Please don’t take this as a criticism of your nicely expressed sentiments Dan, the phrase just set my ironometer a jangling and I had to let loose.

Still though, a million little obscure locales united in a simultaneous exhortation of “K.M.A.” to the various meddlers, freebooters and world-improvers who are the real Draculas of this so called “modern” era. Another few decades and the “terrorist trunk” will have the most divergent and comprehensive contents known to man.

Ah Mr. Platon – any country that has people with such good sense doesn’t need Americans!

Related to this, Paul Gottfried’s ‘Liberalism trilogy’ is well worth reading.

In other words, we’ve brought it upon ourselves, and the American (governmental and private) export of neoliberal values has more to do with our own plotting than with the nexus between a global corporate economy and its ideological underpinnings embodied in the homo oeconomicus. I don’t know much about the composition, financing and aims of the “ethnic lobbies” in Washington (who finances, who handles, and who listens to them?), but in my own country, Romania, American “human rights” posturing resulted in an unprecedented (at least since the 1820s-30s) wave an sympathy for Russia, seen as the “conservative” alternative to American Neoliberal advocacy of globalization and political correctness.

It is still true that the much greater radicalism of the (small) urban working class made a prevention of Communist takeover hard as Europe developed (I have never seen a watertight refutation of the viewpoint that the Marshall Plan prevented Communism taking over most of Western Europe and turning the continent into a sea of warring Marxist states), but the point that “personal and public integrity” is largely gone from the former Soviet bloc nations is one that I have not the slightest doubt about and is far too seldom mentioned in serious cultural or political discussion today.

Sorry to be a putz Mircea, I liked your essay, but to ask the bankrupt for a loan is not likely a good strategy.

The remarkable thing about this whole long period of the Cold War is that we did not experience World War III. The two sides took out their aggressions through proxie wars that cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. Bad enough, true, but not nuclear war.

No, the Americans are not coming. Perhaps that is not so important today. Perhaps the Romanians will be able to find their own way out of the socialist-EU swamp, with the rich resources they possess, in the twilight of the Pax Americana, as we await the next large movement in history.

Perhaps the West was afraid of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. But I suspect the Soviets–with a far more fragile industrial base–were even more afraid of it, no matter what they said to Dulles or Eisenhower. But at any rate the help did not come, and Central Europe was left to free itself 40 years later. But in fact, they just changed masters. And not even that. In Russia, the country has settled into the autocratic rule of a former KGB agent, and not a few Eastern Europeans look on the days of communist rule as times of relative security.

I am about to embark on a trip to Romania. My message is mainly, “Don’t wait for the Americans and for damn sure don’t wait on Brussels (like the Irish).” Romania is a rich country-in natural resources. Rich in fields, pastures, minerals, fish, minerals and every gift a loving God can bestow on a nation to make it prosperous. This is the “Romania profound,” under all the imposed layers of communism and euro-socialism-capitalism. It is the same message that the FPR gives to the American South, or West, or North. It is the only message that will work in this age that will see, is seeing, the breakup of globalist capitalism and its various offspring.

It was, at the same time, an endangered habitat, so to speak. Up close one couldn’t help but notice that that those Pauline headscarves were made of mystery plasti-fabric, and not a few homes were decorated with satellite dishes. More troubling was the perpetual eye-rolling of some of the young people. I suppose they were a little anxious to move to one of the bigger towns nearby, or some place even loftier, perhaps a real city with glossy Western European-style shops. And then there were the more enterprising men in the villages, utterly ready to sell every last shred of authentic culture to the Tourism Bureau (and tourists such as myself.)

At the time I assumed Hollywood and its pop cultural associates were the principal culprit, but obviously there is something more sinister at work.

It’s heartening to know that there are voices in Romania like Mr. Platon’s. God preserve Romania!

Not too much socialism here. Front Porch Republic appears to me as a very anti-statist blog.