Ethical Demagoguery

Doina Cornea

On the margins of the interview given by Mr. Petre Roman, on 28 December 1990 on Romanian Television (TVR)

Ethical demagoguery is perhaps the last resort of power, and the most perfidious one. It deepens confusion in the realm of values.

Until now, by practicing slander and lies, those in power have partially succeeded in discrediting parties, political groups, and individuals they feared. Yet gradually, the country began to awaken and to realize that it had not been sold to foreigners, that dollars could not have been distributed for dishonest purposes in fifteen or twenty localities at the same time by the same person, that no one had bought up the country’s factories, that Romanians and Hungarians, in their concrete relations as neighbors, as inhabitants of the same village or town, have no desire whatsoever to quarrel again, that students and intellectuals are not the enemies of workers, and so on.

In the disastrous economic and socio-political situation into which the current power has dragged the country, demagoguery on economic and socio-political themes no longer succeeds. Empty shops, inflation, anti-democratic methods of governing have opened many people’s eyes. Faced with this decline, the neo-communist power has invented a new — and I must admit — formidable weapon of struggle: ethical demagoguery. It is the demagoguery that exploits the noblest feelings of citizens: love, faith, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace… It is, on the part of the one who practices it, an imposture in the realm of values. This is what the Prime Minister did on 28 December 1990 in a televised interview, so that the harmful effect of his discourse — in the sense of confusion in the realm of values — might be taken up by millions of innocent souls. Mr. Petre Roman, smiling, sought to deceive people’s moral conscience through perfidious shifts of meaning, destroying their ability to discern between value and moral imposture. Considering the string of reprehensible acts committed by the Iliescu–Roman government, the Prime Minister had no right to utter the Christian exhortation “let us love,” trying to obtain petty political advantages from such an imposture, and he had no right, with a chilling cynicism, to sow confusion and disorientation in the souls of those listening to him.

— Following your speech, Mr. Prime Minister, I think of a man who throws a piece of tin, instead of a coin, into the hand of a blind man asking for help. That piece of tin is your ethical demagoguery.

Was this also a sign of love — for you spoke of love — on your part toward the citizens who listened to you? By profaning our essential values, you continue to destroy — in accordance with the communist tradition — the moral fiber of the nation. For this purpose, do you believe that forty-three years of communism were not enough?

But let us return to the Christian love of which you have given so many “certain proofs” this year. Let us bring some clarity into our reasoning and see, as Christians, whom and what we must love. Since your imposture places itself in the domain of the sacred, I will use Christian terminology in order to delimit the area of pure love from that of guilty love toward our fellow human beings. We have the obligation to love and to forgive in a Christian manner those who wrong us only if we stand before them in a condition of complete inner freedom — that is, only if the coefficient of power they possess does not impinge upon our moral conscience. But when we declare forgiveness or love, determined by feelings of fear toward the guilty one or by the desire to obtain personal advantages from the guilty one — who at the same time holds power — we lose our inner freedom, and our declaration of forgiveness or love loses its moral significance. More than that, the tendency of those who are guilty of reprehensible acts and who possess a great coefficient of power is to force our moral conscience — through cunning or force — by imposing upon us the recognition of lies as truth, of violence as justice, of baseness as love. In other words, by granting them forgiveness or love under these conditions, before they have acknowledged their guilt, we agree to become accomplices in their lawlessness. The moral degradation of the country has its origin precisely in this complicity maintained for decades with a guilty power. This form of repression — the defilement of the victim — lay at the basis of the repressive methods of Pitești.

Speaking of love on TVR and exhorting to Christian love, your sin, Mr. Prime Minister, was a sin of moral imposture, because you exploited these Christian feelings in order to draw petty political benefits from them; because you attempted to extract the adhesion of millions of people, in the name of Christian love, to the sins — politically speaking, to the lawlessness — committed this year, with your assent, by the current power. Between the Christian obligation to love even the sinner, together with his sin (or his lawlessness), there is a great distance. Here I see the shift of meaning in your discourse and the source of the confusion you knowingly wished to create in order to draw political profit from it. Only that, speaking of love under these conditions, you yourself do not place yourself in that state of inner freedom, of disinterested availability, without which no act can be considered moral.

Let us love… But do your political acts spring from love?

For a year now we have done nothing but endure the proofs of this terrifying love.

I wonder whether, in the name of love, the population has been and continues to be manipulated through Free Romanian Television, being deprived of its right to information and truth? In the name of love, did the National Salvation Front not fail to respect the program announced on 22 December 1989, when it presented itself as a transitional power that would organize free elections, ensure pluralism, the separation of powers, human rights, and would not become a political party? In the name of love, Mr. Prime Minister, do you pursue a policy of diversion, sowing division and hatred in society? In the name of love, did you consent to bringing in the so-called miners, causing dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, looting and illegal arrests, violating the citizen’s right to life, physical integrity, and property? In the name of love, have you promoted those who have been shooting at the people for forty-three years? On TVR you stated that you feel loved. This is yet another affront to common sense; or have you perhaps forgotten that at that very hour one hundred and fifty thousand students were on strike, demanding your resignation. As a former university lecturer, I would have felt ashamed. Do you not believe that your place, as an academic, should have been alongside them? In the name of love, did you incite, on 1 December in Alba Iulia, certain groups deliberately brought in to disturb the commemoration of this great holiday, with which the Greek-Catholic Church or the National Peasants’ Party have a closer connection than you do, and where you rejected the UDMR’s expression of loyalty? In the name of love, have you denounced Timișoara, the martyr city, profaning its memory? In the name of love, did you expel His Majesty King Michael, a Romanian citizen by right, a personality with recognized historical merits, who, after forty-three years of exile, came to see again his native soil and the graves of his ancestors? In the name of love, do you burden the country with debt merely to subsidize economic bankruptcy and social failure, with the sole purpose of keeping yourselves in power, without a shred of mercy for those who will have to repay these debts? From so much love, perhaps young people flee the country as from something unclean. Last January they were returning, full of hope, and no longer wished to leave. What has happened?

A government that inspires neither trust nor hope means that it has reached — to quote you once again — that dead point at which it must resign. The crisis of the current power is due, first and foremost, to the lack of transparency, truth, and loyalty that you practice. You have lost moral authority, Mr. Prime Minister, and only moral prestige can legitimize a governing team. The elections were only the beginning of a road. If you had even a little love for this country, you would no longer endanger its very existence now that power has reached this dead point. You would yield power to others, more innocent, who would fear neither truth nor the freedom of people, and who would use power in order to serve society, not merely to remain in power at any price.

Cluj, 2 January 1991