Published in Direction Magazine, July 2002 under the title:
  'The Legacy left to Romania by the corrupting cult of communism'

In the traditional society the people of a community will be responsible for the needy ones and the disabled or those who for some other reason could not look after themselves. They will offer alms. My mother is still doing it quite regularly. There was no discrimination until the New Faith introduced them. Then, if your father happened to be a wealthy man or a well-to-do before the Proletarians took destiny into their hands, you qualified as a blood-sucker of the poor, and could expect no mercy. Or if one of your family members, or even you, were declared an enemy of the People, expect the same treatment.
The Party became the substitute for the Church and would fulfill its charitable duties through Its
missionaries and activists, who would study your 'file' first before aid would come.
'God is dead!' stated the German thinker Nietzstche maliciously. No more so than in the new Kingdom that will be governed by the New Faith - the Materialist-Dialectic. (what a mouthful!).
Anyone that will do the ministry of this New Faith shall live very well, not in a Paradise beyond, as the liars of the old poisoning faith had preached to the ignorant masses for centuries, but here on Earth.
The church soon became a subject of scoffing. To enter a church during the usual ceremony to disrupt the religious service with obscene swear words, and make a mockery of the whole congregation was an act a civilising patriotism.

Truth - Light - God - oh, these were dangerous concepts, they had to be removed from peoples minds either by education or re-education. The Party showed the way by sending its 'disciples' - the activists - to preach the new Gospel, that the world will soon be set free from the burden of the ten commandments. 
"Go to the lost worker of the Party of the People" (its temples will be built by Ceausescu over the years), "For him, the proletarian man, will inherit the terrestrial Paradise".
Yes, teach the exploited that he is a saviour, and soon God is replaced by the Party. Tell him that he, the exploited, is able now take destiny in his own hands, and is free from sin - but well, not so free, for this freedom has a price, too. - Obedience to the Party.
Teach the 'proletariat' that they are the salt and the pepper of this world and that they have to be ready to sacrifice their lives for the spread of this philanthropic ideology throughout the world. (for no price is too high when it is about the saving of the World). To make sure they will not pass agonising through the ninth hour, incessantly teach them that our scripture - oh sorry, ideology - is based on science and supported by the best minds of this age and time.
Tell them our morality is the only true morality, and never let them guess that we have none, except maybe the one of the jungle. Yes... that good old jungle one, the human jungle, the jungle of Darwin, the survival of the fittest.
Tell them that the end of time has come and during their lifetime they will see wonders after wonders, for all the world will be converted to our ideology!
If thy neighbour understandeth not these Party commandments, yea must he be educated. Verily if he still understandeth not, then re-educated - within barbed-wired confinement:

Thou shall not steal.  The abolition of property meant the abolition of Justice too. The Roman Law became a fiction. Collective ownership meant nobody owns anything. The unifying principle of 'communal solidarity on behalf of the general good' in fact launched the merciless war of anybody against anybody. All that the New Faith stood for invited us boldly to steal or rob our neighbour. So much so that cheating has become a trait of character in time, so that to cheat someone is still now, for an ordinary Romanian, the most natural thing in the world. 
Thou shall not murder. Hah, an old superstition. Against such superstitions we should be fighting with all means. Inevitably there will be those who will try to stave off the advance of the word, so be prepared to kill with cold blood. For it is your duty to kill those who opppose the spreading of the New Faith among all peoples. 
Thou shall not lie.  Impossible! Any proletarian knew instinctively that in order to avoid 're-education' the lie is essential. You had better focus your attention to lie professionally. Like an actor. 'All the world is a stage' said Shakespeare (who incidentally was not considered a threat to the Party). And all of us became actors, playing just about everywhere: on the street, at work, in the office, in our pastimes, at the church, at school and above all, at home. Most of us were engaged in this play. It was a large scale play, being practiced for such a long time we can't see how much it has uglied our character.

Midwinter tragedy
Well Dave, I've written all that so that I could write this. It's a sad episode from the long past that a lady in Enisala village confided to me, although I already knew something of it.... 

