[News] The Forgotten Fascist Roots of Humanitarian Interventionism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

April 5, 2011


The Forgotten Fascist Roots of Humanitarian Interventionism

100 Years of Bombing Libya

By MARK ALMOND
http://www.counterpunch.org/almond04052011.html

TThe celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth 
anniversary of Italian unification in March, 
2011, were overshadowed by the crisis in Libya. 
Coinciding with Italy's birthday, Silvio 
Berlusconi's government decided to make seven air 
bases available to NATO allies for the bombing of Colonel Gaddafi's forces.

By coincidence, this was one hundred years since 
the Italians invented aerial bombardment and 
initiated its practice precisely over Libya. A 
century later, the bomber returns to the scene of 
its bloody birth. Clio seems to take a perverse 
enjoyment in ensuring that history repeats 
itself, first acting as imperialism then as 
humanitarian intervention, without even needing to change the stage-set.

On 1st November, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti 
dropped the first bomb from an aeroplane. 
According to the Ottoman authorities it hit the 
military hospital in Ayn Zara in the Libyan 
desert. The Italians strongly denied targeting an 
installation protected by the Geneva Convention. 
Modern aerial warfare and the propaganda battle 
which has accompanied it ever since was underway from the start.

Lt. Gavotti's four bombs were modified hand 
grenades, but soon the Italians had learned how 
to drop incendiary bomb and shrapnel bombs – what 
we would now call cluster munitions.

The initial impact of aircraft overhead was 
alarming and disorientating to the forces below. 
Panic spread as an airplane engine was heard 
approaching. But soon enough the Turks and Arabs 
below learned the limitations of aerial 
bombardment and their terror subsided. The 
Italians decided that they had to increase the 
terrorising effect of their bombing and strafing 
to keep the enemy on the run. The Italian pilots 
also realised that fixed targets like villages or 
oases were easier to find and strike than mobile guerrillas.

The British Arabist, G.F. Abbott who was with the 
mixed Turkish-Arab forces resisting the invasion 
noted that they soon recovered from their fear 
partly because bombs which fell into the sand 
tended to explode harmlessly. But he added, "The 
women and children in the villages are 
practically the only victims, and this fact excited the anger of the Arabs."

Antagonising the civilian population was an 
unfortunate side-effect of the bombing which 
became a major factor in turning the Italian 
invasion into a protracted counter-insurgency.

When the idea of occupying Libya as a fiftieth 
birthday present to themselves was turned into 
practice in September, 1911, Italians were 
assured of a quick victory there. They were told 
that the Ottoman Turkish regime was thoroughly 
hated by the Arabs living there and that a warm 
welcome could be expected for the soldiers 
bringing civilization and liberation from the 
Sultan's tyranny. To use modern parlance, 
Italians were encouraged to expect a cakewalk. 
The media assured the soldiers, "Arab hostility 
is nothing but a Turkish fable."

Gavotti's dropping of the first bombs in history 
barely a month into the campaign was evidence of 
how quickly the Italians realised that things 
were not going to plan. Resistance in the main 
cities like Tripoli was quickly crushed but in 
the great expanses of territory even the 100,000 
troops deployed by Italy were not enough to 
regulate a thousand-mile-wide country stretching 
deep into the Sahara. The newly-invented airplane 
offered a way of displaying Italian power across 
vast swathes of land which were in effect 
controlled by local Arabs who preferred the 
Muslim Turks to the Christian Italians – not 
least when the Italians preached civilization via 
shrapnel bombs dropped from a few thousand feet.

The alleged cruelty of local Arabs and Turks 
towards captured Italian soldiers was one of the 
justifications for the widening use of reprisals 
from the air and on the ground in Libya. In a 
fight against uncivilized folk like them the 
rules of war could be suspended. But the Libyans 
proved harder to terrify into submission than Rome anticipated.

Nevertheless, on 9th November, 1911, the Italian 
government declared victory, even though the war 
was only just beginning. With the mission far 
from accomplished, the war was vastly more costly 
than Italians had expected. Characteristically, 
the prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, lied to 
Parliament in Rome saying the war had cost 512 
million lire. That was a huge figure given that 
the War Ministry's last annual peacetime budget 
was only 399 million lire. But in reality 
off-balance sheet accounting hid another billion 
lire in costs of the war against the Ottoman 
Empire over Libya. As for the human cost, 8,000 
Italians were killed or wounded. No-one counted the Arab dead.

