European Integration as State Ideology and Social Malady
This idea is also being used by the political and civic groups which are contesting the current governance. The critics from the so-called liberal right side are not using this idea for foreign policy, but only for its failure in the course of integration into the EU. In the same way it attacked the unsuccessful implementation of the reforms, which are seen as the agenda of all state institutions that must be fully inspired by EU directives as well as the recommendations of the IMF and World Bank. In the same context western diplomats, especially the ambassadors of the EU, Germany and the USA, are regularly launching public propaganda pieces focused on the same idea of European integration which is presented as the last step towards the so-called “success story” of the Republic of Moldova.
The Moldovan public education system is forcing students to have obligatory lessons on European integration. It even exists as specialized curriculum in universities, preparing the holders of these diplomas on the conveyor. Thousands of young people are earning their master degrees and PhDs by dedicating all their studies to EU integration.
The mainstream media is super-saturated by the pro-EU discourse which is permanently articulated by the cohort of experts and analysts on duty, who are trained and are financially supported by the Soros Foundation as well as by other American and European NGOs, which are promoting the “development of democracy” in countries like Moldova. Specifically, the dozen professional commentators, who have been fabricated in western laboratories, position themselves as keepers of the ultimate truth. They are the ones evaluating all political actors, appearing as a new class of clergy which promotes the worship of democracy and human rights. Evidently, the indispensable ingredient of this ideology is the demonization of Russia and sacralization of the West (USA, EU, IMF, WB, and WTO).
The liberal paradigm, correctly named “the liberal virus”, became a real state ideology. And it happened in spite of the fact that Article 5 (2) of the Moldovan Constitution clearly states that: “No ideology can be installed as official state ideology”. Thus the Moldovan society has fallen into a conceptual impasse. Therefore, the entire social dynamism is nothing more than stagnation, a rotation inside of a circle.
Being fascinated by this new religion, the Euro-enthusiasts who practice it fervidly are not even able to make the right comparisons. Meaning that they cannot understand what is truly happening in the economic and social fields, in culture and the educational systems, etc., of the ex-communist countries. They neither penetrate the real causes of the financial crisis in Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc., nor understand the real dimensions and consequences in the short and long term of the wave of immigrants in the European Union.
Non-military wars which were launched against coutries like the Republic of Moldova by using the propaganda machine and mass culture, as well as by the inoculation of consumerism, are paralyzing any kind of critical spirit – they are annihilating the capacity of reasoning and the ability of following cause-effect relationships. Brainwashing as a tool of societal control was not the exclusive property of only the communist regimes. It is applied much more efficiently under so-called “democratic” regimes.
Looking at these depressing realities it is appropriate to address our society with a bitter greeting: “Welcome back to the USSR!” The triumphal march of the Soviet Power and walking cadence to the bright communist future has been easily substituted by what the new state and party nomenclature is naming “the European path”. The communist dogma was replaced by the (neo)liberal dogma. The idolatry of the trio of Marx-Engels-Lenin was replaced by the divinization of European commissioners and the emissaries of the IMF. The religion of human rights, promoted by the perverted western apostates, became an obligatory cult and a reference system for the whole society, especially for the ones who claim to be the “national elite”.
One of the basic elements of the newly converted believers of this religion is the laicism or anticlericalism. The hostile attitude against the Church is diminished only on Easter or Christmas, when the state and party nomenclature uses this PR opportunity by going to the central cathedral for no other reason than to take some pictures of the devoted holding enormous candles. These belated ideological victims of the French Revolution and of the Bolshevic coup d'état, who are demonstrating a grotesque form of anticommunism, have to do some research and understand why in 1918 the clique of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) and Leon Trotsky decided to separate the Church from the State and the School from the Church. It would also be useful for them to try to penetrate the spiritual, mystical meaning – the one that exposes the fact of terror and genocide against Christians which was committed by French revolutionaries and repeated on a much bigger scale by the group of conspirators that attained power in Russia in 1917.
For half a century, in Moldovan schools, icons were replaced by Lenin's portraits. After the fall of communism his pictures weren't replaced by icons like before, but by pictures of more or less valuable writers. Here we have another form of idolatry. This conflict is about as old as Modernity itself – it represents the conflict between culture and cult, or to put it another way, it is a conflict about the laicization of culture, about its degeneration into the trap of anthropocentism. When people who were educated during the communist regime and the generation who grew up in the post-soviet period try to give some supplementary arguments, they usually make reference to classical writers of national or foreign literature. Just a small minority know “Our Father” by heart, read the Bible and are patristics. This kind of spiritual vacuum and religious blindness represents the most severe collective disease in our society. Unfortunately, we are not an exception, but just one example in this long list of countries which have progressed from the communist to the liberal model.
The interpretation of economical realities is based on the same liberal paradigm. A whole collection of myths of capitalism in its neoliberal version from the Chicago school – deregulation, small government, “the invisible hand of the market”, free trade (free movement of goods, services and money), globalization, the elimination of customs barriers, the subordination of budgetary and fiscal policies to the directives of the IMF, mass privatization, including the transmission of the rentable state factories, frequently having strategic importance, to the private sector – all of these elements are parts of the same religion, and they are shared with obedience and veneration by our “happy slaves” as well as by so many others. Economics, which is seen as an exact “objective” science with immutable rules, became a sacrosanct model which dominates the way of thinking of the political class, as well as the educational system.
The connection between ideology and economics (the latter deriving from the former) is almost not realized. Even the group which is showing a noisy patriotic speech by calling on history and national culture has failed in understanding what a national project of economic development actually means, how would the elaboration and implementation look on the national scale of the model based on economic sovereignty or patriotism, rightfully called economic nationalism. Is it not sad to see local patriots fiercely fight against an empire which disappeared many years ago (Soviet Empire) and capitulated in total unconsciousness before the only global empire (the United States), with its regional vassal incarnated by European Union? The fact is that people who claim to defend national interests are actually contributing to the vassalization, the enslavement, the “de-sovereignization” of the country. This is indeed offering a reason for deep sorrow. Only a few of them are able to decode the essence of new geopolitical realities in the period when national states as actors of international law are undermined and subjugated by transnational corporations – those sharks of speculative capitalism – which are devastating huge regions of the planet, and are oppressing all countries and nations, thereby turning them into hopeless victims of this new type of colonialism. Unfortunately, they are practically inexistent.
Meanwhile, in the EU countries and the USA there are being published plenty of academical works, there is a large number of alternative media platforms and anti-system parties that are rising, both from the right and from the left wing of the political spectrum, which are articulating serious critics against the state of things. In Moldova, on the other hand, nearly the entire media and all our academic establishments are continuing to operate on the liberal paradigm.
Our collective effort oriented towards national emancipation and the assumption of an honorable destiny could really start only when people who claim to be intellectuals will start to get over the ecstasy of common thinking, will overcome the stereotypes in the interpretation of reality, and will finally abandon their blinders and see the world in its entire complexity.
The renunciation of one’s own prejudices is the biggest struggle for human beings who were created in accordance with the image and likeness of God – the one divine Being who possesses rationality, and who is transcendental, trans-historical, and mystical. Without this struggle, which has to be done in a conscious and responsible way, any attainment of power will be nothing other than a change of decor and an increasingly abysmal plunge into a combined political, economic and spiritual fiasco.