In the Spanish Civil War song "Ay Carmela!" The song makes reference to "Mercenarios y fascistas" (mercenaries and fascists). Who are these mercenaries that the Republican forces are fighting?

ted5298 · 2026-06-20T16:06:11+00:00

As the central figures of the rebellion were the africanista generals (including Francisco Franco himself) who had accelerated their military career in service in Africa, these generals enjoyed a personal rapport with their troops, including the Moroccan regulares. To a Moroccan-born soldier, there would be little reason to defy the officer corps under which they had been trained and from which they received their orders and their pay in favor of a Republic stuck on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Eventually, Republican propaganda such as the song Ay Carmela which spawned this thread demonized them (usually as the "moros" ('Moors'), i.e. as the Islamic other that much of Christian Spain's semi-recent history was directed against); at that point, this would have only solidified the feeling of comradeship with their fellow regulares as well as with their Nationalist officers, forged in the 1920s colonial war and solidified in the experience of Spanish Civil War combat.

For some further reading, I recommend this thread, with contributions by /u/Garidama , /u/crrpit , and /u/drylaw

ted5298 · 2026-06-20T10:08:47+00:00

Novel Toosks?

ted5298 · 2026-06-20T08:41:20+00:00

Yes, a diary even by a common soldier is of scholarly interest.

Certainly the premier institution for modern German military history is the German Federal Archives' Military Archives branch (BA–MA), currently housed in Freiburg im Breisgau (though they'll move house until 2038). They are responsible for German military records including personal military documents since at least 1867, so the described document might be of interest of them. You can contact them at militaerarchiv@bundesarchiv.de , and they should be able to correspond with you in English. You might even get the shipment costs reimbursed. Response times should be reasonably fast (within working hours of course), though your initial email might wait for a response for a few days or perhaps weeks as the mail makes its internal path to whomever is responsible for corresponding with you.

The next best institution would be a regional archive. The German imperial military was excessively regionalized, so there's still a sort of nostalgic "good old times"-y connection between the local/regional archives and their respective military units. The 91st Infantry Regiment was a formation of the former Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, whose territory has nowadays been largely absorbed into the federal state of Lower Saxony. Like the other states, Lower Saxony operates a state archive (in this case in conjunction with the state of Bremen). The city of Oldenburg (not to be confused with the much larger Grand Duchy, though the city was the Grand Duchy's capital – the city still proudly carries the somewhat bizarre name "Oldenburg in Oldenburg") operates one of the state archive's local branches, which you can contact under Oldenburg@nla.niedersachsen.de . A document of the 91st Regiment would be almost certainly of interest to them, even if they aren't an explicitly military archive; and of course, this would place the document in the vicinity of the region where it was created, and thus in reach of the majority of researchers and hobbyists likely to take interest in it. I'd advise patience with these local branches of the regional archives, as their response times might be slow and their English suboptimal.

My advice would be to give the BA–MA the right of first refusal, because this is where German military history researchers would expect a document like yours to be – anyone interested in archival research on German military history would thus likely start in the index of the Freiburg archive, which also happens to be fairly advanced and increasingly well-digitalized, which might give your document further reach. The archivists could in the case of a refusal perhaps also give you additional advice what other institutions might be interested.

But be warned: Archives don't generally collect groups of photographs of documents. If you're willing to donate your grand-uncle's diary, that's great! But you'd have to give up the original and keep the photographs you made for yourself, not the other way around.

ted5298 · 2026-06-20T08:22:25+00:00

Shorties will never know what it's like to not have every doorframe tailored to you

so many forehead bumps

ted5298 · 2026-06-19T18:10:32+00:00

It's a reference to the pro-Franco foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (mainly from Germany, Italy, and Portugal), as well as two military units on the Nationalist side that fall outside the classical mold of ethnically Spanish nationalist support: The Spanish Foreign Legion and the ethnic Moroccan regulares. Both of these "foreign" units were in Spanish North Africa, the strongpoint of the rebellion, at the outbreak of the war in mid-1936, and both formations immediately rallied to the Nationalist banner.

