The Italian Fascism

The Italian fascist government unveiled their policy for anti-Semitism racial policy in the year 1938 where they surprised very many Europeans. Italy was always regarded to as the central state in Europe where history had not favored anti-Semitism. Jews in Italy were always very few. In the fascist regime, they were just a little bit more than 0.1% in the whole Italian population.

Italian Jews endured a three-act catastrophe under Fascism that started with promise, devolved into anarchy, and culminated in destruction, as all epic tragedies do. They had remained in peace in Fascist Italy until 1938. The majority tended to identify as Italians first and Jews second. As such, the abrupt promulgation of legislation 'for the protection of the race' had little correlation with the Jewish community's self-perception in Italy. While Italian Jews have been reluctant to reflect on these rules, recent publications suggest that they are starting to recount their encounters with Fascism. While the vocabulary of the laws remains critical for interpreting Fascist anti-Semitism, historians must also broaden their scope of inquiry to include evolving social histories. As the key origins of Italian Jews and the leading advocates of Fascist anti-Semitism are combined with the laws themselves, the 1938 race laws seem to have been envisioned and consciously promoted by the Fascist dictatorship regardless of prior assumptions.

Prior to 1938, Fascist Italy lacked any limits on racism. The racial laws were passed simultaneously with Fascist Italy's alliance with Nazi Germany and just months prior to the Fascist Italy could form the military alliance recognized as the Pact of Steel to Nazi

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1. Cavaglion, Alberto, "Foreign Jews In The Western Alps (1938 – 43)", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005), 426-446
2. Napoli, Olindo, "The Origin Of The Racist Laws Under Fascism. Aproblem Of Historiography", Taylor & Francis, 2021 [Accessed 28 June 2021]
3. Corner, p, Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened To Dictatorship?, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 2017)

Germany. Mussolini enacted the rules, according to William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in order to appease his powerful German supporters, rather than to assuage genuine anti-Semitism within the Italian populace. Italians' reactions to 1938's anti-Jewish racial laws also sparked controversy. According to others, they encountered hostility, whilst others argue that the laws astounded and perplexed Italians. Even others assert that the laws were unanimously approved.d

The laws were first targeted against non-Europeans and citizens of mixed ethnicity in the colonies, before being extended to Jews. This essay examines recent research on racial statutes, which took a number of forms, and of which the uniqueness of anti-Semitic legislation must be noted, notwithstanding the fact that anti-Semitic legislation developed concurrently with other forms of racial legislation. For some time, these topics have been the topic of heated discussion, in which divergent historiographical ideologies have clashed, although focus has been called to the importance of countering efforts to accuse others for what remains a matter of Italian duty.

Italy's former lands have long been shrouded in a curious secrecy in popular memory and Italian historical research on alleged crimes perpetrated by Italy. The aim of this WORK is to consider the explanations for this silence by an analysis of the major historiographical issues and a study of the few accessible studies. The historiographical application of the judicial category of

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4. Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378
5. Visani, Alessandro, "Italian Reactions To The Racial Laws Of 1938 As Seen Through The Classified Files Of The Ministry Of Popular Culture", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 11 (2006), 171-187
6. Gori, Annarita, and Rita Almeida de Carvalho, "Italian Fascism And The Portuguese Estado Novo: International Claims And National Resistance", Intellectual History Review, 30 (2019), 295-319

'crimes' or 'war crimes' should not be assumed, especially when investigating the colonial experience. The more prominent writers have overlooked the danger that sensationalistic usage of the term 'terrorism' – in and of itself an unusual and unprecedented occurrence – would obscure the gravity of an imperial power's everyday operations

Controversy rages over Italians' responses to 1938's anti-Jewish racist legislation. Some say they were greeted with animosity, while others assert that the laws shocked and perplexed Italians, while still others assert that the laws were universally accepted. In view of the documents quoted in this article, it is difficult to comply with those who argue that there was a 'lack of agreement' among Italians over Fascist 'racial' legislation. The documentation described and addressed here put significant doubt on the widely held belief by historians that the majority of the Italian citizens were overtly hostile to the racial and anti-Semitic movement. The fact, it seems, was very different.

