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Corrado Gini (Motta di Livenza, 23 May 1884 – Rome, 13 March 1965) was an Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist who developed the Gini coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was a proponent of organicism and applied it to nations.[1]
Career
Gini was born on May 23, 1884, in Motta di Livenza, near Treviso, into an old landed family. He entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna, where in addition to law he studied mathematics, economics, and biology.
Gini's scientific work ran in two directions: towards the social sciences and towards statistics. His interests ranged well beyond the formal aspects of statistics—to the laws that govern biological and social phenomena.
His first published work was Il sesso dal punto di vista statistico (1908). This work is a thorough review of the natal sex ratio, looking at past theories and at how new hypothesis fit the statistical data. In particular, it presents evidence that the tendency to produce one or the other sex of child is, to some extent, heritable.
In 1910, he acceded to the Chair of Statistics in the University of Cagliari and then at Padua in 1913.
He founded the statistical journal Metron in 1920, directing it until his death; it only accepted articles with practical applications.[2]
He became a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1925. At the University, he founded a lecture course on sociology, maintaining it until his retirement. He also set up the School of Statistics in 1928, and, in 1936, the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences.
Under fascism
In 1926, he was appointed President of the Central Institute of Statistics in Rome. This he organised as a single centre for Italian statistical services. He was a close intimate of Mussolini throughout the 20s. He resigned from his position within the institute in 1932.[3]
In 1927 he published a treatise entitled The Scientific Basis of Fascism.[4]
In 1929, Gini founded the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (Comitato italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione) which, two years later, organised the first Population Congress in Rome.
A eugenicist apart from being a demographer, Gini led an expedition to survey Polish populations, among them the Karaites. Gini was throughout the 20s a supporter of fascism, and expressed his hope that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy would emerge as victors in WW2. However, he never supported any measure of exclusion of the Jews.[5][6] Milestones during the rest of his career include:
• In 1933 – vice president of the International Sociological Institute.
• In 1934 – president of the Italian Genetics and Eugenics Society.
• In 1935 – president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies in Latin-language Countries.
• In 1937 – president of the Italian Sociological Society.
• In 1941 – president of the Italian Statistical Society.
• In 1957 – Gold Medal for outstanding service to the Italian School.
• In 1962 – National Member of the Accademia dei Lincei.[7]
Italian Unionist Movement
On October 12, 1944, Gini joined with the Calabrian activist Santi Paladino, and fellow-statistician Ugo Damiani to found the Italian Unionist Movement, for which the emblem was the Stars and Stripes, the Italian flag and a world map. According to the three men, the Government of the United States should annex all free and democratic nations worldwide, thereby transforming itself into a world government, and allowing Washington, D.C. to maintain Earth in a perpetual condition of peace. The party existed up to 1948 but had little success and its aims were not supported by the United States.
Organicism and nations
Gini was a proponent of organicism and saw nations as organic in nature.[1] Gini shared the view held by Oswald Spengler that populations go through a cycle of birth, growth, and decay.[1] Gini claimed that nations at a primitive level have a high birth rate, but, as they evolve, the upper classes birth rate drops while the lower class birth rate, while higher, will inevitably deplete as their stronger members emigrate, die in war, or enter into the upper classes.[1] If a nation continues on this path without resistance, Gini claimed the nation would enter a final decadent stage where the nation would degenerate as noted by decreasing birth rate, decreasing cultural output, and the lack of imperial conquest.[8] At this point, the decadent nation with its aging population can be overrun by a more youthful and vigorous nation.[8] Gini's organicist theories of nations and natality are believed to have influenced policies of Italian Fascism.[1]
Honours
The following honorary degrees were conferred upon him:
• Economics by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (1932),
• Sociology by the University of Geneva (1934),
• Sciences by Harvard University (1936),
• Social Sciences by the University of Cordoba, Argentine (1963).
Partial bibliography
• Il sesso dal punto di vista statistica: le leggi della produzione dei sessi (1908)
• Sulla misura della concentrazione e della variabilità dei caratteri (1914)
• Quelques considérations au sujet de la construction des nombres indices des prix et des questions analogues (1924)
• Memorie di metodologia statistica. Vol.1: Variabilità e Concentrazione (1955)
• Memorie di metodologia statistica. Vol.2: Transvariazione (1960)
• "The Scientific Basis of Fascism," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar., 1927), pp. 99–115 (17 pages) at JSTOR
References
1. Aaron Gillette. Racial theories in fascist Italy. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA. Pp. 40.
2. "Corrado Gini's Biography". Società Italiana di Statistica (SIS). Retrieved 2016-11-05.
