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Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania by Roland Clark
Holy Legionary Youth introduces readers to the turbulent lives of ordinary people in interwar Romania who participated in the Legion of Archangel Michael, an anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, nationalist organisation. The book explores the Legion’s penetration of village and city life through spectacles and rituals. Invoking Romanian Orthodox Christianity, the Legion rapidly gained popular legitimacy despite resistance to its claim to power from political and commercial elites. Its underdog status added to its allure among the disaffected and disenfranchised who remained suspicious of the urban political class. The book examines ‘fascism from below’, showing how groups such as the Legion grew from the grassroots and gained power in universities, churches, communities and families through affective bonds of friendship, family and joint sacrifice and suffering. Fascism, we learn, had an everyday face and was not simply an ideology imposed from above. Heroes of the fascist movement were created through everyday practices that impacted people personally and resonated with their grievances.
This is a remarkable study that draws on fresh materials from oral histories, memoirs and secret police archives about a period in Europe’s history shortly after the fall of the Austro–Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. In those tumultuous times, ordinary people sought answers to problems of local and national identity, faith and economic power. Roland Clark shows us how individuals’ everyday choices led them on the path to a far-right racist and isolationist nationalism — a gripping account with uneasy resonances in our global political climate today.