Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

As this chapter has demonstrated, more important than inquiring about the attitude of Portugal’s fascist regime in favor or against science, is to understand how scientific artifacts contributed to maintain its imperial dreams. CICA was undoubtedly a crucial institution in the transformation of Mozambique into a cotton production territory, tightening it to Portuguese economy and making real the motto of nationalizing the empire. This nationalization was accomplished not only through copying the Belgian experience in Congo but also by relying on enduring inter-imperial scientific relations with the British Empire and the scientific infrastructure of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation. As we also saw for the Nazi case, the materialization of fascist imperial undertakings through the cultivation of breeders’ artifacts was built on a colonial repertoire developed previously by other European powers.

It seems reasonable to conclude that Quintanilha’s work contributed to make the system less brutal by relying less on increasing numbers of forced laborers, indiscriminate occupation of land with cash crops, and promotion of food crops among natives. This is well in accordance with the current emphasis on the role of colonial scientists as rising sensitivity to local conditions and in moderating imperial policies. But on the other hand, the new cotton strains coming out of the CICA’s experimental fields and the important increase in productivity associated with them were key to sustain and make plausible the New State ideologues vision of Mozambique as cotton producer for the metropole. More than that, different varieties embodied different colonial practices: while selections of the U4 with pubescent leaves allowed Portugal’s textile industry to grow on the backs of hundreds of thousands of forced black workers, SB8 smooth leaves made viable white settler mechanized farms in buffer zones preventing the advance of the guerrilla.

Conclusion

It was in the colonies that fascism showed its most brutal face. Wars of colonial occupation produced more deaths than anything fascists had done internally. Whereas 3,000 Italians died in the takeover of Abyssinia, Ethiopian historians estimate a death toll of 300,000 among local people, both from war and from brutal repression. Nazi numbers are, of course, more appalling. Approximately 30 million people died on the Eastern Front in World War II. Such figures seem more than enough to make the case about the uniqueness in history of the violence unleashed by the fascist experience. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, this death toll is of the same order of magnitude of the wars of colonial expansion of the last third of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. To put it more bluntly, the most violent dimension of fascism was colonial expansion.

Portuguese fascism certainly looks more benign than its Italian and German counterparts. But the Portuguese equivalent of those bloody wars of expansion in Ethiopia and eastern Europe had already taken place in the nineteenth century in brutal campaigns in Angola and Mozambique.[131] What the case of Portugal reveals is how a fascist regime manages its empire after wars of conquest have been already waged. And yes, its cotton regime, mobilizing about 800,000 forced laborers among the natives of Mozambique, was already an outlier in colonial Africa the moment it was put into place. When the English, the French, and the Belgians were already reforming their labor systems, Salazar’s New State turned Mozambique into the first supplier of raw materials for Portugal’s textile industry through a distinctively violent system of obligatory cash crops. The main difference of fascist colonial experiences was timing and lack of routes for reform, leading to characteristically more violent practices. Although there were constant criticisms internal to Portugal’s New State regime concerning cotton forced labor, these were silenced by the lack of free speech until 1974. While France, for example, abolished forced labor from its colonies in 1946, Portugal would only do it in 1962 after the beginning of independence wars and strong international pressure.[132] If other fascist regimes had been able to keep their imperial possessions it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to consider that the lack of reform would also characterize their respective colonial situations. Nonetheless, fascist empires would still belong to the family of European colonial empires, just as Portugal’s Third Empire did.