Lazy, Moi?? - Old Essay pt 4

The Crucible of the New Man – Anthropological rebirth within Violence

‘He must be severe and merciless, without mercy and pardon, for his duty is to lesson the pain of the Croatian people with fire, iron and blood, to crush with force the neck of the foreign parasite and so liberate his homeland’[1], Pavelić, Ustaša, May 1932

‘I swear before God, before your holy sacrifice, for Christ and the Legion, to tear from me the earthly happiness, to render myself from humanly love and, for the resurrection of my People, to be ready for death at any time’[2], Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, 11 February 1937

One of the most prominent aspects of generic fascism is the mythology of the anthropological rebirth. It is of little surprise given the fascists’ perspective on their revolution. Rather than being based on political or materialistic change, the fascist revolution was primarily concerned with an idealistic and psychological rebirth on the anthropological level. By the infusion of a new ‘habitus’ and grand narrative as well as totalitarian social experimentation, a ‘heroic pedagogy’[3] was unleashed, transforming the imperfect and fallible human stock of the nation into a higher form of human collective life. The New man was to be infused with the characteristics and higher morality of the epitome of the national ideal type as well as a possibly conflicting willingness to ruthlessly carry out the bidding of the movement. Violence had a part to pay in the creation of this new form, not just in destroying physically human life ‘incapable’ of joining or aiding in this project. Violence also provided a scaffolding for constructing the new man, a crucible where the reborn was forged and the impurities of character melted away.

If we consider the elements deemed vital in the make up of this new form of life, we see that violence served as a midwife, removing the individual from the decay of the old equipping them with the skills need for the new. Violence was a baptism of fire for the new man, where the decrepit humanitarianism of the old was burned away, like Junger’s ‘myth of the new gestalt fashioned in war’[4]. In this furious heat, the new skills and virtues for ‘mastering’ modernity, ruthlessness, submission to the movement, selflessness would be indoctrinated. Emilio Gentile’s work on the anthropological outcome of Modernist Nationalism and Italian Fascism’s proposed palingenesis on the micro scale place the role of war as the most central dynamic in the transformation[5]. This is taken up in particular detail with regards to the Ustaša and the Legion by Yeomans[6] and V Sandulescu[7]. All point to the fact that violence was a form of socialisation for the new race of ‘barbarians’.

Violence broke the individual out of the malaise of the decadence, ‘dis-embedding’ them from the fallacies of the bourgeois humanitarianism that so imprisoned them. By breaking all the taboos of the decaying world, the individual proved themselves as part of the new elite, they demonstrated they were reborn. By violent acts, the foot soldiers of the fascist revolution demonstrated that they were at heart, beyond conventional morality and in the embrace of the functional moral coda of the movement. There were no returning ‘rites of reaggregation’[8]. This was the key to creating a new type of social actor. Only through this forcible detachment could the new man be allowed to come forth.

As has been mentioned the nature of the violence was ideologically informed too. Fascists conceived that to kill others for the cause was similar to being killed or martyred for the cause. Between Selbstopfer and Fremdopfer was a link of gift giving and reward. In both instances, a gift was offered up to the altar of the nation. The gift was two fold in the case of Fremdopfer. On the one hand the destruction of your enemies was a vital part of the National Revolution[9].On the other, by committing such actions, the individual conquered the moral qualms[10]and obstructions of their personal moral coda.

To Codreanu, the mission to create a new man was the centrepiece of his political practice. No longer in thrall to selfish materialism and individualism, the new man or was a willing and complete servant to the cause. In the borrowed terms of ‘Village Orthodoxy’, Codreanu saw the salvation of the fallen Romanians only via the movement and in the service there of. As such unthinkingly doing the bidding of the movement became a central part of its pedagogy. This had a tripartite logic, education via Social acts of piety, altruistic work and in violence, creating a ‘hero in the warlike sense; so through struggle he may impose his ideas’[11]. Bear in mind that both Moţa and Codreanu had killed before they formed the Legion and became such parables, They had stepped out of convention. In pray and the building of public buildings, such obedience was easy, only in violence was the choice sufficiently existential.

Moţa was more than a martyr, he was lionised for both his willingness to die and fight for the cause, he was in essence ‘one of the ‘finest products’ of Legionary education, coming close to Codreanu’s ideal ‘new man’’[12]. In the shape of these martyrs and those of the death team, voluntarily suffering imprisonment and the ‘damnation’ for their worldly sins, the Legion had ‘dying proof’[13] of this new breed. After the Moţa/Marin funeral, ‘The Moţa and Marin Order’ was formed, a vast expansion of the Death teams with ‘10,000 members willing to die at any time’[14], following Moţa’s transformative example. The Death Teams might thus be considered finishing schools for the new man, a parable of the extent of what was required. Violence articulated this ascendancy in its ritualistic forms, in its place within the mythology of the movements. The key aspect of this new moral constitution was its ability to overcome the crisis of modernity, being ‘the man of today’s historical moment, the men requested by the present Romanian society’s needs’[15]. This new skill was to be found in violence as the commandment of the movement, in the uprooting of the old.

