Extreme heat waves disrupt honey bee thermoregulation and threaten colony survival

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Although honey bees have the ability to regulate hive temperatures, new research published in Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology shows that extreme summer heat can overwhelm these critical pollinators' cooling systems, leading to significant colony population declines.

The research in “Negative Effects of Excessive Heat on Colony Thermoregulation and Population Dynamics in Honey Bees,” conducted during a hot Arizona summer, monitored nine honey bee colonies through three months of temperatures that frequently exceeded 40°C (104°F). The results indicate that intensifying heat waves worldwide represent a significant threat to honey bees and the pollination services they provide.

"Honey bee colonies have well-documented mechanisms to cope with heat exposure," write authors Jun Chen, Adrian Fisher II, Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, Cahit Ozturk, Brian H. Smith, Jennifer H. Fewell, Yun Kang, Kylie Maxwell, Kynadi Overcash, Keerut Chahal, and Jon F. Harrison. "However, there have been no studies to date that have assessed the limits of such thermoregulation or how natural heat waves affect the capacity of honey bees colonies to thermoregulate and grow."

The research team discovered that while colonies maintained average brood temperatures within the optimal 34-36°C range necessary for healthy development, significant daily temperature fluctuations still occurred. Developing bees in the brood center experienced nearly 1.7 hours below optimal temperatures and 1.6 hours above them each day. Conditions were even more extreme at the brood edges, where young bees spent almost 8 hours per day outside the optimal range.

These temperature swings had measurable consequences. Higher maximum air temperatures and greater temperature fluctuations within hives led to population declines. The study found that "excessive heat, with maximal temperatures exceeding 40°C, can reduce colony populations by impairing the thermoregulation of brood or by exposing adults to temperatures that shorten their lifespans."

Colony size emerged as a critical factor in thermal protection. Larger colonies maintained more stable internal temperatures, with the smallest hives experiencing daily temperature swings of up to 11°C at the outer edges compared to 6°C in the largest colonies. This enhanced stability meant that developing bees and adult workers in larger colonies spent far less time exposed to potentially harmful temperature extremes.

Beyond Arizona, "Climate projections indicate that global average temperatures could rise by approximately 2.7°C by the end of the century, with potential increases up to 4°C under higher emission scenarios," the authors note. Such warming would intensify heat wave frequency and severity worldwide. Additionally, high humidity may compound these challenges in many regions. The authors note that "high humidity significantly reduces the effectiveness of evaporative cooling—the primary mechanism honey bees use to regulate hive temperatures—potentially making thermoregulation even more difficult."

The research has practical implications for beekeepers and agricultural systems that depend on honey bee pollination. The authors suggest that implementing effective management strategies, such as supplemental water provision, shading of hives, improved hive structure and materials that provide greater insulation, and ensuring high-quality forage will become increasingly important to mitigate impacts of high temperatures and maintain colony stability in a warming climate.

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Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology primarily publishes original research examining fundamental questions about how the ecological environment and/or evolutionary history interact with physiological function, as well as the ways physiology may constrain behavior. For EEP, physiology denotes the study of function in the broadest sense, across levels of organization from molecules to morphology to organismal performance and on behavior and life history traits.

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Journal

Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology

DOI

10.1086/739493 

Article Title

Negative Effects of Excessive Heat on Colony Thermoregulation and Population Dynamics in Honeybees

 INDIA

‘Save Last Honey Bee Before Human Existence Inches Toward Extinction’

D N Singh | 09 Jan 2026

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Botanists in Odisha are trying hard to promote beekeeping, as the impact of pesticides, habitat loss, and climate change lead to their disappearance.

The forests, once resonating with the music of chirping birds, rustling leaves, humming of insects and animal steps, have gone silent.

Forests are disappearing fast, rivers drying up, the homes of millions of species are in total jeopardy, to say the least. In the altar of development, these are being sacrificed for over a century. Every tree felled is just not wood lost, but a feather of heritage being plucked.

None other than, perhaps, scientist Albert Einstein predicted that with the end of the last honey bee from Earth, human existence too would come to an end.

Although this quote from Einstein remains unconfirmed, going by a post from USDA published in Natural Resources Defense Council. However, the threat to insects is seemingly growing faster than ever thought, as in all the spheres of the Earth, insects are on rapid decline. Both the creeper and the feathered species.  

Amid all this lies a question: why are the homes of bees being taken away, and how can they escape extinction?

