The difference between ideas and facts is often lost on leftist scholars. That sentiment comes by way of Florin Curta, a professor in medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida who was raised in communist Romania.
Growing up, Curta experienced empty grocery stores, frequent power outages, and no warm water. It was a freezing, miserable, hungry youth under an oppressive regime in a country falling apart. That’s why Curta says peers who romanticize socialism as some sort of utopia are dangerously mistaken.
“I think that there’s an idealism that most people in academia, specifically in the humanities, share,” he recently told the College Fix. “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.”
Curta has more wisdom to impart. Read the full interview at the College Fix.