The basis of Fascist racism can be found in the document titled Fascism and the Problems of Race, based on pseudoscientific theories, was hosted among other programmatic articles in the magazine La difesa della razza in issue 1 of August 5, 1938.
“A group of Fascist scholars professors in Italian universities under the aegis of the Ministry of Popular Culture set out in the following terms what is the position of Fascism towards the problems of race:
- Human races exist. The existence of human races is not already an abstraction of our spirit, but corresponds to a phenomenal, material reality, perceptible with our senses. This reality is represented by masses, almost always imposing masses of millions of men similar in physical and psychological traits that were inherited and continue to be inherited. To say that there are human races does not mean a priori that there are superior or inferior human races, but only that there are different human races.
- There are great races and small races. It is not only necessary to admit that there are the major systematic groups, which are commonly called races and which are individualized by only a few characters, but it is also necessary to admit that there are minor systematic groups (e.g., the Nordics, Mediterraneans, Dinarics, etc.) individualized by a greater number of common characters. These groups constitute from the biological point of view the true races, the existence of which is a self-evident truth.
- The concept of race is purely biological concept. It is therefore based on other considerations than the concepts of people and nation, which are based essentially on historical, linguistic, and religious considerations. Underlying the differences of people and nation, however, lie differences of race. If the Italians are different from the French, Germans, Turks, Greeks, etc., it is not only because they have a different language and a different history, but because the racial constitution of these peoples is different. They have been different proportions of different races, which from a very ancient time constitute the different peoples, whether one race has absolute dominion over the others, or whether they all turn out to be harmoniously fused, or, finally, whether the different races still persist inassimilated one to the other.
- The population of present-day Italy is in the majority of Aryan origin and its civilization Aryan. This population with Aryan civilization has inhabited our peninsula for several millennia; very little has remained of the civilization of the pre-Aryan peoples. The origin of present-day Italians starts essentially from elements of those same races that constitute and constituted the perennially living fabric of Europe.
- It is a legend the contribution of massive masses of men in historic times. Since the invasion of the Lombards there have been no other notable movements of peoples in Italy capable of influencing the racial physiognomy of the nation. From this it follows that, while for other European nations the racial composition has varied considerably in even modern times, for Italy, in its broad outlines, the racial composition of today is the same as it was a thousand years ago: the forty-four million Italians of today thus revert in the absolute majority to families who have inhabited Italy for at least a millennium.
- There is now a pure “Italian race.” This statement is not based on confusing the biological concept of race with the historical-linguistic concept of people and nation but on the very pure blood kinship that unites the Italians of today with the generations that have populated Italy for millennia. This ancient purity of blood is the greatest title of nobility of the Italian nation.
- It is time for Italians to proclaim themselves frankly racist. All the work that the Regime has so far done in Italy is at bottom racism. Always frequent in the speeches of the Leader has been the reference to concepts of race. The question of racism in Italy must be treated from a purely biological point of view, without philosophical or religious intentions. The conception of racism in Italy must be essentially Italian and the address Aryan-Nordic. This does not mean, however, to introduce into Italy the theories of German racism as they are or to claim that Italians and Scandinavians are the same thing. But it only wants to point out to Italians a physical and above all psychological model of human race which by its purely European characters is completely detached from all non-European races, this means raising the Italian to an ideal of superior self-consciousness and greater responsibility.
- It is necessary to make a clear distinction between the Mediterraneans of Europe (Westerners) on the one hand and the Orientals and Africans on the other. Therefore, theories that claim the African origin of some European peoples and include in a common Mediterranean race also Semitic and Camitic peoples by establishing absolutely inadmissible ideological relations and sympathies are to be considered dangerous.
- Jews do not belong to the Italian race. Of the Semites who over the centuries landed on the sacred soil of our homeland nothing in general has remained. Even the Arab occupation of Sicily left nothing but the memory of a few names; and besides, the process of assimilation was always most rapid in Italy. The Jews represent the only population that has never assimilated in Italy because it is made up of non-European racial elements, absolutely different from the elements that gave rise to the Italians.
- The purely European physical and psychological characters of the Italians must not be altered in any way. Merging is permissible only within the sphere of European races, in which case one should not speak of true hybridism, since these races belong to a common stock and differ only in some characters, while they are the same in a great many others. The purely European character of the Italians is altered by crossbreeding with any breed that is non-European and the bearer of a civilization different from the millennial civilization of the Aryans.”