How to Survive Communism in the USA?

Communist Flag Protest

Editor’s Note: This is Tom Sunic’s article in one piece. Still having technical problems, but we’ll survive!

The fundamental mistake made by most American conservatives, both old and new, is to think of communism solely as a violent ideology designed to abolish private property. During the so-called Cold War, they imagined that by mimicking some communist practices they could tone down the very real communist threat and elicit some Soviet sympathy. They should have been more careful what they wished for. The reason why communism fell apart in the early 1990s in the communist East was due to the fact that communist ideologemes, such as the idea of progress, economic equality, and the instauration of a borderless and multiracial society, had been more successfully put into practice in the capitalist West than in the communist East — albeit under a less abrasive name and without resorting to a large scale state terror.

For many Americans, surviving communism is therefore a contradiction in terms given that they have already fully aligned themselves to the System, i.e., “the deep state”, oblivious to its repressive crypto-communistic principles. Unsurviving communism, by contrast, is a destiny of a hapless few who are prepared to live a life of dissent — and also pay a heavy price for their non-conformist views.

Modern day neo-communist BLM and antifascist activists in the US know well that parading with the name of communism could backfire. Their self-ascribed title “antifa” resonates far better in the ears and eyes of the modern media. Many of them, including many of their Democratic party overlords are heirs to a now defunct Homo sovieticus species who once thrived in communist countries of Eastern Europe. The twin brotherhood between former Homo sovieticus and the present Homo americanus has had a very long history irrespective of their often feigned feuds and fake semantic posturing. [i] Given that the US, since its inception, has also been involved in a large number of world-improving projects, not least its century-long messianic virtue-signaling adventures aimed at elevating foreign peoples world-wide to a global City on the Hill, it was to be expected that at some point the communist temptation would gain in popularity in a new garb and hit home in the US. For example, US campuses continue to be the main breeding ground of antifa activists, having now more of their adepts than campuses in Western Europe where, over the last decade, there has been a noticeable recycling to populism and nationalism by many former leftist, but also Jewish authors (Michel Onfray, Alain Soral, Eric Zemmour). In post-communist Eastern Europe, organized antifa groups and their LGBT sidekicks are virtually non-existent, except when temporarily hired and exported by EU or State Department-sponsored NGOs in order to unseat some local populist and anti-globalist ruler. Hatred against antifas in all segments of East European society is understandable given that for many the term antifascism rings the bell of communism. Worth recalling is that words and locutions containing nouns or modifiers related to the word “antifascism” were in surplus in all official communist documents in Eastern Europe, even on marriage certificates, lasting well into the late 1950s. During the Cold War, and without any exception, all East European dissidents were squarely depicted in communist court proceedings as fascist agents.

The brainwashing of young American masses by the word antifascism owes much to the early Bolshevik agitator Leo Trotsky and his collection of essays under the title What is Fascism and how to Fight it,[ii] in which he depicts fascism as the ultimate stage of capitalism and showing how communists in the USA must smash it:

The backwardness of the United State working class is only a relative term. In very many important respects, it is the most progressive working class of the world, technically and in its standard of living…The next historic wave in the United States will be the wave of radicalism of the masses, not fascism. Of course, the war can hinder the radicalization for some time, but then it will give to the radicalization a more tremendous tempo and swing.[iii]

The recent antifa riots in many large cities in USA are also a belated follow-up on riots carried out by antifa “sixty-eigthers” half a century ago all over the West. [iv] They were successful in imposing communist cultural hegemony in higher education and in paving the way, a decade later, for the political takeover by the Left. Sixty-eighters spawned the modern-day antifa. However, neither the psychology of sixty-eighters, nor their modern antifa offshoots can be fully grasped if one loses sight of the world order created jointly by the capitalist US and the communist Soviet Union in 1945, both being part of the common antifascist block. In the final analysis, the entire West, with America at the helm, is unable to repudiate modern antifa activists, let alone declare them a terrorist organisation, unless it first revises its own writing of the history of World War II and overhauls its own system of liberal governance.

