The present paper discusses the memory of fascism in post-Communist Romania. Through the lens of the movement for canonization as saints of the former members of the Romanian fascist movement known as the Legion of Archangel Michael deceased during their imprisonment during the Communist years, a question arises: how did a young post-1989 generation remember fascism and commemorate legionary martyrs as saints of the Orthodox Church? The paper argues that through a process of "vicarious memory" (Climo, 2002), neo-fascists re-enacted and re-lived the cult of the legionary martyrs perceived as martyrs of the Orthodox Church.
Moreover, the paper also addresses the religious practices and political rituals the young generation supports the Legion of Archangel Michael implemented to reconstitute legionary ideological orthodoxy. Describing these fascist martyrs as martyrs for the faith, former legionaries and their young disciples intended to depict their resistance to Communism as respectable and situate their martyrs on the same moral footing as the political dissidents of former democratic parties opposing Communism. As counterfactual history, under the guise of religion, neo-fascist groups in Romania turned anti-Communism into an all-encompassing concept describing dissidence, uniting under the same banner sympathizers of former democratic parties, religious splinter groups, former fascists, and virulent antisemites.
The Romanian fascist "martyrs" should be studied concerning the other case studies of "canonizing" fascists in the region (Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Serbia) both at a trans-historical and trans-confessional level. In Romania, in shaping these biographies according to a framework of spiritual resistance to the "satanic" Communist regime, the post-Communist legionary hagiographers employed several narrative strategies in whitewashing these biographies of their fascist and antisemitic content. Establishing biographies of dissidents for canonization, fascist survivors took into account only the stern opposition to Communism, an opposition in itself invested with religious content.
Using literary "trans-codation" (White, 1989; Halfin, 2012), fascist biographers refashioned their narratives about resistance to Communism in an arcane language accessible only to former fascists. Moreover, keeping with the fascist past that required that every fascist movement needed a hagiography of its martyrs (Zamponi, 1996; Siemens, 2014), the fascist biographers enriched their samizdat hagiography with liturgical and rhetoric elements stemming from the official hagiography of the Orthodox Church. Not only the quasi-religious language ensured their palatability within the Orthodox Church's milieu, but it also invested resistance with an aura of historical impeccability. Their sufferings for a Christian ideal, the very notion of spiritual resistance against godless Communism, stood as sacred in these biographies. By so doing, legionary hagiographers ensured that Iron Guard's resistance to Communism stood as far as possible from any criticism.
