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The atrocity stories were backed up by harangues on the theme that Italian immigrants have provided "the most solid working arms and the most capable brains on the North American Continent; . . . now the Americans are coming back over your ports and cities to repay you with bullets and to spread death and destruction." For Italo-Americans abroad the Fascists provided another line, easily picked up by the cheapest short-wave radio: Mussolini was forced to enter World War II because Britain would not grant the "just demands" of the Italian people for "freedom from fear." This ancient outcry comes from a Mussolini-bred national psychosis that Italy has al ways been kicked around, instead of being boosted by helping hands to No. 1 posi tion in the world. Its effectiveness could be judged by a recent flood of letters to Washington protesting the bombing of Italian cities.
"Live Dangerously." With such threads Mussolini has tried to weave a web of resistance. He has told his people that an Allied victory means enslavement to imperialist powers. He has titillated their sense of personal honor and national pride, as he did in 1935 when he defied the sanctions imposed (but not enforced) by the League of Nations during the Ethiopian campaign. Italians rallied behind him then. They may do so more generally now than the Allies expect. At least Mussolini has built up a façade of bravado, patterned on the ancient cry of the gladiators in the Colosseum : "Morituri te salutant" (Those who are about to die salute you). But in case the façade trembles or Darlans gnaw their way through it, Mussolini has made certain that those who helped him to power, and those who have been crawling on his back, will be with him when the walls come down.
The most overripe fruit on the top branches of the corporate-state system has been cut away. "Routine" shakeups in Party organizations have occured so often in the past six months that the people can scarcely keep track of them. But they do know that Mussolini has called back into power his old stalwarts of the club-and-castor-oil era, notably such "perfect Fascists" as Roberto Farinacci, now Minister of State, and Carlo Scorza, Party Secretary.
Farinacci, who lost a hand in the Ethiopian campaign (reportedly while using dynamite to catch fish), has what passes for the voice of the Fascist conscience. His newspaper, Il Regime Fascista, has railed against the abuses of bureaucracy, against defeatists, inflation and black-market dealings. Scorza, tall, tough provincial Party boss who once cheated Credito Toscano out of $6,000,000, is one of the Party's most ruthless administrators, has run an almost continuous series of purges of apparently thousands of "cancroid creatures who have crept into the Mussolini structure."
One of the shaky pillars of this baroque structure, the Fascist Grand Council, last week held its first officially announced emergency session since the night before Italy daggered France. It was followed by an order which was tantamount to total mobilization and a list of drastic reforms calling for "increased ruthlessness," and "pitiless elimination" of subversive activities. The hour for Fascism to pit its strength against the Allies was nearing.