3. "Tales of Statisticians | Corrado Gini". http://www.umass.edu. Retrieved 2018-08-21.
4. The Scientific Basis of Fascism, Political Science Quarterly Vol.42, No 1, March 1927 pp. 99-115.
5. Mikhail Kizilov, The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority Among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772-1945, BRILL, 2009 pp.278ff.
6. Riccardo Calimani, Storia degli ebrei italiani, vol.3, Mondadori 2015 p.583.
7. Boldrini, Marcello (1966). "Corrado Gini". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General). 129 (1): 148–150. JSTOR 2343927.
8. Aaron Gillette. Racial theories in fascist Italy. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA. Pp. 41.
External links
• Biography Of Corrado Gini at the Metron, the statistics journal he founded.
• Paper on "Corrado Gini and Italian Statistics under Fascism" by Giovanni Favero June 2002
• A. Forcina and G. M. Giorgi "Early Gini’s Contributions to Inequality Measurement and Statistical Inference." JEHPS mars 2005
• Another photograph
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Italian Eugenics Under Fascism, from "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics" [Excerpt]
edited by Alison Bashford, Philippa Levine
Oxford University Press
2010
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics in the autumn of 1921. In America, "race" was the exclusive focus of eugenicists concerned about the germ plasm. The perceived threat posed by Blacks, Jews, and immigrants stood at the top of their agenda. American delegates at the 1921 conference supported calls for legal sanctions against all detrimental influences upon the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant breeding-stock of the nation.18 By contrast, Italian eugenicists took a soft-line approach to the problem of race contamination. They did contemplate the adoption of some form of negative eugenics, but they again stopped well short of endorsing anything as radical as forced sterilization. In the 1920s, a lively debate about these issues continued to take place in fascist Italy in the pages of specialist medical, public health, and legal journals. Government bodies also participated in discussions about what the desirable and appropriate contours of a eugenic policy might be in Italy.
One of the main loci of discussions about these contentious matters was the Italian Institute of Hygiene, Insurance, and Social Assistance, originally founded in Rome in 1922 as a private charity devoted to the study of problems relating to public health. Its founder was Ettore Levi (1880-1932 [by suicide]), a Jewish intellectual who had been a member of the moderate Left, the birth control movement, and the eugenics society before the rise of fascism. Levi was the leading proponent of social medicine in Italy. As founder of the Institute of Social Medicine, he was instrumental in its establishment as a recognized discipline, backed by university training programs and guidelines. He defined social medicine as the science of those illnesses affecting the health of the collectivity, the purpose of which was the prevention and cure of disease for the benefit of the individual and the nation. Levi was drawn to fascism because of its professed commitment to the health and hygiene of the "stirp" (denoting ethnic Italians); in this regard, he is an interesting example of a Jewish fascist, which was by no means a contradiction before the dissemination of anti-Jewish legislation beginning in 1938. Levi's Institute was committed to the principles of "eutenics" (eutenica), which, in contrast to "Anglo-Saxon" or "Nordic" eugenics, advocated improvements to the home and social environment, as well as the protection of motherhood and infancy through welfare reforms, as the best means to promote racial advancement.
Launched in 1922, the Institute's journal, Difesa Sociale (Social Defence), began a dialogue with fascist officialdom and a range of health and medical professionals in Italy. One of the most controversial issues under consideration was the so-called "pre-matrimonial certificate." Some eugenicists and their supporters, including members of the government's Royal Commission for the Study of Post-war Problems, believed that medical certification, demonstrating that a couple were free of contagious social and sexual diseases, such as tuberculosis and syphilis, should be a requirement before marriage. Objections to prenuptial health screening were based on the grounds that it would be offensive, intrusive, coercive and impractical. Opponents alleged that any such scheme would create the possibility of medical fraud for gain, would pose the difficulty of actually enforcing the ban on the unfit from getting married, and would cause extramarital unions and illegitimacy to rise. Levi's Institute lobbied for the introduction of a mild negative eugenic program for social prophylaxis and favored the idea of medical certification before marriage.19
The fascist regime, however, remained opposed to any measures that deviated from the pronatalist path already being frantically pursued. The preparedness of the dictatorship to control all aspects of its demographic campaign, which was devoted to an increase in the quality and the quantity of the Italian population, is amply illustrated by the fact that it simply subsumed Levi's institute within the organs of the state: it became a public agency under the direction of the National Fund for Social Insurance in 1928. While this gave the Institute a national platform, the change also marked the loss of freedom of that sector within Italian eugenics which veered toward the idea of some sort of selection for the sake of the race. Talk of any kind of restrictions to reproductive freedoms now became an impossibility, as the regime co-opted eugenics and steered population policy towards an unconditional pronatalist, reformist, and environmentalist position. "Positive" health and welfare reforms, the fascist line oft repeated, would gradually bring about beneficial psycho- physiological adaptations to the individual and the race. Grounded in a Lamarckian evolutionary perspective, this thinking ran contrary to the hereditarian and Mendelian paradigm that was perceived to be the doctrinal basis of "Anglo-Saxon" and "Nordic" eugenics. Under state control, the activities of Levi's institute were restricted to the dissemination of "sanitary propaganda" and its research confined to questions relating, in particular, to the government's attempts to contain the spread of tuberculosis.
