[lbo-talk] Question for Woj or anybody else on Poland

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Thu Feb 1 16:41:00 PST 2007


Chris Doss wrote:


>Give a complicated answer then! :)
>
>--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
I really and truly don't know the complicated answer.

I remember my grandfather, who was an outstandingly decent man, speaking nostalgically of Antonescu. His daughter had married a jew and that was OK with him, but Ceausescu was no-class dirt who had no business running the country. So he looked back to Antonescu.

There was antisemitism in Romania -- after the war, the Jews, who had formed a large part of the resistance got some very cushy and powerful positions and they didn't exactly institute democratic policies. I knew these people; they were close friends of my parents. They were interesting people, they were very intelligent people, they were very well educated people, and they were extremely elitist. This did not endear them to the masses.

Also all the Jews who had relatives abroad -- and that was many Jews -- had a much higher standard of living because they got much-desired foreign goods which they could keep or sell, thus elevating themselves above the common herd. And also, they were the only group who could actually get out of the country -- through special arrangements with Israel. This didn't help either.

The Gypsies, of course, are the negroes of eastern europe and I am not familiar with that history. I can make a guess about the natural enmity between rooted peasants and rootless nomads, but that's all it would be, a guess.

So, fascism in Romania would scapegoat the jews and the gypsies for various reasons. Speaking to Romanians more recently, there is also a great deal of animus against the Chinese who, since the "revolution," have been coming in and buying up everything. Think of them as the new Jews.

As I have written before, Romania has a long, pathetic history of subjection and suffers from all the deformities that this engenders.

"The bowed head is not cut by the sword."

That is what passes for wisdom in Romania. Not a country of cossaks.

What the aetiology of modern fascism is, I have no clue....

Joanna



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