The New York Times, December 5, 1940
It is not news that an Italian Futurist poet, major Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, defended “the aesthetics and beauty of war” in an address delivered this week before a Roman audience. It is news, and good news, that a part of the audience audibly signified before the lecture was over that enough was enough. Such an incident could hardly occur in Berlin, where war is taken seriously as Hitler’s great gift to mankind. In Italy there seems to be some survival of the sense of irony.

The sense of irony may reveal to many Italians that Mussolini’s warlike activities since last June, however beautiful in conception, have brought small rewards to his country. They had little enough to eat in May, they have less now. They had lost sons, brothers and husbands in the Ethiopian and Spanish adventures; they are losing more now in Greece and Egypt. They have helped to bomb Britain, but many of their planes did not return. Coffee, butter, peace and honor have been bartered for glory, and there isn’t as yet any glory.

Mussolini taught Hitler how to dictate, with some help from the uncommunicative Stalin. Now if any dictating is to be done in Europe, Hitler does it. The beauty of war is tanks in the mud, Greeks coming [home] at the point of the ignoble bayonet, civilians blown to bits in Corfu, and, at home, dismay, forebodings and telegrams to the next of kin.

No wonder Signor Marinetti’s audience grew restive. The wonder is that they threw off the Fascist hypnotism long enough to show it. Perhaps behind the brutal fantasy something of the lovely, lazy, humorous, creative old Italy survives.