Although the Italian elite had economic aims in 
occupying Libya wrapped up in nationalist and 
civilizational rhetoric, oil was not the Italian 
motive. Only at the end of the Fascist period was 
any serious exploration undertaken which 
indicated that oil lay beneath the desert. 
Libya's first major oil strike was outside 
Gaddafi's home town of Sirte in 1959. At the end 
of thirty years of Italian rule, salt was still 
Libya's main export. Italians were fed the idea 
that Libya would return to being the bread basket 
of the Mediterranean as it had been under the 
Roman Empire. Few in 1911 seem to have realised 
that the desert had spread over the Roman fields and cities long ago.

As the war dragged on enthusiasm in Italy waned 
but the newspapers and instant books of the day 
record how united the opinion-makers were in 
support of the war at its opening shots. Above 
all, there was admiration for the airmen dealing 
death from the sky. The cult of the pilot soaring 
across the sky while clinically disposing of a 
dot-like savage foe below was born.

The greatest living Italian poet Gabriele 
D'Annunzion immediately sought to immortalize Lt. 
Gavotti's act in his Canzone della Diana. (A few 
laters in the First World War, D'Annunzio would 
take to the skies over Vienna and drop leaflets 
threatening bombs to come.)Giovanni Pascole 
sentimentalised the feats of Italian pilots as 
the Libyan war passed it first Christmas in La 
Notte di Natale. The Futurist, Filippo Marinetti, 
took the air over Libya itself to urge Italian 
soldiers below to fix bayonets and charge.

Everybody seemed to support the invasion at the 
beginning. The great philosopher and future 
anti-Fascist, Benedetto Croce declared 
–apparently without irony - that occupying Libya 
was a worthy birthday gift to Italy on the 
fiftieth anniversary of its unification. The 1907 
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, E.T. Moneta, became 
the first – though by no means the last recipient 
of the dynamite fortune's largesse – to 
anticipate Barak Obama's faith in aerial 
bombardment as a tool of progress for humanity 
and therefore declared it was not against his 
pacifist principles. The Catholic hierarchy had 
been hostile to the secular not to say Masonic 
Italian political elite but it endorsed 
Giolitti's crusade in Libya with as much 
enthusiasm as its predecessors had backed the 
original version over eight hundred years earlier.

The meeting of the poetry scholars of the Dante 
Aligheri Society on 20thSeptember, 1911, broke up with cries of "To Tripoli!"

It was not only Italian proto-Fascist 
intellectuals like D'Annunzio and Marinetti who 
swooned at the thought of a pilot soaring high 
over the desert dealing death to savages below. 
Sweden's Gustaf Janson described the intoxicating 
sense of unbridled power and of the pilot's 
impunity in action against primitives below whose 
air defence was incapable of revenging their 
casualties: "The empty earth beneath him, the 
empty sky above him and he, the solitary man, 
sailing between them! A feeling of power seizes 
him. He was flying through space to assert the 
indisputable superiority of the white race.

Within his reach he had the proof, seven 
high-explosive bombs. To be able to sling them 
from the heavens themselves - that was convincing and irrefutable."

A few Italians protested the naked aggression. It 
was left to the extremist Socialist newspaper 
editor, Benito Mussolini, to make the most 
unconditional rejection of the war. He was 
arrested after dismissing the national flag as a 
"rag to stick on a dunghill" in a speech denouncing the war in Forlì.
This was a stark contrast with the attitude of 
the ex-Marxist in power as Duce of Fascism after 
1922. The airplane and the destructive power it 
could project enthralled Mussolini the Fascist as 
it had repelled Mussolini the Marxist. He 
declared that the airplane was "the first 
Fascist." He became a born-again bomber.

Mussolini's rejection of Marxism and his embrace 
of the thrill of ultra-modern war was 
simultaneous. Almost as soon as he came to power, 
Mussolini was taken up for his first flight by 
the war ace, Mario Stoppiani, who described the 
Duce's "enthusiastic delirium" with the 
experience. Then he learned to fly (and to the 
alarm of his more pedestrian ally, Hitler, would 
take charge of the controls of planes with the 
timid Fuehrer on board.) Until George W. Bush and 
Vladimir Putin has there been a political leader 
who piloted himself so publicly?

The airplane was also used to suppress his 
opponents: Mafia bosses and Libyan tribal chiefs 
would be taken for a one-way flight out over the 
Mediterranean and pushed to their deaths in the sea below.

