By Julianne Stanford
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Today Professor Florin Curta is a professor in medieval
history and archaeology at the University of Florida, but his road to the sunny
vistas of north-central Florida came by way of communist-controlled Romania,
where growing up he grappled with empty grocery stores, power outages, and an
oppressive government that discouraged creativity and free enterprise.
Curta grew up under the iron-fisted regime of Romanian
President Nicolae Ceaușescu, a dictatorship characterized by unrelenting
state-control, extreme poverty and widespread dilapidation and deprivation.
Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed by firing squad in 1989, leaving his
country in shambles.
Curta, meanwhile, managed to earn his bachelor’s degree
from the University of Bucharest in 1988, and left his country in 1993, having
been invited to pursue a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University after delivering
a speech before the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo,
Mich.
He hasn’t looked back. Discovering academic and personal
freedom unlike anything he could have in post-Communist Romania, Curta
permanently relocated to America.
“There’s a certain atmosphere in which scholarly thinking
can grow in the United States that it cannot grow in any European country,”
Curta said. “I left after communism collapsed, but it was a regime that left a
deep, deep imprint on people’s minds. Even though there was no official
communism in the government, a lot of people continued to think in communist
ways, specifically in the academic world.”
Curta is one of the world’s most distinguished scholars
in medieval history and archaeology – and is co-founder of the University of
Florida’s medieval and early modern studies center, where he directs its
certificate program.
He recently shared his experience growing up under a
communist regime and discussed the rise of socialism in America during a phone
interview with The College Fix:
Tell us about
growing up in communist Romania. What was the quality of life?
Curta: Stores were completely empty. There was no food.
There was a black market where you could buy some things, but obviously at much
higher prices. Besides the fact that there was no food, every now and then
electricity would be cut off in the apartment, at a sudden moment in time. You
would not know when and for how long. Sometimes there was no running water at
all, and there was no warm water at all. We’re talking about life in an urban
environment, we’re talking about an apartment, not one or two, but thousands in
which people lived in such conditions. I was in college in that time, and I
remember actually studying in the library with gloves on my hands because it
was so cold. So not a happy place.
Socialism appears
to be a popularly embraced ideology in American academia. Why do you think this
is? What is so tempting about this mindset?
Curta: I think that there’s an idealism that most people
in academia, specifically in the humanities, share. We live in an era of
ideological morass, especially with the collapse of communism that has left no
room for those idealists in the academic world. No matter how you can prove
that system doesn’t work, with an inclination to go that way perhaps because
most people associate socialism with social justice, while the former is an
ideology with concrete ideas and concrete historical experiences, while social
justice is a very vague abstract notion.
You have to understand, the difference between ideas and
facts is what is of major concern here. As my father used to say, it is so much
easier to be a Marxist when you sip your coffee in Rive Gauche, left-bank
Paris, than when living in an apartment under Ceaușescu, especially in the
1980s.
Why do you think
socialist ideology has been gaining popularity with some Americans? Why do you
think Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose platform is
based-off of socialist ideas, gained such traction with the electorate,
especially millennials?
Curta: First of all, I would not be willing to put a
blanket on all of the population that is drawn toward that idea. It’s a matter
of certain segments of that population, especially the young ones, and I think
that has something to do with two factors, one of which is the distance in time
between the real experience, the historical significance of communism. In other
words, the parents of those young people who are now very enthusiastic about
socialism and Bernie Sanders were those who lived during the Cold War. So to
them, socialism, or even more so communism, was a real threat. And they could
see under their own eyes how that form of living was out there.
Also the lack of historical knowledge. I would say the
school system is responsible for that. You get courses at the university on the
Holocaust, but you don’t get courses on the history of communism. Last time I
checked, [it was estimated] 100 million people were killed under communism by
various regimes in various parts of the world. That seems to have passed
without a note in the academic world. I think that lack of prominence in the
curriculum, in other words, not teaching what really happened, and the sheer
ignorance about the disaster in terms of human cost, economic cost, in tragedy
in general is responsible for this rosy picture of socialism.
And so what can be
done to counteract this misperception or perhaps even incorrect view of
history?
Curta: Education. But also the willingness to know about
this. Just by ignoring those factors a dialogue is not possible… Bringing up
the truth in what happened is of crucial value. Ignoring what happened will
lead to similar mistakes.
But what about
“free college education for everyone,” which is one of Sanders’ campaign
promises? Shouldn’t people have access to free higher education?
Curta: My answer to that is very simple. I went through
20-plus years of school in the old country, under communism, for free, but I
had no food on the table.
Bearing all of this
in mind, what would you say to a millennial who wants to vote for Sanders?
Curta: First of all, I would say that you are free to
vote for whomever you want. That’s the principle in which this country is based
on, unlike the one from which I was coming from. You have options. You also
have options to educate yourself and to answer questions that might arise from
an investigation of that candidate’s points of view and so forth. Don’t try to
push them down my throat though because indeed I know a lot more about where
these ideas can go because I experienced them not from reading books, but from
living under it.
Do you think
socialist ideas could ever actually be implemented here in the U.S.?
Curta: To tell it frankly, I think this is a
philosophical question and I can answer it by giving my take on this… Let’s
take an invention, for example, an invention that really changes the lives of
hundred, thousands, millions of people. From the moment that invention is drawn
up on a piece of paper by the inventor, from the moment it actually gains
social application, to change the lives of people, it takes very little under
the capitalist system. That is because of the profit. It takes a very long
while under socialism because it needs to be approved. Originality and creation
and creativity, those forms of freedom that most Americans don’t think much
about are discouraged under socialism. You have to stay in your line, not get
out of your line.
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