Dracula Politics – the Pathetic Fight with Imaginary Monsters

On September 27th local elections were held in Romania. Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski discuss how cheap political theatre continues to displace serious political debate. The campaign before these elections was Romanian “politics” in a condensed form: the neverending battle with communism and corruption.  To that we should add the consequences of such a battle — the demonization of progressive taxation and redistribution, of LGBT rights or any concept bringing social stability. Say a word and you will see a tsunami of outrage over how you are attempting to revive the communist monster. This of course paved the way for libertarian pro-business extremism which, while viewed as the only meaningful approach, has been sowing destruction in the state and society. The effects of that are what we are now forced to endure. Yet every pathology that has developed over the last three decades is attached to — you guessed it — communism and corruption. While the latter definitely exists and not only in Romania, the former is long gone and it is rather pathetic on the part of our political class to explain their current failures with a phenomenon that died 30 years ago. But who cares?   
The second topic Maria Cernat is taking up in this edition of The Barricade’s Podcast concerns a very troubling story of a Romanian woman who died of post-surgery complications after an abortion in a private clinic. The Romanian public hospitals denied her access to an abortion, using the ongoing pandemic as an excuse. Maria Cernat also comments on the absolutely disgusting reactions on the part of the Romanian Ministry of Health regarding this gruesome incident.
In the second half of the programme Boyan Stanislavski brings up some fresh examples of the absurd from Poland. Last week a very peculiar installation was placed in the centre of Warsaw — a statue of John Paul II holding up a huge stone and wading in a basin of reddish liquid. The creator of this piece of art explained how the pope is struggling against “new ideologies” that he views as a “continuation of Bolshevism” etc. 
“Considering the poor material the sculpture is made of, the grotesque position of the figure of the pope and the red liquid all around that made people produce memes with subtitles like ‘When you sneeze while on your period’ and all this being their symbol of the eternal fight against the red evil… There is something hyper-Polish about it!” Stanislavski explains.

Photo: Pixabay, CC0
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