Report attitudes towards collective memory of resistance against far-right regimes, groups or practices and specific narratives in collective memory in the target countries
The long history of the far-right: recent debates in memory politics.
Introduction
Far-right movements in Romania began emerging, as everywhere else in central and Eastern Europe, as an afterthought of the European imperial order. After the Great Union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, (1918/1920) following the Peace Conference in Paris, Romania almost doubled its size and tripled its population, of which approximately 30% was formed by ethnically non-Romanians. These systemic changes contributed to the transnational rise of political regimes characterised by extreme nationalism, authoritarianism, conservatism, and fascism.
A new constitutional monarchy was established in 1923, followed by a series of authoritarian governments and culminating with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In the interwar period, Romania saw the emergence of several far-right movements, which were influenced by the fascist and nationalist ideologies of European countries such as Germany and Italy. These movements were characterised by their authoritarian and xenophobic policies, as well as their opposition to liberal democracy. One of the earliest far-right movements in Romania was the Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, which was founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The Iron Guard espoused a mix of nationalism, Orthodox Christianity, and anti-Semitism, and quickly gained a following among disaffected youths and rural peasants. 66However, the movement was also notorious for its violent tactics, including assassinations of political opponents and attacks on Jews and their equal disdain and rebuke of the Roma population. At the same time, “the ideological and political lineage of Romanian fascism can be traced back to its beginnings as a student movement in the early 1920s.”67 Many youth from urban settings, highschool and university students followed ideas about the revitalization of the national setting, social purity and the “new man”.68 The retaliations against minority groups often had to do with the consolidation of the state and nation.
These movements did not operate in a vacuum. The Romanian constitution adopted in 1923 did not include citizenship rights for the Jews in the new territories united with Romania, which led to violations of the democratic rights towards which the country was aspiring. The citizenship rights for the Jewish community had been of the contentious issues during the negotiations of the Romanian representatives in the Paris Conference, who threatened to leave it if any imposition in this direction should have been made. Between the 1920s and 1940s, a series of antisemitic laws was introduced, which affected the rights of the Jews in Romania, as follows.
During the constitutional monarchy of King Ferdinand I, with a government ruled mostly by the National Liberal Party (PNL), a law was introduced in 1924 regarding the right to attain and the conditions of losing Romanian citizenship, which caused between 80,000 and 100,000 Jewish people to lose their citizenship. Under the same regime, in 1925, a law was adopted regarding private schools, through which the Romanian state got involved in the organisation and matters pertaining to private Jewish schools. After King Ferdinand I died in 1927, Prince Michael became king under the tutelage of Prince Nicholas due to him being under-age. The government was ruled by a coalition between PNL and the Romanian National Party (PNR). In 1934, under the Gheorghe Tătărăscu government, an antisemitic law regarding the employment of Romanians in businesses was introduced. In 1935 – the exclusion of Jewish lawyers from the Bar was made official. The Constitution in 1938 brought significant changes in the legal status of the Jewish community.
The legacy of the far-right continues to be a debated topic. In the 2020 Parliamentary elections in Romania, the new AUR Party (Alliance for the Union of Romanians) won 20 seats in the Romanian Parliament, which came as a surprise to many given the nationalist, sovereigntist and often xenophobic messages of the organization. Representatives of AUR have glorified several interwar figures of corporate authoritarianism (either Marshal Ion Antonescu or his political regime) or the far right (the Iron Guard) and emulated their ideas about a “pure” Romanian nation. In doing this, they stoked a narrative of exceptionalism of the Romanian “nation” proper to both right-wing authoritarianism and to the late 1970s blend of national communism of the Ceaușescu regime.
The ideological position and political direction of the party have often been contradictory, but they do bring a sense of normality (or inevitability) to the re emergence of the radical right, and the type of narratives that have helped mainstream this type of politics.69 The group identifies itself as anti-corruption, socially minded and anticommunist and sceptical of the impositions from Brussels.70 Various of its representatives have shown disdain for any type of constraint of xenophobic tones.