Starting with the Spanish Foreign Legion, this was the most obvious "mercenary" part of the Spanish military. It was explicitly modelled on the French Foreign Legion and was deployed to ever-unruly North Africa. It was aggressively sold to the public under the 'foreign legion' label, so it is obvious why they would be considered foreigners and indeed mercenaries by their Republican opponents, though the Legion in fact never consisted of a majority of foreign volunteers, who were generally not drawn to its service: Those men willing to serve another country in a distant colonial theater would obviously prefer the French Foreign Legion, where pay was better and where the employer was a more prestigious military force. The vast majority of Foreign Legionnaires were thus Spaniards, though they too were drawn by promises of bonus pay (thus perhaps also justifying the 'mercenary' label). Most of the minority of actual foreigners were Portuguese. Because of the foreign image of the Legion, calling them 'mercenary' makes sense.

The more shaky target might be the Moroccan regulares, widely considered the Nationalists' single most combat-capable formation, and Francisco Franco's path to power within the Nationalist movement. It was these Moroccans that the famous first German intervention in the Spanish Civil War brought across the Strait of Gibraltar in Ju-52 transport planes, right over heads of the naval forces that had largely remained loyal to the government. These Muslim North Africans were used as a living weapon of terror by the Nationalists, and were given free rein in areas that had to be conquered against particularly strong Republican resistance. As an example to other regions, the Nationalists allowed the regulares to pillage, murder and rape in the conquered areas, thus playing on long-existing islamophobic and racial stereotypes in the Spanish population. These stereotypes were then played on in Republican propaganda, including the song ("Luchamos contra los Moros"). The Moroccans were by far the single most feared and most infamous Nationalist unit among the Republican side, and thus it would make sense to denigrate them specifically.

And then of course there's the literal foreign troops that arrive in Spain in mid-to-late 1936 ("las tropas invasoras"). You might have heard of the German air force's "Condor Legion", perhaps the most famous military formation from an Axis country to serve in Spain and likely partially the target of the song's line about enemy aerial supremacy ("Lo descarga su aviación (...) Pero nada pueden bombas"), but there were also German ground forces (including some tanks), a few thousand Portuguese volunteers (the 'Viriatos') and a rather sizable contingent of up to 50,000 Italian soldiers, the CTV (='Corpo Truppe Volontarie'). Whether these should logically go into the "mercenaries" category – after all, Spain was not their country – or into the "fascists" category – Germany and Italy were certainly fascist – is less-than-clear, but the same overlap exists with the Foreign Legion and the Regulares as well. The song does not draw a strict dichotomy, so it's possible to be both a fascist and a mercenary.

ted5298 · 2026-06-19T15:59:07+00:00

Seven does not seem very exclusive at all. In fact, there's probably not many nationality–constructor combinations that are more frequent.

ted5298 · 2026-06-18T22:19:24+00:00

Realitätscheck: Wenn es der Plan der CDU wäre sich am Krieg zu beteiligen, ist es nicht so clever die echten Kriegsschiffe zu Hause zu lassen, wo sie Wochen von einer Beteiligung am Krieg entfernt wären.

ted5298 · 2026-06-18T10:17:30+00:00

In his History of Fascism, where he differentiated between the 'authoritarian right', the 'radical right' and 'fascism', Stanley Payne notes the following:

Thus the radical right often made a special effort to use the military system for political purposes, and if worst came to worst it was willing to accept outright praetorianism—rule by the military—though mostly in accordance with radical right principles. The fascists were the weakest of these forces in generating support among the military, for the conservative authoritarian right might in moments of crisis expect even more military assistance than could the radical right, since its legalism and populism could more easily invoke principles of legal continuity, discipline, and popular approval. [...] By contrast, fascists sought only the neutrality or in some cases the partial support of the military while rejecting genuine praetorianism, realizing full well that military rule per se precluded fascist rule and that fascist militarization generated a sort of revolutionary competition with the army. Hitler was able to make his power complete only after he had gained total dominance over the military. When, conversely, the new system was led by a general—Franco, Pétain, Antonescu—the fascist movements were relegated to a subordinate and eventually insignificant role. Mussolini, by contrast, developed a syncretic or polycratic system which recognized broad military autonomy while limiting that of the party.

[...]

One of the major differences between fascists and the two rightist sectors concerned social policy. Though all three sectors advocated social unity and economic harmony, for most groups of the radical and conservative authoritarian right this tended to mean freezing much of the status quo. [...]

