I did some digging into this and...yeesh.
From reading snippets of it I couldn't help but be reminded of Goebbels' The Year 2000, except with more fear mongering about Asiatic Bolshevism and "miscegenation". I don't think it's any oversight that the fascists are the heroes.
Actually, I came away from Red Napoleon with the definite impression that in the author's eyes the Red Napoleon character was the hero of the piece, but that he had to be defeated in the end in order for the book to get published. The only other person I know of who read the book came to the same conclusion.
And a little research confirms that. From an afterword to the 1956 edition (via the wikipedia "Red Napoleon" article: ""What Gibbons is saying from behind the fortress-wall of his trash-writer gimmicks, is serious and convincing: white superiority on this planet is finished, and, worse, if we refuse to meet the Third World halfway - refuse to shuck off the racial prejudice that has been a standard feature of our character from the beginning - we face virtual extermination... Gibbons found himself in a curious position [when he wrote Red Napoleon in the 1920s]... Everything he believed most profoundly - and believed to be a matter of life and death - would be anathema to his readers. Not only would the vast majority of his readership find his visionary slogan ridiculous - "We recognize but one race - the HUMAN RACE" - they would find it grossly evil.. "
I think the fascist admiration is probably genuine, but not unusual for the time, even among 1920s liberals. Fascism hadn't revealed its evil side yet when the book was written and Mussolini had a lot of admirers in the US. I've seen embarrassingly fawning articles in the New York Times about him in the mid-1920's. Mussolini was really good at propaganda stunts that made fascist Italy look like a powerful, progressive country, but truly awful at actually governing.
BTW: I hope this isn't edging too far into modern politics.
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