ABSTRACT
This chapter will address the moral implications and historiographical consequences of one narrative of a long history of regime comparison: that of Italian Fascism as a ‘lesser evil’ with respect to National Socialism. While the Italian dictatorship has not been included in the totalitarian equation as defined by the other essays in this volume, it ranks high on the scale of twentieth-century European evil – except when compared with Nazism and Communism. Whether the index is body counts or the dissolution of traditional state institutions, Italian Fascism comes up a distinct third, classifiable at most as an ‘imperfect totalitarianism’, to use an old slogan that still circulates.1 My intent in investigating this comparison is not to ascertain its truth-value, but rather to explore its histories and symbolic value and the ways it influenced the evaluation of Italian Fascism among both Italians and foreigners. For although a wealth of studies testifies to an effort to assess Mussolini’s regime on its own terms, this international historiography has also been shaped directly and obliquely by a sense of ‘what [Italian] Fascism was not’: a regime of genocide and mass murder in which ‘ordinary men’ implemented policies designed to produce a racialist utopia.2
