Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 2

Ritualised Violence and the Cosmology of Terror – ‘Kosher Meat’ and the Satyr

‘For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets’[1], Mile Budak, July 22, 1941

‘....the most important thing was to act’[2], Codreanu

Having made their diagnosis of society’s endemic ills, the fascists were left with the problem of how to bring about national revolution. In this, fascists were united in their rejection of ‘bourgeois’ socio-political norms and routines of power and governance. Such systems were part of the problems contributing to, and indeed a cause of, the societal decadence and decay they discerned. Due to democracy and meek Christian virtues, ‘the Romanian cause everywhere suffered and bowed to the foreigner’[3] and as such ‘...We cannot fight against those forest bandits with a prayer book in our hands’[4]. Their impulse to change, they boasted was not based fallacious notions of programs and party policy and consensus. Rather the idea, the act of will was the central dynamic, one that would be communicated by their choice of ‘social strategy’. The act of will could overcome the perceived crisis of modernity, via ‘active nihilism’[5] one that had defeated the previous social structures and epistemological constructs. The act of will made politics unhinged from certain conflicting realities, it made the impossible possible. This new form of social strategy was the cultural setting for revolutionary change, a palette for would-be rebels, to pick and choose meaningful and socially emotive indicators of power, status and deviancy.

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus depicts man as an animal that uses a tapestry of various strategies to navigate life situations[6]. The particular habitus ‘...is a set of dispositions which incline agents to and react in certain ways’[7] Faced with problems and periods of crisis, humanity resorts to traditional or more accurately hegemonic cultural formats of action, performing an act of ‘ludic recombination’ to reconfigure the cultural abstract to the situation in reality. Chris Taylor’s anthropological work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has particular resonance with regards to the Legion and the Ustasha[8]. He saw within the very ritualised and metaphoric violence perpetrated by the Hutu militias on their Tutsi victims, a logic derived from radicalized forms of cultural myths and perceptions.

Naming this toolbox of norms and strategies a ‘Cosmology of Terror’, Taylor saw such elements of folklore, traditional religious or cultural practices as well as the particulars of Hutu supremacist ideology ‘enacted’ within the individual acts of violence. Liisa Malka asked of the killings in Rwanda, ‘...the extent to which the techniques of cruelty actually used were already meaningful, already mythico-historical’[9]. I propose that this analysis also holds true with other forms of political violence and the particulars originating in the cultural foundations of each of the perpetrating movements. Further I suggest in the cases of the Ustasha and the Legion, two particular elements are in play. First is the ‘generic’ act of will found within fascism as a political genus, whilst the second relates to peasant or rural habitus with regards to otherness, deviancy and crisis of identity. These elements allow the researcher to see both the similarities and the differences of rituals of political violence. In addition such a schema allows us to discern the essence of fascist violence.

In their dynamic of social scission, the fascist movements were contorting forms of habitus. In their rejection of compromise they sought victory through a test of wills. When Cuza was attacked on the street by a Jew, Codreanu, Moţa and a group of students went from cafe to cafe in Iaşa, beating up Jews. One student even shot at Cuza’s assailant[10]. Only demonstrative will, manifested in violence would do. In extended periods of such high stress such as the Legionnaire revolt or the civil war in Croatia, the parts of habitus dealing with deviancy and ‘other-ness’ became super-charged. Faced with the macro-tasks of the ‘gardening state’, the perpetrators used rituals taken from their (mostly) peasant habitus to embody within the act of violence, higher meaning. Against increasingly isolated ‘deviant’ communities, the Legion and the Ustaša sought to demonstrate the new order of things.

Dealing with the act of will initially, both the Ustaša and the Legion exalted their decisive action with regards to their enemies. They sought nothing from them in way of compromise or recognition; rather they wished to take everything. Codreanu’s lament of Romania’s surplus of programs[11] and deficit of men willing to act demonstrated to both the Legionnaire at the time and the Historical observer a structural ideological impatience. ‘You accomplish, let others talk’[12]. The will to act became a major cultural construct to mass murder and political violence. Pavelić dismissed the norms of ‘Bourgeois’ society as being the very chains on the Croat nation that had caused its ‘Golgotha’[13] under Yugoslavia. Once Yugoslavia had fallen, there would be no accommodation, ‘Blood will be shed and heads will roll’[14]. The occasion of each murder was a demonstration of the fascist’s power and control, of the power of the ideology, of the victory of will over reason. . At that point, the culture of violence and action as a dialectic of history, became as powerful as any idea.

