Damn, can't get rid of a thought that these pre-WW2 Italian peasants are dressed better than the Soviet city dwellers of the 1980s. Communism should be condemned, not Fascism.

>>221371182
Trve, I wish he never went to war with Ethiopia either
Maybe in a reality where he stayed neutral we'd have kept Lybia, too

>>221371182
you watched any german movies from that era?

>>221371182
Something people don't realize is that the USSR was way more brutal and authoritarian against its own citizens than fascist Italy. Most of the targets of the Fascist State were communists who literally took orders from a foreign country (the USSR) through the Comintern. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, was such a good lapdog of the Stalin regime that a soviet town was dedicated to him.
>why did Mussolini have to cooperate with Hitler
Pre-war Italy had two problems:
a) revising the post-WWI order in the Balkans, while also claiming territories in Africa after everyone else had taken a piece of the cake;
b) preventing Nazi Germany from ever laying claim to South Tyrol (never forget that Hitler was, before everything else, a pangermanist, and thus a threat to Italy).
The former necessity alienated Britain, France, and the rest of the former Entente powers, which became hostile and isolated Italy. Mussolini then decided that the best way to prevent a German takeover of South Tyrol would be to closely cooperate with Germany and make such an issue unlikely.
In 1940, when the war against France and Britain seemed to be won, he decided to fight a parallel war in Italy's areas of interest (Albania, Greece, etc.) to prevent a situation where Germany controlled everything, which would have been terrible for Italy as Hitler would have almost surely raised the issue of South Tyrol.
But this parallel war failed and Italy became a junior partner of Germany.

Also, Mussolini was physically sick due to an unidentified stomach illness, his son-in-law and foreign minister described him as erratic and hard to work with shortly before WWII. This probably clouded his judgement. His advisors repeatedly warned him not to get involved.

>>221373374
what was his position on the mafia

>>221373203
>Maybe in a reality where he stayed neutral we'd have kept Lybia, too
How? It's massive state with severely lopsided demographics, even with mass incentives and gibs the Italian pop wasn't high enough to matter outside of the handful of coastal cores.

It's still not quite clear why Mussolini decided to go full retard post-1936. If he stepped down or died that year he would have been remembered as Italy's greatest statesman. By that time he had revitalized and transformed the state, dealt with the post-war crisis and the great depression, transformed Italy's old malaria infested marshes to new farmland, won the war against Ethiopia, etc.

>>221373410
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Mori

>>221373454
I think there were few enough people back then that Italians could overtake it

>>221373454
libya has less people than sweden. it's a big country only on the maps