Comments on: I Can’t Read My New Book

By: back yard kibbutz

back yard kibbutz — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:56:35 +0000

it would be extreamly difficult to avoid “critics” in Romania eager to picture distributism as a masked form of socialism.
plus, the apparent imminance of the eschaton in history (very strong current in nowdays orthodox-conservatorism in Romania) will throw a glimpse of hiliasm on such a long term perspective.

By: Platon

Platon — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:24:51 +0000

well, Hurduzeu could learn you something (but I’m not sure about that…)

By: Marianne

Marianne — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:56:25 +0000

Well, this seems to be Romania Week! I just posted a long comment on Mircea Platon’s article about my own experience with Romania. Translating the canon of Front Porchers and their ideological allies into Romanian seems like a terrific idea. “Localism” is an often still lived experience there, as it is in many countries. Perhaps America is, on the whole, lost, but there are places today where a Wendell Berry wouldn’t so quickly be dismissed as a “romantic radical” or whatever. Just maybe.

By: Articole conservatoare pentru neoconservatori « Radical & hipercritic

Articole conservatoare pentru neoconservatori « Radical & hipercritic — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:51:49 +0000

[...] Profesorul John Medaille: I Can’t Read My New Book. [...]

By: JS Bangs

JS Bangs — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:59:41 +0000

My impression after having married a Romanian and spending years with her family is that a significant minority, approaching a majority, think that things were better under Ceausescu. This despite the fact that some things were obviously worse under Ceausescu–there were chronic food shortages, not to mention brutal suppression of many forms of religious expression, both Orthodox and non. But while they’ve gained a little bit in material abundance, they’ve paid quite a bit it terms of their national soul, and feel it keenly.

By: joel

joel — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:46:28 +0000

My impression after having spend some years in Romania is that Romanians under communism were given caricatures of capitalism, cartoons with fat men on top of piles of money. It was a picture of pure greed without ethics, maybe closer to the truth now than in my grandfathers generation when ethics and serving a local community was still a goal in business. Once Romania freed herself of ‘the communists’ (they were always referred to as some other group that came and left the country) she became a full hog capitalist…just like the cartoon capitalists, no ethics just pure greed. After all capitalism won out in the cold war, it is superior and almost a moral mandate to go with your greed, it produces good economies right? I wish someone would translate Wendell Berry’s works into Romanian, before someone has to write ‘the Unsettling of Romania’. I think the good people of Romania want to hold onto local agriculture and neighborliness rather than be run out and sold out by the ‘capitalists who ran out the communists’.