For the Legion, the new spirit of social organisation and action that they proposed as a resolution to Romania’s problems was inherently cultural and indeed meta-political. By being subsumed by the movement’s Weltanschauung, Legionnaires entered a world of clear pathways and delineated morality, Moţa declared ‘As God resurrected Christ in order to help the good to victory, so will the legion triumph, too – even if only by miracle’[15]. The Ustaša went even further, constructing an elaborate system of laws and institutions that worked from the cultural supremacy of the act. Their camps and tribunals were not organs of guilt or innocence, freedom or punishment. Rather they were the mechanics of a vast enactment of an ethno-cratic mythology of value propelled by a fetish of will and action. Jasenovac was not a place where debate and mediation had a home, it was the workshop of the Ustashas’ ‘Nationalising war’, where acting had a position inestimably higher that reflection. In sum, ‘...There are only two paths: that of the Croatian Ustasha state or that of the šuma’[16]. The traditional forms of intra-ethnic compromise in Bosnia, the slavas were destroyed as Ustaša violence and vendettas tore at the communities[17]. Between ‘light and darkness’[18], there was no centre ground

The Counter-type outline in the pervious chapter points towards a powerful analogy. The Counter type opposed to the peasant resembles the Satyr, the Wildman, the nomad[19]. They were a both a dark ‘primordial’ threat over the stability of the peasant community and the unity so prized by the fascist. The Counter type held the role of the Wildman, ‘a degenerate, the model of a lost soul’[20], They were the thieving and parasitic bandit or grazer, the backwards and pagan forest dweller, the barbaric and cruel un-rooted enemy of the village. In dealing with them, habitus suggested their humiliation by the power of the village, the peasant collective; it suggested an area of metaphoric forms of symbolic justice and power. In the words of the NPD, a German Ultra-nationalist group ’ We have to manage free areas, in which we de facto exert power, in which we are able to sanction, that is to say, to punish deviants and enemies’[21]. The Satyr would be made humble for its effrontery and then made invisible for its inherent threat. Unwillingly, the rootless would play its part in a performance of expiation, where the supremacy of the peasant was affirmed and reinforced and the deviant ‘exiled’.

In the following cases, it should be noted that the choice of ‘un-ritualised’ murder was there and indeed practiced simultaneously. Each of the groups of killers had access to guns and each group chose to go beyond ‘simple’ shooting. These were conscious decisions to make these acts of murder ‘mean’ more. It is this investment of meaning that provides powerful evidence of cultural forces at play in these heinous crimes.

The Ustaša were particularly clear in their use of peasant mythology in describing and dealing with the conglomerate counter type. The Serbs, the Gypsies, the Jews were the šuma or ‘Forest’. They represented chaos, an end of stability and certainties. As traditionally cattle farmers and state sponsored settlers, the treatment of Serbs was an example of reversed and inverted logic. ‘They were a race of destructive pastoral nomads and bandits’[22] in the words of Pilar, they were fattening their cattle on the hard work of arable and thus civilised Croats. The knife gloves, designed for the slaughter of cattle[23], the mallet, used for stunning the animal before draining[24], the uses of the counter type as doomed pack animals, dumb automatons[25], all were linked to a cultural depiction of a conflict between the civilising mission of the clearing and planting farmer and the locust like behaviour of a cattle farming nomadic tribe. The Ustaša super-charged an existing culture of conflict and compromise, making it unbalanced towards violence whilst using its mythology as an overarching logic to their crimes. Whilst the Croat peasant dreaded nightmares of this forest Satyr as his eternal enemy, the Ustaša made them die according to the logical, even ‘ironic’ humiliations of these mythic constructs.

