Laszlo11

Laszlo Alexandru

HOLY FASCIST YOUTH

english version by Felicia Waldman

Every few years, in a recurrence impossible to explain in the absence of a deliberate project, Constantin Noica’s name keeps popping up in cultural debates. This obstinate presence has reason enough to astonish those familiar with Romania’s recent history. Noica’s work and ideas are far from having won the public’s heart. (In case you do not believe me, try a small experiment: stop a humanist intellectual anytime and ask him to mention three fundamental concepts, which have spiritually enriched him, after having studied the hermit of Păltiniş. Responses like “hmm”, “well” will not be taken into account!) As for the traces of his effective passing through this world: a tragedy! His most important biographic stages stand under the mark of compromise, ambiguity, or treason. Yet, here we see his doubtful figure taken over, turned upside down and transformed into a reference point.

In his early youth, C. Noica was a passionate legionnaire, the very editor in chief of the far right officious paper, Buna Vestire [The Annunciation]. Later on, while under arrest during the communist repression, the philosopher yielded during the investigation, humbly collaborating with the torturers, under the saddened eyes of his friends: “The boss [Noica] speaks in a submissive, prompt, concentrated voice, which evokes a long and painful training. This is the fate awaiting all of us. He does not contest anything, he confirms everything, he utters my name carelessly, toting it up. (…) The exam is short and the candidate has answered quickly and accurately. The candidate even bows several times” (N. Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii [Diary of Happiness]). Reeducated during detention, upon his release from prison the writer proposed himself for the position of … “Marxism trainer” for the youth. The guardian’s disdainful grin was spontaneously embraced in a loving smile (see vol. Rugaţi-vă pentru fratele Alexandru [Pray for Brother Alexander]). His pen then joined the long row of propagandists who used to intonate, in Glasul patriei [Motherland’s Voice], the music of the spheres for the exiled who had fled the country out of too much good: “The truth of our world bears the name of socialism. I know its face from books, I know its historic versions, and now I can see its Romanian face” (20 April 1965).

His friends in the West had every reason to be perplexed. During his prison years, they had mobilized themselves and even tried to collect money to ransom him from the claws of the Securitate (the Romanian political police). Once the political situation had relaxed a bit, and the philosopher was allowed to travel, they were in for the biggest surprise at seeing him transfigured into an agent of Ceauşescu’s regime. Notable exiled Romanian writers surrounded the messenger, listened to him respectfully and took notes, while Constantin Noica was explaining… the charm of collaborationism. “After his first trip, Noica left, having been refused by everyone. By Cuşa violently. By us courteously (but on the edge). By Mircea Eliade strongly. By Cioran with the enormous laughter he would burst into whenever he met with something incredible, and would exclaim, passing his fingers through his hair, «C’est pas possible!»” (See Monica Lovinescu, La apa Vavilonului [By the Water of Babylon], vol. 2). Upon his return in Romania, the philosopher met with agents of the Securitate, to describe in detail what he had seen across the border, giving them suggestions on how to neutralize the anti-Communist exile, etc. (see, for instance, fragments from the C.N.S.A.S. [National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives] files published by Adevărul literar şi artistic [The Literary and Artistic Truth] of 29 July 2006, p. 4-5). In the apocalyptic years of the agonic Ceauşescu regime, the “master” withdrew, surfeited, in the mountains: “Noica did not go to Păltiniş to escape fear, or repent for his years of cowardice and treason; he went there to turn this manner of ignoring the essential into a genuine lifestyle (…). The country is on fire, Europe itself is on fire, Noica parts from Goethe; the Romanian language disappears, he pleads for the opening that is shutting down, the limit that does not limit, the “one” that divides itself without sharing. (…) This is an imposture, we are still dealing with culture, our culture; but the theatre act continues, and they are left alone – who could be scared by some cowards who play with German and Greek balloons but have no regard for the people and its drama – they are so high, and they have created such a subtle language that whenever I read them I feel like a Chinese with no access to martial ideograms” (see Ion D. Sîrbu’s letter to Mariana Şora).

