Manifesto of Race - Eugenics and Race

The Manifesto of Race was published anonymously in IL Giornale d`Italia on 14 July 1938, having been so substantially revised by Mussolini and by the officials within the Ministry of Popular Culture that the ten original signatories (Nicola Pende and Sabato Visco) demanded that their names not be listed among the authors. A National Fascist Party memorandum ignored their wishes and published the names on 25 July. With its proclamation that Italians were racially Aryan and biologically distinct from such non-Europeans as Jews and Africans, the manifesto was clearly designed to please Nazi Germany in the immediate wake of Hitler´s May 1938 visit to Italy. (The importance of the German alliance had vastly increased due to the political isolation and economic sanctions imposed on Italy by the League of Nations in retribution for its 1935 invasion of Ethiopia.)

Though motivated by political opportunism, fascism´s embrace of racism was facilitated by a range of factors, including the increasing importance of imperialist ideology (racial vocabulary had crept into the antimiscegenation laws in Ethiopia), the presence of vocal anti-Semitic minorities in the National Fascist party and Catholic Church, an anti-Jewish press campaign carried on into 1936, and Mussolini`s fears that Hitler was emerging as the true figurehead of international fascism. This said the manifesto was inconsistent with Mussolini´s prior positions (which had been unambiguously antiracist) as well as with prevailing Italian political traditions. Its inordinate emphasis on the role of Jews in Italian public life appeared at odds with reality since they represented only one tenth of 1 percent of the population. As a result, the manifesto met with substantial resistance both inside and outside the party even as it became official policy and was translated into a corpus of law. The sorts of objections that it was still eliciting two years after its publication are documented in "Critique of The Manifesto of Race," an internal report regarding debates within the Higher Council of Demography and race. The result of these debates led the council to draft a revised version of the manifesto on the 25 April 1942.

The Manifesto of Race (Italian: Manifesto della razza) sometimes known as the Charter of Race was a set of laws enacted in Fascist Italy during July 1938. The laws are regarded as anti-Semitic in nature, stripping the Jews of Italian citizenship and with it any position in the government or professions which many previous had. The manifesto demonstrated the enormous influence Adolf Hitler had over Benito Mussolini, since Italy had become allied with Nazi Germany which, at the time was quickly rising to power.

In the sixteen years of Benito Mussolini's dictatorship prior to this, there had not being any race laws; Mussolini had held the view that a small contingent of Italian Jews had lived in Italy "since the days of the Kings of Rome" (a reference to the Bené Roma) and should "remain undisturbed".[1] There were even some Jews in the National Fascist Party, such as Ettore Ovazza who in 1935 founded the Jewish Fascist paper La Nostra Bandiera. The German influence on Italian policy upset the established balance in Fascist Italy and proved highly unpopular to most Italians, to the extent that Pope Pius XII sent a letter to Mussolini protesting against the new laws.

The Manifesto of Race, adopted as law in July 1938, declared the Italians to be descendants of the Aryan race. As its title implies, it targeted races that were seen as inferior (i.e. that were not of Aryan descent). In particular, Jews were banned from many professions and could have their property confiscated. Under racial laws, marriages between Italians and Jews were abolished, Jews were banned from positions in banking, government, and education, and their properties were confiscated. These laws also targeted African races. Originally, many scholars believed that Italian fascist racism was a largely artificial creation of the Italo-German alliance.

Antonio Spinosa, one of the first to examine the problem of Italian fascist racism comprehensively, charged that this politics [of the Italo-German alliance] crowned by the declaration of war against Great Britain and France, was the cause of the Italian racist campaign desirable to the leaders of the Gross-Deutsches Reich.

The historian Renzo De Felice, while essential agreeing with this assessment in his earlier work, added several secondary factors: in this "conversion" to anti-Semitism the influence of the Nazis and of Germany was a determinant, but not direct. From the Nazi side there had not been pressure because Italy allied itself even in this subject of race with Germany. It was indirect: one side waved the "Jewish threat" and let the facts demonstrate to Mussolini the impossibility that between the Allies there could be a very strident diversity of attitude. The other side were notoriously anti-Semitic Fascists, such as Preziosi, who served as instruments of pressure on Mussolini, or those who made anti-Semitism their political raison d'etre, out of conviction or personal interests in the Italo-German alliance.

