Sensitivity! Human Rights! Democracy!

Wednesday, 15 June, Year 8 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

Find below a translation of a fragment of an article published by one Mihai Eminescu in the Romanian newspaper Timpul on December 14th, 1877.

It should be noted that the 1877 version of "Sensitivity! Human rights! Democracy!" read "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!". The extreme ease of the change, as well as the complete obliteration of the previously discarded snakeskin is testament to the fact that stupidity (for truly socialism is naught other than millitant stupidity) has no nation nor any linguistic involvement, moving freely from French to English with the flows of trade and the attendant wealth and power which invidiously drive it in the first place. Wherever, whenever two men gather to bake a pie, raise a wall or dig a trench, a third will pop out of nowhere to importantly drool while emptily posturing.

Introducing the most ideally perfect and beautiful laws in a country they don't fit drives society into the ditch, no matter how pure the author or generous the intention. Why this ? Because anything that's not painted icon but live matter must be treated like any other organism. Anything organic is born, grows, may become ill, then healthy again, but eventually dies. Just as there's difference between one organism and the next, similarly their cures will be different, and while Stan's health benefits from a certain weed, Bran's health even further declines if fed it.

How do we call however those who claim to have discovered a single medicine for all the disease in the world, a cure without fail, which, if you're stupid makes you wise, if you're deaf makes you hear again, and altogether whatever may afflict you, impetigo, baldness, pockmarks, frostibite, glaucoma, toothache, still with the one true ointment embrocates you and with the same powders stuffs you ?

Such a doctor is called a quack.

How then shall we call the professed doctors of the Romanian nation, which to any shortcoming respond with the same fairydust, possibly a legitimate cure for something at some point, but who even knows for what anymore ?

Is the road unmaintained to the degree chunks of concrete fly from under the wheels and behead bystanders ? Sensitivity, human rights and democracy, and everything will be ok. Is the public debt running out of control ? Sensitivity, human rights and democracy, and they'll be somehow paid. Is school bad, are the teachers illiterate, are farmers going broke, is industry vanishing like a snowman in Hell, are there floods and epizootia ? Sensitivity, human rights and democracy, and everything will sort itself out.

I've showed before that we've taken these magic powders and holy ointments of the liberals for so long and in such prodigious quantities we're by now made up of the crap halfway by weight, and nothing's getting any better, on the contrary.

Maybe those weeds are good for something, but whether they are or they aren't it's plain to see they're of no use for our particular needs.

Let's review how the liberals stumbled upon their recipe, theoretically good for all ills and in practice useful for none. Last century there was in the country of the French much hullabaloo because the State ended up, through the waste of the Kingly court, under so much debt that they had introduced a monopolyi even on the sale of grain. The knife was scraping bone, by the multitude of taxes and all sorts of burdens on the populace, so they found themselves in a corner and raised their weapons - either to kill or to die, but in any case to escape such life.

Here, Voda Stirbey leaves the throne leaving 16 million in the country's treasury and 3 million with the villages. No fit.

In France, all taxes were farmed, and the tax farmers squeezed all the classes of society to feed the court with its niggers. Here, the tax was overwhelmingly collected directly, and Voda was a rich boyar living on his own feuds, who also didn't enjoy any notable luxury. Still no fit.

In France, judgeships and army commissions were purchased for money, and the act of justice also. Here, whosoever, by how many books he'd read and how well his head worked, could become right equal with the descendants of the oldest families of the country. No fit at all.

In France, economical invidy was at a peak, for everyone perceived both a need and an entitlement to more than what he had. Luxury and fashion regularly drained the largest fortunes. Here, the boyar would inherit a sable from his great-grandfather, a Turkish shawl from his grandfather, a sytaraii surplice from his father, with the full intent of leaving them to his grandchild so he can take pride in them in turn. Everyone had stores for the winter and white coins saved for cloudy days. In a word, everyone had a surplus, because back then the whole country was "conservative". No fit whatsoever.

But wonder, what did the grandfathers do to deserve the fury of the liberals ? Well... what could they have done. As much as their heads allowed : churches and monasteries, schools, hospitals, wells, bridges, so their name may still be remembered after they'd be wearing grass for a hat... and another one, nearly forgotten. Many took gold out of their pocket and sent the boys that seemed smarter abroad, to learn and become enlightened for the happiness of the country. They warmed snakes in their bosom, in other words.

