29 Oct 2012
26 Oct 2012
Aşteptându-l pe God...ot...ul românilor
Foaie verde elefant, ce penibil, ce jenant...
Ce tăcere de mormânt... câtă laşitate...
Poate că „reuşita“ cea mai perversă a Complexului Militar-Industrial al capitalismului corporatist (al consumului pe datorie!) o reprezintă pacificarea Societăţii Civile şi transformarea ei într-o Societate Docilă, în care Oamenii au fost preschimbaţi (modificaţi cvasi-genetic) în Resurse Umane, clone (dez-umanizate) obligate să muncească tot mai mult pentru profitul patronului şi acoliţilor săi...
Tupeişti abili, prestidigitatori ai îndemnurilor „ştiinţifice“ la muncă (aşa-numitul „Management al... Resurselor Umane“), sub care abia dacă se mai ascunde ameninţarea concedierii, în caz de nesupunere...
Parveniţii „privatizărilor“ bunurilor care ţi-au aparţinut (în cota indiviză a „întregului popor“!) până la „revoluţia“ nomenklaturiştilor ceauşişti... pe uşa rotativă pe care pleac-ai noştrii, vin le notre comme le conifere!
Hoţii care şi-au „socializat“ pierderile în buzunarul tău, privatizându-şi câştigurile în refugii tarifare, unde fiscul este la fel de orb ca tine...
Dar, nu vă impacientaţi cu astfel de considerente, ascultaţi reclame, muzică, fiţi preocupaţi de posesiuni, înfăţişare şi, bineînţeles, de cele 15 minute de faimă pe internet... Cumparaţi-vă azi telefoane mai deştepte ca voi şi vedeţi mâine de unde veţi înapoia datoria acumulată la bancă...
Râvniţi la poveştile nemuritoare ale manelelor de succes, cu tractoare 4X4 şi curve de lux, crezându-vă propriile minciuni că sunteţi speciali, că veţi putea deveni milionari, că astea nu sunt problemele voastre...
Rămâneţi cuminţi şi cu credinţă în Domnul-Zeu, care Vă va aşeza de-a pururi la masa Sa, în Raiul din cer, imediat ce ieşi din stratosferă, pe dreapta... că asta nu este problema voastră...
24 Oct 2012
Che Casino Capitalism - Capitolul 2,5: Cea de-a Doua Revoluţie (prea mult-aşteptată de căpşunarii mioritici!) a Capitalismului de Cumetrie (Crony Capitalism)
Puncte pe Ordinea de Zi: Apel la Raţiune
... aşteptăm propuneri pentru completarea listei!... aşteptăm mult şi bine oare?
- Scopul nr. 1: Să furnizăm actorilor sociali, Oamenilor transformaţi în biete Resurse Umane, Acte de Identitate Noi, de Cetăţeni ai Societăţii Civile Româneşti.
- Scopul nr. 2: Să oferim un „Fir al Ariadnei“, destinat orientării prin labirintul comportamentelor umane, pentru alegerea celor mai bune căi de acţiune socială pentru emanciparea umanităţii de sub paradigma liberalismului utopic.
- Scopul nr. 3... Nu Scuză Mijloacele... de reeducare a individului hiperegoist, transformat într-o fiinţă sociopată, preocupată, mai presus de orice, să îşi atingă propriul interes îngust si autodistrugător...
- "Libertate": a. "frumuseţea morală a societăţii civile"; b. "decomercializarea, depolitizarea şi demistificarea naraţiunilor politice, economice, sociale sau religioase"; c. "identificarea şi tragerea la răspundere a agenţilor şi agenţiilor corporatiste ale capitalismului de cumetrie autohton"
... aşteptăm propuneri pentru completarea listei!... aşteptăm mult şi bine oare?
Icelanders back first ‘crowdsourced constitution’
23 Oct 2012
Che Casino Capitalism - Capitolul 1: Revoluţia Oalelor şi Cratiţelor, şi Schimbările Constituţionale din Islanda…
Icelanders back first ‘crowdsourced constitution’
Sa recapitulăm: după Revoluţia Oalelor şi Cratiţelor [Iceland, People Building a Revolution], islandezii cer crearea unor sisteme de control şi alarmă care să prevină repetarea pe viitor a colapsului financiar care cuprinde ţara în octombrie 2008, pedepsirea celor vinovaţi că jucaseră poker cu resursele ţării, iar acum, scrierea unei Constituţii noi.
Guvernul de centru-dreapta, condus de Partidul Independenţei (un amalgam toxic de naţionalişti, tehnocraţi neoliberali, bancheri şi oligarhii familiilor deţinătoare ale cotelor de pescuit) este forţat să demisioneze. O alianţă de forţe progresiste de stânga, incluzând Partidul verzilor şi Partidul Socialist este aleasă la putere.
Dupa discuţi interminabile, are loc un Forum Naţional, în urma căruia este selectat un comitet format din 25 de cetăţeni, selectaţi dintr-un număr de 1000 de aplicaţii, incluzând aici politicieni, ingineri sau instalatori deopotriva, care supun sugestiile primite de la cetăţeni atenţiei Parlamentului, asa-numitul Althingi. Votul de sâmbătă reprezintă cristalizarea tuturor sugestiilor în 6 (şase) probleme principale:
1. Doriţi ca propunerile Consiliului Constituţional să constituie baza unui proiect de Constituţie nouă?
DA: 66.1% NU: 33.9%
2. În noua Constituţie, doriţi ca resursele naturale care nu sunt proprietate privată să fie declarate proprietatea naţiunii? [Nota Bene, NU Re-Naţionalizării bunurilor publice deja privatizate!]
DA: 81.2% NU: 18.8%
3. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie prevederi exprese stipulând stabilirea unei biserici (naţionale) în Islanda? [N.B., în România, de exemplu, BOR ar deveni Biserică de Stat!]
DA: 57.3% NU: 42.7%
4. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere autorizând alegerea anumitor indivizi in Parlament (Althingi) dincolo de prevederile actuale? [N.B., în România, de exemplu, Salam Fermecătorul ar putea deveni Preşedinte!]
DA: 76.4% NU: 23.6%
5. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere oferind pondere egală voturilor exprimate în toate părţile ţării? [N.B. În prezent, voturile exprimate în localităţile rurale au o pondere mai însemnată având în vedere faptul că aproximativ 90% din populaţia ţării locuieşte în Reykjavík (majoritatea) şi Akureyri.]
DA: 55.6% NU: 44.4%
6. Aţi dori să vedeţi în noua Constituţie o prevedere potrivit căreia o anumită proporţie a electoratului să poate solicita ca anumite probleme să fie supuse unui referendum?
DA: 70.5% NU: 29.5%
Bibliografie:
- Iceland, People Building a Revolution, 14.02.2012, de
- Icelanders Back First "Crowdsourced Constitution", 22.10.2012, EurActiv.com;
27 Aug 2012
Chris Hedges: The Mirage of Our Lives
25 Aug 2012
The Major Economic Ideas We Live By Are Shockingly Flimsy
August 19, 2012 |
In
his well-known textbook Economics, Paul Samuelson depicts our economic
world as being like the universe of Newtonian physics. Though he
concedes that deciding on policies may involve value
judgments—eliminating rent control may hurt individuals, even though it
benefits the economy—he promises to focus on the economic science of
cause-and-effect. “Positive economics describes the facts and behavior
in the economy,” he insists. The emphasis is his. Questions in this
realm may be “easy or tough,” but they “can be resolved only
by reference to facts.” In another popular text, Walter Nicholson
similarly tells students: “‘Positive’ economists believe that one reason
for the success of economics as a discipline is that it has been able
to emulate successfully the positive approach taken by the physical
sciences rather than becoming involved in the value-laden normative
approach taken by some of the other social sciences.”
Economists’ insistence that their discipline is like physics sounds a little nervous. Did you ever hear a physicist boast to the world that that physics is like economics? More important, when they talk about economics this way, Samuelson, Nicholson, and other economists are misrepresenting what they do and what economics is. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, economists have sought to gain insight into economies by building models of them. They make simplified assumptions about the economic world we inhabit and construct imaginary economies—in other words, models—based on those assumptions. They use these imaginary economies to draw practical conclusions about the actual economies we inhabit.
Economists’ insistence that their discipline is like physics sounds a little nervous. Did you ever hear a physicist boast to the world that that physics is like economics? More important, when they talk about economics this way, Samuelson, Nicholson, and other economists are misrepresenting what they do and what economics is. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman, economists have sought to gain insight into economies by building models of them. They make simplified assumptions about the economic world we inhabit and construct imaginary economies—in other words, models—based on those assumptions. They use these imaginary economies to draw practical conclusions about the actual economies we inhabit.
Nearly everything economists do is based on some model. For example, the famous story that prices are determined by supply and demand is a model. Consider the price of oil. On the one hand, there is supposed to be an upward-sloping “supply curve”: the higher the price of oil rises, the more oil producers want to pump. This curve is an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that producers would pump at any given time, if oil prices were at different levels. On the other hand, there is supposed to be a downward-sloping “demand curve”: the lower the price of oil falls, the more businesses and consumers want to buy. This curve is likewise an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that consumers and businesses would buy at any given time prices were at different levels. The point where the imaginary curves intersect—where the price is such that the amount of oil producers would pump just equals the amount of oil businesses and consumers would buy—is supposed to determine the actual price of crude oil and the amount of oil that is pumped.
All we ever see is the point where the imaginary curves are supposed to intersect: the actual oil price. Nobody has ever seen supply or demand curves; they are models. They can be useful, but should not be mistaken for a literal picture of reality. If you trace, over time, the movement of actual gasoline prices versus consumption, you see loops and zigs and zags that don’t look anything like imagined supply and demand curves.
