Manifesto of Race - Motivations

Motivations

Antonio Spinosa, one of the first to examine the problem of Italian Fascist racism comprehensively, charged that the politics of the Italo-German alliance, which led ultimately to the declaration of war against Great Britain and France, was the cause of the Italian racist campaign. Such a campaign was desirable to the leaders of the Gross-Deutsches Reich.

The historian Renzo De Felice, while essentially agreeing with this assessment in his earlier work, added several secondary factors: in this "conversion" to antisemitism, the influence of the Nazis and of Germany was a determinant, but not direct. From the Nazi side there had not been pressure because Italy allied itself even in this subject of race with Germany. It was indirect: one side waved the "Jewish threat" and Mussolini emphasized the impossibility that between the Allies there could be a diversity of attitude. The other side were notoriously anti-Semitic Fascists, such as Preziosi, who served as instruments of pressure on Mussolini, or those who made antisemitism their political raison d'être, out of conviction or personal interests in the Italo-German alliance.

The strong Italian and German alliance was greatly bound by the idea of fascism. Mussolini was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was captivated by the 1922 March on Rome and envisioned himself at the head of a similar march on Berlin. James Gregor made much the same point: that Mussolini was unable, in 1933, to convince Hitler that racism was unproductive, yet eventually decided that an alliance with Germany was highly desirable. Thus, Mussolini "decided to accommodate the National Socialists by introducing anti-Semitic legislation in Italy as evidence of his good faith. He conceived it as an offering calculated to solidify the Italo-German Alliance." In this way, "Mussolini's anti-Jewish attitude was dictated not by theoretical but almost solely tactical, i.e., political, consideration." This shift toward racism effectuated by political considerations unleashed "biologism latent in the writings of some nationalists." Thus "the Fascist regime passed from anti-racialism to racial Antisemitism on the German model…through the impact of German-Italian relations on the evolution of the racial question in Italy.

Very few of the major Fascist intellectuals were racists of the sort found in National Socialist environs. In fact, since many of the principal Fascist ideologues adhered to actual idealism, they had principled objections to attributing human behavior to material-biological-causes. They simply could not accept the proposition that an entire population, characterized by ill-defined "racial traits, could be held, as a body, guilty of anything.

After considerable resistance, National Socialists influence began to penetrate some circles in Fascist Italy. Anti-semitism in the form of biological racism began to surface in the some publications. In general, however, there was a concerted effort to distinguish Fascist "racism" from that emanating from the north. It was not unusual, before the outbreak of Second World War, for Fascist intellectuals to oppose themselves to some of the major elements of National Socialist racism.

Until the actual publication of the official Manifesto of Fascist Racism, biological racism, as it was understood by National Socialist theorists, had literally no place in Fascist doctrine. Thereafter, the Fascist position on this subject became increasingly confused.

Fascists, and most Actualists, were opposed to any racism that shared significant properties with the racism of Hitler's Germany. In that context, persons who had long been dismissed as lacking any significance, made their reappearance among Fascist intellectuals.