The Manifesto of Race (1938)

The Minister, Secretary of the Party, has received, on July 26 (XVI), a group of Fascist scholars, with chairs in the Italian universities, who, under the aegis of the Ministry of Popular Culture, have composed or support the propositions that lay the foundations of Fascist racialism.

1. HUMAN RACES EXIST. The existence of the human races is not at all an abstraction of our spirit, and corresponds instead to a phenomenical reality, which is material and can be perceived through our senses. This reality is represented by masses, almost always impressive, of millions of men similar for physical and psychological characteristics which were inherited, and continue to be inherited. To say that there are human races does not necessarily mean that there are superior and inferior human races, but only that there are different human races.


2. THERE EXIST LARGE RACES AND SMALL RACES. We must not only admit that there are major systematic groups, which are commonly called races, and that are identified only by certain characteristics, but we must also admit that there are secondary systematic groups (such as, for example, the Nordics, the Mediterraneans, the Dinarics, etc.), identified by a greater number of common characteristics. These latter groups, from the point of view of biology, represent the true races, the existence of which is an obvious truth.


3. THE CONCEPT OF RACE IS A PURELY BIOLOGICAL CONCEPT. It is therefore based on considerations other than the concepts of people and nation, based essentially on historical, linguistic, religious considerations. But underlying the differences in people and nation are differences in race. If the Italians are different from the French, the Germans, the Turks, the Greeks, etc., it is not only because they have a different language and a different history, but because the racial composition of these people is different. It was the different proportions of different races that since very ancient times have made up different peoples, whether it be that one race has the absolute dominion over the others, or that they all end up harmoniously blended, or, finally, that there still exist different races, not yet assimilated into each other.


4. THE MAJORITY OF THE CURRENT POPULATION OF ITALY IS OF ARYAN ORIGIN AND ITS CIVILIZATION IS ARYAN. This Aryan civilization-based population has lived in our peninsula for several millennia; very little is left of the civilization of the pre-Aryan nations. The origin of today's Italians, essentially, stems from elements of those very races that make up and made up the perennially alive fabric of Europe.


5. THE INFLUX OF LARGE MASSES OF MEN IN HISTORICAL TIMES IS A LEGEND. After the invasion of the Longobards, there have been no other significant movements of people in Italy capable of influencing the racial physiognomy of the nation. What follows is that, while in other European nations the racial composition has changed considerably even in modern times, in the case of Italy, in its broad outlines, the racial composition of today is the same as it was a thousand years ago: the vast majority of the forty-four million Italians of today, therefore, come out of families who have been living in Italy for at least a millennium.


6. THERE EXISTS ALREADY A PURE "ITALIAN RACE". This statement is based not on the confusion between the biological concept of race and the historical-linguistic concept of people and nation, but on the absolutely pure blood relationship that connects the Italians of today with the generations that have been living in Italy for millennia. This ancient purity of blood is the greatest title of nobility of the Italian Nation.


7. IT IS TIME THAT ITALIANS DECLARE THEMSELVES RACIALIST. All the work that the Regime has done until now in Italy is essentially a form of racialism. The invocation of the concepts of the race has always been very frequent in the speeches of our Leader. The issue of racialism in Italy must be dealt with from a purely biological point of view, without any philosophical or religious implications. The concept of racialism in Italy must be essentially Italian and its orientation must be Aryan-Nordic. This does not mean, however, that we should introduce in Italy the theories of German racialism as they are, or say that Italians and Scandinavians are the same thing. It simply means, instead, that we offer to the Italians a physical and, more importantly, a psychological model of human race, which, given its purely European characters, is completely different from all the extra-European races, and this means to raise every Italian to an ideal of higher self-consciousness and of greater responsibility.


8. IT IS NECESSARY TO MAKE A CLEAR DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE MEDITERRANEANS FROM EUROPE (WESTERNERS) ON ONE HAND, AND THE ORIENTALS AND AFRICANS ON THE OTHER. Therefore the theories that support the African origin of some European peoples, and that include within a common Mediterranean race the Semitic and Hamitic peoples, thus establishing the bases for absolutely unacceptable relationships and ideological sympathies, must be considered dangerous.


9. JEWS DO NOT BELONG TO THE ITALIAN RACE. Generally speaking, no trace is left of those Semites that over the centuries have landed on the sacred soil of our Fatherland. Even the Arab occupation of Sicily has left nothing, outside the few names that preserve its memory; the process of assimilation, after all, was always very quick in Italy. The Jews constitute the only people that was never assimilated into Italy because it consists of non-European racial elements, absolutely different from the elements that produced the Italians.


10. THE PURELY EUROPEAN PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ITALIANS MUST NOT BE ALTERED IN ANY WAY. Marriage is permissible only within the European races, in which case one should not speak of true and proper hybridization, since those races belong to a common strain and only differ in some elements, while they are identical in many others. The purely European character of the Italians would be altered by any crossbreeding with an extra-European race, the carrier of a civilization that is different from the millenary civilization of the Aryans.