Mussolini: The Anti-Semite
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Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Here's what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has to say about Mussolini and Italian fascism:
There was relatively little overt antisemitism among Italians. Italian Fascism, in the early 1930s, did not focus on racism and antisemitism. . . .In 1938, in part under pressure from Nazi Germany, the Fascist Italian regime passed antisemitic laws. These laws forbade marriage between Jews and non-Jews and removed Jewish teachers from the public schools. Foreign Jews living as refugees in Italy were confined in internment camps. . . .
Although allied with Germany, Fascist Italy did not willingly cooperate in the Nazi plan to kill the Jews of Europe. Italians generally refused to participate in genocide, or to permit deportations from Italy or the Italian occupation zones in Yugoslavia, Greece, and France to the Nazi extermination camps. Italian military officers and officials usually protected Jews and Italian-occupied areas were relatively safe for Jews.
This was the common story to Mussolini and Italian fascism that despite all its horror and repression, it was not anti-Semitic unlike its German counterpart. That Mussolini was mislead by his ally Hitler and many Italians even go further and engage in disingenuous apologetic rhetoric. Italy's Prime Minister Berlusconi, no less, not to long ago even went so far as to state that Mussolini "never killed anyone."
But a new journal kept by Mussolini's mistress Clara Petacci - "Claretta" - sheds a new light on the late dictator. Released from Italian state archives after 50 years in the bunker, so to speak, the diary reveals that Mussolini was not led astray into anti-Jewish hatred but a genuine European anti-Semite who welcomed the genocide of European Jewry.
"These disgusting Jews, I must destroy them all," is but one Mussolini's rants recounted by Petacci, who died alongside her lover.
In 1938, Mussolini spoke about committing a genocide against the Jews even before the Nazis started the Holocaust: "I shall carry out a massacre, like the Turks did {in reference to the death of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians)."
And the Il Duce - as he is known to Italians (for some fondly still) - took pride in his racism: "I've been a racist since '21."
The new journal written by a woman who stood by his side and was killed by anti-fascists partisans alongside him reveals that unlike the common narrative by Italians ashamed by their history - the anti-Jewish laws and support for the Holocaust was not some misled moment due to Nazi pressure, but a genuine outgrowth of Mussolini's own hatred for Jews and his wish to see them dead even prior to the Holocaust. Such new facts should also end efforts to whitewash Italian fascism - the first fascism - by modern day Berlusconi right-wingers.
Anti-Semite or no anti-Semite, fascism is vulgar and worthy of unreserved scorn. The new revelations just make Mussolini even more worthy of contempt.
Source: Not just Hitler's fool. The Economist.