This unwavering pronatalist and positive stance gained official endorsement from the state in fascist Italy's new penal code, which came into effect in July 1931, and took a tough line against so-called "anti-Malthusianism" or "the procurement of impotence to procreate." It defined as an absolute necessity for the nation the defense of the "continuation and integrity of the race" through strict measures against abortion, birth control, and sterilization. The Pope had spoken specifically on these matters for the first time when Pius XI issued his famous encyclical, Casti connubii, on 31 December 1930. This decree affirmed the sanctity of marriage and its procreative purpose and condemned all forms of contraception as acts against God and nature. The Pope broadened the scope of his condemnation when he specifically stated that any artificial intervention to prohibit conception ran contrary to Church doctrine. Moreover, a separate part of the address condemned both compulsory sterilization by the state and voluntary sterilization by the individual. The state had no right whatsoever to sterilize an innocent person. And "self-mutilation" was also unlawful; the "bodily organs should not be rendered unfit for natural functions except when the good of the whole body cannot otherwise be provided for," the Holy Office emphatically decreed.20
A wholesale disintegration of liberal and humanitarian values, as happened in interwar Germany, did not occur in fascist Italy. If anything, the unrelenting pronatalism and welfarism of Mussolini's dictatorship helped keep Italy's eugenic movement in check. The eugenicists who came to prominence during this period reflected the priorities of the regime. One immensely influential religious leader, Father Agostino Gemelli (1878-1959), a Franciscan friar, was instrumental in making Catholicism compatible with eugenics. He founded the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan in 1921 and served as its chancellor for many years. A physician by training, Gemelli devoted his life to the study of psychology and was a major figure in that field. A Lombrosian revisionist, Gemelli criticized the simplistic and rigid positivism of Lombroso and his contemporaries and attacked the biological materialism of his own colleagues within the international eugenic movement. His research affirmed that each human being, defined as a totality of organic matter, emotional responses, and complex behaviors determined by environmental, psychic, and innate forces, was remarkably plastic and changeable. Gemelli believed wholeheartedly that even the most "hopeless" or "useless" individuals could be cured or redeemed by science.21
Italian eugenicists responded to the obstacle that Catholicism posed to their cause by adapting their platform to the particular circumstances of their own country. In other Catholic nations too, such as Belgium, eugenics took on a populist, pronatalist guise as a campaign for "family endowment" in order to attract support. Formally established in 1919, the Belgian eugenics society, like the French, had an intense interest in promoting the interests of large families through benefits, incentives, and privileges. This support for familles nombreuses was the linchpin of a proposed legislative program revolving around the aim of increased fertility, which included, as in Italy, fierce opposition to birth control and abortion, as well as the single-issue campaign for the so-called "moral" education of youth. The one major negative proposal that Belgian eugenicists contemplated -- and advocated far more vociferously and openly than in Italy -- was the premarital medical examination. Moderation paid off well, in the sense that official recognition came with the patronage of the Belgian king and the Belgian Red Cross after the war; government support for a eugenic social and population policy also grew in the 1920s.22
In Portugal, too, a Catholic context helped shape eugenics. But in Portugal, as in Spain and Latin America, eugenics responded just as much to the socioeconomic realities of the country as it did to the religious affiliation of the population. In an overwhelmingly poor, low-waged, and agrarian nation like Portugal, where mere subsistence was a real difficulty for many peasants, urban factory workers had few rights, and labor and social conditions in general were appalling by European standards, eugenicists (who were slow to organize into a proper society and movement) called chiefly for the extension of basic public health provision and the introduction of even a modicum of government reforms. As state welfare hardly existed at all, and church and charitable institutions struggled to deal with disease and destitution on a mass scale, the severity of social problems dominated native eugenics, while the more esoteric obsessions that could preoccupy some eugenicists in privileged and affluent nations were simply not seen as an option.23
