Context - Giuseppe

• The poem 'Giuseppe' was written by Roderick Ford
• The poem 'Giuseppe' is set in Fascist Italy during WW2, during Benito Mussolini's Fascist Regime, the poem uses dreamlike imagery to explore what happens when people manage to persuade themselves that other people aren’t human
• The poem 'Giuseppe' is set in Fascist Italy during WW2, during Benito Mussolini's Fascist Regime
• The Mermaid in the poem might be read as a symbol of all the people whom the Nazis and their allies dehumanised and murdered during World War II
• The Fascists of the WWII era represented the Jewish people (and other persecuted groups, including gay people and the Romani & Sinti) as subhuman (Untermenschen)
• As the Great Cartoonist Art Spiegelman has famously explored, Fascist Propaganda justified mass murder (Genocide) by depicting Jewish people as rats, mice, and cockroaches
• Writing in 2005, perhaps Roderick Ford was also thinking of the war that the United States and United Kingdom had recently launched in Iraq - a war of dubious motives that would kill many innocents
• During the Holocaust, it was believed that over 6 Million Jews were killed by the Nazis