The Iron Guard and the Legion (of the
Archangel Michael, no less) were, therefore and in their deranged
way, a force for reform founded on blood-thirsty romanticism and
masochistic sacrifices for the common good. Moreover, the Legion was
crushed in 1941 by a military dictatorship which had nothing to do
with fascism. It actually persecuted the fascists who found refuge
in Hitler's Germany.
Fascism in Hungary developed similarly. It was based on reactionary
ideologies pre-dating fascism by centuries. Miklos Horty, the
Austro-Hungarian Admiral was consumed by grandiose fantasies of an
Hungarian empire. He had very little in common with the fascists of
the "white terror" of 1919 in Budapest (an anti-communist
bloodshed).
He did his best to tame the Hungarian fascist government of Gyula
Gombos (1932). The untimely death of the latter brought about the
meteoric rise of Ferenc Szalasi and his brand of blood-pure racism.
But all these sub-species of fascism, the Romanian, the Slovakian
(Tiso) and the Hungarian (as opposed to the Italian and the
Bulgarian) were atavistic, pagan, primal and romanticist - as was
the Croat. These were natural - though nefarious - reactions to
dislocation, globalization, economic crisis and cultural pluralism.
A set of compensatory mechanisms and reactions to impossible,
humiliating and degrading circumstances of wrathful helplessness and
frustration.
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