Counter-Currents
1,326 words
Emil Cioran in interwar Romania.
Before Corneliu Z. Codreanu, Romania was like a populated desert. Those living between the sky and earth had nothing else to do other than wait. Someone had to come. We were all passing through the Romanian desert, incapable of everything. Even contempt seemed too big of an effort. The country was in our eyes a problem that we had to solve. Sometimes when hope escaped us, we would momentarily justify its existence as a well made illusion. And Romania was no more than a well made illusion. You were running around freely, detached from the past and present, enjoying the sweet chaos of nihilism. The poor country was a long pause between a beginning without glory and possible uncertainty. Inside us, the future was groaning but in one man, it was boiling. And he disturbed the tame silence of our existence and forced us to be . The virtues of the Romanian people united into his body. Romania was rising from possibility to reality.
With Corneliu Codreanu I had a few conversations. My first impression was that I was finally talking to a man in a country full of undesirables. His presence was disturbing and I never left his home without that still breath of reaching a crossroads in life. I was always gripped by a strange fear and also by an enthusiasm full of strange feelings.
The world of books seemed pointless to me; the contents were without ends, the prestige of intelligence was gone and the tricks of reason were useless.
The Captain was not suffering from the fundamental vices of the so-called Romanian intellectual. The Captain was not “smart”. The Captain was profound.
Icon depicting Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as a holy martyr.
The spiritual disaster of the country is the result of intelligence that lacks content, from smartness. The lack of substance of the spirit transforms the real problems into abstract notions and takes away the destiny from the spirit. Smartness degrades even suffering into trifle.
But the Captain’s ideas, heavy and rare, arose from his Faith. The ideas were given life somewhere far away. From here, it looked like a universe of the heart, a universe of eyes and thoughts. When, in 1934, I was telling him how fascinating his biography would be, he answered: “I didn’t spend much time in libraries. I don’t like reading. I just pause and think”. Those thoughts led our purpose to action. In them, nature and heaven breathe. And when those thoughts began to be fulfilled, the historical bedrock of our country trembled.
Captain Codreanu didn’t point to the immediate problems of contemporary and modern Romania. It was too little. It wouldn’t have fit the dimensions of his vision nor would have met our expectations. He formulated the problem in last words, in the wholeness of our national becoming. He didn’t want to clean the filth out of our condition but introduce the absolute into Romania’s breathing. It was not a revolution trapped in a moment of history, rather it was a revolution of history. The Legion should not only create Romania, but also redeem its past, fill the ancient void, recover through sheer, inspired and unique madness, the time that was lost.
Legionary poster depicting a victorious Archangel Michael, on September 6th 1940, the day the Legion took power, in front of a mountain of skulls and crosses representing the fallen members of the Legion.
The legionary pathos is a reaction to a past full of bad luck. This nation hasn’t remarked itself in anything else besides constant misery. Not once did it try to prove it wrong. Our substance is a negative infinite. From here starts the inability to overcome the swaying between an acidic bitterness to an optimistic fury.
In a moment of cowardliness, I told the Captain:
“Captain, I believe Romania has no purpose in this world. There isn’t a single sign in her past which would justify such a hope.”
“You’re right,” he said. “There are a couple of signs though.”
“The Legionary Movement,” I responded.
And then he showed me how he viewed the revival of our Dacian virtues. And I understood that between Dacians and Legionaries is the long pause of our being because we are living the second beginning of Romania.
The Captain gave the Romanian a purpose. Before him, the Romanian was Romanian, meaning a human material made up of drift-offs and humiliations. The Legionary is a Romanian with substance, a dangerous Romanian, a fatality for himself and for others, a threatening human storm. The Iron Guard, a fanatical forest… the Legionary has to be a man where pride suffers from insomnia.
Legionary artwork displaying Archangel Michael leading Romanian troops in battle
We were used to the opportunistic patriot, slimy and barren. In his place appears the individual who looks at the country and her problems with harsh determination. It is a difference of spiritual density.