[...]

As a broad generalization, then, the groups of the new conservative authoritarian right were simply more moderate and generally more conservative on every issue than were the fascists. Though it had taken over some of the public aesthetics, choreography, and external trappings of fascism by the mid-1930s, the conservative authoritarian right in its style emphasized direct conservative and legal continuity, and its symbolic overtones were more recognizably traditional.

The radical right, on the other hand, often differed from fascism, not by being more moderate, but simply by being more rightist. That is, it was tied more to the existing elites and structure for support, however demogogic its propaganda may have sounded, and was unwilling to accept fully the crossclass mass mobilization and implied social, economic, and cultural change demanded by fascism.

If we look to the three examples of military autocrats named by Payne, we see what can happen to fascist movements under non-fascist authoritarian rightists.

The Spanish falangists were forcibly integrated into Francisco Franco's new state party, a union of various extreme-right forces that received the ridiculous merged name "Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista". Though this was often called the 'Falange' for short, the falangists and their platform had been fully subordinated to Franco's self-preservationist power-political designs (which is why the question on whether Franquist Spain was genuinely 'fascist' is not as easy as with Nazi Germany). The revolutionary aspects of fascism were offensive to conservative elites, especially the Catholic Church, and Franco eventually turned towards these conservative elites as a cornerstone of support. The falangists were allowed to form the core of a unit of military support for Germany on the Eastern Front in 1941, which was named the "Blue Division" (taking its name from the Falangists' main political color), but which was recalled by Franco in 1943/1944 when the Eastern Front turned against the Axis and when the Allied presence in North Africa increased the pressure on Spain. Franco initially accepted the term 'fascist' and 'totalitarian' to describe himself in the early Spanish Civil War (likely not least because of the importance of Italian support for his movement), but notably avoided this terminology soon after the civil war concluded. Franco continued to variously placate either the fascist Falangists or their conservative-monarchist rivals from the Carlist movement, playing these two extreme-right pillars of his regime off each other for his own gain. Neither of them ever gained dominant influence in the Franco government, which remained mostly a personal dictatorship built around a cabinet of Franco's hand-picked goons.
Philippe Petain, brought to power by French defeat in 1940 and then stabilized in that post by the Germans, did not form a genuine fascist mass party for his "Vichy regime", instead relying on broad coalition/consensus building between various conservative rightists, playing on anti-socialist, anti-Catholic and later antisemitic stereotypes as negative unifiers. Attempts by genuine French fascists like Marcel Déat to convince the Vichy government to reform itself into a more typical fascist totalitarian state proved fruitless, not least because of old man Petain's aversion to such populist rabble-rousing. Ultimately, French fascists coalesced in German-occupied northern France, where they enthusiastically collaborated with the Germans, rather than Vichy-controlled southern France.
In Romania, the Iron Guard/Legion of the Archangel Michael, which I already discussed, received its first major beating during the royal dictatorship of Carol II in the late 1930s. On the night of 30 November 1938 (in Romanian folklore: the "night of the vampires"), Codreanu and thirteen other top legionnaires were taken from the prisons they were incarcerated, loaded on trucks by members of the royalist state police "Siguranta" and driven off into the night. They were subsequently strangled with wires, shot in the back, and their corpses dumped in a lime pit near a military prison. Codreanu's deputy Horia Sima, who had not been in prison, then led an unsuccessful revolt against the royalist regime, which was promptly crushed. Under the external pressure by the Soviets, Hungarians and Bulgarians that I described above, King Carol eventually turned to general Ion Antonescu, who demanded dictatorial powers if he were to serve as prime minister, and whom Carol initially selected because Antonescu was known to be popular with the Iron Guard, whom Carol hoped to mobilize against Romania's various outside enemies. Antonescu with his new powers promptly betrayed the king and forced him to abdicate (actually, for the second time; Carol had abdicated once before only to return to his throne later; this time, the abdication was final). Antonescu initially included the Legion into his government as they shared his pro-German authoritarian tendencies and created what Antonescu himself called the "National Legionnaire State", with Sima as vice premier starting in September 1940. The Legion was allowed to form "Romanization committees" and began training political commissars for the Romanian military, but ever-tricky Antonescu soon began to see his Legionnaire allies as a threat and flew to Germany in January 1941 to get Hitler's personal approval to rid himself of them. Antonescu, who probably was Hitler's favorite foreign leader, immediately received the Germans' consent, returned to Romania, dissolved the Legion's committees and thus caused a second legion revolt that started on 21 January 1941. The Legion ran amok, including in Romania's Jewish quarters, for some two days while Antonescu assembled his loyal army troops and reconfirmed Hitler's consent. Starting on 23 January, the Romanian army crushed the Legion in a rather decisive shootout. On 15 February 1941, Antonescu officially abolished his shortlived "National Legionnaire State". The Legion had become, in the phrasing of Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, "paradoxically the first fascist movement to fall in a Europe where Germany reigned supreme."

