1955. Italian Political Humor

Jokes from Rome

Source: Italian Prime Minister Mario Scelba (right) with American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1955

March 9, 1955

Mr. Eugene Lyons
Senior Editor, Reader's Digest
Pleasantville, NY

Dear Mr. Lyons,

Mr. Wallace sent out a letter requesting examples of foreign humor circulating overseas, which has been in my current file as a reminder when something happens along in which you might be interested. Never a man to pass up a buck, I have three short ones which may or may not be new to you. At any rate, they are rare for this part of the world because they are clean.

Premier Scelba of Italy is facing another crisis in his government, which recalls a story attributed to him when he took office last year. At that time, Scelba was asked what major changes he intended to make in his staff. "The first man I will fire is the cloak room attendant." Surprised, his friends asked why. "Because," he replied, "every time he takes my hat and coat he asks: 'Do you intend to stay long, your Excellency?'"

Another story printed in an Italian humor magazine concerns the very popular Queen Frederica of Greece. While visiting a maritime hospital in Athens to cheer Greek Navy sailors injured in that recent sea collision, Her Majesty was surprised to note that all of the navy men had their arms heavily bandaged. "It must have been a strange accident for all of the men to have suffered broken arms," she commented at the end of the tour. The embarrassed hospital director blushed. "Not all were broken arms, Your Majesty," he admitted. "You see, most of the boys have tattoos and most of them insisted the subjects were not for your eyes -- thus the plethora of bandages."

And finally, I like this one, but I understand it has been around for some time. An elderly Italian, who for years as a good Catholic had generated a personal hate for Red Boss Palmiro Togliatti, was on his deathbed. His son asked if there was any last request -- anything that he wanted before he passed on. "Yes," the father said, "call up Comrade Togliatti and tell him to get over here. I want to join the Communist Party." The son was astounded, reminded of the good fight he had fought against the Reds all his life. "Father," the son asked, "I just don't understand why you would want to do this horrible thing?" "Don't you see, my son," the father smiled. "It is better for one of them to die than for one of us."

That winds up the local crop. As you probably know, Italian humor is satirical, cynical, and highly idiomatic. It is also mostly very unclean, particularly the political humor. But I'll continue to collect and pass stuff along from time to time.

Incidentally, we have never met but I feel we have a certain acquaintance, if only through the fact that both of us have served time as correspondents in Moscow.

Cordially,

Bill Downs
CBS News
Rome Bureau

1943. Horrific Booby Traps Left Behind in Nazi Retreat

A "Cute" Nazi Idea That Didn't Work

Three Waffen-SS soldiers playing with a kitten next to an egg grenade. The two on the right are of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, 1st Estonian, and the one on the left is an SS-Lance Corporal (source)

The parentheses indicate text that did not pass Soviet censors for military security or propaganda reasons.

(For more, see the complete 1943 Moscow reports.)

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

April 2, 1943

The present fighting in Russia has settled into local battles for Soviet rivers. In the Caucasus, it is a bitter, wet struggle to clear the Kuban River. Three inhabited points in the lower Kuban valley were captured last night as the Red Army continues its relentless push toward the Kerch Strait.

Further north, in the Ukraine, the Germans are making sporadic attacks on crossings of the Donets River. The latest big German attack came the other day when the Nazis threw in one full tank division and an infantry regiment against the Soviet position on the right bank of the river. During the several hours of fighting that followed, the Nazis suffered such severe losses that they were forced to break off the engagement. Since that time, the attacks on this sector have not been so violent.

The other river fighting is occurring in the Smolensk region west of Moscow. On this sector it is the Russians who face natural water barriers. The terrain is cut by small but difficult streams. The Germans have fortified themselves on the western banks of these streams. The going here is extremely difficult.

The editorial of Pravda, commemorating the decoration of 157 men and women guerillas from the Ukraine, made an interesting comment on what the German command is preparing in this important area west of the Donets. Calling for increased partisan activity in cutting the network of Ukrainian highways and railroads, Pravda said:

"Germans at the present time are using these highways and railroads to regroup their troops and to bring in reserves, equipment, and ammunition. The task of the partisans is at present time to destroy this traffic..."

Right now, the big events in Russia are occurring behind, and not at, the front.