The murders at Jasonovac were ‘”performances” for public punishment’[26]. At the final Glina massacres, the clubbing to death of several hundred would-be converts in the town church was akin to putting down a pack of rabid dogs, tempted in by the pretence of safety and despatched en masse. In using the Orthodox building, they were mocking the pretence of a separate place of sanctuary, of safety for Serbs[27]. The twin Nomads, the Jews and the Gypsy were pitted against each other at the Gradina and the Granik killing ground, making victims implicit in the whole act of mass murder[28], in the ‘ritual slaughter of Jews’[29]. When bodies were dumped in tributaries of the Drina, the messages of ‘meat for Jovanova market’[30] carved in them revealed two truths. The act of murder was expulsion from the realm of the ‘volk’ and the act of mutilation was the finishing touch to culturally defined humiliation, of symbolic process[31]. The demon of the forest had been processed and reduced into a carcass, made ridiculous, impotent and demonstratively powerless.

In the Romanian case, two particular ritualised acts stand out; the murder of Stelescu and the Bucharest pogrom. The particulars of the Romania crisis are revealed again. The main dichotomy in the Legionary critique was between rural and urban, between Eden and Babylon. The Satyr was at home in the chaos and barbarism of the city. In the case of Stelescu, his ‘betrayal’ of Codreanu placed him deep within the alliance of the counter type. He was a Satyr who had turned his back on the Peasant and sought to divide the movement from the comfort of the City. His subsequent demise was deeply ritualised[32]. Each of the ten assassins emptied a six shot revolver into him as he lay in his hospital bed, then he was hacked into pieces with axes, (again the meat metaphor) before his remains were danced around by the Killers in a trance like state. He was made into nothing, a will-less and powerless bundle of limbs and torso in someone else’s ritual. His pretensions of being the equal of Codreanu and his lack of faith had resulted in his metaphoric annihilation.[33] The act of will and the culture of deviant humiliation were apparent.

Amongst the chaotic bloodletting of the Bucharest pogrom, the 15 lives destroyed in the central Abattoir again suggest a peasant habitus hyper-ventilating in a modern crisis. The Jewish victims after torture and humiliation were fed into the machinery of the slaughter house, their bodies hung on hooks and a mock ritual of Kosher butchery performed on them. This was then presented to a public audience[34]. Here we see a logic of meat and humiliation in action, of destroying the myth and the strength of the urban Satyr and publicising this new ‘order of things’ as proclamation at a time of high stress. The Legionnaires who delved into sadistic action were drawing on a cultural dialogue, one that the ideology of the Legion sought to use.

The results of a peasant habitus being hyper-accelerated are not new or a result of the modern age. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49 (known as the deluge amongst Jews) bare a remarkable similarity to the Ustaša’s Nationalising war, ’In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers' knives[35]’, but in both instances, such bestialities were reinforced by a wider ideology or sense of mission whilst being acted out via peasant habitus. They ended up surrounding their killers with a cultural tapestry of action, violence and ways of making meaning out of death. Within this, the killers could enact simple but resonant morality plays via their brutality, the humiliation and flesh of their victims and the manner of their sadism. The ideology lifted their simple inhumanity into a historic and dialectical act. It made the very nature of the solution to their social critique an important and self-justifying act.

With the act of will, demolishing the ‘false’ moral constrictions on social and political action, the fascists sought to bring inherent meaning to their actions. Each act of murder, of rape, violence and destruction was ritualised and raised above mere brutality by incorporation within the movements’ grand narrative. On the ground, death became the result of a contorted mode of social relationship, between the saviours and the doomed. Those charged with the task of the act, of saving the future of the National community drew on older forms of social catharsis through violence and re-invigorated them with grand meaning, of the battle against decay and for rebirth. The doomed became symbolic canvases for the manifestation of this new form of habitus, to be transformed from people to metaphoric representatives of the other to meat (or finished industrial product), via a ritualised process. Such was the extent of the ritual process amongst these ‘Angels[36]’ and ‘Avengers’[37]