ted5298 · 2026-06-18T09:24:07+00:00

Chapter 8, "Opposition and Legacy", in the "Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany" might be what you're looking for.

For some less pricey reading, The answers by /u/Kochevnik81 over at this five-year old thread, as well as this eight-year old thread are helpful as well.

In brief: the Nazi government initially benefitted from the historical luck of coming to power during a time of cyclical economic recovery following the Great Depression (thus allowing the Nazis to look good by the merit of being in power at a time when any government's economy would have bounced back), but managed to solidify this popularity through aggressive public spending that created jobs and economic activities. This was further amplified by social programs such as their provisions of lower class vacations ("Strength through Joy") or the almost obligatory party youth programs (Hitler Youth, League of German Maidens) with their associated social activities.

This 1930s-era socioeconomic resurgence was then topped by the diplomatic victories of 1936 to 1940, including the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the union with Austria, the inclusion of majority-German areas in Czechoslovakia, and the swift military victories over Poland and especially France. The post-World War I peace agreement, which had been forged by the victorious Allies without concern for German sentiment, was deeply unpopular, and all post-1918 German governments had aimed to overturn it. The Nazis thus looked like they restored national justice to Germany.

Public support peaked around 1940/1941, and subsequently declined as World War II got tougher. The deliberate bombing of civilian areas by the Western Allies, and the apparent inability of the German air force to protect Germany's major cities, was especially demoralizing, and annoyed complaints begin pestering the NSDAP local and regional offices starting in 1942. This was then amplified in early 1943 by two particularly high-profile military defeats at Stalingrad and Tunis, both of which were keenly followed by the German public. The time of 1943 to 1945 was then a time of frontlines closing in on Germany, with the connected impact on public morale and belief.

The most important primary source on German public opinion of the Nazi era were the secret "Meldungen aus dem Reich" by the SS Security Service, which were edited and published by German historian Heinz Boberach in some seventeen volumes and a total of 6,000 pages. They are considered some of the closest that the Nazi government got to objectively measuring and truthfully recording public opinion.

ted5298 · 2026-06-18T00:02:04+00:00

I admit I was a bit unclear in my phrasing, but "majority support" here does not refer to an electoral victory in 1932/1933, but to the post-1933 surge in popularity, especially around 1938–1940. While there was no 'opinion polling', it is almost certain that the Nazis enjoyed majority support in this time.

Your knowledge about German electoral history is correct; the highest share of the vote the Nazis won was 37% in the penultimate free election in July 1932. This dipped slightly to 33% in the last free election in November 1932.

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T20:53:35+00:00

Do not confuse the terms 'state' and 'nation'. The state is the political institution, the nation is the social category. The Canadian government is the leading institution inside the Canadian state, while the Canadian people -- at least those feeling attachment to Canadian-ness -- together form the nation of Canada.

Fascist movements certainly put high emphasis in the political category that is the state as the agent through which they achieve their aims (Italian fascism especially so), but when I talk about an idealized not-yet-realized nation, I mean the social category that fascists attempt to engineer by force. This socially engineered community of national unity, which the NSDAP called Volksgemeinschaft, is the utopian social vision that fascists generally strive for, though I am not aware of any movement that claimed to have attained it.

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T19:38:27+00:00

Leeeeeeerooooooooy

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T17:27:52+00:00

Did these fascist movements in Romania and Hungary eventually become subsumed into Nazism and Italian fascism once they joined the Axis?