While the real-time numbers vary, Odisha has thousands of beekeepers, with significant efforts by bodies like the Odisha Khadi Board and the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) training hundreds of farmers, and pioneers, such as Bikash Patra, empowering over 30,000 rural individuals, showing a growing, but still developing, beekeeping sector focused on tribal and rural livelihoods.

In late 2025, CSIR-NBRI trained 78 farmers in Koraput and Sambalpur and distributed 350 hives, notes a Facebook post from CSIR & National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI). 

The Odisha Khadi Board and CYSD supported 60 farmers with training and equipment in Keonjhar, with plans to reach 600 farmers.

Tribal Focus

Traditional tribal communities in Odisha have long collected honey, and efforts now focus on integrating modern techniques for better income, as detailed by The New Indian Express.

The most notable beekeepers in Odisha include Dr. Patra, a scientist leading the stingless bee revolution, and farmer-entrepreneurs like Bijay Kumar Bir, known for his successful Minibala Beekeeping Unit and training initiatives, and Rajesh Biswal (Mahua Mitu), a young guide in honeybee cultivation, all championing sustainable, profitable apiculture

Modern technology and monoculture have destroyed 75% of the world's biodiversity. The number of beneficial bees is decreasing rapidly. Einstein warned the people, "When the last bee disappears, there will be no human society “.  

Biologists have identified one million species of insects on the planet. Insects are the most abundant in the Kranti (turmoil) region. Because they get more food there. Their number may be 10 times more than scientists have calculated. Amid the destruction going on for the past 100 years in the name of development, these tiny creatures are being sacrificed in large numbers.

Insects and moths play a significant role in the balance of biodiversity. Moths are more or less found all over the world. Scientists have realised that their protection is essential for the well-being of mankind and the protection of nature.

India is one of the 12 biomes on the planet. Some species of these insects and moths help in the reproduction of fruits and seeds of plants. This process of reproduction is called pollination.

Birds, butterflies, bees, flies, bats, moths, small and large insect species do pollination. The fruits or seeds of plants can be pollinated in two ways. Pollination and angiosperm. Some species like cassava, potato, yam and banana are propagated by the vegetative process.

There are two types of pollination -- self-pollination and cross-pollination. Rice, wheat, maize, barley, oats, millet, and small grains reproduce by self-pollination. About 85% of the fruits and seeds of plants are produced by cross-pollination. Most fruits or seeds of flowering plants are produced by pollination. This work is done by insects like bees, bats, butterflies, and moths. Botany experts say that about 2% of plant reproduction is done by wind. As much as 73% pollination of cultivated or wild plants is done by bees. Isn’t this enough to understand the miracle of honey bees?

Simply put, the disappearance of bees would be devastating – from a biological, societal and economic standpoint. If we lose bees, we lose far more than honey; our crops, ecosystems and food systems all depend on their pollination. There is no species on earth, including us, that can do their job.

“When bees fly from flower to flower and suck honey, pollen sticks on their legs, hair and wings. The male carries pollen from the flower and sits on the female flower and collects honey, while the pollen gets stuck on the stigma of the flower. There is a tube from stigma to the stigma. When the pollen reaches the uterus through the tube, it becomes fertilised. The uterus then swells and produces fruits and seeds. Bees collect honey from about 700,000 species of plants that have been identified. There are about 60,000 species of bees in the world” Natabar Sarangi, a veteran botanical researcher and nature lover., told this writer.

We know that wild bees or tiger bees (wild bees), seven-horned, stinging, scorpion, and cored bees are some species. No bee is predatory. When some creatures like humans, bears, and foxes eat honey from the honeycomb, the bees become restless. Some of sting in self-defense. Engineer Amit Godse, founder of the Baskot Foundation in Mumbai, holds a tiger bee honeycomb in his hand and takes care of them. "We are afraid of bees without understanding them," he says. "We set fire to them to get honey. They attack us and sting us", he adds. Humans need to revisit the world of bees.

What Humans Must Learn From Bees

The Odisha Khadi Board is doing beekeeping promotion and propagation work. If you see the work of bees up close, you will be amazed. What an architect, craftsperson, an engineer is each of them! The way they make foam from wax, build cells is amazing.

All the cells are the same. Perfect measurement. Each has a queen bee, who is 2/3 times bigger than the worker bee. The humpback moves like an elephant. Thousands of worker bees guard it. Bees are a beautiful creation of nature. A bee can collect 100,000 times its weight in honey in a year. For this, three lakh flowers are required. They fly long distances and return to their hives with honey and pollen. Timeliness, discipline, and team spirit should be learned from them.