The Red Army the other day turned up something new in booby traps. They entered one recaptured village and found that every house had been mined. Sappers cleared all of the houses but one. (The local inhabitants told the Russian soldiers that, before they left, the Germans spent a lot of time in this particular house.)

(The area was cleared and) a Red Army lieutenant (started looking for the mine. He) sounded the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling of the house. Still he could not locate the hidden explosives.

He was just about to give up when he heard cats meowing in the stove. He opened up the door and one cat jumped out. The second cat just started to leave the stove when the lieutenant pushed it back inside.

On investigation, he found that the second cat had a string attached to one of its rear paws. The other end of the string was attached to the fuse in 25 pounds of high explosive.

It was another of those cute Nazi ideas that didn't work.

1943. The Soviet Commission on Nazi War Crimes

"The Russian People Will Not Forget"

"The execution of 56 Polish citizens in Bochnia, near Kraków, during German occupation of Poland, December 18, 1939 in a reprisal for an attack on a German police office two days earlier by the underground organization 'White Eagle'" (source)

The parentheses indicate text that did not pass Soviet censors for military security or propaganda reasons. A month earlier Bill Downs reported similar accounts of atrocities committed against the people of Kharkiv in Ukraine.

(For more, see the complete 1943 Moscow reports.)

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

April 6, 1943

The Soviet press this morning printed another record of blood and death and suffering; of crime and rape and starvation and slaughter.

This official record is the report of the Soviet state commission investigate atrocities in Russia. (And this report gives a lengthy, detailed description of what the Nazis did to the towns and villages just west of Moscow which have been recaptured by the Red Army forces now pressing on Smolensk.)

The Russian atrocities commission is set up very much like a similar commission operated by the free governments in London. It assesses damage and establishes responsibility for the crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union.

The report issued today concerns the atrocities in the Rzhev, Vyazama, and Gzhatsk district—that powerful defense area west of Moscow held by the Germans for a year and a half. The record makes you sick to your stomach. Some of it doesn't bear repeating over the radio.

The war crimes are divided into four classifications. The first classification is the murders and atrocities of civilians. Here it is, the old story that we have heard from other cities and town in Russia—the stories of murder, hangings, and torture (of people found with their eyes pierced, their hands and legs and arms and ears cut off.) A typical incident were the bodies of two men hung from a gallows by meat hooks forced through their jaws (and left to die).

The second classification in the commission's report concerned the atrocities against Russian war prisoners. (Here the commission has the names of unit commanders and prison guards who used captured Soviet soldiers for target practice.) There are almost unbelievable stories of beatings and emasculation.

The third type of atrocity is the kidnapping of Russian civilians for forced labor in Germany. (The report says that 16,500 people were shipped to German from Rzhev, Sychyovka, Vyazma, Gzhatsk, and the surrounding regions.)

The fourth classification of German war crimes is the destruction of towns and villages which the report says was carried out according to a systematic plan by special German units assigned to burn and blow up every building of importance in these towns.

The atrocity report ends with the names of German officers commanding units responsible for these crimes. These names include the commander of the Fourth German Army, Colonel-General Heinrici, and the commander of the Ninth German Army, Colonel-General Model. Also listed are the names of thirteen divisional commanders and leaders of Nazi police corps. Others listed included the head of the Gestapo for the Rzhev region, a one Baron Adler, as well as two non-commissioned officers who were heads of two German prison camps.

The report ends with the statement, "These men must bear full responsibility and merited punishment for all these unprecedented atrocities."

And this morning's Izvestia editorial adds "The Russian people will not forget."

 ____________________________________________________

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

May 12, 1943

. . .

Mr. Molotov's latest report on the forcing of Soviet citizens into German slavery occupies almost all of the Russian newspapers this morning. The note, which was sent to all countries which have diplomatic relations with Russia, puts on the official record the long, unsavory reports of the kidnapping of labor from the occupied countries of Europe for work in German factories.

(From what I have seen in the recaptured territory of Russia in my trips to the front—from the people to whom I have talked—this long list of atrocities, of starvation, beatings, and degradation, is not exaggerated.)

(These things will be put on the record for investigation by the Russian atrocities commission. And for the first time, the Soviet government holds up the ordinary citizen of Germany who uses slave labor as directly responsible for this violation of international law. It is an interesting development.)

Mr. Molotov's note also expresses concern for the Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, Greeks, Belgians, Norwegians, and Dutch who are being and have been forced to work for Germany.