C. Noica’s sad maturity and controversial old age have already been revealed by his contemporaries’ testimonies. The only thing that still needed clarification was his youth, which prefigured the attainment of these “high ideals”. An answer can be found in a recent book by Sorin Lavric, Noica şi mişcarea legionară [Noica and the Legionary Movement]. What was the adolescent face of the future “creator” of intellectuals? How was it possible that a whole constellation of Romanian intelligentsia (Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Radu Gyr, Aron Cotruş, Horia Stamatu, Sextil Puşcariu, Ion Barbu, Traian Brăileanu ş. a.) capitulated under the burning touch of the Archangel’s doctrine?

The investigation pursues two levels, which at times intersect, superpose, or draw apart: the collective destiny of the legionary movement and the individual fate of C. Noica. On both levels, the author doubles the factual description with a consistent addition of misconstructions, omissions, flagrant falsifications or suspicious exaltations. The past is being rewritten under our eyes, with a tendentious pen, dipped in the ink – not at all invisible – of prefabricated finalities.

There are two options: either Sorin Lavric is very naive (but then why has he embarked upon writing critical studies?), or he is very cunning (but then why does he think his readers are naive?). Fact is we see him embracing to suffocation the interwar legionary mythology, which he serves us today, reheated to incandescence and not at all seasoned. The Iron Guard – we are told in serenity – was combating three targets of its age: Jews, corrupted politicians and communists. The author indeed presents its criminal ideology, but stops short of doubling it with a critical evaluation. He does not inform us to what extent, in his view, the legionnaires’ anti-Semitic hatred was legitimate or not. To what extent the invectives against political corruption were not in fact concealing the movement’s incompatibility with the very notion of democracy. To what extent the Communist Party, outlawed even before the emergence of the Legion of Archangel Michael, represented a danger or was not, in fact, yet another fictitious target, invented ad-hoc for the use of fascist activism? Sorin Lavric forgets to explain all these “details” to us.

The primary concern of the improvised hagiographer is to teach us how to look at history. Every twenty pages we are urged to adopt a sympathetic perspective, to understand the times: “The philosopher’s articles can only be judged in relation to this state of mind. To take them out of their context and to analyze them in themselves, by virtue of the aseptic logic of a lab examination, is to make the exact same mistake most Romanian historians do: judge the past by today’s standards” (p. 215). We thank Sorin Lavric for the news about the existence of a unique type of analysis, forever stuck at the moment the act was committed. Neither the evolution of time, or mentalities, nor the clarification of perspectives would thus allow us to change our appreciations, reevaluate the lights and shadows and reexamine the facts. What kind of arbitrary absolutism is that?

And which would be the optimal chronological interval for the research of historical truth? Take, for instance, the people who were machine-gunned on the street (in December 1989): we are told the facts are too close to the present for us to be able to appreciate them objectively. When we refer to the people ripped up on the streets and hung on hooks in the slaughterhouse (in January 1941), we are told the facts are too far back for us to be able to appreciate them objectively. Far – close: which is the right perspective to condemn collective crime in Romania?

Despite his efforts to mime neutrality, the chronicler of Noica’s youth obviously places himself not on the side of the victims, but on that of extremist propaganda. His fiery eulogies for the legionnaires are generously poured forth, while his reserves are hardly visible here and there, just timidly sketched. Sorin Lavric reminds the series of assassinations that marked Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s political ascension, but does not analyze the extreme violence principle, which constituted the Movement’s propulsion engine. He notes the generalized antipathy (“the hostility front created by the emergence of the legionnaires gathered almost the entire political class around the king”, p. 91), but will not analyze its causes: the legionnaires were a terrorist movement, which, by manipulation, social violence and unpunished crimes, attempted to destroy the very foundations of the state.

There are in this book pages very hard to swallow. The sight of such encomiastic litanies to the Captain in a book published today can but astonish us: “Zelea Codreanu could not be imitated, and even less subordinated. His sight aimed at a horizon only the mad and the mystical visionaries could reach. He was not after bank accounts and trips abroad, but after the immaterial redemption of the Romanian people. The concerted persecutions the legionnaires were to be subjected to, the arrests he had gone through, and would go through again, all these were to him signs that truth was being spoken through his mouth…” (p. 93). Such bad taste pathos and amateurish stylistic fervor have no place in the description of a notorious criminal.

