Earlier this month the world lost an innovative defender of art, heritage and architecture. You’ve probably never heard of him; I hadn’t, until I read his obituary. His name was Eugeniu Iordachescu.
In the 1980s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu undertook a series of disastrous urban planning projects, turning downtown Bucharest and other city centres into brutal (not just brutalist) communist architectural nightmares. Centuries-old buildings were destroyed to make way for generic apartment blocks. The effect is referred to as “Ceauşima”, Romania’s own Hiroshima.
Happily, the genius of Iordachescu saved more than a dozen churches, monasteries and other historical structures. His solution: dig under the buildings, sink a huge concrete plinth beneath them, then lift almost a thousand tons of stone — in one piece — onto specially adapted train tracks to be moved to safety. Calling this an astonishing feat of engineering is an understatement.
The final years of the Soviet Union and its satellite states saw many such instances of resistance, acts both great and small. Just as few people living in SA in the 1980s could anticipate that the apartheid edifice would be crumbling by the end of the decade, few in the Eastern bloc foresaw the collapse of communism in 1989.
SA’s history, our country’s ideological conflicts and indeed our public discourse — the language we use to express our opinions — is intricately linked to the rise and fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (and, to a lesser degree, in east Asia). Our left-leaning politicians, and even some of our right-leaning ones, invoke the rhetoric of militant socialism in everything from party protocol to policy documents.
The post-apartheid ANC is a centrist party that has had to pretend it has radical socialist inclinations. At first this was necessary to keep its partners in the tripartite alliance happy; then it was a guise for state capture; recently it has prevented the EFF from leading the conversation on land ownership, nationalisation and so on.
Some commentators argue that the ruling party has become less centrist and increasingly centralising — read socialist — in its approach to governance. Here is Gareth van Onselen: “The ANC has systematically expanded its nationalisation agenda from service delivery to resources, then to jobs, then land, then the Sarb [SA Reserve Bank] and now to the effective nationalisation of [citizens’] actual money, in the form of prescribed assets.”
For Van Onselen, the ANC’s double-speak (centrist from one side of its mouth, centralising from another) is a mechanism for getting moderates to accept its creeping statism: “In another 20 years, SA will look nothing like the federal idea captured in the constitution, just one big centralised machine.”
More sanguine observers may choose to believe the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa and Tito Mboweni about, say, the independence of the Reserve Bank. More cynical observers might suggest that, just as the ANC is inept at implementing its good policies, it is likely to prove inept at implementing its bad policies.
Either way, wariness of our politicians’ inherited pseudo-communist vocabulary and ideas is no excuse for adopting a hard and fast anti-socialist stance. Socialism works just fine along with a regulated free market in Scandinavia. Socialism helped the US after the Great Depression and Britain after World War 2. (If the Trumpsters and Brexiteers continue in their current vein, both countries may find themselves returning to such economic circumstances.)
Crucially, we should not buy into the Cold War propaganda that too readily associates socialism with oppression and capitalism with liberty. Ask Brazilians after a few years of Eduardo Bolsonaro’s presidency. Or ask a billion people in China, where these four elements make a perplexing compound.
And what of the former Soviet Bloc? Another brave opponent of communist oppression in the 1980s was a Polish student activist by the name of Pawel Adamowicz. In 1998 he was elected mayor of the city of Gdansk, and for two decades in this position he was a firm advocate for equality and human rights, as well as an arts patron.
But Poland, like many countries in Eastern Europe, has turned away from its post-communist openness and (while pursuing free market economics, note) its government has adopted a nationalist and xenophobic stance. Adamowicz remained a firm critic of this disturbing shift.
Now he has joined Iordachescu on the roll of the January dead — assassinated by a madman who was enabled by a climate of hate speech and violence.
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