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
France’s penal colony network in New Caledonia (see preceding post) was not exactly a summer camp for delinquents, it was a brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting environment for existing rather than living. Comparatively though, it pales into lesser significant when stacked up against the unimaginable inferno of its South American equivalent in the colonies pénitentiaires of French Guiana (Guyane française).
The Napoleonic manoeuvre In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, elected president of the French Republic, staged a coup from above. With army backing he neutralised the national parliament and enacted a new constitution giving himself sweeping new dictatorial powers, a hefty step on the road to emulating his uncle by declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852. With France’s jails and hulks overflowing with the incarcerated multitudes, swollen further by the emperor’s defeated opponents, much of the surplus prison population was transported to France’s Algerian colony. At the same time Louis-Napoleon took the opportunity to establish a new penal colony in French Guiana and send out the first lot of transportés. Transportation to penal colonies, especially to Guyane, to New Caledonia and to Algeria, allowed France to rid itself of dangerous and incorrigible offenders at home, and to punish them for their sins by subjecting them to a life of hard labour❋ [Jean-Lucien Sanchez. ‘The French Empire, 1542–1976’. Clare Anderson. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies , Bloomsbury, 2018. hal-01813392.HAL Id: hal-01813392].
Economies of labour Aside from cleansing France of the criminal element, transportation served another purpose for Napoleon III. Slavery had been the engine of growth for France’s colonial empire, but France’s abolition of the institution in 1848 resulted in a massive shortage of cheap labour. Turning French Guiana (FG) and other French colonies into penitentiaries—replacing the lost plantation workers, the freed black African slaves (known as Maroons) with convicts in FG—neatly solved the problem [‘France’s “dry guillotine” a hell on earth for convicts’, (Marea Donnelly), Daily Telegraph, 22-Aug-2018, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
Bagne le plus diabolique The penal system in Guyane française revolved around two principal locations⧆, one was the Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni which functioned as the destination of first arrival for transportés (and usually only a temporary home for the majority). From here, the worst of the bagnards (convicts), the recaptured escapees and the relégués (recidivists), were relocated down the coast to the other Guyane penitentiary, Bagne de Cayenne. Here, a small group of off-shore islands, Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands) comprised the penal colony on which French Guiana’s dark reputation hangs. Better known as Devil’s Island, a collective descriptor for three distinct islands, the farthest away and most inaccessible of which, Île du Diable, was reserved for a select group of prisoners⦿.
(Image: www.thevintagenews.com)
The history of Devil’s Island is one of notoriety and longevity (operating from 1852 to 1946). Conditions for inmates were horrendous… hard labour from six in the morning to six at night (including being assigned to endlessly building roads that were never intended to be finished); working and living in a malarial coast and tropical jungle environment; susceptibility to a host of diseases including yellow fever, typhus, cholera and malaria; the more dangerous prisoners solitarily confined to tiny cells 1.8m x 2m indefinitely, and often exposed to the elements [‘French Guiana Prison That Inspired “Papillon”, (Karin-Marijke Vis), Atlas Obscura, 11-Aug-2015, www.atlasobscura.com].
Île du Diablo (Photo: Romain Veillon / www.thespaces.com)
A tropical death camp A sense of mortality in the penal colony was ever-present – convicts fought and murdered each other, punishment by execution (by guillotine) was regularly meted out❂. For those who could no longer stand the psychological and physical torture of incarceration in such a sub-human hell hole, driven to near-insanity, the urge to escape (“Chercher la belle”) exerted a powerful pull. This however was virtually a suicidal course of action as would-be escapees faced shark-infested waters and jungles teeming with jaguars, snakes and other deadly beasts [‘The story of the world’s most infamous penal system – ever?’, (Robert Walsh), History is Now Magazine, www.historyisnowmagazine.com]. In the first 14 years of the Guyane prisons’ operation, two-thirds of the convicts perished (Sanchez) At its worst point Devil’s Island had a 75% death-rate.