For Pavelić, no less than Codreanu, his revolution required new men. In the Croat case, such men were to be the inheritors of a mythical warrior tradition, from the first medieval Croatia, via the Uskoks, ‘Gun and sword are their father and mother’[16], the Grenzer of the Habsburgs, The Illyians and Dalmatians of the Grande Armee to the present day. They were the vanguard of a new Croat, again embodying a new morality brought out of violence and death. The Black Legion was ‘...seen as a transforming experience for Sarajevan youth itself’[17]. Francetić was more than an eternal hero of the young nation; he was the one of the ’modern barbarians’, one of a nation of ‘wolves and lions’[18] . In his campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing, he had conquered the crisis of modernity, finding mission and meaning.

The ruthlessness and brutality of Glina, the ‘Doves' Nest’ at Jadovno [19] and Jasenovac[20], even the small scale intra-community fratricides of Medjugorje[21] were all explosive and moral fracturing instances were violence placed both the victims outside the aforementioned ‘universe of obligation’ and the killers outside the old ‘universe of Christian morality’. For the Ustaša, ‘the half Slovene and pacifist Maček was the antithesis of the new Croatian ‘barbarian’, unlike the Poglavnik...who, like Starčević, hailed from Lika, ‘the Croatian Sparta’’[22]. Pavelić, Budak and Kvaternik were in short replacing a culture and morality that they perceived to have failed to surmount the identity and nomic crisis. In its stead, they saw a culture of righteous and transformative violence in the service of a totalising ideology as the correct route out of the malaise of decadence and the Golgotha of Croatian identity. This culture and ideology internalised, amounted to a new form of humanity.

In their efforts, the Legion and the Ustaša was following a long tradition of anthropological rebirth. Junger’s belief in ‘Das Arbeiter’ is in essence, how to make a human being capable of thriving in modern society without suffering from the atomisation and the anomie that society entailed. Codreanu and Pavelić were engaged in an identical project. They, like Corradini or Papini or Hilter or Mussolini saw violence as a central part of this crisis defying re-education, allowing the new man to ‘live fully within the realm of modernity, leading “an adventurous, energetic and quotidianly heroic life’[23] .Only violence could remove the ignoble raw materials out of the old morality and teach them the value of the new absolutes. Thus a new man came forward.

Violence placed man outside of the old and equipped them spiritually and physically for the new. To the fascists, this ‘heroic pedagogy’ of ruthlessness, of submitting any moral qualm to the good of the nation was possibly the most vital part of their revolution. Equipped for the struggle of life, bound to the will of the nation via the commands of the leader, fascists would gain from murder and death the status of the prototype new man, the sum and product of the fascistic totalitarian experiment. This mythical baptism, within the programs of violence, was vital to the fascist Weltanschauung and as such assured the individual of their own elevation towards the elite of the new. Within the murderous heat of the crucible, came forth a modern barbarian.

[1] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 161
[2] V Săndulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 264
[3] E. Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism and Fascism, (Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003), pg 58
[4]R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[5] E Gentile, 2003, ibid
[6] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid
[7] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid
[8] R Griffin, 2007, ibid, pg 164
[9] The main administrative organisation for the Ustasha racial policy was the State Directorate for Renewal, charged with the ‘removal of foreign life from the NDH’, N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 379
[10] ‘We swear, at the price of our blood, to defend our honour and to punish traitors and rascals. If we take a step backwards let the curse of the whole nation fall upon us’, Oath of the Legionnaires Moţa and Marin, Z Ornea, The Romanian extreme right: the nineteen thirties, (New York: Eastern European Monographs, 1999), pg 284
[11] V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 358
[12] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 261
[13] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 262
[14] V Sandulescu, 2007, ibid, pg 265
[15] Dumitru Cristian Anzăr as quoted in V Sandulescu, 2004, ibid, pg 356
[16] R Yeomans, ‘Cults of Death...’, 2005, ibid pg 125
[17] R Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men....’, 2005, ibid, pg 702
[18] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 336
[19] ‘Nearly all of them were murdered by beatings, stabbings with knives or swords, or shooting by early August. While many were still alive, they were thrown into a deep pit known as "Golubnjači," or "Doves' Nest," since only birds could get out’, Z Loker, ‘The Testimony of Dr. Edo Neufeld: The Italians and the Jews of Croatia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7/1, 1993, pg 69
[20]The State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators, 1946/2003, ibid
[21] M Bax, 1995, ibid, pg 92
[22] N Bartulin, 2006, ibid, pg 338
[23] E. Gentile, 2003, ibid, pg 56