ITALY: Perilous Backfire

One way for Russia to imperil the U.S. position in Greece was to start a backfire in Italy. As U.S. troops, under the peace treaty terms, prepared to pull out of the country last week, the Communists struck hard.

In Parliament, Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni, who often acts as a Communist cat’s-paw, called for a vote of no-confidence in the Government of Premier Alcide de Gasperi. The Communists were preparing to re-enter the Government, where their disruptive power at this critical time would be greatly increased. The vote was postponed, but for Premier de Gasperi it was a close shave.

The Shock Troops. Meanwhile, strikes threatened to paralyze the country. In the industrial north, 800,000 steelworkers were going out on a general strike; to Italian leftists, steelworkers are known as the “motorized divisions of the Communist revolution.” In Florence, city employees were on strike, in Messina the printers walked out. In Catanzaro it was the building workers, and in the Venetian province the railway and streetcar workers. In Terni, demonstrating workers carried posters denouncing the Pope as a “starver of the poor,” and suggesting that Premier de Gasperi be hanged. Most serious of all was the battle of the fields: almost 1,000,000 agricultural laborers in the Po Valley were on strike, endangering Italy’s desperately needed rice crop. In the cities, food rations were promptly reduced.

Many of the laborers did not really want to quit the fields. But Communist squads and the Communist-dominated Chambers of Labor saw to it that the strike did not collapse. In Modena, city workers reinforced the agricultural strikers. Said they: “We have come to help our brothers in the field.” A favorite Communist tactic was deliberate dislocation of labor—ordering workers needed desperately in one place to farms where there was no work for them.

Red Dust. In Monza, Palmiro Togliatti threatened revolution. Speaking while a red setting sun shone through the reddish dust stirred up by a crowd of more than 500,000 workers, the Communist leader attacked the U.S. and the De Gasperi Government:

“There are war clouds on the horizon today because a country beyond the ocean, capitalistic United States of America, aims at the imposition of its own capitalistic way of life on the rest of the world. . . . Here in Italy we have a Premier who worships dollars as much as he worships the Eucharist.”

The crowd broke into uproarious laughter and cries of “Death to De Gasperi—hang him in the Piazza, Loreto!” (where Mussolini was strung up), and “Death to Truman!”

Cried Togliatti: “The battle which was begun with the northern agricultural strike is to continue tomorrow with a strike in heavy industry. It is only a beginning and a sample of what the workers will do if fulfillment of their rights is resisted.”