La Multi Ani, Adam Tismaneanu!

Many happy returns with joy and good luck, dearest Adam!

 

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Câteva cuvinte despre loialitate

 Este vorba de o insușire a caracterului, de o capacitate de a evita oportunismul, duplicitatea, fățărnicia, fariseismul. Un om loial nu face tranzacții de principii. Una dintre cele mai grave consecințe ale comunismului este tocmai această aiuritoare gimnastică a valorilor in care dispar distincțiile dintre onoare și dezonoare. Un univers plumburiu unde totul este o apă și-un pămant, vorba Monicăi Lovinescu, așadar unul in care totul se transformă in noroi…

La Multi Ani, Andrei Pleșu!

He embodies brilliantly three gifts: the gift of friendship, the gift of love, and the gift of wisdom. Happy Birthday to Andrei Pleșu, a noble citizen of the European Republic of Letters!

Image: Launching my book “Fantasies of Salvation” at the Embassy of Romania, Washington, DC, November 1998.

Darkness at Noon, August 21…

Re-reading “Darkness at Noon” on August 21: “An inscription came into his mind which he had read on the gateway at the cemetery at Errancis where Saint-Just, Robespierre and their sixteen beheaded comrades lay buried. It consisted of one word: Dormir–to sleep.”

 

Stalin’s Willing Executioner

: On August 21, 1940, one year after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Catalan communist agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Leon (Lev) Davidovich Trotsky, Stalin’s nemesis. To carry out Stalin’s order, Mercader hit Trotky in the skull with an icepick. The Old Bolshevik fought back with desperate energy. He passed away one day later in a Mexico City hospital. Mercader was arrrested and sentenced to 25 years in jail. He secrelty received the Lenin Order and… the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for services to the revolutionary cause. Mercader died, age 65, in Havana in October 1978. Altogether, a lurid story of crimes, deceptions, betrayals, manipulations, misplaced ardor, plundered illusions, espionage, hopelessness, and moral decay…

Image: The definitive Mercader biography that I bought in Barcelona in June 2015

 

What Charlottesville is about…

I’m the last person to condone far left violence. I’m unequivocally opposed to any extra-legal forms of rebellion (I don’t regard totalitarian decrees, abusively and arbitrarily humiliating, as laws). I admire Thoreau, but I think that civil disobedience ought to be civilian (with bold characters), i.e., non violent, decent, civilized. I detest Molotov, in any of his incarnations: as the man who signed the infamous pact and as a “revolutionary” …cocktail. My admiration for the whole civil society strategy that triumphed in Eastern Europe during the annus mirabilis 1989 is precisely rooted in this philosophical engagement. But I need to say it emphatically: Charlottesville is the name of far right (alt right, as it were) jingoism, racism, anti-Semitism, white resentment, lumpen malaise, in short updated, Americanized Fascism. I just read a great essay by Mary McCarthy titled “Hannah Arendt and Politics.” It reminded me that during Senator McCarthy’s vicious witchhunts, Hannah Arendt considered returning to Europe, becoming a refugee for the second time in her life. Neither she nor her husband were directly targeted, but they felt that America was running amok. For me, 45’s conduct is just latter day McCarthyism…

Barcelona, mi amor…

Joan Miro, “Sans titre,” 1978