Moreover, some factors that affect oil prices are inconsistent with the model. For example, energy-intensive industries such as aluminum smelters may hedge against possible oil price increases by entering into contracts to buy oil at some fixed price at a given date in the future. Oil producers sell such contracts. They also speculate by buying such contracts. They have insider information about oil prices—if a platform explodes, the firm that owns it knows before the public gets the news—but are exempt from laws against insider trading. Alexander Elder, a commodities trader, describes visiting a friend at the trading desk of a multinational oil company: “After passing through security that was tighter than at Kennedy International Airport, I walked through glass-enclosed corridors. Clusters of men huddled around monitors trading oil products. When I asked my host whether his traders were hedging or speculating, he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Yes.’ I asked him again and received the same answer.” When oil companies speculate on oil prices, they move prices, but there is no supply or demand curve. Sophisticated tests of the supply-and-demand model can be framed, but they depend on other models, some of them statistical, that can in turn be challenged.
Textbooks make economics sound like physics by blurring the distinction between the idealized world of models, which does behave like a physics, and the messy real economic world, which does not. To make sense of economics, you can never ignore the distinction. Not only does Samuelson fail to make this clear in his textbook; he doesn’t even explain what an economic model is. Oh, let me not exaggerate! In the thirteenth edition—the one I happen to have read—Samuelson and his coauthor, William Nordhaus, provide a brief definition of a model in an appendix, on page 977.
Blurring the ideal world of model economies with the complex world of real economies deeply confuses students. Some feel cheated, as if they were watching a magician put on a stage show, the workings of which are hidden from sight. Others like the stage show better than the messy everyday world. As students thus encounter economics, David Colander of Middlebury College laments, “They either love it and think economists have something to say that they aren’t saying, or they hate it and think economists have something to say that they aren’t saying.”
A model is never a
full-dimensional hologram of real economies, but at best a partial
two-dimensional perspective. Much that I say will be controversial, but
this point should not be. Robert Lucas, one of the most creative
model-builders, tells a story about his undergraduate encounter with
Gregor Mendel’s model of genetic inheritance.6 He liked the Mendelian
model—“you could work out predictions that would surprise you”—though
not the lab work breeding fruit flies to test it. (Economists are not
big on mucking around in the real world.) Over the weekend, he enjoyed
writing a paper comparing the model’s predictions with the class’s
experimental results. When a friend returned from a weekend away without
having written the required paper, Lucas agreed to let the friend
borrow from his. The friend remarked that Lucas had forgotten to discuss
how “crossing-over” could explain the substantial discrepancies between
the model and experimental results. “Crossing-over is b—s—,” Lucas told
his friend, a “label for our ignorance.” He kept his paper’s focus on
the unadorned Mendelian model, and added a section arguing that
experimental errors could explain the discrepancies. His friend instead
appended a section on crossing-over. His friend got an A. Lucas got a
C-minus, with a comment: “This is a good report, but you forgot about
crossing-over.” Crossing-over is actually a fact; it occurs when
a portion of one parent gene is incorporated in the other parent gene.
But, Lucas’s anecdote brilliantly illustrates the powerful
temptation to model-builders—across the ideological spectrum—of ignoring
inconvenient facts that don’t fit their models.
As Lucas says, “The construction of theoretical models is our way to bring order to the way we think about the world, but the process necessarily involves ignoring some evidence or alternative theories—setting them aside. That can be hard to do—facts are facts—and sometimes my unconscious mind carries out the abstraction for me: I simply fail to see some of the data or some alternative theory.” Often I disagree with Lucas, but I like the transparency with which he discusses models. He has said that a model is a “mechanical imitation economy,” a “robot imitation of people,” a “thought experiment.” It must be distinguished from reality because “in practice all axioms for models we can actually solve will be crude approximations at best, and determining which axioms produce reliable models will involve judgment, testing, and luck.”
Copyright 2012 Harvard University Press. Reprinted via Alternet with express permission from the author.
20 Jun 2012
Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelor
--- On Tue, 19/6/12, NECHITA MIRCEA wrote:
From: NECHITA MIRCEA nechita_mircea@yahoo.com
Subject: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelor
Este bineştiut, arhiştiut, arhicunoscut, faptul că cei mai de seamă (sau de frunte, sau reprezentativi) ’telectuali, oameni de cultură şi de bine (bineinţeles) ai ţării, s-au strâns, ba chiar s-au inghesuit aş zice, în parlament, ca să pună umăru’ , mâna cu pixu’ sau neuronu’ la propăşirea scumpei noastre (poate chiar si a lor) patrii si a preaiubiţilor ei cetăţeni. La înflorirea, prosperitatea, şi ridicarea ei pe noi culmi de civilizaţie si progres.
Chiar dacă destui şi-au găsit un binemeritat loc călduţ si confortabil printre nemuritorii Academiei/academiilor, de unde nu vor mai ieşi decât cu dricu’ , grosu’ ’telectualităţi românesti e in parlament... Deci aburcarea în cârca suprasolicitatului nostru parlament a grelei, dificilei si de mare răspundere îndatorire, de a oblădui şi îndruma I.C.R.-ul , pare absolut logică şi firească, chiar dacă Preşedintele este şi el un intelectual de marcă, (sau de mărci, celebre, vreau să zic) şi poate primul actor şi performer al celor aproape (dar din ce in ce mai departe) 20 de milioane de spectatori plătitori...Mă rog, aţi promis că nu mai guvernaţi prin ordonanţe de urgentă, da’ aia a fost doar o obişnuită promisiune electorală, normal că nu se pune, iar ăsta-i doar Institutul Cultural Român, deci, clar, nu se pune...
Domnu’ prim procuror, sau prim ministru, al guvernului Ponta, cre’că prostimea n-a înţeles (sau o fi înţeles altceva decât trebuia) şi aţi pierdut nişte procente de viitori votanţi...nu-i nimic, că aveţi de unde, da’ poate puţină prudenţă şi spoială de democraţie balcanică (sau originală-românească) nu strică, până trec şi alegerile generale...Poate ar fi util să explicaţi că-i firesc şi democratic ca şi cei care fură să fie schimbaţi între ei din când in când. Fiecare cu hoţii ’telectualii sau genialii lor... În definitiv, spre deosebire de comunism, când cei care tăiau şi spânzurau , păreau înţepeniţi pe vecie în fotelurile lor de mare răspundere, în capitalism se mai schimbă între ei, în cazuri extreme chiar mai des decât din patru in patru ani...asta ar trebui să dea o plăcută senzaţie de schimbare, evoluţie şi progres...
Mircea Nechita, cetatean cu drept de vot, degeaba
Re: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelorWednesday, 20 June, 2012 9:38
From: "Bogdan Lepadatu" bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk
Perfect de acord, Maestre! Doar ca, asa cum bine pare sa stii (... asta judecand nu doar dupa gravurile tale), ceea ce nu transpare imediat dintre randurile de mai sus (dupa cum nu transpare nici din corul eminentelor voci ultragiate de schimbare!) este tocmai subiectul informarii tale: Miscarea "pinioanelor" sau, mai bine zis, a "pionilor" in "usa rotativa"... pe care "pleac-ai nostrii, vin ai nostrii"!
Totusi, nu chiar toate lucrurile legate de fosta "Republica" cvasi-autonoma a ICR-ului merita sprijinul neconditionat al intelectualitatii romanesti... Un exemplu ar putea fi cazul burselor ICR pentru traducatori in formare - vezi http://www.cennac.ro/anunturi/traducatori-in-formare-4/prezentare-18.
Desi sunt constient de faptul ca m-as putea molipsi de indigestia cu "struguri acrii" a perdantilor ultimelor alegeri din Romania, voi reproduce mai jos "monologul" cu "demna" institutie pe tema contestatiei rezultatelor "concursului" organizat de aceasta si ramas pana in prezent fara vreun raspuns:
Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 14:42
From:
"Bogdan Lepadatu"
View contact details
To:
icr@icr.ro
Domnilor,
Este nevoie sa ma adresez direct instantei pentru primirea unui raspuns?
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatuwrote:
From: Bogdan Lepadatu
Subject: Fw: Re: bursa ICR
To: icr @icr.ro
Cc: "Florin Bican", "Florin Bican"
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:58
Doamnelor/ Domnilor,
Va rog sa considerati prin prezenta contestarea rezultelor comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, asa cum mi-au fost ele comunicate neoficial.
Va solicit, in consecinta, publicarea transparenta a modului in care s-a desfasurat acest proces si rezultatele oficiale, in ordinea punctajului oferit candidatilor la acest program bursier.
Cu stima,
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatuwrote:
From: Bogdan Lepadatu
Subject: Re: bursa ICR
To: "Florin Bican"
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:24
Draga Florin,
Asa cum spuneam anterior, iti multumesc pentru informatie dar nu-mi pot ascunde neincrederea in modul in care a fost organizat procesul de jurizare...
Cred ca, dincolo de mesajul standard oferit de tine, ar fi corect si necesar sa fie transparentizat modul in care arbitrii desemnati au punctat candidatii si, mai mult, sa fie facut public lista tuturor candidatilor, si notele/ media de admitere.
As dori, din acest motiv, sa inregistrezi raspunsul meu ca pe o contestatie legala si, in masura in care acest lucru este posibil, sa le comunici tuturor membrilor juriului profunda mea neincredere in judecata lor.
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Wed, 11/4/12, Florin Bicanwrote:
From: Florin Bican
Subject: bursa ICR
To: "Bogdan Lepadatu"
Date: Wednesday, 11 April, 2012, 14:22
Draga Bogdan,
In urma sesiunii comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, va anunt cu parere de rau ca cererea dumneavoastra de bursa a fost respinsa. Punctajul pe care l-ati obtinut se situeaza sub punctajele carora li s-au acordat cele zece burse disponibile. V-as recomanda totusi sa reveniti cu o noua solicitare de bursa pentru sesiunea viitoare (1 octombrie - 30 noiembrie 2012). Va doresc mult succes.
