Short Introduction to the Legionary Movement.

Anthology in translation. Corneliu Codreanu: thought and profile.

Editor’s introduction:

The period immediately following WWI was marked by a huge exodus of Jewish populations from Poland and Russia seeking refuge in Romania, particularly in its eastern part called Moldavia, the part where Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was born and grew up in.

The Moldavian capital of Iași, the city where the Union of the Romanian Principalities was made and which gave the first ruler of a united Romania, was in Codreanu’s words “more Jewish than Romanian”.

These Jewish communities served as a vector of communist agitation and infiltration, as well as a tight-nit community exerting pressure on regional commerce and real-estate, to the detriment of the Romanian peasant.

This motivated Codreanu, then a law student at Iasi, to form the “League of National Christian Defence”, whose main purpose was to combat communist insurrections in Moldova. This league quickly garnered popularity after several battles where they quenched communist revolts, and gained renown for its “work camps” where nationalistic youths could gather, train and help local communities. The 70 flags of the League were blessed in a religios service which gathered 10,000 Moldavians.

This popularity put them straight in the sights of the Chief of Police of Iasi, Constantin Manciu, who insists on supervising their work camps. This instantly provokes a tension between the two, as the agents of the police are constantly provoking the nationalistic students, provocations that eventually lead to beatings, humiliations and arrests.

Codreanu and his League were accused of plotting the assassinations of numerous officials and were judged on doubtful evidence, then imprisoned in Văcărești in inhumane conditions. The only thing that kept them alive was the generous donations of food and money from Moldavian peasants. Codreanu and his friends spent a lot of time in the chapel of the prison, in front of the icon of Archangel Michael, which would later serve as the origin of the Legionary Movement.

After months of imprisonment they were acquitted, and Codreanu decided to construct a headquarters for the League and began the hard work of laying bricks and digging a garden that could feed them. Hearing of this, Constantin Manciu arrested the students and took them to the police station, where they were severely beaten. After the intervention of a doctor and other students, they were released.

A bit later, Codreanu is serving as a lawyer on the case of a student at the Iasi Tribunal. Codreanu goes outside to the steps of the tribunal to smoke during a break. At the same time, Manciu, who was ordered to the Tribunal to answer for his actions sees Codreanu and attacks him together with his men. Codreanu pulls out his pistol and kills Manciu.

This episode, the imprisonment and the shooting, skyrockets Codreanu’s fame, leading to public manifestations all over Romania. Codreanu was 25 years of age. The shooting was ruled as justified self-defense.

The following anthology contains 5 of the letters he wrote while imprisoned at Văcărești, as well as 2 documents written in 30’s, one of them a declaration he made in front of the Parliament in 1934, when the Legionary Movement was just starting to seem unstoppable. It also includes two profiles of the Captain, one written by philosopher Emil Cioran and one written by his personal Secretary.

All never-before translated.

Codreanu at 25 years of age

Student letters from prison: The Latindom at the Danube is in deadly danger! , Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1924

Most-honored lady Ch… ,

A French newspaper, “La Casque”, of the former Alsatian fighters, wrote in one of their editions published in may 1923, an article about the national student movement of Romanians, and it went something like this:

The movement of the Romanian students, unique in its form on this Earth, brings honour to the Latin race and especially to the Romanian peoples.

In our country, the “press” is almost completely dominated by foreigners and is just as far away from truth as from the Romanian soul. They talked about our pain and aspirations, about the student movement which was crisscrossed with the hopes of a whole race, they painted us as a nefarious movement, started from the lowliest sentiments, our movement as being lead by people that only appealed to animal instincts and they hurled insults which aren’t worth mentioning here.

…But this Romanian student-dom full of barbarians, fighting with rusty weapons taken from a medieval arsenal… mostly formed by former fighters on the front, some with missing arms and legs, with crushed chests, with a memory still fresh of their comrades fallen on the field of battle for the holy war of better days, was daringly demanding justice for all the Romanian souls animating these hills from time immemorial.

Justice? What justice?

…Munţii noştri aur poartă

Noi cerşim din poartă-n poartă!…

[roughly:

... Our mountains carry gold 

We are begging from house to household…]

If someone would go for a pilgrimage through northern Moldova and see how at Cernăuți the Romanian word is not found except on tombstones, if they would travel further and would see how in the mountains our oaks and firs are being felled to the ground in a sad sight, under the merciless attack of the foreigner, then they would understand our pain.

If they stopped at Putna monastery, where the greatest voievod of the Romanians is sleeping for the ages, Stephen the Great and Holy, they would see the descendants of the warriors of yore, the Moldavian archers and mountain-rangers glued to the ground – so poor they are, working as slaves at the two Jewish factories in town.

If they would descend to the lowlands and would go city-by-city through Moldova, they would conclude that Romanian life has been extinguished, that Romanians, in the face of the hordes of foreigners, have retreated, leaving their places in the hands of the enemy.

They have retreated from commerce, they have retreated from industry, they have retreated from real-estate, they have retreated from schools.

And this is not only in Moldova. It is enough to remind yourself that in Maramureș, from whence Dragos-Voda crossed the mountains in order to establish Moldova, there are, by the old statistics, 47.000 Jews to 60.000 Romanians.

…And if all the races of the world, from the oldest times, have the right to defend themselves against Jewish parasitism, to defend their national being, why is it that only us, the Romanians, shouldn’t have this right? Why are we called barbarians when the last drop of our soul is trembling trying to secure a place for itself under the sun?...

