Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and the folly (...) of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

Post-communist East-Central Europe is witnessing a clash of memories focused on its recent past. Whereas Western memory is constructed around the “politics of regret” and responsibility-assumption vis-à-vis the Holocaust, Eastern memory focuses to a large extent on responsibility-attribution for the trauma of communist rule. These are comparable traumatic experiences, but due to different “cognitive mapping” and different mnemonic social frameworks, Eastern memory has produced a post-mnemonic framework that allows for a creeping justification of interwar Radical Right ideologies; for the transmogrification (...) some of their standard-bearers into anti-communist heroes and martyrs; and the obfuscation World War II history. In some countries, religion and its past representatives are used for the same purpose. (shrink)

Post-communist anti-Semitism in Romania and elsewhere in East Central Europe is not necessarily driven by the same motivations. Basically, each of the categories I employ in the taxonomy (updating earlier endeavors) acts out of a different motivation and has a different temporal orientation. What they all share, however, is precisely the attempt to respond to the need to produce what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community,” in albeit significantly different positive terms of reference. A distinction is made between the following (...) taxonomic categories of “producers” of anti-Semitism: a) “Selfexculpatory nostalgic anti-Semitism;” b) “Self-propelling anti-Semitism”; c) “Neo-populist mercantile anti-Semitism”: d) “Utilitarian anti-Semitism”; e) “Reactive anti-Semitism; and, finally, f) “Vengeance anti-Semitism.&rdquo. (shrink)