Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The numbers of colonialism horrors are not consensual, but the estimates advanced by Bouda Etemad are appalling: whereas about 130 colonial wars from 1871 to 1914 implied between 280,000 and 300,000 dead soldiers among European powers, they were responsible for 50 million to 60 million deaths among the colonized populations, 90 percent of the victims civilians.[6] If the violent occupations that contribute to these figures of Algeria by the French and of Sudan by the British were by the 1930s already subjects of imperial legend, the no-less-violent processes of decolonization were still to come and don’t enter into this accounting. The point is that Western nations would have been less appalled by the violence of Italy’s’ occupation of Ethiopia in 1935 if the undertaking had occurred about 40 years earlier.[7] The total number of deaths on the Eastern Front in World War II was about 30 million, civilians included, a scale of violence commonly described as unique in human history, but not too different from that of nineteenth-century colonial wars. Hitler’s imperial views, which led to the killing of about 12 million non-combatants in eastern Europe, were in many ways unique,[8] but they are not unrelated to those of the French demographer Ricoux, who asserted in 1880 that native Algerians were “threatened with inevitable extinction by virtue of the law that backward peoples disappear.”[9]

Hitler’s Third Reich and Mussolini’s African empire were too short-lived for us to know if they would have evolved, after a first violent phase of conquest, into the same kind of awareness of the limitations of empire-building efforts characteristic of other European empires, leading to forms of indirect rule and co-optation of local elites and intermediaries. Fortunately, our image of the hubris associated with fascist imperialism is based on what happened during a short period of time. The case of Portugal is distinct and revealing not only because that country kept its empire for three decades after World War II but also because it already had formal control of vast African territories. What fascism meant in this case was a much more intensive exploration of colonies through a brutal colonial labor regime.[10] It may be argued that there wasn’t much that distinguished Portugal’s brutality from other colonial experiences in Africa.[11] But it is telling that at the moment European powers were undertaking reforms of their colonial labor systems, Portugal was starting a gigantic cotton production scheme based on the violent labor practices of the Belgian Congo being subject of reform.[12]

If campaigns denouncing the inhumane conditions of colonial production regimes led to labor reform movements in other empires, the absence of a free press or of the right to unionize in fascist regimes hindered any possibility of rising indignation among the public.[13] The colonial trajectories described by Ferdinand Cooper for the British and French empires were more difficult to take under fascist rule. Revealingly enough, in France, attempts at colonial reform being timidly advanced under the government of the Front Populaire were quickly dismissed under the fascist Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, only to be revived after World War II.

To summarize, fascist empires were built on, and in reaction to, other European imperial experiences. Owing to an inflammable combination of repression and revisionism, they were characteristically more violent than the other empires of their time, although the violence was no worse than what had occurred in the previous phase of imperialist expansionism (at the end of the nineteenth century). Fascist regimes allowed less space, if any, for reform or for accommodation of claims made by indigenous populations. Also, their wars of occupation came late, in the German and Italian cases facing well-developed state structures and thus resulting in more brutal conflicts. In the case of the Third Reich, the alleged backward indigenous people (Slavs from eastern Europe) ended taking over the imperial metropolis (Berlin).