Mussolini developed the use of air power to 
repress rebels in Libya and eventually broke 
their resistance after almost twenty-five years 
occupation. In Ethiopia he took his war for 
civilization to new depths. Fascist Italy 
announced it would abolish slavery there but 
first it had to conquer the natives. The exiled 
Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, described to 
the League of Nations how the Italians used 
crop-spraying techniques designed to kill insects 
to poison his people. Mussolini's regime made no 
bones about its methods and did not hide behind 
cant about having "no reports of civilian casualties."

Flying Fascists became the order of the day as 
Mussolini became expansionist in the mid-1930s. 
His eldest son, Vittorio and his son-in-law, 
Galeazzo Ciano, took part as pilots in bombing 
Ethiopia.Mussolini's son, Bruno, wrote a lyrical 
description of what it was like to watch 
Ethiopians explode like petals when he dropped his bombs among them.

Bertrand Russell saw Bruno Mussolini's evocation 
of air power's immaculate ability to destroy puny 
humans as embodying the reality of the modern 
totalitarian regimes, but worse still of a future 
world controlled from the air. Russell asked, "If 
one could imagine a government that governed from 
an aeroplane... wouldn't such a government get a 
completely different view of its opposition?" 
Russell feared that a regime of air power would 
"exterminate" any resistance or dissent. He 
thought the bomber rendered mass conscript armies 
redundant and highly-skilled mercenaries would 
replace them willing to do the bidding of their 
masters rather being part of the people: ""We 
seem now, through the aeroplane, to be returning 
to the need for forces composed of comparatively 
few highly trained men. It is to be expected, 
therefore, that the form of government, in every 
country exposed to serious war, will be such as 
airmen will like, which is not likely to be democracy."

But the Italian Fascists were to discover that 
air power was a two-way street. Libyans and 
Ethiopians could not declare "no fly zones" over 
Rome or bombard Florence, but after 1940, the British then the Americans could.
Italian pioneering efforts at air warfare were widely admired and imitated.

Fiorello La Guardia was trained to fly by Italian 
instructors after the United States entered the 
First World War in 1917. The American pioneer of 
bombing, Billy Mitchell, recognised Italy's role 
as an air power pioneer and became an admirer of 
the Fascist regime, calling it in 1927 "one of 
the greatest constructive powers for good 
government that exists in the world today." Like 
Mussolini's air chiefs, Mitchell was a moderniser 
who got left behind by the pace of change: he 
agreed with the Fascist airmen that aircraft carriers had no future.

In Britain, too, there were close links between 
Fascism and flying. Lady Houston, who funded 
Supermarine's embryo Spitfire to compete in the 
Remy Schneider Flying Trophy also offered 
£200,000 to the British Union of Fascists led by 
flying enthusiast Oswald Mosley – so her 
contribution to defeating Fascism was greater 
than the effect of backing the British Union of 
Fascists – aspects of the patriotic myth which 
are omitted the Leslie Howard film First of the Few (1942).

Even today there is the odd, even erotic, irony 
that Mosley's step-granddaughter, the glamorous 
model Daphne Guinness is amorously linked to 
Bernard-Henri Levi, the chief French exponent of 
bombing as the path to freedom in Libya – a 
strange misalliance between the Repubblica Salo 
and the République Sarkozyste, or a reconciliation of a false dichotomy?

But whatever the role of other countries in 
pioneering air flight or even Fascism, Italy can 
fairly claim to have got both off the ground. It 
put the warplane in the sky soon enough with a 
Fascist at the joy-stick. Giulio Douhet was the 
first serious strategist of bombing. Although he 
backed Mussolini, Douhet's career as a 
practitioner of airpower was stymied in Fascist 
Italy by rivals with better party credentials.

One of the few dissenting voices in 1911 belonged 
to a schoolboy in Ferrara who would become the 
second most famous Fascist after Mussolini not 
least for his flying exploits. Then the fifteen 
year old Italo Balbo broke with the nationalist 
atmosphere and published an article denouncing 
the invasion of the territory which he would come 
to rule after 1933 as Mussolini's viceroy. But in 
the meantime Balbo became Italy's own Charles 
Lindbergh – a celebrity pioneer aviator who 
criss-crossed much of the globe to demonstrate 
the new Fascist regime's commitment to the most 
modern manifestation of power – the airplane.

