Confronting Silence and Cover-Up of the Colonial Genocide in Libya: Italian Fascism from the Standpoint of its Victims Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, University of New England Abstract: This paper reflects my thinking on the ethics of silence and the recovery of the history of the concentration camps Italian colonists set up in the early 1930s to suppress resistance. It is based on 15 years of research among the survivors’ oral poetry and folk histories. It challenges the ethics of dominant colonial historiographical paradigm in MENA, which is based on the myth that Italian Fascism did not encompass acts of genocide and mass murder and was therefore a lesser evil than fascism practiced under the German Nazi regime. It focuses on the problems of the Italian cover up, and persistence of silence on violent pasts in the social sciences today. I propose an alternative view on how to decolonize the social sciences and historiography and de-center future ethical research. The revised history of the Fascist genocide in Libya is based on the agency and narrative of the Libyans who survived the camps between 1929-1934 and the critique of Italian fascism and their attempt to cover this up is an example of a decolonized research agenda.