Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

To undertake such a program, the crucial thing was to be in possession of the expensive animals, which were acquired immediately from the flock the Halle institute exhibited at the Milan Pelt Fair. In addition, Maiocco traveled in the summer of 1931 to Germany, where he not only visited the major German Karakul breeders but also stayed at Halle to become acquainted with Gustav Frölich’s work in crossing Karakul with European breeds.[88] In subsequent years, the journal Coniglicoltura would offer detailed accounts of the growth of the Istituto Nazionale de Coniglicoltura’s Karakul flock, celebrating the fine qualities of the newborn lambs. From the first small group formed from the imports from Halle, the herd increased in 1940 to 130 pureblood Karakul sheep.[89] The plans for Karakul were also becoming more and more ambitious.

The original reasons for importing Karakul to Italy were to cross them with local breeds such as leccese-moscia and to establish Karakul farms in the impoverished areas of the Mezzogiorno (Puglia, Calabria, and Campania). But in the 1930s, because of the desire to settle the empire with peasants from the overpopulated regions of Italy, diverting migration headed for the Americas to the Italian possessions in Africa would progressively become a policy of the Fascist regime.[90] Fascist ideologues bragged again and again that Italian colonialism was entirely distinct in nature from the imperial undertakings of the “plutocratic powers,” particularly the British Empire, in that the rationale of the enterprise was not capitalist greed but the establishment of settler colonies to absorb the Italian population surplus.[91] In other words, Italian exceptionalism was to be derived from the frontier experience. Not only was white settlement not exceptional; it was well in tune with other fascist regimes’ expansionist ambitions.

The raising of Karakul offered a hope of reproducing the German miracle in South West Africa by producing wealth, in the form of furs, out of the desert while sustaining a proud settler community. Of course, as previously with the German colonial experience, desert regions that were useless in the eyes of the colonizer presented a more complex reality to those inhabiting them. The establishment of brave Italian settlers on the new Italian frontier was also to be preceded by a violent story of genocide—one of the most violent stories of Mussolini’s regime.

Italian atrocities during the pacification campaign in eastern Libya in 1930–1932, with ruthless use of air power and brutal military tactics against civilian populations, were objects of open disapproval in the international press of the day.[92] Nevertheless, the myth of a benign form of Italian colonialism tolerant of local costumes has proved hard to debunk. But Giorgio Rochat, Angelo del Boca, Nicola Labanca, and Alberto Sbacchi have been responsible for producing a decisive change in our understanding of Italian colonial practices.[93] They have detailed the grim realities of the sixteen concentration camps that operated between 1930 and 1933 in the Cyrenaica region, in the eastern half of present-day Libya. According to Nicola Labanca’s account, nearly 100,000 people of the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations—that is, roughly half the population of eastern Libya—were forced to settle in the camps.[94] Punishment, execution, and death by starvation were daily occurrences. Only 60,000 came out alive. In fact, Governor Pietro Badoglio, in a decision shared with the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Rodolfo Graziani, didn’t leave any doubts about his intentions:

Above all, we need to create a wide and very precise territorial separation between the rebellious groups and the subjected population. I do not hide the importance or the gravity of this measure that will mean the ruin of the so-called subjected population. But by now the path has been mapped out for us, and we must pursue it until the end, even if the whole population of Cyrenaica were to die.[95]