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Scholars of fascism have long understood that the Nazi regime used technoscientific research to promote its own distorted categorisations and definitions of nation, race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. – ending disastrously with state-supported ‘racial hygiene’ practices that targeted Jews, Roma, queer people, people of colour, political and academic leftists, the elderly, people with disabilities, the poor and other minority groups. In some cases, the Nazi dictatorship justified its eugenics programmes through an aesthetic of scientific research – that is to say, using ethically questionable research goals and premises in conducting research, often producing ‘bad science’, in order to create and justify desired socio-political results through that supposed knowledge creation.Footnote ¹³ Simultaneously, the regime conducted research on coding and ciphering, nuclear fission and assault weapon production that demonstrated clear technoscientific innovations. Science also played a significant role in the oppression of people in Franco’s Spain.

One attempt at more carefully considering issues of gender and sexuality in the study of technoscience under dictatorship is Víctor Mora Gaspar’s At the Margin of Nature: The Persecution of Homosexuality during Francoism (Al margen de la naturaleza: La persecución de la homosexualidad durante el franquismo. Leyes, terapias y condenas). This work takes a unique approach to studying the history of science under the Francoist dictatorship by looking at the intersections between law and medical categories used to oppress ‘masculine homosexuality’, which the regime saw as both ‘perverted’ and medically treatable.Footnote ¹⁴ While works by Armand de Fluvià, Fernando Omeda, Alberto Mira, Alejandro Melero Salvador and Gracia Trujillo Barbadillo and edited volumes from Javier Ugarte Pérez and Juan A. Herrero Brasas have focused on the history of legal repression and subversion, Mora’s is the first to significantly expand upon our understanding of how science and legality both institutionalised queer oppression under Franco. By connecting law and medicine, the author places scientific research in a social context (in this case, a heteronormative legal structure), demonstrating how legality can affect the act of technoscientific research. He also offers an example of how the fascist tendency for queerphobia manifested itself under the regime. While studies of the medicalisation of queer people are not new, only recently have scholars revisited questions surrounding the ways authoritarian regimes implemented systematic oppression, not just legally and societally, but also how those dictatorships influenced the production of scientific research itself – which often were used to justify that oppression. Indeed, these questions are also applicable to democratic regimes.

Mora Gaspar shows that in the years prior to the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75), discourses on homosexuality were common amongst prominent scientists, medical doctors and academics. However, any serious discussion of homosexuality was considered a societal threat, as seen in work by the likes of propagandist Mauricio Carlavilla and Francoist judge Antonio Sabater Tomás.Footnote ¹⁵ To demonstrate this change in visibility of queer topics in public discourse, Mora Gaspar uses medical and scientific textbooks to show representations of queerness in the scientific community before and after the regime. The author analyses Gregorio Marañón’s 1929 text, Intersexual States in the Human Species (Los estados intersexuales en la especie humana), to reveal a frank discussion of medicalised queer identities in the pre-Franco years. In that text, Marañón, a polymath, uses the word ‘intersexed’, not to describe physical anatomy as a contemporary reader might expect, but more broadly as an umbrella term to describe all non-heteronormative genders and sexualities.Footnote ¹⁶ Although Marañón’s usage of ‘intersex’ functioned to label all queer people as ‘in-between’ a male and female binary, we still see a moment in which medical categorisation of queer identities is unsettled and present in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁷ For Marañón, ‘the inverted are, then, just as responsible for their abnormality as is the diabetic with his glucose’.Footnote ¹⁸ This type of medicalisation and diagnosis placed blame on queer people – leaving them to absorb the associated ‘responsibilities’ of their queerness. As problematic as Marañón’s understanding of queerness was, by comparison, under the Francoist dictatorship queerness was considered an action not to be treated, but to be eliminated and harshly punished. Indeed, Marañón’s work stands in stark contrast to that of German-Jewish advocate, sexologist and physician Magnus Hirschfeld, a contemporary, whose investigations of sexuality and gender through his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee) advocated for a place for queer people in German society at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Both men relied heavily on Charles Darwin’s pioneering work but used that research for vastly different policy conclusions.Footnote ²⁰

