“I think the Russians wanted to slap the cheek of Ceausescu national-communism here with a cruel slap”
A thousand or so people die after the fall of the two.
Yes, after the departure of the two and after the fall of official communism, after the departure of the helicopter, between December 22, 1989, between the abdication of Ceausescu by the departure of the helicopter, until December 25 in the evening, when they are shot in Târgoviște, because they are shot for Christmas. I think that the Russians wanted to slap the cheek of Ceausescu national-communism here with a cruel slap. That is, to shoot the national-communist leader at Christmas without giving him the chance to save him, when his immediate descendants are obviously close to Moscow’s interests and by political and ideological genealogy they are perhaps related to Gorbachevism, although they came from the old Soviet system, it is clear that something happened here.
Communism, however, was definitively going down the drain. It was a major geopolitical arrangement with the agreement of the Americans, a transition to political pluralism in all these countries and a renunciation of abusive, post-Stalinist state communism.
“All the countries that had been Orthodox-Soviet-Communist enjoy the national-democratic emancipation. We are entering a kind of rush”
Communism with a human face, as Ion Iliescu wanted it.
Communism with a human face in which to continue to control. No one believed that a year later, in 1991, the red flag, the flag of the Soviet Communist Party, would be lowered from the dome of the Kremlin and the tricolor flag of the Russian Federation would be raised, horizontally.
After that, in the ’90s, we are witnessing national, democratic-national emancipations of the former Soviet colonies, outside of us, and we are in a confusion, in an extraordinary confusion. Because we were national-communists. We didn’t have Soviet bases, we were anti-Soviet, almost with the permission of the Securitate, but on the other hand we were not allowed to travel to the West. In this situation, Romania is in a triple state of confusion, I would say. There are no dissidents or resisters of a liberal-democratic party in power, as in the Czech Republic, in Czechoslovakia, as in the GDR. Nor are there reformed Marxist leaders, reformed in the Western sense, Eurocommunists, as they were in Budapest and, in a way, in Sofia as well. So all the countries that had been Orthodox-Soviet-Communist enjoy National Democratic emancipation. We are entering a kind of fever, a kind of total insecurity. Who are we? Well, did Ceausescu leave anti-Soviet and Ion Iliescu comes pro-Soviet? Did those children die in vain? Do we bring the king? No. Confusion, a total confusion of values, in which we are no longer national enough, communist enough and Western enough.
Emil Hurezeanu, in May 1990, in the University Square in Bucharest. Photo source: Free Europe Archive
“Vatra Românească and Greater Romania are the memories of the defunct communism-Ceauses”
In this confusion of values, in this ideological confusion, movements, the precursors of what we see today, the Romanian hearth, the PRM, which have the same vein, caught on in the 90s.
They were a kind of agents of rehabilitation of Ceausism. They were not today’s sovereignists. Today’s sovereignty is at the end of the Western globalist experience. Today’s sovereignist is no longer against the Warsaw Pact and against the CAER, which no longer exists. And it is not even the one who suffered because of them, as a prisoner of the Soviet colony. It is the French or German Westerner, who votes for the National Front or for the AfD and who is unhappy that his country has lost being part of the free world, of Europe, of NATO, that too many sanctions have been imposed on it at the request or at the imperative of Brussels.
They are isolationists.
To be precise. They are not the same as the national-communists, including post-communists. Vatra Românească and România Mare are the memories of the defunct communism-Ceausescu.
And of the Securitate.
Yes, of the Securitate, which was national-communist. But look how it is: the Securitate is privatized, the first, it enters very well into the economic circuits of privatization. Just like the Social Democratic Party, which at the beginning had a kind of Ceausescu-communist lineage by force of things, it is the one that makes the main privatizations. Even today, certain leading Social Democrats complain to us that the Bolojan Government intends to sell our large companies, the jewels of the state crown, through minority packages, in such a way as to bankrupt our country. But I would remind some of the PSD – humbly, that I don’t want to engage in provocative internal politics now: “But weren’t you the pioneers of questionable privatizations?” I’m not saying fraudulent, because for the ordinary world to which I belong, all privatizations could have been fraudulent if they did not have good results. But I believe that not all privatizations were fraudulent, some were questionable, in some commissions were collected, but thank God!, there were privatizations and Romania was part of the orbit of Western evolution, in which it is still today.