The sentencing regime was particularly harsh…bagnards transported to FG were subjected to the penalty of ‘doubleage’. This meant that on the expiration of a prisoner’s sentence, he or she✦ had to remain working in the colony for an additional period that was equivalent to the original sentence. And if prisoners were sentenced to terms of more than eight years, this automatically became a life sentence (Donnelly).
⌂ the Dreyfus Tower
Dreyfus Affair puts the spotlight on Devil’s Island Among the over 52,000 déportés sent to Devil’s Island/Cayenne from its inception to 1936, its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongful arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus endured over fours years on solitary Île du Diable before his case became a cause célèbre taken up by prominent citizens like novelist Emile Zola. Protests forced the French government—in a convoluted set of developments—to reopen Dreyfus’ case, retry him, re-convict him then free him and eventually exonerate him. The Dreyfus affair exposed entrenched anti-Semitism in the French military and in society [‘Devil’s Island Prison History and Facts’, Prison History, www.prisonhistory.net/].
⌂ the Devil’s Island story became widely known after ex-inmate Henri Charriere’s published account of his escape, ‘Papillon’, was made into a Hollywood movie in the early 70s
An anachronism of incarceration historyThe penitentiaries at Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni persisted for an inordinately long time, considering that apart from absorbing the overflow from the prison system in Metropolitan France they didn’t achieve all that much that was positive. The penal colonies were not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but an economic disaster…the planted crops failed badly and self-sufficiently was never achieved, signalling a complete failure in the objective of transforming the bagnards into settlers. In one year alone, 1865, the soaring cost of the FG enterprise reached in excess of 3.75 million francs! (Sanchez). After Salvation Army adjutant Charles Péan exposed the horrors, the utter inhumanity, of France’s Devil’s Island in a damning investigation⌽, the French authorities dragged their feet for another 25 years before they finally drew the curtain on this shameful chapter of their penal history [‘Devil’s Island’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Map: BBC News)
Endnote: These days France calls Guyane française an overseas department rather than a colony, and the colonial prisons are barely a distant memory. Instead today FP hosts the Guiana Space Centre (close to the town of Kourou), a Spaceport run in conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Changing pattern of deportations from metropole to colonies 1852-1866: majority of deportees sent to French Guiana From 1866: deportees from Europe sent to New Caledonia From 1866: deportees from North Africa, Asia and the Caribbean sent to French Guiana
§§ a rider to the system was that the ultimate destination of deportees could also depend on whether they were common or political prisoners
▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂.▂▂▂▂▂
❋ while lightening the burden on the government for domestic prison expenditure
⧆ plus a scattering of sub-camps of convicts located around different parts of French Guiana
⦿ mainly traitors (or accused ones like Dreyfus) and political dissidents. In WWI it housed spies and deserters (Donnelly). Others falling foul of French colonial justice ended up in Caribbean penal holdings on islands such as Guadalupe and Martinique
❂ the macabre pet name of inmates for Devil’s Island was the “Dry Guillotine” (“it kills it’s victims more slowly than the actual guillotine but kills them just as certainly”)
✦ women convicts were transported to FG, but there were only just shy of 400 deported in the duration of the penal colony
⌽ in 1928 duty of care was still non-existent: the prison administrators’ gross negligence was still resulting in 400 inmates dying each year and 2,400 freed prisoners left to fend for themselves
These days the Australian government it seems welcomes the French presence in New Caledonia. Canberra offered a tacit endorsement of France’s retention of its colonial hold over New Caledonia following the recent referendum which voted for a second time against independence for the French Pacific colony. From a geopolitical standpoint it seems that it is in Canberra’s interest for the French, a Western naval power, to continue to have a stake in the Pacific…as it constitutes the existence of a “significant counterweight” to the uncertain but fluid intentions of China in respect of the western Pacific [‘Australia is part of a Black region; it should recognise Kanaky ambition in New Caledonia’, (Hamish McDonald), The Guardian, 25-Oct-2020, www.theguardian.com].
