I sporadically come across Dan Alexe's writings. He's a smart dude, he's courageous, and he seems to constantly be bullying "protocronists / dacologists" whom he calls "dacopaths" ("dacopati" cf Romanian original, a term most likely inspired by the derisive and pejorative “psychopaths”). I thought I deconstruct / smite him a bit.

Feel free to disbelieve me, but I really do like this guy. He’s an accomplished writer, he has a charming demeanour of “defensive / honest dickishness” that I’m sure is a hit with ladies over 40. He could totally open for Holograf with one of his documentaries – just watch his interview with HN or Garantat 100%. He speaks somewhere between 15-50 languages – he might not be able to remember all the languages he speaks, but he certainly recalls their vocabulary and grammar.

We do share a few thoughts, such as the belief that talent, as he says, does not exist, but it is rather organized and efficient work. We also have differences, such as the fact that he’s a militant atheist, while I am not. I was also a bit annoyed by some dacologist “Ninja Spammer” and wrote about some funnier quasi-linguistics interpretations, but all in all, I find [positive, affirmative] Dacology revival more interesting and worthy of study than its denial.

My problem with his fight against protochronism is the same problem I have with militant atheists: their critical thinking is somehow muted when directed at themselves rather than “believers.” This is generally a human tendency, but it is particularly problematic with vociferous atheists in that they suffer of the same intellectual laziness they accuse “people of faith” from suffering.

[I had scheduled this article to be published later, thinking I will finish it, but I didn’t have the time and it got published only half-completed; what follows was added after it was first published.]

Not long ago, triggered by similar errors in judgement, I was writing in The Neutr(aliz)ed History of Romanians that Prof Dr Mircea Diaconescu, Rector of University of Bucharest (the biggest and most reputable in Romania), was similarly misguided. I made a number of points in that article, originally published in Romanian, essentially stating that nationalism, generally a bad idea, is particularly misplaced in science. It didn’t serve well prewar Germany, though it was not as abysmal under the proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet block. Yet history is not and never was “science” hence it does not need to suffer the downside of scienticism.

1. History is more Literature than Science. Subjective interpretations, bias, hidden agendas and groupthink rule.
2. Historians are, by way of consequence, influenced by the context of their formative years and not in the least by the most popular ideas in their alma mater.
3. In their quest to be original and to bring something new, some historians might go to the extreme of a strange “deconstructivism/nihilism” in that they will attack the pantheon of their own nation’s history.
4. Nationalism is a sad disease to suffer from, but it can provide, at least for those still growing up or coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, some needed role-models and self-confidence through the feeling of belonging to a greater collective.
5. Romanian public education has taken such a beating that it is now unlikely anybody can even understand what is going on with Romanian history reinterpretation, let alone judge for themselves and identify errors.

Sadly, it has become hip to badger historic figures. Dan Alexe starts with the Romanian Church at Athos (el-athos), continues on his blog with what he was able to make out of Desunsianu’s “Prehistoric Dacia” (cl-delir) and ends magisterially, at least as far as the articles I was planning to discuss go, with Tiberius Claudius Maximus, the man who “decapitated” Decebalus (cl-max).

LE: Just imagine, for a second, that some lowly NKVD/KGB aparatchik wrote on his gravestone I ordered Mayakovski's suicide. Or that I put it on my gravestone or on someone else’s gravestone. Or that the Sapanta poet put it on someone else's grave and many decades or centuries later, someone discovered it and published it on their blog. Would that make it the smoking gun in Mayakovski's suicide/murder controversy?

Discussing all his logical failings will take some time, but the latter is particularly bad, in that he seems to lend more credence to the bragging / epitaph of an anonymous soldier over the generally accepted narrative of Decebalus’ suicide (i.e., that he committed suicide, as depicted on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and may have been still alive when TCM reached him).

To be continued in the next instalment, Alexic Danopathy.

Sources / More info: hu-da, imdb-da, wiki-da, neurope-da, el-athos, cl-delir, cl-max, wiki-decebal