The sovereignty of the Italians, of the Romanians is mimetic. Of the French and Germans, maybe it’s not mimetic. That is, they don’t want migration anymore and they believe that modern society with the cancellation of religion, with too many Syrians on the streets, with precarious economic situations and with a certain obedience – exaggerated in their view – to the European Union and NATO have led to precariousness, impoverishment and reduction of national potential. France remembers its heyday, Germany, as if it had forgotten that it caused two world wars, also has pro-Soviet sympathies, moreover, the East Germans influence this through their pro-Russian appetite today. So they are tired of too much good and want a return to traditions, because, for one reason or another, they are against the abuses of the European Union.
But apart from a super-bureaucratization and redistribution in favor of the newcomers, perceived by the old incumbents as being to their detriment, the EU has done nothing but good. We, Romania, have paid several tens of billions of euros in contribution since 2007 and have collected several hundred billion euros. If we hadn’t been members of the European Union and NATO, we would have been a free atom, a bit like Bosnia-Herzegovina or Montenegro.
So, I wouldn’t go by the same names, because these fix certain clichés that I don’t think are still valid. So, the Securitate was privatized. The party gangsters, some paid, others did not pay, because communism did not have coherence and consistency in our country. It was more Ceauses-nationalist than communism, national-communism. Communism, in the Marxist sense, had disappeared, as proof that we were entering into the most reducible conflict with Gorbachev, the representative of the last generation of Marxist-Leninist and true communism, let’s say. Ceausescu told Honecker in ’89, in October, when he was going to the 40th anniversary of the creation of the GDR: “Let’s do something, because this is destroying communism.” And Honecker says, “Which one is this?” “Well, Gorbachev.” “Okay, isn’t Gorbachev the leader?” Honecker didn’t think there would be a few more days, not even two months, and he disappears from the scene, with all the party and his state, his artificial state. So Ceausescu was the last Mohican, the last defender of communism in Europe.
But this state of sovereignty, to which you refer today, and which concerns us, has to do with what many Romanians, voters, not political leaders, not militants, consider to be a kind of failure of the governments of liberal democracy in Romania. But I don’t think this failure is real. It is the same mechanism of the internal war, which has been grinding the Romanian political culture since its democratic beginnings, since Cuza’s time. Cuza was expelled, Ceausescu was shot, in another paradigm, in the communist one, they were expelled, glorified, the king was kicked out, then brought and so on. So we are in a phase of confusion of the domestic policy agenda, which is part of our genome, I would say. This is regulated, it has been regulated a lot by belonging to the European Union, that regulations, procedures, by belonging to NATO have appeared. What is really dangerous today is that this sovereignty is also fueled by the nostalgia of a flourishing country that emanated and radiated all over the world, where Ceausescu was someone in the world, while today our leaders no longer mean much. To top it off, we are not interested in the fact that 5 million Romanians have gone abroad and earn their living there. That this freedom for us is practiced most consistently and convincingly. I don’t agree with the departure of these people, we should all have been together, but that’s how it happens, it’s a form of freedom until another. Those people vote in the last elections with the sovereignists and consider that they are the additional victims of the West, beyond those who suffer today in Romania because they are controlled by multinationals, in turn controlled by the West. Or, here we have a problem of cognitive dissonance: on the one hand we enjoy all the benefits of the development and globalization of liberal democracy, on the other hand we detest it and elect it with 40% and, probably in power soon, a party that is against all the real strengths of Romania in recent decades.
