The conduct of the ruling personalities during the deathwatch of His Beatitude Patriarch Teoctist was according to the sad solemnity of the moment. Some have contested the participation of the former and current ruling figures, in both the vigil and the funeral. Unlike them, I consider that their absence would have been a lack of consideration to the passed away patriarch of such a nature to harm the national sensitivity. Otherwise, if the had been absent, they would have been thrown stones at from the pages of the newspapers and the talk-show studios. The same newspapers and talk-show studios condemned them for having participated.
The marvel - i.e. the normality, for us - hasn't last more than three days, after which president Basescu has forgotten about the piety he had showed the evening of the Patriarch's death, stood a few minutes at the catafalque then went out, leaving the people with their grief. But he forced the political and electoral capital a day before the funeral to the charge of the intensely emotional event and decorated the Patriarch post-mortem. He had granted him the Romanian Star with sash, which has never been granted to a Romanian before. The Patriarch hasn't died on the battlefield, nor has come back to die in the native country after a long exile. Traian Basescu had had the whole time to honour him as long as he was alive, the way Emil Constantinescu had done, on the occasion of the visit of Pope John Paul II, for the reunification of the Church.
But the president couldn't have decorated the Patriarch as long as he was still living. With his patriarchal humour, father Teoctist would have given president Basescu to understand that he had to define the reason. And that reason would have been for the collaboration with the communist regime, as Tismaneanu report shows. The head of State had backed this report in the Parliament and later on taken over as such by the international leftist press. In order to condemn the communism as a criminal regime, president Basescu needed to condemn the Romanian Orthodox Church and Its head, after which he decorated posthumously the condemned collaborationist. He should explain to us how this is possible. He either keeps to his breast the Tismaneanu report and then he withdraws the Patriarch's decoration, or he maintains the decision regarding the decoration of His Beatitude and withdraws the Tismaneanu report from the market. Tertium non datur.
Anti-communism is trendy, retroactive and selective. The ones, including the opportunists of communism, defending the Tismaneanu report and condemning those who contest it forget that it was no need of a report to condemn the communism as a criminal regime. Communism should have been condemned from the very beginning, i.e. from December 1989. However, even president Constantinescu didn't do it officially. The sudden anticommunist Basescu, the president uncovered (yet) could have done it ex officio, provided he had really believed so. We skip the fact that, if he had considered the communist regime as a criminal one, he wouldn't have served it to a personal profit. Also, if he had regretted the fact that he had served it and he had sincerely believed it had to be condemned, he would have done it without anyone having asked for it. But he didn't do it until Sorin Iliesiu, a personality of the civil society and of the cultural life, so candidly asked him to. And that was to lift up his percentage.
The percentage counts. Panic-stricken that he's lowering while PM Tariceanu increases together with the pensions, president Basescu ran from the Patriarch's crypt to the Glina hole, so as "to show that it is possible" to make dirt disappear overnight. But he didn't show this by the time he was the Capital's general mayor. He has now mobilized his clientele, which has served him with 1 M Euro sanitation services. It is for the work they got last time and for the ones they'll get next time, plus the flowers on the fields. That's a macho insolence and a Mafia-style cynicism. As for the population, they go into ecstasies. As Marin Preda put it: What, are we a people of idiots ?!
Roxana Iordache
Ziua Luni 06 August 2007 http://www.ziua.net/english
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