In some contexts, culture took precedence over religion in determining the content of a national variety of eugenics. In Austria, for example, where Catholicism remained by a huge margin the largest denomination within the republic throughout the interwar years, the brand of eugenics that finally emerged officially in 1925 had the audacity to campaign loudly for widespread use of birth control (not technically illegal) by the working class, premarital screening for mental defects, and even the abolition of the ban against abortion on the grounds that these would be appropriate social defenses against the wanton procreation of the undesirable subaltern orders. Like any other special-interest group, eugenicists were able to enjoy full freedom of speech and assembly in Austria's newly formed liberal democracy. Possibly the presence of such vocal anti-clericals, as many Austrian eugenicists were, and their connections to the Socialist Party, contributed to the ferocious clerical reaction and right-wing backlash that occurred in Austria in the 1930s and had such tragic consequences after the Anschluss by Nazi Germany in 1938.24
Operating within the context of a dictatorship, single-mindedly pursuing its own social agenda, as well as a political policy of pacification of the Vatican, Italian eugenicists were not in a position to dictate their own terms. Insofar as it existed, dissent from the official line endorsed by the alliance of church and state, consecrated in 1929, did not have much of an outlet in fascist Italy. At least one prominent doctor, Cesare Michele, who worked for the fascist regime's welfare organization catering to women and children, was rumored at the time to be violating the law by performing abortions for rich clients in secret. Aware of the potential scandal, Mussolini and his advisors chose not to make an example of the physician because to have done so would have resulted in potentially damaging publicity. His activities, like that of other suspected abortionists, remained underground. Achille Loria, like Mussolini himself, had been in the pre-war period a well-known "Malthusian," or advocate of birth control. There arc many examples such as these, but controversial views that ran contrary to fascist dictates were kept quiet. The regime's campaign to increase the birthrate was a major showpiece whose ultimate success, despite its demonstrable failure to reverse demographic trends, was never allowed to be questioned in the media.25
The Emergence of "Latin" Eugenics Within the International Movement
Held in Milan in September 1924, the first conference ever organized by the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (formed in 1919 from its precursor), together with the Royal Italian Society of Hygiene, emphasized that positive reforms would be the hallmark of Italian eugenics.26 Despite the inclusion of genetics in the title of their society and the increasing prominence of questions relating to biology and genetics at subsequent national conferences in 1929 and 1937 (the last before 1949), Italian eugenicists preferred to use the term "social eugenics" to describe their aims and to distinguish their movement from those with a more hereditarian, selectionist, or eliminationist orientation. In September and October 1929, they held their second, two-week congress, this time in Rome; over 300 delegates, including many foreigners, attended.27 Along with Achille Loria and Cesare Artom (1879-1934), a distinguished biologist, anatomist, and Jewish intellectual, [Corrado] Gini served as co-president of the thriving Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics. His leading role within the international eugenics movement allowed him to make and sustain contacts with foreign scientists. As ideological and policy divergences within the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (the IFEO, established in 1921) became more pronounced, and the connections between American and German eugenics and their allied movements in Britain and Scandinavia grew more deep and extensive, Gini made moves to found a separate society for those committed to a positive program.
His research activities had also gained notoriety within the International Union for the Scientific investigation of Population Problems (the IUSPP, founded in 1928), whose constitution declared that its work on population questions should not have a moral, religious, or political outlook. Gini took the opportunity of a 1933 Rome conference on population to approach like-minded foreign eugenicists with a view to establishing a break-away organization from the IFEO for those opposed in principle to the variegated platform of negative eugenics. His vision of a Latin International Federation of Eugenic Societies quickly became a reality as countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, France, Mexico, Romania, Catalonia (Spain), Portugal, and French and Italian Switzerland accepted invitations to join. Belgium expressed an interest in joining once it revived its flagging eugenic society.
