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70 | loyal unto death chapter three The Oath and the Curse: Subversions of Christianity Between 1893 and 1903, the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization grew from a committee of six young men dedicated to an autonomous Macedonia to a virtual state within a state that mobilized and armed twenty thousand supporters in an anti-imperial uprising. In that process, traditions and practices of short- and longer-range mobility were one vector by which the organization’s network grew. So too, though, was the appeal of a resonant, durable slogan that, like so much else, the mro had in common with revolutionaries elsewhere. The flag that waved over the so-called, short-lived Republic of Kruševo in August 1903 bore the phrase Sloboda ili Smrt— “Liberty or Death.” The phrase also inspired Armenian organizations with whom mro leaders had extended contacts, including the Protectors of the Fatherland (Nalbandian 1963: 87). Bulgarian revolutionaries in the uprisings of 1876 carried flags with the same slogan, which was also at the heart of the nineteenth-century anti-Ottoman national movements in Greece and Crete. Before all these, of course, in a slightly different form—“Give me liberty or give me death!”—the pledge was made by the U.S. folk hero Patrick Henry in a speech in March 1775. It was also used in Latin America in revolutions of the early nineteenth century, and would become the national slogan of Uruguay. The mro placed considerable weight on the slogan, and it proved resilient . Multiple pension applicants in the late 1940s and early 1950s repeated the phrase in their biographies of the Ilinden period. So too did the movement’s supporters and loyalists in the 1920s and 1930s, even as the organization came to be viewed as a terrorist and criminal enterprise. When long-time vmro member and enforcer Vlado Černozemski shot and killed the king of Yugoslavia and the foreign minister of France in Marseille in 1934—an act that profoundly shifted the political alliances of southeastern Europe—police found on his left arm a tattoo with a skull and crossbones, the letters vmro, and the initials s.i.s., for Sloboda ili Smrt (Broche 1977: 108). the oath and the curse | 71 Western commentators on the 1934 assassination drew attention to the “blood oath” sworn by the perpetrator and his Croatian coconspirators (Graham 1972: 144). Such observations, along with discussion of feuds, ancient hatreds, and intercommunal killing, have been part of a more general exoticization of the Balkans and its people and politics documented by historian Maria Todorova (1997). As Todorova notes, though, the region’s stereotypes are themselves shifty and wavering. Černozemski’s reported ruthlessness, and the more general stigmatization of mid-twentieth-century Macedonia as home to traditions of violence as well as social systems of clan, feud, and retributive justice that were mobilized in the service of political extremism, represents a significant departure from the late nineteenth-century images of stolid, passive, and resigned peasants. This tendency—to treat slogans and sentiments of loyalty that potentially connect the Balkans to the world of nation-states and their heroes as instead markers of backwardness and primitivism—demands further re-examination in the direction opened by Todorova’s compelling work. The dominant representation of Černozemski in particular—as bestial perpetrator of deadly violence—resonates with another case where contemporary observers were quick to demonize a movement for local self-government: Kenya’s so-called “Mau Mau” revolt in the 1950s. In this East African case, a liberation movement that had its roots in long-standing grievances over access to land and that evolved specifically out of political activism through the institutional form of the 1920s Kikuyu Central Association (kca), came to be represented as steeped in barbarism and evil (Majdalany 1962; Walton 1984: 126–127). British commentators were especially fascinated and repelled by the oathing practices of Mau Mau, which were held to have particular power over ordinary Kenyans. A key component of the British counterinsurgency campaign —as well as reliance on “loyalist” Kikuyu “countergangs” who were familiar with Mau Mau’s insurgent tactics—was “counteroathing” to undo the sinister and mysterious grip that Mau Mau held over its “superstitious” Kikuyu adherents (Kitson 1960; Branch 2009). This tactic was conceived by Louis Leakey, an anthropologist who grew up in Kenya and prided himself on his knowledge and understanding of Kikuyu customs. He and other British representatives saw Mau Mau oaths as a sophisticated and cunning distortion of traditional, positive tribal customs by the...

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