Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The human Arditi were a recurrent symbol of fascist iconography. They were the “Daring Ones,” the Italian Storm Troops of World War I. Equipped only with hand grenades and daggers, they breached enemy’s defense lines and converted a static war into one of movement. Their heroic status was due to their role in the November 1918 Breakthrough on the Piave, which paved the way for victory over the Austrians. In the war’s aftermath, the poet Gabrielle D’Annunzio, enraged by the arrangement the Italian government had made concerning the international status of the port city of Fiume, marched on that city with about 2,500 Arditi, initiating a “poetic revolution” that would last for more than a year until it was quelled by Italian regular troops. D’Annunzio’s nationalistic operatic choreography at Fiume would have lasting effects in fascist imaginary: the Arditi repeatedly sang the “Giovinezza,” the future fascist anthem; a proto-corporatist constitution was drafted with electoral bodies divided by category of employment; D’Annunzio was named the Duce of Fiume; and, of course, military uniforms were a constant presence.[64] The black shirts of the Arditi became the main distinguishing feature of the fascist paramilitary squads, formed in 1919, that would violently eliminate their socialist opponents from the Italian political landscape and support Mussolini’s seizure of power.

In fact, Mussolini started the first nucleus of the fascist paramilitary organization by recruiting unemployed Arditi to guard his newspaper Popolo d’Italia. In later years many of the men who joined the Blackshirts were veteran Arditi who put their martial expertise at the service of landowners seeking to break agricultural labor unions in the Po Valley, in Emilia, in Tuscany, or in Apulia. By 1922, the year the fascists came to power in Rome, the Blackshirts, through physical intimidation and unbridled violence, had already dismantled all of the progressive labor regulations in the Italian countryside that in the previous years had been achieved by socialist unions.[65] Strampelli’s Ardito wheat came into being in 1920 while D’Annunzio’s Arditi were experimenting with fascism at Fiume and while bands of squadre di combattimento (fighting squads) were ravaging Italian grain fields, burning unions’ headquarters, breaking strikes, and murdering workers’ leaders. The naming of the strain thus leaves few doubts about the political allegiances of Strampelli, who would join the National Fascist Party in 1925. More than that, it suggested that the new wheat strain could materialize the constant mobilization demanded by fascist ideology, making indistinguishable war in the trenches and cultivation of the national soil.

Independently of Strampelli’s political intentions when developing Ardito, its fascist dimensions were only revealed through the growing process. Only after the Battle of Wheat had been launched did the Ardito began to be grown on a large scale all over Italy. That demanded an enormous propaganda effort and the building of a new state infrastructure to replace traditional landraces with the new technoscientific organisms. Strampelli himself was quick to join in the endeavor, both as a member of the permanent committee of the Battle of Wheat and through directly involvement in organizing the distribution system that enabled the new strain to reach every corner of rural Italy. Also, the demands involved in growing wheat, particularly the heavy use of chemical fertilizers, integrated large parts of the population into the national economy for the first time. Whenever a farmer replaced landrace seeds with new strains he was weaving a new tie beyond the local scale and reinforcing the fascist nation.

^{Figure 1.8 The exhibit presented by Strampelli’s National Institute of Genetics at the National Grain Exhibition, 1932.}

^{(Fondo Nazareno Strampelli, Rieti State Archives)}

The campaign for wheat autarky thus mixed a potent set of traits: mass mobilization of Italians in a common national project, replacing other political forms of participation; charismatic leadership, with frequent appearances of the Duce in the media as the “first farmer” of Italy; increased presence of the state infrastructure in the territory; and praise of the Italian soil as a source of national virtues and independence. This combination of mass mobilization, charismatic leadership, state power, and ideology of the land was characteristically fascist. In Italy, before the Battle of Wheat launched in 1925, there had been no comparable initiative able to bring all these features together.