(This extract takes 2¾ minutes to read.)
In an article by Mussolini published in Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini shares that Italy has viewed Ethiopia as a threat since 1928. He writes that “In 1928, Italy signed a treaty of friendship with the Ethiopian government. Almost immediately thereafter, under the protection of this treaty, Ethiopia began reorganizing its army. To whom did it entrust its reorganization?” (Mussolini 1935, 111).
There is a disconnect between Mussolini’s political speech and reality here. Ethiopia did not pose a threat to Italy, but Mussolini created the narrative that it was to indicate that Italy had to invade and take over. In his 8 October 1935 speech, five days into the [Fascist] invasion, Mussolini states that “Italy and Ethiopia are two distinctly different entities. The first is a great nation, the cradle of three civilizations. The other is a conglomerate of barbaric tribes” (Mussolini 1935, 164). […] In “Sino A Quando?,” Mussolini also describes Ethiopia as “the country of social slavery and barbarism” (Mussolini 1935, 150).
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Mussolini described Ethiopia as “barbaric” (Mussolini 1935, 163). The word “barbaric” as a describer for Ethiopia signals that Mussolini views the people of Ethiopia as uncivilized and in need of rescuing from themselves. By creating this contrast between Italy and Ethiopia, Mussolini appeals to the people of Italy that they are the ones who can help bring Ethiopia into the future because of their superior civilization-building. He claims that Ethiopians have “over the last fifty years […] subjugated, plundered, despoiled, and oppressed the surrounding territories” (Mussolini 1935, 164).
Mussolini uses the word “barbaric” in this speech when he states that “Italy and Ethiopia are two distinctly different entities. The first is a great nation, the cradle of three civilizations. The other is a conglomerate of barbaric tribes” (Mussolini 1935, 164). The dehumanization of Ethiopians by Mussolini’s words would be compounded by the dehumanizing violence of the [Fascist] invasion.
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By stating in his “Proclamation of the Empire” speech that the King of Italy is now the leader of Ethiopia, Mussolini advances the narrative that Italy has saved Ethiopia from its “barbaric” past. […] Mussolini’s Proclamation of the Empire, when victory over Ethiopia was declared, and Mussolini’s speech from the beginning of hostilities in October 1935 both ground themselves in the past, again showing Mussolini and Fascist Italy’s attachment to restoring the glory of the Roman Empire. Mussolini describes Ethiopians as barbarians and positions Italians as superior.
An article from the newspaper Mussolini established and oversaw, Il Popolo d’Italia, references the Proclamazione dell’Impero (Proclamation of the Empire) speech [that] Mussolini gave on 9 May 1936. The fascist-run media attached on to Mussolini’s narrative that the Fascist Régime should be seen as the rebirth of a new Roman Empire after [the Fascist] invasion of Ethiopia. The article states that the “Proclamation of the Empire” was a “decree establishing the empire” and claimed that “the empire of Rome” was “now reborn after fifteen centuries of interruption” (Il Popolo d’Italia, № 131, 10 May 1936, XXIII).
Mussolini says that “Ethiopia is Italian de facto because it was conquered by our winning troops. It is Italian by right because the civilization brought by the Roman sword triumphed over the barbarians” (Zocchi 14).
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An article published 8 December 1936, from Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, states that “A people of daring pioneers and intelligent farmers, the Italians embark upon the first year of the Ethiopian era. Few other peoples in the world would have possessed the vital drive to undertake the immense toil of carving out—by sheer force of arm—thousands of kilometers of roads beneath the tropical sun, and of breaking the soil of barbaric lands situated four thousand to eight thousand kilometers from the motherland. This vital drive constitutes a claim to pre-eminence, a patent of youthfulness, and a source of pride for the race” (Mussolini 1936, 88).
By describing Italians as “breaking the soil of barbaric lands” and a place where Italians can use their “vital drive” as “a source of pride for the race,” Mussolini reinforces the contrast he wants to create between the how “civilized” Italians are compared to Ethiopians.
What a sore loser.
The reason Italians weren’t considered “white” for a long time was because the Ethiopians defeated the Italians when they tried to colonize Ethiopia. It was a major issue with the “Race scientists” of of the late 1800s. Instead of saying “well maybe ethnic makeup has no bearing on military prowess” they decided to go with “Maybe Italians aren’t white and the Ethiopian rulling class have some white ancestors”
europeans had been imagining that ethiopia had something to do with white people since like the 12th century. the whole prester john, (white) christian emperor of ethiopia was invented out of whole cloth probably cos they couldnt imagine black people being proper christians.
No, I’m sorry, this just isn’t true.
The kind of colorism you’re talking about didn’t exist in Medieval times. That wasn’t how Medieval racism worked at all as it was more cultural & religious than biological or physical. Prester John was never depicted as “white” because that concept didn’t even exist yet. Fair-skinned/European Prester John existed in the same context as fair-skinned/European Jesus or fair-skinned/European Salah ad-Adin or fair-skinned/European Andromeda or any other figure in that the culture depicting these people made them look more like their own group either because they didn’t know what these distant people looked like due to lack of experience or because they were trying to make them more relatable to their own people by making them look alike. This is the same reason Ethiopians and Asians depicted Jesus as looking just like them in the same general era.
This is not the same as post-Medieval racialists whitewashing figures to rationalize white supremacy in the face of history that contradicts the idea. The motivations were very different because they existed in very different material contexts and conflating them is bad history that misrepresents these periods. Please don’t retroactively apply white supremacist ideology to Medieval Europe; it is ahistorical misinformation.
No, they didn’t, there are enough works of art depicting Prester John as Asian and later African once Portugal reestablished contact. Besides, the actual myth was born out of the conversion of India by Saint Thomas. Projecting modern (as in post-Renaissance) racism backwards is not conducive to understanding history.
western europeans generally don’t consider miaphysites to be proper christians, not for any theological reasons, mind you, as most of them have frighteningly little knowledge of their own religion, but because they cannot fathom foreign, and especially non-white, civilisations having any kind of culture.
i’ve heard (white) westerners claim in all seriousness that “all middle easterners are enemies of christianity,” never mind where christ himself was born and lived and where the world’s oldest christian churches are located…
Italians were considered white, well, the northern Italians at least, each empire had continentally “discovered” that their ruling ethnic group was the superior race. In olden racialology, Italians were part of the Dinaric race (which sometimes included even Celts and southern Germans), the North sometimes Nordic-Alpine, a subset of the Aryan race, so in modern terms, “secondary whites”. Of course America had its own variation. And not to mention, Ethiopians were not considered black but “Cushite/Hamites”, aka Arabic.
A significant part of the US version had to do with WASPs vs Southern European Catholic immigrants.
I’m not sure how German Catholic immigrants were treated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
During the founding period, they were considered swarthy, but for most of history, they simply got the “Saxon” privilege. Even in Euro circles, they got a subtype: Noric/Nordic-Dinaric, which did elevated them above the others grouped under that nonsense label.
