On April 18, the Italian people are to vote in a fateful election which many believe will be the turning point in the struggle between West and East for Europe, and which may go far to determine the great question of peace or war. Hal Lehrman here analyzes the lineup of forces concentrated in Italy, and tries to offer some perspective on the possibilities that lie ahead.

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In a show of strength some months ago, thousands of Communist partisans paraded the streets of Milan dressed in American uniforms. The only non-GI item in the costume was the red kerchief each marcher wore jauntily around his neck. If the Cominform this spring or summer makes its bid for power in Italy by force, these same paraders will be the elite corps at the hard center of the putsch. It ought to surprise nobody if such an uprising—aimed, as usual, against “conspirators with the fascist-capitalist West”—rolls in GI jeeps and shoots its way to glory with GI guns.

This writer remembers looking down the barrel of an American-made tommy gun when a Red Army sergeant arrested him in Austria for stopping to eat lunch while traversing the Soviet zone with a Soviet pass. He remembers watching Hungarian Communists shepherd truckloads of sure voters to the Budapest polls in Dodge weapons carriers donated by the Soviet high command. He recalls how UNRRA textiles which were to become pants for Yugoslav peasants got made instead into Russian-style uniforms for the Yugoslav Army and how US gun caissons and assorted vehicles shipped as lendlease to Moscow turned up in a ten-mile procession of the “new democratic Yugoslavia’s” military power deploying past Marshal Tito’s reviewing stand in Belgrade. The occasional raids by Italian police these days on Communist arms depots cannot possibly keep pace with the nightly deliveries of weapons all along the Adriatic coast by motor launch out of Yugoslavia. It is quite safe to predict that if and when the hour strikes for Italy, it will be struck partly with carbines, automatic pistols, and sub-machine guns marked “Made in America.”

Such a bizarre denouement can hardly be attributed to American guile. One may even be pardoned for wishing, in the lamentable light of current Italian affairs, that our foreign policy were one-tenth as calculating and sinister as it is intermittently charged with being by Henry Wallace and his associates.

Nor is the delivery of weapons to our enemies with which to shoot down our friends the only evidence of American confusion in Italy. It is now clear that the whole Italian crisis has fed and grown fat on our blunders. If Washington had understood the Communist tactic better, we might not be fearfully waiting in this month of April upon elections which may smash our main dike against the sweep of Communism to the Atlantic. And if the outcome of the Italian vote should in itself fall short of total disaster, and still leave us time to redeem Italy, we shall waste the opportunity unless we commit some of those “imperialist crimes” for which we are eternally being denounced by Pravda without ever collecting the reward. Otherwise, Italy will be lost—and our own security will not long survive her departure. For a Red Italy means even more than a gun in the back of democratic France, the further isolation of Trieste and Austria, and the beginning of panic throughout Western Europe. With Stalin astride the central Mediterranean, Greece remains tenable only by a miracle, and remote Turkey rots like fruit on a severed vine.

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How is it that Communism has been able to burrow so deeply into the soil of Italy, world center of Catholicism, arch-enemy of Marx and the Bolshevik society?

First of all, the credit must go to Mussolini. He was the best organizer that Communism in Italy ever had. He prepared the ground. His police state lopped off the potential democratic leaders, stifled the democratic instincts of the masses, reduced the Italian people to an apathy from which only demagoguery could stir them. His imperial Fascism hauled Italy into a war which dissipated her overseas outlets for excess population, drained her domestic resources, brought ruin, unemployment, and hunger. He thereby concerted Italy into an ideal terrain for Communist maneuvers.

Further, Mussolini involuntarily but nonetheless effectively built up the Communist political machine. For a long time, the only underground operating against Fascism was a Communist underground. It had many years to perfect its structure and discipline. Most of the early victims of the Fascist tribunals were Communists. Those who were not were branded as such by Fascist propaganda anyway. The indiscriminate identification of Communism with all anti-Fascism then and later was false, but the confusion took root, and began to flower abundantly in Moscow’s favor as soon as the hated Blackshirts’ grip was loosened by defeat in the war.

Close second to Mussolini in unconscious aid to Communism after Italy’s liberation, came Allied policy—or rather Allied lack of policy.