Cu cele mai bune ganduri,
Florin Bican
Cu stima si... cu scuze anticipate pentru lungimea mesajului,
Yours sincerely,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) PFA
From: NECHITA MIRCEA nechita_mircea@yahoo.com
Subject: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelor
Este bineştiut, arhiştiut, arhicunoscut, faptul că cei mai de seamă (sau de frunte, sau reprezentativi) ’telectuali, oameni de cultură şi de bine (bineinţeles) ai ţării, s-au strâns, ba chiar s-au inghesuit aş zice, în parlament, ca să pună umăru’ , mâna cu pixu’ sau neuronu’ la propăşirea scumpei noastre (poate chiar si a lor) patrii si a preaiubiţilor ei cetăţeni. La înflorirea, prosperitatea, şi ridicarea ei pe noi culmi de civilizaţie si progres.
Chiar dacă destui şi-au găsit un binemeritat loc călduţ si confortabil printre nemuritorii Academiei/academiilor, de unde nu vor mai ieşi decât cu dricu’ , grosu’ ’telectualităţi românesti e in parlament... Deci aburcarea în cârca suprasolicitatului nostru parlament a grelei, dificilei si de mare răspundere îndatorire, de a oblădui şi îndruma I.C.R.-ul , pare absolut logică şi firească, chiar dacă Preşedintele este şi el un intelectual de marcă, (sau de mărci, celebre, vreau să zic) şi poate primul actor şi performer al celor aproape (dar din ce in ce mai departe) 20 de milioane de spectatori plătitori...Mă rog, aţi promis că nu mai guvernaţi prin ordonanţe de urgentă, da’ aia a fost doar o obişnuită promisiune electorală, normal că nu se pune, iar ăsta-i doar Institutul Cultural Român, deci, clar, nu se pune...
Domnu’ prim procuror, sau prim ministru, al guvernului Ponta, cre’că prostimea n-a înţeles (sau o fi înţeles altceva decât trebuia) şi aţi pierdut nişte procente de viitori votanţi...nu-i nimic, că aveţi de unde, da’ poate puţină prudenţă şi spoială de democraţie balcanică (sau originală-românească) nu strică, până trec şi alegerile generale...Poate ar fi util să explicaţi că-i firesc şi democratic ca şi cei care fură să fie schimbaţi între ei din când in când. Fiecare cu hoţii ’telectualii sau genialii lor... În definitiv, spre deosebire de comunism, când cei care tăiau şi spânzurau , păreau înţepeniţi pe vecie în fotelurile lor de mare răspundere, în capitalism se mai schimbă între ei, în cazuri extreme chiar mai des decât din patru in patru ani...asta ar trebui să dea o plăcută senzaţie de schimbare, evoluţie şi progres...
Mircea Nechita, cetatean cu drept de vot, degeaba
Re: Institutul Cultural Roman. Miscarea papioanelorWednesday, 20 June, 2012 9:38
From: "Bogdan Lepadatu" bogdanlepadatu@yahoo.co.uk
Perfect de acord, Maestre! Doar ca, asa cum bine pare sa stii (... asta judecand nu doar dupa gravurile tale), ceea ce nu transpare imediat dintre randurile de mai sus (dupa cum nu transpare nici din corul eminentelor voci ultragiate de schimbare!) este tocmai subiectul informarii tale: Miscarea "pinioanelor" sau, mai bine zis, a "pionilor" in "usa rotativa"... pe care "pleac-ai nostrii, vin ai nostrii"!
Totusi, nu chiar toate lucrurile legate de fosta "Republica" cvasi-autonoma a ICR-ului merita sprijinul neconditionat al intelectualitatii romanesti... Un exemplu ar putea fi cazul burselor ICR pentru traducatori in formare - vezi http://www.cennac.ro/anunturi/traducatori-in-formare-4/prezentare-18.
Desi sunt constient de faptul ca m-as putea molipsi de indigestia cu "struguri acrii" a perdantilor ultimelor alegeri din Romania, voi reproduce mai jos "monologul" cu "demna" institutie pe tema contestatiei rezultatelor "concursului" organizat de aceasta si ramas pana in prezent fara vreun raspuns:
Wednesday, 18 April, 2012 14:42
From:
"Bogdan Lepadatu"
View contact details
To:
icr@icr.ro
Domnilor,
Este nevoie sa ma adresez direct instantei pentru primirea unui raspuns?
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatu
From: Bogdan Lepadatu
Subject: Fw: Re: bursa ICR
To: icr @icr.ro
Cc: "Florin Bican"
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:58
Doamnelor/ Domnilor,
Va rog sa considerati prin prezenta contestarea rezultelor comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, asa cum mi-au fost ele comunicate neoficial.
Va solicit, in consecinta, publicarea transparenta a modului in care s-a desfasurat acest proces si rezultatele oficiale, in ordinea punctajului oferit candidatilor la acest program bursier.
Cu stima,
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Thu, 12/4/12, Bogdan Lepadatu
From: Bogdan Lepadatu
Subject: Re: bursa ICR
To: "Florin Bican"
Date: Thursday, 12 April, 2012, 9:24
Draga Florin,
Asa cum spuneam anterior, iti multumesc pentru informatie dar nu-mi pot ascunde neincrederea in modul in care a fost organizat procesul de jurizare...
Cred ca, dincolo de mesajul standard oferit de tine, ar fi corect si necesar sa fie transparentizat modul in care arbitrii desemnati au punctat candidatii si, mai mult, sa fie facut public lista tuturor candidatilor, si notele/ media de admitere.
As dori, din acest motiv, sa inregistrezi raspunsul meu ca pe o contestatie legala si, in masura in care acest lucru este posibil, sa le comunici tuturor membrilor juriului profunda mea neincredere in judecata lor.
Kind regards,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer)
--- On Wed, 11/4/12, Florin Bican
From: Florin Bican
Subject: bursa ICR
To: "Bogdan Lepadatu"
Date: Wednesday, 11 April, 2012, 14:22
Draga Bogdan,
In urma sesiunii comisiei de jurizare pentru traducatori in formare din 11.04.2012, va anunt cu parere de rau ca cererea dumneavoastra de bursa a fost respinsa. Punctajul pe care l-ati obtinut se situeaza sub punctajele carora li s-au acordat cele zece burse disponibile. V-as recomanda totusi sa reveniti cu o noua solicitare de bursa pentru sesiunea viitoare (1 octombrie - 30 noiembrie 2012). Va doresc mult succes.
Cu cele mai bune ganduri,
Florin Bican
Cu stima si... cu scuze anticipate pentru lungimea mesajului,
Yours sincerely,
Bogdan Lepadatu (PhD)
Cambridge ELT (Teacher/Trainer) PFA
12 May 2012
Che Casino Capitalism!
picture by John Wardell
At Stake?
T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” has to be one of the starkest reminders of the terminal spiritual alienation afflicting the contemporary individual’s condition... For over five centuries, the Western capitalist machinery has been colonising, raping and pillaging under the pretense of “civilising” other much older civilisations…
The implosion of the “Shylockian” economics' paradigm and the hollowness of this commercialised era of hyper-inflated exchange value may be the soundest reasons for my calling it The Age of Ghost-Modernism.
The boom-bust-ic credit and interest Ponzi schemes of unsustainable growth - turning humans into human resources, consumeristic clones or mere canon-fodder for the Military-Industrial Complex’s Permanent War Economy - have finally reached their Marxian prediction.
Whilst doing their utmost to delay the sistem's inevitable denouement, capitalism’s shareholding agents are simultaneously employing distracting new media outlets while codifying the human species’ most primary instincts (such as greed, violence and other sociopathic traits) to mask the propensity to use all available means in this most selfish and pointless quest for ever larger profits.
The current economic crisis is slowly revealing how its corporate profit-seeking perpetrators (whom I've described before as “utopian liberal agents”) have unleashed a barrage jamming of morally and ethically bankrupt signifiers (reducing critical thinking to its lowest common denominator) whilst promoting an ecocidal cult of “free” marketeering economics (which disfigures the environment while fragmenting society) as the ultimate meta-narrative to be had.
Among sunch weapons of mass distraction employed to jam people’s critical thinking abilities, the new media “social” platforms, such as Twitter (reducing people’s argumentative abilities to 140 characters-long slogans!) or Facebook (aka Fakebook or, better still, Faecesbook) are some of the most effective.
Unwilling to succumb to the perversity of the Faecesbook machinery, drowning-out critical thinking in a sea of gormless, mostly private (at best, local) concerns, in a tabloid rendition of the Babel Tower cacophony through the use of its "news" feed gimmick, I couldn't help but release a virtual salvoe against its virtual yet no less perverse bows, shot in a wishful-thinking attempt to Occupy this commercial platform and turn it into a real Agora for social change…
Despite being painfully aware of its uselessness, it still wanted this protest to be a reality-check for those Romanians identifying themselves as "monarchists", an antidote to their raucous clamour for their idols: blue-blooded (err, rather funny blood type, init?), tax-avoiding, hereditary "civil servants"...
via Occupy Corporate Capitalism/ Ocupaţi Capitalismul de Cumetrie... Fairy tales (poveşti nemuritoare) or furry tales, tall tales, what have you... religioase, ideologice, prozelitizatoare sau născătoare de spaime existenţiale, poveşti care ne transformă din fiinţe raţionale, în sclavii propriilor minciuni!... Domnul-Zeu, "creatorul" Pământului, acum... 6000 de ani (muaha-ha-ha!), într-un moment de cruntă plictiseala (deh, angoasele eternităţii!)......
