Fascist Culture Research Articles

Style over substance? The Blueshirts and transnational fascist culture

ABSTRACT The central debate over the Blueshirt movement has centred on whether the movement can be classified as fascist. The two most significant accounts of Blueshirtism, by Maurice Manning (1971) and Mike Cronin (1997) have largely avoided explicit comparisons between the Blueshirts and other European fascist movements. While John Newsinger (2001) has argued that the Blueshirts may be usefully compared to the British Blackshirts, and Fearghal McGarry (2005) has highlighted aspects of Eoin O’Duffy’s engagement with Italian Fascist ideas and practices, there is still more work to be done in exploring transnational links and possible comparisons between the Blueshirts and continental European fascist movements. This article argues that by interrogating the political culture of Blueshirtism, we can better understand its place within the spectrum of European fascisms. This article considers both the “high” and “low” aspects of Blueshirt culture. It examines the links between the Blueshirts and European fascist movements by analysing both political thought and political uniforms. By applying a transnational lens, we can thus gain a more holistic understanding of one of the most controversial political movements in modern Irish history.

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

Italian Fascists and the Rewriting of American History

«Fascismo antico». Alcune note a margine di una conferenza salernitana di Emanuele Ciaceri

In 1933, during a conference at the Institute of Fascist Culture in Salerno, Emanuele Ciaceri, professor of Ancient History at the University of Naples, proposes an unusual comparison between Pythagorism and Fascism, hypothesizing that the Pythagoreans may have been precursors of the Mussolinian movement.

Нова рецепција Милоша Црњанског – десничарске идеје и књижевни опус тридесетих година 20. века

Нова рецепција Милоша Црњанског – десничарске идеје и књижевни опус тридесетих година 20. века

Aiding and Abetting Suicide: The Current Debate in Italy.

The article analyzes the recent ruling of the Italian Constitutional Court amending article 580 of the Italian Criminal Code, relating to aid and incitement to suicide. According to the first Assize Court of Milan, article 580, conceived in 1930, reflects the fascist culture of its author. The problem of the Constitutional Court was therefore to establish whether a democratic state can still place limits on aid for suicide and in what terms it can do so.

Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism

Exhibition histories of Germany’s National Socialist period (1933–1945) have been dominated by the notorious 1937 Degenerate Art propaganda show, ironically one of the greatest presentations of early twentieth-century European modernism ever mounted. Rightly well studied, Degenerate Art defamed the work of the avant-garde only to weaponize it as an indicator of society’s moral decay and an argument for the eradication of the regime’s constructed Others. Yet, as Michael Tymkiw demonstrates in Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism, Degenerate Art was but one in a crowded and diverse field of exhibitions mounted throughout the duration of the regime. Exhibitions were a powerful propaganda medium of the state, akin to the better-studied media of film and print. Analysing a wide range of exhibitions that displayed art, industrial products and propaganda, Tymkiw demonstrates strong continuities with the very modernist movements that the regime purported to reject, even as these ‘artists, architects, and others made formal decisions that contributed to legitimizing and advancing National Socialist policies and ideas—at times indirectly or even unintentionally, but usually quite explicitly, and often by working with government organizations’ (p. 13). Based on extensive archival research and written in an accessible style, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism should be read by anyone interested in the history of exhibition design, as well as those seeking a more nuanced approach to fascist culture that moves beyond past paradigms that tend to assume a complete break with the freewheeling aesthetic experiments of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, one of the most troubling but important elements of this study is its revelation of just how much continuity existed between the years preceding 1933 and those that would follow.

Entre el nacionalcatolicismo y el fascismo. Las religiones del franquismo

It is considered here, in the first place, that the Francoist was not a fascist dictatorship but fascistized, precisely because of the hegemonic character of National Catholicism. Secondly, that this does not mean that there was no fascist political religion in Spain, which was logically based on the fascist culture of Spanish fascism. Third, that the fact that National Catholicism ended up being hegemonic in Francoism over fascism, must be considered as the result of a complex series of processes, transversalities and conflicts, and not as something that was determined from the beginning.