Moscow shipped in seasoned Italian Communists trained in Kremlin schools, Russian NKVD technicians, money, and newsprint. These were put to work organizing, recruiting, propagandizing, promising all things to all men. While they labored, we dozed. We talked and talked about democracy, but did virtually nothing to make democracy possible. Instead of the flood of materials we could have poured in, we sent the Italian democrats only a trickle of the propaganda tools they needed to win friends and votes. We allowed Fascists to stay in power. We expected democracy somehow to flourish in a climate which had no experience of it, leaving the masses to grapple with the miseries of feudal agriculture, parasitic capitalism, the chasm between wages and prices, the co-existence of black markets and starvation. And, perhaps worst of all, we failed totally to penetrate the purposes and methods of the enemy. Instead of separating Communism from democracy, we insisted on an alliance with Communism and on escorting it to a seat of power, long after the military necessities of the war had ceased to justify such friendliness.

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We could have studied the dismal histories of such fronts in prewar France and Spain, as well as innumerable minor examples of Communist “collaboration” with democratic parties. We might have known that the United Front was the classic device for enabling an organized Communist minority to manipulate the majority and then seize or destroy it. But we were in the era of good will, the evil. In honeymoon with the Soviets—and we insisted on duplicating on the national level in Italy the United Front we fondly thought we had achieved on the international level with Stalin and Molotov. It was Cordell Hull, not Vishinsky, who sounded the call in Moscow for a United Front government in liberated Rome. It was the Voice of America, not Radio Moscow, which did the Kremlin’s work by trumpeting the virtues of “democratic coalition.” It was official Washington, against the advice of Italian-American labor leaders, which literally forced the Communists on the parties of the democratic Left and moderate center. Italian liberals here who knew the facts of life about United Fronts and tried to get to Italy to sound the alarm, learned that there was suddenly no space available on any of the American transport planes flying the Italian route.

With Communist boss Palmiro Togliatti in the cabinet as Vice Premier, and a generous sprinkling of his aides in other important jobs, there began what might be called a drive for the “hispanization” of Italy. As in Spain, this consisted of obstructionism and sabotage inside the government to discredit the non-Communist ministers and saddle the minority on the backs of the majority.

Not only Togliatti but his chief lieutenant Luigi Longo, together with lesser satellites like Giuseppe di Vittorio and even the Socialist puppet, Pietro Nenni, had all actually served in Spain during the civil war. When the curtain rose in Rome, they were ready to play their roles brilliantly. Knowing that democracy was on trial, they did everything they could to make it look silly. They obtained, for instance, the amnesty of swarms of imprisoned Fascists, to the revulsion and bewilderment of the long-suffering anti-Fascist masses. They blocked essential reforms by piously demanding the impossible and rejecting anything less as to near impotence.

Last May Premier Alcide de Gasperi finally threw the Communists out, but by then most of the damage was done. Togliatti and his colleagues had gone a long way towards convincing a disillusioned electorate that democracy, advertised by the west as something new and wonderful, was nothing more than “disorganized Fascism”—and that they, the Communists, Were the real hope of the future.

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In addition to confusing Italian public opinion, the Communists had used their period of respectability to take and consolidate a hold on key sectors of that public pinion. First in line were the trade opinion. Under Fascism, the labor syndicates had been mere bureaucratic facades. With liberation, all of them crumbled. Authentic local unions then began to spring up, and the various parties raced to capture these new groups before the fall of Rome. But the United Front fetish halted the competition. The Socialist, talked into it by Nenni, agreed to rebuild the pre-Fascist Confederation of labor with the Communists. The OWI ballyhooed the compact on the air and certain agents of OSS went all out for it on the ground. Military Government officers, illiterate in native politics and wishing mainly to avoid a decision between “bunches of Italians,” urged all local factions to “get together.” Persuaded that it was the American wish, the centrist Christian Democrats, strongest party in the country, went along too. With the Confederation reborn, the Communists inexorably took charge, thanks to their unlimited funds and army of skilled organizers. Today they control eighty-five percent Of Italian labor.

The same United Front tactic brought dividends of power over the confederaterra of farm workers. It also paid off in most of the cooperatives, which had been traditionally Socialist but were led by the renegade Nenni into the Communist fold. Many of these cooperatives, incidentally, did their chief trade in American food packages, medicines, and fertilizers. The national partisan organization, whose bonafide veterans had fought well against Mussolini and the Germans during the war, was taken over by the simple Communist device of handing a membership card to anybody who asked for one, whether he had been a partisan or not.