“Extremist-fascist leaders have no right to citizenship”
This party has, as I said, extremist slippages of legionary origin, it has isolationist slippages, and through what it does, through the agenda, through public speeches, it only aligns itself with the Kremlin’s propaganda, because this sovereignty is actually an ideological current maintained by Moscow.
Yes, everything you say is perfectly true, to varying degrees. Moscow is facing this background of developments both in the West and in Romania, starting from the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which turns Moscow into a global actor, in addition to the military one in Ukraine, it is alienated, it is ostracized, there are sanctions. And of course it uses its means related to the secret services, to the evil advances of technology, it uses these benefits that it creates to undermine democratic systems. Of course, a country like Romania or Poland – there, but it went harder – neighboring countries in the area close to the Ukrainian war theater, were targets. And of course there are targets easier to hit than others. Although it would not be said that, in terms of the danger of isolationism, we are worse off than the French or the Germans.
It’s just that we are on the coast of Russia. We, if we leave the Euro-Atlantic line, have all the “chances” to reach Russia’s sphere of influence again. Here is the great fear.
I agree with you. We are on the coast of Russia and we are in another stage of evolution, prosperity, maturity of society.
When you say “of legionary origin”, it is exactly what we remember that resembles the most in terms of sequences. We remember their marches and slogans, the personalities of the legionaries. I think it is a referential that we cannot bypass and it is the last of this nature in freedom. Because the legionary movement appears in the relative freedom of the interwar period. And now, in a period of freedom of Western democracies, of which we are a part, when such mystical, sovereignist, “us and ours” scenes appear, we make an immediate connection with the legionary phase.
The fact that a leader who has votes, as you said, two million, before the annulment of the elections, glorifies Antonescu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu is reprehensible, he is punished according to the law, extremist-fascist leaders do not have the right to a fortress, that’s right, but in Romanian society there is also another perception. And it enters into a very interesting analysis of a first-hand American historian, Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, of Hungarian origin, a book he published at Stanford, in the ’80s, in which he states in black and white: “In the political history of Romania, only Iuliu Maniu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu were incorruptible to the end.” Attention! In the Legionary Movement, many deceived and self-deceived followers also saw a form of radical acceptance of a corrupt political system. This is preserved in today’s sovereignism, which uses this instrument of the rather ample discontent in Romanian society, namely that those who have led us so far are either incompetent or corrupt. Many of them. I wouldn’t say that. The results of Romania’s evolution are crushing. Romania is in the best phase of internal development and its external development. What is happening now, however, is that we have a war very close and that at the moment when we have three wars very close, in Ukraine, in Lebanon and in the Gulf – the last two with big, dramatic long-term consequences, of an economic nature, instead of focusing on what we have to do, to strengthen our societal hardcore, politically, nationally, we fragment it, we open the doors wide, long before we are given a Trojan horse as a gift. Maybe he already exists.
Together with Ana Blandiana at the conference “Herder Prize, in history and in memories”, held at the West University of Timișoara. Photo source: UVT
“There is a function of forgetfulness in humanity, which repeats its cyclical mistakes, reproduces the causes of great failures”
Because you talked about the reception that the legionary movement promised in the ‘30s.
In absolute terms, now cut off from effects, murders and everything else.
Now the word reception is not used, formulas like “we are taking our country back” are used. This narrative that we have been seeing at the level of political discourse, and public discourse for several years, is already making victims in society. A recent opinion poll, I think conducted by the Political Rating Agency, at the beginning of April, showed that almost 40% of Romanians would like to change the political system by any means. The formula “any means” can also make you think of the idea that we change the political regime even through violence, through a coup d’état. Surprisingly – or not – this 40% overlaps with the percentage of AUR’s voting intention.