[1] C.K. Savich, Islam under the Swastika: The Grand Mufti and the Nazi Protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1941-1945, http://rastko.org.yu/rastko-bl/istorija/kcsavic/csavich-islam_e.html, 12/1/08 19.00
[2] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 252
[3] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 89
[4] Pavelic in 1929 as quoted in M Glenny, The Balkans: 1804-1999 – Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (Granta, London, 1999)
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 60
[6] P Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (London, Polity, 1991) and G Lakomski, ‘On Agency and Structure: Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron's Theory of Symbolic Violence’, Curriculum Inquiry, 14/ 2, 1984
[7] P Bourdieu, 1991, ibid, pg 12
[8] C Taylor, 1999, ibid,
[9] as quoted in C Taylor, 1999, ibid, pg 104
[10] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 264
[11] ‘This country goes to pieces not because of a lack of programs but because of the lack of men’, N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 267
[12] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 11
[13] Božidar Kavran, 1944 as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 128
[14] Pavelić as quoted in E Paris, 1962, ibid, pg 55
[15] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[16] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 372
[17] M Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics and Violence in Rural Bosnia, (Amsterdam, VU Uitgeverij, 1995), pg 92
[18] Moţa as quoted in N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 266
[19] B Widenor Maggs, ‘Reljković, Satyrs, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Croatia’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 20/ 4, 1976
[20] G Forth, ‘Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe’, Folklore 118 (December 2007), Ante Starčević described Serbs as ‘devious vagabonds and beggars’, R Yeomans, How to make a silk purse out of a Sow’s Ear: The Ustasha Movement and the Cultural Contradictions of the Independent State of Croatia in its Formative Period 1941-4 (London, Meze/SSEES, 2001), pg 18
[21] As quoted in J Casquete, ‘Protest Rituals and Uncivil Communities’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7/ 3, 2006, pg 291
[22] N Bartulin, 2007, ibid, pg 177
[23] ‘...The Ustaše slit the throats of Serbs over a large vat until the vessel was overflowing with blood’ M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 494
[24] ‘According to von Wedel (A German Army Officer), the Ustaša killed the women and children `like cattle' in a series of `bestial executions " The references to the violence of animals or violence used against animals made Ustaša violence into something primal and base. Butchers, after all, participated in crude nontechnical killings of animals bereft of any form of defence’ J Gumz, 2001, ibid, pg 1033
[25]Milko Riffer on arrival at Jasenovac; ‘Through a cloud of thick dust, they then saw an Ustaša guard riding towards them in a cart. Standing with a whip in his right hand, the guard was lashing the backs of the four Jewish men in rags who were harnessed to the front of the cart and pulling it’, M Glenny, 1999, ibid, pg 496
[26] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, trans S Djuric, Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp, (Zagreb, 1946/2003), pg 23
[27] ‘250 people turned up for the event [mass conversion ceremony]. They were greeted by six members of the Ustaša. When all were inside, the church doors were locked shut. The peasants were forced to lie on the ground and the six Ustaše began hitting them with spiked clubs. More Ustaše appeared and one after another every single person was murdered in this fashion’ M Glenny,1999, ibid, pg 500
[28] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 25
[29] The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid, pg 31
[30] Testimony of Prvoslav Grizogono in R. Petrović, The extermination of the Serbs on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, (The Ministry of Information of The Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 1991), pg 31, Jovanova was the main cattle market in Belgrade
[31] V Nahoum-Grappe, ‘The Anthropology of Extreme Violence: The act of Desecration’, International Social Science Journal, 54 (174), 2002, pg 549-557
[32] Stelescu’s breakaway group , the Romanian Crusade was suspected of taking funds from Lupescu
[33] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292 and
[34] ‘‘Millo Beiler and the Rauch brothers, who 'were found with their stomachs deeply slashed and with their intestines tied around their necks', The rest of the bodies from the slaughterhouse were suspended on meat hooks, as if to say 'kosher meat.'’ R. Ioanid, ‘The Pogrom of Bucharest 21-23 January 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 6/ 4, 1991, pg 373-382, Jean Ancel differs, saying there was an actual sign. See J Ancel, ‘The “Christian” Regimes of Romania and the Jews, 1940-1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,.7/ 1, 1993
[35] As quoted in http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/ukraine.html#c (31/4/08, 19:00)
[36] L Barbu, 1980, ibid, pg 388, the full quote is ‘...they were angels of light’
[37] M Biondich, ‘”We were defending the State”: Nationalism, Myth and Memory in Twentieth-Century Croatia’ in JR Lampe and M Mazower eds., Ideologies and national identities : the case of twentieth-century south eastern Europe, (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2003), pg 62, again the full quote is ‘...the avenger of a martyred past’

