Italy

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 215, 6 August 1943, Page 3

Italy

TALY, as we go to press, is still | ] at war with the United Nations, but Mussolini has gone and left no address. It is quite certain, too, that Italy would not be at war if a way of escape had presented itself. Whoever now really rules in Rome, the people want peace at almost any price; but it is one thing to be anxious to get out of the mess in which they now find themselves and another thing to discover how. They will not escape as long as Germany can hold them in; in other words until the Germans find it necessary to escape themselves; and no one knows when that point will be reached. We do know that it is approaching. As for the Fascists, they have become as ridiculous already as their fallen leader, who was no sooner dismissed than he was a joke. It is quite fantastic that a figure so obviously stuffed with straw was able for twenty years to rule forty million people and annoy and even alarm a hundred million. But it happened. It is clear now that firm resistance by either Britain or France would have stopped the conquest of Abyssinia. But their resistance was not firm. They gave way before his bluster, not merely because they were unprepared for war, but because they believed that he was both determined and able to sweep them out of his way if they attempted to stop him. He was perhaps half as able to seize the Mediterranean then as he was in 1940 to take Egypt, and conquer Gréece; yet France did nothing, and Britain, after a feeble attempt to organise a "sanctions" front against him, surrendered to his ‘bluff and moved timidly out of his way. It is now almost ludicrousa loud ranting and roaring and two great nations in retreat with nothing in pursuit. Unfortunately jokes on an international. scale can turn in a flash into tragedy; as that one did. The blusterer got an ally, as intoxicated as himself and many times more powerful and able, and it is only now, after the most appalling struggle in our history, that we are beginning to be sure that the world will be free again. Mussolini is out, his country is al-| most out, but tens of thousands must fall before Germany follows.