In today’s societies, not only in our country, there is more hatred than concord. It’s a kind of recrudescence of abrupt, anti-civilized communication, a lack of patience and understanding for the other. All this also comes from the development of digital networks and from the fundamental change of communication between people, in schools, in relation to the past, to history – it is almost taken out of the circuit of our actuality and in all major countries. This hatred, combined with a state of dissatisfaction with our level of development towards others and the difference in the level of development, is carried by those who have the chance to work abroad. Romanians who go there, many of them in subordinate positions, because they go to unskilled jobs, have not found a place here. Others, very many, are well integrated. For example, in Germany, the largest number of foreign doctors are Romanians. Unfortunately for us, we don’t have them here. But that’s another story. The dissatisfaction also comes from the fact that we are not equal to France or Germany or Spain, in terms of standard of living. We can’t even be. Those who see it in their own skin come here twice a year and write to their relatives who remain in the country that they must vote for those who want to turn discontent and difference into a political weapon for change.
I would like, however, to know what the question of this Rating Agency looks like. Did he have the formula “by any means” in the question asked, or did most of the answers use this formula by themselves? I think it’s a fundamental question. Because if the question was “The situation is serious. It can and should be changed by any means?”, then the one who answers says “Yes”, he did not necessarily have the idea of change “by any means”. Could this method of changes by coup d’état have been induced preemptively, preventively, in order to raise an alarm signal that would prevent such a situation by the surveyor. Democracy also defends itself as best it can, but here the question is too transparent and I want to know if the question was asked like this, thrown into the world in this form – then the question is guilty. I am convinced, as I know the Romanian society, that it does not accept the consequences of a change through coup d’état or violence, no matter how much hatred, misunderstanding, anger, anger may fit in Romanian society, as well as in many others in the West.
But we know how the public can be manipulated through these social networks at a time. We saw what happened in November 2024, at the presidential elections. Through propaganda delivered day after day, one can reach a desired point.
There is, yes, a margin of influence, of radicalization through influence, through intoxication.
Together with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Photo source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
“There is a function of forgetfulness in humanity, which repeats its cyclical mistakes, reproduces the causes of great failures”
You settled in the West and became an important voice of Radio Free Europe. You, as voices of Free Europe, condemn communism, totalitarianism. The West, however, has not firmly condemned communism, its crimes, the evil committed by Russia/USSR in the last over 100 years. It did not do so either before 1989 or after that, as it did with the crimes of Nazism at the level of intellectual and public discourse. We see a different unit of measurement in condemning the crimes of the two regimes. How do you explain yourself?
The question has been with us for a long time, both in Romania and elsewhere. Strictly statistically, seeing things, as far as I know, I have also faced this question and the respective realities in the West and in the East. The actual condemnation, statistically speaking, of Nazism was more intense because the shock produced by the Holocaust was total given that the genocide or the Soviet Gulag system were less known in the West. Solzhenitsyn’s testimonies come late, in 1974.
After 1990 there are entire currents in French historiography, but also in American and German historiography, which take up this equation of the major dilemma of where it was, who made more mistakes, East or West, who killed more, who had more victims. I would say that in the meantime the crimes of communism have also been denounced, accounted for and known.
We have another problem, I think, with history and with the passage of time. The problem is that there is a function of forgetfulness in humanity, which repeats its cyclical mistakes, reproduces the causes of great failures. There is anti-Semitism again today, starting from new causes. Some say that through the wave of migration from Sub-Sahara and Arab countries, especially after 2011, to Germany, to other countries, the bearers of the new anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism also came. Others no longer see the solution except “by any means”. Because he imagines that democracy, by its calm and rotating way of discussing things and welcoming political leadership, does not do enough in depth. Especially since the transformations now in people’s lives, in the economy, in geopolitics are profound. And we only have the classic instruments of peace and prosperity to manage troubled depths. That is why many imagine that other means are needed.
