Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

It is hard to avoid discomfort when applying the notion of “alternative modernity” to fascism—all the more so when considering that many of those who use that term do it with emancipatory intentions, highlighting the multiple forms modernity may assume in the global South, beyond the Western versions of modernization theory.[28] Nevertheless, as S. N. Eisenstadt has convincingly shown when discussing the modern features of current religious fundamentalism, there is no necessary goodness attached to “alternative modernity” (he actually prefers “multiple modernities”).[29] There is also no goodness in a fascist alternative modernity and its totalistic attempt of transforming man and society—an attempt in which the authority of the dictator replaced political democracy and those who because of race or politics were not considered to belong to the national community were deprived of citizenship and eventually eliminated.

But if we take this notion of fascism as alternative modernity as valid, as I think we should, the role of historians of science and technology in producing a better understanding of the phenomenon becomes clearer. Their engagement with the “detail, ambiguity, and variety” of practices and objects of scientists and engineers may contribute decisively to overcoming the limits of accounts of modernity based on naive notions of how science and technology interact with society.[30] In fact, Michael Thad Allen and Thomas Zeller have already demonstrated the advantages of looking in depth at technology when describing the particular version of modernity associated with Nazis. Whereas Allen, focusing on labor management techniques, replaced Hannah Arendt’s figure of the perpetrator of genocide as a personification of the banality of evil with the SS member as a modernist bureaucrat driven by his enthusiasm for efficiency and racial utopian visions, Zeller detailed the contested process of making Hitler’s Autobahnen fit the larger project of shaping a “Volk community that claimed to equalize social differences, smooth out distinctions of class and estate, and be racially homogeneous.”[31] In both cases, the old paradox of reactionary modernism that suggested an unsolved problematic contradiction at the heart of Nazi ideology between romanticism and technical rationality gave way to an image of technologies embodying fascist alternative modernity.[32] More recently, Lino Camprubí has made an important addition to this literature by looking at the co-evolution of engineering and the Francoist regime and showing how typical fascist notions of Spanish national redemption were embodied in technological undertakings.[33] Moreover, such approaches resonate nicely with the important trend in history of science of overcoming the traditional opposition between romanticism and scientific knowledge, a trend that emphasizes how machines were historically able to materialize romantic social utopias, or (to stick to the vocabulary) how scientific instruments and technology embodied romantic alternative modernity.[34] In the same vein, this book delves into the alternative fascist world that science produced, not the alternative science that fascism produced.

Food and the Fascist Organic Nation

Feeding the organic nation played a decisive role in fascist alternative modernity. For fascists, the nation deserved all sacrifices and made allegiances to class or ideology irrelevant.[35] Social and cultural historians have detailed how imagined national communities came into being in the nineteenth century through the invention of a national culture and its dissemination in classrooms, in the press, in world exhibitions, or in army barracks.[36] Building on the different local nationalistic ideologies thus formed, fascists all across Europe developed a radicalized integral form of nationalism by adhering to a biological conception of the nation as organ, body, or race.[37] Liberal regimes were accused of failing in their duties toward the nation and of having led it to the verge of extinction in World War I. Once the conflict ended, veterans were quick to call for a constant mobilization to defend this menaced national body, eliminating the traditional distinctions between reserve and action and between peace and war.[38] And if not every fascist regime put as much emphasis as the Nazis did on the dangerous intrusion of inferior races, none ignored the alleged menace of food scarcity. Hunger, experienced throughout Europe during World War I, made plausible depictions of the nation through the figure of the endangered body.[39] As Nazi propaganda emphatically put it, Germans were “the children of the potato,” having had their existence menaced in World War I as much by the epidemics of late blight that afflicted the potato crop as by enemy weapons.[40]

Though questions of race have traditionally contributed to establishing differences between fascist regimes, with Germany as an outlier, food points instead at the many commonalities of fascist experiences. In other words, in fascist studies food is a lumper whereas race is a splitter.[41] This is important for the present book, since the narrative not only makes comparisons between the three countries but also insists on the importance of following concrete trans-national historical dynamics connecting the three fascist regimes under study.

Indeed, as is detailed in part I, every fascist regime of the interwar period became obsessed with projects for making the national soil feed the national body. Food was central to translating the fascist ideology of the organic nation into concrete policies. National independence from the vagaries of international markets was to be achieved through campaigns for food production such as the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat), the first mass mobilization of fascist Italy launched in 1925, which was soon reproduced in Portugal (1929) and later in Germany (1934). The notion of total mobilization, which in the early 1930s Ernst Jünger transferred from the trenches of World War I to the whole of society, had its most obvious manifestation in these inaugural fascist campaigns.[42] Peasants, chemical industries, machine builders, agricultural scientists, radio broadcasters, and fascist intellectuals were all mobilized to protect the national community. The Portuguese Wheat Campaign’s revealingly martial slogan proclaimed “Our land’s bread is the border that best protect us!” This book argues that it hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated that one of the first steps in the fascist experiment of forming an organic community was to put in place campaigns for the production of food and raw materials to guarantee the survival and growth of the national body.

It may be argued that thinking about the biological nation through food rather than through race projects a more acceptable version of fascism, ignoring its more violent aspects. After all, food-supply issues, in contrast to racial degeneration, constituted real problems challenging all European societies in the interwar years. But food was also crucially linked to ambitions of territorial expansion, with colonization taken as the only long-term solution for survival and growth of the national body in a world dominated by imperial blocs. Counter-intuitively, the fascist nationalistic obsession with self-reliance, first expressed in internal production campaigns, also naturalized the need to grab land. In the hostile world of the fascist credo, only imperial nations could be considered truly independent. This expansionist drive constitutes the framing of part II of the book.

