Former Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi on Thursday said that there is a civic duty to resist in the face of what he called a „restoration” of a national-communist, pro-Putin, anti-Western, and radical Eurosceptic type.
Baconschi participated on Thursday evening, alongside Professor Adrian Papahagi, in the debate „Ideological Drifts of the Present: Nationalism vs. Patriotism – Sovereignty vs. Suveranism/ Orthodoxy vs. Orthodoxism – Christian Universalism vs. Globalism,” an event in the RES PUBLICA series of debates organised by the Civic Academy Foundation and Spandugino Foundation. The event, hosted by the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and Resistance in Bucharest, was moderated by writer and civic activist Ana Blandiana.
„All these nostalgics, professionals of the magical return to supposed ‘golden ages’ are swindlers, impostors, people who have learned nothing from the lesson of the recent past, not to mention the great lessons from which great civilised nations sank and set themselves on fire by exacerbating nationalism. And these people are, simply put, public enemies. So, I listen with pleasure to those who tell us that we need to transpose ourselves… Yes, I can transpose myself into the psychology and the motivation table of the victims of these swindlers, but I cannot look at them as legitimate presences in a democratic conversation. The victims of these people need to be enlightened, clarified, brought closer, we need to be in dialogue with each other, not let this phalanx of aggressive impostors separate us from our own people and divide us,” the anthropologist stressed.
In his opinion, such „political swindlers” cannot be part of a „normal democratic landscape.”
„So, this is a distinction I make between the political, demagogic, populist swindler, who sells such ultra-dangerous fantasies, and his victims, more or less naive, even if this naivety also involves a dose of fishing in troubled waters, an obscure intuition that they might gain more from a kind of general overturning of the order we’ve managed to build in this society, but I am not in favour of the idea that they are part of a normal democratic landscape. No. They are the enemies of open society, and I believe there is a civic duty to resist, especially now, in the case of a national-communist restoration, pro-Putin, anti-Western, radical Eurosceptic, after 35 years, we have something entirely different to defend, namely our own path as personal and community inscription in history, all we’ve achieved, all we’ve accumulated, all we’ve built, all we possess,” highlighted Teodor Baconschi.
According to him, Romania is no longer in the situation where, if a government that practices extra-legal violence calls on paramilitary troops again, we would have nothing to defend.
„Those who left Romania in the first waves of the miners’ riots took a suitcase and left wherever they saw fit. They had nothing to defend. We are in a completely different historical cycle and we would ruin absolutely everything that has happened socially, politically, economically, intellectually, academically in this country if we consider it simply as a wave that grows again, will swallow us, and that’s it. We dreamed of sustainable freedom in vain,” concluded the former head of Romanian diplomacy.
AGERPRES