As the prime mover of the plan to unite eugenic societies with a shared "positive" purpose, Gini served as president of the newly formed Latin international federation, which held its inaugural meeting at the congress of the Eugenic Societies of Latin America in Mexico City in October 1935. A founding address by Gini, who could not be present, was read by Alfredo A. Saavedra, a physician and perpetual secretary of the Mexican Society of Eugenics. Gini's speech emphasized the enthusiastic response that his proposal received. Every single member of the regional Latin federation of eugenic societies, which included those firmly established in Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, as well as those still in formation in Colombia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Honduras, and Panama, agreed to join the new international organization. Membership also included those European societies, in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and elsewhere, which shared a "Latin" sensibility and style in their eugenic programs. Some of these countries possessed a common cultural, linguistic, historical and ethnic heritage, such as Romania and Italy, whose strong attachment derived from their shared pedigree of Romanita Romanian eugenicists, like their Italian colleagues, were generally less inclined than eugenicists in Germany and the United States to advocate the introduction of coercive and compulsory negative measures, like the sterilization of the unfit. Partly, Gini explained, this had to do with the superior societies of these Latin nations, where, because of the strength of family and community ties, a threatening residuum of hard-core defectives and degenerates imperiling the race did not exist to the same extent as it did in the more atomized and individualistic "Anglo-Saxon" and "Germanic" nations. Romania and Italy, moreover, were kindred nations that would forever be linked by their ancient Roman connection and unbroken ties of blood and history.28 The myth of a proud Romano-Dacian race as ancestral racial progenitors, forefathers of the nation, and protectors of the "authentic" national identity and folk traditions of the Romanian people informed much of the discourse of nationalists, eugenicists, and fascists in interwar Romania and provided a powerful familial bond with their Italian counterparts.
Religion comprised a key component of Gini's conception of "Latinity." In the case of France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, this "Latin commonality" was founded upon a shared Catholicism, which functioned as a cornerstone of nation, state, and society and precluded policies favoring abortion, contraception, and other forms of reproductive restrictions. On scientific, moral, and humanitarian grounds, too, Gini stressed that Latin eugenics was a "regenerative" and "curative" science committed to births, not deaths. The pronatalism at its foundation was the most positive form of eugenics because it sought to protect and promote the essence and the best of the collectivity and the race, without sacrificing individual rights and freedoms. Latin eugenics upheld "human dignity and personal integrity." In their haste to perfect humanity, eugenicists should never forget that they were dealing with human beings and unique individuals, not laboratory "flies or rabbits" to be propagated according to some experimental blueprint of a master race. The hereditarianism of some eugenicists was a dangerous ideology with destructive nihilism as its heart. The "Latin scientist," Gini stressed, would always remain reluctant to destroy "one of the most salient manifestations of what it means to be human" -- reproductive and sexual choice -- and could never contemplate depriving human beings of their personhood and humanity.29
At the International Congress on Population in Paris in 1937, the Italian delegates spoke about the innate "vitality" of fecund populations and the "energy" associated with "reproductivity." They contended that fascist demographic policy had a sound scientific base in modern biology and defended the logic of their government's efforts to protect the race by increasing the birthrate. The underlying assumptions of their arguments were that Italian women and men were distinguished by their "hyperfecundity" and that this was a beneficial characteristic which had to be preserved.30 Since 1928, Gini had (as part of his work with the IUSPP) been compiling and examining anthropometric data taken from 15,000 Harvard female undergraduates and a random sample of Italian women; his research confirmed to him that Italian women, by virtue of their especially fertile biotype, possessed greater "reproductive potentiality" than their American counterparts; this evolutionary asset was evidenced by the early age of menarche and the late onset of menopause that typified the lives of so many Italian "mothers of the race."31 A recurring implication in the arguments used by Italian scientists was that a high birthrate positively correlated with male sexual prowess and potency; on that score, Italian men, the reasoning went, had little to fear since they were demonstrably more virile than their "Anglo-Saxon" and "Nordic" counterparts.32
The Second International Congress of the Latin Federation of Eugenic Societies was scheduled to take place in Bucharest in September 1939, but was canceled because of Britain's declaration of war against Germany. In September 1940, the National Congress on the Science of Population took place in Oporto, Portugal, and was attended by many foreign delegates. Italy was represented by Gini and Fabio Frassetto, an acclaimed anthropologist and anatomist based at the University of Bologna. Both Frassetto's paper on "biotypology" and Gini's on "denatality" continued to develop what was a formative principle of Latin eugenics -- namely, that "hyperfecundity" was a positive force for the race and that "prolificity" was a product of a superior racial constitution.
Conclusion
If historians wish to hold eugenics accountable, in some way, for the atrocities committed in the pursuit of racial betterment before and during World War II, then the existence of Latin eugenics within the international movement never amounted to much of an ameliorating force. Undoubtedly, as the twentieth century's first "public science," eugenics of the first wave succeeded, in dramatically different national contexts, in spreading "a new eugenic consciousness," shaping social opinions and ideas, and carving out for itself a prominent role in policy and government. Some eugenicists, like those in the United States and Germany, came closer than others to realizing the aims of their "total revolution" in existing values, statutes, and institutions. Similarly conceived and executed, radical programs of race hygiene by means of mass compulsory sterilization in a Nazi dictatorship and an American democracy were the concrete expression of a cultural crisis, manifest so tragically for so many in the widespread collapse of liberalism and humanism in the first half of the twentieth century, to which eugenics undoubtedly contributed.33 Others, like Gini, Gemelli, and Pende in Italy, were able to exert tremendous influence over government, while at the same time seeking to accommodate overriding political dictates and public sensibilities.
