Huh. This struck a little close to home. I understand in broad principle because what they're saying, but it's so blindingly fucking ignorant that I can't pull off the mental gymnastics to not just get seething mad at this nuclear shit take. People are like "lol Mussolini isn't that bad - he's Italian they can't do wars eeeyyy boppity-boopy bippity boppa." One day we're all gonna have an awkward talk about this Jersey goombah stereotyping shit, too, but let's stay on topic: Fascists are bad. Just because the guy who did it first didn't get the high score for being bad doesn't mean it still wasn't supremely fucked up even by the ghoulish standards of our present day.

We've got the horrors of imperialism in Ethiopia and Libya as a starting point - I don't need to rehash those too much. Mussolini's regime also did cultural genocide of Ladin- and Austrian-speaking peoples in Trentino-Südtirol, and a campaign of fascist terror/actual killing-people genocides of Slovenes, Croats and other Slavic peoples in Istria and Dalmatia. The fascists conducted campaigns of repression, torture, physical violence, and terrorism against dissidents internally along with gross social and economic injustices to many Italian peoples. Mussolini - again an actual fascist - should never be the benchmark for any comparison unless it's people who escaped sufficient punishment for their crimes.