INTRODUCTION TO
The Anti-Humans by D. Bacu
THE AUTHOR of this book, a Romanian born in Greek territory, went to Romania for his university education and there became a member of the anti-Communist organization that flourished in that nation before and during the tragic and fratricidal Second World War. After the Bolshevik conquest of Romania, the Soviets, undoubtedly on orders from their masters, maintained a pretense that their occupation was merely temporary and further disguised their purposes by keeping on the throne as King of Romania the legitimate heir, a young man who was merely a puppet in their hands, but served to give to the people an illusive hope that Romania, though devastated and impoverished, might again become a free nation. In this hope, of course, the Romanians (like many other captive peoples) were encouraged by the governments of the Western nations that had won the military victory. Those governments, especially in the United States, maintained a pretense that they were not the servants of the Bolsheviks’ masters, and, whenever they deemed it expedient to administer a little verbal paregoric to their own population, manufactured oratory about “defending the Free World” and “containing Communism.” Americans, who were so charmed by those phrases that they did not notice what their own government was doing, cannot blame the Romanians (or the others) for having supposed that the official verbiage was an indication of national policy. During the early years of Soviet occupation, therefore, the Romanian people entertained delusive hopes of eventual liberation, and the author of this book accordingly remained in Romania, his true fatherland. When he was at last arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of holding opinions inimical to Bolshevism, he, luckily, suffered only the excruciating tortures and hardships that are normal in what is called a Great Society. During his imprisonment, however, he had by chance an opportunity to learn of an experiment conducted on a select group of young men, and he had the acumen and patience to discover precisely what that experiment was. In this book he discloses for the first time the facts about a practice of which the peoples of the West still know nothing.
Bacu speaks only of what he knows — of what he witnessed with his own eyes and learned from the lips of men who had, despite themselves, been stripped of their humanity by an infallible scientific technique. His subject, therefore, is what the Bolsheviks secretly did to human beings in the prison at Pitesti* from 1949, when the experiment began, to 1951, when it seems to have been temporarily discontinued for some reason unknown.
*With the exceptions of names of places (e.g., Bucharest) and persons (e.g., King Carol) that have well-known English forms, Romanian proper names in this volume are given in their Romanian spelling, but without the diacritical marks that are used in Romanian. To avoid excessive expense in setting type, the use of these marks had to be restricted to actual quotations from Romanian and the index, to which the reader is referred for the exact form of names and titles requiring diacritics.
What is described in these pages is not, however, an isolated event. Everyone who has had experience in military intelligence dealing with the Bolsheviks, or who has made a close study of information that is available from little known but authentic sources, will recognize in Bacu’s pages a detailed description of a technique that the implacable enemies of mankind have used in many lands — perhaps in all countries that are officially Communist — for many years. The military intelligence agencies of Western nations have long known that a film demonstrating basic Pavlovian procedures was produced in Russia for training the Bolshevik secret police in 1928, and that the intelligence service of at least one nation succeeded in obtaining a copy of that film. After the notorious “purge” trials in Russia in 1936, when the masters of that country for some reason thought it advisable to exhibit to the world their ability to elicit the most incredible confessions from highly-placed and hardened Bolsheviks, intelligent observers naturally wondered what means could have been employed to produce such amazing results. Certain Western intelligence services sought to ascertain what means had been used, and eventually ascertained them in sufficient detail to show that the essentials of the method were precisely those that Mr. Bacu has described for us.
Military intelligence services naturally do not publish what they have learned by their secret and often perilous operations. Perhaps the first hint of the new method given to the general public came from George Orwell, who, in his 1984, portrayed the internationalists’ Utopia and described some parts of the Communist technique, eliminating much that was too realistic for the taste of the reading public at that time, and replacing it with some episodes that could give a dramatic touch to what was in reality unspeakably vile and interminably monotonous. From 1984, however, an alert reader could have surmised much that was left unsaid. Since then, confirmatory evidence has become available from many sources, often fragmentary, for victims who have the stamina to tell what was done to them may nevertheless be understandably reticent about the worst aspects of the degradation imposed on them. They often censor their reports, to avoid harrowing unendurably the feelings of a humane reader or arousing total disbelief in tender-minded individuals from whom miseducation or innate sentimentality has concealed the ultimate horrors that lie hidden in creatures anatomically indistinguishable from human beings.
It almost never happens that we have a report from a survivor who at the time observed and interviewed the piteous victims of scientific bestiality, but, by a lucky chance, himself escaped the traumatic and mind-destroying shock of the torments they had undergone. That is what makes the book here translated from the Romanian unique. Bacu, to whom we owe our only authoritative report on the “Pitesti Phenomenon,”* was such a survivor.
*[Mr. Heath wrote before the publication, late in 1969, of Dr. Ion Carja’s Intoarcerea din Infern: amintirile unui detinut din inchisorile Romaniei bolsevizate (Madrid, Editura “Dacia”), a less detailed and explicit book in its description of the methods used. – Editor.]
In these pages, the reader will, for the first time, have at his disposal a fairly complete account of Bolshevik techniques of dehumanization, including some details, here mentioned as delicately as possible, of which we do not like to think. On these, Bacu does not insist, but you will see their import. One aspect concerning which he is silent is the sexual torments that form a standard part of the Bolshevik method. That is a large omission, but scholars who have had the fortitude to study the works of the celebrated “Marquis” de Sade* and his peers will readily perceive what was involved, while a specific report here would not only sicken most readers, but would prevent the distribution of this book through the United States mails.
*Donatien Alphonse Sade (1740-1814), to whom we owe the word sadism, was condemned to death by French courts for rape, murder by poison, and almost unbelievable torture of persons whom he kidnapped for that purpose, but the execution of the sentence was delayed by strange influences until he was liberated from prison by the French Revolution, during which he was honored and admired for his orations about “equality” and “brotherhood.” Napoleon had him put in an insane asylum.
This account, as I have said, deals with prisons in Romania, but the procedures used there have been and are used wherever the anti-humans have gained control. Identical procedures, together with such improvements as may have been suggested by their experiments and delights in Romania and other captive nations, will be used everywhere that their power is extended — including, of course, the United States, if that nation reaches the goal toward which it is presently moving at a vertiginous speed.
If the Americans succumb, they will remember this book as a prophecy that was completely fulfilled.