My Francophilia explained

'In 1960, by signing the "Manifesto of the 121" protesting the brutal war in Algeria and urging French troops to desert, Sartre openly flouted French political authority. When President Charles de Gaulle was urged by his advisers to summarily place the gadfly philosopher under arrest, he responded emphatically: "One does not arrest Voltaire!" '



http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/wolin

Lazy, Moi?? - Old essays pt 1

Creating two nations – the fascist conception of society.

‘For me, the issue is clear and precise, intelligent or not, parasites or not, moral or immoral, this people (The Jews) are enemies here on our country’s territory’[1] Codreanu, speaking in Parliament, 3rdDecember 1931

‘Flee, curs, across the Drina!’[2] Mile Budak

As idolaters of national or ethnic identity, fascists viewed their societies in terms of conflicting identities and vertical cleavages. This contest between various forms of collective belonging and loyalty was sharpened by the Manichean terms of in which each category of identification was described. Inversely, the possibility of ‘false identification’ created a multiplicity of national identities between the two extremes of inherently good and intrinsically evil. N Bartulin produces a compelling model of such a multiplicity in his thesis of Ustaša race theory which has wider application with other fascist movements[3]. At root, there was a conflict as ‘Modernization implied centralisation, and this in turn implied cultural uniformity’[4]. Within such a multi-polar conception of society, fascists were involved in a reductionist Janus faced creation of an ideal type, the epitome of the Nation and its counter-type, the source of decadence and decay.

One of the thinkers who most informed the intellectual roots of fascism, Georges Sorel, had seen the vital need for this Manichean division as a mythic mode of mobilisation[5]. Social Scission, which is the entrenchment and increasing hostility between the two extremes of society, would bring forth an accelerating dynamic of conflict and violence. Within this ‘descent’, battle lines would be sharpened, the revolutionary spirit would be engendered throughout the group seeking power and an enforced unity of identity and purpose augmented. As common ground was washed away and compromise became treason, the myth of scission provided a psychological catalyst for action and the needed determination and discipline to bring about revolution. Indeed, the coalescing of society round the extremes was the primary step towards a solution. The grey had to be rubbed out, two nations must be created, the good and the evil.

These dynamics of division and a linking hierarchy of worth allow a better look at fascist social critique and the place violence has in it. Fascist violence was an attempt to change this multi-polar society into a uni-polar national community, cathartically shedding the sources of dissonant identity and ‘disunity’, via the destruction of flesh, tissue and bone. This is a hyper-active form of a ‘gardening state’[6], a term used by both Zygmunt Baumen[7] and Roger Griffin to describe this imposition of an ideological vision of a mono-ethnic society onto an untidy reality. To uses Gumz’s term, the Ustaša were involved in a ‘nationalizing war’[8] of a destructive/creative nature. In ideological terms, fascists saw their societies as divided, fragmented by positions of national virtue and alien vice. Thus the question of how to ‘save’ society becomes a matter of who to save and who to jettison. This explains the intense nature of the literature in both the Ustaša and the Legion on what truly constituted the ‘real’ Romanian/Croat and inversely its Counter type.

Even worst in the eyes of the fascist than division was the corruption that this multi-polar society creates, it poisons those who might be saved, it corrupts the essential national character in the unwary. The removal of such a source is classified by medical analogies, tumour, cancer, parasite, toxin. The evil cannot be contained as it is infectious, aggressive. Only ‘removal’, ‘subtraction’, ‘inoculation’, ‘purification’ would halt this march. Once the society in which you live is defined by conflicting and warring poles of absolute moral worth, the danger becomes clear as does the solution.