The antifa mindset

Apart from the Gulag system and the topography of its countless killing fields, Communism must first and foremost be analysed as an anthropology, or better yet as a widespread social pathology, albeit savored and craved subconsciously by a very large number of its future victims. The obsession with the idea of equality and equal redistribution of goods and capital is as old as humanity itself irrespective of the name this obsession may carry in different countries and epochs. Several undeservedly forgotten authors such as Claude Polin and Alexander Zinoviev, already quoted in TOO on several occasions, long ago noted that it is a deadly mistake to view communism as the terror of the few against many; rather, “it is the terror of all against all at every moment.”

As the flower and crowning glory of communality, communism represents a type of society which is nearest and dearest to the masses no matter how dreadful the potential consequences for them might be.[v]

Long ago I wrote, based on the analyses of these and other authors dealing with the communist anthropology, that the faith in communism presupposes first and foremost a peculiar mindset whose historical realization has been made possible by primordial egalitarian impulses followed by negative socio-biological selection. Throughout man’s biocultural evolution egalitarian instincts have been held in check by cultural institutions and racial in-group constraints. With the advent of the mass multiracial system, deceptively called democracy, resistance to these animalistic and inborn instincts is becoming virtually impossible.

The contemporary USA is a good place to study the proto-communist mindset. The very abstract eighteenth-century Enlightenment-egalitarian-inspired statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was bound to open up a Pandora box of wishful thinking all over Europe, also opening, two hundred years later, the floodgates of non-European immigration. Those do-good romantic Jeffersonian words had a specific meaning in his epoch and for his fellow travellers; today they are being differently interpreted by US lawyers of Mexican, Asian or African ancestry, let alone by their illiterate or semi-literate, lowe-IQ clients arriving in droves to America from Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

It is also a great self-delusion common to many American conservatives, both old and new, to imagine that they can avert the rise of communism by preaching the capitalist gospel of permanent economic growth. Contrary to a well-entrenched communist-Trotskyite dogma, communism can very well thrive in and within a capitalist free market economy. In view of the coming shortages of resources and the surge in the surplus of uprooted people, the communist experiment seems to be the only functional and viable system for the future of the world. Unlike any system hitherto in the history of mankind communism offers an effortless society, psychological predictability and economic security, however meager, bleak or frugal they may all be. Worse, communism increases the basest human instincts, which can best be seen in the violent behavior of US antifa rioters. Communism is the ideal system for any multiracial state composed of gregarious masses, consumer-minded citizens and lower-IQ individuals.

It is another well-spread hoax doctored up by Leon Trotsky that communists are archenemies of capitalism. The case of modern China, a country the size of the US, bears witness that in an overpopulated society facing scarce resources, the communist ruling oligarchy can work hand in hand with liberal free marketeers, creating large differences in wealth. Similar to Germany’s numerous antifa organisations, including the powerful and well-funded German Amadeu Antonio Stiftung , the activities of modern day antifa in America are also profusely funded by wealthy financiers, international corporations, and individuals, with a billionaire George Soros being the best known. Finally, from the geopolitical perspective it must not be forgotten that antifascist guerillas during World War II in Europe would have not lasted a week had they not been supported by the US and UK massive financial and military aid handed out to their sponsor in the Soviet Union.

Most American conservatives are supportive of communistic legal practices such as affirmative action, forgetting that the same “positive” racial discrimination legislation, albeit differently worded, was part and parcel of the Soviet system whose goal was to strike a balance between 16 former Soviet republics containing dozens of competing and feuding nationalities and ethnic groups. The passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was quite in line with the American Cold War wish to neutralize the Soviet threat by doubling down on the same Soviet legal practices, that is, the re-enactment of the multiracial system already laid down in the Soviet constitution of 1936. But, unlike in the Soviet Union — the dogma of multiculturalism and legal provisions on affirmative action are still alive and kicking in America.