Further, to underscore the shift from a society that openly debated homosexuality to one closed off to discussing queerness under Franco, Mora Gaspar used what he describes as a ‘simple search’ of the word ‘homosexual’ in digitised magazines dating from the years 1920 to 1936 and found more than 100 results.Footnote ²¹ Comparatively, when using that same search term during the Franco dictatorship he finds no mentions of ‘homosexual’. Unfortunately, the author does not describe which databases he searched, nor does he describe what digital periodicals are referenced. We see here a moment in which our own contemporary technology potentially gives us a new insight to understanding a way in which queer identities were erased from public discourse under the Franco regime; however, the lack of specificity by the author reveals the potential danger in and limitation of contemporary research methods. One could imagine a footnote describing exactly how one could repeat Mora Gaspar’s search being rather useful, whether a digital archive or database, or Google even. It would also be helpful to know if the author used any euphemisms for homosexuality when searching. Even better, scholars could benefit from a tool that would allow a reader to replicate, or ‘replay’, an author’s search exactly – to see how the search query was defined.

One central premise in Mora Gaspar’s work is the insistence that to understand the creation of medicalised categories used to castigate queer people, we first need to understand the cultural milieu in which those categories emerged. Many such categories appeared concurrent to the ideological belief in ‘regeneration’ (regeneracionismo) – which arrived in Spain in 1898 as the country lost the last of its colonies and entered an identity crisis of its own. Mora Gaspar writes that ‘Regeneracionismo acquired notable relevance and was used as an argument to favour the elimination of all those that would have threatened the virile national spirit. And from that inheritance came the regenerationalist wave, widely studied, manipulated and poured into public discourse’.Footnote ²² For example, one widely read medical doctor, Antonio Vallejo Nágera, author of Hispanic Eugenics and the Regeneration of the Race (Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y regeneración de la raza, 1937) attempted to merge Francoist National Catholic ideologies with Nazi racial hygiene doctrines – advocating for castration as a way to make ‘psychopath’ homosexuals incapable of participating in sex. Vallejo Nágera called eugenic sterilisation the ‘perfect eugenic measure’ to eliminate queerness – claiming its wide success (given a belief that queerness was hereditary).Footnote ²³

In another case study, Mora Gaspar follows Mauricio Carlavilla, a homophobic, anti-communist, anti-Semitic author, who condemned the Weimar Republic for ‘break[ing] the weak legislative and political dikes that remained against sodomy’, calling Berlin ‘a new Gomorrah that infests all of Germany’.Footnote ²⁴ A more facile reading of queer oppression would simply consider this aversion to queerness as based primarily on Catholicism, but the author shows how Caravilla entwined sodomites in a conspiracy that implicated Judaism, communism and freemasonry – all supposed threats to the Spanish nation. The category of ‘sexual inversion’ was not immoral because of religious reasons but because of its connection to the left, implicitly, if not explicitly, highlighting the necessity for intersectional research to better understand the logical leaps necessitated so that to collapse social categories for the purpose of creating an ‘other’. For Caravilla, the pathologisation of queerness and leftism was exemplified in the personage of Republican president Manuel Azaña – who he claimed was a ‘passive homosexual’ – thoroughly elaborated upon in his manuscript titled Azaña. Biografía psico-patológica-sexual.Footnote ²⁵ These examples show that scholars have too quickly categorised Francoism as opportunistic Catholic authoritarianism – Mora Gaspar’s work demonstrates that more insidious fascistic tendencies similar to Nazism existed in Francoism, although that is not a point the author explicitly makes.

While Mora Gaspar’s book is quite light on archival sources, it indicates what potentially could be a much richer area of inquiry. Its strength is in the questions it asks and the frameworks it proposes. Although the book does not explain how the regime reacted to this discourse, it does show one way in which doctors and scientists in Franco’s Spain used medicalised categories to show queer people and leftists as ‘other’.

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While nationalism has long been a focus of studies in fascism, especially when compared to queer frameworks of analysis, Lino Camprubí’s Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (2014) gives scholars new understandings of ‘techno-nationalism’ through case studies focusing on rice yields, hydroelectric generation and concrete cement production.Footnote ²⁶ The author shows how technology emerged as a means to redeem the nation after the loss of Spain’s colonies in 1898. This concept continued into the First World War era, as Spain financially benefitted from its neutrality. During this period Spain’s financiers and industrial entrepreneurs built connections with engineers and state officials so that to bolster exports and shift Spain’s economy away from agriculture. Under Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship (1923–30), and even under the Second Republic (1931–6), industrialisation was steady, but hardly dramatic.

