Lucian Țion, Cross-border Talks, 5 december 2024
I see more and more often these days, at the anti-Georgescu demonstrations and in the press, how the legionary past of inter-war Romania is equated with that of the communist period – of course, under the unpardonable sign of dictatorship. In other words – you vote Georgescu, you vote a return to communism. Wrong: Georgescu means a return to fascism.
Of course, both the interwar Romanian fascist and communist regimes were totalitarian. What we ignore, however, is that fascism and communism were and remain two antinomic ideologies. Both here in Romania and in Europe and Asia, fascists were the mortal enemies of communists in the 1930s – and vice versa. Just because Dej and Ceaușescu regimes paraded their anti-fascist struggle in the period rightly called “illegalist” by the communists at the time, does not mean that their struggle against fascism was not real.
As a historian and film theorist, I can only refer here to the films by Kurt Maetzig and Günter Reisch, produced by DEFA in the former East Germany. The most relevant of them for our context is Das Lied der Matrosen or The Ballad of the Sailors (the movie was not shown in Romania). It tells the adrenaline-fueled story of the failed revolution in the German Reich in 1918: the sailors of the German fleet join forces with the great October revolution to change militaristic, suicidal and corrupt regime of the Kaiser at the end of the First World War. Paradoxically, the fiercest street battles in this movie are not only between the Reich troops and the revolutionary sailors, but also between the latter and the fascist gangs who hunt the communists even in their own homes.
Apart from Nicolaescu’s A Commissar Accuses, reviled for its pro-Socialist politics but loved for the charisma of its characters and its gripping plot, unfortunately too few Romanian films (except The Actor and the Savages) deal with historical legionarism. If they do, they do not achieve the same level of popularity as Nicolaescu’s films. The latter, however, dramatizes the Jilava massacre of the Nationalist-Legionary state (September 1940 – February 1941) in a historically accurate way. In the opening scene, fascists led by Horia Sima fraudulently break into Jilava prison, where communist prisoners were being held, and kill 64 of them in cold blood. Ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu himself was among those imprisoned at the time, but he managed to escape the Legionary persecution.
Returning to historical reality – the antinomic difference between communism and fascism was felt on the political scene in our country.
Hundreds of Romanian communists fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the communists. These included Petre Roman’s father Valter and Vladimir Tismaneanu’s father Leonte (then Leonid). Although Vladimir Tismaneanu in the meantime became a fierce anti-communist, often ignoring his own family background to vilify the negative aspects of the communist dictatorship, his belief in the socialist international led many politicians in the years of great social upheaval at the turn of the last century to join the communist movement precisely to combat the worrying spread of fascism in Europe. On the opposite side of the Spanish Civil War, Romanian legionaries sent whole detachments of fighters who later made heroes of Moța and Marin, so-called martyrs who, together with several hundred fascists, supported Franco’s legions.
Neither in the 1930s nor later did the ideologies of the two political orientations coincide. Dictatorship can be of many colors: from Caesar’s populist to Mobutu’s carnivorous, with many shades in between. But communism could never be equated with fascism, because fascism seeks to impose a state dictatorship based on the dominance of a single race (the white race), based on nationalist-Christian and sometimes ethnic principles, whereas communism is part of a supra-state, internationalist movement that seeks solidarity between races and between those oppressed by any kind of political and economic authoritarianism, such as bourgeois authoritarianism.
If communist ideology in the Soviet satellites has itself taken on an authoritarian coloration, it is because, because of the Cold War and under economic pressure, the socialist governments of Eastern Europe have largely abandoned the ideals of communist internationalism. But both movements are ideologies with clear platforms, and because just as soccer is played on goals, politics is decided on political programs (despite the existing slippages).
Therefore, we can ignore neither ideology nor history by asserting without documentation that Georgescu wants to bring the country back into the clutches of the communist period.