One of the richest prizes of all was the Union of Italian Women. This was completely fresh territory, female suffrage having arrived in Italy only after liberation. At the head of the Union was Rita Togliatti, the Communist chiefs wife, and Giuliana Nenni, the fellow-traveling Socialist chief’s daughter. This sisterly association did excellent work in child care, maternal welfare, health camps, and the like, on a national scale—all the time dispensing Communist dogma with other gratuities. An auxiliary function was to be agreeable to soldiers. In the confusion following the defeat and the Allied occupation, Italian troops were straggling home from every direction. Younger members of the Union transformed themselves into a kind of impromptu Red Cross, to greet the returning heroes with proper warmth and revive “morale.”

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Since their dismissal from the government last Summer, the Communists, along with the bulk of the Socialists and several splinter groups now incorporated in the so-called “Democratic Bloc,” have been campaigning along two lines in preparing their next reach for power. On the action front they have employed the various organizations they dominate to stage strikes and mass demonstrations occasionally intermixed with planned riots and even miniature uprisings. Such disorders perform the double duty of making things harder for the government and increasing the economic difficulties which gain votes for Communism. An added benefit is the extra costs and problems created for the Marshall Plan in Italy. But strikes and “spontaneous” demonstrations are old devices, well worn from usage in countries farther to the East in Russia’s Europe. It is on the propaganda front that Italy’s Communists have displayed their originality.

In Italy the Communist propaganda line operates on the principle that people must be told exactly what they want to hear. It is therefore, at one and the same time, Marxist and imperialist, share-the-wealth and conservative, revolutionary and devoutly religious. It pledges help from America but calls down a pox on America. It favors Stalin and it favors Garibaldi. It soft-pedals the Italian Communists’ attempted sellout of Trieste to Yugoslavia and whispers that if Italy votes satisfactorily the Russians may help her recover Africa. In Tuscany it courts the sharecroppers by promising a bigger percentage of the harvest; in Southern Italy it makes open alliances with the corrupt local political machines. Its agents tour the countryside with maps indicating the exact piece of land which each peasant will get when the Communist agrarian reform goes through—although the same piece of land is assigned several times over because there is not enough to go around. The Communists vilify Premier de Gasperi as “Chancellor” de Gasperi because he was a deputy to the Hapsburg Parliament from the Trentino—but they carry pictures of Stalin on tall poles. They wave clenched fists toward the West—but get up peace petitions thirty feet high purportedly signed with two million names. They denounce American aid as foul capitalist intervention—but assure the electorate that the rich Americans are boobs and will send food anyway even if Italy goes Red. Secretary Marshall can deny this daily, but Communist newspapers and orators will go on saying it.

The chief triumph of make-believe is the party’s professions of faith toward the church. It will be remembered that Togliatti, to the delight of the clerical Christian Democrats and the mortification of the anti-clerical Social Democrats, used his moment of grace in office to write the Lateran Treaty into the new Italian Constitution. In the Communist rank and file are still some simple priests whose party connections date back to the underground days of the common fight against Il Duce. Togliatti knows that the Italian masses, though they may look to him for bread, look to the Pope for their spiritual sustenance. Accordingly, the Communists reply to Vatican fulminations by sweetly urging party members and friends to attend mass. When they collect ten thousand Communist women for a peace congress in Rome, they send them forth parading not with hammers and sickles but with doves.

 

As I write this, Italy’s elections are set for April 18, less than three weeks away. It is not altogether unthinkable that between now and then the Communists may “postpone” the elections in favor of an armed rising. Such, in effect, was what happened in Czechoslovakia when the Communists there, convinced they would regret it if the voters were allowed into secret voting booths, resorted to police rule, action committees, and threat of civil war as a safer way to circumvent the Czech “reactionaries.” But if the Italian Communists hold their fire and the elections do come off, the various possible results all seem to promise a troubled future for Italy anyway.

There is, first of all, the chance that the “Democratic Bloc” will win an absolute majority. This would be a disaster of major proportions. Italy would then turn speedily—and legally—into a complete Soviet satellite, and nothing could be done about it. Fortunately, the prospect of such a crushing defeat for democracy is slim enough to be negligible.

On the other hand it looks fairly certain—barring more strokes of good luck and genius like the brilliant Anglo-Franco-American demand for Trieste’s return to Italy—that the Communists and their friends will dangerously increase their present strength in Parliament. They now have around thirty percent. The Vatican’s intelligence service, which is rarely wrong in such matters, calculates that this may go up to beyond forty percent. If so, one of two things may happen. Depending on advice from the Vatican, which dominates centrist strategy, the Christian Democrats will either attempt to form a government without the Bloc or else take it into the cabinet in order to “control” it.

