A bold Ceausescu

I watched with great interest Traian Basescu’s interview for the public Television on Monday night....

I watched with great interest Traian Basescu’s interview for the public Television on Monday night. Even though I was aware of Romania’s position as far as the NATO Summit in Bucharest was concerned, I wanted to see the approach of the one for whom the Romanians pay taxes in order to offer the privileges of a president in a country lost in the Balkans.

At the end of a pathetic dialogue from the journalistic point of view (Luca Niculescu was rather attentive and didn’t let the interlocutor speak about anything, but the former spokesperson of the Nastase Government, Claudiu Lucaci, listened to him in a goofy unobtrusiveness paralyzed at the thought that he was in front of the greatest chauffer of the country), I really wanted to ask: Was the person that occupied an hour of TV transmission the Romanian President or a candidate for the Mayor position in a world-forgotten village of Romania? For approximately two decades I haven’t heard so much demagogy per minute in a TV show.

A person that wasn’t aware of the nowadays realities, which are quite the same with the ones of the entire world, would have thought that the show host wasn’t interviewing the President of a small country that battled for survival in the jungle of international politics dominated by the great powers, but Iosif Visarionovici Stalin present at a reunion of the Communist and Labor Parties in the Romanian capital with the purpose to discuss with the first secretaries in Germany, France and England.

The primitive Romanian nationalist, who recites the lyrics of Vasile Militaru would have been highly emotional at the thought that, on Monday night, in Bucharest, he has seen Nicolae Ceausescu on the TV screen liver than ever, even though a little bolder after all these years. I say this because the essence of Traian Basescu was as follows: the leaders of the NATO states came to Bucharest not to impose their own points of view regarding the controversial issues of the Summit agenda, but to find out and to materialize Romania’s points of view.

The press became independent in 1990 and this is the start point of my denouncement of all the politicians that didn’t have any respect for the national pride. We thought and still think that the difficulties of the transition are not a motive to stand on one’s knees in front of the great powers of the world. However, we believe that the necessary national dignity doesn’t mean the paranoid exaggeration of Romania’s place and role on a planet on which the games aren’t made by the small countries.

Such a conscious position would exempt us from the ridiculous situation as well as from the serious national problems. From this point of view, Traian Basescu’s behavior on Monday night on TVR seemed more than dangerous. While trying to be the Great Man of Romanian, the number 1 Virile person in our national history, Traian Basescu, attacked the ones who signed the Romanian-Ukrainian Treaty on the 2^nd of June 1997 accusing them of “leaving the national interest aside”.

I was one of the few that criticized that treaty hoping that the NATO Summit in Madrid on the 12^th of July 1997 would have changed the already taken decision.

However, in time, I realized that the politicians that had the power at that time were kind of forced to sign it. At that time, Romania was under pressure from the Great Powers interested in spoiling the countries of the so-called group from Visegrad: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. We weren’t NATO or EU member. The Treaty with Ukraine was one of the tasks we had to perform in order to get in the Alliance.

Thanks to this kind of tasks, Romania is a member of NATO and EU. Thanks to this kind of tasks, Bucharest hosts the NATO Summit today. However, Traian Basescu behaves as if he wouldn’t know all these things and calls the ones that signed the Treaty with Ukraine traitors, even if he is the host of an event that is a direct consequence of that Treaty.