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Nichifor Crainic

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Romanian writer, philosopher, poet and theologian (1889 - 1972)
Nichifor Crainic
Minister of National Propaganda
In office
4 July 1940 – 14 September 1940
Prime MinisterIon Gigurtu
Ion Antonescu
Preceded byTeofil Sidorovici
Succeeded byPosition temporarily suspended
In office
27 January 1941 – 26 May 1941
Prime MinisterIon Antonescu
Preceded byHimself
Succeeded byMihai Antonescu
State Secretary at the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs
In office
14 September 1940 – 21 January 1941
Prime MinisterIon Antonescu
MinisterTraian Brăileanu
Co-Leader of the National Christian Party
In office
16 July 1935 – 10 February 1938Serving with Octavian Goga & A. C. Cuza
Preceded byOctavian Goga (as president of the National Agrarian Party)
A. C. Cuza (as president of the National-Christian Defense League)
Succeeded byNone (party banned under the 1938 Constitution)
Personal details
Born(1889-12-22)December 22, 1889
Bulbucata, Giurgiu County, Kingdom of Romania
DiedAugust 20, 1972(1972-08-20) (aged 82)
Mogoșoaia, Ilfov County, Socialist Republic of Romania
Political partyNational-Christian Defense League (before 1935)
National Christian Party (1935–1938)
Alma materUniversity of Bucharest
University of Vienna
OccupationWriter, Professor, Politician
ProfessionTheologian, Philosopher
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Nichifor Crainic (Romanian pronunciation: [niˈcifor ˈkrajnik]; pseudonym of Ion Dobre [iˈon ˈdobre]; 22 December 1889, Bulbucata, Giurgiu County – 20 August 1972, Mogoșoaia) was a Romanian writer, editor, philosopher, poet and theologian famed for his traditionalist activities. Crainic was a professor of theology at the Bucharest Theological Seminary and the Chișinău Faculty of Theology. He was also a politician and ideologue associated with far-right, racist, fascist, and antisemitic positions.

Literary career

Crainic was a contributor of poetry to the modernist magazine Gândirea. After become disenfranchised with the publication's progressive views, rather than disassociate with the magazine he became increasingly intertwined in leadership positions in order to de-modernize it. At the end of a series of intellectual sparings within the publication itself, Crainic managed to wrest control of the magazine and institute a sea-change in editorial character supporting mystical Orthodoxy.

He developed an ideology given the name Gândirism (from gând – "thought"), a nationalist and neo-Orthodox Christian social and cultural trend. He edited the Gândirea magazine, and collaborated with numerous other publications such as Ramuri, România Nouă, Cuvântul, and Sfarmă-Piatră. He was also the editor in chief of the newspaper Calendarul.

Politics

Nichifor Crainic became a leading pro-Fascist figure in the political turmoil of the late 1930s, openly praising Mussolini and Hitler. He was an ideologue of antisemitism, although his prejudice was a defense of the Gospels rather than a vision of racial hierarchies. His beliefs were a major influence on the Iron Guard legionary movement, although Crainic viewed himself as a supporter of the legionnaires' rival King Carol II. In a 1938 essay, he theorised the "ethnocratic state" as applied to Romania:

Our state is monarchical throughout its entire history. The monarchy is the principle of its continuity. The crown of the Romanian king symbolizes the glory of the people and the permanence of Romanian consciousness. ... The ethnocratic state differs profoundly from the democratic state. The democratic state is based on the number of population, without racial or religious distinction. The foundation of the ethnocratic state is the Romanian soil and people. ... The soil of the Romanian people has today inhabitants of other races and faiths, as well. They came here through invasion (like the Hungarians), through colonization (like the Germans), or through crafty infiltrations (like the Jews). ... The Jews are a permanent danger for every national state.

— Crainic, Program of the Ethnocratic State

A fulfillment of ethnocracy was to be achieved through the means of a monarch-led corporatist system:

Popularized and accepted by the entire nation, executed by government teams selected from the elites of the professions and controlled by parliament, it will be supervised by His Majesty the King. ... The corporatist regime culminates in royal authority.