For this youth went to a country that was socially rather ill. The upper class, seeing themselves richer than they actually were, had arrived at a refinement of sensuality unseen in other parts of the world. Living art and literature had been weeded out by all manner of hollow piquanteries, and in plain words anything was more sought and desired than plain spring water. Perfumed water, sugared water, almond water, even poison water, anything, just not plain spring water.iii

There, instead of learning useful things, such as math and sciences, they all went into pseudoscience, social "sciences" and assorted "studies" in nonsense, all aiming to find in the abstract how to enhappinize a people and manage its country. After a whole lot of such newspaper wisdom, they returned home : pockets empty where they were full, heads emptier still than they were on departure.

This joyously light youth lives bodily in Romania, but daydreams itself still in France ; lives in a poor country yet fancies the Hollywood-Rent-Controlled accomodations it spied in works of fiction which its uncultivated naivity allowed it to mistake for discussions of reality ; has needs fit for a millionaire and less money than third world shoemakers. This youth, characterised by a rare lack of pietyiv ; speaking a corrupted sort of bird tongue instead of the powerful language of its powerful antecessors ; daring to measure people and circumstance by their narrow cluelessness and to voice disapproval of anything that doesn't fit in their 75 grams of brains, this youth, I say, learned the refrains of fashionable pop music and armed with this vast science comes here with the pretension of becoming members of parliament, university professors, academicians and whatever the hell they call the rest of those empty forms dressing up the orcdom at the ends of the Danube. For to shit a tassel upon the garbage pile : most of these lauded youths are the sons of Greek and Bulgarian upstarts settled here a generation ago, who followed a simple Romanisation chemistry : take a thick necked boy of unclear provenance, send him to Paris and the wonderous return will be a "Romanian" stripling.

Around 1840, Eliad the Older, before becoming "Heliade-Rădulesco" which is to say before going dizzy in the airs of Paris, was writing to the March lordv Ghica as follows :

I am a head of a household, and I have not where to raise my children in these institutions, because even if I had the means to raise them afar, my will is not to raise them abroad and then for them to somehow adapt to living Romanianly. I wish to make them Romanians first, and so they must know matters Romanian, laws and habits. Villains were the parents and knaves the sons that blindly raised "for another century" and "for another country", and then lived in "another century" and "another country".

More precisely can't be shown what's missing to these individuals who, through geographical positioning and loud claiming, pass for Romanian. They lack historical feeling, they appertain to the Romanian nation through the happenstance they were born on a certain piece of land, not through language, habits, thoughts or feelings.

And so they come, wave after wave into our country, with the strangest of ideas extracted from French Cafes and the writings of Saint-Simon, Zigg Marx, Dale Engels and other obscure self-help, weight loss, aluminum siding & friendmaking experts that weren't quite all together in the head. Through pressure of sheer numbers they've changed a lot of the forms of life today to better fit their intellectual poverty, seeking absolute, universal "objective" truths for no other reason than their own convenience : it's easier to memorize one line than it is to memorize twenty. Having as they have no contact whatsoever with any sort of reality, the destructive results of replacing twenty truths adequate to twenty concrete situations with a single line of nonsense entirely escapes their runty grasp.

Thus, wonder of wonders : instead of kissing the old men's hands in gratitude, hot tears in the corner of their eyes made all the warmer by the plain and obvious knowledge of their inequality to the blessings bestowed upon them, the horde starts its Sensitivity! Human rights! Democracy! concerto, to the complete confusion of the elders. You'd think the mills on the river Siret all came down together. And on they milled, green horses on white walls, all matters of the Stars and Moons and how to use sheep's bladders to prevent earthquakes, so much new learning of no practical value, no possible utility and no known venue of applicability it was out of the question anyone could follow, or for that matter care to. Then they went into inventing epithets for anyone not taken with their outpour : ghosts, baccelevi, exploitersvii, retrogrades, all sorts and manner until they ended up far enough to declare the elders aren't even Romanians, that only they, informed as to Zigg Marx & co, are the true elders, and the old people nothing of the sort! Like that saying goes, of the married whore caught whoring, "what are you going to believe, your own eyes or my own words ?"

Yet the old folks were right and true Romanians, and as such incapable of properly understanding the accusations made against them, not to mention very poorly placed to deal with it adequately due to their outmoded inclination to try and understand rather than sprout nonsense directly. Their ilk, having lived its entire life in the country, not understanding other languages outside of Romanian, praying in this language and speaking it sanely, upon hearing the "-tiunile" & "-tionile", imperatorele & readaptorele, admisibilile & propriamenteleviii thought in their own mind, "Well brother, maybe we're just stupid. We thought that if you knew the breviary and psalter, how to properly tend a field, raise cattle and save money, we knew a lot. But listen to this lot, we don't even know Romanian properly!" and instead of picking up the bull whip and showing the cocottesix who's their daddy, instead said "Dear boys, maybe you're right. Maybe we don't even know Romanian properly. But now - a lot has passed, a little's left, soon you'll be in our place to run the world and order it as you see fit." And, taking their leave of the whole world like of that green forest, they slipped off one by one to that place where no one'll ever tell them they were bad Romanians, happier than the rest of us, cursed to see these days of misery, in which the country estranges itself from its own thoughts and wealth while everyone's swaggering the Romanians that they are without bothering to actually be Romanians at all.

