FASCISM AS ALTERNATIVE-MODERNITY

Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press 2016) (From the book jacket: "In the fascist regimes of Mussolini's Italy, Salazar's Portugal, and Hitler's Germany, the first mass mobilizations involved wheat engineered to take advantage of chemical fertilizers, potatoes resistant tolerate blight, and pigs that thrive on national produce. Food independence was an early goal of fascism; indeed, as Tiago Saraiva writes in Fascist Pigs, fascists were obsessed with projects to feed the national body from the national soil. Saraiva shows how such technoscientific organisms as specially bred wheat and pigs became important elements in the institutionalization and expansion of fascist regimes. The pigs, the potatoes, and the wheat embodied fascism. In Nazi Germany, only plants and animals conforming to the new national standards would be allowed to reproduce, Pigs that didn't efficiently convert German-grown potatoes into pork and lard were eliminated.""Saraiva describes national campaigns that intertwined the work of geneticists with new state bureaucracies; discusses fascist empires, considering forced labor on coffee, rubber, and cotton in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe; and explores fascist genocides, folding karakul seep form a laboratory in Germany to Eastern Europe, Libya, Ethiopia and Angola." "Saraiva's highly original account--the first systematic study of the relationship between science and fascism--argues that the 'back to the land' aspect of fascism should be understood as a modernist experiment involving geneticists and their organisms, mass propaganda, overgrown bureaucracy, and violent colonialism." From the text: "In thinking about science and fascism it is worth considering how, in the last few decades, the historiographical status of fascism has changed form a temporal hiatus in which irrationality reigned into an integral part of human experience. Roger Griffin is the author who has most consistently argued for the need to perceive fascism as a modernist political ideology promising to counter the unsettling effects of modernization in which, as Marx put it, 'all that is solid melts into the air.' . . . In this view of fascism as modernism, fascism is much more than a radicalized version of old-fashioned conservatism; it is an all-encompassing modernist social experiment with the purpose of inventing a new national community. Fascists were not reactionaries struggling to freeze history; they were radical experimenters in political conformations. The past certainly played a role, but it was a new, streamlined past invented by the propagandists of the different regimes, Roman legionaries, Teutonic knights, and Portuguese sailors of the Age of Discovery were brought to life in exhibitions, radio broadcasts and films. but no one though of actually adopting their lifestyles; they served myths binding the collective together. Mass cultural rituals, eugenics measures, urban planning, welfare policies, censorship transportation networks, and military power were all elements of the modernist experimental gesture of forming a new national community, an alternative modernity to Bolshevism and liberal democracy." Id. at 4-5, citation committed. NOTE: One should keep this in mind as you, if you, ponder Donald J. Trump, the so-called "alt-right.' and the agendas they pursue. Are not Trump's "Make America Great Again," the nature of hiss attack on the media, the integrity of the election process, the globalization, environmentalism, courts, schools, minorities, his admiration for Putin, and on and on, his attempt to articulate a alternative to America's liberal democracy? Food for thought.).