— Crainic, Program of the Ethnocratic State

Crainic advocated creation of a Romanian spirit that was “antisemitic in theory and antisemitic in practice.” He applied his theological and rhetorical skills to breaking the Judeo-Christian relationship by arguing that the Old Testament was not Jewish, that Jesus had not been Jewish, and that the Talmud, which he saw as the incarnation of modern Jewry, was, first and foremost, a weapon to combat the Christian Gospel and to destroy Christians.

— Friling, Ioanid and Ionescu, 2005, BACKGROUND AND PRECURSORS TO THE HOLOCAUST Roots of Romanian Antisemitism The League of National Christian Defense and Iron Guard Antisemitism The Antisemitic Policies of the Goga Government and of the Royal Dictatorship

In 1940 he was elected a member of the Romanian Academy. He studied theology at the Seminary in Bucharest, and received his Ph.D. diploma from the University of Vienna.

After World War II

After the Soviet army defeated the Germans and occupied Romania, Crainic went into hiding. A trial was conducted in his absence and he was found guilty of crimes against the people. He was eventually caught and imprisoned by the Romanian authorities in 1947, and spent 15 years in Văcărești and Aiud prisons. He was expelled from the Academy by the Communist regime.

Between 1962 and 1968 he was the editor of the Communist propaganda magazine Glasul Patriei ("The Voice of the Fatherland")—a magazine published in Romania by the Romanian Communist regime but sold only abroad, which they used as a tool to try to influence the Romanian intellectual émigrés to be patriotic and not work against the Communist Romania.

Described by the historian Zigu Ornea as "always adaptable" (249), Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) joined and left a number of these groups while repeatedly attempting to establish himself as an ideologue who could draw the various ultra-nationalist parties together into a united front. ... Crainic occupied senior positions within right-wing regimes between 1940 and 1944, and after he was released from prison in the 1960s the Romanian Communist Party used his talents and reputation as an informer and a “reformed” ultra-nationalist to add credibility to its regime.

— Clark (2012: 108)

On 8 May 1995, after the fall of Communism, 10 of the sentences pronounced during the Post-World War II Romanian war crime trials were overturned by the Supreme Court of Justice. They were part of the 14 war criminals convicted in the "Journalists' trial" of 1945. Attorney General Vasile Manea Drăgulin presented the convictions decided upon in 1945 as illegal, believing the interpretation of the evidence to have been “retroactive, truncated, and tendentious”, therefore amounting to a “conviction decision, whose content is a synthesis of vehement criticism of their activity, to which we forcefully ascribed the character of war crimes”. The most notorious name in this lot was likely that of Crainic. An ardent pro-fascist and admirer of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, he was vice-president of the National Christian Party and then Antonescu's Minister of Propaganda. Crainic was among the 10 who were rehabilitated and he was welcomed back into the Romanian Academy.