In agreement with some scholars like Olindo de Napoli, Aaron Gillette, Roberto Maiocchi, Giulia Barrera and Barbara Srgoni, I regard the initial phase to be distinct from the phase that was subsequent, which was defined by the argument of Aryanness from 1936 to 1945, which would become the central theme of Fascist discourse on race from 1936-37. The second step will be described by a distinctly self-referential racialization which asserted racial integrity and self-consistency as evidence of the incommensurability of Italian racial identity and inferior racialized classes.

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7. Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378
8. Gillette, Aaron, "The Origins Of The 'Manifesto Of Racial Scientists'", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies,6 (2001), 305-323

In 1935, Mussolini's Italian army conquered Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia). Mussolini desired the rebirth of the Roman Empire and was a leading League of Nations participant. Unlike the war in Manchuria, the League of Nations did not avoid the conflict in Abyssinia since it was too close to their European headquarters and Abyssinia shared borders with several French and British colonial possessions.

In 1934, there was a conflict in the Wal-Wal oasis between Italian as well as Abyssinian armies. Mussolini used this as justification for the 1935 conquest of Abyssinia. Throughout this march to battle, Haile Selassie, the Abyssinian king, brought his case to that same League of Nations in the hope of gaining assistance. The crisis can be classified into many stages. Mussolini trained for the conquest of Abyssinia during step one, between January and October 1935. Britain and France stalled any League of Nations operation. France and Britain were much more concerned with Hitler's rise and needed Mussolini's assistance in combating Hitler. Britain and France responded by signing the Stresa Pact with Mussolini. Despite this, popular sentiment was shifting towards Italy, and those in the United Kingdom supported the use of aggression against Italy in Abyssinia. At this stage, several British leaders started to argue that Italy was in the wrong and needed the League's protection. However, this resulted in little action, just further discussion and debate. The League finally announced that no one should be kept responsible for the Wal-Wal incident and that Italy could be granted any of Abyssinia. Mussolini refused, and his troops conquered Abyssinia in October 1935.

Ethiopia was the first region to be subjected to fascism's barbaric practices after Mussolini's troops occupied the country on October 3, 1935. On May 5, 1941, it was also the first city to be freed from fascist occupation. As Mussolini's forces occupied Ethiopia, the

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9. Griffin, Roger, "Studying Fascism In A Postfascist Age. From New Consensus To New Wave? 1", Fascism, 1 (2012), 1-17

Ethiopians fought back for seven long months, before Addis Ababa fell on May 5, 1936. Ethiopian opposition was crushed by the fascist military using mustard gas and explosive devices. Emperor Haile Selassie fled to exile after his defeat at the Battle of Maychew. Ethiopians banded together throughout the world to resist the Italian conquest, confining the Italian presence to large metropolitan centers and their environs.

On Aug. 3, 1935, 25,000 Black as well as White New Yorkers demonstrated down Harlem's Lenox Avenue to oppose the invasion of fascist Italy into Ethiopia. Ethiopia, ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie, was a League of Nations participant as well as a leader of one of the only two countries that did not get colonized. The critical nature of the cause pulled together Italian American leftists, pan-Africanist organizations, religious, Black labor, as well as the event's host, the Communist-affiliated American League Against War and Fascism.

Sometimes overlooked by historians, the Italo-Ethiopian War (October 1935–May 1936) took the world to America's Black populations. It reawakened widespread feelings of identity and loyalty that cut through national borders and triggered mass demonstrations. Outside of the United States, the war has exposed numerous members of the Black diaspora to the gravity of anti-racist and anti-fascist movements. The mass backlash to Ethiopia's invasion is worth noting at a moment when a young generation is protesting economic inequality and authoritarian violence is on the rise.

