Krim Unswizzling

News came last week that Abd-el-Krim, famed "Napoleon of Morocco," now exiled by his French captors (TIME, Sept. 20) upon Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, a remote Elba, has turned for recreation to dictating his memoirs to a secretary who is also one of his guards.

Proud, always remote and exclusive, even from his own Moroccan people in the days of his "Sultanate," Abd-el-Krim is reported to hold scornfully aloof from the 172,000 inhabitants, mostly Creoles, of Reunion whose chief diversions are rum-swizzling and cinema-going.*

*The black, the brown, the yellow man learns of the white race from its cinemas nightly in every quarter of the globe. "And what does he learn ?" asks able sophisticate Aldous Huxley in his new round-the-world travel book (see p. 19). "Standing in the midst of ... [a] crowd of Javanese picture fans, I was astonished when the performance attained its culminating imbecility, that they did not all with one accord turn on us [white men] with hoots of derision, with mocking and murderous violence. . . . The share of Hollywood in low ering the white man's prestige is by no means inconsiderable. ... To the subject races of the East and South, Hollywood proclaims us a people . . . mentally defective."