Mussolini's Italy Details Life Under Fascism-A Good Book

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Today I finished reading Mussolini's Italy: Life Under The Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945, and will now start reading How To Hide An Empire: A History Of The Greater United States.  You see a picture of the books above.

Mussolini's Italy was very good if a bit long. There were many interesting accounts of how people responded, survived, prospered, looked the other way & endured Fascist Italy. Mussolini and the Italians are portrayed as wary of Hitler because they know at core Hitler saw Italians as racially inferior. But they signed up with the Nazis anyway.

​As World War II got going, Italian fascists saw that the Germans meant every genocidal thing they were saying. They were not ready for that. But they were out of luck, should have known way better & were bad people themselves. 

Here are some definitions of fascism offered for consideration in the last chapter of the book--

A sociologist named Michal Mann defined fascism as: "The pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism."

A historian named Robert Paxton defined fascism as: "A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Mussolini himself told Francisco Franco that the fascist regime should work to be "authoritarian", "social" and "popular"      

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