Why is it that, two thousand years before Christ, the Egyptians kicked out these Jews from their midst? I wonder why later, Tacitus, the great historian of the Romans, called them “deterrima gens”? Why is it that Mommsen, the renowned historian, ascertains that the Jews were an element of decomposition in the Roman Empire?

Around 1295, England, which was then just starting its development, exiled the jews, considering them a danger to this development, and didn’t accept them back for 500 years, only around 1750. And Chamberlain, renowned English writer, in a letter addressed to Romanians and published around 1900, declared that with all their preventative measures, the competitiveness of the Jews had become so great, that it threatens English ownership itself.

On 1st of March 1492, Ferdinand of Spain made that famous decree, through which he ordered the Jews to leave his country in three months.  The Jewish argument that this was the cause for Spain's decline, is false. On 1st of August 1492 the Jews leave Spain. In October of the same year, meaning after a couple months, Columbus discovers America. And the great development of Spain started only after the discovery of America. And only after that, did the decline follow. Therefore, we could say that immediately after the Jews were exiled, followed not the decline, but the flourishing of Spain.

But who doesn’t know the measures taken by France against Jews in 1680, and who especially doesn’t know the measures of restriction taken by Napoleon in 1806?

Let us be allowed this comparison, in only this point of view, between France in 1806 and Romania in 1924. The wealth of France hasn’t entered into the hands of the Jews, the cities of France were not overwhelmed with them, the middle class of France was not destroyed, it’s ruling class was not threatened with extinction, as they are now in Romania. France was a state congealed for eight centuries, while Romania today is just starting it’s congealing as a unitary state of all Romanians. More than that, France in 1806 didn’t have a 20% literacy rate, as does Romania in 1924. And with all this, France had the right to defend itself. Why should this be considered “barbarity” in front of the world, the defence of your own national life and of your precious land? France, today, has 80.000 Jews to 40 million French, and they are defending themselves against them through the renown movement of Leon Daudet. Us, Romanians, don’t have the right to defend ourselves when at 11 million Romanians, we have 3 million Jews.

…All the races which have come in contact with this destroying peoples have taken measures of self-defence and have removed them. With all this, it is said that the civilised world is against Romanians, when they also try to defend themselves. The English struck at the Irish, in their own country, until yesterday… and it wasn’t civilised. And Americans even today maintain laws of defence against the invasion of the Japanese. And no one sees them, no one discusses them and no one condemns them.

Most-honored lady,

Receiving today through lady G… the books you’ve sent us from your goodwill, we dare to write you these lines, to evidence the right for defence of the Romanian nation, and to make it echo in the world, beyond our borders, in France, where by the graces of these Jews, our justice is unknown. The lack of ties with the foreigners we feel deeply. We shout at the whole world, but our voice doesn’t come through. Your ladyship, through the contacts you have in France, will make an enormous service to Romanians, if in our name you will tell the Frenchmen with a loud voice:

The Latindom at the Danube is in deadly danger!

Student letters from prison: To a kid in Vaslui, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1924

Dear kid and dear children,

We received your letter… let me say the letter of all of you, because it contains the godly and holy spirit of an entire generation.

Your generation is now growing up on the banks of the Cheremosh and until the Danube, from the Dniester and until the Tisa, having in its thousands of chests a single soul, in its eyes – a single spark, in its thousands of arms a single type of sword, in the world – a single purpose: to redeem this race of Romanians and to defend this earth in which our parents, grandparents and ancestors are resting and will rest.

And because you asked me what your primary duty is, I will tell you. It is to love this land with a burning desire, dear children. In it sleeps and will forever sleep all our memories; kiss its soil with love; step slowly on it. Underneath it lay precious bones and plenty of blood. Every bone, every drop of blood will tell your heart stories of pain and bravery, the story of your race; the story of a race of heroes.

In these stories you will find the understanding that these lands were yours; that they are meant for you, and you have to either take them, or to die trying.

This is the first of all your duties, children! The other duties, I will tell them to you when the time comes. Until then, the Romanian students imprisoned in Văcărești kiss you and all of you, you are our hope of tomorrow.

Student letters from prison: The moon enters through the iron bars… , Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1924

Honoured mr. Major,

It is evening! The moon enters through the iron bars of our rooms, with cold and sweet enchantment…

Our thoughts fly away, back on to the old and precious roads… and our friends appear in our minds again. The upheaval of our memories make us relive a sweet and lost past.

Still, we don’t feel bad for being here. If this country were to stop being Romanian, we wouldn’t want anything to do with it anymore. If on the holy soil in which our parents sleep, we are to become slaves and foreigners are to become masters, then its better here with hands tied, than outside with a tarnished face.

And if sometimes our eyes flash with a desire of escape, it’s only in order to grip in our hands the cold steel of a sword and to start righting the wrongs of an oppressed race.

For us, Moldavians, there is nothing left but to choose: the sword, or the grave. The grave is for the unrighteous and cowards, and the sword is for the brave.

We are not a race of the unrighteous, thus the sword will be on our side.

Student letters from prison: The aristocracy of yore is dying… , Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1924

Most-honoured lady G. …,

Yesterday I had the joy of receiving the visit of your ladyship at the prison in Văcărești, a descendant of one of the oldest Romanian boyar families, and of a name, of course, deeply tied to this land. It is the name of “Câmpineanu”, in front of which we, the traitors of today, the knowers of the past, we bow our heads with veneration, with deep piety.

…And after you left us on that day full of sunshine, with a wind foreshadowing of spring, after the great iron gates closed again with a dull noise behind you, we all fell silent and thought… that spring is not coming for us.

