Word: duced
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...three Italian armies fronting Ethiopia on the North, South and East the first two have been well-publicized but Il Duce masked his Eastern Army in such reticence that last week even the name of its General was still unknown to the world...
Today other second-rate Powers still remain what they were then. But in 13 swift years the once obscure Italian editor has carried his once negligible country up & up to the ultimate fulcrum on which Europe's future turns. This may be II Duce's unlucky 13th year, but with the hammer blows of 52 nations ringing out in an anvil chorus of sanctions last week, it was significant to the point of paradox that not Italy but Ethiopia was still being called "the underdog...
...Victorians. The most fateful fact about Benito Mussolini has always been, in crises, the conviction of his foes that he must be bluffing and therefore that his bluff can be called. All his life II Duce Mussolini has rattled and rattled before he struck. The Italian Cabinet against which he launched his March on Rome was sure he was bluffing. After ignoring the bluffer until too late, it failed utterly to buy off Editor Mussolini by offering him the prize of a Ministry without portfolio...
Though the lira is a managed currency, II Duce has kept it on his technical gold standard through eight long years of rumors that he was bluffing and might be expected to devalue any day. To frosty bankers it must eternally seem like bluffing when a fire-eating politician shouts at the top of his lungs, screams in headlines and has cut into a monument at Pesaro: "We will defend the lira to the last breath, to the last drop of blood...
Cunning Fidelity. Declared hoary War-time Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the weightiest British analysis of last week: "The League offered Mussolini nothing which he could have accepted without being laughed off the Italian stage-and as for talk of sanctions, II Duce knew the exact weight of the brain and fist of every man with whom he was dealing, and having carefully scanned the figures on the balance, he decided it was a safe chance to defy them...