In the early years of Francoism, Camprubí argues, ‘technological nationalism became a legitimation tool that allowed the dictatorship to endure . . . despite its increasing contacts with Western democracies’.Footnote ²⁷ This technological nationalism, in part, set the stage for Spain’s industrialisation and even more dramatic shifts in what historians have termed ‘second Francoism’ – a period of intense economic growth and industrialisation under the dictatorship. Camprubí convincingly argues that Franco’s regime was legitimated by an idea of ‘redemption’ through state-funded works and industrialisation – showing how Franco’s rule claimed to make Spain ‘great again’ by providing new jobs and homes for rural population in need. Indeed, a comparison between Camprubí’s ‘redemption’ and Mora Gaspar’s ‘regeneration’ certainly could lead to new lines of historical inquiry. Camprubí does not explicitly discuss fascism in his analysis of technological nationalism and even pushes against any discourse of a fascist project after the Second World War.Footnote ²⁸ However, if one is to consider the role of technological nationalism in the Francoist project, it is necessary to confront the fascist tendencies behind that nationalism. Any discussion of Spain’s nationalism, especially in those years, must be considered in conjunction with Falangism, Spain’s variety of fascism. To omit a discussion of fascism from technological nationalism is to deny the very real remnants of fascism embedded in the foundations of Francoism, or to not understand nationalism as a constituent part of Spain’s fascism, including its later evolution, National Catholicism.

Clearly influenced in subject matter by Dolores L. Augustine’s Red Prometheus: Engineer and Dictatorship in East Germany, the author demonstrates the role of engineers in creating the Francoist state. However, unlike Augustine, who aptly discusses the ways technoscience blended with socialism, Camprubí misses the opportunity to deeply consider the ways fascist ideologies mixed (or did not) with Spanish technoscientific research and production, especially in the author’s discussions of National Catholicism and the National Institute of Colonialisation.Footnote ²⁹

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If Camprubí’s work intentionally distances itself from a study of fascism, Tiago Saraiva’s Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (2016) actively searches for threads that bind together diverse variations of fascism through his study of livestock and agricultural production – the first monograph to attempt to consider fascisms in comparison vis-à-vis new scholarly understandings of the Anthropocene. In his study of fascism in Portugal, Italy and Germany, Tiago Saraiva claims to push against narratives that science and technology fell to the wayside under Italian fascism and German Nazism, though he fails to demonstrates specific examples of where this has been argued.Footnote ³⁰ Despite numerous STS works that look at Nazism, Francoism or other specific case studies, Saraiva’s is the first comparative study that looks at science and technology under fascisms more broadly. Saraiva’s work depends upon his belief that ‘fascism is not taken as a pre-given context in which some scientists operated, but as an historical context to which scientists’ practices and objects contributed’. This argument is predicated on a fascist ontology over fascist epistemology.Footnote ³¹ For Saraiva, this question of ontology over epistemology is seen in what he calls technoscientific organisms – plants and livestock. These organisms made Benito Mussolini, António de Oliveira Salazar and Adolf Hitler’s nationalism ‘plausible’ because of their belief in the strength of a nation coming from its land. The author develops an argument that ties fascism to agricultural production after the First World War, bringing in discussions of livestock breading, seed production and ‘alternate modernities’ through his analysis of science and technology. Saraiva demonstrates how the ‘ethereal realm of ideas and the low sphere of materiality interact’Footnote ³² – that is to say he asks what are the intersections of both nationalist ideology and technoscience with the planet, its flora and fauna and human poverty. He claims that ‘the fascists’ argument was simple: not only had dependence on cheap cereals from the Americas impoverished peasants, driving them out of the fields, it had also exposed European countries’ vulnerability in case of war’.Footnote ³³

In part one of the book, Saraiva looks at how new strains of wheat produced in Mussolini’s ‘Battle of the Wheat’ affected other European countries by tracing geneticist Nazareno Strampelli’s Ardito wheat strain to Portugal. The author convincingly argues corporatist state agencies formed around the standardisation of technoscientific created wheat. He then turns to the German case, presenting a microhistory of potatoes and pigs as technoscientific organisms by looking at the Reich Food Corporation (Reichsnährstand) – the institutional organisation responsible for organising ‘peasants’ in accordance to food production.Footnote ³⁴ Other institutions, specifically the Imperial Biological Institute (Biologisch Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirschaft), dealt with issues such as wart, Colorado beetle, late blight and other viruses.Footnote ³⁵ In the case of pigs, scientists developed a new measurement that valued their ‘Bodenständigkeit’, being grounded or rooted in the soil – an ideology prominently expressed in the Nazi slogan ‘Blood and Soil’ (Blut und Boden).Footnote ³⁶ This ideology claimed that that which distinguished Germans from Jews was the German connectedness to the soil, as opposed to the supposed ‘uprootedness’ of the Jews.Footnote ³⁷ More broadly, such measurements demonstrate fascist scientists’ willingness to create new value categories that were fed by and bolstered nationalism. This argument effectively demonstrates the necessity of considering nationalism in the production of scientific knowledge.Footnote ³⁸

