Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

This focus on the transition from impersonal social bonds into communitarian ties is in tune with the rich literature dealing with fascism as a modern political religion. In the 1990s, some historians claimed that by looking at the cultural dimensions of the phenomenon we had reached a consensus on its contested nature, defining fascism as a “palingenetic myth of rebirth.”[2] This myth of rebirth of a race, a culture, a nation, or all three together after a perceived period of decadence and degeneracy was taken as powerful enough to produce the internal cohesion of a movement committed to the creation of a “new man” defined as an alternative both to the individualism of liberal ideology and the social classes of Marxism. Countering the uprooting effects of modernization processes, fascism constituted a “third way” that offered its followers the opportunity to participate in an allegedly authentic brotherhood based in a new secular religion of organic nationalism. There is, to be sure, much to commend this interpretation. First, it moved us away from crude approaches, typical of Marxist scholarship, that took fascism as a simple radicalization of the all-encompassing struggle between workers and capitalists, with fascists seen as merely the violent faction of the latter.[3] But perhaps more important, it challenged historians to explain in detail the processes by which the new alternative fascist modernity was built.

Historians who have followed the consensus too closely tend to use, nevertheless, a crude notion of culture. In too many narratives we are left with no more than a set of values and beliefs that are supposed to characterize fascism movements and regimes. Following Durkheim’s research agenda, if the social scientist is able to properly identify those shared beliefs, the collective representations, the actual effects of fascist rule in the world are supposed to follow automatically. In such a dualist approach, one never understands very well how the ethereal realm of ideas and the low sphere of materiality interact, the relation between the two being established through direct correspondence: these beliefs entail those actions. The actual processes through which detached radical worldviews operate in the world are seen as unproblematic. In this book, in order to overcome the Durkheimian dualistic framework, I intend to explore how certain things embody fascism.[4]

Wheat, potatoes, pigs, and all the other things I discuss in this book are not to be understood as mere symbols of fascist ideology. Yes, there was a lot of propaganda about food, but the main question here is how the making and growing of new strains of plants and animals could embody a new political regime. We now know that concrete building and labor practices were attached to the high rhetoric of Albert Speer’s architectural designs, and that Himmler’s SS and its system of concentration camps grew on supplying forced labor and building materials for erecting imposing stadiums and government buildings.[5] The buildings were not just representations of grandeur, community, or hierarchy; they also performed fascism through the violent building processes that brought them into being. More to the point, fascism was performed through the existence of these things. In part I of the book, the things are wheat, potatoes, and pigs, and it is argued they perform fascism and thus are properly considered fascist wheat, fascist potatoes, and fascist pigs.

1 Wheat: Food Battles, Elite Breeds, and Mussolini’s Fascist Regime

The Italian War for Bread Independence