Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 3

A portal to eternity – Sacrifice and Killing as a route beyond mortality

‘The finest aspect of legionary life is death. Legionary death has nothing in common with ordinary death. By legionary death the legionary becomes engaged to eternity … is translated into legend’[1]

‘They are with us in freedom! They are with us in Ustasha Croatia! Our martyrs are with us! They are with us!’[2]Ustaša, 1941

As movements obsessed with temporal matters and supra-individual transcendence, the fascists saw sacrifice and the act of killing as essential to defeating the anomie of the ‘old shit’[3]. Within fascist ideology, abandonment of ego and selflessness regarding morality and mortality was to be rewarded. For those who sacrificed themselves and others to the cause, a mechanism of defining history was apparent. Obsessed with the nature of temporality and the direction of history as the fascists were, immortality was seen as the fruit of total sublimation and immersion within the ideology. Fascists actively sought the martyrs for the cause and the ‘martyrs’ to the moral fall of murdering that mass violence produced. In the act of being killed or killing for the movement, the individual would join an eternal elite, a timeless and a-historic band of heroes. These men ceased to be puny mortals, locked in the embrace of a corrupting and decadent gesellschaft and became immortal totems of the National narrative.

Griffin’s work on the acute temporal anxiety of fascism deposits this change from mortal to immortal as a reaction against the metronomic mediocrity of the old ‘liminiod’ world. This he characterises as ‘Chronos’, or dead time; that is a temporal experience devoid of meaning and ritual, one where time is merely the brief passage from birth to death[4]. It is a deeply psychological and chronological variant on anomie, where the individual is made anonymous and insignificant by the dearth of ‘magic’ in society. Individualism was not just another vice, either. It was, in essence, the opposite of the collective nomos that fascist ideology wished to recreate and a form of social ‘heat death’, it ‘denies any escape route from transcendence’[5]. To fascists, this conundrum might be overcome by the total abandonment of the self, by ending any autonomy of the individual for the fascist vehicle of collective meaning. Within the movement, which viewed itself as the logical and organic outcome of a timeless national narrative, the individual might join this narrative via annihilation of the self. Drowning yourself in the waters of the ideology might be the baptism into a supra-temporal existence, eternal, heroic and ‘Chronos’ defying.

Griffin has linked temporality to violence before[6]. The idea of dreamtime, which is a magical supra-individual chronology, is borne out by several examples, i.e. David Copeland and Millian Astray y Terreros’s Legionnaires (‘Long live death!’[7]). Individuals, performing a mission that involves violence cease to be troubled by the mundane humanism or anomic terrors that plague them. Rather, they feel like responsive agents of a supra-individual scheme, driven by a wider sense of meaning beyond their own will. Such violence is based on ‘projective narratives that tell a story of the past and map out future actions that can imbue the time with transcendent collective values’[8]. Thus we see a clear reprocicity between the ‘sacrifice’ of the individual and the ideologies’ award of a-temporal existence beyond mortality.

The Legion has been called ‘a genuine cult of death’ [9], given the central premise of the death/rebirth analogy so evident in their writings and actions. Death as a gateway to a collectively held immortality in the service of the movement was a key feature of the conceived ideal of all Legionnaires. Yet Dreamtime was clearly an element in the aforementioned Stelescu killing, the Decemviri (the name given to the killers) dancing round his dismembered corpse were lost in a time defying and meaningful ritual, in a trance, in dreamtime. Further, the memories of their actions and sacrifice (they gave themselves up to the police immediately and would be eventually killed after the Carlist coup) were to be kept evergreen by the movement and their actions and lives made into parable. For these ten men, they joined the heroes of the Nicadori[10], ‘the first legionary legend‘[11] as men who had become more via their actions; the legion rewarded them with immortality.

Codreanu specifically addressed the nature of sacrifice within the act of killing. The murderers were, according to Codreanu, placing their mission ahead of their own personal salvation. This was a selfless act par excellence to the pious Legionnaires, one they were to be compensated with. The Decemviri ‘surrendered to expiate their deed’[12], the Nicodori ‘gave themselves up in a state of trance’[13] .Whilst they might be damned for all eternity for their un-Christian acts, the nation would provide a separate place for their immortal remembrance.

The names and biographies of such martyrs, not least Codreanu, Mota and Marin were entered into such national pantheon of immortals. The rituals of death and burial became infused with fervent temporal and transitory meaning. Indeed the high point in the Legion’s strength in the sphere of public space was the Moţa/Marin funeral of 1937. Rather than being a ritual of remembrance, the vast proceedings were an intensely stylised transformation of feeble and flawed mortality into perfect and irreproachable immortality. This was a mass communal experience. The nationalistic religiosity of the funeral reached the frenzied levels of classic millennial movements[14]. For instance, a legionnaire stood on the Hearst yelling ‘Romanians, baptise yourselves in the Legionary faith’[15].

The last letters from Moţa whilst in Spain describe a feeling of impeding death intertwined with a strong element of robotically joining a select band of immortals via the struggle, yet another incident of dreamtime, ‘This is why I too have taken leave of my nearest and dearest, why I will no longer be with you physically, beloved comrades’[16]. When Codreanu spoke of the Romanians being those dead, those alive and those yet to be born, he spoke of a relationship forged via transformative action, away from the petty and corrupt selfishness he saw as poisoning Romanian life[17]. That transformative action was in large part the result of the struggle, of violence itself. Legionnaires were in hock to a vision of death for and by the movement as a route beyond the tawdry dead time of the current, a way beyond history.