* * * * * *
APART FROM its value to Americans as foreshadowing things to come — certain to come, if the operations now in progress in the United States are carried to a successful conclusion — this book, although not couched in the technical terminology of psychology and psychiatry, should be of absorbing interest to everyone who, regardless of his political desires or prognostications, is sincerely interested in study of the human consciousness. It delineates the result of a crucial experiment that could not have been performed on Occidentals outside Soviet territory.
This book is a landmark in the broad field now generally designated by a term adapted from the Russian, psychopolitics.
Psychopolitics, a technology rather than a science since it is a practical application of data obtained by research in several sciences, may be defined as the art of controlling a nation by controlling the minds of the politically dominant majority of its population.
As a designation, psychopolitics is preferable to psychological warfare, which, though correct, is often taken to mean only operations directed against an enemy nation in the course of armed conflict. An excellent example of such propaganda attacks is President Wilson’s famous “fourteen points,” a group of fairy-stories about the peace and justice that the American Santa Claus had in his bag for good little boys and girls in Europe.* That high-sounding nonsense, which seemed plausible to persons addicted to idealistic fantasies and romantic fiction, is credited with having broken the will of the German people and induced them to surrender in 1918, after which, of course, it was easy to inflict on them suffering and starvation, Bolshevik outbreaks, and finally a monetary inflation so enormous that the international people then in Germany could “legally” appropriate most of the property in Germany that they had not already acquired, “legality” being observed by handing a few American dollars to famished and despairing Germans in return for land, buildings, or factories worth a thousand or a million times that price.
*It is probably true, but irrelevant, that Wilson half-believed himself when he spun his rhetorical fantasies; if he did, he was selected for the presidency precisely because he had that capacity for self-intoxication. Colonel Curtis B. Dall in his excellent book (F. D. R., Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1967, p. 137) reports that a prominent Jew, who had been an eye-witness and a kind of errand boy for his elders, boasted that in 1912, while Wilson was being trained for the presidency, Bernard Baruch, one of the great Jewish satraps stationed in the United States, used to lead Wilson about, “like a poodle on a string,” and make him recite at Democratic Headquarters, while Baruch’s fellows were egging on Theodore Roosevelt, whose candidacy, of course, ensured the popular votes for Wilson needed to make Wilson’s appointment seem “democratic.” We may be sure that Fido Wilson learned how to sit up and speak “new freedom,” “make the world safe for democracy,” and the like to the satisfaction of his masters and trainers before they had him perform before the footlights for the edification of Americans who imagined that they had selected (elected) him as their Leader. What Fido thinks while he responds to his cues and performs on the stage is of interest only to Fido’s biographers and to psychologists.
The “fourteen points” are justly regarded as one of the great triumphs of psychological warfare, but under modern conditions verbal bombardments, unlike artillery fire, cannot be aimed in one direction. Clever as the “fourteen points” were, we may legitimately wonder whether they would have made the German populace simper, if the populace had not been made susceptible to such gabble by the long and patient work of enemy aliens and their hirelings. What is more significant, substantially the same drivel was used, through Wilson and other mouthpieces, to pep up the American people and make them glad to furnish cannon fodder and money to “make the world safe for democracy” by devastating Europe in a “war to end wars.” Wilson’s ideological barrage was directed against Americans as much as against Germans, and we may wonder which nation, in the long run, was the more damaged.
Under modern conditions, psychological warfare is necessarily waged by a government against its own subjects and only secondarily against a foreign country, and the real beneficiary is invariably the international nation that controls both sides in the war that it has arranged for its own purposes. Only if we keep that fact in mind can we use the term psychological warfare correctly.
The tactical and strategic use of psychopolitics that the Soviet recommends to its allies and agents in the United States and other nations of the West yet uncaptured has been set forth in a remarkable document of which several copies appear to have reached the United States in the 1930’s and later. It is most widely known and generally available as a booklet, Brain-washing, a Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, with an introduction by the Reverend Mr. Kenneth Goff, who was a member of the Communist Party in the United States from 1936 to 1939, and who had studied psychopolitics in a special Communist training school in Milwaukee. He states that the textbook, although issued for the use of English-speaking students in Lenin University, was also “used in America for the training of Communist cadre.” An almost identical text was obtained from a confidential source in 1955 by a Professor Charles Stickley of New York City and published in that year.* A quite similar text, with only minor variations, came into the possession of Mr. Louis Zoul, the well-known author of Thugs and Communists, who published in The Soviet Inferno the greater part of the text divided into short sections, each of which is followed by copious corroboration from many sources, such as Anatoli Granovsky’s I Was an NKVD Agent and Captain Robert A. Winston’s The Pentagon Case, as well as letters from individuals who escaped from Cuba and other proletarian paradises†.
*Mr. Goff’s booklet is available from Soldiers of the Cross, $1.00. It is hard to tell which of the many other printings are still in print. One, containing an excellent introduction by Eric D. Butler, the well-known Australian publicist and editor of the New Times of Melbourne, was published by the Victorian League of Rights in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1956, then priced at 4/-. Another, with a foreword discussing the Soviet textbook as an obvious source of the “mental health” agitation in the United States, was published at about the same time by the American Public Relations Forum, Burbank, California; $1.00.
†The Soviet Inferno is published by Public Opinion, P. 0. Box 4044, Long Island City, New York; 2nd edition, 1967, $2.00.
In the publications before Mr. Zoul’s, the text is preceded by a commendatory address, evidently delivered at Lenin University by Lavrentiy Beria, the Jew who was Head Butcher in the Russian satrapy from 1938 — when he liquidated another Jew, the unspeakable Yezhov — until 1953, when he was in turn liquidated by another and even more ferocious Jew. The date of the oration is not given, but it would seem to be earlier than 1938 and to come from the time when Beria, in addition to feeding his blood-lust in Transcaucasia, was presiding over the manufacture of “historical studies” for the use of educated simpletons in the United States and elsewhere.
The “synthesis,” which deals with the uses of psychopolitics rather than technical details, is obviously a condensation and omits most of the Marxist jargon with which admittedly Communist publications for the general public are almost invariably larded.* It does, however, maintain the pretense, discarded only on the very highest levels, that psychological warfare against Western nations is directed from Moscow in the interests of Russia, and that the goal is the destruction of “capitalism.”
