Transnationalizing fascist martyrs: an entangled history of the memorialization of Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin in Spain and Romania, 1937–41

Abstract

This article analyses the memorialization of Ion Moţa and Vasile Marin, two Romanian Legionary movement volunteers who died while fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as an entangled history of Romanian and Spanish fascisms. The commemoration practices and narratives recounted in the Spanish and Romanian newspapers and archival sources from the period 1937–41 show that commemorating foreign ideological peers and appropriating symbolic elements of foreign fascisms in order to memorialize fallen comrades served as resources for legitimizing the struggle against domestic competitors. Although the totalitarian ambitions of Spanish and Romanian fascists remained unfulfilled, the Spanish-Romanian entanglement contributed to consolidating Moţa and Marin as martyrs of transnational fascism.

“Martyrs for God and Spain”. National Martyrdom in Spain from the Civil War to the Historical Memory Law

“…Свои фашистские мученики были и в других странах, в том числе Хорватии и Украине David, 2020). В итоге фашистское мученичество стало транснациональным и позволило выстраивать связи между режимами, отношения которых не всегда бывали гладкими (Zavatti, 2022), а также между диаспорами и метрополиями, что хорошо изучено, скажем, на материале итальянской диаспоры в США (King, 2021) и некоторых других примерах.…”