Eliade kochał swój kraj Rumunię niemal ponad życie** i był, według samego siebie, obsesyjnym nacjonalistą („mój żarliwy nacjonalizm, mnie obezwładnia” s.8). We własnym kraju uczestniczył w działaniach Legionu św. Michała Archanioła, w ruchu skupiającym rumuńskich faszystów. Podobnie, jak dwaj inni rumuńscy intelektualiści światowej sławy Emile Cioran i Eugene Ionesco, Eliade podzielał w latach trzydziestych XX wieku skrajnie nacjonalistyczny i antysemicki program Legionu. Był przekonany o zagładzie Rumunii w przypadku zwycięstwa koalicji anyhitlerowskiej (Rumunia stała po stronie Hitlera), co uważał za tożsame ze swoją osobistą klęskę.To były okulary, przez które oglądał wojnę z Lizbony, gdzie pełnił funkcję attaché kulturalnego w poselstwie Rumunii (1941-1945). Pisarz i wybitny filozof religii, dobrze poinformowany dyplomata, śledził z pasją i na gorąco komentował przebieg wydarzeń w swoim portugalskim dzienniku. Powtarzajacy się wątek dotyczy Słowian, których Eliade szczerze nienawidził. ByŁ przerażony perpektywą unicestwienia cywilizacji łacińskiej w drodze „usłowiańszczenia Rumunii” (7 luty 1945, s.177).
Katastrofa cywilizacji to dla Eliade konsekwencja zwycięstwa słowiańsko-komunistycznego-azjatyckiego świata nad Osią i faszystowskimi dyktaturami.
22 June 1941 (s. 7/8)
„I admit that I wasn’t expecting war in 1941. I believed that the so-called Russo-German collaboration would last longer. This means that the Germans have realized they can’t win the war this year, and they’re preparing for a long fight. In my opinion, the attack (na Rosję) is a sign of weakeness on Germany’s part. Because, if they had been certain they could crush England this year, there would have been no need for them to attack Russia; the Soviets, after the final German victory, would have done everything Htler would have asked. Before reading Churchill’s speech and seeing what the Americans said, I had hoped (very faintly, it’s true) that perhaps on the back of Russia it would be possible to make a compromise peace. But I see that my imperialis at London is howling that the Russians are fighting for freedom and they must be helped to resist the Hitlerite invasion. Once again, how ridiculous the ethics of the British war seems to me! You don’t say anything when the Soviets take Bessarabia, the Baltic lands, half of Poland, part of Finland – you howl for the Danzig Corridor, and now you help Stalin in the name of democracy, liberty, and Christainity…”
23 September1942 (s. 35)
“I know full well that I’m living at the end of a historical cycle, and that I won’t be able to integrate myself into the paradisial chaos that will follow. Besides, I wouldn’t be allowed to. The new Anglo-Soviet world won’t accept men like me into its bosom.*** But it’s not my personal case that concerns me. … What makes me tremble, however, is the nothingness I see ahead of me: Latino-Christian civilization foundering under the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, actually the dictatorship of the most abject Slavic elements.
And if this is the truth – because that’s what both Churchill and Roosevelt want, and they’re the strong ones – then what purpose does creation in history and culture have? Only two attitudes can still find justification: mysticism and orgy – belief in holiness or cynical disintegration in voluptuousness. And you realize then how useless have been the sacrifices for Romanianism, made for so many centuries”.
9 November 1942 (s. 48)
“The thing that exasperates me in discussions with ąnglophiles who are happy about a possible defeat of Germany is that their political passion makes them forget the decisive fact of the current war: the active entrance of Russia into world history. Just as, earlier, the Latins and the Greeks were beaten at Constintanopole, allowing the Turks to gain a foothold in Europe. Then, for three hundred years, we Romanians had to shed our blood to prevent the Turks from reaching the heart of Europe. But this time I don’t know if history will repeat itself’.
1 December 1942 (s. 49/50).
… “The Jews, the English, the Americans are having great luck with the Russians – the only ones who are holding up. If this resistance brings about the military defeat of Germany, not one of the three great nations cited in the previous sentence will take any account of our historical rights or historical necessity. Or even if the English were to try to take aacount of them, it would be too late – and the Russians too strpng”.