The amazing power of empty phrase, the happenstance that many of the marauding imbeciles were their own children, waiting in the sidelines for their passing to ruin the inherited fortune, the misplaced belief that the "educated" newcomers might be more useful to the country than themselves, their always tried patriotism, and always proven through five centuries of standing pillars for this country, all that and more gifts of the same nature made them keep their peace, and withdraw from public life without noise, without anger and without putting up a fight.

The liberals bilked them, exactly like the Fenerioti Mavrocordat bilked them a century and a half prior. This trickster couldn't raise taxes on the peasants, as they were free, so over the amount owed to the Porte he was making very little profit. What exactly the substance of peasants' freedom was at the time is not today known, but as best we can guess it'd appear that it was a measure taken after great troubles and foreign invasions, to settle people on land. Were it impopular the chroniclers'd have mentioned it, as they so regularly pour anger on any laws that burdened the common folk. Just like the liberals called the boyars "ghosts" and whatever else, just so the Fenerioti thief called them slave traders and tyrants and whatnot, until eventually they all gathered up and, with the Metropolitan lifted the peasant's freedom and swore oaths that no one shall ever reintroduce it. Which is all the enemy wanted.x

The peasants no longer being free, they were ready for enslavement by the state, and the second day taxed them above and beyond the burden they had ever carried, even in time of war. Which taxes he then increased 500% and again 200% in just a few years.

Just as early in the 1700s, again today the results of the boyars' good faith were terrible, utter ruin. The old folks had the mouth of a wolf, but the heart of a lamb, here came the liberals with the mouth of a lamb, full of honeyed phraseology, and the heart of a wolf. And what they did of it... that's our lot now isn't it.

———
  1. Ie, a tax.

    Yes, back in 1877 the notion that the state would tax any sales is outrageous to the point of being scarcely conceivable. They had no VAT, in other words. And the taxes they did have were single digit, also. []

  2. The sytara, alterantively spelled citara, from Turkish çitari, is a type of stripped silk and cotton fabric.

    Much like proper felt or the top hat that used it, much like any other quality product of the "dark ages" prior to the great socialism enlightenment, it is no longer available. Eat shit and wear plastic why don't you, it's... "great for the environment", and certainly good enough for you. []

  3. The rhetorical mechanism here rests on the - widely understood by 1877 Romanians, but likely entirely forgotten by 2016 ESL-tards - fact that to the thirsty man there's nothing better than plain spring water. []
  4. Piety is the lived, internalized knowledge that you, personally, are inferior, and that you, practically, owe things to your superiors.

    No copping out, no "symbolic" service to "representations" that are conventionally superior to "everyone".

    You. Personally. On your knees. Serving. The person that is superior to you. That's piety. []

  5. The concept that yielded "marquess" in English is the same item that yielded Ban (most likely, a Sarmatian word) in Romanian : an independent governor of a troubled border province. []
  6. Possibly from Turkish bağcı []
  7. Really, ciocoi in Romanian denotes a hardass landowner of narrow views. []
  8. A whole array of pompous linguistic derpitude. []
  9. The French term denotes a fashionable, sought after whore, and works by comparing her to the French word for rooster. She's a female coq, you see, which is rather apt. []
  10. Κωνσταντίνος Μαυροκορδάτος, Romania's own Abraham Lincoln, exchanged the peasants' freedom arbitrarily dubbed "slavery" for the much more humane, democratic, modern and sensitive institution of slavery, arbitrarily dubbed "freedom". []
Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte
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20 Responses

  1. Unde găsesc originalul în română?

  2. > in the Romanian newspaper Timpul on December 14th, 1877.

  3. @Anon, citisem și eu partea aia :-) Voiam un link către varianta online că doar n-o fi câștigat Eugen Simion degeaba licitația de digitizare a operei lui Eminescu :-))) La o scurtă căutare n-am decât de tot felul de compilații în care n-am reușit să găsesc articolul cu pricina.

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 8 August 2016

    @Cristian Ia-o asa catinel spre pula, luzere. Nu ie locul tau aici.

  5. Da' ce-am făcut șefu'?

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