Noumea, NC ▵
A look back into history reveals that Australia hasn’t always been as sanguine about the French settlement in its near Pacific island neighbour. The French connection with New Caledonia formally began in 1853 when it established a colony, settling a small expat population from Metropolitan France. Prior to this time the British through its colony in New South Wales had assumed a sort of “titular control” of New Caledonia❋. As well as being within the British-Australian sphere of influence, there was a pre-existing triangular trade between Australia, the New Caledonian islands and China… Australian merchants traded iron and metal utensils and tools and tobacco for sandalwood with the native (Kanak) population, which the merchants then exchanged with China for tea [‘The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australia’s View of New Caledonia In The 19th Century’, (Elizabeth Rechniewski), Portal. 2015. Vol 12, No 1. http://doi.org/10.5130/portal.V12i1.4095].
France’s decision to annex New Caledonia (NC)—a further sign to the British of French imperial designs in the south Pacific after its earlier acquisition of Tahiti—prompted a considerable degree of commotion within the Australian colonies. They criticised the colonial office in London for being lax in not having secured the colonisation of NC by Britain to block just such a takeover by the French. Australian newspapers like the Moreton Bay Courier had been warning for some time of NC’s suitability as an ideal location for a naval station from which to attack the Australian coast (Rechiewski).
Pacific pénitentaires◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌Australian concerns and anxieties grew exponentially in 1864 when the French turned NC into a penal colony using Britain’s penal system as a model – prisons were established at two locations, at Île Nou (Noumea Bay) on Grande Terre (NC’s main island), and a second pénitentaire on Île des Pins (Isle of Pines, or Kunié in Melanesian culture)✪. The outcry from the press in Australia and from some politicians against the French presence intensified…a NSW colonial secretary urged Britain take diplomatic action to discourage Paris from continuing the transportation of “these scum of France”.The intensity of Australian hostility to the NC penal colony, has led one historian to suggest that the fierceness of the opposition may have reflected an element of post-convict shame” within Australian society itself, given that transportation to Australia had only recently been ended [Jill Donohoo, ‘Australian Reactions to the French Penal Colony in New Caledonia’, Explorations: A Journal of French-Australian Connections, 54, 25-45, www.isfar.org.au].
▿Isle of Pines: vestiges du Bagne (Photo: Marco Ramerini/www.colonialvoyage.com)
19th century “boat people”: Apprehensive eyes looking west ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ In the last quarter of the century the principal external anxiety, especially for Queenslanders and New South Welshmen, was the fear of ‘invasion’ from bagnards or forçats (convicts) in NC. Many east coasters on the mainland were fixated on the threat of convicts—either having escaped from the NC colony or whose sentences had expired or had been pardoned—coming to Australia. Although perhaps exaggerated in actual numbers involved, the incidence of arrivals was more than merely perception, with periodic if isolated boatloads landing mainly on the Queensland coast (also in NSW and some reached New Zealand). With France flagging its intent to increase its transportation of habitual criminals to NC in the 1880s, anxieties further intensified. An additional concern was that in the event of a war erupting between France and Britain, France might unleash boatloads of the most dangereux kind of convicts in menacing numbers onto coastal Australian towns. A French proposal at the time to up the annual transportation numbers of bagnards including lifers to NC and to extend transportation to the adjoining Loyalty Islands as well, did nothing to abate Australian apprehensions [‘The problem of French escapees from New Caledonia’, (Clem Llewellyn Lack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1954].
Queensland’s northward anxieties◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌At the same time the Queensland colonial government in particular was equally anxious about imperial German ambitions in the region. Fear of German intentions to annex the eastern half of New Guinea to its immediate north, prompted Queensland first to push the colonial office in London to ratify a British protectorate over thesouthern portion ofeastern New Guinea, and then to unilaterally and rashly plunge ahead with its own plans for annexation in 1883 [‘Queensland’s Annexation of Papua: A Background to Anglo-German Friction’, (Peter Overlack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1979].
