What I Said (56)

In this space, you can read excerpts from Gheorghe Schwartz’s work “What I said” published at Mirador, Arad, 2019.

(56.) About the induced degeneration of colors

You invite me to answer your inquiry, “if I am interested in the subject”. Even if I wouldn’t be interested, the media is so invaded by the “file” that you can’t get out of the topic, just like you can’t ignore a pestilential smell in the atmosphere you breathe.

But the theme is, unfortunately, much broader and does not concern only writers in any case. Personally, I signed, along with many other intellectuals, in the early 90s, a call for the debunking of the security files. The moment was missed by successive governments. Now, in 2006, the problem has taken on a miserable political and population manipulation aspect. It is obvious that the promises for a better (material) and more just (moral) life have failed. The coming winter of criminal maintenance bills, as well as the increasingly generalized disaster of the sanitary system – the two major misfortunes that can lead to any kind of reaction from a desperate population – seem to be hijacked by a noisy and primitive de-conspiracy.

Ask, in the inquiry, if we have a moral problem as a nation. Of course we have such a problem! The crimes of totalitarian systems cannot be prescribed, just as it is not ethical to prescribe any type of genocide. But I think that the most dignified solution would be the electronic display of ALL documents regarding security officers, informants, pursuers. I think that the population has the right to know, and if we keep beating ourselves with a brick while we are democrats, let’s let the same people decide for themselves and not force them to decide in a certain way.

What’s happening now looks more and more like a sinister circus, where CERTAIN people are tied in a primitive ritual over a cauldron of boiling water, and the crowd is invited – well, sometimes even summoned – to dance and whoop around the bastards , before you eat. I observe with horror that the fear of the Stalinist period is being reached again, when it was deeply dangerous to discuss those struck by the fury of the fight against the landlords or the revisionists, for fear that you too will be found a bug. Whoever did not howl like wolves was eaten, so “the cheers were from the whole soul”. This time, however, something else is happening related to the hypocrisy of some of those who shout the loudest. People whose blue eyes everyone felt became the fiercest moralists. They managed to especially hysterize a group of Junes impatient to arrive, bothered that many seats are still occupied. Many of these “young wolves” are used as assault battalions, behind which the real protagonists decide who will be the next one hanging over the cauldron of boiling water. The injustice is not that X was exposed, the injustice is that nothing can happen to Y, equally guilty. And Y, being convinced of this, can no longer be stopped from doing anything.

It was said that young people do not have the moral quality to judge those who lived during the gulag, since they did not prove that they would have behaved differently than those they incriminate. Of course, this is also nonsense: if we thought like that, then no honest man, but who has never held a gun in his hand, would be in a position to judge a criminal, because it is not known how he would have reacted having finger on the trigger. However, the pitting of young people against others is not only a literary theme. (See also “Old Man Hunters” by Dino Buzzati“Diary of the Pig War” by Adolfo Bioy Casares” etc.) It represents a scourge with consequences ever disastrous, both for the hunted and for the temporary rangers, and for those behind them.

I answered the inquiry in this way, because I think that, by restricting the topic to writers only, I would also be blaming a social category, no more guilty than any other. In general, one should not talk about collective guilt, but only about the mistake of each individual. And the writers more or less accepted a role in front of which not every man has a vocation to be a hero. So silence came to be considered as approval… On the other hand, not every contact with security meant an act of collaboration. (Not infrequently, today the persecuted are just as pointed with the finger as the real torturers. I personally knew a persecuted turner and a collaborator who gave only positive references about the confreres. Who does not understand or does not even try to understand the individual conduct of each subject has nothing but howl happily, dancing around the cauldron.)

Each overturning of the system brings with it the reduction of the surrounding colors to “very white” and “very black”. In our country, this optical degeneration did not set in after December 22, 1989, but was caused during a “period of peace”. Which is at least dubious.

(“Lightning Investigation” of Familia magazine, “Writers and security”, Familia Magazine no. 9, September 2006.)