POWER POLITICS: Boo!

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The dictators' press got raving mad last week at France and Great Britain. Usually such pre-arranged fits of anger spring from some positive antitotalitarian act, such as France's ordering more warplanes from the U. S., Britain's guaranteeing another country's security, Poland's refusal to give up Danzig. What pained Germany and Italy this time, however, was French and British indifference at the German-Italian military alliance (TIME, May 15), which Count Galeazzo Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop ceremoniously signed at Berlin.

Yawns. The dictators had expected the democracies to get scared over this juncture of totalitarian arms. Instead there were only deep yawns. The British thought an Italian-German alliance, after all that has happened in the last three years, was a pretty Did story. The French, far from being frightened, snickered that Germany had acquired a new protectorate, Italy.

Obviously this point of view was unendurable and soon Nazi and Fascist press puppets were swinging into action. German Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels sprinkled Nazi papers with such ominous phrases as "impending decisions," the "war of tomorrow," the "mighty reckoning" to come. The Italians went Dr. Goebbels one better. Il Messagero, of Rome, flatly warned: "If within a certain time the democracies do not yield to councils of reason we go to war." The Fascist official newsorgan Resto del Carlino roared: "The time of reckoning is near. . . . They still deny us Tunis, Djibouti, Suez and also deny Danzig and colonies to our ally, Germany. A transfer of power is near. The future is ours."

Final. Virginia Gayda, II Duce's journalistic shadow, confided that there were "secret conventions" in the Italian-German treaty, said the pact was a "final invitation" to Great Britain and France to "collaborate" in a European peace. Neither he nor any of his colleagues was at a loss to describe what they meant by "collaboration": Great Britain and France were to provide the dictator countries with "vital living spaces."

To put some reality into the alliance Adolf Hitler held a showy conference of generals in Berlin, and Italian Chief of Staff Alberto Pariani and German Commander-in-Chief of the Army General Walther von Brauchitsch set to work forming an Italian-German supreme military council. Later, Colonel General Erhard Milch, Chief of Staff of the German Air Force, flew to Rome to unify the two countries' air forces.

All this seemed pretty alarming to foreign correspondents in Italy, who began describing the "rising international tension." But the dictators' press has shouted "Boo!" so many times in the last few years that no longer did such grimacing register in Paris, certainly not in London. There, instead of pondering over the combined Italian-German military might, crowds stood before bookstore windows and gazed at maps of Soviet Russia, commenting approvingly on the size of the great brown expanse. Brokers were calling the advance in stock prices the Stalin Boom. Movie audiences were applauding newsreels of the Red army.