Having delved recently into the historic fascist groups in Hungary and Romania between the wars—“Arrow Cross and Iron Guard: The Native Fascist Movements in Interwar Hungary and Romania”, blog 10-Aug-2021)—I thought it’d be interesting to take a comparative look at their contemporary counterpart in Yugoslavia. The most conspicuous fascist organisation active in post-WWI Yugoslavia shared many of the features of other European far-right movements while exhibiting some characteristics that departed from the standard typology of European fascism.
(Image: Mapsland)
⇑ Alexander I, the “Royal Dictator”
Fear of a Pan-Serbia
Like all European fascist groups in the interwar period the “home-grown” fascist movement embodied in the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, known as Ustaše🆚 (or anglicised as ‘Ustasha’) evolved out of discontent with the new national arrangements following the conclusion of hostilities. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), came into existence from a ”polyglot mosaic of little states“. From the start there was a built-in tension between the centralism of the unitary Yugoslav state and Serbia and the federalist impulses of the other nationalities. Feeding and intensifying Croatian nationalism was Serbian control over the new state – the head of state, the king, was a Serb and the Yugoslav army was essentially Serbian. What wrangled most Croats was that “the new Yugoslavia was not a state of narodno jedinstvo (national unity) (as promised) but a greater Serbia in all but name“ (Judah). In the early years of the kingdom, the political voice of Croatian disapproval of the lop-sided state of affairs came from the moderately rightist Croatian Peasants Party (CPP), who advocated for land reform to alleviate the conditions of Croatian peasantry (75% of the kingdom’s population was agrarian-based). The assassination of the CPP leader in parliament was followed by a coup by King Alexander who installed a “personal dictatorship” and a political crackdown. In response to the crisis Ante Pavelić a former CPP member formed the extremist Ustaše Party🅾️.
Ustasé ideology
The Ustaše movement’s ideological framework contained many of the traits typically found in other European far-right groups—ultranationalism❎ (stridently advocating the uniqueness of the Croatian nation); rabidly racist (though it’s antisemitism seems to have become more visible later after prompting from the Nazis); the significance of religion (Catholicism in its case) and patriarchal life; anti-communist (rejecting Marxism for it’s interference with family life); anti-capitalist and also anti-democratic, believing that the mechanism of parliamentary democracy was corrupt; adopting the personality cult common to most fascist organisations (Pavelić under the influence of the big dictators Mussolini and Hitler styled himself Poglavnik, broadly analogous to Il Duce and Führer, and following the cult’s blueprint demanding unswerving submission to the will of the leader.
Constructing a separate racial theory
The Ustaše view of the racial origins of the Croatian people was a complicated one, but one that suited their national aspirations, to create “a completely independent, ethnically homogeneous nation-state”…this requited separating ’pure’ Croats from the melange of ethnic and religious minorities in Croatia, especially from the more numerous Serbs. Ustaše party ideologues set about trying to minimise the Croats’ Slavic roots while developing the idea that the Croats‘ hybrid stock comprised a kind of “Ayran-Nordic-Dinaric” amalgam, which they contrasted with the alleged “Balkan-Vlach” identity of the Serbs. The Ustaše identified the Croats as descending from the Goths and therefore of Germanic stock, a contrivance by Pavelić by which he hoped “to curry favour with the Nazis”Ⓜ (Bartulin, ‘Ideology of Nation and Race’). The Ustaše aped other aspects of Nazi racial vilification, applying the derogatory term Untermensch (“sub-human) to its scapegoats, Serbs, Jews, etc.
⇑ “A slave never!” (Source: Pinterest.ca)
National regeneration: Forward to the past
As we saw with the Iron Guard Movement’s Omol nou in Romania, Ustaše theory extolled the concept of Novi čovjek, the “New Man”. The movement’s mission as it saw it was to ‘reawaken’ the racially authentic (ie, ‘Aryan’) Croat—the koljenović—who had been corrupted and debased by centuries of foreign rule. The Ustaše Novi čovjek aligns with a core element of generic fascism, formulated by political theorist Roger Griffin called “palingenetic ultranationalism”, which combines “a myth of rebirth or regeneration” with a nationalism that is populist and “radically anti-liberal”, ie, ultranationalism. In the world according to Ustaše, the regenerated Croat warrior, heroic and uber-masculine, is the conduit for a new order to replace the old “decadent and decaying” one.
