troubles: “Perhaps, as representatives of a small nation that has itself had experience of aggression and dismemberment, the members of the Irish delegation may be more sensitive than others to the plight of Ethiopia. But is there any small nation represented here which does not feel the truth of the warning that what is Ethiopia’s fate to-day may well be its own fate to-morrow, should the greed or the ambition of some powerful neighbour prompt its destruction?”51 This linkage is not simply a gesture of solidarity, nor is it an example of rhetorical overstatement; it instead articulates a correlation born of shared fear. Whereas Du Bois had been concerned with the interracial implications of the crisis, de Valera remains fixated on its international implications, which he finds similarly unwelcoming and unavoidable. When Haile Selassie had addressed the Assembly three days earlier, it was in part through de Valera’s intercession. Advocating for the emperor’s right to speak under the Covenant, de Valera listened to his appeal on behalf of his people:
I ask the fifty nations who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor. What are they willing to do for Ethiopia?
I ask the great Powers, who have promised the guarantee of collective security to small states—those small states over whom hangs the threat that they may one day suffer the fate of Ethiopia: What measures do they intend to take?
Representatives of the world, I came to Geneva to discharge in your midst the most painful of the duties of the head of State. What answer am I to take back to my people?52
In its futile attempts to control aggression, the League answered by announcing its ineffectiveness as an institution. For de Valera, the conclusion to draw was that small nations, including Ethiopia, would never receive justice from the great powers and must instead act toward their own protection.
What made this conclusion notably galling was the fact that such action would not be collectively and democratically achieved, but compelled by atomized, defensive, and increasingly acute necessity. What collective action that remained, de Valera pointedly observed, was an astringent one: “Over fifty nations, we have now to confess publicly that we must abandon the victim to his fate.”53 This represented a decisive turn from mutual cooperation toward individual self-preservation, a shift de Valera specifies at the end of his address of July 2: “Despite our juridical equality here, in matters such as European peace the small States are powerless. As I have already said, peace is dependent upon the will of the great States. All the small States can do, if the statesmen of the greater States fail in their duty, is resolutely to determine that they will not become the tools of any great Power, and that they will resist with whatever means they may possess every attempt to force them into a war against their will.”54 Although now contracted to include only Europe, this stage represents the potential “to-morrow” to Ethiopia’s “to-day.” De Valera had already deliberately echoed Haile Selassie in his tabulation of League members, but this invocation of “to-day” and “to-morrow” was for all intents a direct quotation of the emperor, who had icily muttered in front of the Assembly, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”55 With the League’s ultimate failure to confront or counter Italian aggression, and the recognition by most member states of Ethiopia as an Italian colony, the Irish Free State lost what remained of its faith in collective security. It instead began to formulate the policy of neutrality that would soon be enshrined in the 1937 Constitution and strictly practiced during the Second World War.56 After the shattering of trust in the League’s ability to safeguard its independence, the only choice left to the Irish Free State was that which was no longer available to Ethiopia: self-preservation.
Auratic Listener and Fascist Violin
In his autobiographical travelogue The Waveless Plain, Walter Starkie quotes a remark made to him by an unnamed “Italian friend” in Ethiopia: “Cavour made Italy; Mussolini made the Italians; sanctions united Italy.” Explaining that his “visit to Abyssinia had been made, not so much for the purpose of visiting that strange, Oriental country, as for studying the task achieved by 14 years of Fascist Rome,” Starkie validates his anonymous interlocutor’s epochal sense of the conquest as the final stage in Italian national destiny initiated with the Risorgimento and completed by the fascist revolution.57 Rather than break Italian will, League sanctions had occasioned the overcoming of the last impediment to national renewal. To combat sanctions, women donated their wedding rings to the regime and turned to largely vegetarian “Sanctions cooking,” men put aside regional loyalties to enlist in the armed forces, scientists made clothing and flags from a milk-based wool substitute called Lanital: these actions give Starkie “a curious feeling of the continuity of history” and embody a modern vision of “the ancient Rome of the Republic.”58 While presented as his firsthand impressions, these spectacles of struggle and renewal are essentially copped, like his unnamed friend’s slogan, straight from the fascist regime’s propaganda campaigns. By never mentioning, for example, that the mass exchange of gold wedding rings for steel was the centerpiece of the Giornata della Fede (Day of Faith) organized on December 18, 1935, or that references to local and regional attachment (including dialect) were banned from the fascist mass media, Starkie can stage these events as both spontaneous and preordained, as the unplanned expressions of collective unanimity.59 In presenting Mussolini’s Italy as the paradigm of self-determined national development, The Waveless Plain is much more than a crass narrativization of administrative dictates, reading instead as a cultural anthropology of fascist charisma. This is most evident in Starkie’s authorial position, particularly when he faces the radio.
Starkie was born into a distinguished Catholic Anglo-Irish family in County Dublin in 1894, and became a professor in Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1926; one of the students with whom he worked was Samuel Beckett.60 Shortly after this appointment, he was made a member of the Abbey Theatre’s board of directors, a position he would hold until 1942. These professional activities were balanced by a lifelong love of music, and Starkie, a trained violinist, maintained an abiding interest in the social role of traditional music in Ireland and on the continent. With its mix of credentialization and passion, professional rationalization and romantic abandonment, Starkie’s scholastic devotion to languages and music formed a foundational productive tension throughout his life. At one level, Starkie was a throwback to the Anglo-Irish antiquarians of the previous century, a man of leisure invested in the cultural preservation of traditional or premodern forms; at another, he was an international cosmopolitan, able to move with ease between Ireland, Britain, the United States, and the continent. As a member of Dublin’s cultural administration, Starkie gravitated toward its dominant, and decidedly right-wing, poles, combining a belief in cultural nationalism with a desire for the importation of continental strands of political authoritarianism. In 1927, he became a founding member of the Centre International d’Études sur le Fascisme, based in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the following year wrote an essay for its inaugural Survey of Fascism on the appropriateness of corporatist social policy for Ireland.61 While not exactly describing the emergence of the fascist new man, Starkie claimed that corporatist fraternal associations would eliminate the remaining vestiges of colonial servility and free individuals to enter into closer harmony with the national spirit. Yet this process could not be an insular or purely “national” endeavor. Having married an Italian woman, Starkie returned to Italy every summer to visit her family outside Genoa. As described in The Waveless Plain, it is his violin that facilitates mutual understanding between him and Italians, the tunes he plays never failing to draw around him an enthusiastic crowd of passionate listeners. As much as he is prone to attribute this relationship to an innate Italian or Mediterranean sensibility, it is important to recognize these scenes as indicative of the book’s explanation of Mussolini’s Italy. In bringing together a group of listeners who are bound by their recognition of his expert playing, Starkie presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound.
Although it is not yet possible to specify its radiophonic features, the relationship of sound and social organization is central to The Waveless Plain. During the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie published a handful of admiring
