Professor raised under communism explains academics’ love of socialism – and why they’re wrong
The difference between ideas and facts is lost on leftist scholars 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 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.