Ethiopia used to have a very peculiar place in the hearts of many members of the Black diaspora. It had been an early center of Christianity, and the late nineteenth-century Ethiopianism religion movement drew on biblical references to the country's unique interest in promoting

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10. Giuliani, Gaia, "L'italiano Negro", Interventions, 16 (2013), 572-587 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2013.851828

African nationalism and freedom. Ethiopia also served as an emblem of African modernity and anti-imperial resistance. Ethiopians compelled Italian armed forces to withdraw in Adwa in 1896, effectively ending Italy's first effort to occupy the region. Haile Selassie, who was in his fifth year as Emperor at the time, also achieved worldwide renown. He was a source of inspiration for Rastafari, a religious and cultural movement that saw him as a messianic figure. For millions, the Ethiopian colonization jeopardized Black rights and dignity worldwide.

For the fascists, invading Ethiopia was an opportunity to carry out Dictator Benito Mussolini's scheme to turn Italy into an instrument of white ethnic rescue. While the fascist dictatorship was renowned for persecuting socialists and racial and religious minorities, it often served to counter potential challenges to white civilization's hegemony. Mussolini warned in 1927, years before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, that white people faced destruction, when "black and yellow people" were "at our gate," equipped with "a consciousness of their races future in the country."

Italy had invaded Eritrea, Libya and Somalia, in Africa previous to World War I even though Ethiopia, scheduled for settlement by the Italian refugees, would demonstrate a totalitarian ideal of complete colonial dominance to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, sheer military might guarantee success, with the deployment of 1,000,000 troops and hundreds of tons of illicit mustard gas bombs.

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11. Corner, p, Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened To Dictatorship?, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 2017)
12. Pandır, Müzeyyen, "Book Review: Ruth Wodak And John E Richardson (Eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism In Talk And Text", Discourse & Society, 26 (2015), 396-398
13. Corner, p, Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened To Dictatorship?, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 2017)

Under this state of emergency, White and Black anti-racists as well as anti-fascists organized on a global scale. Amy Ashwood Garvey organized a demonstration in London with the allies of Ethiopia organization. Protesters in St. Kitts as well as in the British West Indies requested that the government of Britain take measures against the Italians. 1,400 men in Jamaica petitioned to King George V for the right to enroll into the Ethiopian force. In the United States, Samuel Daniels, president of the Pan-African Reconstruction Association, recruited volunteers by touring major cities. Soon after, the State Department reminded the city officials that American citizens were not permitted to fight for a foreign country. Even though two Black pilots, John Robinson and Hubert Julian found their way to Ethiopia to assist.

New York City developed as a focal point for the activity on both sides of the Italo-Ethiopian conflicts. Just under a week to the invasion, on Sept. 26, a demonstration at Madison Square Garden drew more than one hundred thousand people to listen to the civil rights activist Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others share and inform about the imminent catastrophe. The protest served as a show of ethnic solidarity as well: very many anti-fascist Italian Americans including whites constituted three quarters of that crowd and were applauding the destruction of Mussolini’s 20-foot effigy. Together, whites and blacks boycotted against the Italian companies, resulting in clashes throughout the capital. Ethiopia forged bonds for some New Yorkers while driving others away.

Although some of the Italian Americans opposed Mussolini in New York, some of them welcomed him. The tensions reached a zenith on Oct. 3, when Italian forces started pouring into Ethiopia. Italian American and African-American students brawled with lead pipes and ice pick

14. Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378

at Brooklyn's P.S. 178, as well as a Black rally consisting of the Italian traders at the King Julius General Market on Lenox and also 118th Street devolved into a riot. The New York City Police Department assigned 1,200 more officers to "war duty" in response to the violence. Demonstrators there, as in other American areas, were often subjected to police repression.

Numerous Italian American communities increased their advocacy in favour of their ancestors' countries of birth — the majority of Italian immigrants came between 1880 and 1920. They recruited fighters and collected money for the madreporian through donation of wedding rings to get melted down for armaments in Italy. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered a $100,000 check to the Italian consul general at a rally in Madison Square Garden on December that was attended by twenty thousand people. Most of this encouragement was motivated by admiration for Benito Mussolini. Mussolini has been a star in the United States since the late 1920s, when he began writing a column on a monthly basis for newspapers that were run by his supporter named William Randolph Hearst. A month into that battle, when planes dropped loads of mustard gas, destroying the Ethiopians in thousands, as portrayed by a cover on a TIME magazine showing Duce with his sons, the family guy that he is.

