Hello from a monastery guesthouse in Bukovina, only a couple of miles south of the Ukraine border. This is the heart of Romania’s Orthodox monastery country. I just settled into my room, and am drinking a glass of house wine made by the monks at this particular monastery (I’m skipping dinner — just too tired to eat).

On the all-day drive up from Bucharest, my friends and I stopped at the Voronet monastery, a jewel of a church built in 1488, and the most famous of the painted monasteries of the Bukovina province. It is jaw-dropping. Here is the external wall with a fresco depicting the Last Judgment:

Notice how the Last Judgment wall has withstood over six centuries of weather, but not the adjoining wall.

Here is a look at another exterior wall of the monastery. They call this intense blue “Voronet blue”:

We motored onward north, hoping to make it before sundown to the monastery where we are going to spend the weekend. We pulled in just past dusk. The night air here at the edge of the Carpathians is clean and cool. Catalin and Ninel, my traveling companions, put their bags in their room and went down for dinner at the monastery guesthouse, but I’m just too worn out. Catalin kindly brought me a glass of monkish wine from the dining room, to help me sleep. Before I drift off, I want to share a few things with you.

I am here doing research for my forthcoming book about the re-enchantment of the world. I will be interviewing Orthodox monks and startsi about spiritual practices that can make us more attuned to God’s presence in the world. I flew on Thursday to Bucharest, where I gave a talk last night about The Benedict Option, which was recently published in Romania.

I had a number of meaningful conversations in Bucharest. One thing I learned was that Romania, though standing firm against Russia and with NATO over Ukraine, has a population that’s fiercely divided over the war. I learned that very many people are scared to death that the war will spill over onto Romanian territory. They also do not want to be dragged into war over Ukraine, a country that a lot of them resent as much as they do Russia. (“This war is like watching two coyotes fight over a piece of meat,” one man told me last night.) I knew none of this before coming here. It was explained to me that the Bukovina region, where I was headed the next day, used to extend into what is now southern Ukraine. Here is a current map of Bukovina; you can see that the Romania-Ukraine border bisects it:

Northern Bukovina was annexed in 1940 by the Soviet Union, and is now part of Ukraine. Many Romanians resent the hell out of this. You can read all about the region’s very complicated history here. It’s not my place to take sides, of course, but I tell you this to help you understand how damn complex this war is. Last night at the dinner table, I listened to the story of a professor whose father escaped Chernowitz/Chisinau, in northern Bukovina (today’s Ukraine), during World War II. He was a baby carried by his parents, who somehow eluded the Germans and the Russians and made their way to Bucharest. They thought they would be safe, but then in 1944, the Americans bombed the Romanian capital, given that the Romanian government was then fighting as a German ally. They killed thousands of civilians, mostly refugees from the northern Moldavian region. Here is a diary recollection of the aftermath:

“Yesterday afternoon I went to the neighbourhood of Grivita. From the railroad station to Basarab Boulevard, no house was left unscathed. The view was harrowing. They were still taking out the dead from under the rubble, three women were wailing, yanking their hair and rending their clothes, mourning a smouldering corpse freshly taken out of the rubble. It had rained in the morning, and the entire neighbourhood was smelling of mud, soot, burned wood. An atrocious, nightmarish view. I couldn’t get beyond Basarab, I went back home with a feeling of disgust, horror and powerlessness.”

My interlocutor’s father, as a baby, was caught up in the bombing. When one bomb landed in the back garden of the house where they were staying, the baby’s father took him into his arms and ran into the crater, figuring that the odds of a second bomb landing in the same place would be high. A second bomb landed next to them, and covered them in dirt — but they survived.

The man across the table telling me this is in his early 40s, and he did so with a tight smile. He is a professor; he knows that in war, these things happen. But he also knows that in war, innocent civilians die, sometimes at the hands of the people who think of themselves as the good guys. Of course in World War II, versus the Nazis, we Americans were the good guys. But we bombed Romania to help out our allies the Soviets, who, after winning the war, instituted Communist slavery in Romania. History is complicated.