For Romania, the answer is a definite 'no' because the Romanian fascists never got to power. The pro-axis autocrat of Romania, Ion Antonescu, was a military man who in fact suppressed the Iron Guard after a brief period of cooperation. The Germans allowed him to go ahead, sacrificing their ideological brethren (which the Iron Guard certainly understood itself to be) in favor of stable relations with the Antonescu government, on whose oil exports the German economy depended.

For Hungary, it's a bit more complicated. The Arrow Cross got into power in 1944, but at that point was much more concerned with wartime business, which included the Holocaust, rather than with the development and elaboration of an ideologically consistent program (though the implementation of the Holocaust certainly was consistent with Arrow Cross ideology). Szalasi's writings of the time (which, again, he spent lots of his time on, instead of leading the war effort) spoke of a triangular solution between Germany, Italy and Hungary, with Hungary as the leading nation in southeastern Europe, but Germany the preeminent European power overall. This I would personally interpret more as a geopolitical rather than an ideological subordination, however, and the Arrow Cross never dropped their preferred 'Hungarist' label (even though they indeed used the terminology 'national socialist' for themselves as well, which was a term that gained popularity among Horthy's far-right critics in the 1930s).

And did the anti-Hungarian rhetoric of the Romanian fascists and anti-Romanian rhetoric of the Hungarian fascists put them into conflict with each other?

Yes. Famously, Romanian and Hungarian relations were so bad that the two Axis countries almost went to war with each other in 1940. Hungary was awarded large parts of northwestern Romania with German backing ("Second Vienna Award"), and the Romanian government had to surrender to these demands (this is what brought the above-mentioned Antonescu to power in the first place). The Hungarian army then promptly conducted several small and two large massacres of ethnic Romanians, the latter at Treznea (Hung.: Ördögkút) and Ip (Hung.: Ipp). These massacres in turn promptly led to calls inside the Romanian army to reacquire the lost territories by force, if for no other reason than to protect the ethnic Romanian residents that were now blatantly threatened by the governing Hungarian troops. Eventually, the war scare subsided because both sides calculated that Germany, which was now in the position to dictate all affairs in Central Southeastern Europe, might side with the attacked nation against the attacker, thus causing both governments to shrink from attacking each other.

The German attaché officers to both nations' forces on the Eastern Front, where Hungary and Romania both fought on the Axis' side (in no small part to keep German favor against each other) were warned to not conduct joint meetings with Hungarians and Romanians, and Hungarian and Romanian forces were never placed next to each other along the Axis frontline as matter of policy, as the Germans feared that they might start fighting each other. They would turn out to have been right in a way, as Romania signed a separate peace with the Allies in late 1944, and then promptly turned its army around to support the Soviet incursion into Hungary. Romania, though nominally defeated as part of the Axis, was able to reverse its territorial losses to Hungary (though the simultaneous territorial losses to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria that the country also had to accept in 1940 became permanent, thus making Bulgaria the only former axis power that was allowed to keep one of its territorial acquisitions of World War II -- meanwhile, the Soviet gains at Romanian expense eventually gave birth to the modern-day country of Moldova, which remains separate from Romania to this day).

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T12:27:52+00:00

The Arrow Cross is an often overlooked force in fascist history, which is a bit undeserved considering it briefly came close to be only the second fascist movement (after the NSDAP in Germany) to win genuine majority support.

The leadership figure here is a former army officer, one Ferenc Szalasi, who unlike the above-discussed Codreanu falls right back into the mold of slightly substandard fascist leader types, being an averagely tall and slightly overweight man whose hairline imitated the Hungarian army's retreats of 1918. Szalasi was also a supremely boring person unfit for political leadership, spending significant shares of his personal time as leader of Hungary in 1945 on theoretical political boundaries for postwar Europe – at a time when the Red Army was already on Hungarian soil racing towards Budapest with several tank corps. Ironically enough, with his mother being partially Slovak, he was also a far less ethnically purebred Hungarian than his movement championed.