Conditions in the Île des Pins were of an extreme nature, the bagnards were subjected to cellular isolation, material deprivation and endemic disease, and worse, they were brutalised, beaten and tortured by the guards. The severity of their treatment was conceivably aggravated by the invidious situation of the wardens who themselves were in a kind of “occupational neverworld” (Toth). Entrapped in a low pay, no future work environment, theguards were looked on by both administrators and prisoners as merely “loathed turnkeys” [‘The Lords of Discipline. The Penal Colony Guards of New Caledonia and Guyana’, (Stephen A Toth). Crime, Histoire and Sociétés. Vol. 7. No. 2, 2003. Varia. http://doi.org/10.4000/che.544].
Memorial to 1871 political deportes, Île des Pins
By the time France ceased transportation to the Nouvelle Calédonia pénitentaires in 1897—a decision prompted by the economic failure of using bagnard labour to colonise NC rather than by any humanitarian motives—anywhere up to a total of 40,000 convicts had been transported since 1864. This includedsome 5,000 political prisoners – the Communards, transported for their involvement in the Paris Commune revolt at the end of Napoleon III’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia (Lack).
Spying for the nation, the first tentative steps◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ Nouvelle Calédonia and other Pacific islands played a role in the formative days of Australia’s espionage history. In 1902 Major William Bridges, acting on orders from the commander of the Australian land forces General Hutton, undertook a military spy mission to NC with the purpose of ascertaining the strength of fortifications in the French Pacific colony. Bridges came to this task already with experience of intelligence work having been on a mission to Samoa in 1896 to suss out German designs for the island [‘The growth of the Australian intelligence community and the Anglo-American connection’, (Christopher Andrew), Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 4, 1989 – Issue 2, 218-256, http://doi.org/10.1080/02684528908431996; Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, (1978)].
Aside from having French and German ambitions in the region to worry about, the Australian colonies from the 1890s had a new threat to preoccupy them, Japan. Through a series of bold and aggressive moves—annexing Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea , establishing a foothold on the Chinese mainland, and in defeating Tsarist Russia in a Pacific war—Japan signalled it’s arrival as a force in the Asia/Pacific region, and a rival to British-Australian (or Australasian) dominance in the western Pacific. As the 20th century progressed Australian anxieties about the “Japanese menace” would reach a level of hysteria.
PostScript: New Hebrides – contested ground◌◌◌◌◌◌◌By the 1880s the Australian colonies’ concern about the French in NC had extended to elsewhere in Oceania, especially its ambitions for nearby New Hebrides (NH). Some in Australia feared that France might use NC as a base to annex Nouvelles-Hebrides and energies in Australia were directed at ensuring the British government blocked any French attempts to plant the French tricolour on the island group. In 1886 France did just this, establishing military posts with small detachments of troops at two ports, Havannah and Sandwich. The Queensland government, alarmed that this presaged French intentions to also use NH as a convict dump, pressured London into securing assurances from Paris to the contrary (Lack).
Condominium compromise Notwithstanding this, the French maintained a presence in NH and tensions between the British and French on the islands persisted, including some violent exchanges between the two groups. In 1904-06 a curious solution of sorts was reached with an accord in which both sides made concessions⚉, future governance of NH was to comprise an Anglo-French Condominium. This created a dual system with separate administrations (known as residencies) in Port Vila, police forces, prisons and hospitals▣. The French and British residencies had control over their own ressortissants (‘nationals’) with separate Francophone and Anglophone communities – which led to the inevitable communication difficulties. All of this administrative duplication proved unwieldy and at times unworkable. In the middle of what some cynics tagged “the Pandemonium” rather than the Condominium were the disadvantaged indigenous population of NH, the Ni-Vanuatu who were left stateless (proving difficulties for some of them later trying to travel overseas when they found that they lacked a proper passport) [‘New Hebrides’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Lack]. The unique if bothersome governance arrangement continued until 1980 when the island state finally gained independence as Vanuatu.
