Sinucideri

Am avut un soc cand am vazut la televizor poza unei persoane pe care am cunoscut-o cu mult timp in urma anuntata la capitolul tentativa de sinucidere.
Nu voi da nume probabil ca cei care au urmarit stirile stiu despre cine este vorba.
Daca oamenii ar cauta sa asculte mai mult si sa dea mai mult celor din jurul lor, aceste lucruri nu s-ar intampla.
Dupa umila mea parere nu merita sa alegi acest gest nici ca fiind prima solutie nici macar ca si o ultima solutie. Nimic nu este mai pretios pe lume decat viata si ar trebui sa profitam la maxim de ea. Pentru cei care vor citi acest mesaj sper ca prima solutie sa incercati atunci cand aveti probleme sa vorbiti cu cineva si in al doilea rand sa cautati solutille bune nu pe cele usoare atunci cand ceva va deranjeaza.

Doamne ajuta!
Toate cele bune.

Places in time: totalitarian art and architecture -Germany

The relation between the construction of the nation states and the art. This moment concerns the XIX'th century in Germany and Italy. This period explains how the use of art constitues the row material due to serve to justify the existence of the nation before the state was built (usage of the past). Art was used by new states to install themselves and to represent them and also to legitimate themselves.

During the first half of the XX 'th century, the confrontation between the regimes communist and fascist did not limit itself at the ideology and military , but also concerned the cultural field. In fact the USSR of Stalin, the Germany of Hitler and the Italy of Mussolini created a common estethic in spite of their politic oposition. Those totalitarian regimes have used the art as an instrument of their propaganda.

If art is an active agent of communication between people it is also because it is equally a means of expression of the ideology. One question that follows is in what way the art has participated to the enrolment of the people?

The architecture has offered the luxury and display, its giantism has expressed the authority, giving rise to both fear and admiration. Concerning the fine arts they challanged the supreme chief and they announced the arrival of the "new man". Arts in general gave some form to the totalitarian utopia, which had as a final purpose to change the nature of the human being: to annihilate any form of individualism.

They imagined man as a simple wheel of a huge machine, the one of the all mighty state. The objective was to convince the people of its superiority and to make it accept all the sacrifices in a spiritual union with the Head of State. The art was not the reflection of the society but the reflection of the idea that the power had made of the people

Art was concieved by the our contemporaneous, according of its ways of evolution, as an essential construction of the continuityof the state and that of a political systhem and not only as a clothing of the politic.

Art as a vector of the politic: in other words which functions the diferent regimes assign to the art? Teaching vertues, demonstrative ones, reconversion?...

How is politic represented? According to which estethic canons? Do the political regimes invent new ways of particular representation or do they just borrow the ones existing in order to convert them and use them? To which restraints and logic answer these artistic works immediately related to the politics?
Art as a political practice: the estheticism of the polics is a phenomenon which was underlined by Walter Benjamin for the nazi but which can also be applicable to other form of government.
Art was concieved to convert the people in both a symbolic way for the essential legitimation of the regime but also because of the esthetic emotion of the mass which was concieved as an efficient diving force for the membership and attachment to the values the regime proposed. The monumental art, for example, is difficult to understand if it is detached of the political liturgy which served as a case as the fascist art did.

The nazi choices: the plans of Berlin by Hilter and Speer, the principles, the works (architecture and sculpture) that are to be found in Albert Speer's Books and Memoires, as the architectural delirium of the II-rd Reich. Hitler does not like Berlin he wishes to give it the looks of his political ambitions. The showcase of the regime has to go through a sisethmatic demolition of the buildings which could stop the projects of the architect Albert Speer. Only the war has delayed the constructions of the new capital baptised "Germania" of which inauguration was due to the universal exposition in 1950;nevertheless the old town has been destroyed. The only visible constructions are those of the olympic installations of the olympic games of 1936's summer of Werner March, the airport of Tempelhof by Ernst Sagebiel, the administrative complex of the Fehrbelliner Platz, the barracks of the former Quartier Napoleon ( occupied after 1945 by the French Forces stationed in Germany) and the former minstry of the Air the Reichsluftfahrtministerium