At times, the advocate of fascism comes up, unembarrassed, with breathtaking comparisons: “The legionary phenomenon spreads out. The movement strengthens with the decision to outlaw it, and sympathy for the legionnaires increases with their persecution. The historic mechanism at work in the Christian catacombs of Nero’s Rome repeats itself: the persecutions befalling those below eats at the foundation on which those above stand” (p. 94). The parallel between the terrorist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic Iron Guard movement and the innocent Christians, persecuted in the ancient catacombs, is undoubtedly scandalous.

As we advance in our reading, we soon understand that young Noica’s aberrations are being side tracked, serving just as a pretext for the laundering and dressing of the most violent murderous organization in Romanian history. There is no legionary demagogy, misdeed or crime that is not carefully “polished”, brushed, explained, in S. Lavric’s book. Take, for example, the story of Mihai Stelescu, Zelea Codreanu’s former deputy, who dared contest his superior. While hospitalized, he was attacked in his ward by a sinister commando. The “Decemvirs” put countless bullets in him, then chopped his corpse up with axes. Do you think this extremely horrific act stirs up any dissociation in the mind of the “historian” published by the Humanitas Printing House of Bucharest? No chance! He is content to note the benevolent surrender of the “Decemvirs” (whose full names he gives us – as a sign of appreciation?) and grandiloquently writes: “Codreanu is so affected by Stelescu’s treason, that he will punish himself for his lack of discernment in accepting Stelescu in his proximity by a night ordeal: for six months he will sleep on the bare floor, to atone for his mistake” (p. 133). Sorin Lavric shows a strange ethical analphabetism in judging realities. To him it is more significant that the man who ordered the slaughtering does not sleep on a soft bed for a while, than that a pack of ten pithecanthropuses riddle and chop up a man in a hospital! Reading this book, we can see the close kinship between imbecility and assassination.

The hagiographer does not intend, and does not achieve, a mature critical discussion of, for instance, the Legionary Movement’s public communication and recruitment strategies. The commentator takes punctual historical facts – such as the death of “comrades” Moţa and Marin on the Spanish front – and surrounds them in a soupy pathos of the most ridiculous bad taste: “At the news of Moţa’s death, Codreanu burst into tears. He had lost his brother in law (Moţa was married to his sister, Iridenta [sic! – L.A.] Codreanu), and, most of all, he had lost his right hand, whereby he had lead the legionnaires. Apparently the loss left a deep mark upon Codreanu, changing him: he became more interiorized, more careful, and his face acquired the polish pain usually gives people” (p. 136). At times, the overflow of stupidity manages to make the reader smile.

And if the Captain did not go un-sympathized for his ordeal of having slept on the floor while his enemy was hacked like in pre-historical times, even greater was the need to flatter the doctrine leading to such atrocities: “The legionary movement represents the passing from internal order to external order; it represents the gradual solidification of an external beauty based on a spiritual irradiation coming from within. For you cannot change the world unless you first change yourself, unless you become another being, entirely new, an awfully good other, whose attitude could transfigure Romania and whose presence would bound the others imitate your conduct” (p. 192). A few such “conduct imitations” of the “Decemvirs”, and we would have all turned “awfully good” for the multilaterally developed cannibalistic society…