---

Our aristocracy of yore is extinguishing… And we ask: who remains after the Ghiculești and with what holdings? Who remains after Cuzești and with what wealth? After the Câmpineni, Rosnoveni and with what wealth? I wonder who will remain after our aristocracy which wrote their name in the marble of our churches? Who will remain after the aristocracy which birthed out of its bosom the greatest defender of the Romanian peasant, Domnitor Alexander John I? Who will remain after our aristocracy which birthed out of its bosom and supported the great Romanian Mihail Kogălniceanu during his education abroad?

And why, in villages and cities, churches are not built anymore, and the ones we have are falling to ruin?

Why is it that in our villages we don’t throw parties for christenings like we used to, in which the boyars baptised the most worthy householder, and neither weddings with rich processions at which boyars would crown the proudest girl and boy? 

Oh, God! The answer is painful. Just look around you and ask yourself who is replacing you?... And recognise your sins!...

The new boyars are not called Ghica, nor Kogălniceanu, nor Negri, nor Greceanu, nor Câmpineanu. Their names are Bercovici, Blank, Filderman, Rosenthal, Schuller, Stern, Calmanovic, Fischer… and so on.

When around 1840, the young boys of Romanian boyars were sent to study in Paris, Berlin and other European capitals, we knew that the independence movement of ‘48 was waiting for us, the Union of the Principalities from ‘59, we knew that that the secularisation of the wealth of the monasteries and the redistribution of lands to the peasants was waiting in ‘64.

But today, I wonder what awaits us, when we send abroad sons of Jews, meanwhile, here, in our country, the Romanian student is looking for a job as a waiter so he won’t die of hunger?

We said it, and we will continue saying it: the whip of the Jew waits for us, his yoke awaits us!

And is there anything left to do? Is there something left for us?...

Yes! Battle to the death!

Without too much philosophy, without reservations and without gloves.

In this battle our duty is to make ourselves a shield around our aristocracy of blood. And its duty is to understand its purpose. This ours aristocracy of blood, understanding of its purpose, we need it and we don’t want to replace it with Jews!

The importance of the aristocracy at all times has been great, at all peoples and in all directions.

In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael, Michelangelo, couldn’t have created masterpieces in art which lasted for centuries, if the Italian aristocracy from the XV century (Medici, Sforza, etc) wouldn’t have existed.

Maybe the great growth in literature and art of Louis XVI France wouldn’t have happened, if this wealthy aristocracy wouldn’t have made available their total wealth and its moral concourse.

In our lands, if the aristocracy wouldn’t have existed to support Mihail Kogălniceanu, himself from a noble line, and then all the great men of the previous generation, only God would know were we would be right now.

But, didn’t this aristocracy also give us Iancu Jianu, the haiduc¹ from the mountains of Oltenia?

In our times, in Italy, Mussolini wouldn’t have been able to save his country, if the Italian aristocracy wouldn’t have given him their all so the old Latin civilisation wouldn’t become a ruin.

(But let’s not forget that as much good as an aristocracy can do, it can do just as much evil. Gaze only to Russia, where the Russian aristocracy is bathing its multitude of sins in the blood of the people!)

That is why we have the duty to defend our aristocracy and here is the great duty which falls on it in this hard battle which the Romanian nation is waging now. That is why we have the duty to create it, if it doesn’t exist anymore. An aristocracy of natives, the selection of which should be an unending love for country, old-fashioned bravery, wisdom and a sense of measure. An aristocracy which will be formed by free selection of these values from any direction they come. The same way that “nobility of sword” in France was created, and the way it was during the time of Napoleon, when every soldier carried in his sack a marshal’s cane. The same way our old aristocracy was created, which you are a descendent of.

Who were the boyars of Stephen the Great, if not those peasants, which by acting bravely in war, received for their heroism the rewards of lands and rank?

Is it not true that the Moldavian aristocratic family of Movilesti descends from that squire called Purice [Flea] which Stephen made a boyar for his bravery and changed his name in Movila [Hill] (changing his name like that is the Romanian equivalent to English expression: to make a mountain out of a molehill).

Four centuries have flowed since then… 1475. When on that white valley at Războieni, all 10.000 boyars of Prince Stephen fell in battle, whitening the valley with their bones, to defend their homeland.

That’s how the Moldavian aristocracy knew to write the most briliant page of glory in the history of Moldova: with its own blood.

This aristocracy is needed right now! It will have to defend its tradition by following the heroic example of their ancestors of 1475, it will have to help us, it will have to enter alongside and in front of us, reviving that ancestral bravery in our holy battle for the defence of the Romanian lands!

… Come to us, the descendants of our old, brave aristocracy! Come… Because the enemy is plenty, our strength is drained, and the country is starting to die!...

Student letters from prison: Romania of our dreams… , Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1924

Most-honored miss F,

I have received these lines with so much truth and so much Romanian soul in them, I read them at the light of the hearth on a prison-night and I understood better then what I have long felt… the need for a new Romania.

The shine of contemporary Romanian civilization didn’t capture my eyes… The blinding palace lights, music chanting tones of glory, youths promenading their lipstick and savant hair-dos in front of modern vitrines, the millions marching to the clubs every night…all doesn’t break the surface.

When you try to penetrate even deeper, in every poor Romanian hovel, you will see starving children waiting for a ray of light and a crust of bread, you will see an army in rags, carrying in their eyes the most terrible humiliation, and you will see the most rotten corruption starting from the conductor of the trams, reaching to the ministers of the country and even the justice system.

