Introduction

Looking back on history, we can often see patterns emerging just before dangerous or terrible events occurred. One example is the Holocaust during the Second World War. It’s obvious to us—now—that the rise of authoritarianism, including fascism, was paving the way for leaders in many countries to command the obedience of whole populations. We can see how Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and others began to attack journalists and control the flow of information. They stirred up nationalism by persecuting ethnic minorities or invading desirable lands. In some ways, their actions were like experiments, pushing the boundaries of authoritarian rule to see what they could get away with. This article details some of those experiments.

Italian East Africa

Mussolini, the founder of the Italian National Fascist Party, was among the first to experiment in this way. Within Italy, Mussolini promoted the ideas of la razza and la stirpe (“the race” and “the lineage”). Italians were members of both. But outsiders and immigrants were not. His government also argued that Italians needed colonies, which would provide national Spazio Vitale, or “vital space.” This meant that Italians needed more space to live. This policy had deadly consequences for Africans in Libya and Ethiopia.

In the 1920s, Mussolini pursued an aggressive foreign policy. First, he attacked the Greek island of Corfu. He had plans to expand into the Balkans and acquire Albania as a territory. He also supported the brutal suppression of anti- colonial resistance in Libya. His military leaders used chemical weapons, forced starvation, concentration camps, and mass resettlement of African Libyans. They did so to make space for Italian settlers. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. It used similar harsh tactics.

Historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller argue that the Italian colonies provided “testing grounds for strategies of governance and repression.” Colonialism led to the rise of Italian racism. In 1938, Mussolini published a “Manifesto of Fascist Racism.” It declared state policy of overt discrimination against Africans, Arabs, and Jews. These groups, he claimed, were biologically different from “western Mediterranean” and European people. They had to be conquered or excluded from the Italian nation.

German Lebensraum

German imperialism was long based on a theory of colonial growth. It was called Lebensraum, meaning “living space”. Lebensraum was popular before and during Nazi rule. In the 1890s and 1900s, Germany expanded its colonies in South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) and the Pacific. They did so to provide wealth and “habitat” for German settlers. Between 1904 and 1908 the German military used concentration camps and slave labor in South West Africa. They managed these camps and labor using techniques that would later be used against Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war in WWII.

Under Adolf Hitler, the idea of Lebensraum became clearly connected to race and antisemitism. The Nazis tried to define who belonged in the German “nation.” They tried to expel and discriminate against those who they believed did not. For example, Hitler’s eugenic forced sterilization program began in 1933.¹ Before World War II even began Nazi doctors sterilized over 350,000 people. These were people they judged to be exhibiting “social deviance,” disability, or who had conditions they thought to be hereditary.

In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws. These laws defined who had “German” blood and who did not. They regulated marriage and sexual intercourse between the two groups. They stripped citizenship from both Jews and Roma. By 1938, the Nazis were physically expelling some Jews and debating massive resettlement plans.

The Soviet Union

Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. He used authoritarian tactics to solidify communist control of the Soviet Union. These tactics worked at a time when communists felt threatened by both fascists and capitalist democracies in Europe. Much like Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin used violence and propaganda to maintain order and power. However, he was not a fascist leader. Communist ideology was explicitly internationalist and anti-racist. It was committed to regarding all people (both men and women) as workers. But in practice, communism did not always match its ideology. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union under Stalin was a place of intense violence and fear.

A poor harvest in 1931-32 was made worse by Soviet economic policies. This created famine conditions. The government responded inadequately and blamed the situation on kulaks. Kulaks were better-off peasants who now faced persecution and property confiscation. It is estimated that between 3.3 million and 7.5 million people died in Ukraine during this famine. Another 2 million died in Kazakhstan. This catastrophic man-made famine is known as the Holodomor.

Stalin and his supporters identified their enemies in political and social ways. They did not use race. The kulaks are just one example. Stalin was obsessively focused on getting rid of enemies. This resulted in the Great Purge of 1936-38. During this time, about one-third of the Communist Party’s three million members were killed. Another million were sent to prisons called Gulags. The state decided who was an enemy quickly, randomly, and irreversibly. These decisions affected political officials, army members, peasants, ethnic minorities, artists, scientists, intellectuals, foreigners, and ordinary Soviet citizens.

Japan

In the 1930s, the Japanese government increasingly came under the control of authoritarian governments. Although not really fascist, these governments were heavily influenced by military and industrial leaders. Both sectors wanted Japan to take over territories in Asia. Japan still had a problem of too few natural resources. They needed minerals, timber, and oil from abroad. Japan already had some colonies, including Korea, but many military and business leaders argued that Japan deserved to rule most of Asia. They would call their empire the “Greater East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere”.

In 1931, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria, in China. Five years later they conquered Inner Mongolia as well. A year later they pushed into northern China. Resistance was unnoticed at first but grew rapidly as Japanese forces attacked the Chinese capital of Nanjing. Angry at the growing resistance, Japanese troops killed as many as 300,000 civilians.

At home, meanwhile, the Japanese government increasingly pushed down any opposition to their war effort. It became dangerous to question the government or the military. Many other Japanese citizens, however, embraced the cause of nationalism and military expansion.

Conclusion

The Italian, German, Japanese, and Soviet authoritarian efforts in the 1920s and 1930s had their differences. But we can also see similarities in the ways that they emerged. For example, all of them embraced nationalism. They all found ways to justify violence against civilians. And despite their differences, the fact that they all happened in a similar time period suggests that there was some global pattern making them all possible. By the early twentieth century, events in one place could have widespread political, economic, and cultural consequences. And indeed, rising instability, aggression, racism, and fear triggered the eruption of the Second World War.

1 Eugenics is a set of beliefs that the human species can be improved through selective breeding. It is widely regarded as a fake science and an excuse for “scientific” racism.