal for a powerful movement of national regeneration. The Italians, however, are not free agents. The possibility, at least, is now opened that they may find the national dictatorship of Mussolini replaced by a German dictatorship, in which Mussolini perhaps may be allowed by the Nazis to remain nominally in office as the puppet, ruler of an enslaved nation. In the earliest days of Italy’s participation in the war, wellinformed foreign observers declared that the country and its people were being dragged against their will into active military alliance with Germany. Broadcasting in June last, for example, Mr Vincent Sheean, an American who had, in his own words, known and loved Italy for many years, said in part:—Mussolini has decided that the Italian nation, which belongs by nature to our world, shall fight against democracy. I would 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. ... Mr Sheean went on to declare that he believed there would be desertion, treachery and sabotage in the Italian army, navy and air force beyond anything hitherto known to the experience of men in war and'that the ordinary people of Italy would do everything they could' contrive to help their alleged enemies to win. Observing that he had heard the same story from Fascist, officials and other people who presumably were the instruments of Mussolini’s policy, Mr Sheean added: — 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 profoundly 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. This testimony might be bodied out indefinitely and it, is amplified most, strikingly at the moment in the resignation of military and naval commanders some of whom, at least, certainly would not willingly have disowned the service of their country i'n a time of crisis and peril. It remains a grim and overshadowing fact, however, that Mussolini in his insane lust for power and conquest, has gone far towards placing his country in hopeless bondage to Germany. In spite of the sting of defeat, many .Italians no doubt are ready enough to acknowledge that the attack on Greece was a foul outrage, that Italy’s whole participation in the war is an unnatural crime and that the worst enemy of the Italian people is the posturing egomaniac who inhabits the Palazzo Venezia. The essential problem confronting the Italian people, however, is not that of making an end of Mussolini and h'is work—a task that should now in itself be comparatively easy —but rather of easting off the chains that Nazi Germany, with Mussolini’s aid, has wrapped about them. Assuming, as seems wholly probable, that the bulk of the Italian people desire nothing better than to withdraw from the war, the position in which they now find themselves placed is tragic. With their external sources of supply cut off by the British blockade which has isolated not only the Dodecanese Islands but the Italian colonial territories in North-East Africa, and is helping to make ever more precarious the plight of the armies under Marshal Graziani which have rashly invaded Egypt, Italy is in an. extreme degree economically dependent on Germany. It is probable, also, that a revolt by the Italians against the Axis would lead to the occupation of their country by Nazi forces. In looking either forward or back, the Italians are encompassed by deadly dangers, and for that plight they have to thank Mussolini.