{"id":105365,"date":"2026-10-17T03:00:45","date_gmt":"2026-10-17T07:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105365"},"modified":"2026-10-16T11:52:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T15:52:35","slug":"mussolinis-ethiopian-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/mussolinis-ethiopian-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter<\/em>, Handre<\/a> recounts the brutal invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini’s troops in 1935:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, where Italian forces burned villages, deployed mustard gas banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and slaughtered an estimated 275,000 Ethiopians in the first year alone.<\/p>\n

The invasion was economic lunacy, directed by a sociopath seeking imperial glory. Italy’s economy in 1935 was already strangled by Mussolini’s autarky policies: state-controlled prices, forced grain production quotas, and currency manipulation that gutted purchasing power. Ethiopia was supposed to deliver raw materials and lebensraum<\/em> that central planning couldn’t produce at home. This is the eternal promise of conquest: steal what you cannot generate through voluntary exchange.<\/p>\n

It failed completely. The occupation cost Italy roughly 40 billion lire, accelerating debt that Mussolini’s treasury couldn’t service without the printing press. The resource extraction never materialized. Ethiopia’s terrain, infrastructure, and hostile population made profitable colonization impossible. Rome poured capital into a sinkhole while Italian workers at home faced food rationing.<\/p>\n

The League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy in November 1935, which Mussolini predictably used as nationalist propaganda. Those sanctions were both too narrow (they excluded oil) and too late to matter strategically.<\/p>\n

State violence always carries a price tag nobody budgets for honestly. Mussolini thought he was building an empire; he was actually accelerating Italy’s slide toward the catastrophe of 1943<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the major contributing factors to Italy’s economic woes was the same problem that all authoritarian regimes encounter: bad news is unwelcome, so fake good news is reported instead. That’s bad enough in the newspapers for general consumption, but it’s fatal in the long term for any centrally planned economy (and pretty much every fascist and communist government loved<\/em> central planning).<\/p>\n

The planners demand X million tons of steel, the steel mills can’t achieve that but they know the penalty for failure, so they … lie. The planners now allocate all that extra steel to manufacture tanks or trucks or planes … and the factories can’t produce their assigned output because they don’t get enough steel, so … they lie. The army doesn’t get as many tanks\/trucks\/guns\/etc. as the planners say they will get, but they can’t tell the planners that they don’t have all the new equipment, so they lie and stage photogenic parades for the leaders and the cameras, cycling the same few dozen working vehicles through the same route again and again to “show their military might” … and to stave off anyone discovering that they don’t have all the new stuff. <\/p>\n

The government then goes to war, knowing they have X thousand new tanks, trucks, planes, etc. and are horrified to discover that they don’t just walk over their opponents with sheer military might …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the brutal invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini’s troops in 1935: Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, where Italian forces burned villages, deployed mustard gas banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and slaughtered an estimated 275,000 Ethiopians in the first year alone. The invasion was economic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[362,25,7,339,5],"tags":[1011,934,457,1197,1262,1135,1228,508],"class_list":["post-105365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-economics","category-history","category-italy","category-military","tag-colonialism","tag-ethiopia","tag-fascism","tag-interwarperiod","tag-leagueofnations","tag-mussolini","tag-warcrimes","tag-wmd"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rpr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105365"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105367,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105365\/revisions\/105367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}