Rome

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ITALY is full of color these days. Things look exciting and catastrophic to correspondents; yet this wealth of good story material should not be interpreted as indicating a state of tumult everywhere. By and large the public order is tolerable. The incidents are just local cracks showing that the ice is beginning to move after the long freeze.

In Florence, which inclines to neat definition, partisans and royal parachutists date each other at 9.00 P.M. in Central Square and shoot it out in the approved Guelph versus Ghibelline style. In the plains of the North, peasants annex the crops and ask the landlords to sign new contracts, or else.

In Sicily, the ancient sickness of the island has broken out in real civil war, with well-armed and motorized brigades of the separatist army fighting regular divisions. The worst side of this outbreak is the amount of organization revealed, including a vast gun-running racket extending as far as the Yugoslav coast. But the organization in this case is not Communist. It is headed by the shadowy figures of the great local landlords, who are using feudal retainers and the social flotsam and jetsam left after the Allied invasion tide receded.

The problems are real but are limited in scope. The masses of Central and Northern Italy have not yet shown their hand, and the leaders of the Left are anxiously coöperating with the government in order to stave off the coming crisis for a few weeks more.

In the economic field, things look better than they really are. Reconstruction and the bustle of activity are visible everywhere. Transportation is still a major difficulty, but bridges are being repaired, and communications along the peninsula are almost reestablished. Many plants are working, and the normal exchange of goods has started again.

The topsy-turvy condition in which everyone appeared to have lots of money (Allied fiat money), but couldn’t find things to buy, has turned into the more logical situation of a scarcity of money to procure the available and necessary things. As a result, prices have dropped sharply, hoarded goods have come on the market, and the producers who had been playing the black market with carefully hidden and husbanded stocks of raw materials are putting them into production wherever possible. UNRRA supplies also are beginning to feed the industrial machine.

Italy on relief

How the Italians manage to keep alive is a mystery. One way is by selling their belongings. Another way is by paying only nominal rent, a process which is not without evil consequences in the form of chronic exasperation at the housing shortage. The situation is made worse by six million war homeless. Another method is keeping the diet down to about a thousand calories a day with the result that a common cold will snuff them out.

There are no reserves of material or biological supplies. There is a tragic shortage of drugs, anesthetics, hospital bed sheets — everything. Tuberculosis is rampant. The population shivers in unheated and damaged houses. Nobody who has not gone through a winter without relief from bone-freezing, brainnumbing cold, with not even an occasional pitcher of hot water to wash with, can know what such privation means.

And — for misfortunes hardly ever come alone — nature singled out this critical period for its greatest weather freaks of half a century. It rained for months on end when GI’s were working their way through the Apennines mud. Then it stopped raining. For two years implacable drought has cut crops in half and reduced the single local source of energy, hydroelectric power. Over and above the cold came darkness, imposed for hours each day. This winter there have been only a few days of rain. The only hope has been that the weather would break before the inexorable sunshine sets in again.

Everything considered, the people have taken these grim periods with exemplary calm. But the showdown is still bound to come. The government and business cannot go on wasting billions for the salaries of idle workers, and hundreds of thousands will have to be laid off. The layoff has been postponed twice. A number of industries, notably the Fiat automobile works, have given notice of their intention to shut down.

How long will charity last?

On their side, the middle classes have reached the end of their hidden reserves, which are huge in any civilized country. Some people have mobilized their belongings, from the family silver down to chairs and mattresses. UNRRA raw materials and food have staved off famine. But this aid is still unable to make up for the lack of foreign commerce.

Italy is still on relief. And since no one knows how long this kind of charity may last, people give up planning production. They have again started hiding away gasoline, a gallon at a time, against the day when gasoline will have to be bought on unknown terms and nonexistent foreign credits.

The fundamental aspect of the crisis is the fact that foreign credits, at least an urgently needed 600 million dollars, are not even in sight. There is no hope for them until the peace treaty has been signed and a stable government formed. What kind of settlement will the treaty of peace bring? What price level? There is already a double exchange rate — 220 lire to the dollar officially, and 400 in practice.

This financial uncertainty is upsetting enough. But if America insists on no tariff barriers and backs commerce with credit, it is clear that the Fiat works, for instance, will never be able to compete with American automobiles and tractors so long as Fiat’s overhead costs are spread on only one part of capacity production. Generally speaking, all planning departments which started so hopefully six months ago are in the doldrums of discouragement.