British fascism, fascist culture, British culture

ABSTRACTIn reading British fascism as a cultural phenomenon, historians have started to chart the cultural products and visions of British fascists during the interwar and post-war periods. Such analysis has tended to focus on fascists’ discourse on culture (particularly the ways that they position liberalism and modernism as degenerate), or on the cultural texts of fascists/fascism in the form of, inter alia, literature, music, dress and art. George Mosse goes as far as to argue that it is only through a cultural interpretation of fascism that we can come to understand the movement ‘from the inside out’. However, the notion of fascist culture is contentious, and not simply because the meanings of both ‘fascism’ and ‘culture’ are highly contested. Eschewing Mosse’s invitation to interpret fascism as culture, Richardson nevertheless argues that ‘the cultural’ can be understood as one approach to fascism. In this article, Richardson discusses six ways into a critical cultural analysis of the continuing presence of fascist political projects, focusing in particular on the British variant.

Senfascismens æstetisering af (den hvide) arbejderklasse

Late Fascism’s Aestheticization of the (White) Working Class: Notes for a Communist Art Theory
 The article presents a double take on what I propose to call late fascism in order to distinguish between the inter-war fascist movements and contemporary fascist parties and politicians. Firstly, I follow Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as a question of aestheticization. Fascism is just as much a question of culture and ideology as a question of politics, and we need to map the specific fascist culture that contemporary fascist politicians produce. Secondly, I connect this analysis of fascist culture to an analysis of the specific class composition of late fascism, arguing that late fascism operates through a process of reverse victimization where a privileged white working class comes to see itself as threatened.

Gloria Fuertes: Poesía contra el silencio. Literatura, censura y mercado editorial (1954–1962) by Reyes Vila-Belda

Reviewed by: Gloria Fuertes: Poesía contra el silencio. Literatura, censura y mercado editorial (1954–1962) by Reyes Vila-Belda John Wilcox Vila-Belda, Reyes. Gloria Fuertes: Poesía contra el silencio. Literatura, censura y mercado editorial (1954–1962). Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2017. Pp. 305. ISBN 978-8-48489-993-8. This detailed study, titled Gloria Fuertes: Poesía contra el silencio. Literatura, censura y mercado editorial (1954–1962), is divided into three parts. The first, chapters 1–3, is devoted to censorship in and of Fuertes’s early books of poetry. The second part, chapters 4–8, focuses on the oppression Spanish women suffered and ways Fuertes subverted a female writer’s marginalization. The third part, chapters 9–11, is a detailed review of the immense impact the Seix Barral publishing house had on renovating and internationalizing Spanish culture in the 1950s and 60s. For her analysis of post-Civil War censorship, Vila-Belda conducted extensive research in the holdings of the “Archivo General de la Administración” in Alcalá de Henares. She provides us with an illuminating account of the numerous facets of censorship and how Fuertes’s work was affected. She discusses topics the Regime deemed taboo and mentions that many books had to be published abroad. Focusing on Gloria Fuertes (1917–98), she notes her marginalization as a single woman, a lesbian—Fuertes’s “compañera” was the translator Phyllis Turnbull—and as a member of the working class who was preoccupied with social problems. Vila-Belda discusses where Fuertes found work, her TV performances, and her teaching (in the United States on a [End Page 148] Fulbright and in Madrid’s “Instituto Internacional”). There follows an overview of the three books that were censored: Antología y poemas del suburbio (37 poems, published in 1954 in Caracas, Venezuela); Todo asusta (30 poems, published in Caracas in 1958); Aconsejo beber hilo (70 poems, published in Madrid in 1954). It is quite fascinating to see the words and lines to which the censors objected. Vila-Belda provides a detailed commentary on the censorship of five poems in Aconsejo . . . (two of which see the light of day for the very first time in this study). Needless to say, these poems in no way inscribe the Regime’s arch-conservative role for women (house, home, kids, husband); they deal with poor, abused and lonely women, with prostitution, and with hunger and starvation. The study’s second section treats poetry as a subversive act. The Regime forbade writing about certain topics (e.g., the Civil War, death, suicide and burial). Vila-Belda provides detailed analyses of Fuertes’s poems on such topics and where they were censored. It is enjoyable to see how Fuertes at times was able to trick the censor and how she deconstructed the ubi sunt motif. Vila-Belda also examines in depth Fuertes’s testimonial and autobiographical poems: in a deliberate challenge to the Regime’s Pollyanna view of Spain, she incorporated into her texts the atrocious living conditions of the poor and downtrodden, and of starving children without shoes on their feet. An ingenious aspect of this discussion is Vila-Belda’s reading of how free verse foregrounds the horrors of post-Civil War life in Spain. Also, this critic’s study of Fuertes’s deployment of intertexts to resist the official Fascist culture is illuminating. The study’s second section concludes with an account of Fuertes’s public readings (in pubs, cafés, barrios, theaters), performances that were advertised on posters as “Versos con faldas,” in which Fuertes could read poems that had been censored or had only been published abroad. The third section of this study deals with the impact the publishing house Seix Barral had on culture in Spain from 1954 to 1964 with their “Biblioteca Breve,” their “Colliure” collection and with Castellet’s Veinte años de poesía española. Gloria Fuertes was the only woman published in the “Colliure” collection (with ten men), and no one less than Jaime Gil de Biedma was the anthologizer of the selection of Fuertes’s poetry that appeared in that collection in 1962. Seix Barral’s focus on social realism and its inclusion of...

