Comparisons between the “State of Israel” and Fascist Italy

I am not in a good mood today, given my attention to recent events in the Middle East, so today we are going to be doing something different: we are going to be making explicit comparisons between Fascist Italy’s atrocities and those of the so‐called ‘State of Israel’.

Now, I should admit upfront that the historic and present situations are not comparable in every single respect, but for the time being the similarities are much too important to overlook, so we’ll be focusing on them. Let’s begin, shall we?

Much like the neocolony, the Fascists needed their ‘9/11’ as a casus belli for their war on Ethiopia. Quoting Ian Campbell’s The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, page 21:

[I]n November 1934, there was an incident at a remote desert oasis named Welwel, some 100 kilometres inside Ethiopian territory, where the Italians had unilaterally established a military post. Soon after an Anglo‐Ethiopian border survey commission arrived, shooting broke out, in which more than 100 Ethiopians and 30 Italian colonial soldiers died. Once again striking a posture of hurt innocence, the [Fascists] claimed that Welwel lay within their colony of Italian Somaliland, and even went so far as to demand apologies and damages.

But the fact is that Mussolini’s claims were deliberately intended to provoke the Emperor, for the Duce wrote to the commander‐in‐chief of the [Fascist] armed forces in Africa, ‘In case the negus [Emperor Haile Selassie] has no intention of attacking us, we ourselves must take the initiative.’⁸

We know how unlikely it is that the neocolony would have failed to foresee an assault by Hamas, so already we can find an important similarity. One noticeable difference, though, is that the Fascists took much longer (almost a year) to officially invade Ethiopia, whereas we know that the neocolonists had much less patience (though there were several minor incidents following the Welwel incident).

Much like the neocolony in the Middle East, Fascist Italy was equipped with a highly modern military, which was more than enough to deal with its poorly equipped targets. Pages 25–6:

Virtually abandoned by the world, the Ethiopian barefoot levies, armed with little more than a few guns remaining from Adwa, put up a stubborn resistance to the invasion. But their bravery and pride were not enough. Using long‐outdated military strategies, and with their traditional white clothes making them easy targets, they faced an enormous modern army that included élite [Fascist] regiments as well as numerous battalions of well‐armed colonial (mainly Eritrean) soldiers who constituted a formidable fighting force, the principal livelihood open to Eritrean men being the military.

The Ethiopians were also confronted with overwhelming military superiority in the form of new weapons of mass destruction with which most Ethiopians were unfamiliar: tanks, machine guns, flame‐throwers and, above all, a massive air force equipped with chemical weapons. In the world’s first mass aerial bombardment of civilians¹¹—a harbinger of what would become commonplace in Europe a few years later—entire settlements with their inhabitants were obliterated, with no distinction made between combatants and non‐combatants, or between men, women and children.

The neocolony hardly tires of bombing civilian structures, and neither did Fascist Italy. Page 35:

The [Fascist] air force, or Regia Aeronautica, played a critical rôle in creating terror among the Ethiopians. As early as 1932 Emilio De Bono, then Minister of Colonies, was arguing that the invasion of Ethiopia would depend on having ‘a powerful Air Force, one that can bring terror to the [Ethiopian] empire’s capital and major cities’. In response to a letter from Mussolini in December 1934, he advised that the invasion should be prepared ‘by a violent bombing action on all the principal Ethiopian cities’, including Addis Ababa. ‘Everything must be destroyed with incendiary exploding bombs,’ he wrote. ‘Terror must be disseminated throughout the Empire.’²⁸

When the time came, terror from the air was indeed the cornerstone of the invasion strategy. It was further strengthened during the Occupation, for the most common method of fighting the Ethiopian Patriots was to follow what had been done to their counterparts in Libya: blackmailing them into surrender by terrorising the civilian population. This was accomplished largely by the bombing and aerial spraying of Ethiopian men, women, children, animals, crops and drinking water with toxic chemicals provided by the Asmara‐based Chemical Warfare Service known by the Italians as Section K.

To disguise the obvious immorality of using a military against an unarmed civilian population, the neocolony claims to the world that it is merely acting against Hamas. Fascist Italy did similar. Per David Clay Large’s Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s, page 162:

As [Fascist] troops streamed across the Ethiopian border, General De Bono sent up two airplanes to drop copies of a proclamation over enemy territory. The proclamation, signed by the general, blamed the opening of hostilities on Ethiopia, which had “treacherously attacked” [Fascist] posts. It insisted that the soldiers of Italy were entering Ethiopia to defend its people “against molestation” and to “punish those guilty of provocation.”

Pleading for cooperation with the [Fascist] “liberators,” it urged the people not to listen to “false rumors” and to pray for a quick [Fascist] victory. But it ended with a warning: “Woe to him who disturbs public order. I shall be pitiless.”

Even as some [Fascist] planes were dropping proclamations, others were dropping bombs. De Bono insisted that the targets were exclusively military ones, sites “where groups of warriors had been observed.” Yet one of the first targets was the town of Adowa, which was filled with women and children. Mussolini’s eldest son, Vittorio, participated in the opening raid, which he saw as “revenge […] for the heroic death of our soldiers, who forty years ago fell victim to overwhelming odds.”

News sources that have documented the neocolony’s bombings of Red Crescent and Red Cross buildings, in addition to massacring physicians, are easy to find. So, too, did Fascist Italy bomb Red Cross facilities and massacre physicians. :::spoiler [Examples] Between Two Fires, page 163:

Greek and Levantine shopkeepers painted red crosses on the roofs of their shops, and even on their strawhats, in hopes of securing immunity from [Fascist] bombs.

