Nicolae Negru // Let’s not laugh at Maria Zaharova, because she announces mass purges, genocide

Diacritical marks

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs qualified as “hallucinatory delusion” the recent statements of Maria Zaharova, the spokeswoman of the MID of the Russian Federation, who compared the decisions of the PAS government related to the Romanian language to “experiments of the Third Reich”. “Only then and there did they experiment with people’s nationality, with their language”, said the representative of Russian diplomacy, naturally overlooking the “exercises” of identity and linguistic modeling applied to the peoples of Russia (USSR), located on the perimeter of its border , so that their names and the language spoken by them do not coincide with those of identical neighboring peoples, outside the imperial borders, which he crushed in his expansion. As usual, Russia accuses others of exactly what it is guilty of.

Dismissing her words as coming from a person who does not possess the necessary competence in the linguistic field, the somewhat harsher reaction of our MFA misses something very important, however. The MAE statement is aimed at the person of Maria Zakharova, the insufficient level of “expertise”, the fact that she is a specialist in Chinese New Year symbolism, not the fact that she speaks on behalf of a competent, fundamental institution of the Russian state.

Reproaching her “complete lack of respect for our people”, honesty and fairness, our diplomats overlook or dare not say that it is Russia that treats us with utter contempt, that defiantly interferes in our internal affairs, that brutally ignores the elementary rules of civilized behavior in relations between two sovereign states, members of the UN.

However hallucinatory it may seem, Maria Zakharova’s reference to the “Third Reich” is not accidental, it is not delusion, but the expression of a cynical, shameless, crude strategy that Russia pursues with a persistence worthy of a better cause. From the “simple” excitement of the Moldovans, of the fifth column, in order to use them as a maneuvering table in its hybrid war, Moscow moves to the next stage in the direction of demonizing Maia Sandu and the PAS government, using the procedures and patterns applied in Ukraine: international creation of a “Nazi” image for the Republic of Moldova.

Moscow knows very well that the “Moldovan language independent of the Romanian language” is the creation of Russian (Soviet) imperial propaganda, that the Romanian language is spoken in the Pruto-Dnistrian area, it is aware of the opinions of internal and external linguists, with the resolutions of the Academy, not she didn’t even miss Ion Druță’s remark that she wrote her works in Romanian, she is aware that, with perestroika, with the achievement of independence, the exit of Moldovans from the Moldavianist circle built through terror and ethno-linguistic engineering was inevitable. But, as with the Ukrainians, imperial reflexes lead her to try to crush (to “break over the knees” in the expression of a Russian propagandist referring to the Ukrainians) our will.

After Ukraine, Moscow actually announces the preparation for a new “denazification”: of the Republic of Moldova. That’s why it is necessary for Chisinau to tell the truth, for internal and external public opinion to understand the meaning of Maria Zaharova’s public “aberrations”. She conscientiously does her duty, perseverance in evil is inscribed in her functional attributions.

What the complete denazification of Ukraine would look like, if Putin succeeds in occupying it, we learn from an article we referred to earlier, published by the Russian state agency RIA Novosti on April 5, 2022, immediately after the start of the “special military operation”. Entitled “What should Russia do with Ukraine”, the article argues the need for “denazification” through a process of “de-Ukrainization” and “de-Europeanization”, establishing full ideological and political control by the Russian Federation over the neighboring state .

Apart from the “liquidation” of all Ukrainian leaders, the Ukrainian army, the destruction of the military, informational, educational infrastructure, the banning of Ukrainian educational programs at all levels, the occupation of Ukraine entails the establishment of permanent “denazification” bodies for a period of 25 years, “installation of the Russian information space”, publication of lists of “collaborators with the Nazi regime” and the destruction of prominent figures of Ukrainianism or the application of forced labor (for those absolved from capital punishment or imprisonment).

This is already being done in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and Bucea, Gostomel, Irpin… are the frightening symbols of Russian “denazification”. Accusations of “Nazism” against the Republic of Moldova can have similar consequences. Having gone through the experience of 1940, with lists of “collaborators of the bourgeois-landlord regime”, when thousands of people were killed and thrown into mass graves, because they had been notaries, lawyers, mayors or members of some parties (Vladimir Beșleăgă reported not long ago that a peasant from his native village, Mălăiesti, was hanged because he held the position of mayor for a few months), we can imagine what awaits those who demanded the right to “language and alphabet”, consider themselves Romanians and speak Romanian language.

It can be assumed that, depending on the course of the war in Ukraine, Maria Zakharova’s accusations of Nazism will increase or, on the contrary, decrease in intensity. But Chisinau must take them seriously, no less seriously than the electoral network that the FSB is building in the Republic of Moldova with the help of the robber Ilan Șor, no matter how ridiculous and embarrassing the personal performance and the freshness of the ideas of the imperial spokeswoman may seem. Because Maria Zaharova actually announces terror, mass purges, genocide.

And when a Dodon or a Valeriu Reniță affirms, nitam-nisam, that he speaks the Moldavian language, with all the admiration for Grigore Vieru, Ion Druță, this means that he is waiting for the Russian army to come with “denazification”, that he claims a position in a possible “denazified” Moldavian government, i.e. “de-Romanized”.