Mussolini's Children by McLean Eden K.;

Author:McLean, Eden K.; [McLean, Eden K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS020000 History / Europe / Italy, HIS037070 History / Modern / 20th Century
ISBN: 5399219
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Ensuring the Empire’s Immortality, 1938–40

7

Enforcing the Racial Ideal

Benito Mussolini’s 1936 declaration of a new Italian Empire marked the achievement of a significant long-term goal for the regime, but the Duce certainly did not see it as the endgame for Fascist Italy. Rather, it signaled the beginning of a new era in Italian history.1 The successful conquest of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia supposedly verified the rejuvenation of the Italian race Mussolini and his regime had worked to inspire for the previous fourteen years; it solidified the return of Roman dominance that had once defined the Western world. The project then became—in the years between when Vittorio Emanuele III received his new title as emperor and Italy entered World War II—to develop a race of New Italians who identified as entitled imperialists just as much as conscientious nationalists.2

As the preceding chapters have shown, the regime steadily developed increasingly totalitarian policies and restrictive racial rhetoric in order to further delineate the contours of a healthy Italian race. The period from 1938 to 1940 was no different in this regard; indeed, it faced some of the most dramatic legal and bureaucratic shifts in the Fascist racial campaign to identify and improve the race in the swiftest and most effective ways possible. Italy’s imperial campaign in Ethiopia had come out of a longer and more ambitious racial project, but it also triggered an acceleration of the state’s exclusionary dictates for the Italian race. The codification of racial segregation in Italian East Africa (AOI) shortly after Mussolini’s May 1936 victory speech had largely resulted from preexisting understandings of race and colonial rule and especially from the perceived inability of Italians to honor their racial superiority outside the peninsula. Similar frustrations with the lack of sufficient progress in Italians’ racial strength and awareness—despite the proclaimed successes in Ethiopia—were likewise articulated in the most radical and restrictive racial policies yet seen within the borders of Italy.3

Of perhaps greatest significance in this latest stage of the Fascist racial campaign was the July 14, 1938, article in the Giornale d’Italia titled “Italian Fascism and the Problems of the Razza,” which announced, “Human razze exist.” Allegedly written by a group of racial scientists and laying to rest a long-standing debate among Italian politicians and academics, the article explained, “The existence of human razze is not an abstraction of our spirit, but rather it corresponds to a reality that is unique, material, and perceptible with our senses.”4 This was the first of ten points enumerated in the document, later dubbed the Manifesto of Race, that many, perhaps even most, scholars and observers have declared the cornerstone of Fascism’s official domestic racial policies.5 Of course, the document’s insistence on prejudice against so-called inferior races within Italian borders was not especially novel in pragmatic terms, since the regime had consciously discriminated against Slavic and German speakers, as well as other “non-Italians” since the 1920s. Instead, the component that appeared to be the most dramatic theoretical departure from previous Fascist doctrine was its identification of

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