scholarly journals A Root Which Never Grew

Fascism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Mark Camilleri

Abstract Prior to the Second World War, Malta appeared vulnerable to fascist influence due to the connections between the Italian Fascist regime and Malta’s irredentist political movement, then led by Nerik Mizzi. In part this Fascist influence was present in cultural propaganda promoting irredentist ideas such as the ‘Mare Nostrum’, which Mizzi and his conservative political party, the Partito Nazionalista, helped propagate. However, previously unseen British documents also reveal significant financial support by the Italian government to Mizzi and his political activities. Mizzi never disclosed this, including the financial support he was granted by Mussolini after having met him personally in Rome on 30 November 1936. Mizzi never openly expounded fascist views, although he consistently supported an irredentist vision of Malta and openly campaigned for Malta to fall under Italy’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile, support for domestic fascist organisations was negligible. At the onset of the War, the Imperial Government started to clamp down on the irredentists, eventually exiling Mizzi and most of his collaborators. The author argues that Mizzi’s dalliance with fascism was not just a convenient relationship for a greater cause, but also a direct acceptance of fascist politics given that making Malta part of Italy’s jurisdiction would also have meant accepting fascist rule.

Author(s):  
Fredy González

Chinese Mexican political and financial support in support of the Republic of China during the Second World War was motivated by a desire for ‘home’ – both the desire for peace in migrants’ home communities in Guangdong province as well as a desire for increased respect in Mexico. Activities in support of the Chinese government included monetary contributions as well as cultural activities which helped bring the community together around the country. Chinese Mexican political activities and celebrations for the first time brought them in contact with friends and neighbors in Mexico and presented an alternative image of the community.


Modern Italy ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Baldoli

Within the wider attempt to transform Italian communities abroad into Fascist colonies, the Italian Fasci Abroad sought to build nationalist propaganda in the Mediterranean. The irredentist activities and the propaganda of the Fasci in Malta alarmed the British governors on the island, the British government and MI5. This article analyses the cultural conflict organised in Maltese schools, bookshops and universities by the Italian nationalists against the British protectorate–a conflict the British suspected could be followed by military activity, in particular when Italy began building its empire in Ethiopia. The nationalist offensive was supported in the 1920s and, more vigorously, in the 1930s by the Fasci, the Italian consulate on the island and, ultimately, the Italian government. Not even the Second World War and the bombing of Malta by the Italian air force concluded the conflict between Italian and British imperialism on the island.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90
Author(s):  
Anne Bruch

This article examines a series of educational films and documentaries produced between 1948 and 1968 that document the activities of the Italian state. These films, which record the dedicated and arduous work of the Italian government and administration, had two functions. First, they informed students and the general public about the democratic structures, institutions and aims of the new republic, promoting a fresh and convincing vision of national identity. Second, they served to obscure and rewrite the collective national memory of Fascism and Italian involvement in the Second World War. These films thus reveal the fine line between public information, political propaganda, and civic education.


1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Robert A. Hall

In the 20 years before the Second World War the frontier war dragged to a close in remote parts of north Australia with the 1926 Daly River massacre and the 1928 Coniston massacre. There was a rapid decline in the Aboriginal population, giving rise to the idea of the ‘dying race’ which had found policy expression in the State ‘Protection’ Acts. Aboriginal and Islander labour was exploited under scandalous rates of pay and conditions in the struggling north Australian beef industry and the pearling industry. In south east Australia, Aborigines endured repressive white control on government reserves and mission stations described by some historians as being little better than prison farms. A largely ineffectual Aboriginal political movement with a myriad of organisations, none of which had a pan-Aboriginal identity, struggled to make headway against white prejudice. Finally, in 1939, John McEwen's ‘assimilation policy’ was introduced and, though doomed to failure, it at least recognised that Aborigines had a place in Australia in the long term.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Camelia Moldoveanu

The author examines the legislative means by which the Jewish minority in Romania was dispossesd of its assets prior to World War II by the Fascist regime, and in the wake if this war, by the Communist regime. The study examines how, the post World War II govermennt willfully hindered the restitution of unlawfully taken Jewish assets, and how it has allowed not only the perpetuation of the dispossession which took place during the Holocaust, but has also added measures for the nationalization of Jewish assets. The post 1989 restitution process is also examined briefly, to outline the successive failures of the Romanian Government to enact proper restitution.


2012 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. SALVI ◽  
O. PORFIRI ◽  
S. CECCARELLI

SUMMARY23 January 2012 marked 70 years since the death of the Italian plant breeder Nazareno Strampelli (1866–1942), one of the most important plant geneticists of the 20th century. During the first 30 years of what is known as the ‘short century’, Strampelli was among the first, in Europe and in the world, to systematically apply Mendel's laws to plant breeding, particularly to wheat breeding which resulted in varieties characterized by rust resistance, early flowering and maturity and short straw. Due to Strampelli's varieties Italian wheat production doubled, an achievement that during the fascist regime was referred to as the ‘Wheat Battle’.Some of Strampelli's wheats, such as Mentana, Ardito and San Pastore, were used as parents in the breeding programmes of several countries after the Second World War; they also had a key role in the first phase of Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, being instrumental in the development of the high-yielding varieties of the future Nobel Peace Laureate.A century after the key cross in which Strampelli, 30 years before Borlaug, used the genes for short straw and earliness in wheat breeding, his name and his work are not known and appreciated as they deserve, despite the recent evidence that the resistance to the new rust races could derive from the very same resistance genes identified by the Italian breeder at the beginning of the 20th century.


