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the following cautious attempt, on the part of a big circulation weekly,
to say "something" about them: "These boys are in good health, they
eat fairly well, but their desire to get out of here is strong indeed. So
much the more so since many of them have committed no other crime
than that of having been abandoned by their parents. Bureaucrats
classify them into two categories: the 'morally abandoned' and the
'materially abandoned.' There are many, very many, such cases. There
is for example a nine year old boy. He is hardly 3 ft. 3 in. tall, pale, with
big rings under his eyes. He has been locked up because his mother
charged him with having committed 'unmentionable acts'..... The
doctor considered the accusation preposterous. The boy was classified
as 'morally abandoned.' He is still there. . . . . "
Then comes politics. The task of hushing up the last five years of
Italian history may look discouragingly difficult. Nevertheless, it has
been carried on steadily, and not without success, by the keepers of the
national flame (who are by no means all fascists). A Roman newspaper
devotes a column every day to the most desperate enterprise of all: the
rehabilitation of the late Victor Emmanuel. Two years ago, the project
would have seemed hopeless. Another Roman paper (circulation:
200,000) has recently published an editorial entitled "Italy Without Sin,"
maintaining that of all Western Nations it is Italy who has played the
most honorable role in the history of the twentieth century.
"If
Italy
has sinned at all," wrote the journalist, "she has sinned out of rashness,
and an excess of generosity." Also, two years ago it would have been
hard indeed to hold an official celebration of the glories of the Italian
army. This year the difficulty has been gotten around by commemorating
the Italian victory in World War I while distributing medals to the
veterans of World War II (a sprinkle of anti-German heroes was in–
cluded). Anti-fascist Minister of Defense Pacciardi expounded the thesis
that the yardstick of military honor is obedience to orders, not par–
tisanship.
Obedience to orders, and to the claims of that pliable though
transcendental entity: the Nation, has been, as everybody knows, the
rock on which all the trials of the "war criminals," from Paris to Rome,
and from Nuremberg to Tokyo, have run juridically aground. Trusting
this well established fact, and Italian forgetfulness, the neo-fascists had
hoped to turn the trial of Mussolini's last Marshal, Graziani, not merely
into a demonstration that Rodolfo Graziani was, after all, a
brava
persona,
but into a real exaltation of the last bloody act of the fascist
comedy, the puppet Republic of Northern Italy.
Here one must explain that nco-fascists are characterized by the