Front 14-18. The Experience of Battle in WWI and the Fascist Culture of Violence in Post‑War Germany

In zijn bijdrage onderzoekt Maarten Van Alstein de impact van de frontervaring op de ontwikkeling van een fascistische geweldcultuur in het interbellum. Hij brengt in kaart hoe, in de context van het overwonnen en door interne verscheurdheid geplaagde Duitsland, de oorlogservaringen van zowel intellectuelen als van gewone soldaten fungeerden als een katalysator voor een cultuur waarin opvattingen over voortdurende strijd, de vernietiging van de politieke en existentiële vijanden, nationale wedergeboorte en een nieuwe moraliteit een explosieve mix vormden die zou exploderen in het vuur en bloed van de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

Sia lodato il Grande Torino. La tragedia di Superga e la costruzione della comunità immaginata cattolica

On 4 May 1949, all the players of the top Italian team of the time, Il Grande Torino, died in an air crash. The tragedy of Superga seemed to be representative of Italy in the immediate post-war period and for this reason it managed to connect with almost the entire nation. The images of the carcass of the plane at the base of Turin’s basilica evoked the war images broadcast by the newsreels between 1940 and 1945. The Torino players were heroes and as heroes were celebrated at their funeral, which seemed to indirectly refer to the cult of the fallen in fascist culture. The funeral held in Turin was attended by 500,000 people and managed to unite a large part of the population in a public rite, during which not only did the deaths of the Grande Torino appear to be celebrated, but also those who had died in the Second World War. Public funerals such as those of the Grande Torino gave Italians the opportunity to openly vent intimate emotions linked to personal experience, helping to build the new nationalCatholicpost-war community.

Il fascismo: questioni di cultura e di stile

Among Italian historians, Niccolo Zapponi has been one of those who best grasped the meaning and innovative character of George L. Mosse’s historiography. Adopting it in an original way and drawing from the suggestions of other disciplines as well, between the Seventies and the Nineties of the last century Zapponi launched his study of the Italian culture between the two wars. He did so, moving from the assumption that the origins of political ideologies should be found in collective, long-term mentalities, rather than in the works of prominent intellectuals. This essay shows that his research, at the boundary between the history of ideas and the history of mentality, demonstrated how much fascist ideology itself was deeply rooted in European culture, thereby overcoming the long dispute on the very existence of a fascist culture. Once he recognized the importance of the aesthetic, ritual and symbolic dimensions of modern mass politics, Zapponi moved on studying fascist political style, focusing on its underlying ethical codes. What emerged is not only the fascist objective to impose in this way its own pedagogical model and its vision of modernity, but also a kind of «moral self-discipline», aiming at offering survival strategies in situations of crisis and rapid changes.

