Evolutions

Some reverberations to the recently uncovered Popricani grave (first of an estimated series) were quite interesting in the Romanian press.

Cotidianul, one of the major daily papers, published the comments from readers. It was hard to stomach the predominantly racist comments, and the biggest irony was that some of these 'people' called the archaeological findings 'Jewish propaganda'. The other major daily paper, Evenimentul Zilei, in a debatable moment, decided to ban any comments to the article they published about same news.

The latter paper's decision can be understood, if one saw the reactions (again impossible to describe) to one of their recent articles stating that Antonescu can not be rehabilitated... After what followed, they saw it better to disable comments to this recent news about the mass grave.

The current figures are stuck at 16, the archaeologists state that this is the first 'layer' of the grave, as the digging so far has been superficial. The estimates for this particular grave are re-stated by both newspaper sources and the archaeologists working there, but it is truly inhuman(e) to go into numerology.

Some comments make astounding and casually dismissive analogies between these findings and for example, in the case of one angry commentator, the lives lost currently in the Middle East conflict. It is just breathtaking thought pattern.

One could write a very dark PhD thesis (and some have...) on the mental associations made by some, many of them are truly unimaginable until one sees the words in print or online... Homo sapiens will again characterise itself perfectly.
So the news are evolving, and as expected, multitude international news fori have taken up the story.

Unfortunately, a trend in even the BBC reports is that quantitative aspects overtake the essence of what this single finding means.

The media is, as always, fascinated by numbers - but there are more worrying disregards for the essence of the story. For example, the military prosecutors claim that this has nothing to do with what the archaeological and eyewitness evidence states...

So there are evolutions taking place in this direction, too... as suspected in previous blog posting, there will be a long battle between facts and ideologically motivated claims. It would truly be Utopian to assume 65 years of history whitewashing would suddenly grind to a halt and in this particular political regime the complex picture of the wartime ruler of Romania would suddenly be altered back to the root facts.

Personally, it would be a tragic evolution if the media will bury itself in quantitative rhetoric, because we are talking about a topic where it is inhuman(e) to dissect the numbers on what is expected to be an increasingly troubling finding.

But the hope is tied to the fact that whilst information may suffer remarkable changes in certain official sources, in the age of the internet the people with their hands on the key facts (it was interesting to see, for the first time, the scanned copies of previously 'buried' testimonies of military officers who were present when the acts of genocide were committed) will have a direct pipeline to the public.

In the end, one can be certain there will be myriad new conspiracy theories that will claim the entire saga dating back to that summer of 1941 (not to speak of all the other events during the Antonescu regime) are some new hoax. Element of this already surfaces in comment sections in the Cotidianul newspaper...

But this will again be a showdown between tangible facts and speculations, and ultimately, for those without direct feed to those tangible facts, a showdown between Occam's razor and politicised sanitisation attempts.