Why is the number of bees decreasing so rapidly? Why do hundreds of pumpkin flowers or lotus flowers bloom but no fruit remains? Why do farmers go to war with seed sellers? Answer: Chemical agriculture, green revolution and pesticides.

Diminishing Honey bees

In many parts of the world the decrease in the honey bee population can be simply attributed to the modern methods for better yield of produces, be it fruits, vegetable, grains, flowers and many other things.

Honey bee populations globally face significant threats, with alarming losses reported, averaging around 40% annually in the US, though numbers fluctuate, and some regions see concerning drops, like a potential 70% loss in 2025 predicted by some researchers, alongside regional declines in Asian honeybees and threats to native species.

Overall trends point to unsustainable losses driven by mites, pesticides, habitat loss, and climate change, impacting food security and biodiversity. 

There are significant figures showing honey bee declines in many Asian countries, especially for the native Apis cerana (a native honey bee specie), with some reports indicating over 50% decreases in occupied hives and honey production in regions of Nepal, and widespread severe losses in countries like Thailand, South Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, though some Asian nations like China and India have somehow managed bee populations increase due to commercial beekeeping.  

 “Also figures on honey bee decline in Odisha exist, with a significant 2017 study in Koraput and Rayagada districts showing four out of five native bee species declined by up to 90%, highlighting severe losses impacting crops like mustard, brinjal, and cucumbers, though precise state-wide, recent numbers remain difficult to pinpoint due to data gaps, emphasising impacts from pesticides, habitat loss, and climate change”, says S N Patra, a botanist. 

Until 1840, indigenous farming was done on the Earth, with ploughs. land was fertilised by applying manure and fertilisers. Farmers used to sow indigenous seeds and harvest crops. In 1840, John von Liebig invented chemical fertilisers. Farmers in Europe and America poured fertiliser instead of manure on the land. Soon pests and diseases started destroying crops. Pesticides were sprayed on the land. The bees, too, began to die in the process. In 1934, Swiss chemist Hermann Muller invented DDT, which helped control pests in crops”, but also affected bees, laments Sarangi.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Odisha with over 40 years’ experience in the profession.

The Counterculture That Sprang From San Francisco

Jonah Raskin

 February 21, 2025
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Mural, Bolinas, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year. Thousands of others flocked to the Haight, once a largely Black neighborhood, for the music, the drugs, and the revolution that was promoted by the Diggers, who named themselves after 17^th century English dissidents. Gerard Winstanley and his Digger comrades aimed to turn the world upside down would probably have felt at home in the Haight in 1967 when the great American counterculture was “busy being born” to borrow the words from Bob Dylan’s ballad  “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding).”

How counter was the counterculture?  And if you were alive then and there how counter was your own personal culture? Not sure? You might be able to decide on your own when the Counterculture Museum opens this spring on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the neighborhood where hippies and their friends reigned supreme for about two years in the late 1960s.

Then disaster struck. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad cops. Paradise rarely lasts long, not for Diggers or hippies. But the melodies from that time and place have played on and on. Dozens of books have been written about that era including Charles Perry’s brilliant The Haight Ashbury that comes with an introduction by Grateful Dead member Bob Weir who says, “We weren’t all stoned all the time. But we were all artists, musicians, and freaks all the time.”

The Haight staged a comeback in the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of gay men. Today it is a vital San Francisco neighborhood with Amoeba, a gigantic record store, Gus’s, an excellent grocery, two cannabis dispensaries, a post office, a few decent cafes and restaurants, and dozens of shops and boutiques selling tie-dyed T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers. It also attracts a great many tourists who want to imbibe the magic of the hippie era, buy rolling papers, roaches, posters and R. Crumb Comic books.

Estelle and Jerry Cimino, a husband and wife team and the founders of the Counterculture Museum—they are also the founders of the Beat Museum in North Beach —plan to give as much if not more space to the anti-war and civil rights movements as they do to the “youth culture” of the Sixties that created communes, staged rock festivals, made marijuana a commodity, and went on overland journeys to India to seek gurus in ashrams.

 That decision to blend the movement and the counterculture might surprise and even shock veterans and historians of the Sixties. After all, they were two separate entities from about 1967 to 1972. In those  heady days, Yippies tangled with members of SDS, Abbie Hoffman battled Tom Hayden of the Red Family and Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, who once called Abbie “a thorn in her side.” Abbie called her “Bernie” much to her distress.  At the time, the rivalries and clashes seemed as significant as the divisions in 1917 and 1918 between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks or those between American anarchists and American members of the US Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s.

