Word: mussolini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Messrs. Wilson and Phillips proceeded to teach the teacher. Both were alarmed at the sharpness with which Franklin Roosevelt-and U. S. public opinion-has slapped at Dictators Hitler and Mussolini, and by implication has frowned upon Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of "appeasing" Fascism. Instead of being told that they should revamp their views to fit Washington's, they persuaded the President to leave foreign policy out of his Chapel Hill speech (TIME, Dec. 12), and further to soften his democratic dander last week...
...Most of the French demonstrators, and many of the Italians in private, refused to take seriously Premier Mussolini's "unofficial" campaign for French lands. In Paris some 6,000 non-serious Sorbonne students paraded the streets with placards demanding "We want Vesuvius! We want Venice! Ethiopia for the Negus!" (see map). At the quiet Alsatian border town of Strasbourg, students answered Italy's demands with shouts of "We want Sicily! We want Sardinia!" and in Algiers, capital of the French colony which adjoins Tunisia, hundreds of natives joined university students and chanted "Sicily and Sardinia for France-Italy...
Although the Italian colonial demands on France are not likely to precipitate an immediate war crisis i Europe, this sudden irredentist campaign for Tunisia and Corsica gains added significance in its relation to the Rome-Berlin axis. That Mussolini should pick a fight with Paris at the very moment the Reich has signed a Franco-German Agreement indicates that the interests of the two dictators are diverging. As junior partner in the axis, Italy must rely more on German support than Germany on Italian support. Thus, while Mussolini had no choice but to swallow the distasteful Austrian "Anschluss," Hitler...
...Nazi government realizes that, should the Italian peninsula and Tunisia be joined under the same rule, Mussolini would obtain strategic control over the Mediterranean. And the dominance of this sea by any single nation would imperil the "drang nach Osten." Recent events have only emphasized the importance to Germany of maintaining the divided control there is at present; for the Reich, barred by a hostile Rumania from access to the Black Sea, is now trying to make Yugoslavia her vassal and Mediterranean outlet. German interests have thus come into conflict with the Italian dream of a "Mare Nostrum...
...surprising, then, that Mussolini should so violently press his claims to French colonies in the hope that Germany may yet back him. In all probability, Hitler will give him some support in regard to his minor demands; but that the axis will function as smoothly in obtaining Tunisia for Italy as it did in the Sudeten crisis is extremely doubtful...