Rome

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ITALY has suddenly become an object of solicitude. After regarding it for years as a mere nuisance, American policy-makers have awakened to its crucial importance in our peace structure. This ravaged, disorganized, and bereaved country is still the second on the Continent in population, the third in industrial plant; moreover, it is in a key strategic position.

The United States needs friends in Europe, and needs a strong, stable Europe. If Europe is to live, we must aid in building up her industries, preferably in the non-German zone. Italy would appear a suitable starting point, given its abilities, its inherent weakness, its balanced social structure based on small property, its dependence on foreign imports.

These considerations must have weighed in the statements of Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and Assistant Secretary of State William L. Clayton, where, for the first time, the reconstruction of Italy was presented as a main point in American policy. The Italians as a whole have responded with eagerness to these first rays of hope. They are willing to work on any terms — to work on order, to hire out themselves and their plants as mere labor until they can set up again on their own. The trickle of supplies has widened to a rivulet.

But there is the “Red Peril.” Americans are still wary. Members of the Allied Commission tell each other in awed voices that in such and such a town two Russian offcers were seen walking into Communist Party Headquarters, or they say, “Watch Togliatti. Reinforce the carabinieri. Make sure the Pope has the situation in hand.”

But Italy is one country which certainly will not go Communist — which would not even if it were to be run by Communists. Trotsky — and no one will deny he had a certain experience in the matter — warned against any hopes of a real revolution in a country so “ hopelessly petty-bourgeois.” The figures bear him out. Of 45 million Italians, 23 million are engaged in farming, and are therefore politically cagey or indifferent, for the most part. About 10 million are in the industrial worker class. The rest are artisans, businessmen, government officials, members of the professions.

The “true” Italy

This middle class is mostly ruined and its outlook appears to be hopeless. But it remains the real mass party in Italy. It provides the cadres for most parties, including the Socialist. Individuals in it are human and appealing, but as a group they reveal an obdurate complex of know-nothingism and reaction.

Far from going proletarian, these people are angrily intent on defending their status and privileges, miserable as they may be. They cling to their habits, to their shreds of “humanistic” culture, and to their prejudices. It is hard to imagine what else they could do, in a country still subsisting largely through inertia, and where private initiative is reduced to the black market.

The middle class has learned nothing and forgotten what it wants to. It is still parochial in outlook, full of the old nationalist, authoritarian, jesuitical catchwords; clerical and anticlerical, gullible and skeptical, satirical and conformist in one; apparently reasonable and actually intractable. Its experience of Fascism having taught it all the ways of protective coloring, it is now assiduously engaged in blending with the Four Freedoms, with “democracy,” with outraged virtue, with the wallpaper, with anything that will suit the trend of the times.

These people of the middle class control Italian politics. They rashly called in Fascism to protect them; then, frightened by its excesses and exactions, they started the patient termite work from within which left it to collapse in a cloud of dust. After turning “anti-Fascist” en masse, they are now trying to fake a revolution, and the result is that in less than a year anti-Fascism has been hollowed out to a mere stageprop.

Is such a picture fair to the united fury of the years of occupation, to the thousands who were deported or who died before firing squads in the black Nineteen Months? Can it be true of a country where Partisan mass graves on every route show all classes united against German repression? Is it fair to the first-rate men who are now holding the country together by sheer force of prestige, and getting only casual recognition from the Allies?

One cannot ignore either side of the picture. The “true Italy,” as it knows and dreams of itself, has existed for centuries only in exceptional moments, and has kept madly undoing in life what it had achieved in flashes of illumination. The contrast is hard to explain; but this is a country of sharp contrasts: cypress and olive, strong coffee and clear water, selfless silent dignity and shameless intrigue.

The contrast comes out in the political picture. Today’s leaders, both in government and in the committees of liberation, are possibly the most courageous group in the country’s long history. These leaders were saddled with Badoglios and military expediencies. They had to adjust and procrastinate. Soon they found themselves cut off from the country by the AMG protégés, by the rush of politicians, purgers, and job-seekers from the old and allpervading regime. The middle classes had come together again into the usual impenetrable coalition of waltzing mice and pretzel-benders that nothing short of terror could break.

State socialism, in particular, seems to suit the members of the middle class, as an old and innocuous affair. The only thing that raises their hair is “ Communism ” — meaning, of course, the Red Terror of 1918. They see it everywhere, and are desperately trying to get the Allies to see it too. The war, they wave off casually; a pity it was lost, but it was all one man’s fault. They remain cocky, vociferous, and wholly devoid of any sense of guilt. They raise a howl against anyone who tries to jolt them into reality.

“Mr. Everyman”

The most conspicuous howling has been started by a weekly which shot up into national importance this summer and is selling more copies than almost all the other papers together. Its name — L’Uomo Qualunque — might be translated as “Mr. Everyman”; its motto, peevishly echoing the Duce’s “We don’t give a damn,” is “Will you stop badgering us?” (at least, this is a polite version of it); its general manners are unmentionable.

This particular Average Man has nothing to do with Henry Wallace’s Common Man; he has an unmistakable kinship with Hearst’s American. In its distortions, its appeal to raw prejudice, even in the heavy capitalizing of the text, the paper reads like one of Hearst’s editorials.

Its theme is simple: We are all right. We want to stay as we are. Nobody was a Fascist here. Nobody was responsible for the war, except a few bad men who have died and the king who is still shaming us. We are tired of living in a perpetual scare; we are tired of the purge; we are tired of petty injustice, of corruption, and of these self-appointed bosses. We will accept no lesson at the hands of the sanctimonious fools who pretend to teach us new ways. We will not retract; we will go on as we are, and we will be heard. It is we who are the democrats, who are the majority; it is we who are going to expose everybody.