In part two, Saraiva looks at the ways Germany and Italy implemented colonialist expansionism in their projects, particularly through coffee production in the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, the development of rubber substitute in the German occupation of Eastern Europe and cotton production in the Portuguese colonisation of northern Mozambique.Footnote ³⁹ This history is particularly important when comparing forced labour both in the plantations and concentration camps, though the author is careful to recognise the particular type of violence suffered in each. Later, in what Saraiva describes as his ‘most original in terms of methodology’ because of its transnational comparison,Footnote ⁴⁰ chapter six looks at Karakul sheep and the ways that fascist Germany, Portugal and Italy used the animals in their colonialist projects in Eastern Europe, Libya and Ethiopia and Southwestern Angola.

Methodologically, this work demonstrates ways in which scholars can consider the effects of authoritarian regimes on the planet. Through his highly engaging and original work, Saraiva makes an effective argument for what the history of science and technology under dictatorship can become, drawing from intersectional approaches and considering environmental questions of how fascist authoritarianism transform both flora and fauna. Moreover, by presenting so many examples, he demonstrates concrete ways in which through fascism, humans have acted upon the earth – the heart of the usefulness of the concept of the Anthropocene.

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Considering the intersections of the environment, science, politics and sociality in the Soviet nuclear industry, Sonja D. Schmid’s Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (2015) investigates the how and why of the infamous Ukrainian nuclear disaster.Footnote ⁴¹ The text outlines the organisational framework of the industry, the professionalisation of power plant operators, the impact of the Cold War on the design of nuclear reactors and the global ramifications of the incident, arguing that the disaster was not specific to the authoritarian communist Soviet Union but could have happened in democratic and capitalist contexts as well.Footnote ⁴² Using published sources, numerous interviews and a plethora of government archives, Schmid visited Vienna, Moscow, Obninsk, Dresden, Saint Petersburg and Kiev while doing her research. Through this painstaking work Schmid shows the importance of considering large state bureaucracies more generally to understand disasters.

The nuclear programme depended upon atomic scientists making the case that the work they were doing both made ideological and financial sense. Schmid demonstrates in her narrative how some Soviet scientists, after the death of Stalin, jockeyed to maintain their privileged status, making an argument for the need to have nuclear power in the Soviet Union in order to ensure a ‘bright Communist future’.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, because most of the Soviet Union’s fossil fuel came from Siberia, nuclear energy was billed as something that could be produced closer to consumers, cutting transportation costs. Atomic energy allowed for the Soviet Union to keep valuable land from being flooded, a side effect of the hydro-electrical production process. While Schmid does not cite the concept of the Anthropocene, the connections are obvious and could be made more explicit. With these questions subtlety lurking in the background, Schmid shows the necessity of considering the socio-economic benefits for producers of nuclear energy. While Schmid’s proposition that the proximity of these potential radiation zones is a result of a simple calculation of transport costs is quite provocative and probably correct, the author’s work could have fleshed what these socio-economic benefits were more effectively, giving more examples, to make the point more concrete – as seen in Kate Brown’s Plutopia.

Schmid makes a convincing argument against the belief that under the totalitarian system people lived without choice, doing everything exactly as they were told. Citing what Alec Nove calls ‘the totalitarian myth’, she argues, ‘the goals of the centrally planned Soviet economic system were similar to the goals of Western market economies; growth, industrialisation and progress’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, planning was seen as a scientific endeavour: ‘instead of trusting abstract mechanisms as supply and demand, which were somehow embodied in ‘the market’, Soviet economic theorists envisioned that expert planners would monitor and adjust the system centrally’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Soviet State planning, effectively, relied upon ‘scientific rationality’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Although Producing Power could have benefited from more international comparisons, especially when discussing the choices made related to the design of the reactors, the text is largely successful in its description of Chernobyl as an incident. The work leaves one wanting a second volume that connects these social circumstances to the environmental effects, not just in the Chernobyl case, but also more globally. A thoroughly researched project, the author prepares fertile ground for scholars to cultivate – to tie human science, politics and sociality to the environment.