I would say that it is the West that kept alive the importance, the weight of the truth in relation to the lie, then. In the West, truth was spoken more and practiced, while in the East, communist propaganda and mythology were based on lies, submission and despotism. That is, on the control of being and freedom. This has been said all the time in the West. Free Europe was an expression of postwar American institutions. Free Europe, when Ceausescu and Brezhnev and others went to Germany or America, saying: “But why don’t you abolish Free Europe, which is the only factor that interferes with relations between us? We have diplomatic relations, we have very good relations, why do these voices have to be?” – and Willy Brandt asked the Americans to take the post in Munich and take it to I don’t know where, in America – the Americans never wanted to.
The Americans have always had several lines of action. One of them was this: it is part of the American system, of Pax Americana that wants the populations beyond the Iron Curtain to know this. America never recognized the annexation of the Baltic countries, America knew who it was dealing with when it talked to Ceausescu and about Ceausescu, as proof that what happens in the 80s we all know, the clause of the most favored nation and I don’t know what and the big Western policies preferred peace, even if it was apparent, but peace existed through this monolithic agreement between the Russians and the Americans. Rather than endless civil wars against the background of the greatest nuclear power in the world, which was the Soviet power, and the encouragement of conflicts against communist regimes that, if the story of ’53, in the GDR, the story of ’56, in Budapest, that of ’68, in Prague, would not have evolved, it would have proliferated. It was a kind of repulsive agreement in the name of geopolitical reasons and in the name of peace that, if contradicted and violated by the interference of the two powers, leads to nuclear war and is the end of humanity. Because of this, there were worries and complexes of Westerners, especially of states, but the intellectual world, especially in France and Germany and in American universities, spoke from the beginning with the same harshness and openness about the crimes of communism and those of Stalinism. Of course, America could have done more, but America was doing it through governments. When he was dealing with a somewhat more enlightened leader, such as Gorbachev, he encouraged him in such a way that things evolved from ’85 to ’89 at the end of the Cold War. When they discovered Ceausescu, a leader, let’s say, more folkloric, nationalist, more than pro-Soviet, then they encouraged him, believing that any crack inside this Soviet archipelago is in favor of the West and against communism. Up to one point they were right, from one point onwards they were wrong.
At the microphone of Radio Free Europe, in Munich, during the show “Romanian Actuality”, together with Șerban Orescu and Neculai Constantin Munteanu. Photo source: Free Europe Archive
“At the microphone of Free Europe, the role was to talk about what is happening in Romanian politics”
You left the country in November 1982, as a Herder scholarship, a scholarship received on the recommendation of Ana Blandiana. Did you know that you will not be coming back, or did you make the decision while studying at the University of Vienna?
In my biotope, in Sibiu, as a student in Cluj, then a young nonconformist poet from a generation that was to assert itself, the eighties generation, being the first to debut in this generation and taken seriously by literary criticism, living in a city and in a world from which one departed more than one to which one came, like Sibiu and Transylvania, I had, through education and intellectual choices, completely different opinions and principles related to the development of society and people than those that worked around me. There was an underlying intention not to accept staying in such a system that could not be changed from within by people like me. Going to Vienna gave me this chance – which I would have used, if it was repeated in another form, even later.
I was 26 years old, I didn’t have a family, I was in a kind of more open spread, so to speak. Later I would have started a career, I would have entered into the small conformist understandings of the naturalization of normal life, if you did not want to go to prison or become a martyr. So it happened on time, I made this decision and finished my scholarship in Vienna.
Shortly after, you arrived in the central studio of Radio Free Europe in Munich. How?
My books and articles were quoted in the shows of Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca, as well as by acquaintances of mine, including Gelu Ionescu, hired not long ago by the new director of Free Europe, Vlad Georgescu. The fact that Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca knew what I was writing – not only poetry, but also theater reviews, film reviews, literary chronicles – and even the attitude led to my invitation to the radio by Vlad Georgescu, in March 1983. I had already been in Munich for a few months.