Ustaše and Iron Guard
Commonalities between the Ustaše movement and Romania’s Iron Guard fascists were many, both were deeply mystical organisations, preoccupied with a death cult and notions of violence and martyrdom (though the Ustašhe didnt express the same degree of intense religious ritualism as Iron Guard). Both Ustaše and Iron Cross members tended to see the world in extreme Manichean terms, regularly evoking the imagery of the ”overtly apocalyptic and chiliastic” (Yeomans).
Ustaše militias unleashed an unrestrained violent onslaught to deal with the perceived enemies of Croatia, terrorist targeting of political foes, assassinations, shootings, knifings, bombings, etc. The pattern of party violence culminated in attempts at outright genocide when Pavelić’s fascists gained power in Yugoslavia during World War One. Ustaše ‘reprisals’ were concentrated against the Serbs, Jews and Roma who came under their area of control – estimations of atrocities committed the Ustaše and the authorities vary, somewhere between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbian civilians were slaughtered in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in just one year of an out-of-control, manic bloodlust. Another Ustaše strategy supposedly to purify the NDH or the “Independent State of Croatia”—accomplished with the collaboration of Croatian Catholic clergy—was the forcible conversion of somewhere in the vicinity of 250,000 Orthodox Serbs and Jews⛎. In a further emulation of Nazi extermination methods Ustaše built a notorious concentration camp in Slavonia, Jasenovac, where upward of 100,000 Serbs, Roma and Jews were barbarically killed during the war (consequently Jasenovac is known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”).
⇑ Two uniformed Ustaše women (Source: Pinterest)
Footnote: Women in the Ustaše world
Just as the Ustaše envisaged a new type of Croatian man reinvigorated with the lost values of valour and struggle, it wanted to return Croatian women to a previous, less pluralist life. The Ustaše railed against the sexual status quo, against an encroaching feminism which had liberated women from the home, becoming, in Ustaše eyes, “cafe dolls without children”, sacrificing family for their careers. The movement wanted to revive the cult of motherhood, making Croatian women submissive and dutiful home bodies again, procreating a new generation of Croats. At the same time the Ustaše hierarchy organised women into their own separate body called the “Vine of Ustaše Women”, their main task was to act as social workers of sorts, circulating among the peasant women in Croatia to bring about improvements in their lives. Interestingly, as Rory Yeomans outlined, the leadership received pushback from militant young female members of the movement who wanted the same opportunity as Ustaše men to become warriors and immerse themselves in the revolutionary activities of the cause. In any event, the drain on Croatian manpower during the war necessitated a re-expansion of female roles to fill the gaps left by men in offices and factories and even in the military ranks (Yeomans).
“Greater Croatia” ⇑
Postscript: The Ustaše fascists failed to establish a mass base of support as a precondition for its revolutionary movement that Arrow Cross and Iron Guard movements achieved in their respective countries. And in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Croatian peasantry, Ustaše never matched the appeal of CPP. Added to this, Ustaše’s growing chauvinistic stance in pursuing a “Greater Croatia” ensured it made no headway in trying to appeal to any other national group in the country. Ustaše as a consequence was forced to draw on Croatian students, right wing intellectuals and the lower clergy for its core support. An additional brake on Ustaše power was the effectiveness of opposition from the left in Yugoslavia—in stark contrast to the situation in Romania and Hungary—from the well-organised communist party (brilliantly led by Tito).