*Marxist doctrine, though very useful for befuddling low-grade minds (which normally accept as profound any highly touted mass of intricate verbiage that they are unable to untangle), is believed only by the lowest ranks in the Communist hierarchy. As Duane Thorin perceived when he was a prisoner of the Communists in China (A Ride to Panmunjon, Chicago, 1956; p. 39): “Intellects that failed to see through the falsities of communism were so arrested that they were of only limited use in the totalitarian state.” Persons with such inert minds are, naturally, not promoted to really responsible positions, no matter how hard they work or how sadistic they are. The policy of denying them promotion, which is certainly sound from an organizational standpoint, has led to some defections — which are of no real consequence, since the dullards do not know very much to reveal and they are easily replaced — although, where circumstances make it convenient, such tools are usually scrapped and liquidated when they begin to show discontent or claim promised rewards as you will see in Chapter XXVIII of the present book. In the middle echelons of the organization, comparable to company-grade and field-grade officers in an army, the ambitious career men, naturally too intelligent to take their own propaganda seriously, are careful to use the official “ideology” even among themselves, partly for exercise in unremitting hypocrisy, and partly because they find Marxist dialectics a game as entertaining as chess. This sport, which may be played for high stakes, gives rise to clever syllogisms about “deviationism,” “Stalinism,” etc., which often trap the players. A good example may be found in the work of the Soviet physician, J. Landowsky, available in a Spanish translation, Sinfonia en rojo mayor (Madrid, 1949), of which one chapter has appeared in English, translated by George Knupffer, Red Symphony (London, 1968).
The text, though candid enough in treating the American people as enemies who must be destroyed or enslaved, was evidently designed for students who would forget that the Bolshevik capture of Russia was, of course, planned, financed, and directed by the Schiffs, Warburgs, and other wealthy Jews then living in the United States who used their control over the governments of Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States to ensure the Bolsheviks’ triumph over the Russians*. The students were also expected to believe or pretend that “capitalism” included the international lords of finance, who have always found their Soviet colony an extremely profitable investment both in itself and as a means of exploiting their control over the money and banking of nations that are told that they are “free.” The text of Brain-washing† deals primarily with means of inducing insanity or idiocy in selected victims and is thus directly relevant to the Pitesti experiment described in the present book.
*Pretense is often dropped on the highest levels in talks with outsiders who are too well informed to be deceived. Prince Sturdza, in the authentic text of his memoirs (see the footnote on p. xxxv below) pp. 346 f., reports that when he came to New York in 1929 to obtain a loan for the Romanian government, he had to plead his country’s case with the mighty Jewish lawyer who represented the great international banking houses of New York that had directed the Bolshevik seizure of Russia. This lawyer, known as Louis Marshall (a good Scottish name!), was, as Prince Sturdza says, “a second Bernard Baruch, less conspicuous but just as influential as the famous proconsul of Judaism (rather than Jewry) in the United States.” (A proconsul, it will be remembered, was in the Roman Empire a governor sent into conquered territory to direct and supervise the native governments, which were allowed some autonomy in local matters that did not directly affect the interests of the Empire.) Marshall, like other great Potentates, disdained to play a comedy with the suppliant: he took Prince Sturdza to the window, pointed at Wall Street and said with lordly bluntness: “Look what we can do for a country we like; in Russia we have shown the world what we can do to a country and government we hate.” Prince Sturdza adds, “Mr. Marshall, a few days later, reiterated that statement to Mr. Gheorghe Boncescu, the Financial Adviser of our [Romanian] Legation in Washington].” Marshall naturally thought it best to profess a liking for the United States, a country which he and his fellows were about to afflict with an “economic depression,” neatly arranged by a squeeze through their banks, to ruin influential natives, appropriate their property through foreclosures, and create the atmosphere of crisis and poverty that would facilitate the “election” of their talented servant, Franklin Roosevelt.
†The word brain-washing is “an English translation of a Chinese euphemism,” according to an article by Professor Revilo P. Oliver in the Birch magazine, American Opinion, November 1964, pp. 29-40. This article is an excellent discussion of the whole subject in brief compass, and gives some telling examples of tricks used in public schools and newspapers, but unfortunately fails to treat the strictly scientific (psychological) principles of propaganda, which can (and indeed must) be used to create “public opinion” in modern circumstances. The techniques of propaganda are no more “Communist” than rifles or airplanes; like all weapons, they work for whoever uses them, but do not hit the target, if they are not well aimed. In all wars, victory goes to the side that has the best weapons and uses them most expertly.
It is not, however, a complete treatise, even in outline, of psychopolitics; it barely alludes to very important weapons of psychological warfare. We cannot digress to discuss those weapons here, but no one should overlook the efficacy of scientifically produced propaganda* in the United States, where it is virtually a monopoly of the Jews, who, through advertising, can control the ever diminishing number of newspapers, periodicals, and broadcasting stations that they do not own outright. The best strategic propaganda is produced by manufacturing impassioned argument and violent controversy on “both sides” of a given question, so that the public accepts as unquestionable fact everything that “both sides” in the contrived controversy seem to take for granted.
*The best technical treatises on the subject are in French: Jean Stoetzel, Esquisse d’une theorie des opinions (Paris, 1943), and Jacques Ellul, Propagandes (Paris, 1962). One cannot too much emphasize the fact, ignored by Professor Oliver and other American writers, that the techniques of propaganda, like the technology that makes possible television and computers, have no political or social content. The results that are obtained by means of a television station or a computer depend entirely on who uses it for what purpose. It is true that all technological advances place the people who are too stupid or lazy to use them at a hopeless disadvantage. A nation that neglected or refused to use airplanes, for example, would necessarily he defeated in war and disappear (except as a political fiction, if that suited the purpose of the conquerors), but that is not the fault of the Wright Brothers and General Sikorsky. The effectiveness of propaganda, in the strict sense of that word, depends largely upon what is technically called pre-propaganda, i.e., the ideas injected into the minds of children by their education. In the United States, the public schools were early converted into a very efficient machine to stunt the minds, pervert the morals, and destroy the self-respect of children, but the Americans seem pleased with the results, even after they have had a preliminary view of them in the unwashed derelicts, sexual perverts, drug addicts, and crazed revolutionaries that their public schools are systematically producing at their expense. It seems likely, therefore, that the Americans no longer have either the intelligence or the will to resist their enemies, and will dumbly acquiesce in the fate prepared for them. Since the number of Americans who are still permitted to have liquid capital is very small, the ever increasing number of foresighted refugees who are fleeing from the United States to other countries is significant, though statistically small.