If the former tactic is adopted, it is hard to see how de Gasperi could obtain and keep a majority when some forty percent of Parliament would automatically oppose everything he did. It would be particularly difficult if the suspicion is confirmed that the Communists are behind a new extreme right-wing party, the Italian Social Movement (MIS), which is campaigning vigorously and may win a small but crucial number of seats in the next National Assembly. This MIS is an ultra-nationalist outfit but, curiously, it directs most of its saber-rattling against the Western powers. Another oddity is that most of its leaders are the republichini of Mussolini’s brief North Italian Republic who were later amnestied by none other than Communist leader Togliatti in his capacity as Minister of Justice. If the MIS deputies vote against the Centrist coalition, de Gasperi may be hemmed in on both sides and unable to govern. And if de Gasperi should nevertheless manage to scrape together a workable majority, the Communists are not likely to remain passive. At the least, they are expected to follow the usual pattern of strikes and riots. They may even go farther—and call for civil war.

Should the centrists, however, decide on appeasement, that might also mean the beginning of the end. The Bloc, as the largest single unit in Parliament, would certainly demand key ministries like Interior, Justice, and War. If de Gasperi refused, the Communists could decline to enter the government, and then turn to violence. If de Gasperi accepted, or even if he surrendered less than all the positions demanded, the stage would be set for a repeat performance of the Czechoslovak legerdemain. It was by their “democratic” supervision of police, army, and press that the Prague Communists maneuvered into total power, and their Roman colleagues will try to be at least as agile.

This last alternative is so distasteful that the centrists will hardly stand by and spinelessly allow it to happen. Much more probably, the test will be a test of arms. For this the revolutionary Left has been long preparing.

The Communists are especially strong in the North, which may try to set itself up as a separate “people’s republic” with Yugoslav assistance. The Bloc already holds virtually all the industrial cities of the North—Turin, Venice, Genoa, Bologna, and Florence among them—where the habits of local insurrection and autonomy are part of the city-state and communal tradition. The Bloc also controls the local Chambers of Labor, easily transformable into a kind of soviet. It has guns, even in the South, where the Cominform’s secret committee for France and Italy has been accelerating clandestine arms deliveries against the day when the Western imperialists set up “war bases” in Sicily and the Italian boot. The Communists have their own army, more than seventy-five thousand strong, built around the wartime partisan units and drilled by Yugoslav instructors. And they have plenty of money—the ten billion lire taken from Mussolini’s private till when Communist partisans nabbed the fleeing dictator, the steady flow of dues from nearly two and a half million party members, the fat tribute extorted from industrialists who fear strikes or from ex-Fascists who fear denunciation, and the untraceable but unlimited supply of currency smuggled in from Yugoslavia. Except for a contribution known to have been recently made by the Polish Socialists, Nenni’s left-wing Socialists dip into the deep Communist treasury for practically all their funds. The Communists have lately taken a costly three-hundred-room office building as Rome headquarters, aptly located on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure—“The Street of the Dark Shops.” They have fleets of cars and trucks, with an ocean of gasoline. Their newspapers are large and many. They can afford to support Bloc clubs in the remotest villages and hamlets. They never stint on free-flowing wine parties for the enlightenment of prospective voters. And they will have ample cash on hand to finance an Italian putsch of any magnitude.

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The de Gasperi government demonstrated last Autumn that it could handle Communist strikes and riots. But those disorders did not amount to a shooting civil war. Since then, the police have been strengthened but so have the Communist para-military forces. It is no longer certain that the legitimate government would be able to put down a large-scale insurrection. And it is most painfully clear that if Belgrade should recognize a northern “free democratic people’s republic” under Togliatti and then dispatch Yugoslav troops openly or secretly across the border, the Italian army and police would be overwhelmed.

The one bulwark between Italy and such catastrophe is the United States. If American military supplies to Italy will suffice to maintain the legitimate government, then we can limit ourselves to sending just military supplies. But if these are not enough, we are bound by duty, right, and our own security to do more. By duty, because we exacted a peace treaty from Italy which will have left her too feeble to resist aggression. By right, because that treaty required the Italian government to obtain for all within its boundaries “the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms”—pleasures which will not endure for a moment in a Red Italy. And by our own security, because American inertia before the rape of Italy would only whet the Kremlin appetite for conquest over the shrinking remainder of free Europe.