Supporters such as writer Sorin Lavric who questions gender equity and human rights as “political correctness” and Claudiu Târziu who reproduces nationalist Orthodox narratives are often the public voice of the group.71 More generally, they fit into a European context where young, and fresh-faced politicians are taking up the case of a menaced “identity” caused by globalization; see, for example, the AdF in Germany, Chega in Portugal, and Forum voor Democratie in the Netherlands.72
But the sudden realisation that there is a relatively cohesive conservative right wing spectrum in 2020 Romania triggered a polarising debate about why this is happening and how it can be labelled. Some commentators, such as historian (and prominent member of the Liberal Party) Andrei Muraru, openly used the term “neo fascist” or far right to describe the organisation and its messages, and, more rhetorically, to showcase the magnitude of having a far-right-leaning party in Parliament).73 Although history does not necessarily play a crucial role in the narratives of the group, some of its members do insist that the histories of the Holocaust or anti-Semitism are mere exaggerations, an enduring and relative mainstream way of avoiding historical reckoning. AUR denied all such labels.
This debate about semantics has been a long-standing discourse in Romanian historiography and directly or indirectly a strategy of clemency. Dan Berindei, a well – known conservative historian, has emphasized that the Iron Guard could not really be integrated into a transnational “fascist” context since the movement was solely the result of local dynamics.74 In response, others pointed out that such interpretations are not surprising given there are no “incisive debates” in on the history of far-right movements or their pull regionally or nationally.75 They emphasized a lack of critical awareness of how “normalized” far-right views really are in mainstream political languages and cultural discourses.76
The Normalization of the far-right
There are different other memorial debates which have strengthened the pull of the far-right. The debate about the victims of totalitarianism, defined by communism and its subsequent ‘trauma” inflicted on liberal democracy, had a primarily functional role in supporting ideas of democratic activism, of agency and responsibility. Improbable concoctions came out of this memorial perspective, such as the 2005 book the Genocidul Comunist (The Communist Genocide) by Gheorghe Boldur Lăţescu, who presents the entire political history of communism as a deliberate attack on the make-up of a nation. It shows the early roots of the “double genocide” thesis, which instrumentalizes Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide as based on a cultural aspect concerning the rights and expression of minorities. Its abuses, primarily in relation to denial of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, have been a concern.
Indeed, conservative, if not revisionist, history readings backed many of the formulations of “democracy”. Perspectives like those of Lățescu were not even that controversial in the 1990s and early 2000s, and indeed voiced sentiments of persecution invoked more broadly. In 2003, the so-called “trial of communism” was reactivated based on the “communist holocaust”.77 Debates at the time were presented in equally polarised terms. By popular demand, individuals suspected of collaboration with the former regime were called in to testify and publicly recognise the communist holocaust between 1945 and 1989 and apologize to the broader public for their actions. This ‘double-genocide’ thesis is today seen in continuation of Central and Eastern European nationalisms. But the role that the Europeanization of memory has played in the perpetuation of this thesis, and its dynamic, should lead us to question how the Cold War liberal origins of totalitarianism might have contributed to this angle.
Seeds of this normalisation go deeper than the type of Orthodox nationalism and masculinity imagery attached to the Iron Guard or the impunity of the Antonescu era and were connected with the type of narratives about democratic subjectivity circulating in the public space. Biographies of members of the Iron Guard, the main far right organisation active in Romania in the years leading up to World War II and disbanded in 1941, have often been airbrushed because of their anticommunist resistance.78 Examples of difficulties in distinguishing these issues have been numerous since the Second World War in the region, and the Iron Guard (the mass organisation of the Legion of the Archangel Michael) is only one example, just as the Balkan Chetniks.79 Octav Bjoza, former President of the Association of Former Political Prisoners (of communism), has continuously refused to incriminate members of the Guard.80 When asked about his camaraderie with members of the Guard while in prison, he apologetically queried whether that should still matter in the face of the context of the 1950s.81 Biographies of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the movement, frequently struggle to distinguish Codreanu from the ideological message of the movement.82 The insistence on freedom and sovereignty in values of liberal democracy, through anticommunism, has been the key of this dynamic.
More recent debates on Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu (1926-1993), a once-familiar face in the 1990s as a revered figure of the anticommunist resistance, show an alternative angle, that is primarily about expectations of consensus. In 2010, the internationally praised documentary Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man, focusing on the anticommunist resistance in Romania’s Făgăraş Mountains following the Second World War, took him as protagonist. As the movie made its way through European cinemas, the Elie Wiesel Holocaust Institute in Bucharest cautioned that the film’s narrative decontextualises Ogoranu’s pre-war anti-Semitic biography and that Ogoranu “was part of the Romanian Iron Guard and a militant for this fascist-like organisation, with both anti-Semite and racist undertones”.83 But the director of the movie, Constantin Popescu, played down all these controversies and argued the movie “was not a hagiography” of Ogoranu. Instead, by adopting a deliberately “apolitical” stance, he hoped the film avoided new controversies regarding recent political history.84 Popescu, faced with a politicized and bitter debate, declared this perspective does not take sides; it is fundamentally a “negative memory”, one that looks at the past instrumentally (and in relation to values of liberal democracy) that had to be told.
