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