Notes

  1. Ionițoiu, Cicerone (2002). "Dicționar C" (PDF). Victimele terorii comuniste : arestați, torturați, întemnițati, uciși (in Romanian). Vol. 2. Bucharest, Romania: Editura Mașina de Scris. p. 245. ISBN 978-973-99994-2-7. OCLC 46872499.
  2. Livezeanu, Irina (2003). "Reviews of Books:Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania Maria Bucur". The American Historical Review. 108 (4). Oxford University Press (OUP): 1245–1247. doi:10.1086/529946. ISSN 0002-8762. JSTOR 10.1086/529946. Clearly there were affinities between the eugenicists and thinkers, writers, and politicians on the extreme Right such as Nichifor Crainic, Nae Ionescu, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Octavian Goga, and A.C. Cuza.
  3. ^ Clark, Roland (2012). "Nationalism and orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the political culture of the extreme right in 1930s Romania". Nationalities Papers. 40 (1). Cambridge University Press (CUP): 107–126. doi:10.1080/00905992.2011.633076. ISSN 0090-5992. S2CID 153813255. The institute only lasted one year, but allowed Crainic to advance ideas such as anti-Masonry, anti-Semitism, and biological racism within an LANC-approved forum (Crainic, Ortodoxie 147).
  4. Caraiani, Ovidiu (2003). "Identities and Rights in Romanian Political Discourse". Polish Sociological Review (142). Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne (Polish Sociological Association): 161–169. ISSN 1231-1413. JSTOR 41274855. Nae Ionescu considered ethnicity as "the formula of today's Romanian nationalism," while for Nichifor Crainic the "biological homogeneousness," the "historical identity" and the "blood and the soil" were the defining elements of the "ethnocratic state."
  5. Wedekind, Michael (2010). "The mathematization of the human being: anthropology and ethno-politics in Romania during the late 1930s and early 1940s". New Zealand Slavonic Journal. 44. Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association: 27–67. ISSN 0028-8683. JSTOR 41759355. A prominent proponent of the concept of 'ethnic homogeneity' was the chauvinistic, xenophobic and pro-Nazi writer, politician, poet and professor of Theology Nichifor Crainic (1889-1972), author of "Orthodoxy and Ethnocracy" (Ortodoxie și etnocrație), published in 1938.
  6. Ioanid, Radu (1992). "Nicolae Iorga and Fascism". Journal of Contemporary History. 27 (3). Sage Publications, Ltd.: 467–492. doi:10.1177/002200949202700305. ISSN 0022-0094. JSTOR 260901. S2CID 159706943. Amongst those arrested for Duca's assassination were Nae Ionescu and Nichifor Crainic (a fascist ideologue, mediator between the NCP and the Iron Guards).
  7. ^ Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E., eds. (2004). "Antisemitic Propaganda and Official Rhetoric concerning the Judeo-Bolshevik Danger: Romanian Jews and Communism between 1938–1944" (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania: Final Report. Iași: Polirom. pp. 93, 116. ISBN 978-973-681-989-6.
  8. ^ Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E., eds. (2004). "Background and Precursors to the Holocaust. Roots of Romanian Antisemitism. The League of National Christian Defense and Iron Guard Antisemitism. The Antisemitic Policies of the Goga Government and the Royal Dictatorship" (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania: Final Report. Iași: Polirom. pp. 35–37. ISBN 978-973-681-989-6.
  9. Zach, Cornelius R.; Zach, Krista (2010). "Dietmar Müller Staatsbürger auf Widerruf. Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschaftskonzepte 1871–1941. Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden 2005. = Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen, 41. ISBN: 3-447-05248-1". Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge (in German). 58 (4): 609–611. ISBN 978-3-515-11333-5. Retrieved 27 March 2019. Die ideologischen Mentoren der "jungen Generation", Nae Ionescu und Nichifor Crainic, lieferten den Antisemiten (besonders der legionären Bewegung) ein theoretisches Gerüst für ihre Argumentation.
  10. Deletant, Dennis (1993). "Reviewed Works: A Providential Anti-Semitism. Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth-Century Romania by William O. Oldson; The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s by Leon Volovici". The Slavonic and East European Review. 71 (3). Modern Humanities Research Association: 546–548. ISSN 0037-6795. JSTOR 4211337. Volovici's study is a complementary one; it examines competently the role of the Romanian intelligentsia in the inter-war years in legitimizing anti-Semitic ideas and thus facilitating public acceptance of them. Octavian Goga and Nichifor Crainic were extreme examples and Volovici rightly highlights their deeds and writings.
  11. ^ Crainic, Programul statului etnocratic apud Sugar, Peter F. (1995). Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth-Century. American University Press. pp. 275–276. ISBN 978-1-879383-39-5.
  12. Andrei Muraru, "Elie Wiesel” Institute`s Journal, 2020, Outrageous Rehabilitations: Justice and Memory in the Attempts to Restore the War Criminals’ Remembrance in Post-Holocaust Romania. The Recent Case of General Nicolae Macici (I) in Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări / Holocaust. Study and Research, vol. XII, issue 1(13), pp. 345-348
  13. Alexandru Florian, Indiana University Press, Jan 24, 2018, Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania, pp. 73, 79 and 93-94

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