Interlocutor: Mário Soares

Abstract

The challenge of the past, its legacy and burden, was the inevitable starting point for the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Twenty years after the fall of communism, both public intellectuals and scholars face a fundamental query: How can truth and justice be reinstated in a post-totalitarian collective without the emergence of what Nietzsche called the “reek of cruelty”? For the first time in Romania’s contemporary history, the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Regime (PCADCR) rejected outright the practices of
institutionalized forgetfulness and generated a national debate about long-denied and occulted moments of the past (including instances of collaboration, complicity, etc).  I had the honour of being appointed Chair of this state-body. I was one of the co-ordinators of its
Final Report. Generally speaking, decommunization is, in its essence, a moral, political and intellectual process. The PCACDR Raport answered a fundamental necessity, characteristic of the post-authoritarian world, that of moral clarity. Only memory and history can furnish responsibility, justice and expiation. Reconciliation and the healing of a nation besmirched by the bloody mire of Evil depend on the recognition and non-negotiability of human dignity as a primordial moral truth of the new society.

Bio

Vladimir Tismaneanu


Coorganization: Centro Cultural Romeno em Lisboa (ICR), Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES), Universidade de Coimbra e Fundação Mário Soares