that's a little bit too simple imo. mussolini was talking about race and eugenics long before hitler and the nazis had any power over him.
mussolini in 1920, the nsdap just started to exist, :"When dealing with such a race as Slavic - inferior and barbarian - we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy.... We should not be afraid of new victims.... The Italian border should run across the
Brenner Pass,
Monte Nevoso and the
Dinaric Alps.... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians...."
he also supported the nazi party with money during their rise to power and i think the nazi party was racist and antisemitic from the start.
also don't forget the italian concentration camps in the balkans and the support coming from the italian police and population in hunting jewish people in regions occupied by the nazis through mussolinis puppet state.
fascism may not be inherently racist but it is extremely fertile ground for such sentiments. and mussolini used these sentiments for his benefit.
I would agree with the bolded comment, but not the general tenor of your comment.
Anti-Semitic laws were passed in Italy, there were Italian anti-Semites who were members of the Italian Fascist Party, most of the atrocities perpetrated against civilians after 1943 couldn't have been committed without the help of Italian fascist sympathizers of the Nazis.
All of that I have never denied; in fact, I posted about a lot of it myself, before anyone else had ever mentioned it, so I don't quite get what you're driving at...
However, there is no comparison between the attitude of the general Italian populace toward Jews, and that of the German one, which is why so many of Italy's Jews survived. Most of our Jews were saved because average Italian people, including priests and nuns, couldn't stomach what was going on. That didn't happen in Germany.
You also just can't get around the fact that not a single Jew was deported from Italy until after the German occupation. Nor can you get around the fact that the Italian armed forces, armed forces who were brutally butchered by their former German allies after 1943, created safe havens for Jews in a number of European countries.
A deliberate policy to exterminate men, women, and children could never have been conceived of in Italy, period. Even the Germans knew it, which is why they kept them out of it.
Just look at the treatment of homosexuals: internal exile, while deplorable, is a lot different than being sent to a death camp. Or look at the treatment of political opponents. Some were killed clandestinely, but there wasn't a mass round up and herding them off to a gas chamber. Most of the time, again, it was internal exile. Out of one of them came "Christ Stopped At Ebobi".
I don't think anything that Italians might have done in the Balkans begins to compare with what they have done to each other, and that barely a generation ago, so I don't know where you're going with that, either.
All in all, it's a complicated, ambivalent story. Nobody's hands are completely clean in this story, but it is indeed not so simple as to make moral equivalencies everywhere. There are a number of excellent books on the subject, if you're really interested, some by understandably bitter Jews.