While prompting his unpalatable eulogies to the Legion and its Captain, the callow Humanitas publicist misses no opportunity to falsify history. To this end, he introduces a scandalous distinction in the typology of political assassinations: “collective memory retains the crime perpetrated with one’s own hand, but not the crime perpetrated through intermediaries. For, it is one thing to kill by ordering gendarmes and militaries to do it, and yet another to kill by pulling the trigger yourself. In truth, both are crimes, it’s just that one ca be stifled, the other not. The difference between the legionnaires and the other parties lies in that the former killed with their own hands, while the latter killed using the agency of state institutions’ employees [sic! – L.A.]. Even if the legionnaires committed fewer crimes than their adversaries did [sic! – L.A.], posterity’s selective memory would retain that the legionnaires only were criminals and, even more serious, that it was again them who introduced violence on the interwar political scene” (p. 246). The irresponsible crime scaling, with the obvious aim of making the Iron Guard look innocent, continues in an avalanche: “And so, during the following years, the legionnaires would kill 67 people: Armand Călinescu, the 64 at Jilava, Nicolae Iorga and Virgil Madgearu”, while King Carol II escaped by fleeing, although “he had killed – indeed, not by his own hand – much more people than the legionnaires would kill in their entire history” (p. 157). Sorin Lavric uses the most disqualifying cunnings and diversions to rewrite historical facts. He places on the same scale historical parties and personalities, who assumed politico-economic programs for governing Romania, on the one hand, and an anarchist, anti-Semitic, movement, on the other. He “analyzes” the typology of assassination, to underline the accountability of the former and the unaccountability of the latter. He only counts 67 people killed by the Iron Guard, “forgetting” to include in the corpse calculation the police prefect Manciu, Premier I. G. Duca, the former accomplice Stelescu, etc. (why? Because they died earlier?). He mentions the massacre at Jilava, but is as silent as a mouse about the pogrom of Bucharest, where at least 125 Jews were killed. (Why? Were the Jews killed by the legionary instigation not human beings, too?) It is still a dreadful callousness to take on record the assassinated politicians only, but forget about the Jewish victims of the same nut cases. It is not by manipulating the number of dead that we beautify the horrors of the past!

Similarly lamentable is Sorin Lavric’s attempt to relativize the legionnaires’ responsibility in the killing of two Romanian Prime Ministers. “To search into the background of Duca’s assassination is to walk on quick sands” – the wise manipulator tells us –, for King Carol II had allegedly been previously informed by the secret services, but did not take any protection measures (see p. 102). Armand Călinescu was indeed shot by eight legionnaires, but the assassination was supposedly perpetrated under the eyes of the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, which suggests a royal conspiracy (see p. 167). When S. Lavric does not tendentiously diminish the victim’s number, he is careful to sneak doubts about the crime’s background. Another profoundly dishonest intellectual maneuver.

The Guardists had various enemies along the time. Most of them are enthusiastically tarnished by the venomous commentator, as a sign of belated revenge. King Carol II is thus supposed to have more victims on his conscience than the Green House gunmen (p. 157). Marshal Antonescu “suffered from a constant psychical over-stimulation, an irascibility his contemporaries ascribed to a syphilis untreated in due time” (p. 253). In the aftermath of World War II, the communist persecution was allegedly targeted particularly against the guardists: “Statistics show that two thirds of the political prisoners in Romania were legionnaires” (p. 268). In fact, communist repression acted against entire political, social or professional categories, among which were indeed the legionnaires, but not mainly them. This Pinocchio of romanced history throws in derisory, with but one gesture, the political detention of liberals, social-democrats and members of the Peasants’ Party, of boyars, farmers and peasants, of Greco-Catholics and Protestants, of intellectuals and… bridge players. To claim the priority of legionary suffering in the communist detention is much more than impertinence: it is an impiety.

And the impression that “no other category was more pursued, more harassed and more persecuted during the Ceauşescu regime than the former legionnaires or their adepts” (p. 291) is just a banal intoxication with green poison. The old guardists were pulling strings and making money in exile, the young ones were still pioneers or members of the communist youth organization – what persecutions?...

Sorin Lavric’s mental mechanism is vulgar, in its elementariness: the legionnaires were a bunch of somewhat crazy boys, but who wanted the best in the world for us. Their adversaries were either unscrupulous or schemers, syphilitics, or communists. This is what happens when you sleep for too long with the Nest Leader’s Booklet under your pillow: you wake up with dislevelments.

From the “historian” published by Humanitas we also find out the interesting novelty that the legionary rebellion did not even take place! It was just a coup, brewed by Marshal Antonescu together with his Hitlerist allies for the sacking of his government partners (see p. 254). Naturally, according to the new Roller textbook, with a right hand wheel, the two days of public barbarity, the slaughter and the anti-Semitic pogrom brewed by the Iron Guard before the Romanian troops had intervened did not exist either. The historical innovations Sorin Lavric serenely serves us, from the tip of his pen, continue relentlessly. Under Marshal Antonescu’s dictatorial regime, “individual liberties were not significantly altered” (p. 256). Moreover, by a currish maneuver meant to hide the criminals among the victims, “the only ones who were subjected to genuine reprisals were the legionnaires and the Jews” (p. 256). The new researcher’s short sight is straightforwardly … reflexive.

