Word: spivak
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...Newshawk John L. Spivak set out last year to peek under the lids of Europe's dictatorships. He had a glowing reputation as "America's greatest reporter" based on his books, Georgia Nigger and America Faces the Barricades. Partial to underdogs, he paid calls on Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia over a period of five months. Despite radical bias and E. Phillips Oppenheim sensationalism, his findings, published last week as Europe Under The Terror,* gave U. S. readers a good chance to size up both Europe's tyrants and the people they tyrannize...
Italy's tyrants, suggests Spivak, are clowns, its people poltroons. Benito Mussolini has the worst economic situation in Europe and the least rebellion to contend with. Nevertheless, though every Fascist officer says, "There are no strikes in Italy," Spivak dug out records of 153 illegal strikes under Fascism. The humblest Italian is paralyzed with fear by the secret police ("The Bats") headed by an imitation Mussolini. Another imitation Mussolini, handsome President Tullio Cianetti of the Confederation of Labor, conceded that "Fascism has not abolished the class struggle or class distinctions." Mussolini, says Spivak, has smashed the middle classes, degraded...
...people," writes Spivak, "know that they are hungry but they do not realize that Mussolini, faced with the imminent collapse of his regime because of the condition of Italian industry, the disintegration of the middle class and the increasing unrest among workers reduced to less than a subsistence level, was virtually compelled to make this gamble for Ethiopia. With that land in his grasp Mussolini would have a place for his unemployed, he would have raw materials which Italy sorely needs and could borrow money from the world's bankers on the conquered country's undeveloped resources...
Germany's tyrants Spivak describes as super-efficient grafting gangsters, its people dolts. Spivak quotes an anonymous U. S. businessman as charging Nazi officials with systematic shakedowns of business for "protection" against boycotts. Espionage is carried to the point of ingenious Dictaphone-telephones which record conversations within a room even when the telephone is on the hook...
Hitler's graft, according to Spivak, is more respectable: The Munich publishing firm of Franz Eher publishes the official Nazi organ, Volkischer Beobachter; most school textbooks; and Hitler's best seller, Mem Kampf. Even over Minister of Economics Dr. Hjalmar Schacht's desperate embargo on marks, Nazi leaders are suspected of having smuggled out of Germany millions of marks for a Nazi rainy...