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A staged propaganda photo of Italy's facist leader, Benito Mussolini "harvesting" wheat, 1938
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Can anyone explain WTF he was wearing motorcycle goggles in this photo? "Working" without a shirt, okay, sure, he wants a sunburn, that's his problem. But goggles? Is this some proto-cybergoth bullshit?
Actually, that is probably exactly what he was going for. Mussolini was a huge proponent of the Italian Futurist movement, and he had a lot of weird ideas about what was futuristic. Stuff like, "In the future, people will make their clothes out of milk." Anyway, aviation and representing aviation was a huge part of that, and he frequently used it in his propaganda.
Futurism was a fascinating movement; many of the ideas of the Manifesto of Futurism by Marinetti have ended up being absorbed by culture. The change of popular music--particularly synthpop, industrial, and techno--really capture ideas of futurism, regarding changing aesthetic tastes away from the classic.
It definitely got very intertwined with fascism, though. There were a lot of ideas like, "In the future, there will be no books. Books focus too much on the past, and we need to keep looking forward." The never look back mentality especially led to a lot of bad things, and it ended up directly inspiring fascism. It's pretty easy to see the close association, especially considering the Futurist Political Party got absorbed into Mussolini's party basically as soon as he created it.