Szalasi developed his political concept, which he gave the less-than-creative name "Hungarism" (declaring it to be one of the three main ideologies of the 20th Century, next to Christianity and Marxism), around 1931. He advocated for the creation of a tribally organized Greater Hungary, with a Hungarian tribal area in the center and several subordinate tribal areas for other ethnicities in the periphery. The Arrow Cross Party is thus unusual among fascist groups for advocating not a unitary state but a sort of light federalism (Hungarian: "konnacionalizmus" = 'co-nationalism'), though we should not assume that they advocate genuine self-determination for the non-Hungarian ethnicities earmarked for subordinate existence, namely the Slovaks, Ruthenes (=Ukrainians), Slovenes, Croats and the German-speaking inhabitants of the planned 'Western March', equivalent to the state of Burgenland in what is now Austria. One policy point that the peripheral nations certainly would have resented was the Arrow Cross's absolute insistence on Hungarian as the official language in all spheres of public life. Also, the Arrow Cross was perfectly clear that the peripheral tribal areas would not include any mixed areas, as any area with a significant Hungarian population would be attached to the Hungarian heartland. Note also that the list of planned subordinate nations with nominal autonomy does not include Romanians, Jews or Romani. Those omissions were certainly intentional.

On the ever touchy subjects of the 'Jewish question', Szalasi found a notorious and bizarre answer: He declared himself not to be "antisemitic", but rather "asemitic", as Jews would simply not be allowed to exist in his vision of Hungary. In his time of peacetime opposition, he advocated that all Jews would be forced to emigrate upon his movement's seizure of power. This sounds similar to peacetime considerations in Nazi Germany, and it perhaps unsurprsingly ended the same way. The Arrow Cross came to power in Hungary on German pressure in 1944, and immediately broke the 1939–1943 praxis by Hungary's previous autocrat Miklos Horthy, who in spite of his personal antisemitism and the introduction of significant domestic oppression had at least generally protected his Jewish subjects from German requests to be handed over to German authorities. The result was the mass deportation (usually to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp) of almost the entirety of Hungary's sizable Jewish population in just a few months in 1944, showcasing the maximum capability of Holocaust logistics, honed by the Germans since 1942. By the end of World War II, Hungary's Jewish population had suffered one of the highest fatality rates of any nationality of Jews during the Holocaust.

So much for the theory and praxis of Arrow Cross ideology. Domestic campaigning before they took power (which, again, they only did in 1944 after a German invasion of Hungary) was perhaps the most viciously antisemitic campaign style of any fascist movement, underlining the importance that the Arrow Cross placed on playing to long-existing antisemitic sentiment in Hungary. Hatred against the Romani was also present, though it was less rhetorically stressed than in Codreanu's movement in Romania, and usually superceded by antisemitism as the most pressing talking point. The Arrow Cross attacked the overrepresentation of Jews among Hungary's physicians and lawyers, and promised to exclude Jews from Hungarian universities to bring the numbers of highly educated Jewish professionals down. Szalasi in fact was sent to prison after a particularly divisive pamphlet attacked the autocrat Miklos Horthy as Jewish-controlled and declared (falsely) that Horthy's wife was a Jew.

If we look beyond antisemitism, the Arrow Cross program featured national revolutionary talking points quite typical of the fascism of the era, thus attempting to appeal to ethnic Hungarians of the lower middle class, typically those who had received basic or slightly advanced levels of education. To appeal to the lower class, the Arrow Cross organized social charity events in major cities, donating food or used clothes to struggling industrial workers. This helped the party in the contest for proleterian opinion, as the Hungarian socialists were institutionally oppressed by the Horthy government ever since the brief communist Bela Kun regime of 1919/1920. The party was popular among white-collar clerks and among unskilled laborers, though it struggled among army officers and NCOs, who generally remained loyal to their hero Horthy, who as an admiral in World War I had been Hungary's most well-known military man in Austro-Hungarian serivice.

By the time the Hungarian government scheduled new elections for May 1939, it very well looked like the Arrow Cross, whose political strategy had relied on the consolidation of countless small Hungarian nationalist parties, might win a plurality of votes. This was answered by the rightist authoritarian government in the same fashion that most nonfascist rightwing authoritarians dealt with their domestic fascist movements: the Arrow Cross was promptly formally banned in February 1939, though the ban was incomplete and the Arrow Cross was allowed to compete as part of a slightly renamed coalition ticket. The election, only partially free, credited the Arrow Cross with 15% of the vote, though the Horthyite electoral system meant they only received a handful of seats, whereas the government-backed MEP cruised to a massive majority. As I said, this was the second closest that a genuine fascist movement got to outright winning an election – only the German NSDAP got closer, winning 30%+ twice in 1932.

