The real Rumania
Sir: Perhaps Rumania was 'the only com- munist country in which it was possible to live a civilised life' in 1968, as Professor MacGregor-Hastie claims (Letters, 10 June), though I doubt it. But so what? It is beside the point now, in 1989, as Rumania lies dying.
MacGregor-Hastie fails to condemn President Ceausescu and instead he pleads on his behalf: `No man can rule for so long without making mistakes,' he writes. The devastation of Bucharest is not a mistake: it is a systematic policy of demolition. He pays the starving people of Rumania a grotesque compliment for their 'super- human efforts to pay off huge external debt by self-sacrifice not whining'. But it is a sacrifice imposed upon them. And for the future he makes the most idiotic promises: 'the country will soon return to normal'. But the mediaeval heart of Bucharest razed to the ground by Ceausescu can never be replaced.
`Age distorts the vision', he writes. In Ceausescu's case this is rubbish — his vision was distorted from the very begin- ning. But it is surely true of MacGregor- Hastie who, in spite of his fond memories of happier times, his seven books pub- lished in Rumania and his volume on Rumania's national poet, refuses to take seriously the cause and the scale of the tragedy.
MacGregor-Hastie's long involvement with Rumania makes his apology for her diabolical master and this blindness to the suffering of her people doubly offensive. His opinion should be ignored.
James de Candole
London
Previous page