Alte detalii, cusute cu aţă albă: Adam şi "coasta" sa fracturată, Eva, umblând sexy-dezbrăcată prin "Raiul" situat în stratosfera cu ozonul subţiat dintr-atâta poluare; Extraterestrul sfânt şi "Fecioara" hymenală; căsătorii aranjate (că doar nu întâmplător spun unii australieni, "Jesus was a hard act to follow"!...), patimi moderne şi chinuri medievale, urmate de levitaţii private (Beam me up, Scotty!) şi alte demonstraţii "ştiinţifice" ale efectului de turmă...
Apoi, urmează colonialismul Occidental "civilizator" şi monarhiile constituţional-neplătitoare de taxe - că, deh, "aleşii" Domnului-Zeu (regii, reginele şi odraslele lor princiare nu trebuie să-şi tulbure seninătatea de "funcţionari publici ereditari" cu problemele electorale cu care se confruntă puţin... Putin, securistul patriot al 'mamei Rusii'!) au grupa de sânge "Albastru +"... către violet!
Violetul "slujitorilor" (pedofili ai...) Domnului-Zeu, ceilalţi scutiţi de plata taxelor care susţin existenţa statului, a educaţiei, sănătăţii, reţelelor de transport şi restul bunurilor publice în baza cărora putem pretinde că suntem fiinţe sociale...
Şi uite aşa ajungem la "sfârşitul istoriei", propovăduit de ideologii capitalismului corporatist/ de cumetrie, a exploatării omului prin cămătăria creditului şi dobânzii, a transformării sale în resursă (dezumanizată), credincioasă şi ascultătoare, o simplă piesă de schimb peste care se va pogorâ "duşul de aur" şi "blenoragia bunăstării" (aşa-numitul trickle-down effect)...
Fericiţi cei săraci cu duhul... şi cu acces la internet! V-a plăcut "povestea"?
"Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you're locked up."
1 May 2012
Welcome to the Asylum
Posted on Apr 30, 2012
By Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.
By Chris Hedges
AP/Mahesh Kumar A.
People scavenging in a rubbish tip, in Hyderabad, India.
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse—although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives—did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation. Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence,” in the primacy of “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker.” Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin notes, became “national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero is stranded on an island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive “monster” Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island’s wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.
Mâna de lucru...
by Mana Delucru
... dacă sintagma alienanta a "resursei dez-umanizate" a înlocuit, în corporatismul neocon post-industrial în care ne-a fost ipotecat viitorul, sintagma "mâinii de lucru", astăzi, pseudo-ştiinţele "free marketingului" (sic!), ale managementului şi restului reinvenţiilor eufemistice ale roţii au aceeaşi menire: să ascundă realitatea exploatării omului de către elitele corporatiste, prin intermediul creditului şi dobânzii!... Dar, Nu! Nu ascultaţi aceste îndemnuri de trezire la realitate... Oh, Nu! Trăiţi-vă clipa, cheltuiţi azi şi gândiţi-vă mâine (... de unde veţi da banii înapoi!)... Fiţi mobili social şi poluaţi natura şi mediul înconjurător, în numele "creşterii economice" producătoare de profit pentru elitele parvenite şi de inechităţi sociale marcante, că "mâine va fi şi mai rău"... Zâmbiţi tâmp şi credeţi-vă propriile minciuni în coconul de căcat (de unde şi Faeces-book!) în care aţi fost prozelitizati să proslăviţi capitalismul privatizărilor abuzive ale cumetrilor conectaţi la pârghiile de putere şi... Asistaţi pasiv (aspiraţional!) la devalizarea activelor sociale care ne dau calitatea de cetăţeni... Creaţi-vă stilul "propriu" ascultând muzakul pop pentru mase... Distraţi-vă în mall-uri cumpărând lucruri de care nu aveţi altă "nevoie" în afara eliberării de anxietăţile existenţelor depersonalizate, şablonate să creadă în Noroc, în Domnul-Zeu, în clerul neplătitor de taxe, în reţelele sociale ale celui mai primar numitor comun, în manele şi telenovele şi în câte şi mai câte modalităţi în care Complexul Militar-Industrial al corporatismului Occidental vă dirijează şi vă distruge vieţile...
16 Apr 2012
Fiți Oameni, Nu Resursele Dezumanizate ale "Capitalismului de Cumetrie"!
S-a mai scris (chiar dacă, timid şi sporadic!) pe tema "capitalismului de cumetrie" din Balcani - o sintagmă discreditată prematur din care lansării sale, așa cum era evidențiat și în op-ed-ul lui V. Duma, de "tătucul" Iliescu, la scurt timp după rocada securiștilor și nomenclaturiștilor - câștigători ai "revoluției" de partid și stat, din decembrie 1989.
S-a bătut de-atunci destulă monedă speculativă pe tarele presupuse genetice, ori geografice ale "urmașilor" mioritici ai "românilor" Burebista, Decebal sau Traian, păstrându-se însă cu sfințenie limba de lemn în care a fost narat cadrul cultist al revizionismului cu referințe istorice.
Să luăm, de pildă, exemplul cărturarilor Școlii Ardelene de secol XVIII, care sunt printre primii și, poate, şi cei mai articulați instigatori ai instinctelor primare de organizare statală pe criterii etnico-naționale. Dincolo de zgândărirea așa-zisei "conștiințe naționale" aceştia reușesc "serigrafierea" latină a codrului frate cu... "bradul, brânza, viezurele" și restului contribuţiei autohtone la formarea latinei vulgarizate mai abitir în urma vizitelor "hoardelor" de "turiști" slavi, huni sau tătari.
Această pasteurizare mitizantă a folclorului este "colectivizată" ulterior prin intermediul pașoptiștilor, al elitelor interbelice și, surprinzător, al comuniștilor - care-i păstrează elementele constitutive fundamentale într-o conștiință naționalistă, diferită de internaţionalismul afişat în blocul sovietic din care făcea teoretic parte.
Continuitatea acestor elemente patriarhale (de încăpățânare funciară!) nu poate fi întreruptă nici de recenta mobilitate socială a românilor, obligați să își ia lumea-n cap în căutarea unui trai mai decent decât poate oferi o Românie afectată profund de virusul neoliberalismului.
Ceea ce s-a putut observa empiric a fost faptul că nici măcar angrenarea în economia serviciilor (din țările aflate în căutare de mână de lucru ieftină) nu a reușit să modifice semnificativ tarele de mentalitate ale unei excepționalități de o particularitate halucinantă. Desigur, sforăielile patriotarde, de genul "Acolo este țara mea și neamul meu cel românesc..." nu sunt specifice doar unor trubaduri ca Tudor Gheorghe, ele putând fi întâlnite în orice alte "comunități inventate" de pe glob unde sunt negate realitatea și adevărurile filosofice pronunțate de Kant sau Rawls.
Potrivit acestora, statul ar fi trebuit să fi încetat de mult să mai fie o problemă de geografie sau etnicitate (evident, cu excepția "Israelului Mare" - un stat creat artificial pentru adresarea atrocităților Holocaustului, în care au fost înglobate succesiv majoritatea teritoriilor palestiniene (și nu numai) și în care sunt continuate politicile de apartheid de către cei care se autointitulează "aleșii" Domnului-Zeu...)
Dincolo de aceste considerații de ordin general, acest pamflet se dorește a fi un semnal de alarmă destinat solidarizării locale cu mişcările anti-capitaliste din lumea întreagă şi concentrării atenției (distrasă de la problemele cetății printr-un asediu - atât al mass-mediei tradiţionale, cât şi al noilor platforme virtuale, de genul Faecesbook (sic!) sau Twatter - cât se poate de insidios, de continuu și de real!) asupra parveniților tranziției capitalismului de cumetrie autohton către globalizarea neoliberală.
O mână de nomenclaturiști
O mână de nomenclaturiști direct conectați la pârghiile de putere şi deţinând accesul la activele economiei naționale profită de starea de derută generală și de lipsa de cultură politică a populației pentru a socializa pierderile economiei "multilateral-dezvoltate" și privatiza (în propriile buzunare!) activele economiei de stat printr-o serie de abuzuri flagrante.
A trecut atât de puţin timp de când stăteam la Cărturești, la două mese depărtare de I.M. Vlas - țapul ișpășitor al schemei Ponzi a FNI-ului. Dar, astfel de întreprinderi (destinate devalizării activelor României!), precum SAFI, Caritas ș.a. pălesc prin comparație cu adevărații coloși, de genul Bancorex sau restul scheletelor din dulapurile sale, așa cum au fost Întreprinderea „Carpaţi" sau ICE „Dunărea", firma MAI-ului, controlată de fosta Securitate, Tehnoforest, Agroexport, Crescent, Vitrocim, Terra, Delta și câte altele.
Singura soluţie?...
Înc-o Rev... erificare a conformităţii declaraţiilor fiscale ale posesorilor autovehiculelor de lux înregistrate la Direcţia Regim Permise de Conducere şi Înmatriculare a Vehiculelor (DRPCIV) sau poate o Rev...erificare a legalităţii autorizaţiilor de construcţie ale viloaielor ostentative ale aşa-zişilor câştigători ai tranziţiei, ori a valorii activelor acestora... atât din ţară, dar mai ales din refugiile tarifare în care au fost ascunse de organele fiscale din România ş.a.m.d.
Absenţa unor astfel de gesturi de voinţă politică, atât de simple şi de fireşti într-o democraţie care ar fi trebuit să se consolideze în cei peste 21 de ani petrecuţi într-o "libertate" lipsită de etică, echitate şi de cele mai multe ori, legalitate, evidenţiază faptul că doar o schimbare calitativă de proporțiile unei Revoluții mai poate adresa problema tragerii la răspundere (penală!) a noii burghezii post-ceaușiste...
