A lefty manifesto

A few weeks ago, I’ve been in a stylish hotel located at Parâng mountain’s feet, where, in the

evening, a large group of German tourists appeared. They were serene and cheerful retired

people, around 70 years old. At a certain moment, I started talking to them, trying to be their

translator. They came from all “social ranks”: a former lawyer, a former mechanic, a former

office man, a housewife… There was also a Turkish family that had immigrated to Germany 40

years ago. They were spending their old age together, travelling around the world through tourist

offers that the German state had specially promoted for older people. It was the “Germany of the

butter”, the capitalist social state which we all had dreamt about when butter had disappeared

from the storefronts of communist shops.

I remembered about this image when I read Mr. Baconschi’s declaration, our Secretary of

State, audibly stating that “the time of assisted people has been banished by the global crisis.

Even better for Romania”.

The wide context is known and had been fiercely discussed in the latest newspapers, but ad

personam, as usual. But the problem isn’t Mr. Baconschi, the diplomat who knows what he’s

talking, but the fact itself that he knows what he’s talking. And this is what he tells us:

Saturday I said that I would like the votes of working Romanians for PDL, not the votes of those

who beg (and roam around the illusions sold by socialists). It was a metaphor, but I am sure that

the right party poll gets my message very well (…). Ultimately, there are the impoverished

manipulation masses of the left party.

Let’s extract the main ideas, like we did in school: the right party poll is laborious and the

prosperity awaits for it; the ones who aren’t with us are on the side of the left party, they are lazy

and poverty awaits for them. So be it, this is the Europe of tomorrow!

The weird thing is that the authentic orthodox Baconschi perorates a protestant speech

that would make Luther himself wonder if he hadn’t gone over the limit with the divine calling

of labor. The serious trouble is that he’s right: the Europe of crisis heads towards this ideology,

and the diplomat Baconschi only achieved to signal Romania’s undoubted alignment to this

tendency still negotiated by the great European powers. This ideological mysticism is the way

out of the crisis, and it presupposes the sacrifice of poor people, declared as being ontologically

lazy (even though nobody dared to declare them, until now, downright “beggars”), and thus, the

main culprits of the last, the actual and the future crisis’ catastrophes. The social rank is

“unmasked” as being assisted, and this one is radically delegitimized by the neoliberal powers,

which thus blame the heavy heritage of phantasmal left party. Dichotomy saves the world!

The story began some time ago, when the famous Huntington, for example, the American

kite’s mace, was thrown in the market gate to let us know that the world is divided in two and

that the next clash will be between the development-prone cultures and the development-resistant

cultures, i.e. societies made for labor and development and societies which, through their local

pastoral spirit, are not and will never be capable of productive vim and which, without emotional

effusions, have to be left to sink or swim. In academic terms, scholastic, yet accurate, this is

called “giving an ethnical character to poverty”: the poor are guilty, because they don’t change

their congenital mentality of being poor!

This is happening in the year or our Lord 2000. And, lo and behold, Huntington was right

once again, like in the case of Islamic danger.