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According to received opinion, they were. They are the only two dictators for whom (at least in the Anglo world) it is absolutely taboo to say anything positive about. (In contrast, it is not unusual to find even mainstream right-wingers who express sympathy towards Franco, Suharto and/or Pinochet, while on the far left there are still some who are sympathetic towards Stalin and/or Mao, and even on the mainstream left more than a few people express sympathy towards Castro).
However, I think there were fundamental differences between them. First of all, needless to say that Hitler's death toll was many times greater than Mussolini's - the latter comes nowhere near the list of the 20th century's most murderous dictators.
Partly and indirectly related to that were their very different conceptions of race and nationhood. Hitler and the Nazis viewed Germanness in very Manichean and rigid terms - if you were an Aryan, then good; if not, then you shall be damned. Mussolini and the Fascisti, on the other hand, had a more flexible idea about Italianness - to a large extent, it was about how you behaved and where your loyalties lied rather than what you were in a strictly biological and genetic sense. As a result, at one point as many as one third of the membership of the Italian Fascist Party was of Jewish origin, and even as late as 1939 Mussolini's Foreign Minister was a Jew...as was his mistress. Even the anti-Jewish laws passed a little bit later were mostly to appease their Nazi allies and still not as vigorously enforced as in Germany.
Nevertheless, others may think differently. Let us discuss.
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