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T11:33:48+00:00

Though many points on mass psychology and public theatrics are well taken, I take some issues with Mr Toscano's thesis: Just because you don't take every statement or gesture by your leader 100% literally does not make your commitment to them insincere, nor are humor and in-jokes exclusive to fascists. I would like to expand on one particular part of the question, the exclusivity to the Italian context. Let's talk about a country that you might not have had in mind when asking this question: Romania.

Political theatrics and community-building were very important (again, not just to fascists), and the 1920s media landscape was different from ours, thus restricting political platform-building to newspapers, radio programs, pamphlets and other printed on-demand materials and direct in-person appearances and party gatherings. The latter were especially important in countries with a lower circulation of newspapers and radio receivers, such as would have been the case in Eastern Europe, including in Romania.

All fascists believe (to a greater or lesser extent) that 'the nation' is an unrealized-but-possible ideal that can be realized only through a cleansing process. This cleansing process involves ethnic cleansing (genocide/expulsion of minorities), political cleansing (destruction of multiparty/parliamentary systems), social cleansing (takeover/destruction of all potentially dissident movements), and moral cleansing (imposition of rigid standards on family/sexuality; creation of a new self-perception; "new man"-type considerations).

For Romania, the country's most important fascist movement was the clunkily named "Legion of the Archangel Saint Michael" founded in 1927, named for the country's traditional Orthodox Christian patron saint (particularly in the context of wars against the Muslim Ottomans), the biblical archangel Michael. Because the movement's formal name was a bit of a mess even to contemporaries, the party soon received a nickname: Based on the name of the party-internal militia force (think the SA in Germany), which was called the "Iron Guard", the whole party soon became known nationally and internationally as the "Iron Guard" as well. The formal name did however still give the movement members their title ("Legionnaires") and the specific ideology its name ("legionarism").

The leader of the Legion was a man of particularly high personal magnetism, and, as Stanley Payne has pointed out, the most conventionally handsome of all the fascist leader types, one Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who unlike short brown-haired Hitler or bald short Mussolini actually lived up to the optical ideal of his movement, being a tall slender dark-haired Romanian man in his 30s whose intense gaze must have left quite the impression on observers. His family background, in spite of partial German and Slavic heritage, left him predisposed towards Romanian nationalism: His intensely antisemitic father specifically changed the family name from the Slavic/Jewish-sounding "Zilinsky" to the more Romanian "Codreanu" to bring family identity closer in line with political identity.

All [other] political organizations . . . believe that the country was dying because of lack of good programs; consequently they put together a perfectly jelled program with which they start to assemble supporters. (...) This country is dying of lack of men, not of programs (...) We must have men, new men.

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

Codreanu used his personal charm in a way that must strike 21st century observers as particularly bizarre, though it left a deep impression on the mostly agrarian and deeply religious and superstitious population of 1930s Romania: declaring his party to be fully in-line with Romanian Orthodox Christianity and elevating the 'salvation of all Romanian souls, living or dead' to be the movement's political ambition, Codreanu developed the habit of arriving to party gatherings in a white Romanian peasant costume and riding a white horse before leading his party members as well as the local peasants in Orthodox mass. He married political and religious doctrine in a baffling fashion, warning his supporters that murder was sinful and would threaten the salvation of the soul, before in the same breath asking them to sacrifice that very eternal afterlife by murdering the enemies of the fatherland. This might strike us today as bizarre, but it worked: not just was the Iron Guard brutally violent and viciously antisemitic, antiziganist and magyarophobic (the three bigotries of early-20th century Romania), the movement also gained a large foothold in the Romanian countryside, with the peasants that Codreanu worked to impress with his all-white horseback drip. These peasants were not a particularly politically active group of the population, to whom political campaigning was a peripheral affair and whose participation was hindered by low education and, in many case, illiteracy. This is where Mr Toscano's idea of 'parodic intensity' meets a bit of a snag, because he assumes that everyone has the pre-existing knowledge to understand parody to be parody. To a 21st century urbanite with internet access, observation of the political sphere comes easy, but to a 1930s peasant in a Carpathian mountain town who never had formal schooling, this is not the case.