Propaganda, if properly used, can always control a majority of a given population, but will always be ineffective against both the critical intelligence of independent minds and the faith of a religion that the propaganda line openly contradicts. Although the minds can usually be hired, and theologians can be employed to “modernize” the religion, there will always be troublesome exceptions, even after a century of strenuous effort. In the conquest of a country by psychopolitics, the exceptions must be put under physical restraint and either liquidated or made harmless imbeciles or, if possible, converted into useful zombies.
This is the problem with which the text of Brain-washing is principally concerned, and with particular reference to the United States, where naked terrorism through the government was impossible in the 1930’s, and is not yet feasible, even today. The principles expounded in the text and the methods suggested are indisputably authentic: they are the standard Soviet application of the discoveries made in Russia, before the Bolshevik conquest, by Dr. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose scientific talents the shrewd Bolsheviks were able to take over and put to their own use*. You will find the essentials stated in the text.
*For an account of the way in which this was done, and a transcription of the preliminary negotiations with Dr. Pavlov, see Dr. Boris Sokoloff’s authoritative report in his book, The White Nights (New York, 1956), especially pp. 66-72.
The “synthesis” of the textbook on psychopolitics recommends and prescribes for use against Americans a propaganda campaign for “mental health” to obtain from the stupid Americans acquiescence in legislation to authorize the “legal” kidnapping of troublesome Americans and their incarceration in prisons (to be called “hospitals”) in which “trained psychiatrists” of alien origin and their brutish assistants can induce insanity, imbecility, or, if necessary, death by means of scientific tortures, especially “electric shock therapy” (which can be used to break the backbone), or mind-destroying drugs, such as the now famous L.S.D., which was only later produced by the Weizmann Laboratories in Israel and shipped to the United States for surreptitious sale to adolescents and children whose minds had been given a preliminary conditioning in the public schools.
In the 1930’s, the “mental health” scheme would doubtless have seemed preposterous and ridiculous to the stolid and happy-go-lucky Americans, if they had heard of it. It has now, however, been almost completely implemented, and has already been used in a considerable number of cases, a few of which have attracted some little attention, especially that of the abduction of General Edwin A. Walker, which failed because he had prominent friends who acted before he could be destroyed, of Frank Britton, who had dared to criticize Jews and was effectively silenced, and of the journalist, Fred Seelig, who, through a miscalculation, was prematurely released and had time to narrate his experience in print before he died.*
*Frederick Seelig, Destroy the Accuser, with a foreword by Westbrook Pegler and a commentary by Dr. Revilo P. Oliver (Miami, Florida, Freedom Press, 1967). This book, which I have seen, has become unprocurable, and I do not have a copy at hand. The author is said to have died of heart failure in Valparaiso, Indiana, not long after his book was published, and a letter to the publisher was returned to me with the notation “unknown”! The book, as I remember, contained some details about the eagerness of the staff at Springfield to start torturing General Walker, who was kidnapped through the complicity of Federal judges (compare Judge Petrescu in Chapter XXVIII of the present book) while the author was a prisoner there.
We may expect, however, that the procedure will be used with increasing frequency and less secrecy, and that soon it will be mere routine for Americans who make themselves obnoxious to their masters (for example, by claiming that the “United Nations” or the Federal Reserve System or the Marxist income tax is “un-Constitutional,” or by pretending that God’s People do not have a right to use lesser breeds for their own profit and fun) to be hauled to Springfield, Missouri, or some other equivalent of Pitesti on the western side of the Atlantic, and there, with “loving care,” be restored to “mental health” as vertebrate vegetables.
Despite the panoply of refined techniques, such as surgical operations on the brain (“lobotomy”), excruciating electrical torments, and subtle drugs, it is noteworthy that even in the United States at the present time the favored procedure is to subject inconvenient Americans to a kind of physical degradation of the same kind as that used at Pitesti, though, for some reason, less intense and systematic. A typical case is that of the American journalist, who, having come upon evidence that compromised the nest of homosexual perverts in Washington, was kidnapped by a U.S. Marshal and hustled to Springfield, Missouri, where he was stripped and thrust naked into a small cell, of which the floor and three sides were of rough concrete, while the fourth was a ponderous steel door. There was no furnishing of any kind in the cell, and only two openings, one a round hole in the floor leading to a sewer, and the other a ventilator, through which were sent blasts of frigid air alternating with shrill, deafening, cacophonous, and rhythmically disoriented “music,” intended both to damage the auditory nerves and to make sure that the poor wretch in the cell could not possibly fall asleep as he stretched his naked body on the rough concrete. Naturally, the victim’s skin, abraded by the concrete, soon developed open sores, and his despairing mind eventually took refuge in periods of total stupor that even the howling din coming through the ventilator could not break. After being deprived of food and water for three days and nights, the victim was forced to obtain them by crawling on his hands and knees in minimum time to a pot placed on the sill of the briefly opened door.*
*The unfortunate journalist was almost certainly Frederick Seelig, but, for reasons stated in the preceding note, I have had to quote from the article in American Opinion, November 1964, p. 31, mentioned above. The writer of that article, Professor Oliver, does not give the victim’s name, but the circumstances make the identification certain. One wonders how (or why) Oliver’s article was printed in a Birch publication.
In the United States it has thus far been necessary to use a certain amount of discretion and pretense in the destruction of anti-Communist nuisances, but in Romania, after the completion of the take-over, more effective secrecy made precautions less necessary.
The Pitesti experiment dispensed with such complicated and expensive paraphernalia as electrical apparatus, brain surgeons, and specially prepared drugs. It used only the simplest tools, everywhere procurable: clubs, the bestiality of degenerates, the weakness of human when attacked by Pavlov’s methods. The results of the experiment were, as you will see, impressive and appalling. They proved that no one could resist the techniques of the Anti-Humans, but whether the experiment was entirely a success is a question that must be left to your decision on the basis of your estimate of what the experimenters hoped to discover or prove, while a critique of their methodology must be left to the few Occidentals who have expert knowledge of psychobiological processes.
What no reader of this book can fall to perceive, if only for a moment before he tries to forget the “unthinkable,” is the unspeakably vile and sadistic lusts of the contrivers of the experiment at Pitesti — appetites so foreign to everything that he regards as human that the creatures who are animated by them can be described only as the “enemies of mankind,” or, concisely, as the Anti-Humans.
