1938 жылғы итальян фашистік нәсілдік манифесті

Italian Fascist racial manifesto, promulgated in 1938

The "Manifesto of Race" , otherwise referred to as the Charter of Race or the Racial Manifesto, was an Italian manifesto promulgated by the government of Benito Mussolini on 14 July 1938. Its promulgation was followed by the enactment, in October 1938, of the Racial Laws in Fascist Italy and the Italian Empire. The anti Semitic laws stripped the Italian Jews of their Italian citizenship, and they also stripped them of their governmental and professional positions. Mussolini had earlier issued statements ridiculing especially the racial policies and theories of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and highly contradictory statements regarding antisemitism and Italian Jews, many of which had supported the National Fascist Party (PNF) earlier throughout the dictatorship.

The Italo German alliance was greatly bound by the two countries' shared political philosophy of fascism as a form of "progressive reaction" against the modern world—both Mussolini and Hitler despised modern style humanistic liberal democracy, but lauded their own ideas of fascism as the fulfillment of modern politics and the embodiment of the popular will. Hitler was captivated and personally inspired by the 1922 March on Rome and envisioned himself at the head of a similar march on Berlin. Thus, Mussolini increasingly decided to harmonize Italian Fascism with German Nazism by introducing anti Semitic laws in Italy as evidence of his good faith towards Hitler. He conceived it, at least partially and tactically, as an offering calculated to solidify the Italo German alliance. In Italian Fascist literature and periodicals, a shift toward a less refined racism, accentuating the biological, Indo European element occurred, emphasizing the ancient Latins and Romans as a nucleus of warlike Aryans closely related to the Celts and other Indo European ethnic groups; therefore, Italian Fascist nationalism merged with the doctrine of Aryan racism. After considerable resistance, Nazi influence began to penetrate some intellectual circles in the Kingdom of Italy. In general, however, there was a concerted effort to distinguish Fascist "racism", allegedly of "culturalist" variety, from that emanating from the Germanic realm. Giovanni Gentile, for example, despised the introduction of biological racism into Italian Fascism, and the same can be said of the majority of the early theoreticians of intellectual Fascism. Yet the concern for a corporate national identity, as opposed to what Gentile called the "solipsist ego" enshrined by demo liberal politics, was always part of the Italian Fascist worldview. In any case, it was not unusual for Fascist intellectuals to oppose themselves to the more excessive and irrational components of Ariosophy, before the outbreak of World War II.

For the most part, the Racial Laws were met with disapproval from not just ordinary Italian citizens but also members of the National Fascist Party themselves. On one occasion, an Italian Fascist scholar questioned Mussolini over the treatment his Jewish friends were receiving after the promulgation of the Racial Laws, which prompted Mussolini to say: "I agree with you entirely. I don't believe a bit in the stupid anti Semitic theory. I am carrying out my policy entirely for political reasons." William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich suggests that Mussolini enacted the Racial Laws in order to appease his German allies, rather than to satisfy any genuine anti Semitic sentiment among the Italian people. Indeed, prior to 1938 and the Pact of Steel alliance, Mussolini and many notable Italian Fascists had been highly critical of Nordicism, biological racism, and anti Semitism, especially the virulent and violent anti Semitism and biological racism that could be found in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Many early supporters of Italian fascism, including Mussolini's mistress, the writer and socialite Margherita Sarfatti, were in fact middle class or upper middle class Italian Jews. Nordicism and biological racism were often considered incompatible with the early ideology of Italian fascism; Nordicism inherently subordinated the Italians themselves and other Mediterranean peoples beneath the Germans and Northwestern Europeans in its proposed racial hierarchy, and early Italian Fascists, including Mussolini, viewed race as a cultural and political invention rather than a biological reality. In 1929, Mussolini noted that Italian Jews had been a demographically small yet culturally integral part of Italian society since Ancient Rome. His views on Italian Jews were consistent with his early Mediterraneanist perspective, which suggested that all Mediterranean cultures, including the Jewish culture, shared a common bond. He further argued that Italian Jews had truly become "Italians" or natives to Italy after living for such a long period in the Italian Peninsula. However, Mussolini's views on race were often contradictory and quick to change when necessary, and as Fascist Italy became increasingly subordinate to Nazi Germany's interests, Mussolini began adopting openly racial theories borrowed from or based on Nazi racial policies, leading to the introduction of the anti Semitic Racial Laws.