Sfarmă-Piatră
Sfarmă-Piatră (pronounced [ˌsfarmə ˈpjatrə]; literally "Stone-Crusher" or "Rock-Breaker", named after one of the Uriași characters in Romanian folklore) was an antisemitic daily, monthly and later weekly newspaper, published in Romania during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The editorial staff comprised a group of far right intellectuals; alongside the editor-in-chief Alexandru Gregorian, they included Ovidiu Papadima, Vintilă Horia, Dan Botta, Dragoș Protopopescu, Toma Vlădescu, and Pan M.
Noted for its contemptuous style of journalism and its recourse to violent language, Sfarmă-Piatră launched press campaigns against various figures who advocated left-wing or centrist positions, as well as against prominent members of the Jewish-Romanian community.
The publication was involved in a lengthy conflict with left-wing newspapers such as Adevărul and Dimineața, as well as with two rival voices on the far right—the National Christian Party (PNC) of Octavian Goga and A. C. Cuza, and Mihail Manoilescu's Buna Vestire.
This was the start of internecine conflicts within Romania's radical right, highlighted when Crainic criticized Alexandru Vaida-Voevod (whose own right-wing party, the minor Romanian Front, was about to merge into the PNC).
[4] Noting the heavy use of demeaning epithets, literary critic Ruxandra Cesereanu describes Sfarmă-Piatră and all its partners on the far right as chiefly preoccupied with "besmirching writers and public figures",[6] while political analyst Michael Shafir summarizes its content as "viciously antisemitic".
[8] Sfarmă-Piatră constantly popularized the claim that Romania was subject to a Jewish invasion and featured articles in which Jews who took on Romanian-sounding names were referred to under their original ones, seeking to brand and marginalize them.
[11] From early on, Sfarmă-Piatră also made a point of attacking the political establishment, and in particular members or former leaders of the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ): Argetoianu, Stere, Vaida-Voevod and Victor Iamandi.
[13] Sfarmă-Piatră regularly featured appeals to rescue Romanian culture from what it claimed were dangerous tendencies: modernism, the avant-garde, and the more traditional left-wing critical school, Poporanism.
Announcing to the world that "the era of unforgiving judgments is approaching", Papadima accused Sburătorul of having engineered "spiritual decay" within a modernist "invasion" and hoped that, like the intrusion of "foreign capital" on the local market, such ideas would be reversed.
[19] Gregorian described his rival as manipulated by the Jewish entrepreneur Breuer, and, emphasizing Sadoveanu's prominent status within Romanian Freemasonry, a worshiper of both the Supreme Architect and Ucigă-l toaca (that is, the devil).
He focused on Eliade's Domnișoara Christina, which contained a dream-like sequence in which an adult seems to have a sexual encounter with a 10-year-old girl, describing the writing as evidence of "pathology" and concluding that it was "inverted tripe.
"[35] The same year, after that program had been rebutted by corporatist ideologue Mihail Manoilescu in the magazine Buna Vestire, effectively an Iron Guard platform, Crainic returned with a Sfarmă-Piatră editorial expressing deep disappointment.
[36] He still took care to note that the ethnocratic project model was not a "chromatic imitation" of Nazi German or Italian fascist totalitarianism, but his newspaper regularly featured homages to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Ornea notes that this was effort hampered in mid 1936: with his theological credentials, Crainic condemned the ritualized assassination of Mihai Stelescu (a dissident Guardist and leader of the Crusade of Romanianism, who had incurred Codreanu's wrath).
In January 1938, Crainic's column celebrated the Iron Guard, referring to its Legionaries as the real victors in the 1937 election (where they had placed third), praising them for their youth and supposedly universal social appeal, and claiming that they best represented his ideal of nationalist unity.
Sfarmă-Piatră again switched its allegiance, proclaiming that Antonescu had taken on "the armor of predestination" and a seat among great European leaders, with Hitler, Mussolini, Portuguese Estado Novo founder António de Oliveira Salazar and Francisco Franco, the Caudillo of Nationalist Spain.
[62] The military operation and the recovery of Bessarabia were received with enthusiasm by staff member Vintilă Horia, who wrote: "I am reminded of those horrific days when, last year, Asia spilled over the Dniester and the Jewish scum [...] were slapping the clean cheeks of the Romanian soldier.
[64] On the eve of the massacre, Crainic's paper publicized the official version of the events, under the misleading headline: "500 Judeo-communists Who Shot at Romanian and German Troops, Executed in Iași".
Horia celebrated the war as a victory of fascist Europe over "barbarous Asia", noting that it crowned the fight against all "democrats, Jews and Masons", and suggesting the Romania was at her best when on the offensive.
[63] His later pieces called Hitler a "Great European", more constructive a figure than Napoleon, and a driving force of Europe's progress—claims included by researcher Laszlo Alexandru among "the most egregious" homages to the German dictator.
[69] He was afterward rehabilitated in part, and assigned to the staff of Glasul Patriei, a communist propaganda mouthpiece targeting the Romanian diaspora and controlled by the Securitate police apparatus.
Stancu, who had debuted with Crainic's press before switching to leftist politics, was a self-declared "enemy" of Sfarmă-Piatră's fascist stance, but refused to "chase away like dogs" any colleague in despair.
[8] The self-exiled Horia pursued a successful literary career in Western Europe until 1960, when revelations of his fascist past, including his Sfarmă-Piatră articles, prevented him from receiving The Goncourt.
However, in post-communist times, some publishers have created controversy by choosing to omit mentions of Sfarmă-Piatră from the standard bibliographies of such figures, obscuring their association with the Iron Guard or with Antonescu.
Referring to the standard dictionaries of Romanian literature, published or revised before 2005, literary historian Paul Cernat proposed that the selective censorship of totalitarian beliefs, either fascist or communist, rendered the works unreliable.
[80] Writer and editor Geo Șerban also notes a habit of only mentioning Horia's contributions to the more palatable Gândirea, and so a tendency "to hide away [his] involvement in the more foul, hooligan-like, campaigns of Sfarmă-Piatră or Porunca Vremii".
As noted by political scientist Gabriel Andreescu, this is one of several strictly online projects of pro-Legionary activists trying to gain exposure in the mainstream media—in this case, the publisher is a "George Manu Foundation".
[82] Similarly, educationist Ștefan Popenici suggested that, against anti-defamation legislation, the deregulated web could still foster "hatefilled" sites, from sfarma-piatra.com and Noua Dreaptă's homepage to a Romanian electronic version of NSDAP/AO (1972).
[83] Media analyst William Totok additionally noted that the new Sfarmă-Piatră, a "pro-Sima" venture, was partly dedicated to combating other factions that claim to represent the Guard's legacy.
