Fascist Civil Warfare: Mussolini’s Wars in Spain and Italy, 1936–1945

Abstract

Fascist Italy developed a policy of extreme violence in its colonial practices, in the context of the world war and occupation (in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Russia), and in civil wars. Nonetheless, Mussolinian Fascism has survived media scrutiny rather well, a circumstance paradoxically assisted by the alliance it forged with Nazi Germany in the Spanish Civil War. Reduction ad hitlerum of the genocides during the Second World War has been a significant factor in glossing over Italian culpability in Africa, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Italian war crimes and crimes against humanity during Mussolini's regime range from poison gas bombing in Ethiopia to the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, and to the 'marvellous' Italian aviation actions, as Mussolini put it, in the bombing of Republican civilians in Spain. 1 It is not easy to find a historical analysis that connects these bellicose practices with the nature of the Italian Fascist regime, with its militarized foreign policy, with fascism as the great political praxis of interwar Europe, or with its violent and-in the most extreme case-eliminationist aim. In this chapter, by analysing two cases of Fascist participation in an intrastate war, we will examine how the concepts of civil war and fascist war are interrelated. We look first at Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War,