What is described in this book happened in Romania after the Bolsheviks discarded the pretense that they were tenderhearted humanitarians bringing “equality” and “civil rights” to the downtrodden victims of the wicked “Fascists” and “anti-Semites.” Before and even after the Anti-Humans stopped dissembling, some Romanians were, by foresight or good luck, able to escape westward, and even to make their sufferings known, as Mr. Bacu has done in this book, to peoples not yet imprisoned.
When the United States has progressed to the point reached by Romania in 1948, there will be no place on earth to which Americans can flee, and there will be no one to hear their screams.
* * * * *
ALL THAT REMAINS to be said to introduce Mr. Bacu’s book to American readers can be expressed in a few pages giving such information about Romania as will enable Americans to appreciate the human drama — the pathos and the tragedy of this narrative.
Romania was for centuries, even while it was under the comparatively mild and humane oppression of the Moslems, the easternmost land of the West. The nation was born of the Roman conquest of Dacia (101-106), and there Rome left an imprint that has thus far been indelible and a spiritual heritage that survives in the heart of the people.
The civilization of Romania was the civilization of the West. The names of men and places may be unfamiliar to your eyes, but the people you will recognize as your own kind and their thoughts will be the thoughts of the Christian West.
There is, however, one peculiarity of Romania that requires some preliminary explanation, for it is the very opposite of what contemporary experience in the United States — and, for that matter, in most Western nations to varying degrees — makes us take for granted.
The persons whom the Bolshevik beasts selected for dehumanization were a clearly defined group: university students. That was because in Romania, in sharp antithesis to what we see in the United States today, university students were a highly respected elite and included men who combined the vigor and ardor of youth with unsurpassed patriotism and a lucid conservatism, intellectual and religious.
This fact, which will seem so paradoxical to Americans today, was the result of two concurrent factors.
Romania was essentially a land of peasants with limited industrial and commercial classes. The four universities, at Iasi (founded by Prince Cuza in 1860), Bucharest (founded in 1864), Cluj (1872) and Cernauti (1875), each divided into several faculties (theology, philosophy, letters, science, law, and medicine), were open to all who had completed their studies in a lyceum (liceu, translated ‘high school’ in the present book). The lyceum had relatively high standards, requiring, for example, the learning of French and German as well as either Latin and Greek or English and Italian, and weeded out the intellectually incompetent.* Only a small fraction, therefore, of Romanian youth entered the universities, and consequently a considerable prestige was attached to the very word student (i.e. university student, since a pupil in a secondary school was an elev). It suggested a considerable intellectual ability and a serious purpose, for the students in Romanian universities were, for the most part, the children of hardworking peasants or of earnest professional men; the scions of the wealthy more often than not went abroad for their education.
*Romanian children began the formal study of their first foreign language, French, in the year corresponding to the fifth grade in American public schools. By the time that they reached the point that corresponds to the first year of high school in the United States, Romanian children were reading Cicero in Latin and mastering trigonometry. Such progress is, of course, merely normal in serious educational institutions. The public schools in the United States, on the other hand, are designed to blight native intelligence and produce a nation of nitwits that can be easily manipulated and fleeced by professional “educators” and other shysters.
To this fact we must add a second, that will be even more astonishing to the American reader. The Romanian universities were as much centers of ardent patriotism and conservatism as American colleges, in the period of 1920-50, were centers of internationalism and socialism. The prevailing atmosphere of staunch conservatism also distinguished Romanian universities from other European universities. For this there were several reasons.
Romania was essentially an agrarian country and a large percentage of the studenti had had closer contact with the realities of life than was usual in Germany and France. More important, Romania was a small nation with a clear consciousness of its national individuality as a Western nation, tracing its origins to the Roman conquest of Dacia, and encompassed by peoples of Byzantine, Slavic, or Oriental traditions. It had stubbornly maintained that consciousness through centuries of alien domination, attaining a precarious and transient independence in 1600, only to fall again under the rule of the Turks. After numerous interventions by Russia, the enemy of Turkey, and after many episodes of valiant resistance to both Russians and Turks, Romania, formed by the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, gained autonomy in 1859, but remained under the suzerainty of the Turkish Sultan, and did not become fully and formally independent until 1881. Independence so recently attained and constantly threatened remained in the Romanian mind the precious guerdon of nationality at a time when the larger nations of Europe were taking themselves and their prosperous perpetuity for granted.
Romania, moreover, had Russia on its eastern frontier — Russia which, in 1812, had seized and annexed Bessarabia, a region containing a large population of Romanian blood. After the International Conspiracy captured Russia in 1917, Romanians could not fail to know what the beasts did in Russia and especially in Bessarabia. Moreover, it was the Romanian army that in August 1919 occupied Budapest and freed Hungary from the unspeakable vermin led by Israel Cohen, alias Bela Kun. The Romanians knew what Bolshevism was, and whence it sprang. In the United States, separated from the reality by thousands of miles and an infected press, many stupid or cunning professors could gabble about a “noble experiment” and a “people’s regime,” but in Romania such nonsense, so utterly at variance with observed reality, was recognized as either asinine or criminal.
To these considerations must be added another equally important. Although, as was to be expected, Romanian universities naturally tended to imitate the far older and venerable universities of the great European powers, especially Germany and France, there was a significant difference that limited the more deleterious aspects of that influence. The faculties of Romanian universities, especially Iasi and Bucharest, were predominantly composed of Romanians, whereas, of course, elsewhere in Europe university teaching had been invaded by large contingents of the international people.
Before the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, the Jews, for the most part, had ignored Romania, an impoverished land under Turkish rule, and had by preference swarmed into nations where the prospects of easy pickings from the natives were far more attractive.* After 1829, hordes of Jews came over the borders, but, despite various efforts by France and Germany to procure for these intruders in Romania the privileged status they enjoyed elsewhere, Jews were, for all practical purposes, debarred from citizenship until 1923, when the Romanian government then in office yielded to the pressures of the “great powers”†.
*A concise account of this aspect of Romanian history will be found in the opening chapters of L’Envoye de l’Archange by the distinguished French authors, Jerome et Jean Tharaud (Paris, 1939).
