Italian Fascism’s Soviet Enemy and the Propaganda of Hate, 1941-1943

Abstract

In conjunction with the war against the Soviet Union which began in June 1941, the Italian Fascist regime promulgated a virulent brand of anti-communism and oversaw a campaign of hate-mongering propaganda targeted at its Soviet enemy. This propaganda produced to justify the war highlighted the Manichean struggle against the Soviet Union and the special horrors of the Soviet communist enemy. Using longstanding stereotypes about a Russian lack of civilization, 19th-century ideas about racially expressed biological difference, and more recent tropes about Bolshevik barbarism and immorality, official representations of Fascism’s historic enemy—the communist—put forward a racially degenerate, godless peril from the East bent on the destruction of Western civilization and on the desecration of the Italian family and the Catholic faith.

Religion, race, and the nation inLa Tradotta del Fronte Giulio, 1942–1943

“…Portraying counterinsurgency in Yugoslavia as a war against communism had several benefits: it was consistent with 20 years of Fascist anti-socialist propaganda, it defined the conflict as defensive rather than expansionistic, and it connected the undistinguished role of occupation duty to the frontline operations underway against the Soviet Union (Osti Guerrazzi 2011, 34). As Marla Stone (2012a, 85) has demonstrated, Italian anti-communist propaganda aimed at the Soviet enemy on the eastern front ‘seamlessly intertwine[d] commitment to Catholicism and the Fascist cause.’ The same can be said for military propaganda in Yugoslavia. The soldiers of the Second Army were told that they too were part of an anti-communist ‘holy war’ or ‘crusade’ in defence of ‘the nation, family, religion, and justice.’ 11…”