And what is the aim of all these misconstructions, omissions, flagrant falsifications, suspicious exaltations? In the equation “Noica and the Legionary Movement”, for the former to be rehabilitated the latter had to be proven innocent. And in order to launder the image of the serial political criminals, Romania’s recent history had to be rewritten. So, keep up the good work, son!

If the legionnaires benefit from contextualization, excuses and mitigating circumstances, the lesser will be Constantin Noica’s guilt for having written, just for a brief time, fascist articles. His adhesion is not, God forbid, motivated by some political interest, but just reflects the option of a honest man, whose acts can only be great: “Noica was not the man whose gestures were lacking in inner substance: he was an upright man, an intellectual of an undoubted honesty, and it would therefore be unnatural to imagine him making a gesture with such consequences without a long inner debate” (p. 142-143).

When Noica publishes texts in which he attacks democracy (“Shall we continue being democrats? Very well, but for how long? (…) If a doctrine managed to compromise itself so quickly, can we have the patience to wait, quietly, for years and years, its rehabilitation?”), everything is justifiable, in the hagiographer’s glasses, by the corrupt interwar realities (p. 118). When Noica perorates against the Jews (why are the accusing quotations in this direction absent from S. Lavric’s research?), the author insists on the anti-Semite’s “moderation” and “politeness” (p. 117). In fact, the entire effort of the commentator goes into dancing around Noica’s compromises. He even finds four stages in “the itinerary of Noica’s inner evolution”: 1930-1938, rationalism; 1939-1948, legionary adhesion, also coinciding with “the awakening of his interest in religion, God and theology”; 1949-1968, ostracism; 1969-1987, the apogee, his public arena entrance. The philosopher is constantly exonerated, Lavric insisting that his fascist “blindness” was brief and self-explainable by the circumstance of his religious belief.

Sorin Lavric does not seem to worry about the implausibility of his hypotheses (how many rationalist intellectuals have managed the performance to believe in God, on order, for nine years only?! Why did religion too have to be involved in the justification of fascism?). Neither is he, unfortunately, interested in the opinions of other experts who, before him, pondered on Noica’s bio-bibliography. Take for instance Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, who underlines that the “four stages” cannot be so neatly delimitated (see vol. Filosofie şi naţionalism. Paradoxul Noica [Philosophy and Nationalism. The Noica Paradox], Bucharest, Humanitas, 1998, p. 213 and the following). C. Noica had xenophobic convictions long before his guardist conversion. “We must understand once and for all that we can no longer be content to evolve in the shadow of a single culture, be it brilliant” (he would write in his article Noi şi cultura străină, [Us and Foreign Culture] in 1933; see also his article Să nu copiem străinătatea! [Let us not just copy foreigners] of 1934). Noica’s adhesion telegram to the legionary movement, in a “spontaneous” gesture of protest, upon the killing of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, is just a romantic impulse. The germs of nationalism and xenophobia were already deeply rooted in his convictions. The “conversion” moment was not a change of direction, but a transfiguration. “Not only that Noica had no objection against the crime and arbitrary reigning over Romania’s towns at the time, but he even justified them; true, not taking too many risks, since the main instigators were running the country: «Where are the acts of violence, or simply hooliganism and indiscipline, reproached to the legionnaires?», he wonders in his text of 21 September. «For violence is not always related to blindness; it is sometimes related to the thirst for purity. The Captain and Moţa have hit. Many of the best have hit. But they have hit because their gesture had a purifying sense for the people’s soul»”.

The analysis above is included in the consistent monograph published, several years earlier, by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine. Since she “sins” through a precise, rigorous, lucid approach, we are not surprised that the new commentator does not even mention its existence. We are not surprised: we are indignant. Clearly, the anti-Semitic quotations from the “master’s work” would have been damaging to his mythologizing discourse. And S. Lavric does not afford such “audacities”, which the French researcher has already exercised a few years ago, lifting the veil off this blamable direction of the philosopher’s thought. “It is not enough to say: «Down with the kikes and the foreigners!»; you must become, yourself, a man able to confront the foreigners and the strangers. Another education is needed than the ordinary education of politics: a tough, military, youthful one” (see Limpeziri pentru o Românie legionară [Clarifications for a Legionary Romania], C. Noica’s article of 1940).