That is why we must now consider the grim contingency that nothing less than American troops on her soil can save Italy. The sooner we consider this, the better. The mere announcement of such a decision might blow the crisis away. Inadequate and negative as the Truman Doctrine is, we already know that without its clear warning that any assailant would have to reckon with us, Greece would long since have been frontally attacked by the Soviet satellites. An equally vigorous stand by us in Italy would probably have the same healthy deterring effect. But if it does not, if American troops and ships and planes must be sent in whatever quantity we have available, if we must plunge into a limited war in Italy and risk the awful prospect of global war, then we must take that chance. Otherwise, we commit another Munich. We lose a forward bastion in the Mediterranean, increase our potential enemies, weaken ourselves, and encourage the Soviet Empire to wage global war on us at a time of its own choosing.

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There is one possible outcome of the Italian elections we have not yet contemplated. Because of last-minute developments, it is conceivable that the Center and conservative Right will receive a strong anti-Communist vote. If the Communists get a real drubbing at the polls, it may delay their time-table of revolution. This would obviously be a blessing, for the moment. But would an electoral victory for the status quo give true aid and comfort to Italian democracy in the long run?

Alcide de Gasperi is an authentic, tolerably progressive democrat, but he has dubious connections. In France, de Gaulle served as a catalyst on the MRP, French equivalent of de Gasperi’s Christian Democrats. De Gaulle drew to himself the reactionary elements of the MRP, leaving it purged, shaken, but genuinely liberal. In Italy, unhappily, the opposite trend prevailed. There the Communist menace caused reaction to ally itself with the Center for greater protection.

This does not mean that the Center became seriously tainted with Fascism. Renascent Fascism in Italy today is mainly a bugaboo conjured up by the Communists. The allegedly fascist Common Man Front (Uomo Qualunque), during its brief heyday, was primarily a party of complaint. Italians joined it out of revulsion against the futilities of the United Front government. The party’s choicest expression was the pernacchio—roughly identical with the Bronx cheer. This was most frequently inspired by the spectacle of “proletarian leftist” cabinet ministers and officials, each with his sleek limousine, and each with his “Claretta” (little Clara) in imitation of Mussolini and his unlamented mistress, Clara Petacci. But a political party cannot thrive exclusively on the ideology of the Bronx cheer, and “fascism’s” mass support soon drifted into the Christian Democratic coalition.

Nor is monarchism a serious present threat. The main trouble with the Christian Democrats is their clerical, feudalistic, and conservative bourgeois friends. Pope Pius of late has made gestures toward a liberalized economy, but few Italian workers will persuade themselves to regard the Vatican as energetically socialist. The tendency of the prelates, landed proprietors, and big industrialists who prop up the Christian Democrats is toward preservation of the status quo, with minimum concessions to the demands of history. Physical reconstruction has progressed, but economic reconstruction and social reforms to heal the ravages of war have lagged far behind. Farm and factory workers need and expect more substantial relief from their current misery. Like the American Communists who bank on a reactionary Republican White House in 1949 to bring chaos by 1952, the Communists of Italy would pocket the political profits if government resistance to basic reform after the elections drove the desperate proletariat toward the extreme Left for rescue.

For lasting solution of the Italian crisis, American policy had better avoid the chronic, fundamental error committed and compounded in Greece and Turkey. We cannot forever rely on conservatives as our best champions. We cannot always be merely against something, against Communism. From now on we ought also to be for something, for democracy.

In the present critical Italian juncture, of course, we shall temporarily have to forego the luxury of making choices. We must do our utmost for the government as a whole—by vote-getting stunts such as our gift of twenty-nine ships, by our anti-Soviet diplomatic offensive, and by full military aid if necessary. But, over the long term, intimate identification of the United States with the parties of the status quo would repel Italy’s peasants and workers and imperil our democratic purposes. We need to do in Italy what we have not adequately done anywhere else. It is high time to begin. We need to build up and encourage the non-Communist Left—the democratic Socialist wing of the Third Force.