The monetary situation has one good aspect. Italy has been able to avoid the inflationary spiral despite the huge input of Allied military lire. But the reason is that the peasants (who never had so much before) have been gradually absorbing all money available through black-market food dealings and putting it away in capacious stockings. There is a farm population of 27 million. If we reckon the hoardings at 10,000 lire per capita, that makes 270 billion lire — more than the entire amount of the printed American lire. But when prices are stabilized at an international level, that money will pour out in exchange for such mass-produced goods as shoes, clothing, and household equipment. Then inflation may come.

Italy needs strong government

Italy needs a really strong government to steer her through the crisis. It takes a strong government to secure even minimum credits. To scrap stagnant industries, and to relieve mass unemployment, the North needs to carry through drastic social plans. It would take such a government to bring back order and production and to set up a yardstick for prices by an adequate policy of buying and stocking.

No real government is possible in Italy with this provisional, deadlocked six-party outfit, unrepresentative of any real distribution of forces. When Nenni said, “We need a constitution more than bread,” for once he was talking on a firm basis of common sense. Only a representative assembly could establish a government able to take responsibilities.

Since the need for strong government is overwhelming, the Rightists think that the time will soon be ripe when anything goes. Bloodshed is calmly expected. They are disarmingly candid about all this, expecting the Allies to understand.

Whoever has vested interests in Italy today wants a favorable outcome as their right. They will present themselves as oldtime conservatives with no tie to Fascism, but it is enough to consider that for two decades it was the Fascist regime that made, unmade, and distributed vested interests. That is the core of the matter, and the rest comes naturally, including nostalgia for the good old times.

The embittered veterans

The foul-mouthed and slobbering Giannini with his newspaper, L’Uomo Qualunque, is acting as a rabblerouser among some four million former Party members — the bedeviled, leaderless lower middle class. The danger, if any, is of a real neo-Fascist mass movement yet to come, and its leaders are likely to spring from the embittered veterans and repatriated prisoners.

By contrast the parties of the Left are lying low. Leftism has become the last refuge of old-style patriotism. But the only real statesman, Togliatti, frightens people because he is a Stalinist. Caught between foreign dominations, left and right, public opinion is dazed and passive.

On the national plane everything is a matter of compromise and postponement. The Communists themselves are going to face a stiff trial in party discipline, when the layoffs start, for having accepted government responsibility. They preach moderation, and the masses tend to escape them in the direction of some real Left party still in the making. Nor are the Socialists much better off, for it is the Socialist Interior Minister who will have to call out the armed forces against rioters.

And all the King’s men

Observers may well wonder at the ineptitude of Italian politicians as a class. They have allowed themselves to be worn down and depreciated. They exercise a powerless authority to the point that all look alike to the public. The reason lies in the initial mistake of accepting the Allied terms carelessly. These were imposed solely with military expediency in view. The Allies thought they must save the Italian state and accept the burden of responsibility themselves. Now it seems too bad they did.

Italy two years ago had a very definite complexion. It had gone Labor almost solid. If the North, with its already prepared organization, had been able to step in, the country would have had a legitimate government, even though it had only a provisional standing. But the North was cut off for nineteen months. Meanwhile the King and his entourage were again put in power by the Allies with the connivance of the Southern landlords.

This unfortunate move destroyed national unity. The Left could do little except endorse Allied measures, but they could not participate in a sincere national reconciliation, for they knew only too well that the actual power was in the hands of the King’s men, who were building up a machine under Allied sponsorship. So they raised Jacobin howls and got set for the coming showdown. They tried to counter hidden forces with a moral fait accompli, but they only succeeded in frightening the middle classes. The result was the recent swing of the pendulum to the right.

If there had been present any really democratic and serious-minded group commanding respect, no doubt it could have prevented turmoil and created a stable concentration. But the King’s strategic position checked and stultified just that possibility. Parri and his men came too late. Even the North wilted.

As it is, the one intelligible message conveyed to Italians from the outside is that they are a beaten country of no particular concern to anybody. Italians generally have felt that this attitude branded them as fools for their co-belligerence efforts and have turned with bitterness on its exponents. One result is that anti-Fascism is now dead for good. The antiFascists appear as birds of ill omen who croaked until their prediction came true and then looked foolish because they were unable to do anything about it. The whole situation is contained in an overheard conversation. An Italian officer asked, “But don’t you want us to be some kind of organized nation?” An English officer replied, “Hope you don’t mind, old boy — but you’ll remember what happened when you were one.”