A sosit vremea Ocupării agenților și agențiilor Complexului Militar-Industrial şi Renaționalizării activelor acaparate de soții și soțiile, de fiii şi fiicele, de cumnații, finii, verișoarele și nepoatele sistemului de sorginte mafiotă, în vederea democratizării economiei inechităților flagrante și înlocuirii minusculei cleptocrații corporatiste neoliberale cu o democraţie participativă, deteritorializată şi generatoare de sustenatibilitate şi eficiență Paretiană!
E timpul să ne eliberăm de reflexele consumeriste condiționate, care ne-au fost inoculate subtil de către agențiile corporatismului, pentru redobândirea calităţii de cetățeni ai societății civile, capabili să-și negocieze nemijlocit viitorul lor şi al întregii planete!
A sosit momentul reflecției critice prin renaţionalizarea sistemului de educaţie, privatizat şi transformat din incubatoare de cercetare în copiatoare industriale de diplome academice contra cost. Doar perfecţionarea continuă a cunoştinţelor teoretice dobândite acum va permite edificarea unei societăţi meritocratice, în care să fie încurajate valorile integrităţii, solidarităţii și respectului pentru drepturile celorlalți!
Mult succes!
S-a bătut de-atunci destulă monedă speculativă pe tarele presupuse genetice, ori geografice ale "urmașilor" mioritici ai "românilor" Burebista, Decebal sau Traian, păstrându-se însă cu sfințenie limba de lemn în care a fost narat cadrul cultist al revizionismului cu referințe istorice.
Să luăm, de pildă, exemplul cărturarilor Școlii Ardelene de secol XVIII, care sunt printre primii și, poate, şi cei mai articulați instigatori ai instinctelor primare de organizare statală pe criterii etnico-naționale. Dincolo de zgândărirea așa-zisei "conștiințe naționale" aceştia reușesc "serigrafierea" latină a codrului frate cu... "bradul, brânza, viezurele" și restului contribuţiei autohtone la formarea latinei vulgarizate mai abitir în urma vizitelor "hoardelor" de "turiști" slavi, huni sau tătari.
Această pasteurizare mitizantă a folclorului este "colectivizată" ulterior prin intermediul pașoptiștilor, al elitelor interbelice și, surprinzător, al comuniștilor - care-i păstrează elementele constitutive fundamentale într-o conștiință naționalistă, diferită de internaţionalismul afişat în blocul sovietic din care făcea teoretic parte.
Continuitatea acestor elemente patriarhale (de încăpățânare funciară!) nu poate fi întreruptă nici de recenta mobilitate socială a românilor, obligați să își ia lumea-n cap în căutarea unui trai mai decent decât poate oferi o Românie afectată profund de virusul neoliberalismului.
Ceea ce s-a putut observa empiric a fost faptul că nici măcar angrenarea în economia serviciilor (din țările aflate în căutare de mână de lucru ieftină) nu a reușit să modifice semnificativ tarele de mentalitate ale unei excepționalități de o particularitate halucinantă. Desigur, sforăielile patriotarde, de genul "Acolo este țara mea și neamul meu cel românesc..." nu sunt specifice doar unor trubaduri ca Tudor Gheorghe, ele putând fi întâlnite în orice alte "comunități inventate" de pe glob unde sunt negate realitatea și adevărurile filosofice pronunțate de Kant sau Rawls.
Potrivit acestora, statul ar fi trebuit să fi încetat de mult să mai fie o problemă de geografie sau etnicitate (evident, cu excepția "Israelului Mare" - un stat creat artificial pentru adresarea atrocităților Holocaustului, în care au fost înglobate succesiv majoritatea teritoriilor palestiniene (și nu numai) și în care sunt continuate politicile de apartheid de către cei care se autointitulează "aleșii" Domnului-Zeu...)
Dincolo de aceste considerații de ordin general, acest pamflet se dorește a fi un semnal de alarmă destinat solidarizării locale cu mişcările anti-capitaliste din lumea întreagă şi concentrării atenției (distrasă de la problemele cetății printr-un asediu - atât al mass-mediei tradiţionale, cât şi al noilor platforme virtuale, de genul Faecesbook (sic!) sau Twatter - cât se poate de insidios, de continuu și de real!) asupra parveniților tranziției capitalismului de cumetrie autohton către globalizarea neoliberală.
O mână de nomenclaturiști
Credit: Mediafax - Stefan Micsik
În ultimii doi ani, românii au achiziţionat 815 autoturisme premium de la brandurile de lux Aston Martin, Bentley, Cadillac, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Maserati, Maybach, Porsche şi Rolls Royce, potrivit datelor Direcţiei Regim Permise de Conducere şi Înmatriculare a Vehiculelor (DRPCIV) centralizate de Ziarul Gândul.
O mână de nomenclaturiști direct conectați la pârghiile de putere şi deţinând accesul la activele economiei naționale profită de starea de derută generală și de lipsa de cultură politică a populației pentru a socializa pierderile economiei "multilateral-dezvoltate" și privatiza (în propriile buzunare!) activele economiei de stat printr-o serie de abuzuri flagrante.
A trecut atât de puţin timp de când stăteam la Cărturești, la două mese depărtare de I.M. Vlas - țapul ișpășitor al schemei Ponzi a FNI-ului. Dar, astfel de întreprinderi (destinate devalizării activelor României!), precum SAFI, Caritas ș.a. pălesc prin comparație cu adevărații coloși, de genul Bancorex sau restul scheletelor din dulapurile sale, așa cum au fost Întreprinderea „Carpaţi" sau ICE „Dunărea", firma MAI-ului, controlată de fosta Securitate, Tehnoforest, Agroexport, Crescent, Vitrocim, Terra, Delta și câte altele.
Singura soluţie?...
Înc-o Rev... erificare a conformităţii declaraţiilor fiscale ale posesorilor autovehiculelor de lux înregistrate la Direcţia Regim Permise de Conducere şi Înmatriculare a Vehiculelor (DRPCIV) sau poate o Rev...erificare a legalităţii autorizaţiilor de construcţie ale viloaielor ostentative ale aşa-zişilor câştigători ai tranziţiei, ori a valorii activelor acestora... atât din ţară, dar mai ales din refugiile tarifare în care au fost ascunse de organele fiscale din România ş.a.m.d.
Absenţa unor astfel de gesturi de voinţă politică, atât de simple şi de fireşti într-o democraţie care ar fi trebuit să se consolideze în cei peste 21 de ani petrecuţi într-o "libertate" lipsită de etică, echitate şi de cele mai multe ori, legalitate, evidenţiază faptul că doar o schimbare calitativă de proporțiile unei Revoluții mai poate adresa problema tragerii la răspundere (penală!) a noii burghezii post-ceaușiste...
A sosit vremea Ocupării agenților și agențiilor Complexului Militar-Industrial şi Renaționalizării activelor acaparate de soții și soțiile, de fiii şi fiicele, de cumnații, finii, verișoarele și nepoatele sistemului de sorginte mafiotă, în vederea democratizării economiei inechităților flagrante și înlocuirii minusculei cleptocrații corporatiste neoliberale cu o democraţie participativă, deteritorializată şi generatoare de sustenatibilitate şi eficiență Paretiană!
E timpul să ne eliberăm de reflexele consumeriste condiționate, care ne-au fost inoculate subtil de către agențiile corporatismului, pentru redobândirea calităţii de cetățeni ai societății civile, capabili să-și negocieze nemijlocit viitorul lor şi al întregii planete!
A sosit momentul reflecției critice prin renaţionalizarea sistemului de educaţie, privatizat şi transformat din incubatoare de cercetare în copiatoare industriale de diplome academice contra cost. Doar perfecţionarea continuă a cunoştinţelor teoretice dobândite acum va permite edificarea unei societăţi meritocratice, în care să fie încurajate valorile integrităţii, solidarităţii și respectului pentru drepturile celorlalți!
Mult succes!
19 Feb 2012
The victim
Romania, the Holocaust, and the literature of a country in crisis
by Philip Ó Ceallaigh
In 2007, when my first book was published in translation in Romanian, I was interviewed by the Bucharest daily Cotidianul. I answered the usual questions about how I had come to live in Romania, what my influences were, and so on. I was surprised a couple of days later to see my face on the cover of the paper above the words – “Philip Ó Ceallaigh: ‘Romanians believe the lie that they are victims of history.’”
My girlfriend phoned to tell me the interview was on the internet, and comments were coming in. She sounded alarmed.
I got online, and there they were, piling up by the minute. Almost all the comments were hostile, and some went so far as to suggest that I should be located and beaten up.
I had touched a nerve, and not only by suggesting that Romanians were not victims of history. Asked about Romanian literature, I remarked that I had been impressed by an interwar writer called Mihail Sebastian, not realizing that Sebastian had been the subject of a polemic in Romania since the publication in 1996 of his wartime journals, which revealed much about the involvement of the country’s intellectual class in the rise of Romanian fascism.
The polemic came at a particularly awkward moment for Romania, just as it was trying to shake off its communist past. Romanian communism had been a particularly nationalistic phenomenon, with its grand building and engineering projects, an independent line from Moscow, programmes for population expansion that produced a ban on contraception and abortion, and rehashed fascist notions about eugenics that consigned the destitute and the handicapped to incarceration in horrific state institutions.
After the fall of communism, the literature of that period fell into disgrace. Interwar writers, preeminent among them Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran (who emigrated to the United States and France, respectively), became the new Romanian literary heroes. Communism was the source of all evil in Romanian society, therefore the period before it must have been better.
Then Mihail Sebastian’s wartime diaries turned up in Israel, were dusted off, and published. Eliade, Cioran, and others appeared in a new light, as fascist supporters and ideologues, and the fact had to be confronted that it wasn’t the Russians who had introduced totalitarianism to the Romanian nation.