The good news is that even if American communists, under the banner of Antifascism or Democratism, or Liberalism come to power in the US they will soon start eliminating each other. This would be fully in accordance with the iron law of egalitarian entropy, a fact often overlooked by many analysts of communism. The still-strong myth that communists and antifas only enjoyed killing anti-communists and fascists during and after World War II must be dismissed. In fact, ever since their coming to power communists and antifas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in 1917 and 1945 respectively, were involved in the orgy of mutual purges and killings. It must be expected that American antifas or liberals, or whatever they may name themselves in the near future, will start, once in power, with similar mutual killings. Virtually all big masterminds of communist mass killings during the pre-WWII and the post-WWII Soviet era, heads of powerful Soviet secret police agencies ( Genrikh Yagoda, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikolai Yezhov, Lev Kamenev ) were at some point demoted or ended up themselves on the gallows erected by their former communist comrades. A fresh example of latent communist entropy transpiring in incessant intra-communist warfare could be observed on the eve of the violent break-up of multicultural communist Yugoslavia in 1991, falsely ascribed by the foreign media to local nationalists. However, a closer look at the profile of major decision makers in seceding ex-Yugoslav republics points to their common communist past. Similarly, on a positive side, if one carefully looks at the pedigree, or reads the early works of some of the best and brightest anti-Communist analysts and writers (Boris Souvarine, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ante Ciliga), one can notice that they were at some point in their life ardent supporters of antifascism and communism.

Reductio ad hitlerum; reductio ad iudaeorom

The language arsenal of modern American antifa activists is another field of study that merits closer psycholinguistic attention. Antifa rioters and their college mentors, along with pro-communist US main media outlets, including a large number of their Democratic party coaches are using a revised communist jargon borrowed from the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet talk was once the daily menu of the communist propaganda in Eastern Europe, its goal being to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize political opponents. The language processing was simple — it consisted in reversing the meaning of words and redefining political concepts. Similar practice can be observed today in the US amongst modern antifa activists and main media outlets who resort to the principles of reductio ad absurdum, that is, they posit propositions that elicit contradictory yet self-serving conclusions. Along these reductionist lines of verbal sophistry, the process of vilifying Whites as fascists is being facilitated by the methodological tool of reductio ad hitlerum. By now this equation, i.e., Whites = Fascists has become a standard practice in social science studies and in the media in the US. For modern antifa rioters in the US, the word fascism is a pivotal killer-shut-up word. Once uttered it disables any communication. This word, however, has completely lost its original political designation, standing now instead for a synonym of the absolute cosmic evil.

The same verbal demonizing wordings apply to another killer-word i.e. “Nazism,” a derogatory hyperbolic abbreviation of the word in usage since 1945. The word ‘Nazi’, however, was never used in the official National-Socialist documents or academic journals in Germany from 1933–45. Ironically, it first appeared in the late 1920s as a deriding title of the book Der Nazi-Sozi [vi] written as a short lampooning manifesto against Jews, Communists and capitalists by Joseph Goebbels, who was to become in 1933 the main figure of the NS German propaganda war.

Using the pejorative word ‘Nazi’ today is the equivalent of the pejorative word “commie”, the difference being, however, that in a polite academic company in the US, or in academic journals nobody would ever use the word ‘commie’ in the description of communists. The whole array of new euphemisms, as well as torrents of killer-words have been manufactured over the last fifty years in the US , such as “white supremacism,” “ hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “Afro-Americans” instead of Negroes, the modifying adjective “Jewish” instead of a more piercing noun ‘Jew’, with most of these words being taken now as a commonplace either when criminalizing political opponents or when praising non-Europeans to the skies. When inspecting the prose of many leftist or Jewish-run journals or pro-Jewish news agencies in the USA, such as the SPLC or ADL, it becomes obvious that they function primarily as antifa educational loudspeakers when blaring on all frequencies the demonizing labels neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or fascists.

Historical amicability of a large number of Jewish-American intellectuals for antifascist projects have been amply documented by Kevin MacDonald. Most Jewish-American authors, for obvious reasons, are pretty tacit when it comes to analyzing the high percentage of leading Communists officials of Jewish origin in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their role in early communist-antifa movements, as well as their role in the establishment of repressive communist regimes. The very large overrepresentation of liberal-leftist Jews in the major media and elite academic institutions, as well as in financial contributions to political causes of the left, has also been critical in creating the culture of White guilt and fanning the flames of the communist temptation in contemporary America.

However, reducing the birth and the spread of communism, including its modern version of antifascism to Jewish intellectuals and activists is not the whole story; it means ignoring the all-encompassing, indeed democratic reality of the communist temptation. Gentile communist auxiliaries, reared in the culture of White guilt, operate as willing executioners; they fear being suspected of a lax attitude toward non-communist foes, or harboring themselves latent anti-Semitic feelings, and they often outperform their Jewish-communist comrades. It is no accident that the frontmen in modern antifa riots in US cities today are mostly troubled White individuals who have lost the sense of identity and who, driven by feelings of historical guilt (as is the case with most academics in Germany), look for atonement by becoming the loudest sympathizers or standard-bearers of antifascism.