In the fall of 1970— five months or so after the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State and police shot and killed two and injured twelve students at Jackson State—I joined a small delegation that traveled from New York to Algeria to meet with Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both living there in exile with the pipe dream of creating a new organization that would appeal to Black Panthers, Yippies, members of SDS, as well as psychedelic warriors who belonged to the League for Spiritual Discovery.

The other members of the delegation were Marty Kenner, Brian Flannigan, Anita Hoffman, Jennifer Dohrn and Stew Albert.  In the background in Algiers were Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge’s wife, and several young Panthers who had fled the US rather than go on trial and go to jail. In the elegant Panther embassy, in-between visits from the North Korean Ambassador, the young Panthers listened to Motown, smoked dope and danced. I danced and smoked with them. I also dropped acid with Leary and watched a visiting Russian volleyball team trounced an Algerian team.

Anita Hoffman represented Abbie who was not allowed to leave the US; that was an order from Judge Julius Hoffman who presided over the Chicago Conspiracy trial. Marty Kenner represented Panther support groups, Stew Albert spoke for his pal, Jerry Rubin, Jennifer Dohrn conveyed the sentiments of her sister, Bernardine and Brian Flannigan, who had been arrested during the “Days of Rage” in October 1969, expressed the anger of the quintessential street fighting man.

I had a singular objective. Bernardine asked me to meet with Eldridge and tell him in confidence that Leary was untrustworthy, that he had blabbed to reporters and acid heads, gave away secrets about the Weather Underground, and named the names of people who helped him escape from Lompoc Prison and also aided and abetted his flight from the US.

Eldridge taped my conversation with him and held an AK-47 (a gift of the North Korean Ambassador to Algeria) in his lap the whole time we talked. He overreacted to the information I delivered and put Leary and his wife Rosemary under house arrest. The members of the delegation were confined to Eldridge’s pad, which was different from the Panther Embassy and also different from the house in the hills where Eldridge lived with Kathleen.

Don Cox, the Panther Field Marshall gave us a tour of Algiers and described the history of the Algerian liberation movement. On one occasion we enjoyed a sumptuous seafood dinner, while a couple of CIA agents kept their eyes trained on us.

One afternoon, in the pad, I wrote a press release in which I quoted Eldridge, who called for armed struggle, and Leary who wanted cosmic voyagers to travel to outer space. Not surprisingly they couldn’t agree on anything. Also, not surprisingly they both returned to the US, surrendered to the authorities and made deals that kept them from long prison terms.

That fall, I flew from Algiers to Paris, reencountered with Abbie and met pseudo French Yippies —pseudo because they were living at home with their parents. I also roamed the Left Bank with Jean-Jacques Lebel, a French Beat, a translator, and a surrealist. We looked for trouble that never arrived. The young French Yippies seemed to have the best of two worlds. They defied older generations, rioted in the streets and came home to eat their mothers’ gourmet cooking.

My favorite person from that time was Bernadette Devlin, the Irish revolutionary who was fond of saying of the British, “kick them when they’re down.” Nasty but oh so satisfying.

At home in New York I wrote an account of Leary and Cleaver in Algeria. Paul Krassner published it in The Realist under the title, “Eldridge & Tim, Kathleen & Rosemary” and with an illustration that depicted the two couples in bed together in a spoof of the movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice that capitalized on and reflected some of the sexual politics of that era.

I don’t expect the Counterculture Museum to offer exhibits that will highlight the fiasco in Algeria or the odd position of the French Yippies who were both in and out of the global counterculture. The Ciminos emphasize unity not disunity, hope not despair, creativity not self-destruction and positive gains not loses. That’s surely the best tact to take especially since they want to attract visitors and inspire them.

The counterculture that sprang up in the Haight Ashbury is worth remembering and celebrating, especially because the Ciminos will connect it to the movements of the past and political causes of today.

Estelle describes the museum as though it’s a beloved child. “The Counterculture Museum will celebrate the vibrant legacy of Haight-Ashbury by preserving art, activism, and creative expression that once defined the neighborhood. Far from being a relic of the past, counterculture continues to shape music, fashion, social movements and the spirit of independent thinking,” she says.

Estelle adds, “By bringing history to life through exhibitions, events, movies and storytelling, the museum hopes to strengthen the community, enrich the cultural fabric of Haight-Ashbury, and support local merchants by drawing visitors eager to experience the authentic, enduring impact of the counterculture movements.”