Historians preoccupied with the problem of explaining the "Dark Side of Progress," Europe's "Descent into Barbarism," and the "Road to Auschwitz" have long held eugenics to account as a peculiarity of Protestant "Anglo-Saxon" and Germanic cultures and a dangerous "pseudo-science" fueling Nazism and resulting in mass murder. Scholars now know that not all eugenicists were reactionary, anti-Jewish, or racist extremists with evil, genocidal intentions. Within the complex, shifting, and heterogeneous world eugenics movement, the strand championed by Italy and its allies represents a more palatable variety than the far more familiar Nazi type. Significantly, however, eugenics, in both its Latin and non-Latin forms, redefined the relationship between the individual, society, and the state. Whether it was pro-life, positive, and pronatalist or more extreme, negative, and antinatalist in orientation, the underlying presupposition of eugenics was that the interests of mere individuals had to be subordinated to the higher ones of the collective, the "race," the nation, and the state. Whatever shape it took, eugenics was fundamentally anti-liberal, anti-humanist, and authoritarian in means and ends. Even proposals to improve health care and welfare benefits were conceived as ways to enhance the quality of the genetic stock and the racial inheritance of the nation, rather than the quality of the lives of individuals and their families. The eugenic ideal was that the private, sexual, and social behavior of human beings could be coordinated and controlled by a masterful and commanding state and its servants of professional experts in eugenic medicine and science.
The racial utopia envisioned by eugenicists everywhere was a totalitarian fantasy that contributed in no small measure to the breakdown of democratic values and parliamentary systems in the interwar period and operated in perfect consonance with the forces of fascism, Nazism, and dictatorship that were responsible for so much misery, death, and destruction. But after the fall of fascism in 1943-1945, eugenics did not disappear in Italy or elsewhere. On the contrary, second-wave eugenics emerged as an offshoot of genetics and biotechnology. Unlike the state-centred, old-style, coercive eugenics, which mainly sought to influence government, the new eugenics primarily aims to give wealthy private individuals reproductive choices and control in the form of enhanced fertility and the ability to manipulate the genetic inheritance that they pass to their offspring.34
Until his death in 1965, Italy's premier eugenicist, Corrado Gini, continued to playa major role in a de-racialized, post-fascist version of eugenics. To public acclaim within his own country, he continued research in the newly established field of "genetic demography," which was an attempt by old-style eugenicists to rebrand their product into a socio-biological discipline befitting the post-1946 welfare democracy of the Italian Republic.35 Gini may not have been the most heinous collaborator around at the time, but elements of his fascist past, sanitized and forgotten after 1945, were decidedly unsavory.
In particular, his racism and his collaboration with the fascist regime's imperial policies should not have been whitewashed. On behalf of the International Labour Organization and other organizations, Gini became a high-profile player on the world eugenic stage after World War I. In particular, his appointment to the presidency of the International Federation of Eugenic Organization's Commission for the Study of the Eugenic and Disgenic Effects of the War in 1927 was a tremendous accolade. After all, the work of the commission comprised one of the chief collaborative and transnational projects of international eugenics in the inter-war period. The outcome of his involvement, however, led to a major controversy that contributed to his desire to break away from the IFEO. One of Gini's own major interests was the subject of so-called "primitive races"; his work in this field allowed him to contribute to the IFEO's committee on "race crossing." It also led to his involvement with the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. Gini was enlisted by the IUSPP to compile vital statistics on so-called inferior races. With the help of the Royal Italian Geographic Society, fifteen scientific expeditions under Gini's command were sent in the 1930s to Africa, America, Asia, and elsewhere in Europe in order to compile anthropometric and demographic data on "the white race" and its interaction with a range of "primitive and decadent ethnic groups." A particular concern of Gini was to elucidate the deleterious effects of miscegenation on the "fecundity" of the white race.
Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to choose a member of such mixed tribes. Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing", as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e, the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless" and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race...
It is a most suggestive fact -- to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma -- that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the globe, among those races, whose "time is up" -- among just those stocks, be it remarked, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. "Nothing", says even the materialist Lefevre, "can save those that have run their course .. It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle ... The peoples that have been spared ... Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion." (“Philosophy,” p. 508.)
