VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
605
Communist jail. For him, Nae lonescu was a consummate Machiavellian
who managed to beguile a whole generation and thus change its destiny.
The Professor's post-1933 idyll with the Iron Guard was part of his search
for the political force that could fulfill his ethno-theocratic ideal.
Regarded by some as an intellectual crackpot, adored by others as a meta–
physical genius, lonescu died in 1940 at the age of fifty, shortly before the
triumph of the Iron Guard.
A religious thinker, Nae Ionescu yearned for the figure of the national
redeemer, the charismatic leader who would restore the spiritual value of
human existence and make possible the country's "resurrection" from the
execrated democratic shambles. But he was too profound a philosopher,
Vulcanescu argues, not
to
doubt the ultimate legitimacy of Corneliu
Zelea Codreanu, the Iron Guard's captain, to claim such a mystically
privileged status.
In
short, Nae Ionescu embraced the Guard's political views because
of the affinities between the movement's visceral anti-democratism and
his own distrust of Western liberalism. Nae lonescu's theoretically
founded anti-Semitism was rooted in his conception of an immutable
ethnic structure: Romanianness was almost a genetic given, and no effort
to
acquire this status could succeed.
In
1934, the novel
For Two Thousand
Years
by losef Hechter (under the pen name of Mihail Sebastian), which
was a parable of the dilemma ofJewish assimilation in the Danubian and
Carpathian space as well as a
roman
a
clif
about the intellectual debates
among the Young Generation's members, was published. Nae lonescu
responded to it by publishing a "Preface" to the novel, in which he ad–
monishes:
You are sick, losef Hechter. You are essentially sick because you can–
not but suffer; and because your suffering does not lead anywhere.
Everybody is suffering, losef Hechter. We Christians also are suffering.
But we have a way out, because we can redeem ourselves. I know
you are hoping, hoping that he for whom you wait will come. The
Messiah, on his white horse, and then you will rule the earth. You are
hoping, losef Hechter. This is the
only
thing left to you. But I cannot
do anything for you. Because I know that the Messiah you wait for
will not come. The Messiah has already come, losef Hechter, and you
did not recognize him. All you were asked to do in exchange for all
the good things God offered you was to be on the watch. And you
did not watch. Or you failed to see, because vanity covered your eyes
with scales.... losef Hechter, don' t you feel the grip of the cold and
darkness?