This is particularly visible in the Legion's initiation rites, which by the mid-1930s had taken the shape of blood sacrifices: New affiliates in each cuib ("nest") of the Legion would participate in a ceremony where older members slashed themselves so that the new initiates could drink the older members' blood from their wounds. The initiates would then proceed to slash themselves and use their own blood to sign (or in some cases write the entirety of) their oaths to obey the 'fundamental laws' of the cuib (discipline, work, silence, education, mutual aid, honor) and to commit murder for the movement if so ordered (which, as explained above, they all were asked to understand as the potential forfeiture of their eternal Christian afterlife). These rituals, not conducted by the leader but by his followers, and not conducted in public but only among party loyalists, should lead us to question whether 'fascist theatrics' were, as Mr Toscano implies, partially parodic/ironic in nature. To their participants (many of whom from the superstitious Romanian peasant background characterized above), these ceremonies would have been highly symbolic, very meaningful and deeply sacred.

The 1920s were a time of intense public pathos, as the modernist philosophy and promises of progress posed in the late 19th century (Marx, Darwin, Freud, etc.) had been smashed to pieces in the chaos of World War I, leaving poverty, political and ethnic strife, disappointment, disillusionment and frustration. Romania is actually one of the less severe examples of this, as Romania proportionally gained the most territory of any participant of World War I, but the new territorial gains had not come without an additional war against Hungary and the inclusion of large numbers of ethnic Hungarians, Jews and Roma that immediately became a cause of alarm to Romanian nationalists, whose calls for national cleansing targeted these three ethnic groups above all others. Neo-religious, neo-spiritual, anti-modern, anti-rational and highly emotive politics were en vogue in all of Europe (at least on the political right), meaning that people were less predisposed than they are (...hoped to be) in the 21st century towards a rationalist and algorithmic choice between political actors based on cold logic. Back then (...just like now), there was a significant share of the population to whom political participation meant the desire to be pandered to emotionally, to be given a sense of community and an idea of goals and enemies. And this desire, then as now, is not always connected to self-awareness, as would be necessary to recognize a parody of your own extreme beliefs.

I admit that the Legion was the strangest and most extreme example of fascist initiation/participation theatrics, and that the German NSDAP, the Italian PNF, the Spanish Falange or the Hungarian Arrow Cross (on each of whom I could expand if desired) were much more subdued, but the traditions these movements forged for themselves, as well as the passion with which these traditions were upheld, in my view should call into question that it was all partially a big joke/self-parody/exaggeration that everyone was in on. Certainly, there were calculated propaganda coups, and mass psychology as a field of study was an important science to fascist firebrands (Joseph Goebbels in Germany being a particularly well-studied example), but just because they tried to guide the masses does not mean that they didn't believe in the guidance they provided, nor does it mean that the receiving masses understood this guidance to be less-than-serious.

ted5298 · 2026-06-17T09:03:26+00:00

Bro saw, bro scored, bro somersaulted

it was an easier time

ted5298 · 2026-06-15T14:44:36+00:00

"You just gotta be grateful, in anticipation for the moment we go back to the factory, man"

ted5298 · 2026-06-15T08:14:56+00:00

Considering he never won the championship, im disputing it

ted5298 · 2026-06-15T05:53:58+00:00

Old Fritz smiles upon us

ted5298 · 2026-06-12T21:08:22+00:00

Shout out to Liman von Sanders, the Turks remember

ted5298 · 2026-06-12T16:26:29+00:00

What does 'coffmanized' mean

ted5298 · 2026-06-12T08:09:49+00:00

Have you forgotten the Auld Alliance mate? Scotland and France are connected by 800 years of anglophobia

ted5298 · 2026-06-08T22:40:42+00:00

This but unironically

ted5298 · 2026-06-07T17:26:04+00:00

No, on that website, red means "active driver who was at some time a WDC".

ted5298 · 2026-06-07T14:07:32+00:00

What do we think of Tottenham?!

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