15 January 1943 (s.61)
“When my despair reaches its point of culmination – despair arising from the fear that Europe will be destroyed and a new world, uninteresting from my point of view, will arise – my whole being takes refuge in erotic desire. As if it wete avenging itself by threatening the permanence under which it lives. The desire to love, to embrace, to perpetuate yourself in sons.
And there’s something else: the impuls toward ‘totalization’. My being, without my rational or even conscious intervention, seeks a new equilibrium, even in this tragedy, reintegrating contrary elements I a new and higher unity.
I find myself, sometimes, meditating calmly on the new Slavo-Communist world that Stalin would organize. Romania become Soviet will lose its bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia, but the mass, if it is not deported will gain a better education and propoer health care. After 500 years the Russians will withdraw. But what will my country look like then?”.
29 January 1943 (s.67)
“ I’am deeply distressed by the agony of the men at Stalingrad, the agone of Europe. And in order to be able to endure this tragedy, I take refuge in myself, in the book I’m writing, and in my long-standing thoughts concerning the end of our continent. …
And from out of this hell, I hear Aeschylus turning over in his grave. He who sand the heroic resistance of the Greek against Asia witnesses now the surrender of Europe to the Asiatic hordes. Churchill and Roosevelt have met again in Casablanca. And none of their men sees how Stalin is playing with them, how they are the victims of the most tragic farce in the history of the world: the Red assassins – who , in comparison with other political assassins, have the merit of operating on a large scale, in the millions – the Red assassins are awaited as the liberators of Europe…”
7 June 1943 (s.85-6)
“In the apocalyptic struggle of today, my country has very little chance of surviving: this is my daily obsession…
Romania and even the Romanian people (in their elements of historical and cultural continuity) are passing through the greatest crisis in their existence. We are neighbor to an empire six times larger than all of Europe, with two hundred inhabitants, and which by the year 2000 will have circa four hundred to five hundred million, with a formidable economic and geopolitical space, with an ecumenicalsocial mystique that will be popular especially at the end of this war (hunger, poverty. Ruins, revolts, despair, etc.). In th e face of this colossus, soon to be victorious = a sick Romania, optimistic and credulous. A dominant class that expects everything in reward for its hatred of the Germans. In this decisive storm, our ‘pilots’ are blind. Our army was decimated in Russia, we lost all our weaponry at Stalingrad, while Hungary preserved its military strength intact. Our sacrifice of blood is compromised by the idiotic acts of our political leaders who are attempting to play a double game with the Anglo-Saxons, losing what we’ve gained from the Germans, obtaining nothing from the Anglo-Americans. The great Ica**** has played politics 100 percent with the Germans, and now he wants to play politics with the Anglo-Americans, sending imbecilic emissaries who are caught by the Gestapo and costs us more divisions at the front. Ica doesn’t understand what the Hungarians always understood: that the same man cannot take two different political positions, that his duty is to get as much as possible from the Germans on the basis of our sacrifices leaving someone else, if need be, to engage in a ‘different policy’.
From Nina’s (żona Eliade) letters and those of others in the country, I understand that almost all is lost. The fall of Tunisia was celebrated with champagne by the same Romanians who toasted no German victory against Russia. They all have the illusion that an agreement will be made with the Anglo-Americans.The same tragic illusion is held by our Legation in Lisbon, and probably all the others. No one can see the simple fact that if Russia can’t be defeated, the fall of Germany will bring with it the occupation of Romania by the Soviets, with all that will follow: the execution of 100,000 men who, despite their faults, constitute the Romanian phenomenon”.
11 June 1943 (s.86-7)
“Because Adolf Hitler was not a seafarer, the history of Europe will have a different course. In the summer of 1940, when England could have been conquered with a few divisions and a hundred tanks, Hitler hesitated to launsch the invasion – all the preparations had been made – because he thought of the losses – ‘the men drawned’”.
