7:00 AM I am making the effort to write these for the known sympathizers of communism and communist regimes here in the US.
As i said many times before, justice, democracy are beautiful philosophical concepts that in practice however need to be implemented by real people. Persons. Done for various reasons, including personal revenge.
So is communism. It needs to be implemented by real people with their real human qualities.
I call them singularities in the philosophical continuum.
And for this i will bring the overused name of Ceaușescu again into discussion.
He came in power in Romania following the death of Gheorghe (pronounced almost gay or gay, like my legal name) Gheorghiu-Dej, a known stalinist. Some say he was the protegee of Dej. Some go so far and say when they were lovers when they shared a prison cell as Doftana (supposedly imprisoned for then illegal communist activities).
As we can see already, these were the people at the leadership of Romania. Real people with real qualities or defects. Who when they sensed power, they tailored the communism to their likeness. In the end, communism was only a pretext for dictatorship and enslaving a country.
I am not sure exactly how it happened, but he managed to gather under his wings a bunch of nationalists revamped into communists after Dej eradicated many of the remnants of the old democratic regime in Romania, after the Soviet invasion done with the help of King Michael in 1944. Their aura came exactly from the anti-Nazi coup of King Michael, seen by many as a traitor.
Some of them were smart and acting on frustration after what happened at Stalingrad, when over 100 thousands Romanian troops were sent to death by Antonescu, mainly because lack of (heavy) weapons. So they influenced Ceaușescu into bringing in Romania heavy industry. But not from Soviet Union, known for their unreliable and freshly borrowed from Germany technology. From its source in the west.
And for that they needed western money that could only be found in western banks.
But in a way was understandable. They did not want technology from their communist brothers who butchered the flower of a Romanian generation at Stalingrad.
So he made his move during the failed revolution in Prague in 1968, showing independence from Soviet Union. That opened for him (again, one person, not one country) the way to borrow money for his projects and started building the heavy industry (mainly heavy machine tools industry) that was supposedly needed to build heavy weapons like artillery and tanks.
I don't know when it started, the moving of the ancient, perennial peasant class, freshly left without land after the Stalinist style cooperativization, to cities, in newly built condos (by Soviet design following German) to work in newly built factories of all kind, including machine tools.
Every major city in Romania had a heavy machine tools factory. (Which needed lots of engineers. That in the end were so many that ending doing nothing).
How good their products were? During my first years at the Machine Tools factory in Bacău, Romania i managed to get some (Romanian clones) of early PCs and wrote some dumb programs that were extensions of the faculty projects, nothing more than a sequence of calculations, which however allowed a dramatic shortening of time needed for calculating a gear box in a machine tool.
And my boss gave me the drawings of one of the basic models of the horizontal milling machine, the main product at that factory and in one hour i could prove the design was all screwed up. By a guy who had a Hungarian name.
But among all these things they managed to accomplish their dream. A tank was designed and made in Romania, a country that was mainly agrarian only a couple of decades before. Was it better than the Soviet ones they were trying to avoid, in their quest for independence? No i don't think so. They didn't have the experience and power of the already proven Soviet technology.
With Ceaușescu, it all went "well" until he went to visit with then current Kim of North Korea. Impressed by the lavish reception, with thousands of people parading and doing shows in front of him, when he came home he wanted that in Romania.
And so it began the "cultural" movement some would call the personality cult of Ceaușescu and this is where i wanted to get. Lavish parades including Mayday parades, when people, students where pulled out of their workplaces for weeks for reversals and stuff.
Unlike China and North Korea, the proximity of Romania to Western Europe influenced enough people into being almost European (i call then "Europeans by ear", for lacking direct contact). They found it too humiliating, nobody wanted to do it and they all started to hate Ceaușescu (and communism).
That and his obsession with paying the debt contracted for bringing that technology that was not renewed, after the first wave. He kept saying we have everything we need to keep pace. And thing is he was almost right, if it wasn't for the sabotage.
Some of it came from people's disgust with his personality cult. They started to steal everything they could from their workplace and use it at home or trade it with others from different factories. Engineers in factories helped overpay the workers and shared the money. Complete this picture with the food shortage due to exporting all food to repay debts.
There is so much more to add to this chronology but i think i made my point for this mayday. For that, my tea went again cold.
Could things have gotten worse for Romanians after the death of Ceaușescu? Yes they could and they were. The new regime brought by fear after the shootings of December 89 gradually sold everything that was obviously valuable from that industry and millions were forced to emigrate in Europe, in search for (illegal) work.
Romania became full member of EU 7 years later but Romanians didn't know they had full working rights because of one of the biggest and most blatant lies of history as we know it, perpetrated by all Romanian politicians with the help of EU leadership.
Those rights were previously included in Schengen Treaty that went parallel with the EU treaty until 1999 when it was included in EU treaty. Taking advantage of the ignorance of Romanians, both signatories of EU treaty, Romanian and EU leaders lied, saying Romania was not a full member of EU, including Schengen which in 1999 became Protocol 19 of the Treaty, for 17 years or until 2024.
10:25 I got mad only thinking of all of the above. In that moment, they started their own mayday parade, upstairs, with shaking of walls and ceiling, making me cough, right after i ate.
3:40 PM There's a fiesta going on in the new park, not sure if it's May 1st or Cinco de Mayo.