The strong Italian and German alliance was greatly bound by the idea of fascism. Mussolini was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler. In 1920, he founded the National Socialist German Workers' Party, with a charter membership of seven, counting himself. Hitler had been captivated by the 1922 March on Rome and envisioned himself at the head of a similar march on Berlin. James Gregor made much the same point that Mussolini was unavailable, in 1933, to convince Hitler that racism was unproductive, yet eventually decided that an alliance with Germany was highly desirable. Thus, Mussolini "decided to accommodate the National Socialists by introducing anti-Semitic legislation in Italy as evidence of his good faith. He conceived it an offering calculated to solidify the Italo-German Alliance" in this way, "Mussolini's anti-Jewish attitude was dictated not by theoretical but almost solely tactical, i.e., political, consideration. This shift toward racism effectuated by political considerations unleashed, biologism latent in the writings of some nationalists. Thus, the fascist regime passed from anti-racialism to racial anti-Semitism on the German model…through the impact of German-Italian relations on the evolution of the racial question in Italy. Fascist racism throughout the period of 1922-1928, some have argued.

None of the major fascist intellectuals were racists of the sort found in National Socialist environs. In fact, since many if not most, of the principal ideologues of the fascists were Actualists, they had principled objections to attributing human behavior to material-biological-causes. They simply could not accept the proposition that an entire population, characterized by ills-defined "racial traits, could be held, as a body, guilty of anything.

After considerable resistance, National Socialists influence began to penetrate some circles in Fascist Italy. Anti/Semitism informs of biological racism began to surface in some publications. In general, however, there was a concerted effort to distinguish Fascist "racism" from that emanating from the north. It was not unusual, before the outbreak of the Second World War, for Fascist intelectuals to oppose themselves to some of the major elements of National Socialist racism.

Until the actual publication of the official Manifesto of Fascist Racism, biological racism, as it was understood by National Socialist theorists, had literally no place in Fascist doctrine. Thereafter, the Fascist position on this subject became increasingly confused.

Fascists, and most Actualists, were opposed to any racism that shared significant properties with the racism of Hitler's Germany. In that context, persons who had long been dismissed as lacking any significance, made their reappearance among Fascist intellectuals.

Here is a good example on a non racist point of view of Classical Italian Fascism, please keep in mind the era and what may today been seen an racist was quite normal in there time all over the world and especially in America, something extra:

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilisation and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilised some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilisations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University Of California Board Of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilisation.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organisations--which functioned as part of a closely-knit network--published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandised for the Nazis.

Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorised that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton's ideas were imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual character of man.

In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Blacks, immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilisation programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit." The eugenicists hoped to neutralise the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution… Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organised lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalised, the main solution for eugenicists was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilisation, as well as more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all sterilisation procedures with little or no due process. In its first twenty-five years of eugenic legislation, California sterilised 9,782 individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as "passionate," "oversexed" or "sexually wayward." At Sonoma, some women were sterilised because of what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilisations were performed, 700 of which were on women. The state's two leading sterilisation mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with 363 operations. Other sterilisation centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.

Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilised or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.

Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealising sterilisation and circulated them to German official and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimise his anti-Semitism by medicalising it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

Hitler's struggle for a superior race would be a mad crusade for a Master Race. Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic" or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live, and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors would create the science; devise the eugenic formulas, and even hand-select the victims for sterilisation, euthanasia and mass extermination.

During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

In 1934, as Germany's sterilisations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought…I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."

That same year, ten years, after Virginia passed its sterilisation act, Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.

Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenic complex of institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organisation became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.

Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade."

A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades, American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into heredity. The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an unprecedented level. On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR GERM PLASM.

At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that Institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the Institute to form a rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American eugenic press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed up by government decrees. Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenic doctor's journal he edited, that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."

Verschuer had a long-time assistant. His name was Josef Mengele. On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer [captain] and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]."

Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.

Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the institutions they helped found, and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity--an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their defense. To no avail. They were found guilty.

However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer re-established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an exchange July 25, 1946 when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany…. I suppose sterilisation has been discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation."

Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organised by American eugenicists and geneticists.

In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.

Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilisation and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.

Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late twentieth century. Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code through the Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be biologically identified and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and even a master human species.

There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic tests. On October 14, America's first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed the Senate by unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no single nation's law can stop the threats.

America’s experimentation with genetics as a tool for social change is not new. In the 1920s the United States became the world centre of eugenic activity and social policy. From 1907-1960 more than 100,000 innocent Americans were sterilised in more than 30 states. In the 1930s and 1940s Hitler’s scientists took eugenics to the extreme - establishing human breeding farms for "Aryans," large-scale sterilisation and euthanasia programs for the mentally and physically disabled, and death camps for the races they deemed "genetically inferior" or "unworthy life."

Both the American and German eugenics movements of the 1920s and 30s identified human beings as either hereditarily valuable or inferior. They established programs to purify the "race" of "lower grade" and "degenerate" groups, thus extending racism to include a new generic classification - the "genetically inferior." Not surprisingly, the targets always turned out to be the traditional victims of racism - Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Indians, and other minorities.

After Hitler’s defeat, the American eugenics movement fell into disrepute, appealing primarily to the KKK, neo-Nazis, and small groups of old-line scientists steeped in the racist theories of the pre-war period. In the 1960s their key spokesman was Stanford physicist William Shockley, who was the first to suggest offering cash incentives to people with low IQ scores who would agree to sterilisation. He called his proposal the "voluntary sterilisation bonus plan." Despite his status as a Noble laureate, Professor Shockley was widely regarded as a racist and a kook within the academic community. Nevertheless, he laid the foundation upon which the new eugenics movement would eventually be resurrected.

In 1974, Federal District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell estimated that "over the last few years" between 100,000 and 150,000 low-income persons were sterilised under federally funded programs. Ruling on behalf of plaintiffs in a class action suit, Judge Gesell stated that "an indefinite number" of those sterilised were "improperly coerced" into accepting sterilisation. Judge Gesell observed that "the dividing line between family planning and eugenics was murky" (Relf v. Weinberger et. al. U.S. District Court of D.C., March 15, 1974). In many cases welfare patients were told that they could lose their benefits if they did not submit to the sterilisation procedure. On September 21, 1975 The New York Times Magazine reported that doctors in major cities were routinely performing hysterectomies on mostly black welfare recipients as a form of sterilisation, a practice that came to be known euphemistically among medical insiders as the "Mississippi appendectomy."

Today those who advocate eugenics have access to far more sophisticated technologies than those of their pre-war predecessors. For example, Norplant, a drug approved by the FDA in 1990, provides an alternative to permanent sterilisation for women by preventing pregnancy for up to five years. A popular proposal to reduce the birth rate among welfare recipients and unwed teens is to induce them, through monetary incentives of the threat of a loss of benefits, to have Norplant surgically implanted in their upper arm. In 1991, Kansas representative Kerry Patrick defended a proposal to offer $500 to any welfare mother who accepted Norplant, saying the program "has the potential to save the taxpayers millions of their hard-earned dollars. Something must be done to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies..." (The New York Times, Feb. 9, 1991).

In 1994, legislators in Connecticut and Florida introduced bills that would provide cash bonuses for welfare recipients who accepted Norplant. Florida and Colorado have introduced incentive programs for men to accept sterilisation. The Florida bill would offer $400 to men living below the poverty line for undergoing a vasectomy; the Colorado bill would allow criminals early release. While none of these bills has yet become law, the momentum for eugenic solutions is growing. If current trends continue, we can expect to see such sterilisation programs gain legal sanction across America.

Faccetta Nera

Faccetta Nera (Italian, "little black face") was a marching song from the Italian fascist period. It is said to have been inspired by a young Eritrean girl who has been found by the Italian troops at the beginning of the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia October 3 1935 3 years before The Manifesto of Race (Italian: Manifesto della razza) sometimes known as the Charter of Race. The song talks about the "little black face" who is going to be taken back to Rome, kissed by the Italian sun and who will be given a new law and a new king. The song soon became the symbol of the Fascist military campaign in Ethiopia and further one of the audio symbols of Fascism as a whole.