"God Help Africa!"

Benito Mussolini in his strutting, self-appointed role as "Protector of the Mohammedans" has vexed Britain and France for years by giving asylum in Rome to prominent Islamites who for one reason or another have been run out of the Great Powers' colonies. Last week these sloe-eyed clients of the sloe-eyed Duce were zealously trying to recruit for him fierce Arab troops for use as mercenaries against Ethiopia. In Jerusalem, however, the Emir Abdullah of Transjordania, who keeps his throne with the aid of British bombing planes, lashed out with an interview which made prime reading in London.

"I personally do not like Mussolini," said the Emir. "His manner of speaking and the way he appears in photographs make me imagine him to be a cheap comedian. His pompous personal demonstrations do not appeal to the Arab, accustomed as we are to the simplicity of the Sahara. I wish I could be the first Arab to enroll as a volunteer to protect Ethiopia, the ancient friend of Mohammed! What a shame that Rome--the capital of Christianity--is attempting to enslave one of the most ancient Christian nations. It is something more than Power, it is Heathenism. It has divorced the Italians from Christian ethics!"

Meanwhile in London orders were dispatched by His Majesty's Government to have over one million sand bags rushed from Egypt to be piled around and above the British Legation in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in case the Cheap Comedian should send bombing planes to blow Emperor Power of Trinity out of his palace. Punctually at 11:55 a. m. one day last week a pink silk veil covering the Emperor's box in Parliament was drawn aside and the shrewd, sharp-faced potentate addressed his people. He spoke in native dialect. Il Duce said afterward that his actual words as cabled from Addis Ababa by the Italian Minister were far stronger than the flowery official text later released in French to impress world opinion. According to this, His Majesty cried, "My people, your Emperor, who addresses you, will be in your midst, not hesitating to pour out his life's blood for the independence of Ethiopia. . . . God is our shield and our buckler against the modern weapons of our enemies of tomorrow. . . . Soldiers, when you have heard that in battle your loved and respected Emperor has fallen, do not weep or despair."

"What Star Twinkles?" Thus posing as dramatically as possible as the underdog (which indeed he is), Ethiopia's smart Emperor stood for a long moment to receive his people's cheers, then disappeared behind his pink veil. Meanwhile in the U. S. the Negro Afro news service reported that blacks were swarming to enlist to fight for Ethiopia: "Chicago leads with 8,000 enrolled; Detroit comes second with 5,000; Kansas City, 2,000; and Philadelphia 1,500." This news was datelined from Manhattan and Afro's correspondent added with some scorn that Harlem had supplied only 850 recruits, "while Boston, the cradle of U. S. freedom and the home of Crispus Attucks, first American to die in the Revolutionary War, has enlisted only 200.*"

When white reporters set out to check these figures they found their font in President Samuel Daniels of the Pan-African Reconstruction Association. Slogan: "God help Africa!" The U. S. State Department had just dug up a law of 1818 under which a U. S. citizen caught enlisting or recruiting others, within the U. S., to fight under foreign colors can be fined $1,000, jailed for three years. Federal agents were also watching all offices in the U. S. purporting to recruit for Ethiopia on the theory that they must be "gyp-joints" of some sort, since the Ethiopian Government had officially disclaimed all such recruiting. "Well, it's this way," perspired President Daniels. ''So as to correct anybody who says we charge fees, the fact is that the volunteers just donate whatever they care to."

In Washington, D. C. some Negroes of the Universal Multitechnic Association set up a recruiting station. Slogan: "What Star Twinkles for You?" Cried their first recruit, 20-year-old Joseph Wilson: "Just give me a gun. This is just a crap game to me, and boy!--Mussolini is going to shoot snake eyes!"

In Chicago executives of the Negro World Alliance opened a drive to enlist as many men as possible, sought to assess every Negro institution in the country and collect $6,000,000 for Ethiopia. "Peace is Possible." In Rome Mrs. William Brown Meloney, editor of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday feature supplement. This Week, emerged from audience with Il Duce to cable: "He is calm, physically fit, trained down as though he had been through Muldoon's courses. ... I found him more placid than the Theodore Roosevelt of my memory and the Franklin Roosevelt of today. ... I was most surprised by his calm." Since cold-blooded calm is the basic nature of Dictator Mussolini, whose platform bombast is assumed and who frankly follows the methods of Niccolo Machiavelli, Il Duce remained last week alert for any move the Great Powers may make to avoid a war by forcing Ethiopia to give him what he wants, namely an Italian protectorate over all Ethiopia. Early this month Great Britain made an opening offer, involving some cession of British territory, but this Il Duce promptly blocked (TIME, July 8). There was plenty of time last week to play a Machiavellian game, since summer rains prevent warfare in Ethiopia before the end of September.

"Peace is possible!" snapped the Dictator last week, indicating that he, like Hitler, prefers to have people give him what he wants but will fight for it if they do not. In the Mussolini family news paper Popolo d' Italia, calm Benito Mussolini summed things up thus: "Ethiopia will be opened up to civilization by Italian pick axes and if necessary by Italian cannon. Italians are great builders, pioneers and colonizers. Throughout the world they have constructed bridges, aqueducts, dikes, breakwaters, railways and highways. Italians have reclaimed land in other continents. They have developed the resources of other empires. Italians opened American prairies, raised African dikes, and they have sown lands in Australia. "Italians at present work for themselves and their destiny!"

Atrocities, slaves, fate. Since the rest of the warm-hearted world will not easily swallow such ice-hearted candor, Il Duce's Son-in-Law Count Ciano worked happily away in his Ministry of Propaganda last week. His best Ethiopian atrocity: "On the night of May 31 wild Ethiopian tribesmen captured 4,000 head of cattle from an outpost in Italian Eritrea and carried off as slaves a number of men and women. The tribesmen mutilated several children who were abandoned bleeding on desert sands."

Foreigners with no taste for such blood & thunder could have instead from Fascist Playwright Luigi Pirandello, as that Nobel Prizeman landed in Manhattan last week, a comparison of Abraham Lincoln to Benito Mussolini who is going to free the slaves of Ethiopia. People interested in neither atrocities nor slaves but with a taste for the mystic were provided for by Fascist Poet Gabriele d'Annunzio. "You are going to victory," he informed departing Italian volunteers. "It is so inexorable--I wish to say fatal-- to conquer, and to win."

*Crispus Attucks died in the Boston Massacre of 1770, five years before the actual Revolution.

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