Poglavnik Pavelić ⇑
⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫
🆚 = ‘Insurgents’
🅾️ the spiritual antecedent to Ustaše was probably the right wing nationalist Party of Rights (including the Frankovci cell)
❎ Ustaše‘s brand of fascism was ultranationalistic, see ’National regeneration: Forward to the past‘
Ⓜ for his part, Hitler was at best lukewarm toward Pavelić’s movement, considering them too violently aggressive, preferring a stable and neutral Yugoslavian regime to allow Germany to continue to access it’s raw materials during the war. The Nazis only reluctantly turned to the Ustaše as a “puppet government’ after civil war broke out in Yugoslavia
⛎ assistance given by the Catholic Church to Ustaše reached the highest pinnacle. At war’s end, when things turned dire for Pavelić and his cronies, the Vatican facilitated their escape to Argentina via the notorious German “Rat line” by issuing them clerical passports (Stockton)
♠♣ ♠♣
Texts and articles consulted:
‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’, Roger Griffin, Library of Social Science’,www.libraryofsocialscience.com
‘Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and its Policies Toward the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945)’, Nevenko Bartulin, Croatian Studies Review, 5 (2008)
Rory Yeomans. “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 2005, pp. 685–732. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4214175. Accessed 12 Aug. 2021
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (3rd edition, 2009)
Nevenko Bartulin, The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory (2014)
‘Meet the Ustaše, The Brutal Nazi Allies Even Hitler Couldn’t Control’, Richard Stockton, ATI, Upd. 6-Jun-2020, www.allthatsinteresting.com
Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 (1991)
The immediate aftermath of the First World War saw a redrawing of the map of Europe. With the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, a raft of new successor states emerged on the continental landscape. The redistribution of territory in peace-time and the establishment of new sovereign entities led to new tensions and political instability and contributed to the rise of “home-grown” authoritarian and fascist political parties in interwar Europe. The following will look at how this development played out in Hungary and Romania after 1918—focusing on the two states’ main far-right political force (Arrow Cross Party (H), Iron Guard Movement (R)—showing that the growth of fascism in the two states shared core similarities albeit with some individual differences.
(Image: Emerson Kent)
Successor states Hungary and Rumania were on opposing sides during the First World War. Backing the Central Powers, Hungary was a big loser, newly landlocked, forfeiting more than two-thirds of its territory (to Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) and five-ninths of its former population – with ramifications for future irredentism, about three-and-a-half million ethnic Hungarians outside the homeland. Conversely, Romania, ally of the Entente Powers, was the principal beneficiary of Hungary’s reversals. As a consequence, for the new state of Hungary, the seeds of a ready-made grievance for revisionist vengeance against its eastern neighbour was well and truly sown.
🚹 Arrow Cross (top) & Iron Guard flags
Agrarian-based societies
Romania and Hungary were predominately peasant-dominated populations between the wars…in Romania they comprised 78% of the population, in more urbanised Hungary they were less dominant but still a very significant 55% of the population. Because of lingering serfdom-like conditions and the abject failure to implement effective land reform, the bulk of peasants remained impoverished. The onset of the Depression in the 1930s exacerbated their plight, in such a time of crisis many of the peasantry found fringe groups like Arrow Cross (Nyilasok pártja)⧆ and the Iron Guard Movement (the Legion) offering a panacea for their woes with more appeal than the promises of the mainstream parties❂. The increasingly xenophobic pronouncements of the Legion’s ultra-nationalists struck a receptive chord among the Romanian peasantry, who Corneliu Zelea Codreanu identified as the mass base required for his planned revolutionary seizure of power…the Iron Guard leader exploited the peasantry’s distrust of communism and outsiders, making an appeal to “the custodian of the national historic mission” (of the peasantry) to conquer the towns (supposedly controlled by Ukrainian Jews and other ‘foreigners’)(Constantin Iordachi, ‘Ultranationalist utopias and the realities of reconciliation (part one)’, New Eastern Europe, 25-Feb-2021, www.neweasterneurope.eu).
🚹 Codreanu (R) with Gen. Antonescu, the ‘Conducător’
Characteristics of the movements
Political outliers
The Iron Guard Movement (IGM) and Arrow Cross (ACP), as self-described revolutionary movements, laid out radical platforms and pursued electoral strategies which placed them clearly outside the political mainstream…a deliberate repudiation of not just ideologies on the left, communism and social democracy but of the establishment right, the capitalist system, conservatism and bourgeois liberalism as well.
🚹 Codreanu, “The Capitane “
Nationalism
Both native fascistparties were fiercely nationalistic in outlook. The nationalism of Romania’s Iron Guard Movement is considered to have been an unusual “variety of fascism” (Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (1964)). The movement was also infused with a strong Christian Orthodoxy, befitting it’s alternate name, Legion of the Archangel Michael. The party’s leader Codreanu enveloped the movement’s ideology in an odd form of chiliastic mystical religiosity with “spiritual and transcendental aims”, mixing a ‘morbid’ element of Christian martyrdom and ritualism together with a violent nationalism (‘An Unique Death Cult’, Stanley G. Payne, Slate, 22-Feb-2017, www.slate.com). Codreanu and Iron Cross formed a political strategy called by Weber “murder as method”, their plan being to launch “a murder campaign to clear the country…of the Jews and their corrupt protectors”. However the ring-leaders including Codreanu were arrested before they could enact it.
