Of all the fascist regimes (comparing the phalanx or franc to Italian fascism in my opinion is nonsense) The Italian has the best chance of surviving due to a more developed intellectuality and an non-extreme attachment to the race like Germans, The "fascism" of primo de Rivera is unknown since he did not take power and Franco, after the second war, dismissed the Falangists.
Could fascism survive to the present without WW2?
- Thread starter TerranGames
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- fascism fascism wank no ww2
I don't understand why here are saying that Italian fascism would die with the loss of Ethiopia, even though Italy lost the second war and Mussolini was executed, Fascism continued to maintain a minimum of popularity in italian society, in a world without a WW2 war, even with the loss of Ethiopia the Italian fascist party would at least be a Considerable opposition party.
I think everyone here is forgetting that the wars in Algeria and Vietnam (the French and American ones) were fought by democracies, and also forget the kind of war Fascist Italy fought against both the Libyan rebels and Ethiopians themselves. In the former three wars the citizens of France and the US had enough freedom of expression to signal their opposition to the wars their nation was involved in, and frequently took that opportunity, sometimes in increasingly illegal ways (ex: American college students burning their draft cards and firebombing ROTC centers). There's zero way Mussolini would tolerate the same level of dissent. Secondly it's worth remembering Mussolini had his own system of concentration camps and drenched Ethiopia with chemical weapons. Despite the brutality visited in Algeria and Vietnam, neither the French or US were willing to go that far to win their respective wars.
This is also keeping in mind we're not even mentioning what Mussolini was willing to do during WWII, both before and after 1943. We have to seriously ask if there would be an Ethiopian population that survives a serious war of resistance against a longer living Fascist Italy.
Don't forget South and Central America either. There were a number of figures in both regions broadly sympathetic to or willing to work with fascists both before and after WWII, some of whom openly admired Mussolini (like Juan Peron).
Without Nazi Germany invading the USSR the Soviets are going to be in a stronger position than OTL by virtue of not having 27+ million of its population killed. Depending on how the inter-war period goes we could actually see a Red Alert type scenario where its the USSR who serves as the main threat to European security through the 30's and 40's.
Mussolini never had any intention of genocide in Ethiopia. I think they’d give it up, because it’s not worth holding. It might not happen under Mussolini. I just can’t see it being viewed as a net benefit to try and hold on to Ethiopia.
I'd argue his actions constituted genocide. Regardless, who's to say he wouldn't become more vicious if in 1950 the country is crawling with guerillas? Can you really say with certainty he wouldn't crack out chemical weapons again if he felt that the Ethiopians were getting the better of him?
Not in the long term, it's a command economy, and command economies are doomed to fail.
That Mussolini had strong grap on economy not mean that his successor/s couldn't change that like Deng did in China. Fascims has not too ideologically such will to control whole economy. It probably would be easier to make some reforms than with communist nations.
I’m sure he would commit atrocities. I don’t think he’d try to wipe the Ethiopians out entirely.
Agree. Mussolini wasn't such genocidal person as Hitler. He was very brutal and ruthless but still not genocidal enough to wipe whole nation from the map. And it would be impractical to wipe cheap labor anyway. Even Mussolini would understand that.
Not on the same scale as Hitler, but iirc he did plan to ethnically cleanse the western half of Slovenia. He also did perform localized ethnic cleansing in Libya to free up land for Italian colonists. I could totally see him act to remove Amhara from the majority non-Amharic parts of Ethiopia to break cultural continuity with the former Ethiopian Empire.
Killing a bunch of colonized people doesn't seem to me like something exclusive to fascist regimes.
Honestly all this talk about Mussolini slaughtering the population to keep Ethiopia under control and I can only think of the already non excellent Italian economy straining under such a forever war and the British and French armies "losing" equipment near the borders of their colonies with Ethiopia, the Italians also finding out that the Suez is suddenly closed for "security reasons"