The rehabilitation of flagship far-right figures like Marshal Ion Antonescu during the 1991 commemoration in Parliament saw members of Parliament emphasize his heroism and the brave compromises he made to prevent a Nazi invasion.85 Historians Adrian Cioflâncă, Denis Deletant, and Michael Shafir have discussed the paradoxical politics of the memory of Antonescu, where the 1980s reverence towards the “national”, “personal” regime cultivated in last decade of the Ceaușeșcu regime for its own brand of nationalism continued in the 1990s.86 The strategies of justifying Antonescu’s actions as upholding a strong statehood minimised the intentions and consequences of the territorial expulsions and aggressive politics towards minorities.87 Consequently, Antonescu’s myth fit many political narratives of the 1990s, from the immediate political interest in “patriotism” to the populist narratives about “roots”, given his military persona and humble beginnings.
For instance, one of the strategies of defending Antonescu was to argue that the 1944-1946 trial of Antonescu and his collaborators, “The Trial of the National Treason”, had been a “political” purge trial and therefore farcical.88 There were organizations with right-wing (nationalist) credentials, such as the Party of Romanian National Unity or The Greater Romania Party, which argued that Antonescu had been a political victim of the “illegitimate” political age dictated by “foreign”, Russian, interests. Founded by Iosif Constantin Drăgan (1917-2008), a former Iron Guard sympathizer, the organization played a crucial role in uoholding the myth of Antonescu as the victim of an unlawful trial, itself the symbol of a “usurpation” of the legal system by communists. 89 There were others, like the Pro Marshal Antonescu League, that explicitly were interested in his authoritarian-military image in a context of the 1990s that had a certain degree of militarism following the string of governmental repressions of 1989-1993.90 Although scholarship and the liberal opposition were already warning at the time about Holocaust denial as a breach of free expression, the Iron Guard was rarely cited in the 1990s memorial debate as a problematic actor. By revisiting Antonescu as a pillar of the strong state, the perspective on the Iron Guard was often of a “radical” group, rather than a xenophobic or racist project.91 Importantly, the “national re-awakening” narrative was not far from the type of discourse practised by liberals at the time, who were not shy to develop or substantiate claims of political renewal by referring to “projects” of the state. Incidentally, these discourses are very evident today in political narratives.
Indeed, the political parties flirting with interpretations of the Iron Guard as victims, as “anticommunists”, were numerous and their presence of former members of the Iron Guard in mainstream political discourse frequent. The 1990s regrouped Iron Guard seemed to be just one of the democratic voices in Romanian political life. The Christian-Democrat Union, bringing together many former political prisoners, including some members of the Guard, was one such voice. The party that was explicitly affirming its allegiance to the Iron Guard was the New Christian Romania, founded in 1992 by Mircea Nicolau and led by Romania’s Iron Guard leader, at that point, Șerban Suru. It supported the brief trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu because “had it not been for this revolutionary killing, the Romanian people would have paid with thousands of lives for the national resurrection”.92 Furthermore, spinoff organisations of the Iron Guard also got involved in the massive contestation of the type of democracy emerging in the 1990s. They condemned the fact that the FSN still banned the movement but not the communist party. 93 In the 1990s in Declaraţia Mişcării Legionare (Declaration of the Legionary Movement), the organisation criticised Ion Iliescu’s pursuit of power because he was not the “legitimate leader of the people”.94
Overall, Iron Guard’s members resurfaced as anticommunist, industrious figures in the 1990s.95 Mișcarea Pentru România (The Movement for Romania) was an organization vocal and active in the political disenchantment in 1993-1994. After years in exile as anticommunists, members emerged again in the 1990s democratic space. It often invited individuals who fashioned themselves as victims of Antonescu or “anticommunist” exiles in the “West” and ostensibly involved in “modernization”. In 1991, for instance, one such individual, Traian Golea, was invited to a number of cultural institutions to discuss the position of those exiled in relation to the new change of regime. The Forum for the Exiled was another important institution for their visibility.96 For instance, Virgil Ogoranu also publicly testified about his resistance, the organization and daily operations of the Iron Guard.97 In the 1990s, many of those returning were present in public debate. As in many other cases, these individuals had enjoyed visibility and sometimes became respected former opponents of the regime.98 In the 1990s, the image of Antonescu 99, the Iron Guard and the writings of Horia Sima seemed to be a heritage retrieved from the clutches of “antinationalist communism”.100 The renewal narrative relied on the argument that communism represented an “attack on a homogenous [Romanian] community”.101 A new political party, the Party for the Homeland emerged in this same context.
