Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Fascism was responsible for the last large colonial land grab by European nations: while Italy invaded Ethiopia and strengthened its presence in Libya, Germany transformed eastern Europe into a Continental version of Heart of Darkness.[43] Portugal had already secured its empire in the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa, but the new fascist regime would greatly intensify its colonial presence. Focusing on food and land will thus also lead us into the violent features of fascism that justify much of the enduring scholarly and popular interest in the phenomenon. Hitler’s visions of Germany’s expansion into the east were, from the beginning, articulated in terms of guaranteeing new soil for “pure stock” German peasants, making agriculture a central dimension of the dynamics that would lead to the Holocaust.[44] Italy and Portugal’s imperial experiences didn’t have the same combination of racial policy and territorial expansion as Nazi Germany’s. Race certainly played a role, but in neither case can one identify an explicit decision to eliminate a “race” comparable to that made at the infamous Wannsee Conference.[45] But, similarly to the Nazi example, it is also in the colonies that one stumbles into both regimes darkest stories. As we will see in part II, agriculture is key to understand the genocides perpetrated in Africa under Mussolini and Salazar dictatorships.

There are, to be sure, a number of volumes dedicated to the agricultural policies of the different fascist regimes.[46] But agriculture’s lower cultural status, associated with misperception of its low-tech nature, has apparently inhibited the more ambitious historians of generic fascism from including it in their discussions.[47] Who wants to deal with pigs and potatoes when one can explore film, sports, and architecture? Historians of agriculture haven’t helped. Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies’s still-canonical study of the food policies of the Third Reich, for example, teaches us more about the many flaws of Nazi agricultural bureaucracy and its repeated broken promises than about the importance of food for the institutionalization and dynamics of the regime.[48] In common with many other authors, Corni and Gies emphasize the apparent contradiction between fascist praise of traditional peasant culture and modern demands for productivity, ignoring that what was at stake was a single modernist project of inventing a new organic national community. This book intends to overcome the common perception among fascist studies that talk of soil and peasantry is atavistic and in conflict with more modern sensibilities.[49] I suggest that the “ideology of the land” already present in the very first formulations of the fascist credo, and famously summarized by the Nazi dictum “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and soil”) and the slogan “Bisogna ruralizzare l’Italia” (“Italy must be ruralized”), was as modernist as the aviation craze of fascist Italy or the smooth lines of the German Autobahn.[50]

Model Organisms, Industrialized Organisms, and Fascism

The bulk of my narrative is concerned with examining the modernist nature of the fascist “back to the land” movement by following the new organisms that promised to root Italians, Portuguese, and Germans in their respective national soils and to sustain them in their imperial possessions. It emphasizes the fact that such organisms were technoscientific organisms—modern products of scientific breeding operations. The Ardito strain of wheat with which Mussolini fought his Battaglia del Grano was a new variety developed by Italian geneticists that promised Italy self-sufficiency in grain. The sheep that bolstered Heinrich Himmler’s dreams of thriving German settler communities in eastern Europe’s steppes were standardized animals coming from the Institute of Animal Breeding of the University of Halle. And the same goes for the pigs, potatoes, cotton, and coffee gathered in the text.