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When considered in concert each of these works researches historical questions related to technoscience and dictatorship through a variety of approaches – gesturing toward new ways historians can start to rethink those relationships. However, in these works, understanding the influence of large-scale governmental funding of technoscientific projects often falls to the wayside of studies that are more focused on particular groups of scientists and engineers and their research, and vice-versa. In the studies that do delve into the bureaucratic operations, we often lose the sense of any of these being motivated by the socio-political and ideological needs of the dictatorship. Historians are left asking what are the effects of dictatorial, hierarchal power structures on knowledge creation and distribution? What are the long-term repercussions of research on, and use of, technoscience on society and the planet?

These books represent a shift in the ways in which historians of technology and science are beginning to rethink European authoritarianism, pointing to what will become increasingly more necessary research questions: how do historians place scientists and researchers in their sociocultural contexts, using intersectional approaches, and how do we place those contexts into a perspective that considers the impact of humans living in our current geologic era, the Anthropocene? These questions are important not only for understanding our past, but increasingly, our future. Historians must move toward considering human impact on the earth and its organisms and consider the ways in which issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationalism and embodiment play into the ways humans change the planet we inhabit. These types of changes are obvious under authoritarian regimes, which have the capacity to move large bureaucratic levers, but this is also true of democratic governments, corporations, and other large non-state actors. At its heart, the Holocaust and the killing of Jews, people of colour, queer people, people with disabilities and leftists was an attempt to genetically change the human species based upon faulty science that sought to create a homogenous human population built on skewed understandings of history and who could belong to an ‘imagined community’. To understand humans’ time on earth and state apparatus’s ability to literally move people and modify lifeforms, we must understand our motivations, which can only be understood through intersectional approaches that help us to understand the complex reasons we do what we do, regardless of consequences to other lifeforms.

As Eglė Rindzevičiūtė points out, Nobel Prize-winning Dutch scientist Paul J. Crutzen’s concept of the Anthropocene owes a debt to Soviet scientists for their work in the development of the theory.Footnote ⁴⁷ She argues the concept of the Antropocene evolved, in part, from Russian geophysicist Vladimir Vernadskii’s (1863–1945) biosphere theory, which claimed ‘mankind and the Earth co-evolved through the interaction between geophysical and living systems’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Vernadskii believed that the Earth’s system would eventually develop into a ‘noosphere’, in which ‘global coevolution would become governable by human reason’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although the noosphere concept was considered apolitical by the Soviet regime, Rindzevičiūtė argues the theory ‘liberalized the Soviet mentality of governance replacing a centralist, top-down goal-setting with a notion of bottom-up government’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although Vladimir Vernadskii developed the theory, it was Soviet Russian scientist Nikita Moiseev (1917–2000) who turned it into an applied science beginning in the 1960s – even working with Crutzen on a famous nuclear winter study done in the 1980s. Global environmental problems were incorporated into the Soviet understanding of governance because of the dissemination of Moiseev’s ideas of Earth system science amongst the ruling and administrative classes.Footnote ⁵¹ Were it not for science produced under the Soviet dictatorship our understanding of the Anthropocene would probably be quite different.

In a talk given at the American Historical Association’s 2018 annual meeting, entitled ‘The Great Chernobyl Acceleration: How Writing European History has Changed in the Age of the Anthropocene’,Footnote ⁵² keynote speaker Kate Brown underlined the importance of historians thinking about human bodies (in particular those of working-class women working in factories) and the environment as an archive itself, pointing to the fact that governmental archives are sometimes absent or unreliable. As seen in her current research into Chernobyl, which moves discussion away from a singular disaster event to something more epochal, Brown’s forthcoming research relies upon her observations of mutated flora which had preceded what is understood as the Chernobyl disaster and Geiger counter readings, as well as interviews with the female factory workers. Thinking about the ways human technology has affected decay, Brown describes Chernobyl as a place where time has sped up and slowed down because of technoscience developed under the Soviet Union. Seeing the environment as an archive is potentially a model of what these types of new insights and this type of research could bring to the table, finding balance between an update to the Braudelian school of old while still considering what we have learned about the ways various intersectional ‘categories of historical analysis’,Footnote ⁵³ such as race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, embodiment and, perhaps, even species. Such questions might even help us to understand why humanity has failed to adequately address issues such as climate change.