Debauchery, wantonness, moral decadence, with the appearance of brilliance… on a triumphal march.

This brilliance couldn’t blind me. Because I know that “even mold can shine! And the sun before a sunset still shines!...”

But at the same time, I understood that the above have never been and are not in the nature of the Romanian; that it’s a microbe from the foreigner, which after they stole our cities, stole our wealth, replaced us in schools, they want now to murder even the Romanian soul… That’s why when it comes to the Jewish problem we don’t see it as just the simple control of our commerce, but as an attempt against the soul of the Romanian which has lived on these lands, honourably, for centuries. And this is why I have given the signal and sounded the alarm desperately.

Against this march of our race on the way of death, we “the conspirators from Văcărești”, have conspired.

Back to ancestral bravery and ancestral Romanian honour!

For us, who abandoned our flocks of sheep on the peaks of the mountains and descended to the cities in the valleys, the hope for the salvation of our race cannot come either from “red lips” (communists), nor from the great traitors responsible for our current state.

… That’s why, in the silence of a prison night, dreaming of the Romania which our mothers have sung about to us when we were in cribs and to which we’ve tied so many holy hopes and longings, we often turn our faces back to the forests we’ve left, to the lands of our ancestors. There all of our memories sleep, there sleeps the whole glory of our nation, from there we await our salvation to come.

And now, we thank you for the parental care that you’ve shown to us, we raise our eyes and thought to God, praying to Him to give you health and life, in order to live in this new Romania… the Romania of our dreams!...

The Internal Profile of the Captain, Emil Cioran, 1940.

Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was an inhabited Sahara. Those stuck between heaven and earth had no content but anticipation. Someone had to come. We all wandered through the Romanian desert, not being capable of anything. Even contempt seemed like too much effort. Our country could be an issue to us only in the negative. In my most uncontrolled moments of hope, I could only justify it as a moment of successful farce. And Romania was nothing more than a successful farce. You would spin around carried by the wind, free of the present and the past, embracing the sweet debauchery that comes with from a lack of mission. The poor country was a vast pause between a beginning without greatness and a vague possibility. The future was groaning inside us. In him, it was boiling. He ruptured the gentle silence of our existences and forced us “to be”. The virtues of a race embodied themselves in him. From possibility, Romania was headed for power.

With Corneliu Codreanu I only had a couple conversations. I understood, immediately upon meeting him, that I was talking to a human in a country of human trifles. His presence was unsettling, and I never left from his place without feeling that enthusiasm of the irredeemable, of crossroads, that accompanies an existence marked by fate itself. I would even say that I was enveloped by a strange fear and an enthusiasm full of foreboding.

In front of him, the world of books revealed itself to be as useless, of categories - inoperable, the prestige of intelligence — shattered, and the subterfuges of subtlety — futile.

The Captain didn’t suffer from the fundamental vice of the so-called Romanian intellectual. The Captain wasn’t “smart”, the Captain was profound.

The spiritual disease of this country is derived from intelligence without content, from “smartness”. The lack of a spiritual core exchanges legitimate issues, into elements of an abstract game, and steals the aspect of destiny from the spirit. Smartness degrades even suffering into a trifle.

But the ideas of the Captain, heavy and rare, sprouted to him out of Fate. They were forged somewhere there, far away. From where I stood, the impression of a whole universe of heart, of eyes, and of thought. When, in 1934, I told him how interesting an exposition of his life would be, he responded: “I didn’t spend my time in libraries. I don’t like to read. I sit like this and think”. Those thoughts plotted our course. In them, breathed the sky and nature. And when they sailed towards fulfillment, the historical bedrock of the country shook.

Corneliu Codreanu did not raise the issue of immediate Romania, modern or contemporary Romania. That was far too little. It wouldn’t fit neither the dimensions of his vision, neither our expectations. He raised the issue in ultimate terms, in the totality of national becoming. He didn’t want to set right the relative misery of our condition, but to introduce the Absolute into the daily breath of Romania. Not a revolution of the historical moment, but of History. Like this, the Legion, should not only create Romania, but also redeem its past, breath life into its centuries long absence, to save through a madness, inspired and unique, the immense time that was lost.

The legionary pathos is an expression of reaction in the face of a past full of misfortune. This nation hasn’t excelled in the world but consequently in unhappiness. It never refuted it’s own state. Our substance is a negative infinity. From here comes the impossibility of overcoming a pendulation between a dissolving sourness and an optimistic fury.

In a moment of hopelessness, I told the Captain:

“Captain, I don’t think Romania has any meaning in the world. There is no sign in it’s past that would justify any hope”

“You are right”, he responded. “However, there *are* still some signs”.

“The Legionary Movement”, I added.

And then, he showed me how he saw the revival of Dacian virtues, and I understood that between the Dacians and Legionaries is interposed the pause of our being, because we are living in the second beginning of Romania.

The Captain gave the Romanian a meaning. Before him, the Romanian was only Romanian, that is, human material made up of resentments and humiliations. The Legionary is a Romanian of substance, a dangerous Romanian, a fatality for himself and for others, a human tempest infinitely threatening. The Iron Guard — a fanatical forest… the Legionary had to become a man in which pride suffered from insomnia.

We were used to the patriot of occasions, gelatinous and empty. In his place appears a individual which looks at the country and its issues with fierceness. It’s a difference of density of soul.

He, who gave the country a different direction and a different structure united in himself elemental passion with spiritual detachment. His solutions are valid in the immediate and in eternity. History knows of no visionary with a spirit more practical and such skill in life that is supported on the soul of a saint. Exactly like this, she does not know a second movement in which the issue of redemption walks hand in hand with homesteading.