†Strictly speaking, Romania, coerced by a scarcely veiled threat of invasion by Germany and Great Britain, in 1879 repealed the article in her constitution which, like the constitution of the State of Pennsylvania that was framed and adopted under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin, restricted citizenship to Christians. After 1879, the legal privileges of citizenship were available to all Jews, provided that they either (a) had served in the armed forces of Romania or (b) applied for such rights and were found on investigation not to be guilty of political or moral subversion and corruption. Naturally, only a few thousand thus obtained the legal status of citizens, and it was not until 1923 they could all swarm into Romanian politics and begin to take over the country “legally” by manipulating greedy politicians. Everyone knows that the Jews are, as they themselves frankly boast, an international race or “peopledom” who never become in fact citizens of the nations in which they find it profitable to dwell. As Albert Einstein said, “There is no such thing as a German Jew, Russian Jew, or American Jew: there are only Jews.” Hundreds of the most accomplished and intellectually prominent Jews throughout the world have frankly said the same thing, and all the admitted Zionists have proclaimed it year after year, but, unaccountably, the people of the Christian West perversely refuse to believe them — and then secretly complain to one another in private that Jews are not good Christians and not good Englishmen or Americans. Although Europeans do understand that a European who lives in China is not a Chinaman, most of them have a curious mania to pretend that a Jew who resides in Europe is a European — and even a mania to punish other Europeans who will not join in the absurd pretense. The Jews, whose leaders have told the truth often enough, can scarcely be blamed for taking advantage of the folly of the peoples whom they despise and exploit.
It thus happened that in Romania, unlike France and Germany, the universities were still largely staffed by men who in mind and spirit belonged to the nation, and they were not dominated by an alien race whose members can, with the facility of chameleons, take on the color of whatever the environment in which they choose to reside. In Romanian universities, therefore, patriotism was intellectually respectable, and, on the whole, taken for granted until 1918.
After 1918, although faculties remained largely Romanian, the situation became confused. Some professors seem to have been either bemused by the glib patter of Marxism, a “doctrine” cleverly designed to addle mediocre brains that can be fascinated by pseudo-intellectual verbiage, or intimidated by the Bolsheviks’ boast that they represent a mysterious but irresistible “wave of the future.” Many others, perhaps fearing for their comfort or lives, concealed their real sentiments and remained silent or took refuge in ambiguous pronouncements. A few, however, fearlessly maintained Romanian traditions and asserted their intellectual integrity. They provided the inspiration for the patriotic and conservative movements among the university students.
The reaction of the students was doubtless hastened by a simple sociological pressure. The Jews, although they were numerically only a small part of the population even after the great influx at the end of the World War, swarmed into the universities and began to jostle out the natives. According to the official statistics, for example, in the spring semester of 1920 at the University of Cernauti there were enrolled in the College of Philosophy 574 Jews and only 174 Romanians; in the College of Law, 547 Jews and 234 Romanians. At the University of Iasi 831 Jews were enrolled in the College of Medicine as against 556 Romanians, and in the College of Pharmacy, 229 Jews and 97 Romanians.* These are, of course, some of the most striking disproportions, but everyone will see why, especially in such academic institutions, young Romanians, finding themselves a minority amidst a throng of pushing, versipellous, and disputatious aliens, and doubtless also often finding themselves eclipsed scholastically by the mental agility and Oriental subtlety of the Protean race, should have turned ardently to patriotic movements.
*These figures are quoted from official sources by Prof. Ion Gavenescul in his Imperativul momentului istoric, pp. 67 ff.
There was a further development that will be even more astonishing to the American reader. It may be that before the First World War in Romania, a largely peasant nation but recently emancipated from Moslem control, Christianity retained a greater vigor and commanded a more general piety than in other countries of Europe, though it would be difficult to make an accurate comparison between Romania and, for example, Brittany, Bavaria, or Piedmont. Romanian universities were, of course, profoundly affected by the intellectual climate of the great European universities and necessarily reflected the dominant attitudes of thought, from German “idealism” to the “religion of humanity” preached by Auguste Comte in his more lucid intervals; from the stern pessimism of Schopenhauer to the graceful and universal irony of Anatole France. To a very large extent the intellectual life of Europe was dominated by the attitude that Christianity was an historical phenomenon characteristic of an age whose passing one might view with joy, indifference, or regret, but which, whether for better or worse, was passing ineluctably away: religion was a waning superstition that still had power only over the uneducated. These currents of European thought necessarily affected educated Romanians, who, as a matter of course, read and wrote French fluently and, in many cases, German also.
Romanians will, no doubt, variously estimate the direct effect on their intellectual life of the dire and immediate menace of Bolshevism in the period that followed the First World War. Certainly all intelligent Romanians could see that their enemies were anti-Christian — were in both word and deed frantic enemies of the Western World, whose culture had for fifteen centuries been specifically Christian, and whose nations had been so distinctively set apart from others by their religion that they had been little conscious of the underlying racial unity of the West. In the 1920’s, it must be remembered, Bolshevik propaganda was stridently anti-Christian, denouncing religion as “the opiate of the people,” signalizing its victories by massacring ecclesiastics, defiling shrines, and converting churches into stables or warehouses, and teaching militant atheism in its schools.*
*Hence the cliché, “atheistic Communism,” that is still used in many conservative circles in the United States. To recapture the patriotic outlook of the 1920’s, the reader will do well to turn to R. M. Whitney’s fundamental Reds in America (New York, 1924), in which accurate analysis of Bolshevik plans (including the plans for the “Civil Riots” agitation of the 1960’s) accompanies an implicit confidence that Christian Churches will remain Christian!
It was not until much later that the Bolsheviks could implement on any extensive scale their other and complementary technique of utilizing renegade ministers and priests to spread the germs of Bolshevism under the guise of a “social gospel” or “ecumenical Christianity.” Until 1930, at least, the established Christian churches were almost universally regarded as a bulwark against the International Conspiracy. Furthermore, in 1919, the multitude of Jews residing in Romania, deeming a Bolshevik victory imminent, had prematurely and indiscreetly dropped their pretense and appeared openly as the instigators of “proletarian” riots and sabotage, and the suborners of violence and treason, not troubling to disguise their eager anticipation of a glorious butchery that would put the natives in their place. Thus the fundamental and necessary hostility between Christianity and the various doctrines of Judaism again made Christianity the symbol of Romanian nationalism as opposed to its foreign and domestic enemies.
In these circumstances, it was only to be expected that Romanian patriotic societies would be specifically Christian, but some, I suspect, used Christianity primarily as a symbol of their purpose. The first of the patriotic organizations was the Guard of the National Conscience (Garda Constiintei Nationale), founded by Constantin Pancu, a simple steelworker whom his fellows elected their leader, primarily to expose the nonsense of the “proletarian” propaganda with which the Bolsheviks were trying to confuse and utilize Romanian laborers — for the invariable but concealed Bolshevik purpose of ultimately reducing them to brutalized slavery.
