MUSSOLINI AND HITLER AS PURISTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 71, 21 September 1943, Page 4

MUSSOLINI AND HITLER AS PURISTS

Amid the execrations of such stainless purists as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Marshal Badoglio is trying to swing the Italians to the side of the Allies. It must be conceded, in the first place, that the man who stabbed France in the back in 1940, and the man who stabbed Russia in the back in 1941, should be excellent judges of all that is moral and ethical. One of Mussolini's admirers in 1940 described him as being inspired by a lofty "leitmotif" (freely translated as loot-motive), and everyone knows that when Hitler in the following year took his Russian scrap of paper, rammed it down his gun-barrel, and fired it at Stalin, Hiiler did so only in response to the loftiest impulses of racial purity. Let it be granted, then, that Mussolini and Hitler, are outstanding experts in morals and ethics. Let it be granted, also, that fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, but that Mussolini and Hitler cannot. On that assumption, .it follows that if Germany and Italy were glad to accept in 1940----41-42 all the help that they could get from Britain's ally France, Britain and

America will not be so much at fault if they accept in 1943-44 . all the aid obtainable from Germany's ally Italy. Surely the Mussolini-Hitler morals work as well in reverse as in forward motion. To Hitler and Mussolini, Laval was the embodiment of practical justice, Petain the acme of morality. That being so, can Badoglio be anything less?

It is true that the Allies will obtain from Italy the services of fleets and of soldiers, whereas Hitler obtained from France only labourers and an anti-Russian contingent of fighting men. But if the French soldiers who, after 1940, fought against Russia, were only the inadequate i irerunner ■of a great French. army whose services Hitler hoped for and did not secure, that failure was not Hitler's fault. Hitler, and Mussolini in his wake, did all that was in them possible to convert^ France into the fullest war service* against her ally Britain; and their incomplete success does pot obscure the fact that a precedent was set by these two high examples of morals, the dictators of Axis Europe. How, then, is it morally proper for them to criticise Badoglio because he has gone a little farther along the road than the coerced Petain was prepared to go? Marshal Badoglio's message to the Italian people concerning Germany's late ally is just the message that Hitler and Mussolini would have liked to put' into the mouth of Petain, concerning Britain's late ally, in 1940. It is rather to Badoglio's credit that he makes no bones about it. He calls on Italians to fight against the Germans, Hitler, Mussolini, and all their works. Petain was half-blooded for Hitler; Badoglio is full-blooded for the democracies, and his message contains no sanctimonious humbug of the Petain kind. In an appeal for guerrilla and every other kind of activity against the Germans, he brackets with them the pro-German Italians. "It is your absolute duty," the Marshal tells the Italians, "to fight on at the side of the British and Americans against the Germans an| against the few senseless Italians who put themselves under German command. We intervened decisively against Germany following the aggressive attitude of the Germans. We are cooperating side by side with the British and Americans who are now accepting our assistance in the task of driving the Germans from our country." Whoever may accuse Badoglio, it does not lie in the mouth of Hitler and Mussolini to do so. Their own chickens of 1940 have come home to roost, and one more profound irony must be credited to impassive history. j