[Download Full Movie Paper Soldiers In Italian
Everardo Laboy
Diana Garvin is an assistant professor of Italian with a specialty in Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. Garvin authored Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Foodwork (University of Toronto Press, 2022). Garvin's research on Fascist Italy and Italian East Africa has been supported by the Fulbright Global Scholar Award, Getty Library Research Grant, Rome Prize, Wolfsonian-FIU Fellowship, CLIR Mellon Fellowship, and Oxford Cherwell Fellowship.
Under the Fascist regime, young Italians amused themselves by practicing the war games of adulthood. Paper soldiers marched across board games set in the newly established empire of Italian East Africa. To reveal how these vicious lessons worked, this article examines three types of toys. It starts with the design and deployment of paper soldiers: Italian Alpinisti, Eritrean Ascari, and Somali Dubat. Next, a playbook for The Conquest of Abyssinia boardgame provides a guide to military conquest. Finally, I examine where these toys come from, revealing the financial structures that underpinned colonial propaganda for Fascist government projects. Ultimately, toys wrote scripts for adult violence in the colonies.
Apparently these were modest numbers when compared with those of other European countries: in France, it is estimated that, during the conflict, the units of correspondence amounted to about 10 billion, and as high as 30 billion in Germany, while in Great Britain it is estimated that at least 20 million letters were sent from the Western Front to the home front each week.[3] Italy's numbers were not so meagre; in fact, they were surprisingly high when compared with the number of soldiers mobilized and especially with the literacy rates registered in Italy on the eve of the war. On average, certainly with some significant differences between young people and the elderly population, and between the more literate northern areas and the southern ones, nearly 40 percent of the population could neither read nor write. In France, in the same period, more than 95 percent of conscripts were literate. Applying this data, perhaps a little superficially, to the mobilized military, without going into issues related to the processes of literacy and schooling, it can be said that almost 2 million soldiers left for the war without knowing how to write a letter home, well aware that, in any case, no one else in the house would have been able to read it. Several studies, supported by the statistical data, have shown the ways in which many soldiers learned to write during the war. In some cases, they learned with the help of fellow comrades in arms, in others with that of the military chaplains present in the armed forces, and not just because they were driven, in obvious circumstances of constant danger, by the desire to not interrupt contact with relatives or acquaintances back home, but also because many saw, in the daily exercise of writing, a possible refuge from the anguish, suffering and precariousness of war, an opportunity of making sense of this experience.[4] Some, even among those who were least competent and had little experience in writing, were able to record real diaries about their experience of war, succeeding in an attempt to leave a record of an event which immediately seemed, to all the protagonists, boundless, radically new, therefore memorable.[5]
The management of this mass of paper was entrusted to the Military Post, a structure set up specifically for the war. Correspondence arriving and departing for the front, from the beginning of the conflict, was, in fact, taken from civilian offices and sent to military ones. In accordance with regulations issued in March 1915 by a special commission established by the Ministry of Post, which was charged with reviewing the entire preceding legislation and transmitting provisions for censorship to the offices, to which the mail would be submitted during the conflict. The main point of collection and sorting of mail was in Bologna, considered a strategic city because it was not far from the front, while there were four subsidiary offices in different parts of the country in the cities of Bari, Naples, Taranto and Treviso. This venue, due to its proximity to the war zone, was dismantled and reunited with that of Bologna in November 1917. These main offices, along with other minor centres scattered throughout the country, initially organized to manage the correspondence of 500,000 soldiers, had, immediately, to triple their efforts, and subsequently, serve more than 5 million mobilized soldiers. This caused many problems with the timely delivery of mail, especially at the beginning of the war, and then during periods of high traffic, when there were more than 4 million letters a day.
More generally, the letters have permitted the emergence of the gap between the mass of peasant soldiers sent to fight for ideals almost unknown to most of them, and the minority of young volunteers or officers of bourgeois extraction and education, who were more motivated and more likely to exhibit being in favour of the conflict, though no less careful to keep the sentimental and emotional relationships with family members back home alive through writing. There are, in this regard, interesting love letters produced by soldiers or officers, who were protagonists of very intense exchanges of correspondence with girlfriends or wives at home, characterized by very formal writing, within which, with calm and sober tones, they recounted the war-time events, emphasizing the most edifying aspects of the conflict, and often not mentioning the horrors.[10] The writing produced by the more literate, bourgeois soldiers, in some instances underwent processes of monumentalization even during the war, as they were published, in accordance with propaganda aims, through newspapers or books, or used as spiritual testaments of soldiers who died at the front. The war zone was not the only place of intense correspondence: internment and imprisonment also forced soldiers to come to terms with writing. For many, this was an opportunity, away from the activity of the front line, for reflection, or for thinking about their war-time experience. The confinement in prison camps, made even more unbearable by the preliminary charge of desertion and the resulting lack of supplies from the Italian government, made the soldiers resort to writing, mostly using the duty-free postcards distributed by the Red Cross, to ask family members, almost always obsessively, to send parcels containing goods of prime necessity such as food and clothes.[11]
Quite often, the war letters were accompanied by pictures. In rare cases, it was the soldiers themselves who drew sketches, which were either more or less successful in ornamental terms, or, more often, enriched and supported a limited and stunted lexicon and repertoire of information. The more creative, challenging the censorship, were able to reproduce the curious objects handled at the front, hutments and make-shift housing, outlines of mountains and views of landscapes. More often, the correspondence was accompanied by illustrations commissioned from professionals or well-known sketch artists, including illustrated postcards. The diffusion of the latter was accompanied by intense propaganda whose real potential was not unknown, given that all the belligerent countries adopted every means in this direction. On the Italian front, the most recurrent themes were those related to the campaigns for war loans, which aimed at convincing Italians to invest, before the intervention, then in the mobilization and resistance to the bitter end, and finally in the reconstruction of the country. This incalculable series of images also proposed, in their various facets, the heroism and courage of the Italian soldier, the demonization of the enemy, and the solidarity of the combatants. Also very widespread among the soldiers were the postcards with a religious background, which, through a clever mix of mottos, slogans and icons borrowed from religious doctrine and patriotic propaganda, explicitly supported the arguments for the war and only rarely expressed pacifist views. Many of these images contained drawings that were based on standardized iconographic models, which were also used, for the same purpose, by institutions in other countries at war. In this sense, the illustrated postcards were one of the most obvious and early examples of linguistic standardization of mass communication, suffice it to mention the common matrix of the many images used in those years by commercial advertising and then taken up and adapted to the language of political propaganda in various European countries.[13]
The fight broke out at disco Liv in Bassano del Grappa, and it involved U.S. soldiers and "a group of men of African origin," according to Italian paper Il Giornale di Vicenza. The paper reported the fight involved about 40 people, including the soldiers; some were armed with knives and broken bottles.The soldiers are assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, which is stationed in Vicenza, Italy, Stars and Stripes reported.
The fight broke out at disco Liv in Bassano del Grappa, and it involved U.S. soldiers and \"a group of men of African origin,\" according to Italian paper Il Giornale di Vicenza. The paper reported the fight involved about 40 people, including the soldiers; some were armed with knives and broken bottles.The soldiers are assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, which is stationed in Vicenza, Italy, Stars and Stripes reported.
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