In 1923, the National Christian Defense League (Liga Apararii Nationale Crestine) was founded by one of Romania’s most distinguished scholars, A. C. Cuza, Professor of Law in the University of Iasi, with the discreet support of the internationally known historian, Prof. Nicolae Iorga, who is, perhaps, best known in the United States for his History of the Byzantine Empire, which has appeared in several English editions.* A league headed by scholars of such eminence naturally had great prestige among university students and educated men in general and it became a force of very considerable political importance, particularly after it merged in 1935 with the political party headed by Octavian Goga, prominent poet, litterateur, and statesman. Although the National Christian Defense League sought the support of the sincerely religious, its inner direction was rationalistic, basing its avowed hostility to Jews and Bolsheviks on historical and scientific grounds. From all that I can learn, Professor Cuza’s creed was essentially the elegant scepticism of Renan. Professor Iorga’s historical works treat Christianity with a cold objectivity. And Octavian Goga, if correctly quoted by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, seems to have held at heart a view of Christianity similar to that set forth in Nietzsche’s famous Genealogy of Morals†.
*Professor Iorga became Prime Minister of Romania for a time, in 1931. An estimate of his conduct in office is beyond the scope of this notice. [His History of Romania, translated by Joseph McCabe, was published in London in 1925. – Ed.]
†This sufficiently explains why there could be no cooperation between the Christian Defense League and Codreanu’s Legion of Michael the Archangel, and it is not necessary to endorse the suspicions of Professor Cuza expressed by Ion Mota in an essay, “Legiunea si L.A.N.C.”, in the volume Corneliu Codreanu, prezent (Madrid, 1966).
The greatest influence over the Romanian students at this juncture was undoubtedly exerted by Corneliu Z. Codreanu, the son of a teacher in a Moldavian secondary school. Born 13 September, 1899, he prepared himself in law at the University of Iasi, where he studied under Professor Cuza, and he later studied abroad in both Germany and France. A man of iron will, exalted faith, and ardent patriotism, Codreanu, after participating in the Guard of the National Conscience from its inception and in the National Christian Defense League, founded on 24 June, 1927 the Legion of Michael the Archangel (Legiunea Archanghelului Mihail). The organization’s principles — an unlimited love of country, a code of personal honor and moral intransigence, the reciprocal loyalty of knighthood, and rigorous subordination of body to spirit — were all based by the founder on an absolute faith in Christ. The Legion was “indissolubly united under the aegis of God” and its members pledged themselves to sacrifice themselves without limit or reservation for God and Country. This was the movement that by its high and noble idealism attracted to itself all the young elite of the Romanian universities, won their unqualified allegiance, and largely dominated the thinking of even those who stood aloof or opposed it.
This is why the Romanian university students were, in contrast to those of other Western nations, profoundly Christian. I have been assured by Romanians that in many cases the students’ firm religious convictions were shaped not so much by their families or by their churches as by the inspiration of Codreanu and the rigid Christian discipline he imposed on all his followers. There can be no doubt but that, from a strictly religious point of view, Codreanu’s movement represented the greatest and most intense revival of the Christian faith in any nation during the Twentieth Century. Its influence on the spiritual and intellectual life of the elite among young Romanians was enormous and transcendent. That is what makes the Legion unique among the nationalist movements of our age. The combination of ardent faith and intense nationalism produced a generation of heroes. The Legion, also known as the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier), sent an expeditionary force to Spain in 1936 to combat the international vermin there and earned the enduring gratitude of the Spanish people. And when the war with the Soviet began, the members of the Guard, taken from the prisons to which they had been sent by the Antonescu dictatorship in an effort to suppress their movement, formed the very flower of the Romanian army and were distinguished for their valor and devotion in all the actions of that war.
This is not the place to summarize, however briefly, the career of Codreanu* and the convulsed history of Romania after the precipitate and illegal return to that country of Prince Carol, a royal debauche who, after many offenses, had been disinherited and exiled by his own father. Carol, accompanied by a Jewish harlot to whom he was completely subservient, returned to Romania in 1930, dethroned his own son to reign in his stead, and, finding no other way to check the rising political power of the Iron Guard, overthrew the Constitution in 1938 and made himself dictator of Romania. Codreanu, arrested on patently false charges, was, together with thirteen of his lieutenants, taken from prison on the night of 29 November 1938 and, in the early hours of the next morning, murdered in the forest of Tancabesti at the orders of the royal degenerate.† Carol, with the support of the lords of international finance, ruled Romania by a combination of fraud and violence until September 1940, when the Iron Guard drove him and his Oriental leman from the country, and restored his son to the throne.
*For non-partisan and critical accounts of Codreanu’s career, see Paul Guiraud, Codreanu et la Garde de Fer (Paris, 1940), and the distinctly unsympathetic work by the brothers Tharaud, L’Envoye de l’Archange, cited above. Brief appreciations by his followers will be found in Vasile Iasinschi’s Facing the Truth (Madrid, 1966), and in two volumes of essays by various hands, Corneliu Z. Codreanu in perspectiva a douazeci de ani (Madrid, 1959) and Corneliu Codreanu, prezent (Madrid, 1966). On the significance of Codreanu and his movement in the history of Europe during the climacteric years that ended in what may have been the Suicide of the West, see the work of the distinguished diplomat and scholar, Prince Sturdza, cited below.
†The method of the murders was singular and remarkable. The fourteen men were taken in buses to the forest and there each of the men, who bad been bound in an odd way, was strangled with a rope thrown over his head by a gendarme stationed behind him for that purpose. Then, to give some color to the official story that Codreanu and his ranking Legionaries had been “killed while trying to escape,” each corpse was shot in the back several times before it was thrown into the waiting grave. Prince Sturdza, in the Romanian text of his memoirs (Madrid, 1966; pp. 133 f.), asks the inevitable question: “Let us ask ourselves why there was that resort to strangulation, a procedure that was awkward and contraindicated in the circumstances, instead of a bullet in the back of the head, the simple and usual method and the obvious one to have used, since an hour later, to simulate an escape, the lifeless bodies were riddled with bullets.” (There is the further consideration that the bullet, unlike strangulation, would not have left the marks that were detected by autopsy when, after the flight of Carol, the bodies were exhumed and the officers who had carried out the murders under orders testified what they had done). Prince Sturdza then points out that the elaborate and peculiar way in which the victims were strangled corresponds in every detail to the method by which Jews are instructed to kill their enemies in a passage of the Talmud that he quotes (p. 134). Needless to say, this part of Prince Sturdza’s book, like many others, was omitted in the heavily censored English translation cited in our footnote below.
