Culprit and Ratter

Most of the terrible chaos that characterizes the present process for the guilt establishment regarding the people that have collaborated with the former Security in the past is a consequence of the emotional excess of the public discussion. I am absolutely sure that in Germany, for example, the clarification of the situation of the people in East Germany that had collaborated with Stasi has been more lucid and more systematic. We shout a lot, in offense and in defense, we hit bellow the belt, and play dirty against our adversaries without even knowing or understanding the things we are actually talking about. This is the consequence of the fact that the entire process is taking place mainly in the media, on TV and in the press, but not where it should take place, in the law, in a well-developed system, which should set a hierarchy of guiltiness, of responsibilities and of consequences of the facts in the past.

Any discussion with such a national importance, at least morally, usually gets to a dead end. The ethical part is extremely relative and influenced a lot by the emotional pressures. Actually, many people in this part of Europe don’t have a conscience: they are small people that manage through life by their means, that don’t feel sorry at all about their past collaboration with the Security. They will say they didn’t harm anyone by writing all those things in the Security reports, because this is how times used to be…

There is a total criteria selection when it comes to the collaboration of the Romanian citizen with the former Security. There have been hundreds of thousands of ratters that have signed engagements and written information. Are they all guilty, from the penal point of view? The situation is somewhat similar to the one of the 4 million members of the Romanian Communist Party. When the only proof is the signing of an engagement, one can consider himself in the situation of a juridical code that would apply the death penalty (or an insignificant penalty) to all the crimes. For now, there is no lucid or rational perspective on the terror mechanism during the communist period (this is why the Security has sometimes been mistaken for an institution similar to the…CIA). There is a total confusion between signing an engagement and the political police. There is no one to have clear criteria for this matter. For now, there is no mechanism for the disclosure of the Security officers that have caused the actual terror during the communist regime.

Of course all the employees of the Security, from the big boss to the cleaning lady, have taken part in the mechanism one way or another. However, I think the cleaning lady was devoted to a building, but not to an entire system. Convicting her for washing up some stairs is a little too much. Actually, all the officers had different jobs and should be treated in different manners. The electronic engineer that worked on the devices used for the listening of the population was probably a small technician with no conscience that would have worked for a TV-station service unit, if the salary were the same.

We will start to walk tall only when the ethical blame will be replaced by strict, absolute penal criteria, when we will look for the guilty people instead of the ratters. The ratters always manage to pass, the guilty people go to jail.