The main stake of Sorin Lavric’s book, which the author claims on the fourth cover, consists in providing explanations for the fact that “so many good guys”, among whom Noica himself, joined a non-good movement. But the justifications he proposes fall one after another, like skittles. The attempt to offer a generalized innocent look to the Legionary Movement is pointless and reflects an abortion of thinking. C. Noica’s flagrant anti-Semitism remains unexplained, un-illustrated, and even tends to be eluded. The excuse of his momentary religious belief remains implausible. The hypothesis of his … intellectual exacerbation, due to the constant danger – (“Noica experienced, in those months, the irremediable precariousness of his own life. He thought his life was in danger as long as, based on what was happening around him, he had the revelation that he was part of a people whose entire existence was periled by a wrong positioning in history (…). The people who had joined the Legion were hooked on a convulsive-paroxistic type of existence”, p. 252) is as abusive and arbitrary. Again the hagiographer makes use of exonerating sophisms, turning the issues upside down. He does not want to see that the “convulsionary paroxysms” of the legionary crimes reflected an offensive strategy. Far from defending something, be it “the precariousness of their own life”, they were, in fact, attacking the very precariousness of the Romanian state.

The failure of his main direction of investigation is eventually explicitly assumed by the author: “This utterly uncontrollable and unpredictable phenomenon to which Noica gave in – the bedevilment he suffered when putting his faith in the service of “supreme good” – remains one of the great mysteries of human nature” (p. 251). If the phenomenon he has undertaken to study is still a great mystery to Sorin Lavric, what was the use of the 300 pages of verbosity, with notes and a bibliography before the contents? Was the Legionary Movement in need of a pseudo-monograph on Constantin Noica for its own disguised rehabilitation?

Towards the end of our reading, we understand that this book is not very helpful from the historical viewpoint. What uncontestable novelties have we found out from its pages? The names of the criminal Decemvirs? The names of the assassin Nicadors? The hilarious first name of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s sister? But perhaps this is just an innocent literary fable, which we should take as such, giving our opinion on its artistic virtues. We would gladly do that, if the stylistic and grammatical wobbling did not stir our disappointment. Until further notice, in Romanian the predicate must match the subject: “Ferdinand’s death and Mihai’s too young age has led to…” (p. 58). Between the subject and the predicate, there is no place for comma: “…without God any people, dies…” (p. 89). The identification of the accurate gender is the object of a constant search: Codreanu took seriously “the role collective imagination had granted her” (p. 50); “…the political circles in Paris and London, whose representatives is…” (p. 91). Pleonasm compresses the salt and pepper of the half-learned: “…a mnemotechnic ritual meant to strengthen in memory the connection between…” (p. 102). Abrupt repetitions provide the image of the author’s stalled thinking: “After all, if so many young people chose philosophy in the interwar era, with the feeling that whatever they did, they did not have much choice but to return to philosophy, if philosophy became, therefore, a modus vivendi for some young people who, under different circumstances, would have probably never thought of studying philosophy, if, moreover, the same young people joined the legionary adventure at the expense of breaking their destinies, all these happened because, destiny’s unpredictable hand had made it that Nae Ionescu held courses at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bucharest” (p. 60).

What perspective can a book have in today’s Romanian culture, when it is not historic, for it distorts and falsifies the most evident facts of the past; it is not biographical, for it explains the protagonist’s reprehensible gestures by a … great mystery; it is not philosophical, for it remains only falsely descriptive and not at all interpretative; it is not literary, for it reveals elementary deficiencies of expression? Its great chance lays in the fact that by trying to purify Constantin Noica’s corrupt past, it fits into the agenda of Humanitas and its satellites, who for years have worked for the erection of a mausoleum to the Exemplary Philosopher. We therefore predict Sorin Lavric’s research a great future, paved with diplomas, prizes and shameless eulogies (which have already started to appear).