26 July 1943 (s.90)
“The ambassador in audience with Salazar, who tells him (and he conveys this to me ina confidential way) that the Anglo-Americans, despite their Russophile appearance, are fully conscious of the Boshevik peril. But did Salazar say this, perhaps, to prepare the way for abandoning his neutrality?! Because, the main reason that has kept him away from doing so has been the pro-Soviet policy of the Allies”.
17 January 1944 (s. 103)
“Actually, I have every reason to believe that Soviet Russia will win and that a new historical cycle will begin. The ‘man’ I discover in all archaic societies was superseded long ago in Europe. From the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution on, we witness another anthropology. Only the Soviet man can achieve it completely. Modern man is a hybrid. He no longer thinks like the traditional one, no longer valorizes life as he did, but he lacks the courage to become a machine for the production of economic values, as in Soviet Russia. Should we try new ‘synthesis’, new ‘adjustments’, new ‘compromises?!’...”
10 March 1944 (s. 106)
… “How many times has Eminescu helped me to bear my condition of having been born a Romanian, that is, a son of a luckless people, destined by geography and history to a deplorable wandering in the Slavic mass! … Again, the sentiment of imminent, inevitable historical catastrophe. When I imagine how the, how the Romanian elite will perish, how the ‘personalities’ will be suppressed, how hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Romanians will be displaced in order to remove the Romanian thorns from the great Slavic community, I’m seized by a kind of despair. Why, O Lord, were we ever born? Why have we attained a Romanian consciousness of the world, if this tragedy must come to pass?”
6 April 1944 (s. 107)
“The bombing of Bucharest by the American Liberators has made me think of Russia for the first time with less horror and disgust. After the treacherously benign declaration of Mlotov, he Americans destroyed our capital. For me to comment further is useless. I believe that the readers of this journal will have seen the judgement of history by the time they read these pages. The nglo-Saxon imbecility will make it possible for the victorious Russians to leap over the last obstacle in their path.
I have walked around the city and have said to all the Portugese I met: You should know that if Romania falls, then all of Southeastern Europe falls. The Russians will be in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. And when they take Germany, they will be on the banks of the Tagus. No one will stop them”.
May 1944 (s. 108)
…
“He (Carl Schmitt) is an optimist about the fate of Europe. Nationalism as well as internationalism are outmoded forms”. *****
21 June 1944 (s. 113)
“ Looking out my window, observing the beauty of the night – I was suddenly reconciled to the war. To the catastrophe, to the end of the Europe I have known and loved. The destructions of war have a meaning, they fulfill a role in the universal equilibrium. War – like death in the individual case – corresponds to other cosmic act that man ignores or else fears: regression into the primordial amorphic state, where everything is lost in everything else, merging into unity. War fulfills the same role - on another plane of course – as does orgy. I have written about the function of orgy in ‘Mitul reintegrarii’ and in ‘Prolegomene’. I’ll not repeat it here. But I believe that I number among the few moderns who understand the value and necessity of orgy.”
7 February 1945 (s.177-8)
“The whole world is in flames. The fusion taking place today has only one advantage: that the metal liquefied at such great sacrifice can be poured into any kind of mold. If the three – Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill – will have political genius and good faith, they will be able to pour the world in fusion into perfect molds. If not, we will have to remake everything with the old, worn-out forms. But later it won’t be possible to do anything. (‘Strike the iron while it is hot!’) Since after a third world war, the world will not melt again.”
W kręgu znajomych Rumunów w Lizbonie Eliade był osamotniony. „Jestem jedynym, który wyznaje ten pogląd. Inni, wszyscy porządni ludzie, stukają się kieliszkami na cześć anglo-amerykańskich zwycięstw, zapominają, że nasze dywizje są nad Wołgą”. (27 listopada 1942, s.49). Jego poglądów na wojnę i jej skutki nie podzielali także jego koledzy w Poselstwie Rumunii w Lizbonie. W czasie pobytu w Berlinie Eliade przekonał się, że nawet tam dyplomacji rumuńscy sympatyzowali z aliantami.