A plan for Hungarian regional hegemony
The ultra-nationalism espoused by ACP was a component of a peculiar ideology concocted by founder Szálasi…the party’s idiosyncratic nationalism was mixed in with ample doses of anti-communism, anti-capitalism, the promotion of agriculture and Szálasi’s own notion of anti-semitism, which he called “a-semitism” (by which he meant that Jews were not compatible to live in Europe with other ‘races’ and should be removed from Central Europe)§. Szálasi’s multifaceted program which was known as Hungarism was strongly revisionist with the Vezető pledging to restore the ”historic’ Hungary, uniting all of the Carpathian-Danube peoples under a Magyar-dominated empire, extending Hungary’s boundaries as far as the Black Sea.
🚹 Danube monument to Jewish victims of Arrow Cross
Anti-semitism and racialist policy in the Legion
IGM matched the virulence of ACP’s militant anti-semitism. Legionnaire ideologues harboured a fear that the heterogeneity of the Jews in Romania “might spoil the national unity required by the creation of a powerful state capable of fostering a strong culture that would propel Romania into History” (Marin). Ideas of purity and racial superiority were deeply embedded in the IGM ideological firmament◘ (“The Iron Guard and the ‘Modern State’. Iron Guard Leaders Vasile Marin and Ion I. Mota, and the ‘New European Order'”, Mircea Platon, Brill, 01-Jan-2012, www.brill.com). In the early 1940s when IGM was briefly in a power-share arrangement with military strongman General Ion Antonescu (National Legionary State), thousands of Jews, Slavs and Roma (Gypsies) were liquidated by its paramilitary arm. In the late stage of WWII ACP militiamen executed thousands of Hungarian Jews on the Danube riverbank, the location marked today in Budapest by a memorial to the victims (“Shoes on the Danube Promenade”).
🚹 Iron Guard Legionnaires
Anti-capitalism
The anti-capitalist plank of fascist nationalism was a distinctive feature of both Hungarian and Romanian fascist movements✮. IGM philosophy rejected both the class antagonisms of Marxism and the materialistic excesses of bourgeoiscapitalism – a transparently populist appeal by Codreanu to the anti-capitalist sentiments of the large, powerless Romanian peasantry. Instead Codreanuproposed a “spiritual third force”, the Legion’s own unique cocktail of targeted terror and mystical authoritarianism as salvation for the masses (G.L. Mosse, International Fascism (1979)).
Anti-communism
Both ACP and IGM exploited the masses’ distrust of the spectre of communism. In Hungary this was made easier with Hungarians having already in 1919 tasted “the disillusioning experience of the Bolsheviks”, the brief and unpopular Hungarian Soviet regime led by Béla Kun (Deák, I. (1992). ‘Hungary’.The American Historical Review, (4), 1041-1063. doi:10.2307/2165492).
(Source: reddit.com)
Cult of the leader
Both ACP and the Legion forged personality cult leadership structures in their respective movements, based around the charismatic and youthful figures of Szálasi and Codreanu – strong, magnetic leaders whose authority could not be questioned. Arrow Cross and Szálasi repeatedly suffered harassment and persecution at the hands of the conservative Horthy nationalist regime, creating in ACP a sense of martyrdom which the movement transformed paradoxically “into a process via which the leader gained charisma, instead of losing it” (‘The Arrow Cross. The Ideology of Hungarian Fascism – A conceptual approach by Áron Szele (Central European University), Budapest 2015),www.etd.ceu.hu). In Romania the Legion’s propaganda projected Codreanu as the new messiah guiding his devoted, bordering on the fanatic followers, on a millennialist mission to purify Romania by punishing the enemies of the Tara (fatherland), communists, Jews, ‘foreigners’ (Constantin Iordachi, in Ideologies and National Identities: The Case of Twentieth–Century Southeastern Europe, Edited by John Lampe and Mark Mazower (2004)). Codreanu and Szálasi’s integrity and legitimacy was enhanced by the leaders’ decision to pursue power by constitutional means⇹.
