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’