In the case of the Ustaša, the cult of death is less pronounced but still a major part of the rhetoric of the movement. As Rory Yeomans has pointed out, the Ustaša produced a veritable stream of literature and writing eulogising the dead, both those killed by the Yugoslavian dictatorship and during the struggles with the Partisans and the Cetniks[18]. They were ‘a liberating army of avenging angels’[19]. This is most clear in the endless proclamations of blood shed as a powerful catalyst nee fertiliser for the nation. The dead demanded it,’ ...The graves scream, roar!’[20] Blood spilt would fortify the actuality of an independent Croatia, nourishing the mythology of the Ustaša state as the modern receptacle of Croat national aspirations. Jure Prpić was not alone in ‘...Demanding blood and victims’, for him, blood was ‘the ‘eternal guarantee of our happy future’[21]. Thus, Blood, the ‘by-product’ of inevitable violence and struggle, acted to make the utopia of Pavelić more real whilst intertwining the givers of this life fluid to the future of the nation. Again we see the interaction between gift and reward. The dead and the killers became as one with Croatia, they were inseparable.

The Black Legion, a unit within the Ustaša Militia epitomises this symbiosis of killing, death and immortality via Croatia’s continued existence. Again we see dreamtime and a willingness to be submerged within the movement[22], again we see death being a portal out of the chains of meaningless time and anonymous mortality, and again we see the willingness of young men to take up these ideas and put them in horrific and brutal practice. In the words of a student paper, ‘We have begun a life-and-death struggle against them’, ‘We never feared blood when it was necessary to give it, so we won’t be afraid when we have to take it from them, Blood for blood!’[23] Indeed the crescendo of this fetish for the dead reached its logical conclusion on the 10th April 1945 as the regime crumbled, when the feted and ‘martyred’ hero of the Black Legion, Jure Francetić was made the head of the Ustaša army, having already been made the eternal commander of his beloved legionnaires post mortem[24].

In short, there is a clear connection between the fascist conception of revolution, the crisis of temporality and the cults of death and violence. Death and killing as a portal beyond the mundane ‘tick tock’ of modern societies in crisis is in many ways the signature of fascist violence. In death and in becoming ruthless ‘Weltanschauungskrieger’, be it in the Death teams of the Legionnaires or the Ustaša militia, the individual became more then their petty limitations. They, through violent acts, became the very core of a vast supra-temporal narrative of the nation. In a nest leader’s words, ‘Rise now, Rumanian, And march with us in the Legion, And you will feel the sacred thrill of determination, And the blessing of those in the grave’[25]. Whilst many other political and spiritual movements had such pantheons of martyrs and ‘necessary’ butchers, the fascist conception of temporality and revolution directly legitimised such a logic. Violence was not the only ‘cure’ to ammonic mortality, but it remained the most potent.

To the individual fascist, the process of sacrifice and killing, linked as they were, gave an opportunity for immortality. This is important because fascism’s major appeals and internal dynamics were to seek out an eternal place, outside of anomic, chronic time. Here the fascist could escape mortality and become eternal himself. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer, than is between self sacrifice and the sacrifice of others was but a small matter for the fascist, both promised a route beyond history and into a spiritual plane of existence: ‘I am burning for Croatia and the Poglavnik’[26]. Through violence, there lay a portal towards an immortal being, to be celebrated and admired, to become part of history rather than its victim. To the fascist, this offered a seductive path towards beating Chronos, becoming the herald of the new age.


[1] As quoted in Stephen Fischer-Galati, 2006, ibid, pg 246
[2] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 133
[3] G. Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, (1996, Berghahn, Oxford), pg 70
[4] The term is borrow from Frank Kermode, R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[5] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 81
[6] R Griffin, ‘Shattering crystals: the role of “dream time” in extreme right-wing political violence’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15/1, 2003
[7] R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 80
[8] David Rapaport as quoted in R Griffin, 2003, ibid, pg 7
[9] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 80
[10] The Nicadori were the three men responsible for the murder of I Duca, the Prime minister in 1933
[11] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[12] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 292
[13] N Hagy-Talavera, 1970, ibid, pg 285
[14] N Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, (1957), (London: Granada, 1970)
[15] V Săndulescu, 'Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8/2, 2007
[16] Letter to Libertate, 1937 in R Griffin, Fascism: A Reader (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pg 220
[17] R Griffin, 1995, ibid, pg 222
[18] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid
[19] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 131
[20] Hrvatski narod, 1941, as quoted in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 134
[21] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 129
[22]‘In the Ustasha state, created by the Poglavnik and his Ustashas, people must think like Ustashas, speak like Ustashas, and, most importantly, they must act like Ustashas.’ The Ustaša programme of 1941 as quoted in I Goldstein, 2006, ibid, pg 227
[23] Hrvatski branik, 1941 in R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 132
[24] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 142
[25] Poem by Petre C. Stefan, 5th March 1933, CZ Codreanu, 2001, ibid, pg 92
[26] Reported last words of Ivan Kukoranović whilst being boiled alive by Cetniki. R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid, pg 130