2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Phillips-Fein

Abstract“‘If Business and the Country Will Be Run Right:’ The Business Challenge to the Liberal Consensus, 1945–1964,” by Kim Phillips-Fein, looks at the mobilization of conservative businessmen against the liberal political economy that emerged from the New Deal and the Second World War. These businessmen were sharply critical of the expanded federal government and strong labor unions throughout the postwar period. They sought to challenge the liberal economic order by helping to build think tanks critical of liberalism, by fighting labor unions, and ultimately by participating in political activities like the right-to-work campaigns of 1958, the gubernatorial bid of William F. Knowland in California that same year, and the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. By demonstrating the development of a network of conservative businessmen during this period, the article challenges the idea that “consensus” is the appropriate framework for thinking about postwar political economy. It also suggests the centrality of issues of political economy in the rise of conservatism in the postwar United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 251
Author(s):  
Maciej Rakowski

<p>The Second World War brought significant political changes to European monarchies. Immediately after the war, six kingdoms ceased to exist and became republics. This concerned Eastern European countries in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as Italy, where Victor Emmanuel III had to pay for years of cooperation with the fascist regime. Before the outbreak of the war, at least three European monarchies had considerable power, holding the most important prerogatives in their hands: this was the case in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. Such a political model failed to survive the war, as after 1945 the kings and princes of the Old Continent only “reigned, but did not rule” (only Louis II, Prince of Monaco kept a stronger position until the end of the 1950s). It used to happen during the war that in countries with an established parliamentary system the monarch played a greater role than during the years of peace (the most prominent example being Wilhelmina, the Queen of the Netherlands). The article also presents other issues important to the royal authority – the functioning of monarchs in exile, the threat to their lives, the exercise of sovereignty (usually only in a ceremonial capacity) over the armed forces, and abdications forced by the circumstances.</p>


Author(s):  
Jack Jacobs ◽  
Gertrud Pickhan

The General Jewish Workers’ Bund, founded illegally, in Vilna, in 1897, ultimately became a significant political movement among Jews living in the tsarist empire. The Bund played a major role in organizing the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, created self-defense groups to combat antisemitic violence, and was heavily involved in combating tsarism. It was characterized by its sympathy for Marxism, its advocacy of national cultural autonomy for Russian Jewry, and its critique of Zionism. The Bund opposed Lenin’s ideas on party organization from the beginning of the 20th century onward. This opposition presaged the bitter disagreements between leading Bundists on the one hand and the Bolshevik Party on the other following the overthrow of the Provisional Revolutionary government in October 1917. But the Bund ultimately split over its relationship to Bolshevism into two, opposing, organizations—the Kombund (eventually absorbed into the Communist Party) and the Social Democratic Bund (which was later hounded out of the Soviet Union). In the Second Polish Republic, the Bund succeeded in attracting considerable support, despite obstacles, in many major cities (and in specific, smaller, communities with significant Jewish populations). It published numerous periodicals, organized trade unions, fostered a constellation of organizations devoted to children, youth, women, physical education, and education, supported secular, Yiddish language, cultural institutions, and ran electoral campaigns. By the late 1930s, the Bund was regularly winning seats on municipal councils and in Jewish communal elections in important Jewish communities in Poland, including Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Bialystok, and Lublin. The invasion of Poland, in 1939, by both Germany and the USSR, put an end to the Bund’s heyday. In the eastern portions of what had been the Polish Republic, Bundist leaders were arrested by the Soviet secret police. Some died or were executed while being held prisoner in the USSR. In Nazi-occupied Poland, Bundists generally suffered the same fate as did the rest of the Jewish population. Many Bundists in Nazi-occupied Poland were murdered. Others died of hunger or disease. A modest number of Bundists survived the Second World War, and attempted to reestablish the Bund in postwar Poland. Once, however, Poland became a Communist state, the Polish Bund was liquidated. Bundist organizations, made up all but exclusively of emigres and refugees, operated in the decades following the end of the Second World War in many countries around the world. Few of these organizations, however, survived the passing of the immigrant generation.


Nuncius ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIO POGLIANO

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title Italian geneticists managed to establish the boundaries and structures of their own community only after the Second World War, when they promoted, in the space of a few years, a series of initiatives culminating in the Ninth International Congress of Genetics (Bellagio 1953). This essay traces the ways in which, from the beginning of the century, the revolutionary and swift development of the discipline found its context and interested audience in Italy. In contrast to our standard picture, there was no shortage of naturalists to dedicate themselves enthusiastically to genetics, even launching a campaign in the 30's for its 'political' recognition. But cultural trends after the First World War, and especially the directives of the Fascist regime, tended to favour scientific practical and economic values and keep the theoretical and interpretative nature of their work to a minimum. This was ultimately futile, given the indifference with which the centres of power responded. It was the reason, too, for their extremely weak, or almost non-existent participation in the preparations for the evolutionary synthesis in which European and American scientists were involved, which changed appreciably the character and methods of biology.


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