Back in 1911 like Mussolini, Balbo was an odd man 
out. Of course not every future Fascist opposed 
the war. Sergio Panunzio, for instance, 
remonstrated with the young Balbo for publishing 
an article against the pro-war consensus: "Why? 
To go against the grain, against reality, against 
the government." Panunzio anticipated the classic 
Fascist argument that right was made by the might 
of media opinion and the might of state power.

Italians were to be proud of pioneering military 
aviation in the cause of civilization. In 1911, 
Italians achieved a series of aerial firsts: the 
first night flight, the first aerial photograph, 
the first aerial bombing – and the first plane to 
be shot down. Some pedants pointed out that if 
balloon-launched explosives were included then it 
was Italian territory which was the first target 
of bombing as far back as 1849. Then the 
Austrians besieging rebel Venice sent balloons 
filled with explosives drifting across la 
Serenissima which crashed onto the Austrian 
troops on the other side causing the first 
casualties of aerial friendly-fire. The governor 
of Libya, Balbo himself, fell victim to friendly 
fire when his three-engined plane was shot down 
by his own anti-aircraft forces at Tobruk on 28th 
June, 1940. In 1941, Bruno Mussolini was also 
killed testing a new plane. The airplane was 
beginning to eat the Fascists and the nation 
which gave birth to its military role.

Rejecting any romantic nostalgia for the days of 
one-on-one fighter-pilot duels in the First World 
War, Balbo was the proponent of launching 
"hundreds and hundreds" of planes into the sky in 
future wars. Mass attacks were to be the Fascist 
approach to aerial warfare – but Mussolini's 
regime was stronger on intimidating bombast than 
putting resources into such a vast expensive 
programme. It was the democracies who built and 
deployed the first fleets of heavy bombers.

As the Second World War progressed, northern 
Italy was especially badly hit by bombing as the 
Allies advanced to drive out the Germans and 
destroy Mussolini's Salo regime. Leaving aside 
the human cost, the cultural losses were 
enormous. Buildings like La Scala in Milan or the 
Bramante church housing Leonardo's Last Supper in 
its miraculously unscathed refectory could be 
rebuilt but the works of art in them like the 
Mantegna fresco of the Life of St. James in the 
Ovetari Chapel in Padua were lost when shattered by Allied bombs.

The impact of the Second World War left Italians 
deeply suspicious of getting involved in warfare, 
let alone bombing former colonial territory. In 
1999, Italy broke the tabu. Led by ex-Marxists, 
the Italian government accepted the use of their 
country as the main launching ground for 
airstrikes on Serbia over Kosovo briefly part of 
Mussolini's inglorious new Roman Empire 
(1941-43). Fishermen in the Adriatic still moan 
about the risks of falling victim to NATO 
ordinance dumped in the sea. But now a regime 
with "post-Fascist" participation competes with 
the post-Marxists to justify Italy's renewal of 
war over Libya just in time for the centenary of 
a Italy as the mid-wife of aerial warfare.

On this morbid anniversary, the crusade for 
civilization then has become a crusade for human 
rights today. The machinery of the contemporary 
crusaders may be faster than the bi-planes of 
1911 and the bombs are certainly vastly more 
explosive, but the unanimity of the politicians 
and media across the West are a strange echo of 
Italy's echo-chamber of mutually reinforcing 
propaganda from the men in power and men of the 
press. But today there isn't even a Mussolini in 
parliament or the media to oppose air power as a force for progress!

Sources

Italians have written extensively about the war 
for Libya in 1911 and the invention of aerial 
bombardment by their fellow countrymen.

Useful English sources include:

Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the 
First World War (Macmillan: London, 1983)

Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought from the 
Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011),

Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and 
Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007)

Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing translated 
by Haverty Rugg (Granta: London, 2001)

Bertrand Russell, Power with an introduction by 
Kirk Willis (Unwin, 1938, reprinted by Routledge: London, 1995)

Dan Segre, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life 
(University of California Press: Berkeley, 1987)

David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War. 
Europe, 1904-1914 paperback edition (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000)

John Wright, The Emergence of Libya: Historical 
Essays(Society for Libyan Studies: London, 2008).

Mark Almond, Oxford historian, is Visiting 
Professor in International Relations at Bilkent 
University, Turkey. He can be reached through his 
<http://markalmondoxford.blogspot.com/2011/04/libya-100-years-of-bombing-or-is.html%20%C2%A0http://markalmondoxford.blogspot.com/2011/04/libya-100-years-of-bombing-or-is.html>website.




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