The terms by which such ideal types were created are informative too. To both movements, the peasant was the basis of national life and rebirth. Principle twelve of the founding Ustaša program makes clear that ‘...the peasantry is not only ‘the base and also the source of all life, rather it itself constitutes the Croatian nation’[9]. Outside of that was inherently foreign. Looking to racial anthropology, the Ustaša defined the Croat nation as separate from the Serbs because of their specifically Dinaric character and based in the most immutable demographic. Weather Iranian or Gothic influence distinguished them from the ‘Vlachs[10]’ is beside the point. The peasant was the ideal regardless. Calls to Pilar, Šufflay, Filip Lukas and Kerubin Šegvić were in support of a base aim, to support ‘...an overarching idea of Croatian uniqueness and distinction vis-à-vis the Serbs’[11]. The peasant was the prime example of what a Croat should be, the least corrupted element, being ‘virile, energetic and violent, the avenger and the source of the mystical values of the race’[12]. The peasant alone retained the essence of Croatia as seen through the eyes of the Ustaša.

Much the same applies to the Legion. The work on racial anthropology and serology by eugenicists Făcăoaru and Rȃmneanţu were used by Legionnaire ideologues as backing for their contentions of Romanian identity. Primarily this was that Romanian/Dacian blood and thus the eternal national characteristics were still unpolluted by ‘Phanariot and Gypsy blood, and recently by Jewish blood’[13] in the peasantry. This bio-national identity was ‘our biological patrimony’[14] in the words of Făcăoaru, to be protected and nourished. The virtue of the ‘saintly[15]’ peasants of Moldavia and Transylvania was incarnate and inherent to their ethnicity. In both cases, the origins of the ‘virtuous savage’[16], the source of national culture was deposited as the least compromised element in society in regards the malignant Counter type. In Zeev Barbu’s words, ‘The village and the peasant became symbols of honesty, sanity and primeval purity, the strong holds of national life’[17]. The Ideal was bound timelessly to the soil of the land, to the essence of the nation, he was a ‘new man’ in waiting. The Ideal type was, to these movements, the sole route personified or the intrepid path-finder out of crisis via the creation of the volkgemienschaft. In Griffin-ite terms, the realisation of a pure and unified volk was the fruit of the mazeway resynthesis[18], the Ideal was the escapee from decay.

Religion provided a valuable marker of national identity in both movements. Orthodoxy to the Legion was a source of peasant authenticity, of collective ritual and spirituality. Via the symbolic vernacular of the Orthodox faith, of suffering and redemption, of warrior angels and transformative struggle, the Legion conceived Romania’s rebirth. The ritual and ‘village’ manifestation of this faith became a link for the individual legionnaire to the heart of the ’true’ national character. In a similar dynamic, Catholicism was a part of Croat peasant identity, of what being a Croat was about. Via the Catholic rituals, it was possible to expiate ‘false’ nationality, as Budak made clear with regards to conversion, ‘...the remaining part [of the Serbian population] we shall convert to the Catholic faith and thereby melt into Croats’[19]. Though the liturgy of the Church and its adoptive peasant form, the absolutes of the ages and of national mission were sacralised. Religion infused national palengenesis with the certainties and mysticism of faith; ‘Our religion is the Independent State of Croatia!’[20]and ‘God is a fascist!’[21] were the cries. It was ‘not dogma or ritual, but religious experience or religiosity’[22] that these movements wish to summon. In both cases, Religion also helped refine and elaborated on the dichotomous make up of the Ideal and Counter types.

The Counter-type also had such eternal values and temporal meaning, as the mirror image and negation of the ideal. From and within their social milieus, the Ustaša and the Legion detected the Counter-type by looking at the threat to the nature and pretences of their identity. To the Ustasha, the Serbian identity, be it in the guise of ‘Yugoslavianism’ or Pan-Slavic ethnicity, was an ideology of ethnic annihilation ‘aimed at assimilating the ‘inferior’ Croats’[23]. This Serb/Vlach threat was combined with fears of Jewish and Communist ‘denial of Croat identity and characterised as an ‘overall counter-type of the ‘Bolshevik-Asiatic’[24]. The Croatian nation thus faced a tripartite existential threat to its separate identity. In addition, as “Roma and Jew shared the image of “’the stranger’, ‘the outsider’, ‘the eternal other’ and ‘the symbol of foreignness, of dark and evil forces’”[25], the ‘Black’ Gypsies, incapable of a ‘sense’ of Croat feeling were brought into this construct[26]. This conglomerate was labelled as the ‘šuma’[27], the antithesis of Croatian-ness, being made up of Serbs, Communists, Gypsies and Jews, ‘...yokes...’ on ‘...the back of the Croatian people’.[28]

