ITALY: Retreat of the West

As Catholics and as logical Latins, Italians viewed with dismay last week the physical retreat before advancing Bolshevism of the 118,000 Germans who abruptly left the Baltic States on orders of the Führer (see p. 21). Even the carefully controlled press began to express this feeling.

Il Corriere della Sera, leading newsorgan of Italy’s Pittsburgh (Milan): “This is the West which retreats in the face of the union of the East—a Bunion which continues slowly reaching all objectives without shots or ultimatums. . . . After seven centuries of battle against Slav influence, the German minorities which acted as sentinels of northeast Europe now retreat, giving up their parts to Russians. . . . The mass exodus of Germans from the Baltic is viewed with feelings of dismay.”

La Stampa of Turin: “German domination gave in only after hard fighting to the victorious Russian advance of Peter the Great’s armies, without, however, being completely eliminated. . . . The Germans [now] leave behind them habits of culture which can be eradicated only by violent substitution of another regime, such as the Bolshevik. . . .”

Il Corriere Padano of Ferrara, a minor Fascist organ, founded by Air Marshal Italo Balbo, Governor of Libya, took the crack at Bolshevism for which all Italians were itching: “We are born antiCommunists, and we intend to remain so. We have not an ounce of sympathy for the Bolsheviks, who are tragic buffoons, professional tricksters, models of vulgar bestiality, living monsters serving the most insane and infamous enterprise of subjugation, cruelty and human degredation which universal history can recall.”

Of Soviet War Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, soon to visit Berlin, Il Corriere Padano cracked: “If Lenin first, and Stalin afterward set eyes on him, it was simply because they judged him an exceptional gangster. For us, Voroshilov and his equals, like all carrion of Bolshevik Russia, do not interest us a bit. If among themselves they exalt or destroy one another, that is their affair. At worst there will be one less criminal going around the world.”

Still silent remained Il Duce’s own paper Il Popolo d’ltalia (to which all Fascist Party members must subscribe), unwilling yet to attack Joseph Stalin or to slam the Moscow-Berlin Axis. There will be time enough for that when it becomes certain that Joseph Stalin is going to thwart Benito Mussolini’s ambitions in the Balkans.