Italian Fascist Conspiracy Narratives: Burning Churches and Stolen Children

With the accelerating presence of conspiracy narratives in modern politics in mind, this paper analyzes wartime conspiracy narratives and myths promoted by the Italian Fascist regime. Fascist conspiracy theories drew on national as well as international, religious as well as secular, conspiracy theories. Between 1936 and 1945, Fascist conspiracy narratives shifted from a focus on an international communist plot to destroy the Catholic Church, murder clergy, and force the faithful into states of mortal sin to a conspiracy narrative close to the race-based conspiracy theories promoted by Nazism. By the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Italian Fascism devised its own version of Nazi Judeo-Bolshevism, stressing Soviet/Russian barbarism and its plan for global destruction, as well as the plotting and racial pollution of the Jews who the Fascists claimed controlled the Soviet Union.