Handcuffing the left
Fringe right parties like ACP and IGM had their path to power facilitated by the neutralisation of the left. In Hungary and Romania conservative governments outlawed the communist party, shackled trade unions and kept social democratic parties in check. In addition to this, the law treated fascist terrorists more leniently…eg, Codreanu’s “death squad” Legionnaires were acquited of having assassinated Romanian premier Duca in 1933.
A right Royal millstone
The deteriorating state of internal politics in Romania in the Thirties was a boost to IGM’s fortunes. The extreme avarice and corruption of the egregious Romanian king, Carol II, a drift towards political stagnation, all combined with “the immiseration of the peasantry” to steer support towards the Legion (‘The Little Dictators’, Richard J Edwards (30-Nov-2006), www.gresham.ac.uk).
🚹 Szálasi and Hitler (Photo: Hitler-archive.com)
End-notes: (i) National regeneration
Both Szálasi and Codreanu had unwavering faith in the power of their wills, believing that they were destined to lead their movements in the revival of their respective nations, to lift them out of the morass of economic crisis, national trauma and social dislocation.
Arrow Cross militia
(ii) A fascist brotherhood under the Swastika
Like many alt-right groups in interwar Europe, ACP and IGM looked to the “first rank” far-right, totalitarian states, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, for inspiration and ideas. As Anthony Polonsky remarked, “fascism seemed to many the philosophy of the future – an efficient and orderly means of modernizing a backward country” (Evans). Widely regarded as puppets of Nazi Germany, Szálasi and Codreanu saw themselves as part of an emerging new order, a larger pan-European movement of fascist states, one in practice however securely under the control of Hitler and the Nazis.
🚹 Arrow Cross women (Photo: CEU Gender Studies)
Postscript: Arrow Cross women
The fascism practiced by ACP and the Legion, it has been noted, was not without a degree of plasticity. Both fascist parties perhaps surprisingly included a focus on the position of women. IGM was more predictably traditional in reinforcing the domestic role of women, but ACP made a concerted appeal to Hungarian women, attracting female members from those women marginalised, politically or professionally. ACP was the first political organisation to acknowledge and propose a plan to protect women from sexual harassment in the workplace (‘Lessons for Today: Women in the Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement’, Andrea Petö, Central European University, 01-Aug-2019, www.ceu.edu)
⧆ Arrow Cross was just the most prominent of several small “fascist-wannabe” political groups that surfaced in Hungary after WWI
❂ just as the German masses found Hitler’s message fresh and appealing cf. the tired, failing efforts of the Weimar politicians
§ Szálasi’s “a-semitism” was also directed at Arabs
◘ Szálasi’s Hungarism subscribed to a similar view of “master race” status for the Magyar people
✮ significantly though the fascists never moved beyond rhetoric to actually threaten the entrenched position of private property
⇹ ACP’s electoral zenith was in 1939 when it won 25% of the vote in Hungary, becoming the country’s most important opposition party
Currently we are watching, from a distance on television, the Olympics from Tokyo. This is the second time Tokyo has held the Olympic Games, although it is the third time that city has been awarded the Games{a}. The previous time Tokyo hosted the Olympics, 1964, Indonesia, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China, all boycotted the world’s premier sporting event{b}. This disharmonious development within the Olympic community had its origin in the 1962 Asian Games, host Indonesia refused entry to Taiwan (in deference to mainland China) and Israel (to appease Muslim Arab states).
GANEFO opening ceremony, 1963 (Photo from Amanda Shuman’s collection, published in Journal of Sport History) ⇩
Mixing sport and politics
The IOC criticised Indonesia for politicising the 1962 Asian Games, but it’s president, Sukarno, far from contrite, was emboldened to go further in his defiance of the IOC. Sukarno, determined that Indonesia plays a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement, enlisted sport in the task of furthering “the politics of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism”. Sukarno set up GANEFO or the Games of the New Emerging Forces…an alternative Olympics-style event held in 1963 in Djakarta, complete with opening ceremony, giant torch, etc. Like his PRC counterpart Mao Zedong, Sukarno deliberately used sports “to display international prowess” which in turn was meant “to enhance global stature”{c}(Webster, David. “Sports as Third World Nationalism: The Games of the New Emerging Forces and Indonesia’s Systemic Challenge under Sukarno.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations 23, no. 4 (2016): 395-406. Accessed August 1, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26549192). GANEFO represented “a Sino-Indonesian-sponsored challenge to the International Olympic Committee’s dominance in sport that also attempted to solidify China’s geopolitical position as a Third World leader“, Shuman, Amanda. “Elite Competitive Sport in the People’s Republic of China 1958–1966: The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).”Journal of Sport History40, no. 2 (2013): 258-283.muse.jhu.edu/article/525098.