It was not only the memory of the Iron Guard’s violent suppression by the Antonescu government that lent the organization a distinct victimhood status. It was also the history that followed. The Iron Guard was demonized by the Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej regime in the decade after 1948-1949, so that by the 1950s amnesties, many initial members had perished. The prison of Pitești, which operated until 1951 in the utmost secrecy and employed extreme levels of violence, was run primarily by guards of Iron Guard extraction, such as Eugen Ţurcanu, for instance.102 Today, the Pitești memorial actively engages with histories and survivors who had sympathized with the far right while members and sympathizers of the Iron Guard have heavily invoked it as a moment of martyrdom.103
Authors: Flavia Craioveanu, MUZEON; Dana Dolghin, PATRIR
Notes
66 Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) 19-21.
67 Irina Livezeanu, Romania. Fascists and Conservatives, în Martin Blinkhorn (ed.), Fascists and Conservatives. The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth Century Europe, Routledge, 1990, 223.
68 Rebecca Haynes, “Work Camps, Commerce, and the Education of the ‘new Man’ in the Romanian Legionary Movement”, Historical Journal 51, 4 (2008), 943–967,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X08007140
69 See Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 13-16.
70 Sabina Fati, “AUR, extremism și ipocrizie. O piruetă europeană spre anii ʼ30?”, Dilema Veche, 915, Bucharest, October 2021, https://dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/tema-saptamanii/aur-extremism-si-ipocrizie-o pirueta-europeana-633490.html. Last accessed December 1, 2021.
71 Red., “Claudiu Târziu (AUR), derapaj grav la tribuna Parlamentului. ”Dacă eram legionar, știți cum procedam, da? Așa, doar cu cuvintele” / Amenințări la adresa lui Alexandru Muraru: ”O să dai socoteală pentru mizeriile pe care le verși în capul AUR”, G4Media, Bucharest, oct.2021, https://www.g4media.ro/claudiu-tarziu-aur-derapaj-grav-la-tribuna-parlamentului-daca-eram-legionar
stiti-cum-procedam-da-asa-doar-cu-cuvintele-amenintari-la-adresa-lui-alexandru-muraru.html. Last accessed December 1, 2021
72 Léonie de Jonge, “Is the (Mass) Party Really Over? The Case of the Dutch Forum for Democracy”, Politics and Governance, 9, 4 (2021), 286-295.
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/4525/4525 .
73 A.V.D. ”Deputat PNL: AUR este „o grupare de factură neofascistă”, Digi24 (Bucharest, June 2021). https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/politica/deputat-pnl-aur-este-o-grupare-de-factura-neofascista 1520755.
Last accessed December 5, 2021.
74 Raul Cîrstocea, “Between Europeanisation and Local Legacies: Holocaust Memory and Contemporary Anti-Semitism in Romania”, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 35 (2) 2021, 313–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325420906201,.
75 Marius Oprea, “Marius Oprea: Cei Mai Tari Din Europa”, Mediafax, May 19, 2020, https://www.mediafax.ro/editorialistii/comentariu-marius-oprea-cei-mai-tari-din-europa-arestarea legionarilor-in-1948-e-la-noi-zi-nationala-19148962. Last accessed June 5, 2021. 76 Francesco Zavatti, “Making and contesting far right sites of memory. A case study on Romania”, Memory Studies, 14, 5 (2021), 949-970. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020982054.
77Gheorghe Boldur Lățescu, The Communist Genocide in Romania (New Brunswick: ABE Books, 2005), 4- 19.
78 Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania; Raul Cârstocea, “Building a Fascist Romania: Voluntary Work Camps as Mobilisation Strategies of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania”, Fascism, 6, 2 (2017), 163–95, https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-00602002. 79 Jelena Đureinović, The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (London, Berlin: DeGruyter, 2019), 14-20.