In the autumn of 1983 I was hired at Radio Free Europe, I went through all the purgatory of tests. At first, I collaborated with literary chronicles, I also did news in the morning, I did translations, so, at a certain point, I became one of them. They asked me where I wanted to work and I chose the show “Romanian News” from the beginning. I could have gone to the international political program or stayed in the cultural shows, although on that segment were the Parisian glories, Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca, the director Vlad Mugur, Gelu Ionescu and others. I chose “Romanian News” because I thought that I could do literary chronicles and cultural readings in Romania as well, but at the microphone of Free Europe the role was to talk openly about what is happening in Romanian politics, about the problems in your vision, about the possibilities for change and so on.
By escaping from the country – that, in fact, that was it, no?…
It was not an escape, it was a refusal to return. I left with a passport. I have great respect for those who escaped by crossing the Danube by swimming or crossing the border clandestinely.
… you became an enemy of the communist regime, and your employment at Radio Free Europe, the writing of almost a thousand anti-totalitarian articles. These articles came, I suppose, as an aggravating factor of your situation.
It was the main factor, not an aggravating one. It was gravity itself. For eight years, every night, with a few weeks of interruptions a year, I had ten minutes of vituperative texts against the Ceausescu regime.
In the conference you held at the West University of Timișoara, together with Ana Blandiana, on the topic “The Herder Prize, in memories and in history”, I found out that, following your departure from the country and your employment at Free Europe, the former management of Echinox magazine, who appointed you to receive the Herder scholarship, was also kicked out of the university.
From the university, no. They were academics, they kept their positions as assistants. However, other people were brought in to run Echinox magazine. One of the reasons, which they were told with half a voice, was this: that one of them, their chosen one, blasphemes the country every night, from the microphone of a hostile radio station – anti-Romanian, it was said at the time.
“I received death threats, death sentence threats”
What were the repercussions felt by your family, who remained in the country?
All props. My mother lived in Cluj at the time, together with my father and brother. She worked in education, she was a Romanian language teacher and, although she was not of retirement age, she was fired – that was the rule. If you worked in education, and a close family member even left the country legally, most of the time you were also removed from education, on the grounds that you cannot be in a position to teach others what to do if one of yours was a traitor.
My father, who was an energy engineer, entered a long period of supervision – it was seen after 1990, in the CNSAS documents – he lived only in certain hotels, he made many delegations in the country to hydropower plants and thermal power plants.
My friends came into the crosshairs: some of them were sent with bait, to see how and with whom I lived, what my vulnerabilities were. Others refused and stayed at home. So followed a whole system of surveillance and threats that was exercised against me, through letters, telephones and a dangerous situation that I was more aware of through the security structures of the radio and the German Police in Munich.
I think that, in a way, although they hated us, they hated us in the deepest way possible, they also had some care. Although when it worked, years before, they also resorted to assassinations, they also resorted to violent threats, they also resorted to attacks, both in Paris and elsewhere. Four directors of Free Europe disappeared due to rapidly progressing cancers, in a few months to a year, young people, who were around 50 years old. There were also some punctual warnings from the American and German security services announcing us: “In the next period you don’t go there, you don’t go there, you are accompanied there, you don’t make calls, you don’t go, you live somewhere else than in your usual place, etc.”
Have you been directly threatened? Those were the years in which Ceausescu’s Securitate had unleashed itself against Free Europe, planning beatings, assassinations, even bomb attacks. I am also thinking of the incident that Monica Lovinescu had gone through.
Yes, I felt it fully. With Monica Lovinescu it happened a little faster, in the early 80s, after they organized Paul Goma’s press conference, she was beaten in front of her house by so-called Palestinian terrorists.
I was not beaten, but I received death threats, death threats from some organizations. I received calls at home: “It’s your turn, you don’t have much left, I’m next to you, I’m on the street corner”. At a certain point, an organization appeared, the Sons of Avram Iancu, which sentenced me to death in 1989. There were forms of intimidation, threats from the Securitate. The letters came from Baden, near Vienna, where it was known, we knew, it is a kind of economic mission, disguised as an economic mission, a mission of the Securitate, from where parcels, letters were sent.