The country was being asked to come to terms with its fascist past and its communist past all at once, and something had to give. It was simpler to leave the nationalist conception of Romania as a great and suffering nation intact and to dismiss Sebastian as a traitor.
Those who argued that Sebastian’s diaries had to be faced, such as the Jewish-Romanian writer Norman Manea – who was, as a child, deported with his family to a Romanian internment camp – became traitors by extension. Or else ignorant foreigners. “Yalta! Yalta! Yalta!” screamed one of the online comments, in reaction to my interview. Had I not heard of Yalta, the crucifixion of the Romanian nation?
Another thing I mentioned in the interview was that I had started to translate into English a 1934 novel by Sebastian called For Two Thousand Years. Though set in the 1920s and ’30s, it struck me as more real, more explanatory of the mess of contemporary Romania, and its mentality, than anything I could find that had recently been written. Through it, I felt both past and present come into focus. I could see how the past made the present.
This, I felt, was what the literature of a country in crisis must be about.
II
For Two Thousand Years opens in the 1920s. Jewish university students are being attacked and beaten by other students. The nameless young narrator, a Jew, briefly joins, then abandons, a group of fellow Jewish students who have organized to fight back so they can continue to study. It is not being beaten up that he fears. He fears surrendering his freedom through identification with a group. And he fears that he finds the psychology of victimhood far too attractive.
He neither wishes to deny nor be defined by his Jewishness. But he lives in a society determined to define him by this alone.
The narrator describes a meeting with Abraham Sulitzer, a travelling salesman of books, on a train. Sulitzer cuts a ridiculous figure at first, and the narrator is eager not to be identified with him, as a fellow Jew, before others in the compartment. Sulitzer smiles indulgently, saying: “No need to upset yourself, young fellow. The Jew is a man with baggage. Many troubles, and baggage to match.” The narrator now feels ashamed of how cowardly he has been. He buys a book from Sulitzer that turns out to be a history of massacres. Sebastian’s narrator states:
I was reading in Șapsa Zwi’s history [...] that in 1646, tens of thousands of Jews were butchered in Poland and Russia, hundreds of villages and towns were wiped from the face of the earth, and while the towns were burning, while the spilled blood was pouring like lava from a still active volcano, in the synagogues, among flames and blood, they discoursed over Talmudic texts.The early part of the book is the story of the narrator’s own personal suffering as a result of antisemitism. Later on, the narrator attempts to understand antisemitism as a phenomenon. He endeavours to see himself – and other Jews – through antisemitic eyes. He is able to distinguish those for whom beating Jews was a student sport from those who clothe violence in ideology.
The Iron Guard, also known as the Legionary Movement – in the ascendent when For Two Thousand Years was published – mixed religious mysticism with fascist politics. According to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Legion’s founder, history and politics was the realm of sin. The individual could transcend the world through sacramental acts of violence that would bring about the purification and rebirth of the Romanian nation. Guardist thinking is presented in For Two Thousand Years in the persona of the young idealogue Stefan Pârlea (clearly based on the young E.M. Cioran, a friend of Sebastian’s, who would become one of post-war Paris’s favourite nihilists). Pârlea requires a conflagration to transform the nation, with Jews as collateral damage: “Any act of violence is good. ‘Down with jidani’ is idiotic, agreed! But what does it matter? The point is to shake the country up a bit. Begin with the Jews – if there’s no other way. But finish higher up, with a general conflagration, with an earthquake that spares nothing.”
Yet the Holocaust approaches quietly as well, heralded by friends who will calmly discuss the “Jewish problem” with the narrator. In the last pages, a conversation between the narrator and his friend Vieru takes place, and this is worth quoting at length. Vieru portrays antisemitism at its most refined and rational, in discourse with the Jew himself. Vieru has asked the narrator why he doesn’t see him in town any more, and the narrator replies that he’s sick of hearing exterminators of Jews declaiming at every streetcorner.
[Vieru] reflected for a moment, hesitating, a little embarrassed, as though he wished to change the subject. Then [...] he addressed me, in that determined manner people have when they want to get something off their chests.
–You’re right. Yet there is a Jewish problem, and it needs to be solved. One million eight hundred thousand Jews is intolerable. If it were up to me, I’d try to eliminate several hundred thousand.
[...]He noticed my distress and hurried to explain.
–Let’s be clear. I’m not antisemitic. [...] But I’m Romanian. And, as such, all that is opposed to me is a threat to me. There is an aggravating Jewish spirit. I must defend myself against it. In the press, in finance, in the army, everywhere I feel its pressure. If the body of our state were strong, it would hardly bother me. But it’s not strong. It’s sinful, corruptible and weak. And this is why I must fight against the agents of corruption.
I said nothing for a few seconds, which he had not expected. I could have responded, out of politeness, to keep the conversation going, but I failed to.
–Do I surprise you?
–No, you depress me. You see, I know two kinds of antisemites. Straightforward antisemites – and antisemites with arguments. I manage to get along with the first kind, because everything between us is clear-cut. But with the other kind it’s hard.The narrator asserts that he cannot hope to shake Vieru’s intuition that Jews are a threat. Vieru, still convinced he is not an antisemite, assures his friend that “with Jews like you” he has no problem. The narrator knows, however, that when the conflagration comes, no fine discrimination will be made.
One day, the narrator is walking past boys selling newspapers in the street. “Death to the jidani!” shouts one of the boys:
I usually walk calmly by, because it’s an old, almost familiar cry. This time I stopped in surprise, as if I had for the first time understood what these words actually meant. It’s strange. These people are talking about death, and about mine specifically. And I walk casually by them, thinking of other things, only half-hearing.
III
In For Two Thousand Years, Vieru claims that there were “one million eight hundred thousand Jews in Romania.” The correct figure in 1930, around the period when the conversation was set, was about 750,000, out of a total population of 18 million. This figure probably fell by tens of thousands through the 1930s as many Jews fled in the face of repression.
It is estimated that over 300,000 Romanian Jews perished in the Holocaust.
The fates of Romanian Jews varied from region to region. Approximately 135,000 died in Auschwitz and other German concentration camps following transportation from the area of northern Transylvania ceded, under German pressure, to Hungarian administration. Some 150,000 Jews in eastern Romania were transported en masse to internment camps to Transnistria (the name given to the area of Ukraine under Romanian administration, between the Dniestr and the Bug), where as many as 100,000 died of hunger, disease and cold, or were massacred by Romanian troops. The Jews of Bucharest and southern Romania, less numerous and less ghettoized than eastern Jews, were not deported, though they were exposed to random acts of violence, and repressive measures intensified into 1942.
In Romania the killing began as a series of pogroms. With the seizure of power by the fascist Iron Guard in September 1940, violence broke out across the country, from individual beatings and murders to mass executions. These actions were usually provoked by the state, which would then express its concern that things had got out of hand. In the words of General Ion Antonescu, the country’s military leader, in December 1940:
I will not protect jidani who are for the most part guilty of the sufferings which have been brought upon this country. But I cannot tolerate, as the Head of Government, acts which compromise the peaceful and orderly redressing which I am conducting, and which is undermined by the casual acts committed daily by some people who do not realize the harm they are doing to the country and the Legionary Movement.In June 1941, a pogrom, one of the most savage of the Second World War, occurred in the eastern Romanian city of Iași, though the involvement of the Romanian state makes it hard to say where a pogrom ends and a programme of extermination begins. On June 21, General Antonescu ordered the evacuation of all Jews in the region bordering the Soviet Union to a concentration camp in the interior of the country. Iași had a population of about 100,000 people, of which about half were Jews. (Though Jews made up about 4 percent of the Romanian population, they were particularly numerous in the cities and towns of the east.) Many of those rounded up in Iași were shot down in mass executions, corralled into the courtyard of the city’s police station. Over 2,500 died of suffocation or dehydration in the train wagons into which they were packed, which shuffled for days in the summer heat between local stations. Estimates of the total number of victims of the violence oscillates between 3,000 and 14,000, but most tend towards the higher figure.
When Romania joined the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, further massacres of Jews occurred throughout the east of the country.
If the Germans were satisfied with the enthusiasm of their Romanian allies for slaughtering Jews, they did have reservations about the style in which operations were conducted. A report from July 1941 by an SS unit stationed in Romania expressed German dissatisfaction under the headings of efficiency and hygiene:
The Romanians act against the Jews with no preconceived plan. Nobody would have anything to say concerning the very many executions of Jews, if their technical preparation, as well as they way in which they are carried out, were not lacking. The Romanians leave executed people to lie where they fall, without burying them. Einsatzkommando has demanded that the Romanian police proceed in a more orderly fashion in this respect.Romanian troops fought with the Germans in what is now Ukraine. Transnistria, which included Odessa, was at this point ceded to Romanian administration. While the Germans pressed the front eastwards, Romanian troops were given the task of concluding the siege of Odessa, home to over half of Transnistria’s pre-war Jewish population of 300,000.
The Romanians had trouble taking Odessa, and the Jews were blamed. We have this from Antonescu himself, in a letter to Wilhelm Filderman, the president of a Jewish organization. Responding to Filderman’s appeal for leniency towards the Jews of southern Romania, Antonescu noted: “Your Jews, as Soviet commissars, push the Soviet troops in the Odessa region with unparalleled fury, as Russian prisoners testify, towards a pointless massacre, just to cause us losses.”
In October 1941, Odessa fell, leading to one of the greatest massacres of a civilian population of the Second World War. Many thousands of Jews were simply assembled and machine-gunned to death.