Pres. Sukarno (Image: globalsecurity.org)
The IOC was hostile to what it viewed as a challenge to its rules and authority, Djakarta’s breach of the Olympic ideal that sport and politics should remain separate. Sukarno responded by calling out the IOC for hypocrisy, pointing out that the IOC by ejecting the Asian communist countries of PR China and North Korea from the Olympics fold, itself was playing politics. In the prevailing Cold War climate Sukarno characterised Brundage’s organisation as “a tool of imperialists and colonialists”. Predictably, the US and the Western media labelled GANEFO as a ‘Red’ event, citing Sukarno’s links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and communist China’s weighty involvement in the games as well as the USSR and Eastern Bloc’s participation (‘A Third World Olympics: Sport, Politics and the Developing World in the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), Russell Field, Verso, 09-Aug-2016, www.versobooks.com).
⇩ “Onward, no retreat”, GANEFO motto
The establishment strikes back In IOC chief Avery Brundage’s mind it was more than just a case of defending the ‘official’ games as the IOC’s proprietorial brand, his purpose in trying to deflect the challenge from emerging Third World leaders like Sukarno has been seen as an attempt to “buttress the Olympic movement as a First World institution in a rapidly decolonising world” (Field). The IOC’s retaliatory response was quick: the Indonesian Olympic Committee was turfed from the Games (communist China had already withdrawn from the IOC). Later, in 1964, the IOC readmitted Indonesia for Tokyo but decreed that individual athletes who participated in GANEFO 1963 were barred from selection for Tokyo. Sukarno rejected these conditions, demanding that “all or none” of the country’s athletes be eligible for the 1964 Games. Consequently, with the IOC and Indonesia at loggerheads, Djakarta unilaterally withdrew from Tokyo in protest (‘GANEFO I: Sports and Politics in Djakarta’, Ewa T. Pauker, Rand Paper, July 1964, www.rand.org).
Who went to GANEFO 63 and who ‘won’? Around 2,700 athletes participated representing about 50 countries – mostly from Asia but many from Africa and the Middle East (including a team representing “Arab Palestine”, whereas Israel was again excluded); the communist eastern bloc states; South America; and curiously for an event comprising “New Emerging Powers” there were contingents from France, Italy, Finland and Netherlands (the presence of Dutch athletes in Djakarta from the ex-colonial power in the East Indies seemed baffling!). China had the biggest team and easily won the ‘unofficial’ gold medal count with 68. ⇧ Olympic stadium, Djakarta (antaranews.com)
Almost all of the delegations of attending athletes were not sanctioned by their countries’ Olympics committees for fear of reprisal from the IOC. Accordingly, most of the athletes participating were “not of Olympic calibre”. It was especially tricky for the vacillating Méxicans whose participation it was feared might jeopardise México City’s bid for the 1968 Olympics. As soon as México City got the nod from the IOC, a Méxican team was hastily cobbled together to attend{d}.
Beyond GANEFO
Sukarno saw the realisation of GANEFO and the forging of close ties between Third World countries in sporting and cultural endeavours, as a pathway to something bigger than sport, an institution that might challenge the existing international order. GANEFO was meant to foreshadow the creation of CONEFO (Confederation of the New Emerging Forces), a new world body which would appeal to left-nationalist and neutralist states emerging out of colonialism. CONEFO Sukarno hoped might come to stand as an alternative, Third World-focused United Nations (Webster){e}.