To make ends meet and to redeem yourself, politics and mysticism, that is the irreducibility that he put an end to. He was interested, in equal measure, in the organization of a canteen and the issue of sin, in commerce and faith. Nobody must forget: The Captain was a homesteader residing in the Absolute. Everyone thinks they understood him. He, nevertheless, escapes everyone. He surpassed the limits of Romania. He proposed to the movement a mode of life which surpassed Romanian resistance itself. He was too great. Sometimes one thinks that he fell from the conflict of his greatness with our smallness. It is nevertheless not less true, that the epoch of persecution has unearthed characters which which even the most hopeful utopia couldn’t suspect.

In a nation of servants, he introduced honor and in a invertebrate herd, hubris. His influence not only articulated his apprentices but, in a certain sense, his enemies too. Because those, from riffraff, became monsters. He forced them to strength, he imposed to them a character in negative. They wouldn’t have become infernal caricatures they are if the greatness of the Captain wouldn’t have demanded a negative equivalence. We would be unfair to the executioners, if we considered them failures. They all accomplished themselves. One step further and they would have woken up the jealousy of Satan.

In the Captain’s vicinity, no one stayed lukewarm. A dark chill passed over the country. A human region haunted by the essential. Suffering becomes the criterion of worthiness and death, of a calling. In a couple years, Romania knew a tragic palpitation, whose intensity consoles us of our thousand years of un-history. The faith of one man gave birth to a world which leaves the ancient tragedy of Shakespeare behind. And this — in the Balkans!

On the ultimate level, if I had to choose between Romania and the Captain, I wouldn’t hesitate even for a single moment.

After his death we all felt more alone, but over our sadness rises the sadness of Romania itself.

No pen dipped in the inks of misfortune could begin to describe the ill luck of our nation’s becoming. Still, we have to be cowards and console ourselves. With the exception of Jesus, no dead man has been more present amongst those alive. Did any of us really have the thought of forgetting him? “From here on out, the country will be ruled by a dead man”, my friend told me on the banks of the Seine.

This dead man spread a perfume of eternity over our mere humanity and returned the sky above Romania.

Legionary foundation creed, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1927

And the more we are under assault

and the more the world strikes at us,

the more we will stand under the shield

of Holy Archangel Michael and the shadow of his sword.

A ruin… , Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1933

There is no man with eyes that doesn’t see that this rich country has become a ruin. Ruin – the household of the peasant, ruin – the village (a dozen of people beaten by fate), ruin – the commune, ruin – the county, ruin – the widowed mountains, ruin – the derelict fields which don’t give anything to the ploughman anymore, ruin – the budget of the state, ruin – the country.

And above these ruins spread as far as the Romanian lands can hold, a bunch of villains, of imbeciles, a bunch of unashamed thieves which raised palaces in defiance of a country which is wailing with pain and as an insult to your suffering, you Romanian peasant.

Never has this world seen a picture more revolting, more painful and more insolent. Above the millions of households that are being destroyed, above the millions of poor souls which are crying out, the robber-palaces of state-thieves soar mockingly.

Who are they? Search for them in our estranged cities and you will find them. It is the former soldier-on-leave from 1916. It is the war-hero from 100 kilometres behind the front or the traitor of brothers and country, it is the one enriched by the war, the business man, the profiteer of the blood you spilled, drop by drop, from your deep wounds.

When you came back in 1918, you bowed to him, seeing him fat and richly dressed, and you – in rags; from that point on he took you in for rent, and you fell under his dominion together with the country *you* created on the battlefields…

How would you have liked this poor country to end up as when a (Constantin) Stere, condemned to death for high treason and then pardoned is now a party leader in Romania. When a (Emil) Socor, condemned and demoted for treason is a parliamentary and director of a newspaper and leads Romanian politics. When so many “soldiers-on-leave” are sitting at the head of the country?

We raised a flag. Against them, against those that ruined the country, against the droves of strangers which suck up even the marrow from our bones, we raised a flag.

When we marched under its shadow we asked for the blessing of the soldiers that fell on the battlefield for Greater Romania and made an appeal to all those who survived after the grave battles.

This avenging flag won at Neamț against the daring hordes of politicians. This flag crushed them at Tutova. This flag, blessed in two battles, we carry from one end of the country to another. It emboldens our people, and sows fear in the heart of our enemies.

We called ourselves legionaries. We, the servants of this flag, didn’t gather together to rob the country, didn’t gather to gain partisans and to give them to chew bones from the bones of the country.

We are gathered to remain poor until our graves; we will make poor and those that are rich, but we are gathered to triumph, to win, and to avenge. We are ready to sacrifice, we are all ready to die.

These are us, the legionaries! Fruitlessly and wrongly have we been confused by some villagers and townspeople, thinking that we fight to make them rich, to fuel their appetite, to let them feed on the country. Well — not!

Declaration of the message, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, 1933.

We await a new regime, a new system, which will come after this one will be felled by the weight and multitude of its sins. It will have to correspond to the following requirements in the order of urgency:

1. For all these sterile and richly paid discussions of parliamentary democracy to be abolished, which have never produced any light and out of which, especially, cannot come out the heroic decision to face the peril of the dark hour we find ourselves in.

2. For it to be replaced with command, which will gather in a single bundle all the disparate energies of the race, now clenched in fratricide battle, to discipline them, to remake their lost morale, to inspire into them faith in the destiny of our Romanian race and to lead them on the path of this destiny.