It’s worth remembering because as far as I can see there are few if any genuine countercultures today in the US. Journalists and reporters who write about them seem to assume that they’re dead and buried.

In a recent article published in The New Yorker about the documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, and editor and director, Charlotte Zwerin, journalist Michael Schulman notes that the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in December 1969  marked “a death knell for the counterculture.” Indeed, it seemed to be the flip side of Woodstock. Ever since then cultural critics have held funerals and burials for the counterculture though in the 1970s the counterculture spread from  New York’s Lower East side and San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury to the countryside where it put down rural roots.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s in the aftermath of the bloodbaths at Kent and Jackson state I wrote two contradictory pieces about the counterculture: one of them titled “Children of Imperialism” which largely denounced youth culture and the other “New Morning which was issued as a communiqué by the Weather Underground and that herald the arrival of youth culture. Some Black Panthers described it as a betrayal of Third World Liberation struggles.

At that time I thought that the Weather Underground needed a base and a constituency; hippies seemed the only potential allies around, especially since the organization had given up on the white working class. But I could also see that hippies and freaks had adopted some of the racist notions of their parents. They idealized American Indians and Third World peasants and saw themselves as active consumers buying and selling drugs, music, and even rebellion which was framed as a commodity.

Perhaps the Counterculture Museum will convert millennials and members of Generation Z to the cause of rebellion and resistance today but it will be an uphill battle. “We seem to be going backward,” Estelle says, thinking of Trump and company. But she and Jerry Cimino are not giving up their culture war

“It’s important to educate young people about the past so they understand that positive change can happen today just like it did in the 1960s and 1970s,” she says. Jerry adds that the counterculture of the 1960s happened because “the boomers reached critical mass and because their coming coincided with the arrival of global electronic mass media.” Today technology seems more reactionary than ever before, especially when it’s in the hands of autocrats like Elon Musk and his minions.

If the Ciminos wanted help with their museum they could do no better than turn to Stannous Flouride who has lived in the Haight for 43 years and who gives popular walking tours in the neighborhood wearing a black leather jacket and an ancient button that screams “Yippie!”    “City Hall hated the hippies,” Flouride says. “Mayor Joe Alioto wanted to destroy them, so he canceled services to the neighborhood, like garbage removal, which prompted the Diggers to organize a ‘clean-in.’ The Diggers fed thousands of kids and provided the spiritual and political backbone for the hippies.”

If Flouride were creating a counterculture museum he says he’d feature the Diggers, The Panthers, jazz, rock, the January 1967 “Human Be-in” and the “Summer of Love.” He adds “there is really no counterculture here as there was in the Sixties.” He adds, “The only remaining counterculture is hip hop which appeals to both young whites and young Blacks.”

If I wanted to revive a slogan from the Sixties and put it back in circulation it might be, “The spirit of the people is greater than the Man’s technology.” It was greater in Vietnam and it can be greater around the world again. Get off your phones and your laptops. Go into the streets and make as much noise as you can.

If the Counterculture Museum succeeds it will send visitors into the streets of the Haight and beyond. It will turn into its opposite, not a museum with artifacts but a cradle of resistance and rebellion with ideas and tools for insurrections. After all, museums are usually repositories of the past, and as such they are innately conservative and rarely innovative. It’s time to bring about a cultural revolution in the world of the counterculture.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

What Does Fascism Look Like? A Brief Introduction

Stephen F. Eisenman

 October 11, 2024
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Trump Rally, Juneau, Wisconsin, Oct. 6, 2024. ABC News (Screenshot).

The ideology of fascism

It would be good to be able to recognize fascism when you see it. Sight is our dominant sense (light travels faster than sound) and provides us warning. In addition, because “fascist” is an epithet as well as political term, it must be used carefully. In 1942, a New Hampshire Jehovah’s Witness named Chaplinsky was arrested after calling a Rochester city marshal a “damned fascist.” The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the arrest on the grounds that the expression constituted “fighting words,” excluded from constitutional protection. Recent court decisions in the U.S. have widened speech freedoms, but the word “fascist” remains highly charged, underlining the need for historical and political discretion.