Chinese ‘MO’
China played a key supporting role in getting GANEFO up in 1963. It was the principal financial backer for the event and the Djakarta games got great coverage from the Chinese state media. Like Indonesia, PRC saw good propaganda value in the games, its participation in ‘goodwill’ games purported to foster solidarity and understanding between Third World countries across the globe was intended to show it in a good light vis-á-vis the Capitalist West. Beijing was eyeing off the prospect of becoming rivals with both Washington and Moscow, it was looking for avenues to exert influence with Indonesia and the Afro-Asian world and the GANEFO opportunity nicely suited its purposes (Pauker).
End-note: GANEFO 66 and finis
The GANEFO games were intended to be an ongoingaffair but the impetus could not be maintained. A second GANEFO games had been scheduled to be held in Cairo in 1967 but were subsequently cancelleddue to rising Middle East tensions. Instead, the follow-up games (“Asian GANEFO”) took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1966, which tried with less success to replicate the original sporting event in Djakarta. Subsequently GANEFO quickly faded away. The main factors for the GANEFO games’ demise were the overthrow of its driving force President Sukarno and the steep costs of hosting the event (Russell).
◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲◰◱◲
{a} Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Olympics but was stripped of its hosting rights after Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria
{b} in addition South Africa was banned from competing due to its racialist Apartheid policy
{c} now even more important to China as their stand-out performance in the current Games in Tokyo indicates
{d} many of the European participants were from leftist student organisations and workers’ sporting clubs. Military personnel were a component of several nation‘s teams
{e} in 1965 Sukarno pulled Indonesia out of the UN
In the wake of the catastrophic Allied defeat in the Battle of France in 1940, Britain made the decision not to defend the strategically-unadvantageous but sovereign Channel Islands lying just eight miles from the French coastline, giving up the oldest possession of the Crown “without firing a single shot” (Hazel R. Knowles Smith, The changing face of the Channel Islands Occupation, 2007)⚀. The islands were demilitarised, giving the German Wehrmacht a saloon passage into them in June 1940. There was no resistance to the German invasion…in addition to the British government withdrawing all troops, the locals were instructed not to resist the German invaders. Unfortunately no one told Berlin about the demilitarisation and German bombers raided Guernsey and Jersey, resulting in the death of 44 civilians✦.
Resistance by the islanders was pretty much out of the question due to geography as well as the numerical strength of the German military commitment (some 21,000 troops and a ratio of two Germans to one civilian in some areas). The islands’ terrain, being very small, flat and easy to search, made it “very difficult for a potential resistance to hide and organise” [‘Life under Nazi rule: the occupation of the Channel Islands’, (Rachel Dinning), History Extra, 25-Nov-2020, www.historyextra.com].
🔺(Photo: World Travel Guide)
A so-called “Model occupation?”
Compared to the harshness of the Nazis’ subjection of Eastern European peoples, the occupying German military exerted a softer, lighter touch in its handling of the residents of the Channel Islands. The occupation has been described as “a gentler and kinder one with a correspondingly civil ladies and gentlemen’s resistance” MCGETCHIN, D. (2017). Journal of World History, 28(1), 154-161. Retrieved July 3, 2021, fromhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/44631517]. Even the attorney general of Guernsey depicted it as a “model occupation”. Hitler clearly saw an opportunity for an exercise in public relations (Dinning). The greater lenience given to the islands’ Britons also can probably be attributed to the Nazis’ perception of the occupied people as “racially elevated”, similar to how the Germans treated the Danes and Dutch, in contrast to the much harsher treatment meted out during the war to Russians and Poles for example (McGetchin).
While relations for the most part were cordial with the majority of islanders accordingly willing to peacefully co-exist with the German presence, the “softer approach” of the Germans shouldn’t be overstated—islanders were not free to speak their minds, they were subjected to curfews, 2% of the population were convicted and some imprisoned, two persons were executed, over 2,000 were deported including some Jews—certainly not a Sunday school picnic and things got tougher over time as the inhabitants faced critical food shortages which progressed into the very real reality of starvation.