Fascism was responsible for the last large colonial land grab by European nations: while Italy invaded Ethiopia and strengthened its presence in Libya, Germany transformed eastern Europe into a Continental version of Heart of Darkness.[43] Portugal had already secured its empire in the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa, but the new fascist regime would greatly intensify its colonial presence. Focusing on food and land will thus also lead us into the violent features of fascism that justify much of the enduring scholarly and popular interest in the phenomenon. Hitler’s visions of Germany’s expansion into the east were, from the beginning, articulated in terms of guaranteeing new soil for “pure stock” German peasants, making agriculture a central dimension of the dynamics that would lead to the Holocaust.[44] Italy and Portugal’s imperial experiences didn’t have the same combination of racial policy and territorial expansion as Nazi Germany’s. Race certainly played a role, but in neither case can one identify an explicit decision to eliminate a “race” comparable to that made at the infamous Wannsee Conference.[45] But, similarly to the Nazi example, it is also in the colonies that one stumbles into both regimes darkest stories. As we will see in part II, agriculture is key to understand the genocides perpetrated in Africa under Mussolini and Salazar dictatorships.

28

For a good sample of alternative modernity literature including such authors as Homi Bhabha or Dipesh Chakrabarty, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Duke University Press, 2001). Aníbal Quijano and Arturo Escobar in their more radical critique of modernity have argued that instead of alternative modernity, emancipation would only come through alternative to modernity. Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a crossroads: Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development?” Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 1–65. For an informed critical discussion of the uses of the concept of alternative modernity see Arif Dirlik, “Thinking modernity historically: Is “alternative modernity” the answer?” Asian Review of World Histories 1, no. 1 (2013): 5–44. In history of science literature, see the important article by Antonio Lafuente who characterizes creole science in colonial Latin America, critical of the modes imposed by Linnean botany, not as an alternative to science but as “alternative science.” Antonio Lafuente, “Enlightenment in an imperial context: Local science in the late-eighteenth-century Hispanic world,” Osiris (2000): 155–173.

29

S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Brill, 2003).

30

Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds., Modernity and Technology (MIT Press, 2004). For an exemplary case of a historical account sophisticated in its treatment of both technology and modernism, see Amy Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 168–187.

31

Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Thomas Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 (Berghahn, 2007).

32

Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984). The notion of reactionary modernism was already an important step in overcoming previous scholarship that had identified fascism simply as the negation of enlightened modern Europe. For this previous view, see Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist ideology,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. W. Laqueur (University of California Press, 1976).

33

Camprubí, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime.

34

M. Norton Wise, “Architectures for steam,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. P. Galison and E. A. Thompson (MIT Press, 1999); M. Norton Wise and Elaine M. Wise, “Staging an empire,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. L. Daston (Zone Books, 2004); John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). (Here I am not suggesting any direct unproblematic link between romantic culture and the rise of fascism.)

35

Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Harvard University Press, 1996).

36

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. II (Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a discussion of this literature from a history of technology point of view, see Tiago Saraiva, “Inventing the technological nation: The example of Portugal (1851–1898),” History and Technology 23 (2007): 263–273. Also see Antonio Lafuente, “Conflicto de lealtades: los científicos entre la nación y la república de las letras,” Revista de Occidente 161 (1994): 97–122.

37

On the origins of organic nationalism during the nineteenth century, see W. Mommsen, “The varieties of the nation state in modern history: Liberal imperialist, fascist and contemporary notions of nation and nationality,” in The Rise and Decline of the Nation State, ed. M. Mann (Blackwell, 1990). In addition to the works on eugenics and fascism cited in note 7 above, see also the important collective volume Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, ed. M. Turda (Central European University Press, 2007).

38

Political enemies accused of bolshevism were the first “infectious elements” to be removed and the first occupiers of concentration camps in Hitler’s Germany and Salazar’s Portugal.

39

Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (Penguin, 2012); C. P. Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Ohio University Press, 1985); Gesine Gerhard, “Food and genocide: Agrarian politics in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union,” Contemporary European History 18 (2009): 45–65; Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oiclass="underline" Food and Politics in Italy (Berg, 2004). The problems faced by impoverished European peasant populations would be part of the bedrock on which fascism thrived throughout the continent. The war only made more obvious the stunning revolution in the global system of food supply that had been occurring since the late nineteenth century because cheap commodities from the Americas were flooding European markets. See David Goodman and Michael Watt, eds., Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring (Routledge, 1997).

40

Mark B. Cole, Feeding the Volk: Food, Culture, and the Politics of Nazi Consumption, 1933–1945, PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 2011, pp. 159–160.

41

For informed discussions of lumpers and splitters in fascist studies, see Mann, Fascists and Kallis, “Fascism, para-fascism and fascistization.”

42

Ernst Jünger, “Total mobilization (1930),” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Wolin (MIT Press, 1993). On the importance of Jünger’s concept for a general understanding of modernity, see Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Suhrkamp, 1989).

43

Mazower, The Dark Continent.

44

Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton University Press, 2002); Uwe Mai, “Rasse und Raum”: Agrarpolitik, Sozial- und Raumplanung im NS-Staat (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002); Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut: das Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Wallstein, 2013); Gerhard, “Food and genocide”; Timothy Snyder, The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015).

45

This is not to suggest that race didn’t play a major role in the Portuguese and Italian empires in conforming particularly violent colonial regimes.