Croat fascism was not an isolated phenomenon. Fascism (and, less so, Nazism) were viable ideological alternatives in the 1930s and 1940s. Variants of fascist ideology sprang all over the world, from Iraq and Egypt to Norway and Britain. Even the Jews in Palestine had their own fascists (the Stern group). And while Croat fascism (such as it was, "tainted" by Catholic religiosity and pagan nationalism) lasted four tumultuous years - it persisted for a quarter of a century in Romania ("infected" by Orthodox clericalism and peasant lores). While both branches of fascism - the Croat and the Romanian - shared a virulent type of anti-Semitism and the constipated morality of the ascetic and the fanatic - Codreanu's was more ambitious, aiming at a wholesale reform of Romanian life and a re- definition of Romanianism. The Iron Guard and the Legion (of the Archangel Michael, no less) were, therefore and in their deranged way, a force for reform founded on blood-thirsty romanticism and masochistic sacrifices for the common good. Moreover, the Legion was crushed in 1941 by a military dictatorship which had nothing to do with fascism. It actually persecuted the fascists who found refuge in Hitler's Germany. Fascism in Hungary developed similarly. It was based on reactionary ideologies pre-dating fascism by centuries. Miklos Horty, the Austro-Hungarian Admiral was consumed by grandiose fantasies of an Hungarian empire. He had very little in common with the fascists of the "white terror" of 1919 in Budapest (an anti-communist bloodshed).