Because of Hitler and Mussolini, it’s relatively easy to recognize fascism retrospectively. Though Hitler preferred the term “National Socialism” and Mussolini “fascism”, their regimes had enough in common that we can use the single word, fascism, to describe them both. They were violent, imperialist, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-individualist, and nationalist. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” a phrase coined by Roger Griffin in 1991, describes their shared, underlying ideology: interwar fascists believed they were spurring the revolutionary rebirth and modernization of a decadent nation for the benefit of racially superior citizens. Fascism is hierarchical and corporatist; it endorses existing aristocracies of birth and wealth; it is capitalism in its desperate, parasitical phase.

Fascist iconography

While the Germans worshipped ancient Norsemen and Aryans, the Italian fascists venerated the Roman Empire. They embraced its symbols – the fasces (a bundle of sticks with an ax in the middle) and she-wolf. That the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a wolf, allowed the Italian fascists to proclaim their own decent from a fierce and ruthless beast. Like the Roman emperors, Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, Mussolini and his followers were bent on imperial conquest. Mussolini was Il Duce, the name derived from the Latin dux, or Roman military commander.

The attainment of national and racial destiny, according to the fascist idea, is the result of individual will. Both Italian and German regimes were premised upon the “leadership principle” — in German Führerprinzip — the idea that power and wisdom reside in a single, great leader and that the people owe him loyalty and obedience. In 1936, Hitler and Mussolini quietly agreed to support each other politically and militarily; two years later, they openly formalized the relationship in a “Pact of Steel.” By the Spring of 1945, both were dead – the one by suicide, the other killed by a mob of ordinary Italians.

Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will, 1935.

Because of the indelible stain it left, fascist iconography is memorable: the toothbrush moustache and stiff salute, swastikas, goose-stepping troops, the SS symbol, black shirts, and the ancient fascist emblem itself. Here are two stills from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary/propaganda film Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg; And here are two propaganda photos of Mussolini reviewing his troops. Together, they represent militarism, masculinism, elitism, nationalism and the Führerprinzip,

Photographers unknown, Mussolini speaking (Rome, 1940) and Reviewing Troops (Rome, c. 1938).

This iconography was so well known that it could be satirized by Charlie Chaplin in his popular, 1940 film, The Great Dictator. The story concerns a Jewish barber (no name given) who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Both roles are played by Chaplin. (Rather than Führer, he’s called the “phooey” of Tomania.) Hynkel is allied with, but also in comic competition with Benzio Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria, played by Jack Oakie.

The movie is vague on the details of Nazi politics and ideology. But the best three minutes of the movie – Hynkel’s ballet with a giant balloon-globe — effectively suggests the imperial ambitions of fascist leaders. It includes many of the icons of Nazism: Hitler’s moustache, uniforms, jackboots, eagle, and swastikas (the latter so well-known they can be changed into doubled x’s). The balloon/globe — which bursts at the end — suggests both Hitler’s violence and self-destructiveness.

Still from The Great Dictator.

Not until the end of the war, did Chaplin fully learn about another Nazi iconography: piles of emaciated dead bodies, hollow-eyed survivors, showers that sprayed poison gas instead of water, industrial-sized crematoria, and the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (“work sets you free”), above the entrance to the forced-labor/death camp at Auschwitz. During the Nuremberg trials (1945-47), documentary films played in court showing these icons of genocide. They were edited and replayed as newsreels all over the world.

From concentration camp films, shown at Nuremberg Trials, Nov. 29, 1945.

Fascist architecture and art in Italy and Germany

If that were all there was to the visuality of fascism, the question in my title would be answered. Look for swastikas, goosesteps, stiff arm salutes, jackboots, or the sign Arbeit Macht Frei, and there you’ll find fascism. But the visual culture of interwar fascism is obviously much more extensive than that, encompassing fine art, architecture, and design. And it’s quite varied — up to a point.

Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como,1932–36. (Photographer unknown).

During their first decade in power, fascist authorities in Italy allowed a wide variety of artistic and architectural styles to co-exist and even flourish. Avant-garde modernism, with its focus on structure and function, appealed to a state striving to develop or modernize its infrastructure. Many civic buildings, schools and railway stations — such as the Santa Maria Novella (1932-35) by Giovanni Michelucci and others — present an austere, modernist aspect. The archetypal example of fascist modernism however, is Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, in Como (1932–36). The building, with its planarity, grid, and lack of ornament, draws upon Walter Gropius’s innovations at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, and Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House, among other buildings. Tarragni was part of Gruppo Sette, a coalition of Italian rationalists. In their 1926 manifesto, they rejected Expressionism and Futurism in favor of “logic and rationality.”

Marcello Piacentini, Palace of Justice, in Milan,1932-40. (Photographer unknown).

