(Mirror. Mirror.)

This article analyses the memorialization of Ion Moța and Vasile Marin, two Romanian Legionary movement volunteers who died while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as an entangled history of Romanian and Spanish fascisms.

The commemoration practices and narratives recounted in the Spanish and Romanian newspapers and archival sources from the period 1937–41 show that commemorating foreign ideological peers and appropriating symbolic elements of foreign fascisms in order to memorialize fallen comrades served as resources for legitimizing the struggle against domestic competitors.

Although the […] ambitions of Spanish and Romanian fascists remained unfulfilled, the Spanish–Romanian entanglement contributed to consolidating Moța and Marin as martyrs of transnational fascism.

[…]

In the successor states of Austria–Hungary, where victimhood nationalism developed as a common post‐war cultural phenomenon and a means of justifying the reclamation of lost territories and failed attempts at independence, claims of self‐martyrdom were a powerful instrument for establishing legitimacy in the political arena.

For example, in the Polish domains of Eastern Galicia, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (O.U.N.), which co‐operated with and was receptive to the ideas and practices of Italian Fascism, attempted to humanize its fallen terrorists as martyrs at the hands of the Polish authorities.

The main function of praising fallen O.U.N. comrades in articles, songs, poems and icons was to integrate violence into everyday life and instil courage for further extremist actions. With the [Axis] occupation of 1941, these cults competed with those organized around the ‘victims of Soviet barbary’, which were conceived by Nazi Germany as a means of mobilizing the population in favour of the goals of the Third Reich and against the political project of the O.U.N.

[…]

In the early months of the Spanish civil war, Spain, Romania and their fascist movements were mostly irrelevant to each other. In Romania the civil war transformed Spain from a distant and politically insignificant country into a mythical place where anarchism and Soviet communism were already destroying Christian civilization.

Several rightist political projects present in Romania attempted to exploit this distant conflict in order to legitimize themselves domestically, in a propaganda campaign that was politically profitable and without risk: the Kingdom of Romania was by then bound to a non‐intervention agreement supported by France and Britain.⁶² Only a few left‐wing newspapers promoted a favourable view of the Republic; on the other hand, many right‐wing dailies explicitly supported the Francoist forces.

These competing parties were supported respectively by the Spanish embassy, loyal to the Republic, and the Spanish legation, which comprised former diplomats turned Falangists. The latter was not recognized by the Romanian government.⁶³ In right‐wing newspapers, the coup was justified by constructing the Republican institutions as a régime of terror where chaos, homicides and the persecution of political opponents and Catholic priests were the norm. Like other right‐wing movements, the Legionaries supported the rebel forces.

Sfarmă‐Piatră, led by [ph]ilo‐Legionary philosopher Nichifor Crainic, and Libertatea, led by Moța, presented the Spanish Civil War in apocalyptic terms as a battle in the greater war between the forces of light, fighting to defend Europe, and the ‘monsters’, ‘red beasts’ and ‘Devil worshippers’ accused of being emissaries of the Soviet Union and an international Jewish conspiracy.⁶⁴

(Emphasis added.)