Fascism Midterm: Reading Notes

Italy's entrance into the war in 1915 were the movement's literary form par excellence."48 Their rhetoric was even more bloodthirsty than that of other nationalists. The original Futurist manifesto of 1909 declared: 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. 3. . . . We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the forced march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. . . . 9. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—and militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women. 10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.49 Much of what became Italian Fascism in 1919 could already be found in the Futurist manifesto ten years earlier. (pg. 64) Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, 35-79. (WyoCourses) “Italian Fascism thus burst into history with an act of violence against both socialism and bourgeois legality, in the name of a claimed higher national good” (Paxton 7) “For fascists, the dysfunctional capitalism of the interwar period did not need fundamental reordering; its ills could be cured simply by applying sufficient political will to the creation of full emoployment and productivity.” (Paxton 10) “But it was an alternative modernity that Fascist regimes sought: a technically advanced society in which modernity’s strains and divisions had been smothered by ascism’s powers of integration and control” (Paxton 13) “Fascist minimum, which is supposed to allow us to formulate a neat general definition of facism” (14) Mobilizing Passions of Paxton are: “ dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of indiviudalstic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences” (41) Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 3-86. No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State. Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State (which amalgamates classes into a single economic and ethical reality) is unknown, and which sees in history nothing but the class struggle. Fascism is likewise opposed to trade unionism as a class weapon. But when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State. (2-3) Fascism also denies the immutable and irreparable character of the class struggle which is the natural outcome of this economic conception of history; above all it denies that the class struggle is the preponderating agent in social transformations. (5) Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” 1-10. (WyoCourses) What this meant in practical terms became all too clear over the next years. From 1925 to 1929, a series of laws drafted by Rocco and other members of Mussolini’s government transformed Italy into a police state with extensive powers of surveillance and detention. Groups with autonomist tendencies (the Mafia, former squadrists, regionalists) were coerced to coordinate their interests with those of the state; ethnic minorities in border regions such as the Val d’Aosta and the Alto Adige, for example, were labeled as “anti-Italian and antifascist” and forced to adopt new “national” surnames. Other disciplinary measures punished “nonproductive” members of the national collective (single men and women, criminals, dissidents, homosexuals, vagrants) and provided for the confinement (confino) of problematic persons in remote areas. (18-19) The “shockingly amoral” nature of American life also struck Italian ob- servers who investigated gender relations and the family. Like their counterparts from France and Weimar Germany, Italians castigated American women whose lifestyles confirmed the outcome of modern trends that had begun to manifest themselves at home: female emancipation, the supposed neglect of maternal duties, the eclipse of traditional patterns of seduction and courtship. American wives dominated their husbands, they claimed, and their focus on careers meant that, as in Stalinist Russia, the hearth and the home-cooked meal were things of the past. As one reporter observed, American homes consisted of “cold radiators, iron, cement, glass, and aluminum, all without history, beauty, or dreams. One has instead levers, buttons, floodlights, and bare bulbs. Everything is standardized.” (41-42) Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, 17-45. Mussolini’s regime stood for returning women to home and hearth, restoring patriarchal authority, and confining female destiny to bearing babies. (1) The deep conflict within the fascist state between the demands of modernity and the desire to reimpose traditional authority On the one hand, fascists condemned all the social practices customarily connected with the emancipation of women—from the vote and female participation in the labor force to family planning. They also sought to extirpate the very attitudes and behaviors of individual self-interest that underlay women’s demands for equality and autonomy (2) On the other hand, fascism, in an effort to bild up national economic strength and to mobilize all of Italian society’s resources, including the cpacicty of women to reproduce and nurture, inevitably promoted some of the very changes it sought to curb (2) Italy: Hence, on principle, it denied women any role in decisions regarding childbearing. Indeed, on population issues, women were presumed to be antagonists of the state, acting solely on the family’s interest without regard for the nation’s needs … In sum, by foreclosing reforms and by aggravating economic insecurity and social inequalities, fascist policy may actually have increased detterents to childbearing and heightened fertility differentials between urban and rural areas (5)