Mussolini himself in 1933 proclaimed rationalism the correct architectural style for fascist Italy, but internal and external competition forced a change, and by the middle 1930s, a more traditional and ostentatious architecture – an architecture of power — was favored. An example is Marcello Piacentini’s colossal Palace of Justice, in Milan (1932-40). It speaks the language and rhythm of classicism – tripartite horizontal and vertical division of the main facade, rusticated lower level, tripartite central portals, half columns between the windows, plus cornices and entablature. But ornamentation (capitals, fluted columns, pediments and decorative moldings) is reduced or eliminated. Classical antiquity is recalled not by detailing, but sheer monumentality — it has 1200 rooms — and lavish materials, chiefly marble and bronze.

In Nazi Germany, the modern movement in architecture – meaning the Bauhaus and its planning and design offshoots — was cast aside as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, though no theory or program of art and architecture ever took its place. Instead, modern artists and designers and more traditional ones were forced into competitions which the former could not possibly win. Thus, classicism – at once buffed-up and stripped down –was the chosen idiom for major architectural commissions such as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich (1936) by Paul Troost, and the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin by Albert Speer (1939).

Postcard of Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich, 1936.

Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown).

Speer was of course the kingpin of Nazi architecture. He was Hitler’s favorite and later named Minister for Armament and War Production, in which post he commanded hundreds of thousands of slave laborers. Speer claimed to have no architectural program or theory, only a desire to tailor his plans to the Fuhrer’s will. Indeed, his buildings, and Nazi public architecture in general, are not programmatic expressions of Nazi ideas about race, Lebensraum, Judeo-Bolshevism or the Führerprinzip. In both architectural and symbolic terms, they are banal in the extreme. They are however, effective instruments of political strategy, in particular, war planning. Parade grounds, Zeppelin fields, stadiums, party headquarters, the Chancellery and more were built with a speed and scale intended to drum up enthusiasm for war. They were public demonstrations that Germany was a powerful and ambitious nation. Only a state with a legitimate claim on empire would build on such an imperial scale and at such expense. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler said of the Chancellery, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Two over life-sized figures by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor, flank the entrance court; on the left is Partei and on the right, Wehrmacht. They are roughly derived from the famous ancient Greek bronze figure of Zeus, hurling a thunderbolt.

Albert Speer, New Reich Chancellery, grand gallery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)

Arno Breker, Partei and Wehrmacht, outside, New Reich Chancellery, 1939. (Photographer unknown.)

As in architecture, so in art. There was no single aesthetic criteria guiding Nazi or fascist painting and sculpture, except the consistent preference for traditional over modern art. That, however, was not unusual. Representational art was the preference across Europe, Russa, and the Americas. It could be used for indoctrination, persuasion or entertainment, and was deployed by progressive as well as regressive institutions and states. Despite the inroads of modernism, traditional art retained its popular appeal. It was familiar – available to be seen in churches, newspapers, advertising, and movies – and therefore comforting. The great modernists on the other hand — Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, etc – despite their considerable success, were little understood by the broad public.

Where fascist or totalitarian states differed from capitalist democracies, was in their enforcement of the preference for traditional art. In Nazi Germany, this was most clearly manifested in the contest between the annual Great German Art Exhibitions, inaugurated in 1937, and the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937-38. The former arose from an open

Great German Art Exhibition, Haus der Deutschen Kunst, 1937 (photographer unknown).

Catalogue for Great German Art Exhibition, 1937; Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements, 1934.

invitation to artists in 1937 to submit works for national exhibition at the new, Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich. After seeing the submissions, which included some modern and expressionist works, Hitler was furious. A few years before, he had called modern artists “incompetents, cheats and madmen.” He thereupon fired the jurors (who had been chosen by propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels) and appointed his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman to curate the selection. In addition, he endorsed

Visitor at Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich, 1937.

Goebbels’ proposal to mount a didactic exhibition of the rejected artists and many others, under the rubric “Entartete Kunst”. The “degenerate artists” included much-derided German expressionists such as Grosz, Dix, Kirchner, Marc, and Nolde, as well as dozens of others, including Impressionists, Post-Impressionists (including Van Gogh), Cubists, Dadaists, Surrealists and more. The works were hung helter-skelter among wall texts that read, for example: “nature, as seen by sick minds”, “madness becomes method”, “revelation of the Jewish racial soul” and “deliberate sabotage of national defense” (the latter displayed anti-war imagery by Dix, Grosz and others). And while the Great German exhibition was lauded in the Nazi-controlled press and the Degenerate exhibition mocked, the former was little visited while the latter attracted nearly 3 million total viewers. It was probably the most visited art exhibition of all time. Whether that represents widespread embrace of the Nazi derision of modern art, or broad endorsement of the works is unclear.