3. To declare war to general misery and poverty by urging to work and moderation those that are good, by forcibly sending to work all those that are parasitic elements which play the role of hive-drones in the state, all the lazy ones which guard the tables of cafés from morning till evening, all the bored ones that wander around on the street, all the electoral agents from cityhalls, prefectures, ministries, in substance, all the democratic ideologues wanting to hold gratuitous speeches.

4. For everything that is parasitic on the body of our country to be abolished, for all the creative energies of our race to be stimulated and organised.

5. For all dishonour to be stamped out and by confiscating the wealth of those guilty of it, to bring back to the last cent to the coffers of the state, the money that was stolen.

6. To step to the front of the great poor masses in both good and bad times, to eat the same black bread and same poor food that is eaten by the poor worker now. Because in these hard times, moral misery, inequality of treatment wounds more than material misery. Some live in luxury, with champagne and black roe while others don’t even have mamaliga, under this democratic regime that “loves the people”.

7. To do right by the Romanian in his own country. To heal his deep wounds. To set right the millennia old wrongs which he has suffered during the long lordships of the foreigners.

8. To defend Romania from the threat which is presented by the always growing invasion of the Jews.

9. To end the failed existence of this democratic state founded on the obsolete ideology of the French revolution. To produce that epochal gesture of reformation, which will destroy completely and definitively the system of false abstractions of the political philosophy of this revolution. A great historical epoch is setting and it is the time to put in its place the foundations of a new epoch. An epoch of returning to the realities of the nation, giving it it’s real meaning of a natural society, of individuals of the same race, and not the juridical sense of a citizen, which allows for an automatic transformation into a Romanian of all the foreign hordes that come here to conquer and oppress us.

10. To raise from the ground up a new state, ethno-national, founded on the primacy of national culture, on the primacy of the family and the primacy of worker corporations.

A program cannot be a combination of theories fallen from the skies. It has to be based on the realities of our Romanian race which cause its pain. It is its wounds that have to be healed. You search for programmes? They are on the lips of the masses. You should rather search for people. Because in one night anyone can make a program and it’s not that which our country is longing for, but for people and a will to accomplish them.

There are movements which don’t have any programme. They live from the speculation of different problems which appear in life. For example: usury —they devour it and then die, if another prey doesn’t jump out in front of them before that. There are others which do have a programme. There are others that have more than a program, they have a doctrine, they have a religion. It is something of the superior spiritual order which mysteriously bring together the thousands of people decided on creating a new fate for themselves. If the man of the programe or of the doctrine somewhat serves his programme because of his interests, Legionaries are people of a great faith for which they are always ready to sacrifice themselves for. This faith —they will serve unto death. No matter how beautiful or complete the programme of Lupists, Georgists, Liberals, and Agrarians looks, you can be sure that no Lupist is ready to die for the Lupist programme, no Georgist for his, and so on. That’s why, I put less faith on people gathered on the basis of programmes that will abandon you to the wolves in hard times, than on those recruited on the basis of great faith that won’t abandon you even in death.

Our Legionary Movement has rather the character of a great spiritual school. It aims to bring out unsuspected faith, it aims to revolutionise the Romanian soul.

Shout in all directions that evil, misery, ruin, come to us from the soul. The soul is the cardinal point on which it must be worked on at this present moment, the soul of the individual and the soul of the mass. A lie are all these new programmes and social systems pompously flaunted to the people, if in their shadow we are being wounded by the same thieving soul, the same lack of consciousness in executing one’s duty, the same spirit of betrayal of everything that is Romanian, the same debauchery, the same luxurious and wasteful acts.

Call the soul of the race to a new life. Do not seek electoral success if it does not also signify the triumph of the organised forces of a renewed soul.

Programmes, how do you mean?

You think we cannot drain swamps?

We cannot build Romanian cities?

We cannot, on our rich land, secure the bread of every Romanian?

We cannot create laws that will secure the good functioning of a state mechanism corresponding to our times and our national specific?

We cannot make five year plans?

We will not be able to create, here, in the crown of the Carpathians, a land that will shine like a beacon in the middle of Europe, and which will be the expression of our Romanian genius?

We can.

But the great mistake of my many political enemies is that they’ve *flaunted* their programmes before being *forced* to accomplish them.

The Portrait of the Captain, Stelian Stănicel, 1977

He is a handsome man, tall, straight, of a harmonious construction, with chestnut-wavy hair, always leaning on his forehead. He had penetrating, blue-green eyes, out which radiated strong rays and which shone with a nobleness of the soul.

Without doubt he was a good man, correct, honest, humane, and full of love for everyone around him. He had a faith and undisturbed conviction in the mission he had to accomplish. His correctitude went so great that it knit itself seamlessly together with virtue of honour he applied with a great severity not just to himself, and to his own, but even to his enemies: “it is better to fall on the path of honour than to win by treachery”, he often said.

He was a man of great and high judgement. He seamlessly united right judgement with the strategy of a great army leader on the field of battle and with the great ability to execute, a union seldom found in a single person.

He was handsome and attractive. His step was heavy, gestures controlled and speech economical even when the storm clouds downed on him. When his enemies struck at him, without him being able to respond, his eyes thundered with anger and his only reaction was: “These pygmies we will never forgive”.

He produced a magnetic force the orbit of which was impossible to escape from. If he walked on foot, people would start following him. In the tram, or on the street, they whispered to each other: “This is Corneliu Z. Codreanu”.

