Surfeited with the unprecedented horrors of World War II, the moral consciousness of the Western world has become jaded. There was a time-in the mid-1930's—when it protested Mussolini's practice of forcing castor oil down the throats of political prisoners and then parading them in public while stalwart Fascists watched the spectacle with sadistic glee. During his Ethiopian campaign, Mussolini's use of irritant gases to give brave but ill-shod and illequipped Ethiopian tribesmen “the hot foot” was also condemned by a moral conscience that had not yet learned to accept the organized cruelty of World War II—the terror bombings of both British and German cities, and the unexampled savagery of the German invasion of Russia, widely heralded by Nazi propaganda as a great anti-Communist “crusade.“