On conservatism

On Conservatism

It could be told that the Conservatism has no status as a program, ideology or political philosophy. Sometimes even its status as a political condition, stand is interrogated.
From Huntington's point of view "the ideology is a system of ideas regarding the distribution of political and social values according to a significant social group". According to Huntington, there are three large conceptions of the Conservatism which are in conflict.
The first one is the "aristocratic theory" which defines the conservatism as an Ideology of the historical movement which is unique and specific to a moment in time. It is the reaction of the feudal-aristocratic and agrarian social classes to the French Revolution, the Liberalism and the progress of the "bourgeoisie" at the end of the XVIII th century and at the beginning of the first half of the XIX th century.
Karl Mennheim describes the modern conservatism as a "function of a particular historical and sociological situation"

The liberalism is the ideology of the middle classes; the socialism and the Marxism are ideologies of the proletarian and the conservatism the ideology of aristocracy.
The Conservatism becomes in an indissoluble manner associated with the feudalism and the "Ancien Regime", the medieval period and the nobility. It is opposed to the middle classes, the work, the trade and the industrialization but also to the democracy, the liberalism and the individualism, as Huntington observes. According to Louis Hartz, the United States don't have a feudal tradition, and the efforts of the intellectuals of spreading the conservative ideas through the middle classes are doomed to fail.
The second theory is the "autonomous" one. In which the conservatism is not necessarily related to the interests of a particular group or dependent of a historical specific configuration of the social forces. "Conservatism is an autonomous system of ideas which are generally valid"

It is defined in terms of universal values as the justice, the order, the balance and moderation. The conservatism as Russell Kirk argues is simply a problem of "will and intelligence". The principles of the conservatism are not reduced to a one and only class of interests. According to this theory, the conservatives may appear from different classes and occupations. This theory is popular in the Neo-conservative class.
The third theory is based on the circumstantial definition. It defines the conservatism as an ideology which appears from the distinction of a recurrent type of historical situation in which the major challenge is addressed to the established institutions, and of which supporters use the conservative ideology for defending those institutions. "The conservatism is that system of values used to justify any social established order, anywhere and anytime it may exist, against the fundamental challenges of its nature"

Huntington also argues that the essence of the conservatism is "the passionate affirmation of the values of the existing institutions". This doesn't mean that it is opposed to all the changes. But for preserving the social fundamental values it may be necessary to put the changes on a second plan. To be a conservative you must be happy with the existent order and to be willing to fight against a serious challenge.
The difference between the three theories is closely related to the relation between the conservative ideology and the historical process. The aristocratic definition reduces the conservative ideology to a particular social class in a particular type of society. The autonomous theory, allows the appearance of the conservatism in any moment of the history. The circumstantial theory argues that the conservatives appear when social groups oppose themselves to the challenges and defend their status in relation with other social groups.
A common point between the three theories is that they agree on the content of the conservative ideology: the substance of the values and the ideas in which the conservatives believe.

One of the most important representative figures of the Conservatism is Edmund Burke. In his work we can find the structure of the conservative thinking.

Promoting Romania's Image

Promoting Romania's Image

I have been planning to work on the issue of Image and promotion of cultural values since 2005 and there has been progress made in this field, mostly due to the contribution of country branding makers as Simon Anholt and Philip Kottler and other specialist in Marketing Places and Branding. My research in this complex field, as a crossroad between political sciences and marketing, lasted two years during the Graduate School. A project of thesis of PHD in this field was developed during 2007's summer. But the subject of avant-garde in this area was considered less important than the studies of the past and political history. As a result it has never found the light in a long lasting relation between the Faculty of Political Sciences and me. That was really a shame because in the eyes of a believer that could have been a true success story. I honestly believe that the access to modern joint-ventures between different fields of research can only help the evolution of a subject, of a domain. And my contribution was to relate apparently total different fields in order to increase the potential of development of the complex domain that are the political sciences, towards a practical approach of the old and new theories concerning the development of democracy after the totalitarian trauma in the post-totalitarian societies.

I have focused on the issue of the image because the well functioning of such a country, especially Romania, is also based on the way that it is perceived from outside. Unfortunately there is no symmetry and no correspondent between what Romania wishes to promote and how it is really seen and promoted by others.

