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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Fascism & Nazism
Developing a knowledge of the Spanish-Italian connection between
right-wing extremist groups is crucial to any detailed
understanding of the history of fascism. Transnational Fascism in
the Twentieth Century allows us to consider the global fascist
network that built up over the course of the 20th century by
exploring one of the significant links that existed within that
network. It distinguishes and analyses the relationship between the
fascists of Spain and Italy at three interrelated levels - that of
the individual, political organisations and the state - whilst
examining the world relations and contacts of both fascist
factions, from Buenos Aires to Washington and Berlin to Montevideo,
in what is a genuinely transnational history of the fascist
movement. Incorporating research carried out in archives around the
world, this book delivers key insights to further the historical
study of right-wing political violence in modern Europe.
How the breeding of new animals and plants was central to fascist
regimes in Italy, Portugal, and Germany and to their imperial
expansion. 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 to late blight, and pigs that
thrived 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, following Karakul sheep from a laboratory in Germany to
Eastern Europe, Libya, Ethiopia, and Angola. Saraiva's highly
original account-the first systematic study of the relation 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.
This book proposes an interpretation of Francoism as the Spanish
variant of fascism. Unlike Italian fascism and Nazism, the Franco
regime survived the Second World War and continued its existence
until the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Francoism was,
therefore, the Last Survivor of the fascisms of the interwar
period. And indeed this designation applies equally to Franco. The
work begins with an analysis of the historical identity of Spanish
fascism, constituted in the process of fascistization of the
Spanish right during the crisis of the Second Republic, and
consolidated in the formation of the fascist single-party and the
New State during the civil war. Subsequent chapter contributions
focus on various cultural and social projects (the university,
political-cultural journals, the Labor University Service, local
policies and social insurance) that sought to socialize Spaniards
in the political principles of the Franco regime and thereby to
strengthen social cohesion around it. Francoism faced varying
degrees of non-compliance and outright hostility, expressed as
different forms of cultural opposition to the Franco regime,
especially in the years of its maturity (decades of the fifties and
sixties), from Spaniards both inside Spain and in exile. Such
opposition is explored in the context of how the regime reacted via
the social, cultural and economic inducements at its disposal. The
editors and contributors are widely published in the field of Spain
of the Second Republic, the civil war and the Franco dictatorship.
Research material is drawn from primary archival sources, and
provides new information and new interpretations on Spanish
politics, culture and society during the dictatorship.
A philosophical investigation of dealing with guilt and its impact
on democracy, in the case of Austrian NazisDrawing on the work of
Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the
relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and
democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court
documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public
controversies surrounding Austria's involvement in the Nazi
atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes
and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing
the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing
involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of
breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the
inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can
individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes,
show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the
emergence of new crimes.
This book is an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual
State (1941, reissued 2017), one of the most erudite books on the
theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first
comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of Nazism, and the
only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His
sophisticated-not to mention courageous-analysis amounted to an
ethnography of Nazi law. As a result of its clandestine origins,
The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of
intellectual resistance to the Nazi regime. In this book, Jens
Meierhenrich revives Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual
state," restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public
law scholarship. Blending insights from legal theory and legal
history, he tells in an accessible manner the remarkable gestation
of Fraenkel's ethnography of law from inside the belly of the
behemoth. In addition to questioning the conventional wisdom about
the law of the Third Reich, Meierhenrich explores the legal origins
of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. The book sets the
parameters for a theory of the "authoritarian rule of law," a
cutting edge topic in law and society scholarship with immediate
policy implications.
France is often held up as a bastion of gastronomic refinement and
as a model of artisanal agriculture and husbandry. But French
farming is not at all what it seems. Countering the standard
stories of gastronomy, tourism, and leisure associated with the
French countryside, Venus Bivar portrays French farmers as
hard-nosed businessmen preoccupied with global trade and mass
production. With a twin focus on both the rise of big agriculture
and the organic movement, Bivar examines the tumult of postwar
rural France, a place fiercely engaged with crucial national and
global developments. Delving into the intersecting narratives of
economic modernization, the birth of organic farming, the
development of a strong agricultural protest movement, and the rise
of environmentalism, Bivar reveals a movement as preoccupied with
maintaining the purity of the French race as of French food. What
emerges is a story of how French farming conquered the world,
bringing with it a set of ideas about place and purity with a
darker origin story than we might have guessed.
The Screen Is Red portrays Hollywood's ambivalence toward the
former Soviet Union before, during, and after the Cold War. In the
1930s, communism combated its alter ego, fascism, yet both
threatened to undermine the capitalist system, the movie industry's
foundational core value. Hollywood portrayed fascism as the greater
threat and communism as an aberration embraced by young idealists
unaware of its dark side. In Ninotchka, all a female commissar
needs is a trip to Paris to convert her to capitalism and the
luxuries it can offer. The scenario changed when Nazi Germany
invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, making Russia a short-lived ally.