Unlike the party of Léon Blum in France, the Socialists of Italy failed to maintain their integrity against the totalitarian Left. For this, our foolish insistence on the United Front as the cure for Italy’s maladies was largely to blame in the crucial first months after liberation. Only a minority faction of the Socialists, under Giuseppe Saragat, finally broke last year with the Communist-dominated Nenni wing. When the party split, Nenni kept the funds. Since then, the Saragat branch has been struggling for sheer survival. Latterly, it has been strengthened by deserters from Nenni. But because of lack of resources and party organization it is not expected to produce any brilliant totals when all the votes are in.

That is unfortunate for Italy, and for our cause in Italy. There was a time when the philosophical Saragat—seconded by intellectuals like Ignazio Silone, the novelist, and men of action like Ivan Matteo Lombardo—thought they might serve as a “bridge” between revolutionary Marxism and liberal capitalism. Since the events in Czechoslovakia revealed what happens to bridges between East and West, this notion has gone out of fashion. Right-wing Socialists today are still wary of unreconstructed capitalism. They still believe in a middle way. But they are vigorously in agreement with Saragat’s current dictum that “nothing separates us from the Communists except an abyss.”

Saragat is a Vice Premier in the present government. The head of that government is a prisoner of the conservatives. To rescue de Gasperi, to orient him toward a clean-cut liberal program, he must have a strong democratic Left instead of a conservative Right to lean on for his votes of confidence in Parliament. That is also the only way permanently to insure Italy against legitimate capture by Communism.

But the United States has been of little help in this direction. Our Rome Embassy has given some small assistance, but not enough to count. The State Department, even if it wanted to do better, undoubtedly still feels it must walk warily because of the lingering congressional phobia which sees both Attlee and Stalin as identical “Bolsheviks.” Nor has American labor been notably effective. The ILGWU, which has many Italian-American workers in the needle trades, “loaned” Saragat 150 thousand dollars last July. The money disappeared quickly, so great was the need and so meager the fund. The AFL has been mailing an eloquent Italian-language bulletin to some six thousand union leaders in Italy. But, in general, American labor has busied itself with international conferences and inspection tours, leaving the propaganda war for democracy to the thin Voice of America.

What the right-wing Socialists and the small left-of-center groups allied with them should have received was the implements with which to construct a thriving political party: newsprint for newspapers, paint for wall slogans, cars and gasoline for organizers, and money for wine, fertilizer, and the other items of down-to-earth electioneering in Italy. It may be perfectly clear to us on this side of the Atlantic how the Italians should vote for the sake of righteousness and wisdom, but over in Italy it is the door-to-door party worker who gets out the vote. The liberal Socialists in the current campaign have been squeezed between the Vatican-built Christian Democratic machine and the well-oiled Communist steamroller.

It is too late for aid to reach the non-Communist Left in time to make a substantial difference in this month’s vote tally. But, barring the outbreak of civil war, there is much that can be done later. The Marshall Plan will automatically take adherents away from the Nenni faction if it is applied intelligently and with speed. The alliance with the Communists was mainly by agreement among the top leaders, the rank and file accepting it as a convenient device against “reactionary capitalism.” Nenni has fought the Marshall Plan, so its success will cost him many followers. The democratic Socialists will be particularly benefited if American help is directed to where it will do most good for Italy’s farm and city proletariat: the building of roads, the supply of medicines, the delivery of materials to non-Communist cooperatives and of machinery to non-Communist collectives, with substantial quotas allocated to the impoverished South.

As for direct political help, the best investment American dollars could find for democracy’s future in Italy would be in newsprint, equipment, and propaganda for the Third Force. Normally, the American government does not operate that way. In our peacetime democratic rectitude, for example, we have no “secret funds” to counter the bottomless treasury which a totalitarian regime can tap for “unvouchered” purposes. But these are abnormal times. We are engaged in a struggle in which our ordinarily proper aversion to “undercover” financial transactions abroad may cost us dear. American labor unions might be one channel for such operations. There are certainly others. All that is required is the will to explore them.

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In Greece we have allowed a reactionary government to persecute democrats and drive them into the arms of the Communists. In Turkey we have made common cause with a semi-dictatorial regime. It could be argued that such dismal partnerships were imperative as temporary expedients in a crisis. In Russia’s Europe we watched listlessly while the men of good will in the middle ground—the Petkovs, the Manius, the Nagys, the Mikolajczyks, the Masaryks—went down before the Communist bone crusher. It could be argued that this was the price of our honest effort to placate the Soviets and keep the peace. But in Italy we will let the men of good will be wasted and dispersed only at our peril—and to our shame.

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