Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Feeding the organic nation played a decisive role in fascist alternative modernity. For fascists, the nation deserved all sacrifices and made allegiances to class or ideology irrelevant.[35] Social and cultural historians have detailed how imagined national communities came into being in the nineteenth century through the invention of a national culture and its dissemination in classrooms, in the press, in world exhibitions, or in army barracks.[36] Building on the different local nationalistic ideologies thus formed, fascists all across Europe developed a radicalized integral form of nationalism by adhering to a biological conception of the nation as organ, body, or race.[37] Liberal regimes were accused of failing in their duties toward the nation and of having led it to the verge of extinction in World War I. Once the conflict ended, veterans were quick to call for a constant mobilization to defend this menaced national body, eliminating the traditional distinctions between reserve and action and between peace and war.[38] And if not every fascist regime put as much emphasis as the Nazis did on the dangerous intrusion of inferior races, none ignored the alleged menace of food scarcity. Hunger, experienced throughout Europe during World War I, made plausible depictions of the nation through the figure of the endangered body.[39] As Nazi propaganda emphatically put it, Germans were “the children of the potato,” having had their existence menaced in World War I as much by the epidemics of late blight that afflicted the potato crop as by enemy weapons.[40]

Though questions of race have traditionally contributed to establishing differences between fascist regimes, with Germany as an outlier, food points instead at the many commonalities of fascist experiences. In other words, in fascist studies food is a lumper whereas race is a splitter.[41] This is important for the present book, since the narrative not only makes comparisons between the three countries but also insists on the importance of following concrete trans-national historical dynamics connecting the three fascist regimes under study.

Indeed, as is detailed in part I, every fascist regime of the interwar period became obsessed with projects for making the national soil feed the national body. Food was central to translating the fascist ideology of the organic nation into concrete policies. National independence from the vagaries of international markets was to be achieved through campaigns for food production such as the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat), the first mass mobilization of fascist Italy launched in 1925, which was soon reproduced in Portugal (1929) and later in Germany (1934). The notion of total mobilization, which in the early 1930s Ernst Jünger transferred from the trenches of World War I to the whole of society, had its most obvious manifestation in these inaugural fascist campaigns.[42] Peasants, chemical industries, machine builders, agricultural scientists, radio broadcasters, and fascist intellectuals were all mobilized to protect the national community. The Portuguese Wheat Campaign’s revealingly martial slogan proclaimed “Our land’s bread is the border that best protect us!” This book argues that it hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated that one of the first steps in the fascist experiment of forming an organic community was to put in place campaigns for the production of food and raw materials to guarantee the survival and growth of the national body.

It may be argued that thinking about the biological nation through food rather than through race projects a more acceptable version of fascism, ignoring its more violent aspects. After all, food-supply issues, in contrast to racial degeneration, constituted real problems challenging all European societies in the interwar years. But food was also crucially linked to ambitions of territorial expansion, with colonization taken as the only long-term solution for survival and growth of the national body in a world dominated by imperial blocs. Counter-intuitively, the fascist nationalistic obsession with self-reliance, first expressed in internal production campaigns, also naturalized the need to grab land. In the hostile world of the fascist credo, only imperial nations could be considered truly independent. This expansionist drive constitutes the framing of part II of the book.