Is Putin the reincarnation of Rasputin? Or of Stalin?! Is Nicușor Dan the reincarnation of the infantile King Michael? Or of that royal scoundrel, Carol II? Is Călin Georgescu the reincarnation of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu? Or that of Comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu—that "brilliant imbecile" (or "fool," as Theodor Paleologu labeled him in the book *Pathologies of Power: Thoughts of a Convalescent*), a murderer of his own people, whom this "comrade" cast beneath the hooves of the Trojan horses of the KGB and other major predators. Much like the interwar period—with the arrest of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Legionnaire leader, for the 1924 killing of Iași prefect Constantin Manciu in front of the courthouse, followed by his release under pressure from fanatical Legionnaires—and by analogy with the circus surrounding the arrest and release of Călin Georgescu under pressure from fanatical sovereignist supporters of the AUR party, all these similarities strike me as a fractal repetition of history. The rhetoric proclaimed by Călin Georgescu upon leaving DIICOT custody—such as "God is great, the world is small!"—and the parallels drawn with the mystical fervor of Legionnaire leader CZC and his obsession with the "afterlife," all suggest that social history repeats itself. It unfolds exactly as the historian Jules Michelet brilliantly intuited in *History of France* within the Hegelian paradigm—"widening and unfolding in a vast spiral," as Marin Bucur writes in the Preface to *History of France*. Hegel proposed the idea that history does not repeat itself linearly or identically, but rather in the form of an ascending spiral, a concept that blends conservatism with progressivism through... ...of his dialectic. While the popular saying holds that "history repeats itself," the Hegelian perspective adds a critical nuance. Hegel asserts that an event appears to repeat, yet does so at a higher level of progress, civilization, and social evolution. The Hegelian spiral model explains how human society evolves through successive conflicts and resolutions. Hegel views the course of society as a dialectical movement: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Each loop of the spiral represents a repetition of the same conflict structure, but at a higher level of consciousness, culture, and human freedom. In Hegel's view, the ultimate goal of history is the full realization of freedom and the self-consciousness of the Spirit (*Geist*). Although Hegel spoke of this cyclical yet ascending evolution, he noted in his *Lectures on the Philosophy of History* that certain moments of crisis seem to require a twofold manifestation to be truly understood or accepted—such as the collapse of an empire or an extremist political system—as began, for instance, in Europe through the degeneration of democracy and the imposition of political extremism via devastating "revolutionary" force. In my view, political extremism is synonymous with terrorism. Synthesis does not destroy the past; rather, in Hegel's view, socio-political evolution preserves the traditional values of earlier stages while eliminating their limitations. Each loop of the spiral represents a repetition of the same conflict structure, but at a higher level of consciousness, culture, and freedom. In Hegel’s view, the ultimate goal of history is the full realization of the freedom and self-consciousness of the Spirit (*Geist*). Marx would go on to express—with irony—the harsh, brutal truth of radical socio-political changes, drawing upon the history of the French Revolution, the abominable crimes committed by revolutionaries, and the tragedy of society in his book *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical events and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." I equate revolution with tragedy, and political farce with comedy. Just like our older sister France, Romania experienced the tragedy of 1989—two hundred years after the French Revolution—and subsequently, in the post-December era, the farce or comedy of the transition from a totalitarian political system to a democratic one.