I arrived at Free Europe in the ’80s, the harshest decade of communism in Romania, of our shows, through the tone and the level of criticism necessary given the situation in Romania, but at the same time, through a kind of congruence of growing Western reservations and skepticism towards the Ceausescu regime. The Western press had also become radicalized against the Ceausescu regime. Especially when information has appeared that villages are being destroyed to make up I don’t know what constructions. Ceausescu had been regarded until then as a somewhat courageous character, who leads his state, the country on a different path, who does not resemble Brezhnev, who does not resemble Jaruzelski, does not procrastinate with Zhivcov, and so on.
I understand that, in the 80s, your mother was sent twice to Germany to convince you – without success – to return to the country or at least not to write against the communist regime.
It was twice, and the last time he told me that the “blue-eyed boys” asked him to tell me to talk about the danger of communism, but not to tie myself to the two anymore, otherwise I will suffer something permanently.
What year was it?
1989, at the beginning of the year.
So it was at the end of the regime and they didn’t get to put the threat into practice…
As we know, someone suffered it by the end of the year… But not me.
Along with the US state secretary Marco Rubio. Photo source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
“Destruction is assured, it starts with each of us”
“A generation like mine lived 70-80 years in world peace – even if not in an actual peace always. This world is over,” you said in an interview. Gloomy prospect…
It is a subjective perspective, perhaps exaggerated, but in any case realistic.
Who is to blame or what has favored this situation which, you say, has no way out?
A certain catalyst, acceleration of what I could call the sequential anger of the man who no longer has patience, no longer has the old, family connections with his environment, because everything has changed: his profession has changed, the frequency with which he meets people has changed, the frequency with which he can travel – I am thinking of both the East and the West – and, Above all, the frequency with which he informs himself and with which he is assaulted by the sequences of an increasingly controversial, violent, intrusive communication, day and night, which took his time to read, to have calm discussions with friends and to understand the quiet world that was changing slowly around him. Now the world is changing rapidly around him, the neighbors are no longer the same, the terraces are deafening, the books are not even browsed, let alone read, children at school are assaulted by technology, by TikTok, they don’t even know what is most important for their lives, and this has created a climate that develops something that has happened before in our sublunar world: People, from time to time, overcome or reach the end of historical cycles that they forcibly change, through violence, although they then start from a level lower than the one they kicked out with violence.
The use of violence and change through conflict, unfortunately, is part of human history. We live in such a climate of acceleration now. This is what the Trumpist philosophy is called, accelerationism – which no longer has any secret of denying the importance of liberal democracies and the deadly danger of migration, arrives on the wave of this newly created, anti-capitalist and anti-democratic, but deeply technologized ideology, based on the major advances of American technology, especially in Silicon Valley, this is how Trump came to power.
Because of this, what I see around me announces, through this collusion between the American president and the Russian president, through this mistrust planted within NATO, through the rapid possibility of starting and not explaining the continuation of a war, through the appearance on the horizon of an almost inevitable conflict between China, highly developed and still mysterious, and America, too quick to anger. All this heralds the approach of a forceful change in a historical cycle. The last 70 years of peace. Some of us lived them in the West, where peace was prosperous, others we lived in the East, where it was more full of hopes than certainties, some lived them in Vietnam and had no peace, others in Afghanistan, others in Israel, some lived them threatened – some by right-wing and militarist dictatorships in South America, other left-wing dictatorships, just as harsh, in Eastern Europe, but this world was preserved because it was an easy balance to maintain between two nuclear powers that knew that when one gave in, the other came into play and they had a second nuclear blow. This technique was called MAD. MAD – which also means crazy in English – is the acronym for Mutual Assured Destruction. Now destruction – total, partial, fragmentary and accelerated – is assured. It starts with each of us.
