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Two days after Roosevelt spoke, worried Pope Pius XII, addressing 25,000 workmen brought to Vatican City from all parts of Italy, warned: "Salvation and justice are not to be found in revolution, but in evolution through concord." He decried anti-religious propaganda among the people, inveighed against labor-employer strife, condemned "social" revolution as "a mere show incapable of realization in fact." More than ever it was apparent that the hope for the underground, and for all Italian democrats, lies first in unconditional surrender, followed by military occupation. After that, if the Allies are wiser than they were in North Africa, the Italian people can speak for themselves. On that day Mussolini's epitaph can read:
Benito Juarez Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, born July 29, 1883, tasted the grey bread of the poor in his early youth and never forgot it. From his part-time blacksmith father he learned atheism and anarchy. From his schoolteacher mother he learned enough culture to become, first a grade-school teacher, then a journalist. He sold out the policy of his first important newspaper (Avanti), official organ of the Italian Socialist Party, for a reported price of $8,000 a month.
He picked up the cult of superman from Nietzsche, the creed of power from Machiavelli. Pareto taught him to despise democracy, Marx to scorn capitalism, and Sorel the myth of universal violence. He courted martyrdom, spat at priests, lived promiscuously with at least half a dozen women. Out of Marxism, jingoism and obscurantism he compounded a new thing called Fascism and imposed it on a nation weakened by war and frightened by social unrest.
His thugs spread terror, his henchmen grabbed Italy's financial and economic power, and through the organized murder in 1924 of Giacomo Matteoti, the one dangerous leader of his opposition, boosted him to a modern tyrant's throne.
For the Italians' romantic love of their homeland and their nostalgia for past glories, he espoused the cult of Romanism. He fancied himself a new Julius Caesar, was courted by the world's big shots, loved to be called leonine and at the same time "father of his people." He helped Adolf Hitler to power, was mastered by his pupil. Trapped by his own illusions of grandeur, he led his people into war in an unholy alliance with Germany and Japan. By 1943 he had lost his Empire, and Allied bombs and bayonets threatened to chase him into the sea.
*At a Washington private press conference in May Churchill said: "Of this you may be sure, we shall continue to operate on that donkey at both ends—with a stick as well as with a carrot."