The Soviets were quickly glorified in such films as Song of Russia,
The North Star, Mission to Moscow, Days of Glory, and
Counter-Attack. But once the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe,
the scenario changed again. America was now swarming with Soviet
agents attempting to steal some crucial piece of microfilm. On
screen, the atomic detonations in the Southwest produced mutations
in ants, locusts, and spiders, and revived long-dead monsters from
their watery tombs. The movies did not blame the atom bomb
specifically but showed what horrors might result in addition to
the iconic mushroom cloud.Through the lens of Hollywood, a nuclear
war might leave a handful of survivors (Five), none (On the Beach,
Dr. Strangelove), or cities in ruins (Fail-Safe). Today the threat
is no longer the Soviet Union, but international terrorism. Author
Bernard F. Dick argues, however, that the Soviet Union has not lost
its appeal, as evident from the popular and critically acclaimed
television series The Americans. More than eighty years later, the
screen is still red.
Fascism was one of the twentieth century's principal political
forces, and one of the most violent and problematic. Brutal,
repressive and in some cases totalitarian, the fascist and
authoritarian regimes of the early twentieth century, in Europe and
beyond, sought to create revolutionary new orders that crushed
their opponents. A central component of such regimes' exertion of
control was criminal law, a focal point and key instrument of State
punitive and repressive power. This collection brings together a
range of original essays by international experts in the field to
explore questions of criminal law under Italian Fascism and other
similar regimes, including Franco's Spain, Vargas's Brazil and
interwar Romania and Japan. Addressing issues of substantive
criminal law, criminology and ideology, the form and function of
criminal justice institutions, and the role and perception of
criminal law in processes of transition, the collection casts new
light on fascism's criminal legal history and related questions of
theoretical interpretation and historiography. At the heart of the
collection is the problematic issue of continuity and similarity
among fascist systems and preceding, contemporaneous and subsequent
legal orders, an issue that goes to the heart of fascist regimes'
historical identity and the complex relationship between them and
the legal orders constructed in their aftermath. The collection
thus makes an innovative contribution both to the comparative
understanding of fascism, and to critical engagement with the
foundations and modalities of criminal law across systems.
This book is a fictional account of the life of German film and
theatre actor Werner Krauss, eponymous star of the classic silent
film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Upon gaining worldwide
recognition in this film, Krauss was co-opted into the Nazi hate
campaign of the 1930s and 1940s. He featured in the vicious
propaganda film Jud Suss, and he was complicit in giving
anti-Semitic performances onstage, most notably as Shylock in
Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice. The book focuses on three
distinct eras in Krauss life: the struggling, exuberant actor of
the 1920s; the philandering pragmatist of the 1930s; and the
elderly, neurotic outcast of the 1940s. Despite his honourable
intentions, Krauss was all-too-often undermined by his inability to
say no to women, alcohol and the egregious Joseph Goebbels. In this
fictional re-imagining of his life, Krauss motives and decisions
are explored in an attempt to discover why he collaborated with the
Nazis in the way that he did, as well as demonstrating the personal
and political consequences of his actions. As someone who was
influenced by the Nazi regime, and, in turn, influential in
perpetuating their message, Krauss story tells the wider story of
the role of the arts and media in Nazi Germany. Extensively
researched, including contemporary news stories, archived film
material, critical essays on Krauss and translated passages from
his autobiography, Das Schauspiel Meines Lebens, this fictional
reconstruction of Krauss life and career is preceded by a
substantive Introduction by the author, setting the novel in the
context of the genre of Holocaust fiction, emulating and
reminiscent of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and Thomas
Keneally's Schindler's Ark.
Here is the story, in his own words, of how Cesare Mori, with the
support of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, took on the
might of the Sicilian Mafia. It was a struggle that earned Mori
much criticism of his methods from the liberal media, but much
praise not only from Mussolini himself but from the people of
Sicily who had for decades lived in fear of this criminal secret
society which had become the scourge of ordinary Sicilians. There
was nothing of a flashy nature about the Mafia in Sicily. Operating
in a non-industrialised society, the Mafioso in Sicily made their
wealth not from drugs, prostitution and gambling, but from the
theft of horses and livestock, kidnapping, and the extortion of
money from simple town and country folk and large landowners alike,
and like their American colleagues the Sicilian Mafia enforced
their rule through violence and murder. However, with the Allied
invasion of Sicily in 1943, the U.S. Military enlisted the help of
the American Mafia in re-establishing Mafia activity in Sicily,
with the aim of undermining Fascist rule - a tactic that not only
had far reaching consequences for Sicily, but for the whole of
Italy for decades to come.In another time or place Cesare Mori's
struggle against the Mafia would have been remembered alongside
Elliott Ness, but it is now a story largely forgotten, because,
like much else, it was an achievement of the Mussolini era, and as
such is to be written out of history. Cesare Mori's story of his
struggle against the Mafia not only deserves to be told, but it
provides an insight into Sicilian society and a rural way of life
that has for the most part now disappeared.
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