One thing that sets Mussolini apart from many other of history's "greats" - and which we should keep in mind when evaluating his position and investigating his actions and his motives - is the fact that, in some ways, he wasn't a publicist only by trade, but by vocation as well.

Even at the end of his ten years experience as a director, editorialist and chief editor, and without ever losing his attention for the national press, he maintained certain distinctive traits of a proper publicist: a haphazard but somewhat extensive cultural formation which allowed him to speak competently of many issues he didn't really understand; a propensity for apodictic statements, encapsulating and summarizing a complex argument, striving for effect over accuracy; an inclination not to bother with consistency - which, especially when you write one piece a day and review a dozen others, is not only impossible but in large measure a detriment to your professional activity.

Nowhere are those qualities highlighted as well as they are in his "conversations" with Emil Ludwig - which I believe are the source of the quote.

Now, as highlighted by my own statement which opens the previous sentence - which is pretty dubious, as those qualities shine through many other of Mussolini's literary and public discourses - you don't need to be a Fascist dictator to fall prey to your lyrical inclinations. And I have read enough of early XX Century literature and press, and Mussolini especially, that I don't really find the quote shocking at all.

Therefore - without detracting anything from your question - I may need to backtrack a little from here. Since it doesn't appear to be especially "un-racist" by generalist standards of the epoch.

First, I think we should reject the assumption (sometimes made) that the degree of racism displayed by the Nazi in their "social policies" and general vision of society was somewhat on par with your average racism of the time. An expression of backwards tendencies already present in society and made more extreme by the special circumstances of economical struggles and social tension. Which - I understand that this is not the point you are making, but it is generally tossed around as if Hitler's position on race was a fair reference point - would be the "reactionary" role of racism.

From my understanding - and please, feel free to correct me on this point, since this has never been a central subject for me - Nazi's racial views, while not especially inventive or original, were nonetheless in some way exceptional and "revolutionary" in their application.

Something which is made more apparent by a direct comparison with the reference frame of casual racism, as displayed within the sphere of Italian public opinion during the first decades of the XX Century. In this context, reference to races, peoples and cultures are in good measure interchangeable. Mussolini's made many, many references to race and races - to the Italian race, to the Latin race, to the race of the combatants, to other races, to the slavic races, to the abyssinian races - the word being almost entirely interchangeable with culture or peoples and the choice resting more or less on circumstances and opportunities.

It has been noted repatedly - see for instance De Felice, Mussolini and Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo - that Mussolini wasn't especially racist, which in substance is true. This doesn't mean that the idea of race didn't exist as a parallel concept to the aforementioned ones of culture and people.

In very short terms - and only limitedly to a general, third page summary of your morning edition - history was a history of competing cultures, of competing ideas, of competing peoples and races. Certain nations pretended to promote freedom and liberal values, but did so only in service of the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon race (as showcased by their treatment of...). To regain Her rightful position among the other leading peoples of the world, the Italian race needed to establish her cultural superiority over the other Mediterranean peoples. The model of this process - the gold standard of racial assimilation - was the Roman Empire, which had established (I hope it's obvious that I am giving you a summary of what you'd find in the general press, under a not especially racist light) its supremacy over the inferior races and cultural groups by means of cultural, political and economical hegemony; until the other peoples had essentially given up and accepted the Roman model as the better one, embraced Romanity and become Romans themselves.

This sounds like I could get published in the mid 1920s.

What matters to us, is that this is - fluctuations aside - along the lines of Mussolini's views on racial problems. And this is a point he'd return with some frequency, shifting from a more "cultural" definition or race to a more "racial" one (again, in generalist terms, the difference was neither marked nor apparent, unless one wanted for it to be so) during the late 1930s. Consider for instance his famous speech of October 25^th 1938 to the Grand Council.

The racial problem is for me a most significant achievement and most significant its introduction into the history of Italy. The ancient Romans were unbelievably racist. The great struggle of the Roman Republic was indeed to know whether the Roman race could aggregate with the other races.

While framed differently, and to explain and illustrate the introduction of racial legislation in 1938, this is not an uncommon view. The cultural assimilation of the Romans proceeded by means of the other races understanding their relative inferiority, and surrendering their identity. But this understanding appeared impossible, unless Italy had, first, conscience of Her own superiority. A point which hepls us root the Fascist racial legislation in the complex attempt to develop a stable relation of hegemony over the recently conquered Empire (rather than on a possible, but unlikely and unconfirmed German ingerence, or merely on the desire to align with the newfound ally).

[...] here we [had become] persuaded that we are not a people but a mixture of races.

Now when a people takes conscience of its race, it does so in opposition to every other race – not to one alone. But we did so only in opposition to the Camites, which is to say the Africans. The lack of racial conscience had severe consequences in the Amara. […] when they saw that Italians went more raggedly than themselves, that they lived in tuculs, that they took away their women; they said: this is not a race that brings us civilization!

To preserve the Empire it is necessary that the natives have absolute, undisputed understanding of our superiority.

But, as the concept of race is still an instrumental one - predicated on the acknowledgment of relative differences and on a test of relative superiority - it doesn't rely on any metrics of intrinsic purity to establish which one is the better.

Nor the claim that no pure races exist is especially non-racist by modern standards (the "miscegenation" of different races as cause of social, cultural and political degeneration seems to be a recurrent theme in post WW2 racist literature), but could certainly serve Mussolini's claims to a superiority of the Italian people and to the cultural and ethical legacy of Romanity more than any appeal to a savage ideal of original purity of the German tribes.

In this matter, like many others, ideas were instruments - not only to Mussolini's ends but on general grounds, and to an extent Mussolini assumed them to be just that; themes and sounds that the great men of history, the Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons, managed the way a publicist handles the latest rumors and trends, to ride history in the way one bridles and saddles the pubic mind.

He shared this view with Hitler himself, advising him on the "Jewish question" on March 31^st 1933

Every regime has not only the right but the duty to remove from places of authority any element non entirely trustworthy, but to this end it is not necessary, rather it could be damaging, to bring on the racial ground – Semitism and Arianism - what is instead simply a measure of protection and advancement of the revolution.

And here Mussolini seems to fail to understand how someone could believe the idea to be true. How Hitler could believe race to be a dicisive factor of history - not a convenient description of the historical process, or a framing device for a self-serving narrative, but a prescriptive part of it. That a racial victory was a necessary part of any affirmation and in fact the ultimate summary of the affirmation itself.