Confronting Silence and Cover-Up of the Colonial Genocide in Libya

Abstract This short article reflects the author's thinking on the ethics of silence and the recovery of the history of the concentration camps, based on fifteen years of research among the survivors’ oral and folk histories. It challenges the ethics of the dominant colonial historiographical paradigm in Middle East and North Africa scholarship, which is based on the myth that Italian Fascism did not encompass acts of genocide and mass murder and was, therefore, less evil than the fascism practiced under the German Nazi regime. It focuses on the problems of cover-up and the persistence of silence in the social sciences today. Finally, it proposes an alternative view on decolonizing the social sciences and historiography and on decentering future ethical research. This article presents a history of fascist genocide in Libya and Italy based on the agency and a narrative of the Libyans who survived the concentration camps between 1929 and 1934, and it offers suggestions for a new decolonized research agenda based on a critical model of Italian Fascism.