“I was born in a dictatorship. I lived in a dictatorship until the age of twenty-six. I know what it is. I know how it settles…” Forced into exile from Romania in 1977, the journalist and writer Radu Portocala exclaimed: “In recent times, what I have experienced is found more and more in what we are experiencing. Different, but the same. For all these reasons, from now on, I’m afraid.”
Dictatorship: any resemblance…
Absurd prohibitions and humiliating obligations are easy to impose.
We let you live; you are only forbidden to exist. Everything is in this tragic nuance.
You are nothing more than a file in which resolutions and informative notes accumulate. The repressive bureaucracy casts its shadow over you, controls you, but you can’t do anything against it.
But it can take other forms, it can even, by decorating its shop window nicely, pretend not to be what it is. It doesn’t change its miserable substance. There are so many ways to crush people!
Horresco reference ! “Dictatorship” is a word willingly forbidden to those who are alarmed by attacks on freedoms, accused of all excesses. Radu Portocala knew it, why does he use it, indifferent to this injunction, for the situation we are experiencing? He reminds us that many dictatorships have hidden behind democracies in appearance, and behind the simulacrum, finds that we are slipping towards a “Total City”, title of a work by his compatriot Constantin Dumitrescu. Fear, the desire to make people happy “in spite of themselves”, the “deprivation of freedom” for faults that one has not committed… Is the comparison right here?
The ravages of Manichaeism
One war has wiped out the other, and Radu Portocala finds that, here too, totalitarian springs are at work:
In this time of great manipulations, it only took a few days to bring about a new rupture in society – and this is not just a French phenomenon – to give birth to and impose as the only acceptable posture a ukrainolatry without nuances and a russophobia which, even in Stalin’s time, no one had thought of conceiving. Not to endorse Macron’s rave admiration for Zelensky — a comedic actor of dubious financial heritage, whose political destiny was forged in Washington — is necessarily to be a henchman of KGB-ist Putin. “He who is not with us is against us,” said Lenin, the unexpected precursor of today’s moral judges. Manichaean simplifications have been the source of many disasters.
[…]
I do not believe in the existence here below of an absolute “good side”. I don’t want it to be shown to me where it isn’t and inflicted on me. I experienced that and I managed not to let myself go. I prefer to choose alone and I don’t like to make mistakes in packs. And if tomorrow the “good side” decides to ban Dostoyevsky (as we have already tried in Italy) or Bulgakov, I will read them anyway, even if it means having to do it by candlelight.
Radu Portocala underlines the paradox of not knowing how to see anything coming, then of having “knew everything” instantly, once the conflict started. Can’t we withhold judgment for a moment?
He reminds us of the episode of the mass grave of Timisoara, of sinister memory: a flagrant example of media frenzy that he experienced in the front row. History demands time, but misinformation does not wait. Witness to the fall of Ceausescu, and translator of his trial for Antenne 2 at the end of 1989, he disputes the legend of a popular revolution.
Should we choose sides? Rather than haste, Radu Portocala prefers patience and information: “let’s wait to know everything”, noting that it is “easy to move”…
Emmanuel Macron, the “thundering wave”
“He will probably never be a great leader”: it is to be feared that at the top of the state, we have not heard him. The President of the Republic, however, inspires Radu Portocala with scathing notes. Thus he does not spare the outrageous communication of a “barely thick” Emmanuel Macron, stuck in his postures of peacemaker and warlord (…at the risk of losing his hand):
Photographs of Emmanuel Macron have been circulating on the Internet for a few days. In black and white or in dark colors, they are not remarkable either technically or artistically. This is, no doubt, intentional: the image is modest in favor of the message.
They show a tense Macron, prey to the most serious reflections, confronted with the tragedy of History; a Macron with messy hair, who no longer has time to take care of his beard, who, to be more comfortable in his struggle with the forces of evil, has abandoned the suit in favor of a dark colored knit.
Photographs of electoral propaganda, character portraits rather missed, which want to show a president-candidate in the high solitude of power, in his painful confrontation with the destiny of humanity. Never inspired when it comes to acting, the subject clumsily stages himself, strikes the pose of the overwhelmed tall man – and, ultimately, misses the point. Instead of the desired dramatic intensity, the unveiling of the most secret moments of depth, we only see in these images the artifice that borders on the ridiculous.
There is theater in politics, of course. But it is not only theater. This is what Mr. Macron does not seem to have understood yet.
“The press made him president, when he was not even a candidate”, wrote our guest five years ago… We are there again, a pretext to (re) immerse ourselves in “The thunderous wave“, a collection of posts from 2017-2018 which, in a limpid style, both clinical and tasty, dissects the one who “was normally doomed only to a sympathetic marginality”. Ruthless for the character, without giving in to ease or fall into the gratuitous attack, his removed texts form a Go with me precious one month before the first round of the supreme election. Radu Portocala explains to us why he dedicated these words to Emmanuel Macron: “I cannot be indifferent to what is happening with this country. And Mr. Macron is not what France needs!”
An interview with a writer who recalls the essential: “My freedom asks me to write what I think and what I feel”.
Find Radu Portocala on Facebook and on talker