🔺 Seigneur of Sark (Dame Sibyl Hathaway) visited by Wehrmacht officers at her fiefdom (Source: Twitter)
Pockets of non-militarised resistance
A lack of overt resistance didn’t mean there was no resistance at all. Among the islanders there was episodes of defiance of a non-violent kind – Britain’s BBC encouraged people to chalk the ‘V’ (for Victory) sign on buildings, ‘V’ jewellery was made, some civilians and local policemen as well raided German stores and supplies, others engaged in intelligence gathering, arson and graffiti-writing (Dinning). Act of sabotage on a small scale occurred and many islanders fed and even hid especially Russian POWs in their properties. On the other side of the coin there were varying forms of collaboration with the invaders, including paid informants who turned in their own people to the Nazis. The most vilified collaborators were women—derisively labelled ‘Jerrybags’ by townsfolk—who had sexual liaisons with the soldiers stationed on the islands (‘Defending Jerrybags’, (Colin Smith), Prospect, 20-Apr-1997, www.prospectmagazine.co.uk).
A Nazi island fortress
With the British civilian inhabitants largely under wraps, the Nazi Führer embarked on his plans to “battle-proof” the Channel Islands. The Nazis transported massive amounts of steel and concrete for the grandiose-scale building scheme, tower forts, 45m-high gun stations, casements, anti-tank walls, air-raid shelters, bunkers and tunnels§. Beaches were mined and barbed wire laid around the coastlines. Hitler has plans for the heavily fortified islands in the post-war Third Reich as well, to serve as a haven for Axis soldiers [‘Did you know about Hitler’s insane “war-proof” islands?’, (Jeremy Caspar), SBS, 17-Mar-2017, www.sbs.com.au]. The value of the Channels’ coastal defence network to Hitler as propaganda against enemy Britain accounts for Berlin’s out of proportion material commitment to the Channels, constituting 10% of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall resources⋔ (‘Occupation of the Channel Islands by Nazi Germany’, New World Encyclopedia).
Forced labourers building island fortifications 🔻
(Photo: Priaulx Library & Occupation Archives)
The fortresses were built by Organisation Todt (OT – the Nazi civil and military engineering group) employing forced labour mainly from Eastern Europe (French and Spanish prisoners were also forced into service on the mega-building project). The effectively enslaved workers (Ostarbeiter) were treated appallingly badly (with a resulting large loss of life) by the Wehrmacht soldiers who looked on them as Untermenschen (“sub-human”) (Dinning)✪. The Nazis built four labour camps on Alderney Island, two for ‘volunteer’ labourers (Hilfswillige) and the other two were concentration camps.
(Source: tvtime.com)
Hitler’s fortresses, or the remnants of them, remain highly visible to this day – especially on Alderney the most northern of the Channel Islands. Alderney was the most heavily fortified of the islands (nicknamed “Adolf Island”), after virtually all of its inhabitants were evacuated [‘The Nazi Occupation of the Islands of Guernsey‘, (Stephanie Gordon), Historic UK (nd), www.historic-uk.com].
Footnote: How did the Channel Islands first become English?
Traditionally belonging to the Duchy of Normandy, the collection of small islands became English when Norman noble William the Conqueror was victorious at Hastings and succeeded to the English throne in 1066.
Postscript: the return of evacuees to the Channel Islands from mainland Britain after liberation in 1945 led to a difficult period of reintegration for all. A schism within the communities developed and sustained for a long time, some of those who stayed thought the evacuees cowardly for leaving, whereas the latter retorted that it was they who had gone through the real war facing the Blitz while the “safe-at-home” ‘stayers’ cosied up to the Germans (Barrett).
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⚀ Britain prime minister, Churchill, in his ‘bulldogged’ forthright fashion still wanted to defend the Channel Islands on a matter of principle, however the stark realities disclosed by the naval high command—the islands were situated too far from mainland Britain, too close to enemy bases in France, the martial materials required to do so would have left Britain vulnerable to defending itself—made the decision a “no-brainer” [Duncan Barrett, Hitler’s British Isles, 2018]
✦ there was token resistance to the raids from a solitary ground gun on the Isle of Sark
§ in both Guernsey and Jersey 200-250 strongpoints were constructed by OT
⋔ the Atlantikwall was an extensive Nazi coastal defence system built along western continental Europe andScandinavia
✪ around 16,000 forced/slave workers were sent to Jersey alone [‘World War Two: Forced labourer who made Jersey his home, BBC, 10-May-2020, www.bbc.com]
(Image: Mapsland)
⇑ Two uniformed Ustaše women (Source: Pinterest)“Greater Croatia” ⇑
Poglavnik Pavelić ⇑
(Photo: Priaulx Library & Occupation Archives)
(Source: tvtime.com)