“The Book and the Rifle”: Cultural and Racial Policy in Fascist Italy, Part 3

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Eugenics and Racial Policy

Tarquini devotes substantial attention to race and eugenics in Italian culture under Fascism. She notes that the Fascist government gave Italian eugenic scientists support and attention which they had never enjoyed under previous regimes:

From 1922 to 1945 Italian scientists contributed to racial culture and policy. These included anthropologists, statisticians, demographers, and doctors who were already well-known in the scientific world in the early years of the century, when demography and eugenics — the science which studies the methods to perfect the human species by favoring the proliferation of individuals deemed best (positive eugenics) or through the suppression of individuals considered harmful (negative eugenics) — brought their attention to the demographic decline present in many Western countries. … With the advent of fascism these scientists played a role which they did not have in previous regimes. In exchange they offered the totalitarian and racist policy their own generous support. (pp. 201–202)

Demographic issues were given particular attention in the aftermath of the massive bloodletting of World War I and a significant fall in the birth rates of Western countries. Read more

“The Book and the Rifle”: Cultural and Racial Policy in Fascist Italy, Part 2

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Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini

Go to Part 1.

Intellectual Debate in Fascist Italy

Tarquini emphasizes that culture in Fascist Italy was by no means monolithic, but allowed considerable stylistic variation and intellectual debate so long as these respected core Fascist principles. Indeed, Fascists emphasized that being a Fascist was more about a certain manly mindset than about theoretical abstractions. As Nietzsche did, the Fascists rejected the bourgeois spirit with its satisfaction with mediocrity, its skepticism and compromise, its concern with careers, and its death-fearing selfishness.

Fascism was born out of diverse groups dissatisfied with Italy’s small gains during World War I, frustrated with liberal impotence, and disturbed by the rise of communism. These included military veterans, self-sacrificial arditi soldiers, futurist artists, revolutionary syndicalists, socialistic republicans, and others. Fascism emerged organically as “a militia in the service of the nation,” a political movement, and finally a government, rather than as a preset set of ideas.

The “spirit of the trenches,” the spirit of hierarchy, discipline and community, which had shown its awesome destructive power in wartime would be used by the Fascists to constructively develop the nation in peacetime. Indeed, Fascism developed a “secular liturgy” (p. 43) and “a conception of the nation elevated to a sacred entity” (p. 51). Fascism rejected internationalism, egalitarianism, and materialism, embracing aristocracy, spirituality, and nationalism. Some Fascists even credited their movement with the potential to save Europe from decadence and degeneration.

Fascism was unabashedly communitarian. Economics and culture were to respect community interests. The Fascist doctrine of corporatism reflected “the relevance to the state [statalità] of every economic phenomenon” (p. 157). Fascists similarly argued that writers had “a political, moral, and educational role” and culture had to support “the struggle for civilization” (p. 184). Read more

“The Book and the Rifle”: Cultural & Racial Policy in Fascist Italy, Part 1

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Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 2011)
by Alessandra Tarquini

Since World War II, the very word “fascism” has always conjured up images of evil in the cultural and political mainstream. This is largely because the fascists lost that war and, as we know, the victors write the history books. It is also because the most famous fascist regime, National Socialist Germany, did in fact have an official doctrine of disregard for the lives of many non-German groups, thus providing ample material for the Allies’ atrocity propaganda.

It is interesting then to note that the original fascist regime, that of Fascist Italy, also been widely demonized despite the fact that this government was far more moderate. Indeed, the deaths attributable Fascist Italy are perhaps an order of magnitude lower than those of the Western Allies or the Soviet Union. Italian Fascism, having ruled for over 20 years, longer than National Socialist Germany and mostly in peacetime, then provides another example of what the West might have been had history taken a different course.

Here at The Occidental Observer, we are obviously extremely interested in culture and its impact on evolutionary adaptiveness and reproduction, that is to say gene-culture coevolution. Italian historian Alessandra Tarquini has provided a useful summary of cultural policy and life in Fascist Italy in her Storia della cultura fascista (History of Fascist Culture). Tarquini’s study is scrupulously neutral and empathetic, even as she dedicates her book to “the memory of the first anti-fascist I knew” (presumably a close relative).

Perhaps the most striking theme in the book is the absolute importance the Fascists gave to culture understood as the systematic education of the people. This meant especially the youth, but also the working masses and women who had been neglected by previous regimes. Tarquini observes: “From 1922 to the end of 1943, one of the main objectives of Fascism’s cultural policy was the education of the young generations” (p. 231). The National Fascist Party (PNF) “for the entire Ventennio [two decades of Fascist government] invested all its energy in the mobilization of the new generations” (p. 232). Furthermore, “from the earliest years, the Fascists showed the will to educate women and workers” (p. 233). This was not done in the lackadaisical way characteristic of liberal regimes — a bit of schooling, perhaps some cultural subsidies, but otherwise leaving young people’s minds in the hands of often hostile television oligarchs —  but systematically, through schooling, sports, Party activities, holidays, film, radio, etc. Read more