As Ethiopian resistance continued after the proclamation of empire, the Italians combined old-fashioned savageries (decapitations, castrations, and burning and razing of civilian quarters) with industrial killing methods (aerial gas bombings and efficient open-grave executions) that are more commonly associated with Hitler’s and Stalin’s soldiers than with Mussolini’s rank and file. Indeed, the slaughter in Ethiopia was so out of keeping with Italians’ self-perception as the more “humane” dictatorship that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until 1995, the Italian government, and former combatants such as Indro Montanelli, denied the use of gas in East Africa. [...]
Fascist officials envisioned Ethiopia as a laboratory of another sort. For this generation of men, whose lives had been irremediably marked by their participation in World War I, the battlefield remained the supreme arena for the refashioning of Italians. Calling the Ethiopian invasion the start of a “gigantic work … of human reclamation [bonifica umana],” Mussolini posited the war as a practicum for the disciplinary education received in schools and fascist mass organizations. Combat and the collective nature of military life, his followers asserted, would eliminate tendencies toward “moodiness,” “impulsiveness,” and “romanticism” in the national character, producing a new breed of hard-edged Italians. To set an appropriately tough and virile tone, the press was forbidden to depict “sentimental and tearful” family scenes that accompanied Italian troops’ departure for Ethiopia, as well as any emotionalism shown by soldiers in Africa. [...]
In reality, racial boundaries proved difficult to police and administer, especially in the sphere of sexual relations. As we saw in the 1933 film Treno Popolare, the regime demanded that its unmarried “new men” learn the virtues both of continence and conquest and worked to reroute female sexuality into procreation. Once Italian troops invaded Ethiopia, the specter of miscegenation imparted a new urgency to ongoing state efforts to modify comportment and primal drives. Now, the true fascist was less a fearless conqueror than a man “with the attributes of his virility firmly in place.” Miscegenation thus received much media attention as a practice that caused physical and psychological decrepitude. Journalists warned Italians that many Ethiopians were of “beautiful appearance and noble bearing,” and speakers at colonial preparation courses for women reminded their audiences that heat caused the female sex to “put up less resistance to men.”