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜
❋ the island chain’s first visit from a European was by Captain Cook in 1774 who gave it its name but didn’t formally claim if for Great Britain
✪ prior to colonising New Caledonia France had shown an interest in the southwestern region of Australia as a possible repository to offload criminals from overcrowded French jails [Bennett, B. (2006). In the Shadows: The Spy in Australian Literary and Cultural History. Antipodes,20(1), 28-37. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org./stable/41957504]. A few French convicts were despatched to a spot in the Pacific even more remote, Tahiti
⚉ France recognised the British occupation of Egypt in return for recognition of its interests in Morocco
▣ though there was a Joint Court established for all residents
Before the Sovereign Citizen Movement came along (see preceding blog), there was an earlier fringe organisation in the US, Posse Comitatus, which mined the same ideological/conspiracy terrain and employed similar disruptive tactics against federal authority. Emerging in the late 1960s, Posse Comitātūs (Latin for “force of the county”), sprouting anti-Semitic hate speech and uncompromising anti-government dogma and railing against federal taxes, appealed to a range of conservative and reactionary fringe groups — including the Tax Protest Movement, 2nd Amendment Absolutists, Christian Identity adherents and other ”white WASPs”, and ’preppers’ or survivalists. The driving impetus for Posse Comitatus anti-came largely from one William Potter Gale who took over the movement from its founder Henry Lamont Beach⁕. Gale, a self-styled minister, preached retributive violence against US public officials who violate the law and the Constitution (Gale’s “sound bite”: they should be hung by the neck at noon at the nearest intersection of town) [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
⟰ WP Gale, Posse Comitatus ideologue and leader
The trans-Atlantic sheriff Posse Comitatus drew on an earlier institution in American history, the office of the sheriff. This office deriving from 9th century Anglo-Saxon England—the word ‘sheriff, meaning literally the “shire guardian”—was exported to England’s American colonies where the sheriff of a county came to be directly elected as a constitutional officer holding great autonomy and independence in his position [‘Sheriffs and the posse comitatus’, (David Kopel), The Washington Post, 15-May-2014, www.washingtonpost.com].
⟱ Office of the sheriff had its genesis during the rule of Alfred the Great in Wessex (Source: www.historytoday.com)
After America became a republic, the institution of sheriff retained its status as the grass-roots hub of local law enforcement, although over time regional variations emerged. In the more densely populated North-East of the country the creation of urban police forces eroded the office’s power, but not so in the South and the West, where the preponderance of larger rural counties meant the sheriff remained a key force in tying together isolated communities. Here the overriding perception commonly is that ”the sheriff in his county is more powerful than the president”§ [‘The Renegade Sheriffs‘, (Ashley Powers), The New Yorker, 23-Apr-2018, www.newyorker.com].
An alternate history of US law: Common law trumps statutory law Posse Comitatus doctrine affirms the office of sheriff as the truly ‘legitimate’ arm of law enforcement in the land. In the minds of its adherents, it authorises the office-holder to determine local laws based on judicial decisions of county courts. Thus it holds that common law always takes precedence over statute or written law [‘Posse Comitatus’ (organization), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
“Constitutional sheriffdom” Influenced by Posse Comitatus and other extremist anti-federal government groups a body of sheriffs in the US have gone further to enunciate their local authority over the law. These hardliners in 2011 formed themselves into an association of ‘constitutional’ sheriffs (Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association or CSPOA)✪. CSPOA’s position echoes that of Posse Comitatus– the sheriff represents the highest authority in the county (Powers). In the early 2010s CSPOA mobilised sheriffs to take a very strong stand against President Obama’s attempts to establish gun control legislation [‘Line in the Sand’, (Mark Potok & Ryan Lenz), Southern Poverty Law Center, (Summer Issue, 13-Jun-2016), www.splcenter.org].
Posse Comitatus stoking the Midwest farm crisis
A farm recession in the American Midwest in the early 1980s, resulting in economic ruin, bank foreclosures, etc., “created the conditions necessary for the (Posse Comitatus) doctrine to attract significant support” among desperate and disenchanted farmers⊞. Gale’s acolytes “crisscrossed the region explaining to farmers and ranchers (that they) were under no obligation to repay overdue loans or peacefully accept the foreclosure of their property” [‘Posse Comitatus’, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, www.plainshumanities.unl.edu]. Some unscrupulous peddlers of Posse Comitatus ideology even sold the hard-hit farmers bogus prepackaged legal defences to circumvent their financial obligations (Carey).
