How Italy’s Colonial War in Ethiopia Foreshadowed the Barbarism of World War II
The Booker Prize shortlisting of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the latest sign of rising interest in Fascist Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia. The genocidal violence perpetrated against Ethiopians in 1935–6 was soon turned back onto European soil — and united Italian anti-fascists with the Africans resisting colonial aggression.
Abyssinian soldiers in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1936.
In early 1934, with the United States and Europe mired in the Great Depression, Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, was widely hailed by any number of Western media barons and public intellectuals. Faced with the dramas of the economic crisis, they praised the “successes” of Mussolini’s corporatist state — supposedly overshadowing the economic model used by the Western democracies.
Eminent author Sir Philip Gibbs informed New York Times readers of Mussolini’s “acute, subtle and far-seeing mind.” Britain’s King George V spoke of Italy as being “under the wise guidance of a strong statesman.” And academics from all over loyally churned out papers supporting Mussolini’s “creativity” in boosting Italy’s domestic economy. But not all were deceived. A. L. Rowse, the somewhat snobbish scholar at All Souls College Oxford, shrewdly described him as a “short, stocky butcher, with a heavy, ill-shaven jowl.”
Mussolini had long been a favorite of British and US establishment figures like press mogul Lord Beaverbrook, Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, Henry R. Luce of Time, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, and Winston Churchill. This latter remarked in 1927 that he could not help being charmed “by Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing.” Even American progressives, including Lincoln Steffens and New Republic editor Herbert Croly, publicly applauded Mussolini.
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