To the Ustaša, the crisis of modernity was expressed as a denial of their identity as Croats. All they thought as simultaneously essentially Croatian and virtuous was threatened by the political and social situation between the wars. The first Yugoslavia might be described as a deeply liminiod period of dis-embedding and nomic terror for Ultra-nationalists in Croatia, ‘a morally contaminated Babylon’[29]. Under the perceived weight of Serbian belligerence, Jewish corruption and Bolshevik Internationalism, only extreme acts of ‘repristination...’ or ‘...cleansing’[30] would allow a national revolution. Faced with being assimilation into a ‘Yugoslavic’ or Pan-Serb identity or internationalist denial, Ultra-nationalists sought to define aggressively their reality of what it meant to be Croatian. In the words of Aleksa Djilas, ‘...By provoking Serbs into rebellion and sometimes even into reprisals against Croats, the Ustasha wanted to compel the Croatian nation to choose between subjugation by the Serbs or support for the Ustasha as masters of Croatia’[31], a classic dynamic of social scission. At root, this need to define and defend a seemly fragile identity via an integral nation state specified the landscape of this particular ‘social scission’ of the Ustasha.

In comparison, the Romanian ultra-nationalists defined the crisis of modernity of losing the control over their state to foreign elements. This fear of the erosion of ethnic Romanian control of state power would hang heavy over much of the Nationalist discourse in the inner-War period. Livezeanu sees this conflation of elements as the result of the conflict between the organic pretensions of Romanian monopolies over power and the realities of a multi-ethnic and ethnically stratified society. Given the ethnic heterodoxy of Greater Romania, there was ‘a perceived need to wholly redefine the nation’[32]. This conflict was over the very nature of national identity and societal meaning, thus it possessed powerful energies towards nomic recreation or remaking Romania. Thus the Legion was ‘faced’ with the challenge of changing a multi-polar society into one united by Romanian identity and heritage.

The Legion, following a long tradition within the Romanian Nationalist heritage, saw the Peasant as the root of Romanian identity and diametrically opposed to this organic class to the ‘foreignness’ of the cities. Here were collected the Kikes[33], the rascals[34], the Lupists[35], the traitors[36], the very negation of the peasant. This was reinforced by personal perception amongst the Legionnaires. In Ion Moţa’s words, these country boys and indeed the nature of Romania itself was divided between ‘”the Old World” of the idyllic village life and “the New World, alienated from ancient mores and invaded by pagans”’.[37] To break out of this ‘social schizophrenia’, the two worlds must be separated, the division made clear, there must be ‘cultural purification’[38]. Consider one example of the circles of violence that engulfed the Legion. In 1923, the failure of the Brȃtianu government to repeal Jewish citizenship so enraged Codreanu that he forced his way into the Prime Minister’s office. After that intimidation did not work he formed a group of six students who would assassinate key figures in the change in Jewish legislation, in a ‘purification’[39] of national politics. Legionary propaganda and violence was aimed towards this forceful separation, further evidence of social scission.

Thus to both movements, the way out of crisis, of identity and state control was via an act of division and fortifying national identity. This homogenisation of identity was enacted on both sides of the social division. The Ideal type and its Counter type made this chasm clearer and increasingly energising. Violence played a central role, re-enforcing the mythology of social conflict and destroying cross-division dialogue and social contact. This violence was facilitated, if not encouraged by the Manichean nature of the Ideal/counter dichotomy. The base evil of the Counter type and the ‘urgency’ of crisis lead Ustasha and Legionnaire alike to follow the logic of their ideological position. The Counter was malignant, poisonous, threatened the very future of the ‘volk’. To Codreanu, their crime was meta-physical too, in their ‘attempts to destroy [our] ties with eternity[40]. In a time of crisis and violent upheaval (which the movements themselves willingly contributed to), the Counter was placed ‘outside the universe of obligation’[41] in Fein’s term and its destruction or expulsion became expedient and ideological justified.