Buildings marked with red crosses, however, seemed to attract rather than deter [Fascist] pilots, and they were one of the few targets the bombers managed to hit with any consistency. The British minister in Ethiopia telegraphed London that the first [Fascist] bombs had fallen precisely on a house containing hospital stores and flying the red cross. European and American newspapers sent up cries of indignation over this “barbarous” behavior and over [Fascist] air attacks that claimed the lives of defenseless women and children. General De Bono dismissed these complaints with equal indignation. In reality, he insisted, the only victims of the first raids “were one woman, one child, and several cattle.” He said nothing about warriors. :::
\ Not only that, but the neocolony’s illegal deployment of white phosphorus in Lebanon and Gaza feels like a throwback to Fascist Italy’s likewise illegal deployment of mustard gas. The Addis Ababa Massacre, pages 36–8:

[T]he Regia Aeronautica deliberately attacked Ethiopian, Swedish and British Red Cross field hospitals and facilities whenever it suited them for military reasons, for the carrying out of reprisals, or to silence doctors who might reveal Italy’s use of chemical weapons. And when later challenged by the international community, officials such as Graziani, in a face‐saving exercise for Mussolini, had no qualms in falsifying pilots’ flight reports to make it appear that the strikes had been unintentional.³⁵

For the [Fascist] military the great value of chemical weapons was as a means of destroying Ethiopians—soldiers and civilians—en masse from a safe distance without having to confront the enemy directly, but only from aeroplanes.

That this policy was public knowledge in Italy is illustrated by the fact that in early October a group of Bologna university students, having swallowed the propaganda put out by Mussolini regarding Ethiopians, exhorted him to conduct ‘a war to the limits’, against the ‘inhuman, vile … bestial Abyssinian people’, and insisted that in the process the Italians should deploy chemical weapons to ensure that they themselves would not be put in harm’s way.

In a telling admission of Italian martial spirit that probably infuriated the Duce, who always proclaimed multiple deaths on the battlefield as positive expressions of Italian valour, they wrote, ‘We are Italians, and we want to keep our sacrifice to a minimum—especially when it is a question of fighting animals like the Abyssinians.’

[…]

By January 1936 the application of poisonous chemicals had been further refined by the Regia Aeronautica to provide for high‐volume discharge during low‐flying aerial spraying of Ethiopian civilians and their crops, animals and water sources, bringing the number of Ethiopian deaths during the invasion to an estimated total of more than a quarter of a million. […] Poison gas, administered from the air, was used extensively and, after the Occupation began, became the principal weapon used against the resistance.

Note the dehumanization. The neocolonists’ disparagement of the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ unconsciously(?) echoes Heinrich Himmler’s reference to thousands of Slavic prisoners as ‘human animals’, but you can see it a little less exactly in the words of the Italian Fascists, too.

Paramilitant settlers regularly contribute to Palestine’s colonization, and many Italian settlers did likewise in atrocities committed against local populations in Ethiopia:

With rifles, pistols, bombs, knives and clubs served out for the occasion, gangs of Blackshirts and workmen went through the native quarters killing every man, woman and child they came across. Others, with flame‐throwers and tins of petrol, fired the flimsy huts and houses and shot down those who tried to escape.¹⁰⁴

Incarcerated Palestinians are perhaps the only people that the neocolonists treat worse than ordinary Palestinians, and similar mistreatment is visible against Fascist Italy’s Ethiopian prisoners. Page 209:

In his memoirs, Temesgen stated that the [Fascists] estimated that there were 18,000 prisoners in Fit Ber. Although this is probably an overestimate, the figure was certainly in the thousands, and there is no doubt that he was correct in saying that the captives ‘were not able to speak, due to the hunger and thirst. Although alive, they were totally exhausted.’

Like the previous day, Monday was quite hot, and in the compound of the Central Police Station, where thousands of prisoners were sitting on the ground, there were no shelters and no shade. So the prisoners took off their clothes and put them over their head.¹⁷

There is a wide agreement among scholars that the neocolony is an apartheid state, where contact with Palestinians and neocolonists is minimal. The Fascists practiced apartheid as well in East Africa. Quoting Haile Larebo in Italian Colonialism, page 84:

During the occupation the Ethiopians had unprecedented employment opportunities, but they were relegated to the most demeaning jobs and explicitly excluded from participation in any sector of the economy where they might compete with Italians.³ This policy culminated in laws that set out rigid rules of separate social and residential development based on race.⁴

It entailed massive forced removal of Ethiopians from their residences to new quarters where they would live under a form of apartheid that mandated separate social amenities and ways of life for settlers and Ethiopians. The two communities were forbidden to have any social contact with each other except when the imperatives of the labor‐exchange market required it. In large urban centers Ethiopian ghettos developed which Europeans needed a permit to enter.⁵

Finally, as it is sadly reasonably possible that the neocolonists will attempt to exterminate the Palestinians, Wazir Ali Baig rumored that there was a plan to eventually exterminate the Ethiopians:

I have heard some Italian agents say here that Mussolini declares there is not room enough for his 15 million Italians with families to establish themselves in Addis Abeba so he must wipe out all the black races of the country. On any small pretext gas and bombs will therefore be used to finish the Abyssinians.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

All atrocities are and should be appalling in their own right, thus comparisons are usually entirely optional. Likewise, it would be ahistorical to claim that there is something intrinsically fascist about war crimes, which have occurred for as long as wars and crimes have co‐existed, long before fascism.

But comparing the present to the past can help us predict the future. Identifying the Zionist ruling class with the Fascists not only helps us think of our oppressors in a new or clear way, but can help us predict their course. As many of the Fascists could not get away with their atrocities forever, the Zionists shall pay for theirs.