The gruesome murders in the dark forest of Tancabesti that night in November 1938 where one of the fateful and decisive events of modern history. King Carol, who gave the orders, himself acted on the orders of his masters, the hidden and malevolent powers that, through their puppets in the governments of Great Britain, France, and the United States, were relentlessly herding the peoples of the West toward the catastrophic and fatal war that Germany was trying so desperately to avert. Carol’s owners were, of course, the powers that had installed the Bolsheviks in Russia twenty-one years earlier, and the destruction of the Iron Guard, the only organized and formidable anti-Bolshevik force in Romania, left Carol free to carry out (as he did less than two years later) the plan to surrender Romania’s fortified border in Bessarabia to the Soviet and thus open to the Communist hordes the passes into the Balkans and southeastern Europe.
King Carol’s commitment to subject Romania to the Soviet as soon as the projected war began was, of course, known to the French government and doubtless in other circles even before he gave the orders for the murders of Tancabesti, which thus changed the strategic balance of Europe and were a preliminary to the dire and appalling disaster that was in fact, as Prince Sturdza has so aptly termed it, the Suicide of Europe.* It may even have been the decisive turning-point.
*Prince Michel Sturdza wrote his brilliant analysis of the origin of the Second World War in French: La Bete sans nom – enquete sur les responsabilites (Copenhagen, 1944). Unfortunately he chose to publish his memoirs, which include a comprehensive study of the European catastrophe and are an absolutely indispensable source for all serious historians, in Romanian: Romania si sfarsitul Europei — amintiri din tara pierduta (Madrid & Rio de Janeiro, 1966). It is a misfortune that the observations of one of the wisest and most experienced diplomats of Europe — perhaps the only one who witnessed events from a peculiarly advantageous position, recorded them with philosophical detachment, and then was free to publish his book without being constrained by a need to apologize for himself or for a political party or government at the expense of historical truth — were written in a language that so few of our people can read. To make the work generally available, a wealthy American hired the John Birch Society to perform the technical work of supervising translation and printing and to distribute the book when it was published: The Suicide of Europe (Boston, 1968). The choice was unfortunate. The greater part of Prince Sturdza’s book was accurately and even ably translated, although the material was drastically rearranged and often curtailed: for example, the concluding paragraphs of Prince Sturdza’s text (p. 323 of the original) were reduced to a few lines and buried in a footnote at the bottom of page 23 of the English version. But the text was diligently censored to eliminate every statement, direct or indirect, that could offend the Birch Society’s Jewish masters. A great many passages of historical importance were “lost” as the contents of the book were shuffled around, and in what was left, for example, the word evrei (“Jews”) is almost invariably translated as “some people” or “certain individuals,” wherever it could not conveniently be ignored. And, naturally, a long passage was interpolated to commend and advertise the Birch business. But even in this mutilated form, The Suicide of Europe is a very valuable book and must be recommended to everyone (except the few who can read the original) who wishes to understand the age in which we live.
No diplomat and statesman of the Western world was more farsighted and sagacious than Prince Michel Sturdza, whose long career as an ambassador in many capitals of the Western world and corresponding contacts in the highest circles of many governments gave him excellent sources of information, while his personal position during the European disaster enabled him to observe and judge with a dispassionate lucidity that could scarcely have been attained by even the intelligence services of the great nations that were destroying one another in the interests of their common enemy. Honest historians must therefore accord great weight to Prince Sturdza’s conclusion that:
It was Codreanu’s murder that prompted Hitler to a radical tactical change in his foreign policy — a change loaded with the most fateful consequences not only for Germany but for the entire world of Western Civilization … Hitler made two speedy decisions: The first was of military character, the occupation of Czecho-Slovakia … The second was a bold political decision. . . he would negotiate an understanding and an economic arrangement with Soviet Russia*.
*The Suicide of Europe, pp. 120-23; in the original, pp. 137 f. These two sudden shifts of policy made it seem to the rest of the world that Germany had acted in bad faith at Munich and that even its opposition to the Soviet was insincere; that certainly facilitated the work of the international lords who finally forced on the West the suicidal war which, as the British historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper candidly admits, “Hitler would have done anything to avoid.” By far the most complete and accurate study of the complicated diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues that were needed to start that war is the carefully documented treatise by Professor David L. Hoggan, which, since it has been mysteriously “delayed” by the American publisher who had it set in type many years ago, is thus far available only in the German translation: Der erzwungene Krieg (Tubingen, 1963). Much less complete, but valuable, are the late Professor Charles Callan Tansill’s Back Door to War (Chicago, 1952) and Professor A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1962). The facts are indisputable, but many Americans believe that the devastation of Europe and the slaughter of millions of Europeans was admirable because it pleased Jews.
By this estimate, Corneliu Codreanu, although he could not have known or even imagined it, carried with him the destiny of generations then living and yet unborn, and the crowned hireling whose hand struck him down was, although his clotted mind could not have guessed it, one of the most pernicious traitors of all time. By any estimate, Codreanu was a great man.
The most eloquent attestation of the nobility of Codreanu’s character and the purity of his religious faith is the deep veneration for him and loyalty to his memory felt by his surviving followers. Thirty years after his death, twenty years and more after failure and the loss of their country, they are exiles in foreign lands and menaced even there by the ubiquitous power of the anti-humans and the ever accelerated conquest of the Western world by its furtive enemies. But for their Captain and his vision they still feel the devotion that twenty-nine Romanian writers express in their contributions to the recent volume, Corneliu Codreanu, prezent.
The students of Romania, patriots and Christians, were selected by the anti-humans as victims of the process described in this book, not so much because they were the objects of the beasts’ most venomous hatred, as because they provided material for an experiment that would confirm the universal validity of a technique that the world conquerors had elaborated long before and thus far used with uniform success. The anti-humans rightly judged that if the courageous and devoted youth of the Iron Guard, exalted by the most ardent Christian faith, could not resist the application of a fiendish science, no humans could ever resist.
That is what makes this narrative so tragic.
The Legion took its motto from Seneca: “He who is willing to die need never be a slave.” Aye. But what of those who are not permitted to die?
Revilo Oliver