True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the “destined cycle” and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their “appointed hour”? The answer that it is due to a “mental disproportion” between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden “checks to fertility” which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks, “the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three great human types” (before the Sixth Root-Race dawns), the white (Aryan, Fifth Root-Race), the yellow, and the African negro — with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc., etc. — all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root-Race runs through a gamut of seven sub-races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the “why.” The tide-wave of incarnating EGOS has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity.
-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky
Pushing the confines of demography and population statistics ever closer to biology, eugenics, and genetics, just as Galton himself had done, Gini was also simultaneously preparing the ideological arsenal for the fascist regime's extensive anti-miscegenation legislation, which was implemented in Italian East Africa after the violent conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-1936. So draconian were the laws on cohabitation, "sexual congress," and relations between the conquering and the vanquished "races" that they have been compared to the system of Apartheid in South Africa. Indeed, the rationale was the same -- the notion of the necessity of the separate development and the total segregation of the races in order to protect European blood from contagion by inferior elements informed both experiments.36 From the late 1920s, Gini's research and connections with fascist population policies were becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the IUSPP, which attempted to consider population apolitically. In particular, the IUSPP's honorary general secretary, Captain George H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers, grew increasingly uneasy about Gini's political and scientific biases and intentions. In 1932, he formally censured Gini and then withdrew funding for his commission, before resolving, with the support of the executive committee of the IUSPP, to dissolve his investigative team entirely in 1937. Pitt-Rivers outlined his reasons in an utterly damning critique of Gini's aims and methods. This accused the renowned Italian scientist of conducting work that was entirely unscientific -- by any internationally accepted standard of research into population matters, Pitt-Rivers stressed -- and that was politically motivated, highly suspect, and sub-standard.37
The criticism had no effect upon Gini's reputation at the time or his resuscitation after the war. In fact, the national awards and honors in recognition of his outstanding service to science continued to accumulate in the 1950s and 1960s. Gini did, however, keep a low profile when it came to matters pertaining to his past life as a leading eugenicist. Discredited, eugenics ceased to play much of a role in the first and only postwar conference of the re-formed Societa Italiana di Genetica e di Eugenica (Italian Genetics and Eugenics Society), which met briefly in September 1949. Although Gini's Latin Federation failed to be revived after World War II, the sentiments that first brought it into existence have continued to have relevance in the postwar period and into the twenty-first century in government and media-generated scares about the low birthrate, a "dying" population, the endangered nation and invading immigrants. At a much deeper level of consciousness and culture as well, Italian pronatalism is alive and thriving within the Italian medical and scientific communities, as issues like abortion, reproductive technology, stem-cell research and "euthanasia," as well as the rights and responsibilities attached to them, remain highly controversial and contested. For example, advocates of scientific "progress" accuse the Catholic Church of undue influence in a secular and democratic society and contend that its position on assisted conception, reproductive technology, and research on human embryos is "medieval" and "backward."38 In an investigation of the attitudes of physicians toward the assisted death of terminal patients in a palliative context, one of many such studies over the years, the researchers concluded that the majority of doctors questioned were opposed to "euthanasia" and that "the variable most strongly associated with a negative response" was "religious belief."39 Just as they were in Gini's day, national culture and religion remain determinants of attitudes and anxieties about those issues that have concerned eugenicists, old and new, for well over a century.
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Italy
by Francesco Cassata
eugenicsarchive.ca
Accessed: 6/12/20
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The word eugenica (or, less frequently, eugenetica) began to spread in Italy in 1912, in the wake of the First International Congress of Eugenics, held in London, under the presidency of Leonard Darwin. The Italian participation at the London Congress not only stimulated a process of institutionalization of Italian eugenics—through the constitution in 1913 of the first Italian Committee of Eugenic Studies—but also demonstrated from the beginning the particular originality of the Italian approach to eugenics. Neo-Lamarckian theoretical influences, Pareto’s theory of the elite and social exchange, positive anthropological evaluation of racial interbreeding and immigration, the Lombrosian connection between genius and degeneration: all these factors created a scientific and intellectual framework that made Italian eugenics inassimilable to the Anglo-Saxon model.