Śmierć Roosevelta Eliade uznał za podzwonne katastrofy. !3 kwietnia 1945 roku odnotował w dzienniku wypełnienie się przeznaczenia: „Rumunia została cofnięta o 120 lat do ery rosyjskiego protektoratu”. ( 13 kwietnia 1945, s. 203).
W młodości Eliade studiował przez kilka lat w Indiach. Był tam świadkiem „rewolucji obywatelskiej” (kwiecień/ maj 1930). Zaimponowała mu hinduska „siła nienawiści wobec ciemiężców”. Opowiedział się jednoznacznie po stronie Hindusów stawiających angielskim kolonizatorom opór bez przemocy „wobec obcej cywilizacji, wobec barbarzyńskiej rasy i jej dominacji”.
„Jakże niezwykłe jest to szaleństwo Indii – stawać bez broni przed karabinami maszynowymi i europejskimi czołgami. Jeśli ono zwycięży, jak tego pragnę z całego serca, w dziejach otworzy się nowy etap. Duch jeszcze raz okaże swą niezwyciężoność. Gdyż siła indyjskiego nacjonalizmu polega na tym, że instynktownie ufa ona duchowi, magicznej mocy cierpienia, praktyki non-violence. Ten ruch tak bardzo przypomina chrześcijaństwo pierwszych wieków, że zauważyli to niezależnie od siebie liczni obserwatorzy. To podobieństwo nie jest chyba złudzeniem”.******
*Wszystkie cytaty pochodzą z dziennika portugalskiego (1941-1945) Mircea Eliade, „The Portugal Journal”, Translated from the Romanian and with a Preface and Notes by Mac Linscott Ricketts, SUNY Press, Albany 2010.
**Eliade wahał się jak postapić w obliczu klęski państw Osi. Nie zdecydował się powrót do Rumunii i walkę na froncie rosyjskim, jak pragnął: nie żeby tam walczyć, ale, aby spotkać tam śmierć. Ze wstydem przyznaje się przed sobą do własnej słabości. (6 kwietnia 1944, s. 107).
*** Po wojnie Eliade zamieszkał w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Wybitny znawca religii wykładał przez kilkadziesiąt lat na uniwersytetach amerykańskich. Niektórzy z jego przyjaciół w Rumunii zostali osądzeni zaraz po wojnie, a Ion Antonescu, faszystowski dyktator odpowiedzialny za sojusz i braterstwo broni z Hitlerem i za wymordowanie trzystu tysięcy Żydów został stracony w 1946 r. . Hitler, który szanował rumuńskiego dyktatora, uważał, że Ion Antonescu musiał wywodzić się z rasy germańskiej. (Jerzy W. Borejsza, „Antyslawizm Adolfa Hitlera”, Czytelnik, Warszawa 1988, s. 34).
**** Ica – Mihai Antonescu, polityk faszystowski, wicepremier i minister spraw zagranicznych Rumunii, bliski współpracownik generała Iona Antonescu, prowadził tajne pertraktacje z aliantami oraz próbował skonstruować „Oś łacińską” (z Włochami, Francją Vichi, Hiszpanią i Portugalią) skierowaną przeciw ZSRR i Węgrom. Podobnie jak jego szef Ion Antonescu został rozstrzelany w 1946 r. W dzienniku Eliade nie ma śladów, że attaché kulturalny, który znał dobrze ministra z czasów, gdy byli Legionistami i spotykał się z nim w Bukareszcie w czasie wojny, brał udział w poufnych rozmowach prowadzonych także w Lizbonie.
*****Eliade w trakcie wojny kilkakrotnie spotykał się z Carlem Schmittem. Obydwaj byli zafascynowani myślą Rene’ Guenona, twórcy koncepcji tradycjonalizmu integralnego.
******Mircea Eliade, „Dziennik indyjski”, przełożył Ireneusz Kania, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa 1999, s. 119. W tym dzienniku (miał 21 lat) wyraził swoją opinię o Rosjanach: „Mam wrażenie, że jestem śmieszny, żem Rosjanin. (Czuję trwogę przed Rosjanami, przed wszystkim, co zwierzęco tanie i triumfujące w nas i w książkach)”, s. 166.