Way back in the 60's, in the dead of the winter, on the country road from Enisala to Zebil, two men were travelling on their cart pulled by oxen. It was a frightening snow-storm. Somewhere along the road, about 4-5 km away from Enisala, the men, and the oxen, could go no further because they could not see through the continuously falling big snowflakes. As night fell they soon found themselves buried in snowdrifts. It was a tragic situation. One of them who felt stronger said to the other to stay under the cart and wait, until he will come back with help from the village. Through the snowdrifts and the snow-storm he made it into the village, Enisala, and with great difficulty through the darkness of the night he caught sight of a gate. Approaching it he shouted many times with all his might (in those times only a few houses were around). The door opened and a hoarse voice asked what the stranger wanted. When the half numb man looked at him imploringly, asking for help, the man replied suspiciously that he could not do anything for him and quickly slammed the door behind him leaving the poor man out there. He went to the next house and with great, very great difficulty because by now his legs had frozen, found understanding and help. Hardly had he finished telling his story inside the house, when he started to howl with pain because the warm temperature inside made the freezing unbearable. When the people from the village gathered together at the end of that night and reached the man left behind, they found him by the frozen marsh, under the cart, already dead together with the two oxen. The lady told me that next morning she could hear the howling of that man still from the house in the vicinity. He was taken during the day to the Hospital. 
Many, many years later, at the Hospital here in Tulcea, this lady was queuing up for a doctor's check-up. There were many people queuing too. Among them a woman was telling her sad story...  A story about a man, her husband who she loved so much, who once was caught by a snow-storm in the midwinter many years ago somewhere not very far from Enisala. His travel mate had frozen to death but her husband escaped death, but was forever lame. "And my husband is always wondering why, on that frightening night, that man in didn't offer help? He is convinced his mate could have been saved." 
When she heard this, she told me how she had burst into tears for suddenly she knew: It was about her husband who went out that night but didn't tell the truth to her what for. He had kept the secret from her and never talked about it, not a word. Now she tells me, he always refuses to talk about it. No scruples of conscience can open his lips.

At the time her husband was an enthusiastic Member of the Party. Like all of us, he was taught that the heart of the true revolutionary should be like stone. Being sympathetic to your neighbour was dangerous, only the Party had the monopoly of pity.

Miti

Newthink, Newspeak, Newfaith                        27 July 2001 10:30


There is such a thing as believing in a future utopian age. The word for it - 'millenarianism' - is the same word for believing in Jesus Christ's Second Coming.
Obviously the founding fathers of the New Faith, namely Marx and Engels (and later Lenin and Stalin with their Russian version), made use of that belief by replacing God in the minds of the ignorant masses with 'The Party', and Jesus with the incarnation or embodiment of the Party in the saving person of 'The Party Leader'. This triggered a monstrous cult of personality which unfortunately I witnessed. The Leader had to be the new subject of worship for the masses. 
According to the Darwinian theory (which they also twisted to fit their Ideology), we were nothing but superior animals and naturally had to be tamed. Tamed (educated) to develop new reflexes, to think as one. To sing as one, and be as one, like an SS battalion - organised and disciplined.
The architects of the new theology had reorganised our whole lives in their Party Labs on a 'scientific' basis. Of course they ignored what true science people stated, that everything in Science is relative, including any theory or any new invention. The concept of relativity fell heavy to their stomach, a catastrophe to their New Faith that was supposed to be made of eternal truth.
The classical church buildings (and there was an incredible large number of them), where people used to congregate every Sunday and at religious feast days, were to be replaced by the new 'Workers Cultural House' or Clubs. There we had to congregate to acquire the new developments in Ideology and also to manifest openly, without any reserve, our unanimous adhesion to what we have been taught (the Party liked unanimity).
At work, in any factory or plant or institution, we had such clubs where we had to go every two or three days in the evening. WE knew they lied, and they knew we did not believe a single word of their interminable wooden language, but that was the game. They were paid generously by the Party to preach and we were paid as well for listening to them.

I was an apprentice in a huge factory in Bucharest and though I was not a member of the Communist Party I was among those taken in group to the factory Cultural Club for Party briefings. Sometimes we were forced, but most of the time we were glad to go because we were paid normally. For me it was a good opportunity to get out of boring work that did not bring any satisfaction in my 'grey' life. The old trick with the Carrot and the Stick was applied at national scale. The carrot was big in the beginning, and was seen as such by enthusiastic poor masses. But later it grew smaller and smaller until the stick was out of all proportion to it.
The new 'God' was a jealous one, and vengeful too. To this God we had to kneel down, for It would punish insubordinate subjects to the sixth and seventh generation.
There was nothing but matter in the whole universe and we are nothing but such a piece of matter that the Party had the noble mission to model in a new, superior form.
By force, of course - force and motion.
Your character had to be modelled by the new historical force and had to be moved in the 'right direction'. Often at the Cultural Club I was looking carefully at each spin doctor who was trying hard to perform on the stage. They stood behind a podium - a pulpit - wrapped lavishly in red silk, with the omnipresent portraits of the founding fathers hung on the wall behind them, a presentation dreamed up by others up there 'above the clouds' in the Central Committee building, the Olympia of the new gods.