Removing the communist temptation presupposes cleaning up the swamp, first in American higher education and then in defunding departments of humanities in all colleges. In order to do that, the fallacy of multiculturalism needs to be discarded; it has never worked anywhere in the world. It has always been a recipe for disaster and civil wars all over the world. Abandoned policies of racial segregation must be reconsidered as a viable option for a functional society. It is better to have fences than cohabiting with an alien partner in a fake marriage. Prior to that, however, the whole idea of progress, still strongly embedded in the American dream, needs to be re-examined. Of course, this may all sound like wishful thinking because, as we have seen thousands of times in history, it is the size of someone’s sword which only makes the difference between good and evil.

Notes:

[i] T. Sunic, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age (Arktos, 2018), pp. 34-70.

[ii] Leon Trotsky (Pathfinder, 1969).

[iii] Ibid. „The Perspective in the United States,“ published first in Fourth International, October 1940.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

[iv] T. Sunic, „Sixty-Eighters“, Chronicles of American Culture, March 1999.

[v] Alexander Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism (London: Victor Gollancz), p.28.

[vi] Joseph Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi; Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsozialisten, (Elberfeld, 1926). In Egnlsih trans.: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/nazi-sozi.htm

 

How to Survive Communism in the USA? Part 4

Editor’s note: I can only post very short pieces, so this very interesting article is posted in four parts. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3.

Historical amicability of a large number of Jewish-American intellectuals for antifascist projects have been amply documented by Kevin MacDonald. Most Jewish-American authors, for obvious reasons, are pretty tacit when it comes to analyzing the high percentage of leading Communists officials of Jewish origin in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their role in early communist-antifa movements, as well as their role in the establishment of repressive communist regimes. The very large overrepresentation of liberal-leftist Jews in the major media and elite academic institutions, as well as in financial contributions to political causes of the left, has also been critical in creating the culture of White guilt and fanning the flames of the communist temptation in contemporary America.

However, reducing the birth and the spread of communism, including its modern version of antifascism to Jewish intellectuals and activists is not the whole story; it means ignoring the all-encompassing, indeed democratic reality of the communist temptation. Gentile communist auxiliaries, reared in the culture of White guilt, operate as willing executioners; they fear being suspected of a lax attitude toward non-communist foes, or harboring themselves latent anti-Semitic feelings, and they often outperform their Jewish-communist comrades. It is no accident that the frontmen in modern antifa riots in US cities today are mostly troubled White individuals who have lost the sense of identity and who, driven by feelings of historical guilt (as is the case with most academics in Germany), look for atonement by becoming the loudest sympathizers or standard-bearers of antifascism.

Removing the communist temptation presupposes cleaning up the swamp, first in American higher education and then in defunding departments of humanities in all colleges. In order to do that, the fallacy of multiculturalism needs to be discarded; it has never worked anywhere in the world. It has always been a recipe for disaster and civil wars all over the world. Abandoned policies of racial segregation must be reconsidered as a viable option for a functional society. It is better to have fences than cohabiting with an alien partner in a fake marriage. Prior to that, however, the whole idea of progress, still strongly embedded in the American dream, needs to be re-examined. Of course, this may all sound like wishful thinking because, as we have seen thousands of times in history, it is the size of someone’s sword which only makes the difference between good and evil.

How to Survive Communism in the USA? Part 3

Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2.

