APOCALYPTIC RECOUNTS ON THE ROMANIAN INTERNET: THE NEW RIGHT WARNINGS ON THE END OF ROMANIA
APOCALYPTIC RECOUNTS ON THE ROMANIAN INTERNET: THE NEW RIGHT WARNINGS ON THE END OF ROMANIA

Summary/Abstract: The New Right organization from Romania traces its origins back to the inter-war period, to the Archangel Michael’s Legion. Its nationalist discourse is constructed on anti-modern, anti-European and extreme Christian dimensions, which are consistently summarized by their slogan, Identitate naţională. Revoluţie spirituală/National identity. Spiritual revolution. A short account on the evolution of the national idea in Romania would prove that during the last 200 years the notion of national identity has evolved rapidly as a response to the history dominated by the Ottomans, the Russians and The Austro-Hungarians. The need and greed for a national identity oftentimes tinged the nationalist discourse with extremism. After 1989, the 2000 elections proved that Romanians are prone to choosing the nationalist discourse. In the following paper, I will analyse how the New Right uses the internet to spread and promote their ideas, by looking at how they depict extreme threats to the Romanian identity. Apocalyptic stories will be my focus and, as the internet is a cultural product that addresses consumers and audiences, I will also assess the extent and form of reaction to the on-line apocalyptic stories. The New Right makes its voice heard on the internet, and given that voice means agency, thus change, I analyse the on-line apocalyptic stories as dialogic events, where writers and readers, tellers and listeners meet and reconstruct the world. The analysis of the extreme threats will show that the Romanian apocalypse has ethnic and demographic dimensions, sustained by propitious political settings. The issues of Hungarian-Romanian and Roma-Romanian relationships are central to the case taken into account. The study triggers attention toward the odds of the Romanian apocalypse to become a credible topic on the public agenda, and thus reiterate the extreme nationalist ideology in the setting of a young, unstable Romanian democracy.

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