Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Large landholders in Alentejo have been repeatedly identified among the main supporters of the fascist New State and there is no good reason to contest that. In the Po Valley the paramilitary Blackshirt squads had broken the rural workers’ unions; in Alentejo the landholders were able to mobilize the state National Republican Guard to undertake the same violent job. An oppressed and underpaid workforce was an essential condition for maintaining the profitability of the large estates, and the new regime was happy to provide one. This favoritism toward the oligarchy of Alentejo has served as demonstration of the social conservatism of Oliveira Salazar’s New State, which allegedly lacked the revolutionary character of other fascist regimes. It is thus common in the historiography to underscore the division in the interior of the regime between ruralists and industrialists, with the first dominating clearly the scene until the 1950s. If industrialists supported a development policy based on import substitution, ruralists, allegedly attached to traditional aristocratic values, were suspicious of the virtuous of technology and science and used all their political influence in Salazar’s regime to halt modernization of Portuguese society and to keep timeless social structures in place. Instead of a fascist regime, there would then be no more than a conservative dictatorship willing to “keep life as usual,” as Salazar liked to say.[50]

Such a thesis tends to ignore the technological nature of the large estates.[51] It takes at face value much of the rural rhetoric of the regime itself, and ignores the machines and chemical fertilizers on which the large estates had thrived since the end of the nineteenth century. Strangely, Pequito Rebelo is the figure historians have chosen to embody the ruralist reaction against the regime’s industrialists. They have overlooked the fact that besides owning a large estate in Alentejo he was also an enthusiastic aviator, which might have had put scholars in the unexplored path of the modernism of the ruralists. In Italy, the goggles used by Mussolini while threshing wheat, made it easier for historians to see how futurism could go along with agriculture. Here is one of Pequito Rebelo’s praises of large estates, from one of the many speeches he gave on the subject:

Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to present you the anti-latifundium prejudice. It denies the motherland one of its higher attributes, its freedom to be large and vast and offer itself to the civilizing undertakings that man aspires to. If the land wishes to organize itself as a monument to production, an immense tapestry of wheat fields, forests, orchards, and animal herds, with men in its interior in disciplined and harmonious labor, with vastness and abundance, petty ideas charge against this natural creation sustained in its environment and time. When observing the bustle of Ceres harvesting a vast wheat field, petty men dress her a strait-jacket, retail her august mantle, and bring to agriculture, which single aim is to multiply, the obsession of destruction.[52]

Pequito Rebelo’s Edenic depiction of Alentejo’s large estates equated them with a “monument to production.” This was no going back in time, but a utopian vision of an organic alternative modernity in which productivity and social harmony were not in conflict.[53] A veteran of trench warfare in World War I who also had fought on the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Pequito Rebelo didn’t shy away from calling for violent police repression whenever agricultural workers broke such alleged harmony.[54] But the point here is that technology played a central role in Pequito Rebelo’s integralist celebration of land and blood. While his futurist enthusiasm for speed materialized in the motorcycle he rode while a member of the Portuguese military in World War I or in the airplane he flew on his own initiative to help Franco’s regime exterminate his political enemies, his organic nation materialized in the wheat rows of the integral method, in the new agricultural machines he designed, and in the chemical fertilizers that were used to expand the latifundium.