Crowd awaiting entry to Degenerate Art exhibition, Berlin 1938 (photographer unknown).

What does fascism look like today?

Fascism doesn’t have a light switch with an on/off setting. It may be found in capitalist democracy, just as democracy may be discovered in the recesses of fascist states. Maybe it’s better to say fascism is controlled by a dimmer switch. Under Donald Trump, turned up quite high. Under Biden it has been dialed down, but still glows in the background and sometimes flares up, like in the current U.S. president’s growing anti-immigrant rhetoric, or his consistent support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and now Lebanon. That’s fascism by proxy.

George Bergstrom, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA, 1941-43.

However, it’s difficult to speak of fascist art and architecture in the U.S. The amount of public patronage of art is tiny, and what exists is extremely diverse in form and style. There are certainly municipal, state and federal buildings that serve deeply oppressive, even fascistic, purposes: prisons, psychiatric hospitals, military bases, and some schools. And a few buildings, like the U.S. Pentagon resemble in monumentality and style, buildings by Speer. (It was built just two years after the completion of The New Reich Chancellery, and may have been influenced by it.) But these are outliers and marked by contradiction. For example, when the Pentagon was completed in between 1943, it was the only public building in the state that had integrated lunchrooms and toilet facilities. In that respect, it may have been the least fascist building in Virginia!

Sue Coe, Rio Grande, 2023. (Courtesy the artist).

Today, the U.S. the border wall with Mexico – actually, dozens of different and colliding walls, fences, and natural barriers – is an icon of fascism. So are the concentration camps (detention centers) that temporarily house immigrants. But the image of these facilities — in photographs and memory — have also made them a resource of anti-fascism, as apparent in drawings and linocuts by British-born, U.S. artist Sue Coe. For example her linocut titled Rio Grande, depicts immigrants caught up in razor wire and drowned on the Texas/Mexico border. This actually happened on Jan. 14, 2023. (For more such images, please see our new book, The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism.)

A more clear-cut diagnostic of fascism is the MAGA hat. Trump often wears one when he gives speeches, and regularly repeats the phrase “make America great again.” Here’s a few lines from a speech he gave in 2023, that has since become standard at rallies: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions, from all over the world. Without borders and fair elections, you don’t have a country. Make America great again.”

MAGA is today emblazoned on millions of caps, T-shirts, yard-signs, flags and more, It’s an expression of palingenetic ultranationalism — almost. By proposing the revival of an earlier time, it’s more conservative than revolutionary; and the “greatness” it promises is not imperialist. There is no discussion of “lebensraum”. Indeed, Trump’s other major slogan, “America First” is isolationist, dating back to Charles Lindberg’s America First movement, which aimed to head off U.S. participation in World War II. But given Trump’s rhetoric about Iran and China, as well as his proposals to increase military spending and massively update and expand the nation’s nuclear arsenal, I’d argue that his policies are in fact expansionist – in that sense, fully consonant with fascist militarism and imperialism. Trump’s rallies suggest he has a war strategy. They are intended to mobilize thousands of followers who will, if needed, storm U.S. voting stations, state capitals and the capital in Washington to overturn an unwelcome election outcome.

As we have seen, fascism has no settled or essential iconography. It can’t. Wherever it appears, it draws from motifs and ideologies that are distinctive to that particular nation. In 1939, a Yale professor and Methodist minister named Halford Luccock gave a lecture at Riverside Church in New York City. Observing the growing strength of Nazism and fascism abroad and a rising fascist movement in the U.S., he warned his audience:

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’…The high-sounding phrase ‘the American way’ will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties.”

Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-32, himself often called a fascist, said: “American Fascism would never emerge as Fascist, but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet.”  Fascism, as I said at the beginning of this brief survey, is easy to see in retrospect, but not in prospect. However, when it appears right in front of you, identification becomes simple – signs and symbols appear everywhere. As we approach the U.S. election, we can clearly witness one political party’s tight embrace of fascism – but seeing it doesn’t mean we can easily stop it.

Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Guide to American Fascism,” and is forthcoming from OR Books. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu  

NDP LEADER TOMMY DOUGLAS  'THE GREATEST CANADIAN'