The historian Iulius Fischer estimates that – in addition to the over 87,000 Jews and 25,000 Gypsies from Romania that died following deportation to Transnistria – 130,000 local Jews were killed in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that “the Romanians killed, in the area of Odessa and Golta, 150,000 local Jews... No other country, with the exception of Germany, participated in the massacre of Jews on such a massive scale.”
It was only the turning of the tide of war against the axis that caused Antonescu to stall the implementation of Romania’s solution to its Jewish problem. Sebastian’s personal diaries record in detail the build-up to the war and its early years as he watches his friends, both fascist sympathisers and others, disassociate themselves from him. He records his bitterness as these friends try to drift back as the tide of war changes. He watches fascists reinvent themselves as socialists, and invite him to rejoin the writer’s union, from which he had been expelled.
IV
It must have been a lonely and dispiriting thing to have published a book as calm and thoughtful as For Two Thousand Years in 1934. Sebastian’s attempt to see through to the heart of a problem was misunderstood and rejected.
And it must have been a lonely thing to be a Jewish intellectual in a climate where virtually the entire intellectual class – Sebastian’s friends and colleagues – were at best the reasonable antisemites of the kind Vieru is depicted as being. Possibly out of loyalty, or vanity, or from a generous belief that dialogue was possible with the prejudiced, Sebastian asked the charismatic Nae Ionescu, who was mentor to many young writers – Sebastian, Cioran and Mircea Eliade among them – to write an introduction to For Two Thousand Years. Ionescu’s introduction – which Sebastian allowed to be published – blames antisemitism on the Jews, because they insist on being a separate nation:
When someone keeps themselves apart from you because he looks down on you, because he considers you beneath him and not worthy of being in contact with him, there’s a natural reaction: you’ll start to see him as an enemy or, at any rate, basically different to you. The process of separation begun by the Jew is strengthened by others.The Jews, says Nae Ionescu, believe themselves to be the chosen people because from them the Messiah will come. The Messiah has already come, says Ionescu. The Jew denies Christ “because pride has put scales on your eyes.”
If Nae Ionescu was able to perceive anything pertinent about Romania’s own crisis in For Two Thousand Years, he never let on.
Sebastian understood the mind of the antisemite so well – in its refined, intellectual and metaphysical expressions – because he was himself a product of the intellectual climate from which antisemitism sprang. He was a follower of Nae Ionescu, contributing to Ionescu’s newspaper Cuvântul even as it veered to the right. Sebastian understood nationalist ideas because as a young man he had been deeply attracted to them, and only withdrew from them when he saw where fascist ideology could lead. He must have been conscious that, had he not been a Jew, he might even have become an antisemitic ideologue himself.
V
In 1947, Saul Bellow’s novel The Victim was published. It is an illuminating study of the psychology of victimhood. The story concerns a man called Levanthal, who is doing his best to ignore his Jewishness and what others make of it, and trying to get on and make a living, like everyone else in New York. The story becomes that of his relentless harassment by a man from his past called Allbee, whom he can hardly remember but who bears him a terrible grudge. While we initially assume that the victim the title refers to is Levanthal, by the end of the story it is clear that the victim is in fact Allbee. Allbee’s relentless harassment of Leventhal is rooted in Allbee’s conviction that he is the injured party, in his frustration and disappointment with his own life, in his refusal to see his own failings. The novel is a study of Allbee’s sense of victimhood.
The story culminates with Allbee’s attempt to kill himself. Allbee breaks into Levanthal’s home one night and tries to gas himself using the oven. Levanthal awakes in time to avert disaster. Years later the two men meet, and Allbee explains that he never even meant to hurt Levanthal on that night. “I wasn’t thinking of you,” says Allbee. “When you turn against yourself, nobody else means anything to you either.”
Thirteen years, and an ocean, and the Holocaust, separate Bellow’s The Victim from Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years, but Allbee’s words can be placed beside those of Stefan Pârlea (E.M. Cioran), the authentic voice of the conflagration to come:
I asked Pârlea:
–Aren’t you afraid it’s going to end again with cracked skulls and broken windows? Don’t you ask yourself if it’s going to end with an antisemitic disturbance, and stop there? Don’t you think calling this thing of yours a “revolution” is using too new a word for such an ancient wretchedness?
He frowned, and answered.
–There’s a drought, and I’m waiting for the rain to come...
With hail, storm, lightning, as long as it comes. One or two will survive the deluge. Nobody will survive drought. If the revolution demands a pogrom, then give it a pogrom. It’s not for me, or you, or him. It’s for everybody. Whose time is up and whose isn’t, I don’t care, even if I myself die...The narrator of For Two Thousand Years attends a meeting at which Pârlea speaks. At one point the audience breaks into a chant: “The foreigners and the jidani/ All suck us dry, always suck us dry”. The sentiment, though crude and passionate, can be set beside Vieru’s refined arguments, and the comments by Antonescu in the previous section. All exhibit the same underlying sentiment and subscribe to a narrative of victimhood. That the suffering and failure of the Romanian nation is due to the machinations of Jews and other minorities, and foreigners. The sentiment is also echoed in the words of the writer and philosopher Mircea Eliade, recorded in Sebastian’s diaries, on the subject of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto: “The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is a Jewish resistance. Only Yids are capable of the blackmail of putting women and children in the front line, to take advantage of the Germans’ sense of scruple.”
The Romanian national narrative demands that the Romanian nation be a victim. The perpetration of the Holocaust in the name of this myth has never upset this narrative because it has never been confronted. Romania, goes the narrative, came out of the Second World War yet again as a victim, this time of the Yalta agreement and a political system imposed from without. The peculiarly nationalistic features of Romanian communism are never remarked. Despite Romania’s unique independence within the Warsaw pact (no Soviet troops were stationed on Romanian soil), Russia was, according to the narrative, responsible for Romania’s failure during these years to achieve greatness, and presumably also for the continuation of Stalinism in Romania three decades after the death of Stalin.
“Romania will regain its senses when the problem of responsibility is posed in earnest,” wrote Sebastian in his diaries, at the end of the war.
VI
With the end of the war, people who had looked through Sebastian when they passed him in the street – for six years – would now cross the road to shake his hand. One after another, fascists turned communist overnight. People “rehabilitated” themselves. “There is a frightening spirit of conformism,” noted Sebastian, “new in its orientation but old in its psychological structure.”
Tom Gallagher writes in Romania: Theft of a Nation:
Nationalism, after an interlude of Soviet-sponsored internationalism, was rehabilitated and tailored to suit communist needs; the traditional viewpoint that freedom consisted essentially of freedom from foreign rule and not the right of the individual to dissent from the government or majority opinion proved extremely useful... A new generation of intellectuals promoting implacable forms of nationalism was groomed by the state, and sometimes pre-1945 chauvinists were able to revive their careers by preaching the catechism of nationalism.It is not hard to imagine Nae Ionescu, had he lived (he died in 1940) reinventing himself.
Mircea Eliade went abroad and made a career as a philosopher of religion, though his later years were shadowed by revelations of his fascist past. A reading from Eliade’s work was given at his funeral in 1986 by his university colleague Saul Bellow. Sebastian’s diaries were first published in Romania in the 1990s, and in English – by a Chicago publisher - in 2000. In the same year Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel that contained the character Radu Grielescu, a disciple of Nae Ionescu and participant in the Bucharest pogrom, who turns up in Chicago as refugee academic, looking for an influential Jewish friend to be the instrument of his rehabilitation.
The process of rehabilitation in Romania was repeated in 1989. Communists reinvented themselves as democrats, and seized the state’s economic assets in the transition to a capitalist economy. The old security apparatus – Securitate – was mostly left in place. This institution, which was responsible for killing, torturing, imprisoning, and persecuting the citizens of the communist state, was not disbanded. Nobody was prosecuted. Though its archives were made public in 1999, access has remained problematic and the victims of the Securitate regularly find that their files have been tampered with and information deleted.
Communists became patriots. Some of Ceaușescu’s circle of poets, such as Corneliu Vadim Tudor, and other intellectuals, turned up after the death of their patron as the most virulent nationalist politicians. Meanwhile, the intellectual class of the country, post-1989, was not made up of dissidents and those who had been forced into exile, but by those who were intellectuals under Ceaușescu.
The playwright I.L. Caragiale said: “Political parties in the European sense of the word, formed by traditions, or by new or more recent class interests, and where programmes are based on principles or ideas, do not exist in Romania.” He was describing Romania before World War I, but his words equally describe the interbellum period, and even the situation that prevails today.
Mihail Sebastian, writing in the 1930s, in the wake of the controversy provoked by the publication of For Two Thousand Years, recorded the confusion of a French visitor who noted two extremist enemies engaged in an amiable conversation. The friends explain that they are just friends, and such contact does not oblige or compromise them in any way. “How does it not oblige you?” asks the Frenchman. “The slightest gesture compromises one!”
The Frenchman is wrong, says Sebastian: “Such people are not committed to anything: neither to hate, nor love, nor life, nor death. No matter what they do, what they say, there always remains, in some corner of their consciousness, a smile that annuls what they’ve done, retracts what they’ve said. They’re free people. Perhaps the only free people in Europe, because they’re not bound by their acts, or committed to their ideas.”
VII
In a nation where ideas have no real purchase, the nation is the only enduring dream. And if the nation that is great in its dreams finds itself debased in its waking hours, it must resolve the contradiction by continuing to perceive itself as a victim. The problem of responsibility must never be posed.
The Holocaust does not fit into the narrative of victimhood, and so it is as though it never occurred. In post-communist Romania, the dream of the nation does not permit acknowledgment.
In the interbellum period, the dream of the nation was projected into the future. It was a greatness that was yet to come. Now, in a process of mythologization, the dream is projected back into the past. The fascist interbellum, for modern Romania, has become a fictional land.
