Sometimes I happen to have beautiful utopian dreams. Sometimes I dream that it was not Lenin in that sealed car crossing Germany and going to Russia in 1917, rather there were three or four odious American capitalists: Russia, Europe would have been saved. Imagine all those constructions, all those industries in the steppes, all those mines produced in the Ural Mountains, in Siberia, all those new metropolises! What a giant market! A wealthy world! There would have been enough ice-boxes for all Russians, all Ukrainians, and cars, and penicillin – because we all know that capitalists do not do business out of charity, although the result is charitable: if I have made five hundred thousand cars, I must make five hundred thousand clients to buy those cars. It seems that after half-a-century of blunders and crimes, the Russians are on the road that is taking them where the Americans are, to the society of wealth, to overcoming economic concerns. Except the Russians will get there more slowly. Although, for instance in Czechoslovakia food is not enough, the Russians take the food, in other words they are still in the colonization period, starving and exploiting those colonized. In the "imperialist" expansion of their economy, the Americans make it so that the territories over which they expand have to gain. And all could have been accomplished without massacres, without concentration camps, without tyranny, without the animal, giant, and stupid explosion of aggression, sadism, and terror instincts, and without any persecution delirium. Plus, as a supreme favor, in a society of wealth, people would have been allowed to criticize, without being afraid and without being persecuted, this very society, the consumer society. They would have been able to have whims, wishing in a futile or hypocritical manner to go back to idyllic simplicity, to poverty, saying they are against the capitalist society that has to be combated not because it needs poor people, as people claimed until three or four years ago, but, on the contrary, because it abolishes poverty, solving the economic problem, as I said earlier. I dream of an even more beautiful utopia. Once industrialized by the United States, Russia, assisted again by the United States, could have persuaded China to accept the "American challenge" the way Japan did: what an extraordinary market, all those raw materials, what a titanic industrial development, and all this without the bloody quakes of the "permanent revolution," but within a true revolution or permanent evolution of scientific, technical, and industrial progress! Tibet would not have been destroyed, and, in another context, the Chinese spirit would have been preserved, because nobody would have had the interest or the idea to contest it, the way those "enlightened people" who brought misfortune to humankind contested it. The world disregarded simple solutions. Willy-nilly, it is a prey to contortions, tortures. Could this be a mandatory stage? I have often thought that the attitudes of nations toward the United States are the expression of an unprecedented ingratitude (having saved Europe twice is too much!) and of colossal jealousy. The lesser of two evil or the good – this is what the United States means currently. At a time when churches are being defiled in London, at a time when dissent is increasingly strong in other parts of the world by pettiness and gratuitous restlessness in support of secondary issues that are artificially dilated, while people declare war against "consumption" between two vacations and they try to provoke if not invent crackdowns, during all this time and in spite of all this, the "materialistic" Americans climb up to heavens, offer infinite, new, and miraculous horizons to people, and unaware Europeans do not even learn about these things, the way they are confined among their pigmy limits. And void spaces no longer frighten, since a Presence was invoked there which has populated them by its very existence.
Le Figaro, 24 April 1969
by Eugen Ionescu (1909-1994)