He judged with an astonishing quickness. He analysed every situation to the smallest details. He wanted to know everything that was going on. He liked to be well-informed and from secure sources. The one who gave him information had to pay for its veracity, so-to-speak, with his own head. He didn’t allow whispering around him and was very tough on those that started rumours and made up untruths. When he made a judgement, or judged a situation, he had to be informed to the maximum and always consulted with others to hear their opinions. He was on Earth but at the same time, he wasn’t. His whole being burned with an inner flame which consumed problems and thoughts that are hard to decipher, and yet so natural for the ones who understood his mission on Earth. The natural and the supranatural were mirrored in his whole being. He was man and emperor. The mystical flames in his gaze armed his fellow legionaries with hitherto-unsuspected weapons, which exalted us to total spiritual devotion and sacrifice.

He was a realist. He knew that the path to the moral regeneration of a generation cannot be done on the path of night. A triumph cannot be won by a cheap victory, but only by patience, education, and sacrifice of your own individual, of your race and lastingly so.

He abstained from any excesses with exceptional ease. He only smoked one cigarette in the evening, and only after dinner. In work camps he advised his legionaries to not smoke before breakfast. He fasted on Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes completely; he didn’t eat anything until after sunset.

He was poor and lived in Fransiscan renunciation. In the times of his job as a lawyer in Iasi, when he made some money, he gave it to the cause of national fight or for the help of those in need. When he passed by a beggar and didn’t have a coin in his pocket, he asked the people who were with him, to give some money for the mercy of the beggar.

His wife was modest and didn't need wealth to be satisfied. His national dress or the couple outfits of civil clothes he had were gifted by friends. His clothes that he purchased in France, during his studies, he wore for many years afterwards. During the time we were building the Casa Verde in New-Bucharests, he slept in a little hovel underground. When the building was finished, he was gifted an apartment. It was the first time he and his wife had their own house. His whole life he either lived at his parent’s house in Huși, by renting or at friends.

Once he settled permanently at Casa Verde, and the distance to the HQ on Gutenberg street being too long to be done by tram or bus, Ionel Mota organised to buy him an automobile, for economy of time and for his personal safety, so he wouldn’t be killed by the agents of the Camarila². After a lot of convincing, he finally accepted us buying him an automobile: “but don’t buy a German brand (Hitler was in power) and don’t buy an Italian brand (Mussolini was in power), but a French brand, if you can.”. At that time Leon Blum, a socialist, was in power in France. “Nobody could believe that Leon Blum gifted it to me”, added the Captain. We bought him a french Renault, and the Workers Corps ordered Ilarie to be his permanent chauffeur. With that car he could quickly travel in Bucharest, or in the whole country.

He was accused by political parties and enemies of being a servant of Hitler, and that he wants to sell his countries to Hitlerists. Flondor was a friend of his and a legionary commander. His brother worked at the Royal Palace as Chief-of-Protocol. Once Flondor ran to the headquarters and told the Captain that Marshal Goring is on a hunt in Bucovina and it would be good for him to go talk with the Marshal. “What would I tell him? I have nothing to say to him”. And he didn’t go.

Another time, Flondor advised him that it would be good for him to sign up on the register for an audience with the King at the Royal Palace. And on the day the audience will be scheduled on, Flondor will bring him the tailcoat that’s required by the dress code.

“I will not go and sign up for an audience. I have nothing to ask from the King. I don’t want to be a minister, I don’t even want him to give me power. But if the King will summon me, I will go, but I will wear my national dress whether he likes it or not”

At a later point, he explained to others who heard of this his reasons for why he won’t ask for an audience:

“If I ask, it means I want something. But I don’t want anything. I want only to be left to activate in peace. If I ask for an audience, they will ask me what I want. If they summon me, I will ask them why they asked for me and what they want from me. If I were to speak to the Palace, I can’t speak in my name. I will have to speak in the name of our whole generation and of our whole Race, and then the whole country will know what I said.”

When he went to church, he prayed. During the whole Mass he stood straight as an arrow, without moving. His posture added majesty and filled the Holy Liturgy with glory. When he was hard-pressed by problems he would ask Nicoleta and the others from the HQ: “You go and pray. Maybe your prayers are more powerful than mine. Pray for me as well”.

He spoke nicely even with the people he knew were wishing for his death. He forgave them, because their hate was of a human, excusable nature. He knew that with him comes a new world of honour and righteousness in the social and political life of the country. Many of them feared him, and others respected him in silence.

He reserved a set of words for his dishonourable enemies: villains, pygmies, imps. “These ones we should never forget.. They aren’t worthy of the joy that the Romanian People will experience when the day of triumph will come”. When he felt that Prime Minister Gheorghe Tatarascu is plotting his assassination and proceeded to say that “a wounded boar has to be killed, otherwise, he becomes dangerous”, the immediate response of the Captain was: “These ones will not be forgiven even in death”.

Here are some characterisations formulated by several great legionary personalities: Puiu Gârcineanu, Ion Banea, Iordache Nicoara and Gh. Racoveanu.

This is how Puiu Gârcineanu characterised the Captain:

“This man is both cerebral and sentimental. He is rational and mystical. He is good and harsh. Kind and implacable, willful and suave, proud and modest, tenacious without being rigid, idealist without being utopic, a visionary of the latent potentials of the Romanian People. Of great spiritual energy and extraordinary physical force. Teacher and leader, patient and prudent although of a tumultuous temperament, free of personal appetites, predestined to lead the masses. He was an organiser obsessed with spiritual imperatives, with love of great strength for everyone, for all creatures of God, for animals and insects, for the colours of the fields, for all the flowers and birds of God. His loving-kindness for children and the humble was endless. As we believe that nothing great had been done in this world without love, it is without doubt that he was called to reawaken the Romanian Race”

And Ion Banea wrote this on 13th of March 1936:

“The Captain! He is a cornerstone; a frontier. A sword drawn between two worlds. One old, which he challenges with manliness, destroying it; another new, which he creates, he gives life to, he brings to light.