In this parallel universe, before the intervention of the Russians, Romania was on its way to becoming a mature and prosperous European nation, and possibly an economic superpower. Romania was the breadbasket of Europe, and an oil exporter. The image of interbellum Bucharest as the “Little Paris,” a wealthy and fashionable capital with a cultured middle class, is firmly established in the collective imagination of contemporary Romania.
This image is partially true. Romania came out of the First World War with its area and population doubled. The national dream of a Greater Romania, with all Romanians living in a unified state, was realized. With this expanded internal market and the exploitation of oilfields north of Bucharest, sudden wealth flooded the capital, which had been a small Balkan town only decades previously. Whole neighbourhoods of futuristic Art Deco houses were constructed in the area towards the aerodrome, their streets named after the nation’s aviators. It must have been a heady time for a nation so young, with a romantic conception of its destiny, wanting to test its limits.
And yet, just beyond the city, the mass of the population – the peasantry – lived in conditions that had changed little since the Middle Ages. The large Gypsy population had been released from slavery only decades before. And in all the major cities in the newly integrated territories, ethnic Romanians were a minority. The urban centres of Transylvania and Bukovina were more Hungarian and German. The Jewish population was concentrated in urban areas, particularly in the East, an area where they were more likely to have Yiddish or Russian as their language than Romanian.
The intellectual and political life of the nation during the interbellum years was crippled by its obsession with the problem of minorities, and particularly the Jewish problem. The period now romanticized in the popular imagination as Romania’s golden age was one in which, as Tom Gallagher writes, Romania “proved incapable of providing adequate defence, civil order, a reliable system of justice, a reasonably equitable taxation system, and a framework for industry and commercial activity. The national interest was reduced to safeguarding territorial gains and realising the historic Romanian mission.”
VIII
“...If you don’t stand up to the real conditions of life,” says a character in a Saul Bellow story, “and stand up to them with strength and shrewdness, you are condemned to live by one poor fiction or another, of which you are the commonplace interpreter.”
Romania today is choked by poor fictions. Businessmen masquerade as politicians and compete for influence through their control of the media. Political life, seen through this prism, is a series of intrigues and scandals and accusations, focused on personalities rather than issues, as repetitive and as void of ideas as any soap opera. Wealth, politics and the media is controlled by ex-communists, or the children of those who were well-placed under the old system. Those who dominated their fellow citizens under dictatorship are now patriots of the new capitalist order. Most convenient for the rulers is the idea that the dictatorship demanded complicity and conformity, and that since everyone complied and conformed no further examination is necessary. Nobody is to blame.
This is the point at which the work of a writer such as Mihail Sebastian, and a book such as For Two Thousand Years, becomes a rare and important challenge to the dominant narratives by which a country lives.
It is interesting to contrast the work of Sebastian and that of Eliade, a philosopher and historian of religion, and considered one of Romania’s greatest authors of fiction. Eliade’s approach is otherworldly, romantic, mystical. Real places, such as Bucharest, are seen through a lens of fantasy.
Eugène Ionesco, once, mocking the style of a novel Eliade had set in India (the author had studied in Calcutta for several years) joked that Eliade had not set foot on the subcontinent at all, but had been holed up in his attic at home in Bucharest the whole time. Yet, the joke could be extended to cover Eliade’s depiction of Romania in the 1930s, as represented in his fiction. In an important sense, he wasn’t really there. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iron Guard as it gained influence in the late 1930s, yet his fiction is imbued with more personal and mystical preoccupations. Eliade emigrated to America after the war. It is very possible that (like Cioran) he was ashamed of having fooled around with fascism. But we don’t know for sure, as he went very quiet about his past.
Just as we don’t know if he ever felt ashamed of having turned his back on his old friend Mihail Sebastian. He stopped seeing and speaking to Sebastian as Romania became an ever-more obliging ally of Nazi Germany. We only know that this happened from Sebastian’s diaries.
The notion that fiction is an aesthetic or spiritual exercise that has nothing to do with the real world, and steers clear of challenging the dominant fictions, is well established in Romania.
IX
In late 2010 I attended a public interview with the Romanian-born writer Herta Müller, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier that year. Her work is an unflinching portrayal of life under communism in Romania. On the day the prize was announced, I went around Bucharest looking to buy a copy of one of her books. I could find not a single copy.
Now, on a winter evening, she was filling a theatre and being interviewed by her publisher, Gabriel Liiceanu, a philosopher and arguably the country’s foremost intellectual.
Until she was permitted to leave Romania in 1987, Müller was a victim of relentless Securitate intimidation. But Liiceanu missed the chance to discuss with Müller an issue she has repeatedly raised publicly: that the structures of a dictatorship are still in place. That Romania’s communist security apparatus (the Securitate) was never dismantled. That it simply changed its name and employs the same people (or pays them generous pensions). That Securitate files on those it spied upon and harassed are routinely altered and destroyed, and that access to them is obstructed. That nobody involved in the communist party or the secret police has ever been prosecuted for crimes against their fellow citizens (just as there has never been any guilty verdict ever brought in a corruption case against a high-level politician or businessman since the fall of the dictatorship).
Gabriel Liiceanu, whose career as an intellectual began under communism, had another problem. He didn’t like Müller’s suggestion that Romania’s literary and intellectual class were spineless conformists, and reminded Müller that, under the dictatorship, the only political engagement permitted was active membership of the communist party or reproduction of their slogans. There’s another form of political engagement, Liiceanu argued, and this was the refusal to use the prescribed language imposed on a society by its oppressors. “Some of us were naïve enough to believe we were politically engaged,” Liiceanu told Müller. “Now we learn from you that this way of not prostituting language was insufficient.”
Müller replied that minding your words is not dissidence, and contrasted Romania to other Soviet satellites in which writers and intellectuals were central to dissident movements. In Romania dissidence was confined to a small number of cases, and “those who stuck their necks out were left on their own.”
Liiceanu: But about this kind of engaged writer, who did not dirty his words [engage in official propaganda], you once used the word Mitläufer, “one who goes along with the rest, shoulder-to-shoulder with authority.”The argument here about the meaning of the word Mitläufer has its origin in a public dispute between Müller and Mircea Cărtărescu, widely seen as Romania’s greatest living writer (Liiceanu is Cărtărescu’s publisher as well as Müller’s). In an interview with a German paper, Cărtărescu had said that under communism, writers had enjoyed a certain day-to-day stability. Müller, later asked by a Romanian journalist about these comments, noted with some bitterness that she had never felt such stability, and indeed had feared for her life, and used the word Mitläufer to describe the class of writers who went about their business seemingly untroubled by the nature of the society they lived – and were able to publish their work.
Müller: If you’ll allow me to interpret the word... “Mitläufer” doesn’t mean to go along with authority. It means to keep your head down, so you don’t have problems. Not shoulder-to-shoulder with authority.
In the prose Cărtărescu published in the 1980s, nobody queues for food, shivers in their apartments during winter, has an illegal abortion or snitches on their neighbours to the secret police. Cărtărescu’s Bucharest is, like Eliade’s, a magical sort of place. We can’t look to Cărtărescu to know what Bucharest was really like in the last degenerate days of Romanian communism any more than we can look to Eliade to see the environment that created the Holocaust.
Liiceanu : Do you believe those who – I repeat – who respected language, didn’t degrade it, who never adopted the official way of speaking are “those who kept their heads down”? Don’t you believe that every book – each decent, good, wonderful book – that was born in that time was a way of saying “no” to the world we lived in?
Müller: No. It was a way of avoiding the subject. I’m not blaming anyone – only those who actually produced literature “to order” and shouted slogans – but what you want me to praise seems insufficient to me.
Liiceanu: I didn’t want you to praise. I wanted you not to blame.
Müller: It was a way of remaining honest with yourself, but it was insufficient, it wasn’t an act against the dictatorship. It was something personal – so as not to get your hands dirty. But it wasn’t anything that bothered Ceaușescu’s clique and the secret police, who were all around. I think if a lot of people had bothered the dictatorship, it wouldn’t have been able to have become ever more sinister.
X
It is right that the nature and aim of literature should be debated. And it is a healthy thing that the notion of culture as a form of décor - something that can be enjoyed by those with good taste even when times are hard - be challenged by the idea that writing must make a stand against dominant fictions.
What is troubling is that in a land dominated by lies – Bellow’s “poor fictions” – literature that acknowledges the real conditions of life, that stands up to them with strength and shrewdness, is seen as a threat. The country’s literary and intellectual establishment, in the face of writers like Sebastian and Müller, run for cover. The debate sputters out when it has hardly begun.
In the days after the public interview, Liiceanu wrote publicly that his role as host and gentleman had prevented him from challenging Müller. Then he proceeded to do so in print, arguing that her career as a critic of the regime only dated from the moment she had left the country. Cărtărescu, who writes a newspaper column, had already expressed his outrage at being represented by Müller as solely to blame, as he put it, for the crimes of communism. And the country’s leading literary critic (and an early mentor to Cărtărescu), Nicolae Manolescu, wrote that Müller had insulted the Romanian nation:
Not only were writers thrown in the lion’s den of her judgments about her colleagues, but the whole Romanian nation was too... Her message is an unrestrained criticism of the behaviour of the Romanian people in the years of communist dictatorship and the lack of sense of civic responsibility displayed by writers.It was unanimous; the brave struggle of all those who had built their careers as men of literature and ideas under communism – the same intellectual elite that prevails today – had been dishonoured.
That Sebastian and Müller contest the elaborate fiction that is Romanian nationalism is complicated by the fact that they belong to national minorities, and by the prejudice that they stand outside the nation and are opposed to it. They have betrayed the country by refusing it the role of victim, by exposing its alibis as false. What Sebastian and Müller ultimately pose is the question of individual responsibility.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s most recent book is The Pleasant Light of Day, a collection of stories. He lives in Bucharest.
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