Opinions are divided in that sense, because some people consider that "no news is good news" and others, as the marketing specialists argue, news, no matter if they are favorable or not make the subject of discussion exist in the eyes of the world. So it is very important that the country's name appears in the columns of the news papers, even if it is to criticize negative aspects in politics, policies and social events

The last one hundred meters/Communism in a child's eyes

The last one hundred meters

It is about the last years of the Communist period and the memories of a person that was born in the early eighties in the Eastern Europe, namely in Romania. How do one survive the Communist era without remember anything? It is impossible if we only think at the stories told by our parents, the fragments of the past that we do remember and all that coagulated in our mind and gathered with the memories of stories read and analyzed by people that lived through all the period and even before and after it. The main issue here is to open a new chapter about what the eighties sons and daughters remember of the Communist period and how is the Communist period seen by the eyes "of an angel", the eyes of children that were born only to see the last glimpse of a totalitarian regime, one who was very rough for most of the people but very soft for others in comparison with other totalitarian regimes. We will humbly look on the perspectives of such a remembrance without touching the untouchable, the memories of the others.

One the nicest teachers that I can remember from college who became one of my greatest friends, or maybe my greatest friend due to our common path that has been lasting for so long, Ioan Stanomir , my Constitutional Law teacher, has pointed out, in a collective book about the memories of the Communist past called " A world which disappeared", some very important aspects of that era, beginning with the memories of the boy that he was then and the memories who faded for me about the school and the rules , back then, the hidden information and the way that the conversations back at home had nothing to do with the common discourse in the "real Romanian world". His memories are better penciled because of the fact that he spent a decade more than I in the Communism. But what we have in common are things that most of the children born in the Communist era have in common: memories about family, about how simple was a child's life in comparison with nowadays. The struggle with the words and the different discourses has been erased of my past because I did not have to deal with the real political world besides my first grade when I had at 7 am to be in front of the school singing the National Anthem. And all of our books had on the first page the photograph great leader Nicolae Ceausescu, as also every class had the portrait of him on one of its walls.

What I can remember of that period is more about the innocence of my childhood and the parallel with what children have today, the diversity of activities and freedom, not only from the financial point of view but also freedom of choice, which we did not have back then.

The media and Romania's Image

Since 1990 and the collapse of Communism Romania has been in the attention of foreign media in several occasions. One of the highest moments was the Revolution and its results the steps towards democracy. They focused on the events of the early nineties the social movements and the miners from Valea Jiului in January 1999, moments very well depicted in the former Prime Minister's Book Radu Vasile "Race on the Contrary Direction"

Other events brought to our attention from the foreign press where the elections in Romania after 1990 and the transformations in the parties configurations since then. The main periods being 1990- 1996 the transformations in the Leading Party led by Ion Iliescu, the former president, the FSN (the Front of the National Salvation), and the rests of its split in 1992 FSN became FDSN in one part en PD on the other and led in 1993 to the creations of PDSR and nowadays it is called PSD (The Social Democrat Party). In 1996 Romania was led by a president of the Democratic Convention Emil Constantinescu and his prime ministers Victor Ciorbea and Radu Vasile (from PNTCD- the National Peasant Christian and Democrat Party) till 2000. A third wave in the media's interest is the return to the Leadership of the country of the former president of the left Ion Iliescu and his prime minister Adrian Nastase that lost the elections in 2004 when the Aliance DA (dreptate si adevar) "Justice and Truth" won the elections changing the post revolutionary and transition atmosphere into the rightful one of a new reborn one more democratic in parallel with the western models.

The last but not the least important moment in the international media has been Romania adhesion at the European Union, it was not about "that Romania" anymore but about a new member, one of them. And the interest of the media was increased.
Even if my research ended before the new events that can be attached to Romania's image, in Italy this year, I argue that it is of a major importance to stay focused in this area of research because it is a field so new.

Media has had an important role in the opinion making since the beginning of times. The foreign media could help countries like Romania to develop a sense of comfort, stability and natural well being in the democratic system, by promoting the positive aspects and the positive steps that Romania has made towards the democracy. Instead of that, media has promoted the negative aspects of what Romania still tries to shake and solve, and by exaggerating the negative aspects, the media has created stereotypes that cannot be replaced even if they no longer exist in Romania's realities.