A reader complains:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,
Mussolini’s will was ill; he just had small teeth. Fascism came to
power with limited domestic authority, so its mass-murders were at first
constrained to external enemies. Up to 1931, the Fascists were busy
putting down the Libyan tribesmen in blood; when they finished that,
they moved immediately to planning the conquest of Ethiopia–executed
with a wave of poison gas attacks. Then the Italian army moved to
Spain–where they were not as effective as against the Ethiopians, but
still killed some (tens of?) thousands of Spaniards. At home, the
Fascist party was finally getting strong enough to become more radical,
and initiated anti-Jewish legislation in 1938. Then, of course, World
War II, finally ending in the Salo regime. Now, a good deal of
Mussolini’s policy from the mid-30s on was in rivalry and emulation with
Hitler–but much of it was the native Fascist impulse, radicalizing and
growing more murderous over time. The essential point is, if you
include the slaughters of the Ethiopians and the Libyans in the
historical record, the mass muderousness of Fascism and Mussolini is
obvious enough.

Me: There is much that I think is flat-out wrong here. But the point about the Ethiopians is fair (as is the general point that Mussolini’s “will was ill”).

But, I would argue that the invasion of Ethiopia had less to do with Fascism and more to do with old-fashioned European colonialism. When we discuss Fascists as mass-murderers — or at least when we do it in the context of that “Two Totalitarianisms” piece — we’re usually referring to domestic genocide and the like rather than wars of conquest. It was not Mussolini’s goal to put Ethiopians in camps, it was to give the gift of Italian civilization to them.

Or at least in part.

Which brings me to where I think the reader is wrong. The Fascist Party in Italy did not get stronger in the 1930s, it got weaker (When Mussolini was strongest, it was Fascist Italy which prevented Hitler from annexing Austria). This weakness was why Mussolini felt he needed the Ethiopian adventure in the first place — to bolster his flagging regime. Similarly, the anti-Jewish laws — while terrible — were imposed because Mussolini became increasingly dependent on Hitler’s support to stay in power. It should also be said that the anti-Jewish laws were never enforced with anything like German gusto and the real bad news for Jews came when the Italian Fascist regime crumbled and the Nazis essentially took over Italy. For more on this, you’ll just have to wait for my book.