The one who gave the country another direction and structure, brought together elementary passion with the detaching of the spirit. His solutions are applicable in the present and in the future. History hasn’t seen a visionary with a more practical spirit and so much skill, bolstered by a saintly personality. Just like this, history also doesn’t know a second movement in which the problem of salvation goes hand in hand with being a caretaker.
To do deeds and save yourself, to do politics and practice mysticism, he put an end to everything. He was interested, in equal measure, in building a canteen and nature of sin, commerce and faith. No one must forget: The Captain was a caretaker based in the Absolute!
Everyone thought they figured him out. But he escaped everyone’s grasp. He had surpassed the limits of Romania. To the movement he created, he proposed a lifestyle which overcame the Romanian resistance. It was too big. Sometimes you’re led to believe that he didn’t fall from the conflict of his greatness with our meekness. It isn’t less true though that, the era of upheaval has brought to light human characters which the most believable utopia could not have foreseen.
Artwork depicting the Captain.
In a nation of servants, he introduced honor and in a flock without vertebrae, he introduced courage. His influence didn’t embolden just his disciples, but also, in some sense, his enemies. Because those yokels became monsters. He compelled them to harden themselves, to impose a character of evil. They wouldn’t have become such hellish caricatures if the greatness of the Captain didn’t require a negative equivalent. We would be unfair to the executioners if we were to consider them losers. Everyone had a purpose which they fulfilled. One more step and they would have made the devil jealous.
Near the Captain, no one stood cosy. A new shudder went over the country. A human region stalked by the essential. Suffering became the criteria of worthiness and death and calling. In a few years, Romania came to know a tragic ripple, its intensity consoling the thousand years of cowardliness. The faith of one man gave birth to a world that left behind the tragedy of Shakespeare. And that is happening in the Balkans of all places!
On an absolute level, if I had to choose between Romania and the Captain, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Captain Codreanu with Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.
After his death, all of us felt lonelier but above our loneliness rises the loneliness of Romania.
Not even a pen stuck in the ink of misfortune couldn’t describe the peril of our destiny. But we must be cowards and comfort ourselves. Besides Christ, there isn’t a single dead man more present among the living. Could anyone even forget him? “From there on out, the country will be lead by a dead man” as a friend told me on the banks of the Seine river.
This dead man spread a perfume of eternity above our yoke and put heaven back over Romania.
“Glasul Strămoșesc”, Sibiu, anul VI, nr. 10, 25 Decembrie 1940
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11 comments
As an Orthodox Christian (as was Codreanu) great leaders like him prove to me white nationalism and Christianity are not mutually exclusive (bring on the hate comments). This guy was truly amazing. Thanks for publishing this.
Very much agreed!
Well, just read what Emil Cioran wrote about Orthodox Christianity and its role for the Romanian “spirituality”. And Cioran said this about the Romanian Orthodoxy, which, like the Greek Orthodoxy, always was more national, than for example Russian or Ukrainian branches of Christianity. At least, a Romanian or Greek Orthodox priest would never say, that ancient Greeks or Romanians before Christianity were savage barbarians, like the FSB Patriarch Kiril said so about pre-Christian Slavs.
Hate comments? I think any non christian who’s been in this thing for more than one or two years has lost the appetite for shouting at walls. Kök Böri has provided as much of a rebuttal as necessary but of course you won’t follow up on it.
So long as you keep things separate and don’t try to proselytize every chance you get, almost nobody will care about the cross in your Twitter bio, I promise. And whenever you can’t help yourself, the “hate comments” you get in return are more than well deserved and will keep coming, no matter how much you cry and try to feign innocence.
My point exactly. I’ve made innocuous statements about how I have no qualms being either, without proselytizing and someone always jumps on it. So thanks for proving my point.
My second paragraph was a generalization, in case that much wasn’t clear. While I could’ve phrased it better, it wasn’t limited to you and this particular instance by any means. I was pointing out the course of things which invite the so-called “hate comments” most of the time.
