WITHOUT HONOUR”

Waipa Post, Volume 51, Issue 3695, 9 December 1935, Page 3

WITHOUT HONOUR”

ITALIANS AT ADOWA. The Italians captured Adovva, and their Press and wireless with a single voice—Signor Mussolini’s voice—proclaim that the historic Italian defeat of 1896 is avenged and a national disgrace has been wiped out. Foreign nations will scarcely see things in that light, and there will be a widespread feeling that whatever reproach may have attached to the former defeat is as nothing to the ignominy and scandal of the recent victory. Here on the one side is a huge modern army organised by a great Power, with every death-dealing variety of modern military equipment — aeroplanes, tanks, artillery, machineguns, high explosives, gas —in the fullest profusion. What, with all this apparatus of massacre, do they go out to fight? A crowd of half-armed black men defending their homes against a criminal aggression, for which Signor Mussolini himself, when addressing his countrymen, alleged no motive but conquest. What sorL of honour can be acquired or vindicated by. triumphing in so unequal a conflict? Is it honourable to use all the resources of science to blow to pieces the flesh and blood of a brave primitive people in order to annex their land? Is it heroism to carry out a mechanical massacre? Human decency revolts at the whole proceeding. The greater the slaughter, the greater the infamy. If Italy can reap no laurels from this monstrous wickedness, ought she to be allowed to reap anything else? That is where the League of Nations now comes in. It has not prevented the war from starting. It has not saved from this initial butchery the people of a League State, whose ‘territorial integrity and existing political independence’ all the other .members of the League are pledged, under Article X of the Covenant, not merely to ‘respect,’ but to ‘preserve as against external aggression.’ Yet it may still justify itself if it insists that the -wrong-doer shall be precluded from consummating his wrong, and organises an effective effort by its members under Article XVI to compel him to stop.—Yorkshire Post.