The Imagery of Fascist Pigs: How Pigs Have Helped Promote and Deify Fascist Regimes

The use of pigs as relevant to the function of a fascist in matters of agriculture and in opposition to a fascist nation and narrative in the 20th century emerges as an interesting lens through which to observe totalitarian states. In matters of material importance, pigs can display the function of independent industry from imports that fascists would seek to achieve. They also allow us to analyse the use of propaganda to construct ideas that could either support or defeat a nation.

Industry and Germany

Born in 1895, Richard Walther Darré was the Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. His work was on animal breeding and its relationship to the more general biological question of race, mainly researched using pigs. ‘Blood and Soil’ (Blut und Boden) was a phrase used by Darré to emphasise the importance of having a racially defined group of people tied and united to a specific area of land.

Darré transferred his learnings of animal breeding onto the breeding of humans to produce the ‘new aristocracy from Blood and Soil’, made up of the farmers. Published in 1933, his essay ‘The Pig as the Criterion for Nordic Peoples and Semites’ (“Das Schwein als Kriterium für nordische Völker und Semitten”), outlined the pig as ‘the leading animal’ of the Germanic people. The distinction between the farmer and the nomad came from their relation to the land and to livestock, outlined in the example of the pig. For him, with no pigs there were no true Germans, as the necessary relation to soil was made possible by pigs.

Post-WWI, animal breeding spread as an influential idea in German academies. There was a focus on pigs in the Halle Institute because it was the main source of protein for Germans. Pork accounted for about two thirds of German meat consumption, and bacon and lard for 30 percent of fat intake; but Germany imported 60 percent of the fats it consumed.

The Nazi food policy and the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) aimed to improve their pig breeding stock in association with fat production. With the closing of world markets to the Reich, the increased focus on pigs to cure the demand for fats intended to aid the dairy industry. The reality, however, was that to reach their desired production of fatter pigs, they would have to crossbreed. This shift from wanting purebred pigs to having to accept the idea of mixed breeds for efficiency is ironic and reflective of the impossibility of maintaining a pure Germanic race for the thousand-year Reich Hitler wished to achieve.

The focus on the pig in Nazi Germany unintentionally reflects the link between the imagery of pigs and evil throughout history, which was solidified into the link between pigs and fascism in the 20^th century.

Culture and Propaganda

The idea of the pig being ‘impure’ can be traced historically and is talked about in ‘The Disputation of Sergius the Stylite against a Jew’, recorded in the 8th century. It lays out the argument for the dirtiness of pigs, especially in the eyes of Jewish people: “Why do you eat the pig which is the most defiled and impure among the animals...”. This has further links back to the technical meanings of the words ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ found in Leviticus 11:7-8, which explicitly bans the consumption of pork.

During the Second World War, propaganda took many forms but distributed across multiple languages was the ‘pig puzzle’. Children were told to fold paper with the image of four pigs in such a way that the face of a dictator would appear. In countries such as Britain and the Netherlands the face revealed was Hitler’s while in Greece it was Mussolini’s. Mytro Sereti notes that images were effective propaganda against children because ‘pictures play a crucial role in children’s upbringing’.

A continued link between pigs and fascism can be seen in George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm. Its inspiration is linked to the USSR and Stalin rather than right-wing fascism, the idea of red fascism developed. It was popularised in post-war America to understand this new enemy in relation to those previously defeated, through shallow similarities like totalitarianism.

The use of the pig in Animal Farm as a totalitarian figure in this political satire links to unappealing characteristics associated with pigs historically, such as greed. While not directly commenting on fascism in this novel, Orwell presents the totalitarian figure as an evil pig, which some readers are likely to link to prominent dictators.

Orwell had earlier provided commentary specifically on fascism in his 1944 essay ‘What is Fascism?’. He outlined the difficulty of defining the word, and how people of different political allegiances would approach fascism differently. He summarised that most English people would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for fascism because of how diluted the word had become.

More distant links between pigs and general evil are found in William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, commenting on the evil which Golding concludes exists within all. This is personified by the head of a pig on a stake: the Lord of the Flies. The name itself is a direct translation of the word Beelzebub, the personification of evil, the devil. His inspiration was drawn from what people who lived in totalitarian states did to one another, concluding ‘that man was sick – not exceptional man, but average man’.

Exception to the Rule and the Long-Standing Legacy

One piece of media from the late 20th century stands in opposition to the traditional link between pigs and fascists – Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Porco Rosso, made in 1992 under Studio Ghibli. An anthropomorphic pig who was once a man is apathetic to the fascist state. Refusing to join the Italian war effort, he states it’s ‘better to be a pig than a fascist.’ This piece of media, like the pig puzzle propaganda of the Second World War, is positioned towards children, but it doesn't demonise the pig into the villain the children are meant to hate. Ultimately, it stands alone in the historical links of fascism and pigs which developed and solidified.

Pigs in an industrial and cultural sense have played their part in opposing fascism, complicating the attempt to further agricultural independence, as well as being a successful tool used to construct stories that warn of evil. To be called a pig continues to be a common insult against politicians today, demonstrating the established political relevance of the imagery of the pig and its historical associations, most notably with fascism, since the early-to-mid 20th century.

Bibliography

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