Having shouted all this from the housetops, they conclude by threatening: “If those last-minute Partisans are organizing squads in order to keep us down, we will organize counter-squads of our own, and we shall see what we shall see.”

“Mr. Everyman,” in short, is returning to his vomit of 1920, and is ready to welcome a new Fascism. There is a difference, however. This time there is poverty, and there are the Allies. No saber-rattling; no big talk of manifest destinies. But the Allies, it is rumored discreetly, might countenance a “safe” dictatorship, sponsored and staffed by the clergy — something in the line of Salazar’s Portugal.

Who can purge “Everyman”?

Such a dictatorship will not come off. But there is in “Everyman’s” invective a core of dangerous truth. Fascism is the sinister pressure of modern reality. The modern state in its insatiable hunger tends to absorb the middle class almost without residue; there is no coherent group that is left intact to serve for future eventualities. So the all-comprising middle class has to undergo all the changes in itself as they come, and rot in its mistakes without chance of replacement.

Who is going to purge it indeed, except itself in a new form? Who is going to supersede it, except itself? It cannot be exterminated, because it is capable of starting a civil war on its own — and winning it again with Allied help. It cannot be educated, because it holds the monopoly of education itself, and is exceeding wise in its own conceit.

These people are rich in civilized qualities, but we cannot expect them to change their habits unless we create positive conditions; for they labor under the accursed legacy of century upon century of Bourbon, Aragonese, papal, and princely misrule — of bribes, inquisitors, and court parasites. They carry in their blood a “culture” of landowners, lawyers, clerks, orators, servers of writs, litterateurs, tax-collectors, and fawning humanists.

If there were normal ways of building up capital, they would in time turn into capitalists. But there just isn’t enough capital to start with, and they are too many; so they have to go on preying upon the flow of tax money and pushing each other out of a job. Left to itself, this class will carry on in tumult and inconclusion. Short of a revolution or a Reformation or both (neither of which the Allies would be willing to countenance) it will not die. It firmly intends to go on living as it is.

Such is the situation today in Latin countries, and that is why they were the first to spring Fascism on the world. Their middle classes are not comparable to ours. They should rather be called intermediate categories. As such, they tend to slide in whatever direction power indicates, serve it in any form, and pour themselves into any mold, lamenting their fate all the while. Vichy or Fascist, these intermediate categories have managed both in France and in Italy to absorb the futile efforts of the Resistance men and neutralize their attempts at a radical change.

In Russia, where the intermediate class was small, defeat and crisis were once solved in a revolution. In Germany, where industry was big, the ruined bourgeoisie were absorbed as technicians and turned up later as the innumerable Nazi experts in every branch. In Italy, the intermediate categories filled Fascism to overflowing; they populated its party machine, its bureaucracy, its banks, its trusts, its army, its social services, its militia, its five different and rival outfits of police.

When Fascism collapsed in Italy, the huge amorphous mass flowed into the six parties. At first it was a wild scramble in which everyone was trying to grab everyone else by the neck and shove him forward so that he should take the rap, until the Furies were appeased. When the dust subsided, most parties looked like what they actually had become — broken fragments of the mirror of Fascism.

The Stalinists have well appraised the situation. The presence of the Allies and their own dwindling membership have caused them to ditch any hopes of a real revolution in our time. They would lead Italy into a Tito “democracy” if they ever got a chance. They have little chance, however, against the rightist competition; hence they still store up weapons, but towards the time when they may find themselves with their backs to the wall.

Today, from this dejected and bewildered country there come querulous requests for a “strong government.” If we heed them, if we discountenance the present setup, weak as it is, and favor some military and rightist combination behind a parliamentary façade, we shall not have served our ends. For Italians by now have become consummate in the art of civil disobedience. A people which has learned to frustrate even German ruthlessness need not worry about the feeble posturings of puppet autocrats; it will cease to respond to any authority.

What we could do

There still is, although it is gradually getting weaker, a nucleus of leaders. There is the sad Lincolnian figure of Ferruccio Parri, protected by distant respect and by the trust of the common people. The Allies should help these men to deliver the goods. Over a period of time, given intelligent assistance, a small coherent group of political personnel may grow again from them to command the confidence of the nation. But the men who are needed are men of strict principles and strong character; they make uncomfortable partners at times, but we must not snub them and put a premium on slickness and subservience.

Even the disreputable, collaborationist, and utterly tame leaders of the leftist parties are enough to frighten us. We behave towards them like a maiden aunt feebly waving her umbrella in the face of an inquisitive billygoat. We assist in many indirect ways the machinery of deception and repression, when we ought to encourage the bewildered workers to find a defender of their freedoms, a strong syndicalist party which will not let them down again and again. How can we expect a worker to enter a libertarian syndicate, if he knows that eventually his employer will discriminate against him and will get Allied backing?

We could help economic initiatives, from average private capital to worker coöperatives, and all forms of free association, which have risen rapidly wherever possible, and we could do it without direct intervention, simply as is done in domestic economy through statesmanlike central banking. We have the men for that. We could, in short, assist the rise of sound activities, both capitalist and syndicalist, which might in time fence in the intermediate categories, absorb from their many valuable elements, and prevent them from rocking the boat.

These are a few of the things we might do, if we had a constructive line, or rather if we had any line at all, instead of relying on superstition and wretched weakness to keep the Italian people quiet. What we need is not a debased and demoralized Italy, but a progressive and prosperous Italy, as part of a progressive, prosperous, and varied Western Europe — and we need it badly.