AN INTERVIEW – THE IRON GUARD
AN INTERVIEW
THE IRON GUARD
JIANU DANIELEANU GIVES AN INSIGHT INTO THE PRE-WAR RUMANIAN NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
Reprinted with permission from New Nation, No. 7, Summer 1985, the quarterly Journal of the National Front, 50, Pawsons Road, Croydon, Surrey CRO 2QF, England (Liberty Bell).
The following interview with Jianu Danielenau, an officer of the pre-war Iron Guard, was recently conducted for the interests of our readership. We hope that it will stimulate greater interest in Codreanu’s work.
N.N. -Can you give us some sort of idea of the conditions in Rumania that gave rise to the foundation of the Iron Guard?
J.D. -These conditions predated the Iron Guard, which was but a development stage, by about 11 years. We are talking here about a current, a movement whose origins go back to the 1919-20 years. A chaotic situation had been created by the psychosis of a Bolshevik revolution next door. Red infiltrators under the leadership of the Jews and the Jewish press incited our working masses and sowed the seeds of anarchy amongst them.The peasantry, opposed by instinct to this trend for revolution, was disorganised and leaderless, unable to respond. The educated citizenry was vacillating, the State apparatus spineless. Communist invasion was felt to be imminent. But a handful of high school students, headed by Codreanu, acted. Codreanu thus started on his Golgotha in the Spring of 1919. This small but determined move was to lead later, through many trials, tribulations, and imprisonments for him and his band, to the founding of The Legion of Michael the Archangel, and later, the Iron Guard. The appellation ‘Iron Guard’ came into being in 1930 to designate the political arm of the Legion.
N.N. -Could you tell us why you joined the Legionary Movement and what has kept you active on its behalf ever since?
J.D. -The innermost folds of my soul drew me irresistibly to it. I sensed intuitively that the Legionary Movement was, at long last, the organisation really meaning to clean the stables of the political pestilence fouling up the country; to do away with the corruption and moral decadence of the body politic; to end the exploitation of the long suffering peasantry and improve the lot of the worker. And I have stuck to the same faith in these endeavours for I have believed the Legionary Movement to be one of a spiritual regeneration gifted by God to a people perhaps once in a millennium through its predestined leader, Comeliu Z. Codreanu, the “Captain.”
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