80 F.N, “Octav Bjoza, Primul Român Decorat de Iohannis: ‘Legionarii mi-au marcat tot restul vieţii’”, Frontpress, 2013, https://www.frontpress.ro/octav-bjoza-primul-roman-decorat-de-iohannis-legionarii mi-au-marcat-tot-restul-vietii/. Last accessed March 5, 2019.
81G.P, “Interview Octav Bjoza”, Gândul, April 1, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awiOKrTR65U&ab_channel=NTDRomania. Last accessed July 24, 2019.
82 See for instance, Tatiana Niculescu, Mistica Rugăciunii și a Revolverului (Iași: Polirom, 2017). 83 William Totok, “Portretul Luptătorului La Tinereţe” a Stîrnit Controverse La Berlinală”, Deutche Welle, 2010.
https://www.dw.com/ro/portretul-luptătorului-la-tinereţe-a-stîrnit-controverse-la-berlinală/a-5255039.Last accessed April 1, 2020.
84 Ibid.
85 Shafir, “Unacademic Academics”, 1–23, Alexandru Climescu, “Law, Justice, and Holocaust Memory in Romania.”, in Florian, Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania, 58-70, 60-61. 86 For an overview of the Holocaust memory and antisemitism see Cârstocea, “Between Europeanisation and Local Legacies”, 320-323.
87Adrian Cioflâncă, “A Grammar of Exculpation in Communist Historiography: Distortion of the History of the Holocaust under Ceaușescu”, The Romanian Journal of Political Science, 2 (2004), 29–46. 88 Executed after a show trial in 1945-1946, Antonescu was a revered figure for his anti-Russian stance during the war and consequently symbolized a struggle for sovereignty. His political trajectory inspired trust, rather than a necessary reckoning with the Holocaust. See Florian, “Memory under Construction: Introductory Remarks”, 1-9; Randolph Braham, Romanian Nationalism and the Holocaust: The Political Exploitation of Unfounded Rescue Accounts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 7-12. 89 Ibid., 33.
90 Camus and Lebourg, Far-Right Politics, 67.
91 Alexandru Climescu, “Law, Justice, and Holocaust Memory”, 60-61.
92 Lixeanu, “Mișcarea Legionară în Comunism”, Mișcarea Legionară (Bucharest, June 1990). 93 Ibid.
94 Declarația Mișcării Legionare, 1990, http://miscarea.net/declaratia-miscarii-legionare_.htm.Last accessed June 3rd, 2021.
95 Lixeanu, “Mișcarea Legionară în Comunism”.
96 It was active all through the 1990s.
97 See for instance Ion-Gavrilă Ogoranu, Brazii se frâng dar nu se îndoiesc (Timișoara: Editura Marineasa, 1993).
98 Szalasi’s Arrow Cross was transformed in 1935 into a political party, but its origins lay in the right-wing groups that were the advocates of “national socialism”, and admirers of pro-German extremists such as Gyula Gömbös, but advocated independence from Austro-Hungary. See Andrea Pető, The Women of the
Arrow Cross. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (London: Palgrave, 2020), 5-18. 99 Cosmin Sebastian Cercel, “Judging the Conducător: Fascism, Communism, and Legal Discontinuity in Post-War Romania”, in Belavusau and Gliszczyńska-Grabias, Law and Memory, 228–245. 100Horia Sima, Era Libertății. Statul National Legionar (Timișoara: Gordian, 1995) 101 Stelian Tănase, Clienții lui Tanti Varvara, II (Bucharest: Humanitas Publishing, 2009), 45. 102. The prison was a highly secretive and brutal facility operating at the height of the consolidation of the regime. See Andrei Muraru ed., Dicționarul Penitenciarelor din România Comunistă (Iași: Polirom, 2008), 34-43.
with the far right while members and sympathizers of the Iron Guard have heavily invoked it as a moment of martyrdom.103
103 Red, “Istoricul Mihai Demetriade despre „fenomenul Piteşti“ şi dispute instituţionale în IICCMER şi CNSAS”, Observatorul Cultural, 994, 2019. https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/istoricul-mihai demetriade-despre-fenomenul-pitesti-si-dispute-institutionale-in-iiccmer-si-cnsas/. Last accessed September 11, 2011.
Leave a Reply