714
PAJ~
TISAN REVIEW
all this? Nothing, except the inertia of a large number of the voters - an
inertia that goes hand-in-hand with a grain of dishonesty. All the rumors
spread by television, by the disinformation network of the secret police,
and by the trained men of the Party have an amazing effect on the
masses. The most incredible slanders of the leaders of the opposition are
repeated, commented upon, and amplified with a malicious pleasure that
betrays, in many of us, the remains of a resentment susceptible to psy–
choanalysis: if we are dirty, then everyone has to be dirty. And the
dirtiest of all, of course, are those in the opposition, because in the mind
of the Romanian citizen, the opposition stands against him and not
against an irresponsible power. That by tradition the Romanian citizen
has always been on the side of the powers-that-be was borne out by the
interwar free elections, where the winner was, in every case, the ruling
party. Frail, cowed before history, seeking desperately the protection of
the strong, Romanians fear any force that threatens to unbalance their
relative inner comfort, a comfort which seems to be more than a
desperate fight for subsistence but is, in fact, never more than just that.
The Iliescu regime has governed for two years, and the country has
reached the abyss. Lies and corruption have seized the entire social mech–
anism. The current prime minister, Theodor Stolojan, speaks of
economic and financial blocking.
It
would be more accurate to speak of
the blocking of honesty and honor. The workers are driven to despair by
the thought that foreigners will come and exploit them. At the same
time, they envy the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the Poles, who are be–
ing helped by the West. We don't sell our country, but we require ev–
erything for free. This is the revenge of the old phrases, so familiar to us,
"they give" and "they bring." Unfortunately, in today's world, nothing
is given or brought anymore. Year after year, Romanian workers have
been transforming our industrial plants into places of rest; now they are
afraid they will lose their daily bread. They understand perfectly that if
foreign investors arrived, they would get rid of a number of these un–
fortunate proletarians, who have already been transformed by Ceausescu
into
pseudo-lurnpert.
They do not seem to understand that the great fa–
ther of the country himself, Ion Iliescu, will be obliged to do the very
same thing. Having reached the deadline, the country's economy now
faces the choice of bearing a brutal urgical intervention of acknowl–
edging, in the near future, its own clinical death.
What the large mass of voters does not understand is that, once in–
stalled at the helm, Iliescu and his team would not hesitate to sacrifice
those who helped to invest them with such authority. Unfortunately, the
constitution gives them every right they need to do so. The voters do
not want to understand - because "that suits us as well" - that for the
