Briefly quoting Micheal Clodfelter’s Warfare and Armed Conflicts, pages 354–5:
After Mussolini had seized power, he determined to end the Libyan insurrection. […] Over 100,000 Senussi, nearly 50 percent of the tribe’s population, had died during the insurrection, most of them in Graziani’s concentration camps.
[…]
In the fall of 1935, Mussolini sent [an army] into Ethiopia to avenge the defeat of Adowa in 1896 and to expand the Fascist empire. […] Ethiopian military and civilian dead, many of them from the barbarous [Fascist] bomb and mustard gas attacks, were estimated as high as 275,000.
Although this history may seem elementary, I never see anticommunists even mention this, and I am willing to bet that you don’t either. That’s really all that I have to say.
Good post. To many, “World War II” only began when it entered Europe, completely ignoring Germany and Italy’s genocidal campaigns in Africa.
The horrors of Japanese imperialism are also mostly ignored.
Yes! If you (or anyone reading) haven’t read it, “Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II” by Iris Chang is a must read for anyone that thinks they know the utter brutality of the Japanese occupation. It opens up readers’ eyes to the cultural trauma still reverberating throughout China today and explains why a lot of things are as they are.
Shinzo Abe and other Japanese politicians visiting the grave of “Japanese veterans” is viewed by a lot of well-meaning Westerners as understandably offensive to Chinese and Korean people, but they usually also justify it by saying it’s complicated or that “they’re just honoring their veterans”. No. They’re honoring some of the most inhuman atrocities ever committed on planet Earth. They’re indicating that they were just acts and they were right in doing them. Every time they refuse to acknowledge or apologize for these crimes, they are saying that Chinese and Korean people are subhuman and deserved it.
Iris Chang herself began receiving death threats from both Amerikan and Japanese nationalists after the book was published, and ended up taking her own life because she thought she was being followed by the Amerikan state department. It is a historiography of extreme importance and if I had my way it’d be mandatory reading in every Amerikan high school history classroom.
the Nazis didn’t have any involvement in Africa until WW2 was well underway, Libya was purely an Italian affair, and they were plenty genocidal there too.
You’re right, but imperial Germany was very active in Africa until about 1920, and the loss of their overseas colonies was part of their revanchist ideology. It wasn’t until 1941 they established the Afrika Korps under Rommel, you’re correct.
Yeah, just meant in relation to how ww2 begian before 1939, that was Japan and Italy. Imperial Germany’s actions in Africa are pre-wwi.
the Nazis didn’t have any involvement in Africa until WW2 was well underway
Well, no, not quite (unless you consider 1931 the beginning of WWII). Egypt (Raiders of the Lost Ark was nonfictional in one way) was a notable exception; it was one of the few relatively open markets with growth prospects, and some Egyptian commodities, most notably cotton, attracted the interest of the Fascist markets. Thus, German capitalists increasingly negotiated with the capitalist gentiles of Egypt:
‘It appears from this example that rivalries between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were less severe in Egypt than in other markets. This assessment is backed by evidence from the rivalries between the German and Italian ports. Even though the ports of the North Sea and the Adriatic competed for the same transactions (see Chapter 8), this long-lasting battle did not prohibit German authorities from allowing the import of Egyptian agricultural products via Trieste, and even agreed to use the German-Italian clearing mechanism to pay for the goods Italian merchants bought in Egypt.’
(Source.)
Surprisingly, the Third Reich also sent a (modest) quantity of matériel to the Ethiopian army, not out of any sympathy for the Ethiopians — certainly not — but to prolong the war and convince the Kingdom of Italy that regardless of how it felt about a probable absorption of Austria, it needed the Reich’s help in the long run:
‘On the military level, it has now been established that Germany had helped Ethiopia to rearm prior to the outbreak of hostilities, in order to make sure that the country could fight against Italy. Hitler wished to avoid two extreme outcomes: defeat for Italy (which would shatter the prestige of European fascism in general) or a quick victory (which would enable Italy to use her newly-acquired prestige against Germany). The prolongation of the campaign enabled him to capitalise on his ‘good services’ to Italy, and to bring Italy closer to Germany by taking advantage of deteriorating Italo–British relations.’
(Source.)
I am glad that you brought this up, though, as it’s another topic that receives less attention than it should. On the face of it, friendly negotiations with any Africans may seem unlikely given that it doesn’t jive well with the Third Reich’s white supremacist bullshit, but at least until it could secure global dominance, Realpolitik had to be the order of the day.
Excellent post, I should have been more specific that it was fascist territorial expansionism/warfare in Africa that was an Italian affair, ‘involvement’ was way too vague and a poor choice of wording on my part.
And yes, the Nazis were certainly willing to contradict their own racial bullshit - notably with their aid to the Chinese nationalists and then the Japanese, even going so far as to declare the later as Aryans.
This is very much worth remembering, what’s also worth bringing up is their attempts at cultural and physical genocide within Italy against minority groups and even minority/regional languages.
Obviously the foremost goal was the Italianization of the Slavs (Slovenes and Croats) in the northeast, the fascists built concentration camps for them which were rather brutal. They also repressed the Germans in the north, going to the point of making a deal with the Nazis to deport them to Germany. All languages apart from Italian were banned, so Slovene, Croatian, German, Provençal, Arpitan, etc. etc. etc. (there are too many to list here easily). They even went as far as renaming towns and cities that had ‘foreign’ or insufficiently ‘Roman’ names - some of those changes were reverted after the war, but some still persist to this day. My father has told me stories of how the teacher would beat him for not speaking Italian at school, just like, holding his hands out on the desk and whacking them, or bashing his head against the blackboard. (he still doesn’t really speak it properly lol)
On top of this we should also remember the many socialists, communists, and other political opponents who were tortured and murdered by the fascists. I think everyone will be at least familiar with Antonio Gramsci, who died in prison under their rule.