NARRATIVES OF DECLINE IN THE DUTCH NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT, 1931–1945

AbstractGeneric fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

NARRATIVES OF DECLINE IN THE DUTCH NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT, 1931–1945

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

When fascism met empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria

AbstractFocusing on the case of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, this article asks what set Japan, Germany, and Italy apart from other empires during the ‘fascist moment’ from the aftermath of the First World War to the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945. While scholars have examined the politics and culture of fascism in metropolitan Japan, there is virtually no literature on fascist imperialism. Indeed, the consensus term is ‘wartime empire’ and the dominant framework is of an empire mobilized for total war. One of the goals is to think through what the concept ‘fascist imperialism’ might mean and what the Japanese case might contribute to its definition. Detailed comparison with Germany and Italy is beyond the scope of this article, which builds a definition of fascism around four core elements drawn from the Japanese case: the ideology of Asianism and its vision for Japanese leadership over a regional movement of anti-colonial nationalisms; hyper-militarism that went well beyond military imperialism pursued since the late nineteenth century and that constituted a new celebration of military action and the aesthetics of violence; red peril thinking that propelled the creation of a police state targeting communist intellectuals, politicians, and labour activists within the archipelago as well as communist nationalists in the empire; and radical statism, which signified the turn to the state as the spear tip and staging ground of action to address the crisis. All four dimensions of fascism in Japan intensified in the process of territorial expansion from 1931 to 1945, and linked transformations across the nation-state-empire.

Tempi difficili, note sugli ebrei italiani nei primi anni del fascismo (1922-1925)

Between the rise of Fascism and the overt construction of the dictatorship in 1925-26, the relationship between the Italian Jews and Fascist power was not on an inevitable track towards conflict. Part of Jewish culture committed to the national or religious awakening and in particular some Zionists shared with Fascist culture some of the themes and topics typical of the latter. The article analyzes the strategies of the Italian Jewish community in a difficult period, marked by concerns about antisemitism, internal fractures and measures such as the Gentile school reform, which on the one hand put at risk the principle of equality, but on the other seemed to open the way to the fight against assimilation.

Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships

This article highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing ‘fascist culture’ as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between liberalism and communism, and bid to establish an alternative, rooted modern culture. Building logically on this growing consensus, the next stage is to a) accept that modernism is legitimately extended to apply to radical experimentation in society, economics, politics, and material culture; b) realize that seen from this perspective each fascism was proposing its own variant of modernism in both a socio-political and aesthetic sense, and that c) right-wing regimes influenced by fascism produced their own experiments in developing both a modern political regime and cultural modernism grounded in a unique national history.

Making waves: Giacomo Balla and Emilio Pucci

Emilio Pucci emerged as an international fashion force in the 1960s with his bold and brilliant, streamlined outfits for the active woman. Delving into Pucci's first career as a bomber pilot and Fascist aviation hero, this article demonstrates his unacknowledged debt to the fashion theories and textile designs of the Futurist Giacomo Balla. Pucci was linked to Futurist aeropittura of the 1930s by the common culture of Fascism, aviation, and the cult of speed. Though Futurism was tainted by its affiliation with Fascism, in the post-war years, the works of Balla and others were kept in the public eye through exhibitions and their influence on a younger generation of modernist artists. In the same period, Pucci began to produce his vibrant eye-popping textile designs, which elaborated the proto-psychedelic imagery of wave-like swells, spinning vortexes, and exuberant floral arabesques developed by Balla between the World Wars.

Primo Levi's "Small Differences" and the Art of The Periodic Table : A Reading of "Potassium"

Attending to Primo Levi's comment that The Periodic Table "goes beyond simple autobiography," I explore its mixtures of literary conventions and analyze the ways in which the action of writing constitutes a central trope that links Holocaust witnessing and narrative strategy. In this book, Primo Levi, writer, is inseparable from Primo Levi, Holocaust witness, and the discourses of science and of art are subtly intertwined and reciprocally illuminating. Levi's discussion of technological know-how and personal experience intertwine with the subtlety and rigor of a poem. Playing the building blocks of the scientific elements of the periodic table against the personal experience of the narrator, Levi constructs an interactive account. I discuss how Levi's friend Sandro, in the "Iron" chapter, and Rita, in "Zinc," helped his effort to resist fascist culture, including its propaganda. Levi seeks the "strenuous clarity" of physics and mathematics. As Levi's text unfolds, we discover the ways in which the effort to engage the cognitive dissonance of his situation helps him navigate the dire currents of the Holocaust. He connects the "small differences" of his chemical analysis to the consequences of a railroad's switch points. It is an analogy that leads to chaos theory, and Levi's discussion of the role Jews have played as life-giving impurities over and against fascist racialist ideology.