(Source: Iowa PBS)
Followers of the Posse Comitatus manifesto often refused to pay taxes, obtain driver’ licences or pay vehicle insurance counterfeiting (steming from a denial of US fiat money) and other acts of federal disobedience. Posse Comitatus groups set up “common-law courts and juries”✦ to try public officials who had earned their enmity. Some members of Posse Comitatus groups, like today’s Sovereign Citizens, also engaged in more lethal actions. In 1983 one Posse member killed federal marshals and a local sheriff.
Continuing ideological after-effects By the late 1980s with William Gale’s death, Posse Comitatus activism ebbed away. The movement’s decline has been attributed to a lack of effective leadership. Nonetheless the attraction of its ideology to disaffected fringe elements lies in the durability of its receptive message to many [‘The Anti-Government Movement Guidebook’, (1999, National Center for State Courts), www.famguardia.org]. Gale’s inflammatory ideas “gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity” (Carey). The Posse Comitatus ideology held the appeal it did, according to Daniel Levitas, because Gale forged an American-sounding ideology which married together appeals to anti-Semitism, anti-communism, White Supremacy and the sovereignty of the people [‘The Terrorist Next Door’ (Daniel Levitas), New York Times, 17-Nov-2002, www.nytimes.com].
Endnote: The archetype of the posse in the old west In countless Hollywood western movies the standard trope shows sheriffs raising posses to apprehend fugitives or to marshal back-ups to defend a community or town under threat. This was not merely Hollywood mythology but did occur. On the western frontier during the 19th century the sheriff had the authority to command a posse. Posse service was a right and a duty of responsible citizens of the day (Kopel). The reality behind the Hollywood depiction of posses is that they “routinely overstepped their quasi-legal function and were themselves responsible for mob violence” [‘Hate Normalized: Posse Comitatus’, Siouxland Observer, 30-Apr-2018, www.siouxlandobserver.blogspot.com].
⟰ Former Arizona sheriff, Richard Mack, a co-founder of CSPOA (Source: www.azcenter.com)
Postscript: ”An increasingly central role in partisan battles” The Marshall Project has identified at least 60 sheriffs across the US that are currently using the wide discretionary powers they have to oppose state government-imposed restrictions due to COVID-19. This has meant not enforcing pandemic safety measures such as stay-at-home orders, the wearing of masks, business closures, etc. [‘The Rise of the Anti-Lockdown Sheriffs’, (Maurice Chammas), The Marshall Project, 15-Aug-2020, www.themarshallproject.org].
↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼ ⁕ a far-right activist who had been a member of the “Silver Shirts” (American neo-Nazis) in the 1930s
§ the familiar image again courtesy of Hollywood is of the racist, tyrannical southern sheriff who rides roughshod over everyone, personified in the film In the Heat of the Night
✪ the idea of constitutional sheriffs was Gale’s, first proposed in the 1970s
⊞ by the late Seventies there was 80 or more distinct Posse Comitatus groups in the plains states, with Wisconsin in particular a ‘hotbed’ (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
✦ the common law courts, together with Sovereign Citizens, have been described as ”the direct ideological descendants of Posse Comitatus” (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
(Image: Emerson Kent)
🚹 Arrow Cross (top) & Iron Guard flags
🚹 Codreanu (R) with Gen. Antonescu, the ‘Conducător’
🚹 Codreanu, “The Capitane “
🚹 Danube monument to Jewish victims of Arrow Cross
🚹 Iron Guard Legionnaires
(Source: reddit.com)
🚹 Szálasi and Hitler (Photo: Hitler-archive.com)Arrow Cross militia
🚹 Arrow Cross women (Photo: CEU Gender Studies)
⧆ Arrow Cross was just the most prominent of several small “fascist-wannabe” political groups that surfaced in Hungary after WWI