Several Romanians over the day talked about how the Zelensky government in Kyiv oppressed the Romanian minority in Ukraine. I mentioned that Hungarians say the same thing about Zelensky with reference to the Hungarian ethnic minority in Ukraine. There is no love lost for the Ukrainian government in Hungary either. You may not know this, but Hungarians and Romanians tend to dislike each other too, over — what else? — land. Transylvania is now Romanian territory, but it was Hungarian until the 1920 Treaty of Trianon reshuffled the borders, shrinking Hungary (which was one of World War I’s losers) by two-thirds — including giving Transylvania to Romania. After discussing all the ethnic and historical resentments of the region, one of my Romanian interlocutors said, with a laugh, “You can see where the term ‘Balkanization’ comes from!”

Indeed. One thing I’ve observed in watching the Russia-Ukraine war from Hungary this spring is how utterly inadequate our American way of viewing these conflicts is. We can’t help ourselves. We have to simplify everything, and make every war about Good vs. Evil, drawing absolute lines despite having little real understanding about the peoples and the interests in play. Don’t misunderstand me here: I’m not at all defending Russia, which is in the wrong in this war. But come on, this war is deeply complicated; if you don’t believe me, find a random Hungarian or Romanian and engage them in conversation. Both of them hate the Russians … but that doesn’t mean that they love Ukrainians.

One thing I’ve heard consistently in the two days I’ve been in Romania, and having talked with a number of people, is how much they fear and resent the United States and woke culture, especially gender ideology. They feel that it is being forced on them, and that Americans have no respect at all for their culture and traditions, considering them to be backwards people who need to be tutored. What can I say? They’re right.

One man who came to my lecture last night told me afterward that he works in the Bucharest office of a Western multinational corporation, and that the corporation has become obsessed with “what you Americans call ‘wokeness’.” He said that some of his co-workers are aping progressive positions because they know that’s what you need to do to get ahead, but others, like him, stay silent because they are afraid of being outed as “bigots” by the persecutorial human resources culture. This man said to me, “You Americans are always talking about how we have to bring our whole selves to work, but there is no way that people like me could do that.” It’s true. We are humiliating these people, and they hate us for it. All I could tell him was that woke capitalism is doing it to us too.

Today on the drive to Bukovina, I played this clip of the Disney CEO Bob Chapek reciting his apology to Disney employees for not having been a sufficiently woke ally to the LGBT community:

NEW: Disney CEO Bob Chapek grovels, apologizes, and pledges to “be a better ally for the LGBTQ+ community.” He delegated the company’s moral authority to the “LGBTQIA+ Advisory Council” and now those internal activists have taken him as an ideological hostage. pic.twitter.com/efOSOmb47a

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 7, 2022

One of the guys in the car said, “This is exactly like the self-criticism sessions from the Communist era. We grew up with it. ‘Comrades, I promise to be more faithful to the Revolution.’”

I suggested he read Live Not By Lies, which is in Romanian. Immigrants to the US from Romania and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc see all this garbage, and know exactly what they’re looking at.

Along the way, I kept seeing lots of big, ugly concrete-block houses in various states of construction, most of them looking like they hadn’t been worked on in years, or, if finished, never lived in. Look:

I must have seen at least a hundred of these things, sticking out like sore thumbs in peasant villages. At least that last one looks lived in, but where on earth did the money for them come from? One of the guys in the car said that this part of the country, Moldavia, has been heavily depopulated of its working-age demographic, who have all moved to western Europe (within the EU), where they can make a lot more money. They have a habit of coming back to their hometowns and deciding that they really need to show off to the rest of the village that they’ve done well. The best way to do that is to build a big, gaudy house. But it’s often the case that they don’t have enough to finish the concrete-block monstrosity, which sits unused for years, decaying. Or, if they manage to finish it, they return home and find that village life is intolerable compared to what they left behind in western Europe. So they run back west, but can’t find a buyer for the tacky palace, so it just sits there unoccupied.

At first I laughed at these architectural grotesques, but after a while I started to see them as monuments to displacement and exile. One of the guys in the car told me that these places are actually pretty sad. The villages have been home for many generations to families, but nobody wants to stay there anymore, so young people either go to Bucharest, or abroad, where they really don’t know who they are anymore. The villages are becoming ghost towns.

As the sun set on a Friday night, and we drove through one of the towns, I asked the guys what there would be for a young person to do in this town tonight.

“Read Facebook. Play video games. Watch Tiktok. Read Twitter. Maybe go out to the bar to hang out with other bored members of your crowd,” said one of my friends.

If I were living there, I would do the same thing. Hell, I pretty much did the same thing in the 1980s, back home. The world is passing through our fingers.

Off to bed now. I have monks to interview tomorrow.