And so at the Cultural Clubs we would listen to these chaps. Most of them were sons of workers who had no idea whatsoever about the notions or the concepts they were proudly handling. But they knew by heart the slogans and logic of the Ideology. They were slaves of an iron, inflexible logic. A logic based on Force.
"We are the guiding force of humankind" went the slogan everywhere.
All of them were arrogant and primitive in their conduct, and if they were not that way, the Party would not promote them in their ranks.
It was not a good idea to ask them a question or to challenge the illuminations they brought. Immediately they would 'neigh' to their Party superior that you had put between brackets the 'healthy politics of the Party'. You would receive a warning, after which you were to sign a declaration before the local party secretary that you had been wrong, and it would never happen again.
The Party did not want any dialogue between its members. The seeds of doubt could be fatal for those up there 'above the clouds' in that mysterious Kafkian Castle.
To avoid its spread they approved only 'constructive dialogue'. You can figure out what that means. There is only one doctrine, the Alpha and Omega of humankind.
In our so-called 'popular democracy' the only right we had was to say yes and praise infinitely the wonders made before our eyes under the dictatorship of proletariat. It was evidently a contradiction in terms - a popular democracy that is a dictatorship - but our theologians were not bothered.
It was the same with buying your own goods or products. We were told constantly that the factory was ours - we are the owners. The state was ours - we, the people owned everything. This absurd nonsense was soon picked up by us workers, who easily turned its logic around upon itself to ask: 'so why do we have to buy the products we are making??' 
The next logical step - to steal them - was easy, for they were actually ours, weren't they?
(Well, my factory was manufacturing railroad engines and obviously, we could not steal them! But we took smaller things like, tools, electrodes, paint etc. Anything easy to carry. They constantly told us 'the factory is ours' so we did not see it as thieving, which of course it was. Those who worked in a shoe factory would steal shoes and those in a food factory would steal food, and so on. The tragic side of this national stealing game was that workers in an orphanage would steal the food of the poor children and those in hospitals the food from sick people.)

The same with the peasant who saw his crop engulfed by those huge store buildings, massive silos that I showed to you Dave, spread everywhere across Romania. The poor peasant had to buy his own crop to survive!!
They had, of course, an explanation for this absurd situation - always they had an explanation available. Their iron logic never failed them. The activist, followed by the militiamen was always ready to explain to you the inexplicable, it was their job. The militiaman was the most important part of his argument.
The peasants in the countryside never cared much about culture, other than the culture of the field. Sometimes one would burst with anger and break the bones of an activist. Yes the activist needed the militiaman in the countryside, and sometimes even a militiaman would be beaten by the malcontent people.

In the end the millennium never arrived for the Culture Club cabaret acts - the spin doctors and activists. They disappeared, melted away after the power of the secret police was broken. Now it's hard to find anyone who will admit to being part of that great all-powerful, all-knowing empire of absurdity that was our daily bread until December 1989.

Blessings, miti

Economic Black Holes          25 July 2001 14:47 cont..

Lets imagine the national budget as a big loaf of bread. Who will receive more or less from it, you guess? - Those who expresses their adhesion to the New Faith. You could have a nice slice from the Party, which was the administrator of the bread, according to what quantity of lies and treasons you were ready to offer.
Today the idea still persists of alms given by the state. People from the state-owned factories or institutions just don't to hear where exactly the bread will come from.
"Its the states' business not ours, we want to be given our bread, that's all!"
You can hear it every day at strike meetings, on radio or on TV. They don't want to know that the bread is too little and that priority must go to those most in need like in the Hospitals or Orphanages. No, union leaders won't listen to the principle that before they ask for pay they must first work. They think the other way around.
"No matter what we do, or not do (I mean work), the State has the moral obligation according to the constitution to feed us."
This is heard very often at any strike. That is the national alms - the 'bread' given to those, who though good for work, do nothing, but still claim benefit from the humanist principles inscribed in the Constitution.
"Then, in those 'good times', the Almighty Party cared with a maternal feeling for its subjects and nobody would starve to death" goes the saying.
Today the largest iron-mill plant in the country, Sidex Galati, which manufactures 70% of the steel production of the country, has been privatised , It has been bought by the Anglo-Indian group ISPAT. With its 25,000 workers it is going to have a great impact on the whole national economy. The workers will not wait on alms coming from the State anymore, and that is the best thing that could happen for our country because this huge iron mill plant was a black hole for the battered budget.
Another Bank has been privatised today Banca Agrocola. It has been bought by an American - Austrian bank conglomerate. That's goooooood. For many years we have been waiting for this sort of news.Maybe finally, Romania is on the move.

Miti

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