However, the press abounds with articles warning of the possibility of a return to communism. Placards at many street demonstrations equate communism with fascism, bringing to fairy-tale-like depictions the confusing horrors our parents would have told us about. Since it is not clear who the communists are in the current scenario, i.e. who exactly wants to return to communism, the confusion subtly puts the blame both on Georgescu and on the PSD, aka the red plague, which has been in government for 35 years and, surprisingly, has not yet managed to plunge the country into communist darkness. On the contrary, it has managed to get it into the Schengen area and to persuade the Canadians and the Americans to abandon the visa policy.
On the other hand, I don’t recall Georgescu naming Dej or Ceaușescu on his list of national heroes. And however much he admires Putin, the latter can be labeled anything but a communist. And if the communist scare involves the invocation of China, the current economic system of this Asian mammoth cannot be equated with that of Ceausescu’s Romania. China’s is far superior to that of Romania today, even if we compare the two countries on equal percentage positions in terms of population and labor force)
So we are witnessing less a political phenomenon than a psychological one. Namely, a collective paranoia induced by invoking or questioning the name of communism. The procedure is very similar to that described by Slavoj Zizek, who warned in Did Someone Say Totalitarianism that the invocation of totalitarianism stems from fear and that it does not open the minds of the audience, but rather is an airlock for critical thinking. The invocation of totalitarianism, says the Slovenian philosopher, ensures that we will no longer be able to critically analyze anything that is properly totalitarianism, because the word will henceforth be accompanied by a boogeyman vibe that will scare analysts. When a word is used as a scare-monger, critical discourse ends and rhetorical traps are opened. This can only lead, in the warning of another philosopher, Theodor Adorno, to even more apathy. His example refers to the interwar period in which several public messages called for Germans to wake up from the apathy of Nazism, but “Wake up Germany!” had precisely the opposite effect of allowing Germans to sleep more soundly.
We are dealing with a similar effect: the irrational fear of the Romanian post-socialist Romanian society of what the last Ceausescu decade represented has uncritically turned the whole communist ideology into a boogeyman with which we managed to scare several good generations of schoolchildren and students. Without accurate historical information, communism will continue to be equated with Nazism, as Hannah Arendt erroneously did, on the basis of comparative principles of how power was exercised in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
This inept comparison has made possible the fulminating post-decembrist anti-communism, thanks to which voters from the self-satisfied middle class have misunderstood that PSD means communist dictatorship and not Europeanization. And now, based on the same fear-derived confusion, middle-class voters who are upset that immigrants and anti-Europeans voted for Georgescu, are once again resorting to fear to shut the mouths of nostalgic communists.
This status quo only serves to complicate an equation that is wrongly written on the blackboard: the danger comes neither from nostalgic communists (apart from the far-right) nor from the PSD, which is a center-left party with a clearly pro-European orientation.
The danger comes strictly from Georgescu, who wants to return the country to the darkness of the inter-war period, and not the so-called communist period. The inter-war deified by the pro-Europeanist middle class coupled with the irrational fear of communism have opened the doors to an overflowing fascism that none of us or our parents experienced, so they have no way to tell us about it. And this constant, uncritical warning against communism over the last 35 years has led to the gradual, but unfortunate, establishment of a generalized anti-communist affect that dominates the collective mind without explaining to it exactly what communism is.
This kind of ignorance and confusion has made it possible for all those who were dissatisfied with the transition to be easily questioned by the Georgescu camp and sent to the polls convinced that they were voting for the country in a context in which communism would have meant more patriotism than the sovereignism proposed by the fascists.
If we fail to look our history in the face after 35 years of anti-communist vaporization, we risk becoming victims of another ideology. To conclude with the cinema we started with, this ideology will indeed knock us on our backs, as the heroes of Hollywood action movies (in which we sometimes have the impression that we live) would put it, before we even know what hit us.
Photo: Calin Georgescu praises interwar legionary leaders (source: YouTube)
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