Titans of History

Mussolini was now a confirmed anti-socialist, convinced that only authoritarian government could overcome the economic and social problems endemic in postwar Italy, as violent street gangs (including his own) battled for supremacy. To describe his decisive, personality-driven politics, he coined the term fascismo—from the Italian word fascio, meaning union, and the Latin fasces, the ancient Roman symbol of a bundle of rods tied around an ax, denoting strength through unity. In March 1919, the first fascist movement in Europe crystallized under his leadership to form the Fasci di Combattimento. His black-shirted supporters, in stark contrast to the flailing liberal governments of the period, successfully broke up industrial strikes and dispersed socialists from the streets. Though Mussolini was defeated in the 1919 elections, he was elected to Parliament in 1921, along with thirty-four other fascists, forming the National Fascist Party later that year. In October 1922, after hostility between left- and right-wing groups had escalated into near anarchy, Mussolini—with thousands of his Blackshirts—staged the so-called March on Rome (in fact he caught the train) but he presented himself as the only man who could restore order. In desperation, King Victor Emmanuel III fatefully asked him to form a government.

The new regime was built on fear. On June 10, 1924, Giacomo Matteotti, a leading socialist party deputy, was kidnapped and murdered by Mussolini’s supporters after criticizing that year’s elections, which saw fascists take 64 percent of the vote. By 1926, Mussolini (calling himself Il Duce—the leader—and initially supported by the liberals) had dismantled parliamentary democracy and stamped his personal authority on every aspect of government, introducing strict censorship and a slick propaganda machine in which newspaper editors were personally handpicked. Two years later, when he placed executive power in the hands of the Fascist Grand Council, the country had effectively become a one-party police state.

In 1935, seeking to realize his dreams of Mediterranean domination and a North African empire, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Ethiopia. In October of that year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), using air power and chemical weapons (mustard gas) in a barbaric campaign that lasted seven months and involved the systematic murder of captured prisoners, either on public gallows or thrown from aircraft midflight. The campaign resulted in the annexation of Ethiopia into Italian East Africa, along with Eritrea and Somaliland.

Mussolini had dreams of empire but the campaign was also to avenge Italy’s humiliation of March 1896, when Ethiopia had defeated an Italian army at Adowa. The 1935 invasion—for which the Italians used a border dispute as a specious pretext—pitted Italian tanks, artillery and aircraft against Emperor Haile Selassie’s ill-equipped and poorly trained army.

Making steady progress toward the Ethiopian capital, the Italians looted the Obelisk of Axum, an ancient monument, and firebombed the city of Harar, eventually taking the capital Addis Ababa on May 5, 1936, forcing Haile Selassie to flee the country. Mussolini’s victorious commander Marshal Badoglio was absurdly named the duke of Addis Ababa. Along the way, in a flagrant violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Italians dropped between 300 and 500 tons of mustard gas, even gassing the ambulances of the Red Cross.

Meanwhile, from the safety of Rome, Mussolini ordered that “all rebel prisoners must be killed,” instructing his troops to “systematically conduct a politics of terror and extermination of the rebels and the complicit population.” In February 1936, after a failed assassination attempt on the colonial governor, Italian troops went on the rampage for three days.

The Italian military establishment had warned Mussolini that a challenge to British and French influence in Africa and the Middle East might provoke Britain into a war that “would reduce us to Balkan level,” but Britain—under Neville Chamberlain—and France were pursuing a policy of appeasement in this period, and Mussolini correctly calculated they would not act decisively, which encouraged Hitler. However, Italy’s Ethiopian empire was short-lived, liberated by Britain in 1941. Haile Selassie reigned until 1974—and it was Badoglio who replaced Mussolini in 1943 and made peace with the Allies. Mussolini’s Abyssinian atrocities led the League of Nations to impose sanctions on Italy. Increasingly isolated, he left the League and allied himself with Hitler in 1937—the same year in which he granted asylum and support to the brutal Croatian fascist Ante Pavelić—emulating the Führer in pushing through a raft of anti-Semitic laws. It soon became clear, however, that Mussolini was the minor partner in the relationship, Hitler failing to consult him on almost all military decisions.