The good news is that even if American communists, under the banner of Antifascism or Democratism, or Liberalism come to power in the US they will soon start eliminating each other. This would be fully in accordance with the iron law of egalitarian entropy, a fact often overlooked by many analysts of communism. The still-strong myth that communists and antifas only enjoyed killing anti-communists and fascists during and after World War II must be dismissed. In fact, ever since their coming to power communists and antifas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in 1917 and 1945 respectively, were involved in the orgy of mutual purges and killings. It must be expected that American antifas or liberals, or whatever they may name themselves in the near future, will start, once in power, with similar mutual killings. Virtually all big masterminds of communist mass killings during the pre-WWII and the post-WWII Soviet era, heads of powerful Soviet secret police agencies ( Genrikh Yagoda, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikolai Yezhov, Lev Kamenev ) were at some point demoted or ended up themselves on the gallows erected by their former communist comrades. A fresh example of latent communist entropy transpiring in incessant intra-communist warfare could be observed on the eve of the violent break-up of multicultural communist Yugoslavia in 1991, falsely ascribed by the foreign media to local nationalists. However, a closer look at the profile of major decision makers in seceding ex-Yugoslav republics points to their common communist past. Similarly, on a positive side, if one carefully looks at the pedigree, or reads the early works of some of the best and brightest anti-Communist analysts and writers (Boris Souvarine, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ante Ciliga), one can notice that they were at some point in their life ardent supporters of antifascism and communism.

Reductio ad hitlerum; reductio ad iudaeorom

The language arsenal of modern American antifa activists is another field of study that merits closer psycholinguistic attention. Antifa rioters and their college mentors, along with pro-communist US main media outlets, including a large number of their Democratic party coaches are using a revised communist jargon borrowed from the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet talk was once the daily menu of the communist propaganda in Eastern Europe, its goal being to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize political opponents. The language processing was simple — it consisted in reversing the meaning of words and redefining political concepts. Similar practice can be observed today in the US amongst modern antifa activists and main media outlets who resort to the principles of reductio ad absurdum, that is, they posit propositions that elicit contradictory yet self-serving conclusions. Along these reductionist lines of verbal sophistry, the process of vilifying Whites as fascists is being facilitated by the methodological tool of reductio ad hitlerum. By now this equation, i.e., Whites = Fascists has become a standard practice in social science studies and in the media in the US. For modern antifa rioters in the US, the word fascism is a pivotal killer-shut-up word. Once uttered it disables any communication. This word, however, has completely lost its original political designation, standing now instead for a synonym of the absolute cosmic evil.

The same verbal demonizing wordings apply to another killer-word i.e. “Nazism,” a derogatory hyperbolic abbreviation of the word in usage since 1945. The word ‘Nazi’, however, was never used in the official National-Socialist documents or academic journals in Germany from 1933–45. Ironically, it first appeared in the late 1920s as a deriding title of the book Der Nazi-Sozi [i] written as a short lampooning manifesto against Jews, Communists and capitalists by Joseph Goebbels, who was to become in 1933 the main figure of the NS German propaganda war.

Using the pejorative word ‘Nazi’ today is the equivalent of the pejorative word “commie”, the difference being, however, that in a polite academic company in the US, or in academic journals nobody would ever use the word ‘commie’ in the description of communists. The whole array of new euphemisms, as well as torrents of killer-words have been manufactured over the last fifty years in the US , such as “white supremacism,” “ hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “Afro-Americans” instead of Negroes, the modifying adjective “Jewish” instead of a more piercing noun ‘Jew’, with most of these words being taken now as a commonplace either when criminalizing political opponents or when praising non-Europeans to the skies. When inspecting the prose of many leftist or Jewish-run journals or pro-Jewish news agencies in the USA, such as the SPLC or ADL, it becomes obvious that they function primarily as antifa educational loudspeakers when blaring on all frequencies the demonizing labels neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or fascists.

Go to Part 4

 

Bitter Harvest: A Brilliant Film on the Ukrainian Holodomor

“This particular film was extremely important to me, and it felt almost like a mission. I wanted to bring knowledge about the famine genocide, the Holodomor, to the Western world, and that’s why I did it.”
        Ian Ihnatowycz, Bitter Harvest Producer

Bitter Harvest (2017) is a film inspired by the love and rediscovery of the writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover’s ethnic heritage. On a trip to the homeland of his Slavic ancestors he began to ruminate on how to capture the story of the Holodomor on film. With small acting parts in a variety of television series Bachynsky Hoover was learning the ropes of the film and entertainment industry. He went again to Kiev, investigating his family history. It was 2004 and the Orange Revolution was in full swing — he saw firsthand a Ukraine in the midst of upheaval. He learned that Western audiences had never seen the Holodomor dramatized on film — a dramatically different situation compared to that other genocide that has become a touchstone of Western Civilization and both a sword and a shield for Jewish and Israeli interests through endless promotion in the media.  In 2008 he would return with a script, seeking financing for an English language period piece set during the Holodomor. He met with officials from the Ukrainian Government as well as various oligarchs. All of them turned him down. It was not until 2011 that the dream to make his movie finally caught a glimmer of hope when fellow Ukrainian Canadian investor Ian Ihnatowycz committed $21 million to the film.

