How come people talk about the crimes of the Germans and Japanese during WWII but not the OG fascists? It is because they probably only killed maybe a couple million at best while the other two killed tens of millions? Does anyone have any good resources on Italian fascism specifically how the capitalists aided and abetted it?
Also, where did the meme that the Italian fascists weren't racist come from? Was it cause Mussolini expressed doubt about race as a concept one time? It sounds like they were pretty racist against the peoples they conquered to me fam.
Memes. Race was an essential part of the fascist platform the idea Mussolini was significantly less racist than Hitler because of that one out of context quote is totally unfounded.
Colton Flores
i think it was more because italian fascism was more around culture, and they tied the italian race to their italian culture?
Justin Lopez
Italy was fucking pathetic during the war, they could not even get to occupy france.
William Jackson
What racist things did Italy do that go beyond imperialists trampling on the foreigners?
Christopher Taylor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism_and_racism Also, using poison gas and other war crimes against Ethiopians was certainly genocidal. There was a left-wing Italian activist who coined the phrase "racist hysteria" to describe the atmosphere of Mussolini's Italy but unfortunately I forgot his name.
Lucas Turner
So did he have any sort of beliefs of his own or is he just a pure opportunist?
Adrian Myers
Hard to say. Did Hitler believe all the shit that he autistically spewed? Most historians believe that he did, but it appears he expressed some skepticism about the Jewish conspiracy in his Table Talk. We also know that his Einsatzgruppen commanders pointed out that exterminating Jews in the USSR was counter-productive when it came to their primary goal of restoring capitalism in the USSR.
Whether Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, or the Japanese fascists really believed in half of the shit they spewed I think is more of a question for the Great Spook in the Sky than it is one for historians or leftists.
Tbh I don't know what the total is when you factor how many Yugoslavs, Albanians were killed by the Italians, not to mention their adventures in Spain, North Africa, and Barbarossa along with the dissidents and leftists imprisoned and killed. I just used a few million as an upper-estimate, as terrible as Mussolini was, fascist Italy just never had the power to carry out atrocities on the same scale as the other Axis super-powers. Whether you think the Italians were ideologically or psychologically "less murderous/evil" then the other fascist powers is a matter of opinion as far as I'm concerned.
Elijah Diaz
It's not like Mussolini did nothing to prepare the country for the war and contrary to Germany there was zero support for jingoist action.
Angel Sanchez
And then there's the weird case of the racial laws
Do Italians even know what the fuck they are doing?
Christian Stewart
From my understanding Italian fascism basically was attempting to do standard good ol' fashioned imperialism but at a much faster pace considering Mussolini like most modern fascists had a hard on for Rome (technically Fascist Italy's name is "The Second Roman Empire"). I don't have it on me but there's some document on his views which sound like that one Byzantine leader
Blake Myers
Generally no.
Logan Brooks
Franco absolutely did not. He was an opportunist through and through who'd flip on a dime if it benefited him. He may have had some vague traditionalist/elitist convictions but he was first and foremost self-interested.
Oliver Smith
Sauce?
Jeremiah Hall
It has a basis in truth, though. I mean, native Libyans had access to full Italian citizenship and were technically considered equal to European Italians, at a time when the same couldn't be said about France's relationship to Algerians or the UK's relationship with Indians. Italian Fascists sure were anti-Slavic though, even if they were nowhere as brutal and cruel as the Nazis with Jews or the Ustashi with Serbs.
Jackson Bell
What about the pacification of Cyrenaica? How did that happen if Italians and Libyans were technically equal.
Isaac Myers
It was a war of aggression, not a genocide. There was no systematic attempt to eliminate Ethiopians as a national, ethnic or racial group. That doesn't mean it wasn't a barbaric collection of war crimes, just that it's doesn't fit the definition of genocide.
Daniel Bell
Keyword, "technically". Just because they ostensibly had the same legal rights doesn't mean dissenters weren't repressed with the utmost brutality.
The question of genocide is always tricky, but I would also argue that even if the US didn’t intend to destroy the Vietnamese people the sheer scale of war crimes there amounts to genocide. The question of intent is a big part of genocide studies admittedly and is a good example of why the term “genocide” is something of a meme imo
William Sanders
Good point.
