
Corneliu Codreanu with his wife, Elena Ilinoiu
928 words
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
For My Legionaries
Introduction by Kerry Bolton; Historical Overview by Lucian Tudor; with new appendices and photographs.
London: Black House Publishing, 2015
Both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World made competing predictions about the dystopian control of the human spirit. In many ways, the post-WWII world was one in which the Soviet regime attempted Orwell’s more direct and punitive strategy, while the Atlanticist regime attempted Huxley’s chocolate factory of distractions and temptations.
Huxley’s dark vision prevailed, and we live in a world of entertainment, gamification, pharmaceutical enhancement, and self-gratification perhaps beyond what even Huxley feared. America’s Jewish publishing industry has pointedly chosen to avoid publishing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s damning 200 Years Together, . . . and Americans are too distracted to care.
When an American envisions the censorship of ideas, he imagines Nazis burning piles of books or Soviet dissidents surreptitiously passing around their samizdat screeds. We rarely envision the more effective and efficient form of censorship we Americans were subjected to in the 20th century, wherein a Jewish and liberal capitalist elite controlled our society’s academic and cultural chokepoints so decisively that the American mind never pondered dissent in the first place.
The Internet has definitively broken the monopoly on the American mind, though it’s taken decades for the consequences to manifest. It will take generations for the American mind to fully thaw from its deep freeze in the lifeless and narrow spectrum of ideologies which had been permitted by our oligarchs.
I vividly remember reading Corneliu Codreanu’s For My Legionaries in a poorly translated PDF file, devoid of historical or philosophical context. It is only through having read René Guénon and Julius Evola beforehand that I was capable of fathoming such a radical departure from the Modern worldview. Here was a firsthand tale of a man who eschewed all earthly comforts and pleasures in pursuit of an ideal transcending himself, completely sublimating his will to the service of his faith, family, and folk.
For My Legionaries is the single most important book in my own development, as it breathed life into the Radical Traditionalist abstractions spelled out in more academic terms by Guénon and Evola. Codreanu’s life and work may have been cut tragically short, and the Romanian nation he offered his life for may have suffered unspeakable humiliations under the heels of Jewish Bolshevism and cannibal capitalism. But when one lives a truly symbolic life, one earns an eternal life in the perennial struggle for that ideal, and Codreanu’s fight carries on in the hearts and minds of every man and woman inspired by his words and deeds.
Codreanu was defeated rather early on, betrayed by both the corrupt monarchy and cowardly clergy who infested the symbolic institutions of Monarchy and Church that he stood for against the evils of democracy and atheism. Therein lies perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from Codreanu’s tragic life; be wary of the individuals and institutions which are whited sepulchers of identity and tradition: cowardly, conniving, and corrupt vipers in crowns and cassocks.
As James O’Meara accurately noted in his previous review, “The Death Team,” For My Legionaries isn’t necessarily the most straightforward or well-organized read. This is to be expected, as Codreanu was a street fighter and a leader of men rather than an academic. There was much lost on me in my first reading. Fortunately, Black House Publishing’s exhaustive inclusion of a Historical Background and an expanded Appendix which chronicles the man’s betrayal, murder, and legacy allowed me to understood what I was reading more fully this time around.
Even if you’ve already read it, the improvements and additions to the original are an excellent excuse to enjoy it again.
For My Legionaries has finally received the treatment it deserves. The hardcover illustration of Italian artist Guido Reni’s The Archangel Michael masterfully captures the romantic ideal of spiritual warfare at the heart of Codreanu’s life and work. While I’m eternally grateful to whoever bothered to translate and release the sketchy PDF I originally pirated, the typesetting, editing, and footnotes provided in this edition are up to the professional standard that this classic deserves.
Contextual photographs are peppered throughout this edition, breathing intimacy and life into this historical account of an exotic and distant time and place. New Right luminary Kerry Bolton‘s foreword, “A Martyr’s Life,” helps explain how distinct this man was from the other political actors of his day:
The Legionary lived as an ascetic warrior-monk, fasting three days a week, praying, practicing celibacy, and working freely for the people. If the Life of Christ was the figure by which the Legionary strived to emulate, so too his Martyrdom was readily accepted, and that was the culmination of the life of Codreanu.
Last week, while entertaining some New Right company, conversation turned to a familiar subject, the subject of “practical politics.” My friend insisted that we need to set our sights on embracing the more entrenched elements of Modernity like democracy, individualism, and secularism in pursuit of our identitarian objectives. I conceded that while there’s definitely the necessity of working within the institutions and systems we’re entangled in, my struggle for Identity is propelled by and a parcel part of an overarching struggle for a transcendent vision which is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-individual, and integrally spiritual.
He grinned and accused me of being “LARPy.” I grinned even more widely, reached over to my coffee table, held up my crisp new copy of For My Legionaries, and replied, “No. I’m a Legionary.”
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7 comments
One important fundamental of the Legionary movement was the “New Man,” the issue of character and self-overcoming. When faced with a choice between character/doing the right thing vs. expediency, Codreanu chose character. The current “movement” refuses to understand this.
I was recently reading about the latest “movement” scandal. A person of questionable character, the typical swastika-wearing nitwit, was let into the bosom of a racialist organization, after which he absconded with a large number of files which were handed over to a certain “watchdog” group. In other words, “business as usual” for the “movement.” The rationale given by the racialist organization for hiring the individual in the first place can be paraphrased thus:
“Yeah, I knew he was a questionable character, but I needed some help here, and no one else was willing to do it.”
Well, you got your help. I can’t imagine Codreanu saying anything like that.
Which leads to a question. With all this love and admiration now being given to Codreanu and the Legionary movement, I wonder: could a person of Romanian ancestry, even one as gifted as Codreanu (*), ever ascend to a leadership position within the American racial nationalist “movement?” In my opinion, the answer is: no.
*Yes, I know that Codreanu’s ancestry can be considered more “general Central European” than strictly Romanian, but that doesn’t alter the point being made.
I fail to see your point. Why does Codreanu’s being Romanian pose a problem?
Not a problem for me. But there are elements in the “movement” that do not recognize anything to the east of Berlin or the south of Vienna, and to them, there is the problem.
I think that Theodore is not saying that Romanians are a problem for him. Rather, he is criticizing the majority of White Nationalists in America for being more of the Nordicist tendency.
I believe that we are in agreement that being “big tent Aryans” and finding allies in tight knit, rooted communities that share our common enemy would be a necessity for victory. The list of Peoples subjected to Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide by Israeli/Saudi proxies in the Middle East is growing. Only the sheep getting their news exclusively from TV are unaware of the roots of ISIS.
People sometimes erroneously refer to Gypsies as Romanians. So this failure to distinguish Romanian people from inbred degenerate Gypsies may cause some misunderstandings. However, people who are truly ethnically Romanian demonstrate typical Slavic phenotypes. Some swarthy but many fair skinned with light hair. In our current situation sons and daughters of Europa must put down their petty regional differences and realize we all face annihilation and must work together to ensure that does not happen. We have been able to band together in the past, like at the Battle of Vienna, so we must do it again.
Thank you, Matt Parrott, for this review. I remember suggesting your name to BHP as a potential reviewer for the book, because I had the impression you would be interested in this topic. I don’t have any objections about what you wrote, I just wish the reviews for the book would a little bit more spread out on the web – I mean as perhaps one for CC, one for TOO, another for Radix, etc. Although I appreciate the review either way.
Ooooohhhhhhhh!!!!! I thought you bought it
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