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was a prominent Italian medical doctor and intellectual in the second half of the nineteenth century. He became world famous for his theory that criminality, madness and genius were all sides of the same psychobiological condition: an expression of degeneration, a sort of regression along the phylogenetic scale, and an arrest at an early stage of evolution. Degeneration affected criminals especially, in particular the "born delinquent" whose development had stopped at an early stage, making them the most "atavistic" types of human being. Lombroso also advocated the theory that genius was closely linked with madness. A man of genius was a degenerate, an example of retrograde evolution in whom madness was a form of "biological compensation" for excessive intellectual development. To confirm this theory, in August 1897, Lombroso, while attending the Twelfth International Medical Congress in Moscow, decided to meet the great Russian writer Lev Tolstoy in order to directly verify, in him, his theory of degeneration in the genius. Lombroso's anthropological ideas fuelled a heated debate on the biological determinism of human behaviour.
-- Cesare Lombroso: An Anthropologist Between Evolution and Degeneration, by Paolo Mazzarello
Interpreted as dramatic counter-selection or as a means of national biological optimization, the First World War represented an important moment of development for Italian eugenics, demonstrating the efficiency of direct state management of the biological resources of the nation.
Anxieties over national regeneration, technocratic ambitions and new social welfare-oriented policies, which, after the war, accompanied the crisis of the last liberal governments and the progressive rise of fascism, favoured the affirmation of eugenics as a part of social medicine and public health. In this context, eugenics was progressively seen as a paradigm of national efficiency, based on the subordination of individual liberty to superior collective interests for the “defence of society and the race.” Such a technocratic and managerial conception of the population fascinated the Italian political elite in this period, the left as much as the right, ranging from nationalism to reformist socialism, and of course fascism. It was in these years that Italian eugenics was institutionalized, with the constitution of the Institute of Public Welfare and Assistance (IPAS,) the Italian Society for the Study of Sexual Questions (SISQS), the Italian Society for Genetics and Eugenics (SIGE) and the Italian League of Hygiene and Mental Prophylaxis (LIPIM). In the same period, the eugenic debate went through a season of extreme richness and variety, exploring the fundamental issues of birth control, premarital certification, sterilization and mental hygiene.
The orthodoxy based on the binomial quantitative eugenics, pronatalist population policy, was imposed officially by the fascist regime in 1927. The turning point was above all political, and it was sanctioned by the alliance between fascist natalist policy, inaugurated in May 1927 with Benito Mussolini’s famous Ascension Day Speech, and Catholic sexual morals, reaffirmed by the Holy See in December 1930, with the encyclical Casti Connubii. SIGE’s leadership mirrored this ideological and political fusion: the president was the demographer and statistician Corrado Gini; the vice-president was Agostino Gemelli, founder and dean of the Milan Catholic University, and principle exponent of Italian Catholic eugenics.
On a more specifically scientific level, starting from the second half of the 1920s, the theoretical paradigm that fascist eugenics was based on was constituted by the convergence between Corrado Gini’s integral demography—a synthesis of demography, biology, anthropology, economy, sociology and, obviously, eugenics—and constitutionalist biotypological medicine. Biotypology was represented, in particular, by the endocrinologist Nicola Pende. With its synthesis between biological reductionism and cultural holism, Pende’s biotypology provided the scientific rationale for the fascist project of building the “New Italian” (Italiano Nuovo), without alienating the support of the Vatican. Both Gini’s regenerative eugenics and Pende’s biotypological orthogenesis opposed the Nordic, Anglo-Germanic, and Scandinavian model.
This opposition—simultaneously scientific, ideological and political—was expressed at the institutional level by Italy’s exit from the IFEO, and the constitution in 1935 of the Latin Federation of Eugenic Societies: an alternative model, the birth of which coincided not surprisingly with the most critical phase of diplomatic relationships between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Starting from 1936, and in particular in 1938 with the introduction of State racism in fascist Italy, the ideological and political convergence of fascism and Nazism also influenced the relationship between eugenics and racism, feeding new tensions and oppositions. Between 1938 and 1943 the nature/nurture debate became the battleground for the clash between the different racisms of fascism: biological (Telesio Interlandi and Guido Landra) and esoteric racism (Julius Evola and Giovanni Preziosi) adopted the negative Nazi eugenic model, while nationalist and Mediterranean racism (Giacomo Acerbo and Nicola Pende) remained faithful to the Latin model, environmentalist and neo-Lamarckian. The two positions were opposed in their definition of Italian racial identity, but converged in their discrimination of racial enemies, in particular the half-caste and Jews.
The end of the Second World War did not signal the definitive end of eugenics. In the 1950s and 1960s, on the one hand, the development of human and medical genetics redefined eugenics in terms of preventive medicine and reproductive hygiene. On the other, Gini’s racist eugenics provided a relevant contribution to the anti-UNESCO campaign organized by the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnography and Eugenics (IAAEE) and its journal, The Mankind Quarterly.