Duce politics. It is a commonplace among educated Italians that “Mussolini was indeed a dictator, but no bloody-handed murderer [sanguinario] like Hitler.” Scholarly sources tell us that he was a “realist,” unlike Hitler, who “was gripped by a delusion which he made from the purely personal into a collective organic delusion shared by thousands of his fellow-countrymen.” Finally, “far from possessing the gifts of intelligence and character of a truly great and creative statesman,” Mussolini had a hidden weakness in dealing with individuals, and was incapable of choosing or retaining competent subordinates.

Mussolini was certainly no sanguinario on Hitler's scale. He did not have millions of people murdered in the service of a racialist pseudoscience. Italian political prisoners generally ended up in desolate corners of the South and the Islands rather than in concentration camps of the German type. The regime's systematic persecution of the Jews did not end in their extermination until Italy's collapse in 1943 brought German occupation. But Mussolini was hardly squeamish, nor was his brutality free of racialist motivation even before the adoption of an anti-Jewish policy. The imposition of what the regime pleased to call a “Roman peace” upon the Arabs of Libya required mass shootings, large-scale population transfers, and concentration camps. In Ethiopia, Italian forces employed mustard gas systematically in accordance with Mussolini's own directives, issued eight months before the campaign opened. The telegrams with which he bombarded his viceroy, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, vividly render the Duce's conception of what he called a “radical house-cleaning” of the newly conquered Impero: