IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 12

Book Review
Nicholas Evans

Fascist Pigs
Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism.
By Tiago Saraiva. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2016.

t's an exciting time to
write about authoritarianism, populism,
and nationalism. The
Brexit referendum fell
in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union; Marine Le
Pen made gains in the 2015 regional
elections; and of course the United
States recently elected Donald Trump
to the office of President. In today's
world of climate denial and vaccine
skepticism, one would be forgiven
for assuming that an anti-intellectual, anti-expertise, anti-truth wave is
sweeping the globe, and that the rise
of the far right necessarily spells an
end for science-informed policy.
Tiago Saraiva's Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism however, shows that
this assumption is - for better or
worse - misplaced. Saraiva argues
that agricultural science came to promote and embody fascist ideals in
Portugal, Italy, and Germany in the
early twentieth century. As a tool for
engineering livestock and crops that
would sustain and secure these aspiring empires, Saraiva demonstrates how
the organisms produced by scientists
served to shape the narratives and politics of these regimes.

Overview
Fascist Pigs begins with an introduction to the central premise of the
book, which Saraiva attributes to
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2738078
Date of publication: 7 September 2017

Canguilhem and Foucault: that biopolitics, the management and control of life, were central to fascism.
He then expands this account to
encompass how new "techno-scientific
organisms," such as purpose-bred
crops and animals, themselves interacted to promote and produce fascism.
While biopolitics has understandably focused on human biopolitics
in action under fascist rule, most
infamously the Nazi's experiment
in human eugenics, Saraiva develops an inquiry into the way that
plants and animals informed and
reinforced social change.
The book is laid out in two primary sections. Section one, "Nation,"
describes the national programs for
wheat in Mussolini's Italy and Salazar's Portugal, and potatoes and the
eponymous "fascist pigs" in the German Reich. The first chapter interrogates the "Battle of Wheat" in Italy, an
attempt to render the country secure
by eliminating the need to import
wheat from other nations. Saraiva
details how the breeding of wheat
strains, the construction of national
laboratories, and the dissemination
of wheat strains to farmers coincided
with the rise of fascist policies to
enforce shareholder farming, the violent destruction of unions, and the
control of commodities as a means to
cement fascism's hold on the nation.
Chapter 2 is perhaps the most
novel in terms of its contribution
to thinking about fascism and technoscience. In treating Portugal's own
battle for wheat in parallel to the ItalIEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

ian experience, Saraiva draws out the
history of the Salazar regime, arguably
eclipsed by the German regime that,
for understandable reasons, dominates public discourse on fascism. Saraiva details how the interaction between
the Italian and Portuguese regimes
involved the transfer of the Italian
"elite races" of wheat (p. 54), particularly the Ardito strain that was proliferated across the Italian countryside.
As geneticists in Portugal wrestled
with the challenge of modify ing
the strain for use in the different
soil and climate of Portugal, Saraiva
chronicles how the centralization of
agriculture through genetics enabled
the larger corporatist ambitions of
the Salazar regime. These ambitions
included, but were not limited to, centralizing seed distribution, destroying
small landholdings in favor of large
estates, and building the corporatist
welfare state. The argument Saraiva puts forward is that Portuguese
genetics was not simply an artifact
of this development, but a causal
contributor. The scientific challenges
of building the perfect seed were
informed by the Salazar regime's
ideal of the agricultural estate, and
what resulted were seeds designed
specifically for those estates. Along
the way, dissent and unrest was
quelled by building "Houses of the
People" that combined health and
social services, but were ultimately
overseen by the institutions that
ensured large landholder power,
and distributed seed for agriculture.
In this way, the scientific activities
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SEPTEMBER 2017

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