Ruth Ben-Ghiat - Fascist Biopolitics: 'Empty Cribs' and Full Prisons

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat
@ruthbenghiat
Fascist biopolitics then and now. In 1927 Il Duce cast himself as a “clinician” taking “hygienic actions” to defend Italians from the diseased (like leftists). “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person."

Fascist Biopolitics: 'Empty Cribs' and Full Prisons
Beware of far-right politicians fixated on demography and White racial rescue. When "empty cribs" preoccupy governments, full prisons are often not far behind.
lucid.substack.com
8:42 AM · Aug 10, 2021

https://lucid.substack.com/p/fascist-biopolitics-empty-cribs-and

“If we shrink, gentlemen, we won’t make the Empire, we’ll become a colony!” Italian dictator Benito Mussolini told Fascist parliamentarians in 1927, reminding them with a wink to do their demographic duty. From the start, Fascism was a project of White racial rescue. Years before Hitler came to power, Il Duce warned of a racial emergency, contrasting fertile African and Asian populations with Europeans who risked extinction.

“Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding," he declared. "The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” A Fascist “Battle for Babies” followed, as did extensive social welfare assistance for new mothers, ceremonies for prolific procreators, bans on abortion and contraception, and a tax on bachelors over 25 years old.

Today’s autocratic states continue this Fascist rhetoric about White demise and replacement, and promulgate some similar “corrective” policies. Thanks to Tucker Carlson's week-long Fox News infomercial for autocrat Viktor Orbán, millions of Americans now know about Hungary's "solution" to demographic decline: a "pro-family" state, as Carlson terms it, family being defined as White, Christian, and heterosexual.

“Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Katalin Novák, Hungary’s minister for family and youth affairs, in 2019, reprising Mussolini’s words. And just as during Fascism, only certain people are encouraged to procreate. "We don't just want numbers, we want Hungarian children," Orbán makes clear.

*snip*

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Where did the fascists get such ideas?

[JoanofArgh]

2. I lover her. I read her book and highly recommend.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53597796-strongmen