Law and memory
In a world where the shadows of the past never sleep completely, and the wounds of history still bleed under the pole of modern civilization, Romania is hesitant on a knife edge: between the need to condemn, unequivocally, hatred, and the duty to keep the flame of critical memory alive.
The law on combating anti -Semitism is undoubtedly a necessary step. It puts us in shelter from unacceptable skids, the denial of the Holocaust, the incitement to hatred and the resuscitation of the symbols of a criminal past. In a European country, such laws are not optional, but expressions of a deep moral commitment: to never repeat the horrors that have darkened the XX age.
But between memory and manipulation, between justice and revenge, the line is thin.
A law that fights anti -Semitism should not become a wall against historical research, an obstacle to academic debate. History is not written with prohibitions, but with documents, with rigor, with the confrontation of the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. To transform history into a criminal subject is a dangerous mistake; It means to condemn her to silence, and silence, we know too well, is the favorite space of extremisms.
Applied without discernment, such a law can become the tool of justice populism: it can generate social disorders, it can violate citizen rights, it can criminalize opinions and analyzes that, even if they are not comfortable, are necessary. And the most bitter paradox is this: when the punishment becomes abuse, when the law becomes censorship, anti -Semitism is not eradicated – but, on the contrary, it becomes a ghost that lies from the ancient suspicion and of the concealed discourse.
There is another imbalance. Romania still does not have a law that explicitly condemns communism and its symbols. The Holocaust was a tragedy without borders – but also the gulag, the channel, the prisons of silence and deportations left deep traces in the flesh of this nation. Without a law that condemns those crimes, our memory remains creased, the morality of the law – asymmetrical.
Communism, not related to legal responsibility, remains for some a plateau, a speech of a false nostalgia, an evasionist form to block the lucid analysis of the recent past. And in the absence of a clear sanction, the ideological skids are creeping in institutions, in education, in the public space.
Therefore, Romania needs a coherent and balanced legislation, which condemns all the political extremms that mutilated the 20th century – be they right or left. A legislation that not only forbid symbols, but to illuminate consciousness, educate, repair, prevent.
We cannot build a free society on a mutilated memory.
The law must be a lighthouse, not a stick; A guarantee of dignity, not a tool of silence. Only in such a framework, Romania can become a mature, true European democracy-one in which the truth is not afraid, and freedom is not a luxury, but an assumed right.