Joseph Gonzalez
Stanley Payne's history of fascism is great. He goes over how Mussolini was funded by the fiat industrialist, among others, to defect from the left and write as a nationalist newspaper editor. Italian fascism was literally started as a astroturf operation, though admittedly mussolini came to wield more power than the leaders expected, even though he ultimately bowed to their interests.
It's complicated and it's important not to fall for a black and white picture of Mussolini's views on it. I'm of the opinion that Mussolini's first decade or more of power he was not a hard scientific racist like Hitler. Jews, for example, were hugely disproportionately represented in the founding meeting of Italian Fascists and beyond, making iirc 10 to 15 of members while being less than 0.5 percent of the population. That isn't to say mussolini didn't discriminate heavily against un-italian nationalites like the balkan slavs. But if i'm not mistaken these coercive forces were directed at eliminating "unitalian" culture and not targeting and killing people for supposed biological deficiencies. If croats for example, started adopting italian culture then they were more or less accepted. This changed, at least regarding the Jews, in the late 1930s as the Italian Fascist regime stagnated and the Nazis appeared to be in the ascendancy as an economic and international force. Mussolini, for various geopolitical reasons, became aligned with Hitler and the former came to be dominated by Hitler's controlling domineering personality. Mussolini came to feel inferior to Hitler and consequently also saw Hitler's more radical racial ideologies as a more vigorous ideology to his own. Some historians argue that Mussolini cynically, or from political pressure, adopted similar racial policies to Hitler in the late 1930s, to ingratiate himself to Hitler and to strengthen their alliance and therefore guarantee future german economic and military aid for his regime. On the other hand, others argue that Mussolini genuinely came to believe in racial ideologies and the implementation was a sincere conversion to these beliefs. The question extends into the vigor or lack of vigor he enforced racial policies (after all, only 10% of jews in Italy died in the Holocaust) and why this was the case, but certainly when he finally came to be Hitler's true puppet with the Salo Republic, the Salo Republic of which he was the head of state vigorously pursued deportation policies against jews.
Connor Allen
I don't know if even Benny liked them all that much, to be honest.
Aiden Cooper
Was Benito even that good of a ruler? Hitler has his economic "miracle" but what does Angry Spaghetti Man have?
Aaron Lopez
He was a mediocre ruler, who said he was good?
Kayden Barnes
Moderately successful protectionist policies, though their achievements were nowhere as "miraculous" as the economic recovery of Germany. I believe Mussolini's popular support relied even more extensively on smoke and mirrors than Hitler's.
Austin Lee
Many fascists regard him as a total opportunist and despise him for fucking over the Falange.
Ryder Morgan
Frankly, Italians were kind of shitters in that regard. Germans and Japanese are ultra-repressed model citizens who become bloodthirsty demons in times of war. Italians aren't very serious in times of peace already, so when war is declared they just run and hide in an attic.
Stop trying he was not only after 1943 race laws were put in place only bc of hitlers influence stop acting like you don't know fascism is turd positionist
Ayden Richardson
turd position doesn't mean anything in this day and age. If there's private property and wage labor it's capitalism, thus right wing.
Connor Jenkins
As level headed as this thread is, everything said in it is fucking wrong and stupid. Stop this.
Wyatt Hall
Wow. I'm very glad to see you put in a well thought out argument and went point-by-point in a detailed manner. 10/10
Hudson Evans
Italian here. My great grand father was a communist partisan that fought in North Italy against the Saló republic. He always said his greatest regret is that "we did not kill them all". The remaining Italian fascists after the war cleverly used the political climate to secure not only their life, but their future career. The US needed Italy to remain capitalist at any cost, so it did not intervene to punish the fascist survivors like it was done with the German Nazis.
My grand father (not same family branch) worked his all life as a revenue officer and often told me of the fucked up network of mafia, fascist sympathizers (or outright fascists that maintained power) and corrupted politicians that had to witness everyday. He was even deployed on the Yugoslavian border for a while where we kept several thousands soldiers (here the financial police is military, I don't know if it's true elsewhere). Funny little fact he had a good relationship with his superior officer and one day after they both retired he told him about his profile compiled by the secret service, apparently he was classified as a "christian with communist sympathies", he then asked what the hell did that mean and the officer answered "I have no clue". It's too bad that because of these sympathies he never was promoted beyond common grunt.