It is a move toward international settlement of atrocities, and it opens the way for cooperation between the commissions operating in Moscow and in London.

"The Sling and the Pebble" by Ernest Hemingway

The Sling and the Pebble

"Ernest Hemingway and Joris Ivens, Guadalajara, Spain (1937)" (Photo by John Fernhout – source)

From Free World, March 1946, pp. 16-17. (See Hemingway's World War II essays here.)

THE SLING AND THE PEBBLE

BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Now that the wars are over and the dead are dead and we have bought whatever it is we have it is a good time to publish books like this.

We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.

To understand we must study. We must study not simply what we wish to believe. That will always be skillfully presented for us. We must try to examine our world with the impartiality of a physician. This will be hard work and will involve reading much that is unpleasant to accept. But it is one of a man's first duties, now.

It will be our duty, when we have sufficient valid knowledge, to disagree, to protest, even to revolt and to rebel and still work always toward finding a way for all men to live together on this earth.

It has been necessary to fight. It has been necessary to kill, to maim, to burn and to destroy. Certainly for a country whose continent has never been bombed we have done our share of bombing. We have possibly killed more civilians of other countries than all our enemies did in all the famous massacres we so deplore. There is really very little favorable difference to a man or a woman between being burned alive or stood against a wall and shot.

We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated.

It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of all other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Fascism did.

We have invented the sling and pebble that will kill all giants; including ourselves. It is simple idiocy to think that the Soviet Union will not possess and perfect the same weapon.

This is no time for any nation to have any trace of the mentality of the bully. It is no time for any nation to become hated. It is no time for any nation even to swagger. Certainly it is no time for any nation to jostle. It is no time for any nation to be anything but just.

In this new world all of the partners will have to relinquish. It will be as necessary to relinquish as it was necessary to fight. No nation which holds land or dominion over people where it has no just right to it can continue to do so if there is to be an enduring peace. The problems this brings up cannot be examined in this foreword. But we must examine them and examine them intelligently, impartially and closing our eyes to nothing.

This book has one advantage. The various articles are not full of the knowledge after the fact of the use of the release of atomic energy. We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of a part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it' unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

In Germany our military courts have sentenced a sixty-year-old German woman to be hanged as one of a mob which brutally murdered American aviators who had parachuted to the ground in Germany. Why hang her? Why not burn her at the stake if we wish to make martyrs?

For the Germans know whether any sixty-year-old German women were ever killed by fighter pilots, on their way back from missions, coming down to strafe German villages. As far as I know we never hanged any pilots for going down on the deck and doing a little strafing. German civilians, strafed in Germany, feel much the same about it as Spanish civilians strafed in Spain by Germans or as American civilians would feel if the Germans had ever been able to strafe them.

Say you've been down on the deck; sometimes there were comic incidents. Often they looked comic from the air. Nothing blew up like ambulances (which proved the Germans carried munitions in them). Always plenty of comic instances when you have command of the air. Comic to you. I believe in shooting up everything, myself, and getting it over with. (You shouldn't say that. That's too much like war.) But you cannot expect them not to be excited if you fall into their hands.

Air-Marshal Harris is on record as to what he wished to do to the German people. We were fighting the German people as well as the German army. The Germans fought the British people as well as the British army. The German army fought the Russian people and the Russian people fought back. That is war and to fight a war any other way is playing dolls.

But the secret of future peace is not in hanging sixty-year-old women because they killed fliers in hot blood. Hang or shoot those who starved and beat and tortured in cold blood. Hang or shoot those who planned the war and would plan another. Hang or shoot deliberate war criminals. Deal with the S.S. and the voluntary Party members as they should be dealt with. But do not make martyrs of sixty-year-old women who killed in anger against force which had become so strong it no longer had any conscience or any feeling of evil doing.

To win a war you have to do things that are inconceivable in peace and that are often hateful to those who do them. That is they are hateful for a while. Afterwards some people get used to them. Some get to like them. Everyone wants to do everything, no matter what, to get it over with. Once you are involved in a war you have to win it by any means.

The military, in order to maintain their status and certain safeguards of their status, would like to have war fought by rules. The air-forces steadily smashed through all these rules and developed a realistic war in which nations fought nations; not armies armies.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, and let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves.