by DORIN TUDORAN - February 5th 2005
"Letâs not talk about communism anymore. The communism was just an idea; >", Boris Ieltin confesses. The Tsar Boris has drunk a little bit too much, I think.
"Communism is not love. Communism is just a hammer we use to crash our enemy", Mao Tze-Tung assails. He is cynical, but right in the same time. "Even if I donât see communism as a bad thing", Whoopi Goldberg profoundly thinks. She is cynical too, but she is not right. Hollywoodâs specialty is fiction, not reality.
"For us, in Russia, communism is a dead dog. For many people in the Occident, communism is still a living lion", Alexander Soljienitin writes. He is right. "Who should you feel more pity for? For a writer seized by the policemen who also gag him or for a writer living a total freedom who does not have anything more to say?" - Kurt Vonnegut wonders. He is really "confuse", isnât it? This is the difficult part of having so many options.
"Letâs not talk about communism anymore. The communism was just an idea; >", Boris Ieltin confesses. The Tsar Boris has drunk a little bit too much, I think. "Communism is the corruption of a dream about justice", Adlai E. Stevenson writes. And he is partially right. By the way, while the dream went away, the corruption is enjoying every day, becoming more and more great and solid.
Many things are wrong about the post-communist countries, but there is nothing more murderous than the corruption hunting them. Professor Robert Klitgaard is right when offering the formula of corruption: "monopole + discretionary power - responsibility". It is the exact recipe that transformed the frowning communist ideokrats into filthy, lousy kleptokrats over night ("ideo" - referring to the idea; "klepto" - Greek term for "to steal"; "kratos" - Greek term for power).
Could the political kleptokrat be the main character that this extended painful hangover, also known as the post-communist era, produced?
Translation by SORIN BALAN