Paul Rouse

And you're right.

It's an attempt to push into every aspect of life.

And what better way, if you want to look at the hours between when people are working and sleeping or in school and sleeping, if you take that chunk of time for a lot of people is an engagement in sport.

It's both an opportunity and

to channel people in certain directions, but also an opportunity to channel their behavior as well.

So you got, in the case of Italy, the development of mass sporting movements, which happened in two ways.

First of all, it's the suppression and either the destruction or the colonization of organizations that were run by the communists in Italy or by the Catholic Church.

and their identification with the new regime.

And then the creation of a youth sports movement, the sport and leisure movement, more broadly, and an adult one, which attempted to draw Italians in, to not just develop the body in a certain way, but to get them to identify with the regime which was there, being constructed by Mussolini.

Well, the teachers who were being trained were being trained by army instructors who were brought in.

And you can see by these army officers who trained the physical fitness instructors who were going around the place, produced by 1936, there were 14,000 such instructors produced from these army academies.

And I think it's interesting, we'll see this later on, but

You look at the Argentinian in particular with Perón.

He was in Italy in these years.

He saw what was happening and he adopted this broader sporting approach to sport and the engagement with the army that he had witnessed in Italy during these years.

No, but when we go through this later on, you can see these ideas that were replicated.

I mean, what happened in Italy in the 20s and 30s?

These notions expanded and sport is part or they were exported.

I mean, and part of that is what happened in South America after the war.

It's not that Mussolini arrived in 1922 and there was the immediate creation of a fascist state.