The fascist Weltanschauung is inherently Manichean, The intrinsic nature of the others’ decadence and threat to the rebirth of society went beyond social or political conditions. To the Totalitarians of the 20th century, the root of the others’ ‘a-national’ or ‘a-revolutionary’ character was physical and mental, only through the destruction of these elements could society be purified. The terms of the fascist division, rootedness versus cosmopolitan, Spiritual versus materialistic, Vital versus mediocrity, defined both the lines of that division between healthy and decadent and the route of any cathartic resolution. Within such a (self created) bipolar world, fascists believed they had to look beyond the usual acts of political routine and ritual, towards a magical act of will, one that completely remade society. This revolutionary act would transform the world from bipolar to ‘uni-polar’, regardless of the bodies that fell.
[1] As quoted in CZ Codreanu, 2001, Legion: The Nest Leader’s Handbook, (London, The Rising Press, 2001)
[2] I. Goldstein, 2006, ibid, pg 227
[3] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid
[4] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 9
[5] G. Sorel, 1941, ibid
[6] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 331
[7] Z Bauman, 1993, ibid
[8] J Gumz, 2001, ibid, pg 1038
[9] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 165
[10] Ivo Pilar on the Vlachs/Serbs: ‘its innate racial appetite for usurpation, its anti-social tendencies, its mania for destruction’, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 181
[11] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 185
[12] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid, pg 692
[13] Traian Herseni as quoted in M Turda, 2007, ibid, pg 438
[14] M Turda, 2007, ibid, pg 439
[15] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 79
[16] The ‘savage’ of Rousseau was taken over by many nationalists in the mid to late 19th century. Rather than being a transcendental life full of the common spirituality of mankind, the new peasant ‘savage’ was gifted with the essential elements of what it meant to be Czech, Hungarian, Romanian or Croatian. See A Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871, (London, Phoenix Press, 2001)
[17] Z Barbu, ‘Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Iron Guard, the Fascist Movement of Romania’ SU Larson eds., Who are the Fascists (Stockholm, Global Book Resources, 1980), pg 381
[18] The Mazeway Resynthesis is the particular ludic recombination or ‘new canopy’ of a revitalisation movement, Griffin’s anthropological template in describing generic fascism and temporal crisis. The term was coined by Anthony Wallace, See R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 106
[19] D Mirković, ‘Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Reflections on Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 548, 1996, pg 197
[20] R. Yeomans, Cults of Death and fantasies of annihilation: the Croatian Ustasha movement in power, 1941–45, Central Europe, 3/ 2, 2005, pg 124
[21] R Ioanid, 1990, ibid , pg 140
[22] B Weisbrod, ‘Fundamentalist Violence: Political Violence and Political Religion in Modern Conflict’, International Social Science Journal, 54 /174, 2002, pg 501
[23] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 188
[24] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 223
[25] D Reinhartz, ‘Unmarked Graves: the Destruction of the Yugoslav Roma in the Balkans Holocaust, 1941-45’, Journal of Genocide Research, 1/1, 1999, pg 81
[26] White Gypsies, being either Muslim or Catholic were not under the agency of the ‘nationalizing’ Serbian Orthodox Church and thus were ‘capable’ of being part of the Gemienschaft.
[27] Lit. the Forest, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 370
[28] Danijel Crljen, 1942 as quoted in N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 368
[29] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 127
[30] S Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005, (Washington, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), pg 83
[31] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 397
[32] I Livezeanu, 1995, ibid, pg 307
[33] From a poem by Radu Barda in R Ioanid, 1990, ibid, pg 126
[34] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 67
[35] Lupist, derived from Helen Lupecsu, the life-long Jewish paramour of Carol II, she was commonly thought to be considerable involved in the making and breaking of Governments. CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 86
[36] CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 66
[37] C Iordachi, 2003, ibid, pg 25
[38] C Iordachi, 2003, ibid, pg 19
[39] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 262
[40] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 260
[41] H Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York: Free Press, 1979), pg 197