His figure amongst the national movement, from the war onward, appears as a firing line around which all the great events of the nation are happening. He was the leader and the animator. At the same time, he was in the foremost position on the battlefield, full of faith and resolution, never backing down from his responsibility. 

His life is merged with the national movement and struggle to such a degree, that nothing remained of his personal life, it becomes dedicated wholly to continuous and great struggle for the interests of the Nation. Predestined to sacrifice, he lived intensely and tumultuously. His life was stalked by danger and full of action. He has reached peaks as are seldom for one to even aspire to, and has descended into depths from which only the power of God – in which he believed so much –  was able to deliver him from. He has known what it means to be forced to work for life, and the greatness of the whole Romanian Race being solidary with his actions. The harsh days spent in prisons have eroded his health and the great moments of life of leading tens of thousands of people gathered by his command gave him thrills. 

He walked hand-in-hand with the times, receiving both praise and insults with a smile on his lips.

A lover of battle, he dedicated it all to bravery. He gave all of himself to the Movement, and he didn’t ask for anything in return for himself. His enemies wanted him slain, but he ascended even higher. The Captain: Thought, will, action, bravery, life.

Iordache Nicoara (Legionary commando, who received death before a machine-gun for Codreanu) wrote:

“And this man, descended from the mountains, accomplished his Romanian life profoundly, with a beauty and authenticity which put a seal on his entire century. And he managed, painting an Archangel on his shield, after long prostrations on the slabs of church and prison, after sacrifice and torture. He managed to gather, with his arms and eyes, the entire will of the Race, to dig it a deep riverbed and to allow it flow seethingly through the centuries.”

And Gheorghe Racoveanu, emeritus theologian and student of the savant Professor of Logic and Philosophy, Nae Ionescu, wrote:

“Corneliu Codreanu was not a preacher; he was not a professor of christian education; he was not a pedagogical teacher. But he was a teacher, organiser, and guide. He taught, organised, and led. Our great Eminescu didn’t just have genius intuitions, but also the gift to formulate them in pregnant truths which still nurture us today. Corneliu Codreanu didn’t just have the gift to intuit and formulate, but also the power to organise; he had the capacity to work the existent human material. He was distinguished, undoubtedly, by his great sense for what is real. But over and above that he had a strength that melted the slag of human treachery, chased the sickness of laziness, prepared the souls of others for heroic action, towards total sacrifice of self. In this power, in this exceptional gift is his value. Here, the extraordinary prestige of his. Corneliu Codreanu didn’t just manage to raise – against the will of all imaginable enemies – a movement of great proportions.

Corneliu Codreanu transformed people: he dressed their souls in wedding clothes. In a country and at a time that lacked honour, where high-robbery and debauchery where at home, Corneliu Codreanu placed honour as an independent virtue on the pedestal, he made righteousness and spiritual honesty the primordial condition for living together, and out of austere morals – the coat-of-arms of his warriors. And the crown of these virtues – belief in Jesus Christ. These virtues, he didn’t preach, he embodied them. That’s why the Romanian Race saw in him its guide, head, chief, its captain. By decapitating it, the sclerotics of 1938 decapitated the Nation.

By making this statement I am not referring to the purpose which Corneliu Codreanu would have in the struggle against the East, or in changing the profile of European politics. The Russian occupation will stop together with the defeat of Soviet Russia, a defeat we believe in with all our strength. But once the Russians are chased off, the process of healing the nation will not end. In the times of freedom is when the Nation will need the teacher, the extraordinary man which it gave us and which it cannot produce but only in intervals of centuries; will need Corneliu Codreanu, the one that was killed “pro populo”. ”

We know that Nae Ionescu, who understood the whole profundity of Corneliu Codreanu’s work and who felt his call, said – when Codreanu was still alive – that the miracle embodied by him is so great that now it exceeds even his own person. And after his murder he taught us that the most fruitful revenge of Corneliu Codreanu is for us to embody his will.

The apprentices and friends of Corneliu Codreanu have the honorary duty to not betray his work. But Codreanu is no more. And Codreanu cannot be replaced by anyone else. That’s why, through the decapitation of 1938, the Romanian Nation has remained poor.

But God will transfigure it into a sign for the good. Because the sin was not committed by the Nation, but by its deathly enemies.

And now, at the end of these lines, my prayer:

Birth, oh God, out of Romanian soil another Captain which will raise the Cross that  has been felled, will transfigure our ancient history, will wipe our tears and suffering with his hands, will heal the wounds of our flesh and spirit made by those without God and will open the luminous path towards the throne of Your Kingdom for our Romanian Race and will make out of our country “a country as beautiful as the Holy Sun up in the Sky, wealthy, powerful, and with the fear of God in it”, the way it was wished of by Ion Mota and the Captain.

In the year of our Lord 1977, the Captain would have turned 78 years of age. In 1938, at the age of 39, he was murdered, through strangulation and gunshot by the men of Carol II, the executioner being the Prime Minister Armand Calinescu.

1. An outlaw, a man who hides in the mountains from where he raids and attacks unjust authority. In the eyes of the authorities he is a bandit, in the eyes of the regular person, a hero. Similar to Robin Hood.

2. The King’s secret service