An ardent fascist admires the "patriotic, moral, military values of the Jews of Israel"

I can't remember whether I've written about Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, one the three or four best books I've read in the last 15 years. A strange, beautifully written and very shocking account of his years as a fascist foreign correspondent present at the Jassy pogrom supposedly (he really arrived the next day), dining each night with Hans Frank, German Governor of Poland, and entering the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.

Anyhow I'm reading Malaparte's biography by Maurizio Serra and discover that the real Malaparte is as hidden from view as he is in Kaputt, which is neither fiction nor nonfiction, or rather which is both. 

Malaparte’s life was fiction, which is another way of saying he was a practised liar, like Keir Starmer for example but very much more entertaining. A cold, egotistical man with no principles. I'm describing Malaparte now, in case you were wondering.

I love footnotes very much and I came across the following one in the book.

'The French writer Lucien Rebatet. a refined music critic and rabid anti semite declared himself open in the same period to certain concessions: “For my part I would not see any harm if a great musical virtuoso from the ghetto were authorised to come play for the Aryans for their pleasure like the exotic slaves of ancient Rome.” But wait: “If this turned out to be the pretext for an encroachment however minimal of this horrible species on us I myself would shatter the [gramophone] records of Chopin and Mozart performed by the marvellous Horowitz and Menuhin”. This passage along with many others was omitted from the post-war reprinting.'

This is a reminder of what antisemitism is – it’s not Tucker Carlson criticising Israel. 

However looking up Rebatet in Wikipedia I discovered that he did not criticise but instead became a huge admirer of Israel.

I quote:

‘Although Rebatet continued to proclaim his adherence to fascism until his death, his antisemitism became less pronounced after the war, and he later came to admire the State of Israel. In 1967, he admitted: "The cause of Israel over there is that of all Westerners. It would have surprised me if [it] had been prophesied in 1939 that I would one day wish for the victory of a Zionist army. But this is the solution that I find reasonable today." In 1969, he also observed: "savour the historical paradox that led the Jews of Israel to defend all the patriotic, moral, military values that they most violently fought during a century in their adopted country."’