British actors Max Irons and Samantha Barks star as Yuri and Natalka, two childhood sweethearts from the same village. They marry young and soon their lives are thrown into the whirlwind of revolution and resistance that comes with annexation of the Ukraine by the Soviet Union and eventual famine by way of grain confiscation. Barry Pepper and Terence Stamp are crucial to the supporting cast as Yuri’s family. Pepper sports the classic Cossack khokol (also called oseledets in the Ukraine) haircut — a long lock of hair on the top or front of an otherwise completely shaven head. Tamer Hassan, an English actor of Turkish Cypriot descent, takes the role of the real life villain Sergei, a Soviet officer who enforced Stalin’s will with relentless brutality. Hassan is the only non-White cast member, and may in fact be the only non-White member of the film crew. With the exception of a few stunts the entirety of the film was shot in Ukraine with Ukrainian extras and crew — some of whom took part in the Euromaidan protests during their off hours while shooting from late 2013 to early 2014. In several interviews and promotional appearances for the film much of the cast — but most significantly Max Irons — expressed a slight sense of shame over their prior ignorance of the Holodomor and the need to raise awareness of this historical tragedy. Read more

Communism In Romania: The Anti-Humans by Dumitru Bacu

To this end the students were obliged to crush under-foot everything they held most sacred ­– God, family, friends, love, wife, colleagues, memories, ideology ­– everything which bound them to the past, anything that might give them inner support while in prison. (Dumitru Bacu, The Anti-Humans)

The story of Communism in Romania may not be a unique story. The familiar elements all present their ugly heads. As the Bolsheviks came to power the lives of the indigenous population worsened precipitously — the ideology of the enlightened government against the backward people. Foreigners became policy makers. Peasants starved. Prisons swelled. Slave labor killed hundreds of thousands. And lastly, the indigenous intellectual class was suppressed. What is unique about what happened in Romania is how the intellectual class was suppressed. Rather than simple suppression through imprisonment and discouraging political activity, the intellectual class in Romania was subjected to sadistic experimentation in what has been dubbed “re-education experiments.”

The intellectual class targeted for re-education was a specific group of people. Rather than target older academics or those of influence, the Communist regime targeted university students for their experiments. These students were chosen for a variety of reasons. To become a student in a Romanian University was a difficult task. For example, to be a student, an individual was expected to know French and German as well as either Latin and Greek or English and Italian. This demanding language requirement as well as other academic requirements brought a high degree of prestige to the very word student. The prestige of being a student could not be bought either. The wealthy who wanted to send their children to university had to send their children to another country if they did not meet the requirements. The result was that a large portion of the student body came from peasant backgrounds.

The final, and perhaps most important reason for targeting students, was their ardent patriotism. Students in Romania were patriotic for a number of reasons. Just as our American rural class is disproportionally conservative, the Romanian students who mostly came from an agrarian background were also a highly conservative group. Furthermore an influential man on the student body was Corneliu Z. Codreanu. He established the Legion of Michael the Archangel (the Iron Guard or simply the Legionary Movement) in 1927. The organization’s principles were love of country, a code of honor and moral intransigence, the reciprocal loyalty of knighthood, rigorous subordination of body to spirit, and an absolute faith in Christ. These high-minded ideals attracted students and other intellectuals to the movement. Even 30 years after Codreanu’s murder by Bolsheviks in 1938 he had faithful followers, many being students who were still part of the nationalist Legionary Movement.

The most intense and psychologically damaging experiments were done at Pitesti Prison between 1949 and 1951. The primary victims were students, the majority of whom had previously been a part of the Legionary movement. The students were often arrested for being involved in “anti-Communist activities” which could mean essentially anything that the Communists found politically expedient. Often times being part of the Legionary Movement was reason enough to arrest a student but in other instances, telling an anti-Communist joke could be grounds for arrest. Regardless of how or why they were arrested, the true horrors of Communism made themselves apparent inside the walls of Pitesti. Read more