On May 9, 1936, after Italy proclaimed victory, hundreds of African Americans held demonstration at Lenox Avenue once more, shattering the windows of the Italian American organizations and their operations. In the midtown, the American League of War and Fascism demonstrated against the Italian Consulate, disturbing an exquisite strip of Fifth Avenue with

15. Labanca, Nicola, "Colonial Rule, Colonial Repression And War Crimes In The Italian Colonies", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 9 (2004), 300-313 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571042000254737
16. Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378
17. Gentile, Emilio, Paul Corner, and Christopher Duggan, "Two New Books On Fascism. A Review, The Authors’ Responses And The Reviewer's Comments", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 19 (2014), 665-683

their denunciations of the continuing massacre. Exiled Emperor Haile Selassie made headlines in June 1936 when he addressed the League of Nations, condemning "the poisonous rain" that had killed his citizens.



However, the start of the Spanish Civil War a month later and Hitler's growing spread across Europe quickly rendered the situation in Ethiopia a non-issue for the majority of Whites. Many members of the African diaspora became aware of this. Ethiopia, not Munich, was the first instance of fascist repression being appeased. As deaths in Ethiopian escalated — an approximate two hundred and fifty thousand died before Allies were able to force the Italians out of the world in 1941 —West African black people and the Caribbean began to denounce Italian colonialism. In March 1938, the West African Pilot newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria, wrote an editorial condemning the fascists' usage of slave labor.

The plurality of experts who have focused on developing a philosophy of totalitarianism agree that fascism cannot be called an authoritarian dictatorship, despite the fact that Mussolini as well as the fascists considered themselves to be the founders of the totalitarian State. Although it seems that fascism did not coin the phrase "totalitarian," it was most certainly the only political dictatorship, among those later deemed totalitarian that proudly used the concept to describe its political philosophy and power system. Furthermore, the Fascist dictatorship was the first authoritarian regime of the twentieth century to officially follow the concept of totalitarian state. From the mid-1920s on, antifascism used the word "totalitarian" and all its derivatives to describe the fascist regime's novelty and originality. Democratic antifascists such as Giovanni Amendola and Luigi Sturzo developed the first elements of a study of totalitarianism based on

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18. Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378

the Italian context and comparisons between fascist and communist regimes. These elements were later mostly recapitulated by postwar studies on totalitarianism.

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References

Gillette, Aaron, "The Origins Of The 'Manifesto Of Racial Scientists'", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 6 (2001), 305-323

Cavaglion, Alberto, "Foreign Jews In The Western Alps (1938 – 43)", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 10 (2005), 426-446

Visani, Alessandro, "Italian Reactions To The Racial Laws Of 1938 As Seen Through The Classified Files Of The Ministry Of Popular Culture", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 11 (2006), 171-187

Corner, p, Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened To Dictatorship?, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 2017)

Giuliani, Gaia, "L'italiano Negro", Interventions, 16 (2013), 572-587 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2013.851828

Gabbuti, Giacomo, "Labor Shares And Inequality: Insights From Italian Economic History, 1895–19701", European Review Of Economic History, 25 (2020), 355-378

Gentile, Emilio, Paul Corner, and Christopher Duggan, "Two New Books On Fascism. A Review, The Authors’ Responses And The Reviewer's Comments", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 19 (2014), 665-683

Gori, Annarita, and Rita Almeida de Carvalho, "Italian Fascism And The Portuguese Estado Novo: International Claims And National Resistance", Intellectual History Review, 30 (2019), 295-319

Griffin, Roger, "Studying Fascism In A Postfascist Age. From New Consensus To New Wave? 1", Fascism, 1 (2012), 1-17

Labanca, Nicola, "Colonial Rule, Colonial Repression And War Crimes In The Italian Colonies", Journal Of Modern Italian Studies, 9 (2004), 300-313 https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571042000254737

Napoli, Olindo, "The Origin Of The Racist Laws Under Fascism. Aproblem Of Historiography", Taylor & Francis, 2021 [Accessed 28 June 2021]

Pandır, Müzeyyen, "Book Review: Ruth Wodak And John E Richardson (Eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism In Talk And Text", Discourse & Society, 26 (2015), 396-398