Your comment is appropriate given the theme of the article and wasn’t intended to proselytize. However in choosing to preemptively bring up the “hate comments” you’d surely receive, you did more than simply make innocuous statements regarding your faith.
For one thing, it’s meant to give you the moral high ground by painting yourself (and christians in the movement more broadly) as eternally persecuted by non-christians. That framing is one-sided to say the least and push back is not only fair but necessary in my view, given how often it goes unchecked.
It’s also meant to overstate the “hatefulness” inherent in any kind of replies which are critical. I don’t feel like I’m being hateful in addressing you in the least but rather bitter due to the nature of the topic itself. Nobody said christians and non-christians are supposed to be on best terms though, not stepping on each other’s toes is the best we can realistically hope for.
Wow. You read way too much into that.
A brief response to Brother Argyle.
Orthodoxy’s history has given it greater resistance to universalism because, lacking a pope, it organized itself through national churches, had the experience of being long dominated by persecutory foreign non-Christian groups (Muslims/Mongols), and was less infiltrated by the Enlightenment. All these helped to merge religious and national identity very tightly.
With the exception of Islamic Iberia and the Viking raiders, most Catholic nations, unified by the Pope in Rome, and then the Reformed nations, had only each other to contend with. No outsider alien ruled them. So nation and faith were merged until the Enlightenment’s “equality” fetish and all the post 1789 revolutions (Napoleon, then 1848, etc and Marxism). It had far greater popular influence in Western Europe and, of course, in America. The western churches are now all infected.
Does that make sense to you?
It makes sense to me. I am also an Orthodox Christian.
Dr ExCathedra: September 12, 2024 …The western churches are now all infected.
Does that make sense to you?
—
Yes, all of them, Ex, for two reasons 1) They all worship our racial enemy’s mythical Superspook, Yahweh. All of them. 2) Christian creeds are anti-Nature and not grounded in reality at a time when Aryans must get real and be guided by a belief system that conforms with Nature’s laws.
Codreanu was a courageous, charismatic leader of his people, however misguided. Dr. Revilo Oliver wrote an entertaining piece about him nearly 40 years ago, found here: “The Christian Nazis” at nationalvanguard.org.
AS EVERYONE KNOWS, “Nazis” are lowly Aryans so wicked that they do not worship Yahweh’s Yammering Yids or appreciate the honor of being robbed and humiliated by those godly superhumans. They are also called “Fascists” and “Aunteye-Seemites” and many other things by the prostitutes who write in the Jews’ liepapers or jabber over the Jews’ hypnagogic picture-machines.
Most Western states have had organizations that wanted their nations to become independent in fact as well as name, but few of them attained such success that they could influence their nation’s destiny. In Italy, the Fascists rescued the kingdom from “democratic” corruption. In Germany, the National Socialists freed the nation from Jewish parasitism and by great heroism almost ensured the survival of our race. In Spain, the Falange prepared the victory of General Franco and civilized Spaniards. And in Romania, the Iron Guard defended White men against their predators and for a time almost had their irresponsible and venal king under control.
The Romanian organization differed fundamentally from the other three.
Mussolini effected what diplomats call a modus vivendi with the Vatican, but his eyes were on the nobler civilization of ancient Rome before it was corrupted by Oriental superstitions and destroyed by mongrelization. In Germany, Hitler gave a generous tolerance to the Christian sects and did not offend them — for which their leaders showed their appreciation by conspiring against him — but his movement represented the noble ethos of the Nordics before they were poisoned by an alien religion. Although the Falange delivered the Church in Spain from the horrors of Communist rule, its members were, for the most part, atheists and agnostics with a few deists of one kind or another. But Codreanu’s Iron Guard was specifically Christian in its basic premises and organization, and, indeed, could accept no recruits, or ally itself with leaders, who were not Christian…
The caption on the picture is wrong. These men are neither Eliade nor Cioran. Please don’t perpetuate this myth.
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