Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Though Nazism is not commonly dealt in the literature on colonialism, many scholars have emphasized the continuities between colonialism and Nazi rule in eastern Europe.[2] This has been mostly done by searching for ideological connections between Germany’s pre–World War I African empire and Nazi Germany’s occupation of eastern Europe.[3] But although the ever-expanding literature on Nazi ruling practices in eastern Europe doesn’t refrain from using references to colonialism, these tend to be very generic and ahistorical, not confronting the problem of other European colonial experiences of the time directly and systematically.[4] Pointed observations by anti-colonial intellectuals, such as Aimé Césaire’s comments on toleration of Nazism before it was inflicted on Europeans “because, until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples” or his disciple Frantz Fanon’s description of Nazism as “a colonial system in the very heart of Europe,” haven’t led to systematic scholarship on Nazism in eastern Europe as colonialism.[5]

In these two chapters, I use the concrete cases of the raising of Karakul sheep and the cultivation of the rubber substitute kok-sagyz to explore Nazi Germany’s occupation of eastern Europe through the lenses of colonial history. Keeping with the methodology of previous chapters, I use technoscientific organisms as historical models when discussing general historical points. The intention is to experiment with the notion of the Third Reich as a full legitimate member of the family of European colonial empires.

At issue are not only colonialism and Nazism but the broader subject of colonialism and fascism. There is no contention about the importance of colonial expansion for the regimes of Mussolini and Salazar, but scholars have tended to deal with both cases in the exclusive framework of colonial history. In cruder terms, the Third Reich points to fascism while the Third Portuguese Empire and Mussolini’s Great Italy point to colonialism. To put it in more mundane academic language, scholars dealing with Nazism in eastern Europe have been seen mainly as historians of fascism whereas scholars dealing with the African empires of Salazar and Mussolini are considered first and foremost historians of colonialism. Nevertheless, the two literatures should be brought together. To talk about fascism and ignore colonialism would be the equivalent of talking about the Nazi regime and leaving aside Nazi colonial occupation of eastern Europe. In the opposite direction, to talk about colonialism and ignore fascism is to give insufficient attention to the last major drive for European colonial ventures in the twentieth century, a point strangely not generally taken in the literature.

^{Figure 4A.1 Portugal’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, featuring a map overlapping Portuguese colonial possessions (including Angola and Mozambique) with a map of Europe and asserting that “Portugal is not a small country.” The installation suggests the pertinence of perceiving a continuum between European expansionism in Africa and the Nazis’ quest for Lebensraum in eastern Europe.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

Indeed, fascist imperial initiatives came late in relation to other European colonial undertakings. Fascist states were colonial latecomers. In more accurate historical terms, the imperial agendas of the three regimes were reactive in relation to existent imperial blocs, claiming that colonial expansion was the only way to guarantee national survival in a world of competing empires. In the cases of Italy and Germany, this led not only to brutal wars of expansion that other empires could now dispense with but also to confront more developed state structures (in Ethiopia and in the Soviet Union) than the ones encountered by the British or the French in the nineteenth century scramble for Africa. Not only were the Germans transforming other Europeans into colonial subjects, as Fanon noted; they were doing so when the violent stories of colonial expansion by the French, the British, and the Belgians were allegedly already history.