The Hen with the Golden Chicks

The most valuable archeological find in Romania was Closca cu Puii de Aur (The Hen with the Golden Chicks). Discovered in 1837, in the village of Pietroasele, Buzau County, by two farmers, Ion Lemnaru and Stan Avram, on Istrita Hill, the treasure was buried under a large boulder.

An artistic treasure of pure gold was composed of twenty-two items: a large tray, cups, necklaces, and brooches with precious stones, shining in the rich dirt. All pieces were hidden behind a large tray, like chicks under their mother’s feathers, hence the name, someone thought. Maybe some of the pieces looked like a hen with her chicks?

What did the two farmers do with all this treasure they found? It is not easy to keep your silence for a year in the small village until someone decided to report the find to the authorities.

Before someone reported them, Lemnaru and Avram found an Albanian entrepreneur, Anastase Verusi, who was building a bridge over the river Cilnau. Verusi gave them 4,000 piastri (at the time, Romania did not have her official coins, it used whatever coins were accepted on the market from various neighboring empires), a good pay day for the two farmers but not enough for such a historical treasure. Verusi split the tray into four pieces with an ax (what a horror) and squashed other pieces to fit them into his luggage.

The sale did not go unnoticed and someone from the village told the authorities about the sale. Verusi and the two farmers were arrested while the police tried to reclaim all pieces.

From the original twenty-two, only twelve are found: the large tray, a jug, a cup with mythological gods in base-relief, three necklaces, four brooches, and two vases, all weighing in at approximately twenty kilograms of gold (44.09 pounds). Some consider the largest of the brooches, an eagle, as the Hen. The other ten pieces have disappeared, melted down, and sold as gold ingots. The remaining twelve pieces were sent to the museum in Bucharest.

Whose treasure was this and how old was it? Archeologists believed that it belonged to the Visigoths, a Germanic people. The proof was the runic inscription on one of the necklaces – Gutani Hailag (holy object of the Goths). It was believed to have belonged to King Athanaric. The Visigoths buried it in a hurry when they had to flee before the arrival of the invading Huns in 375 A.D. They never went back to claim their treasure, and it remained in the ground for fifteen hundred years until the two farmers found it under a large boulder that they were moving to make the field ready for agricultural purposes.

On November 20, 1875, inside the University of Bucharest where the history museum was located, a young man, Dimitrie Pantazescu, was hiding on a floor above the museum where the treasure was displayed. An excellent acrobat, he cut the floor during the night and hung an umbrella through the hole to catch the falling rubble; the intense snowstorm outside gave him cover for any cutting noise. He lowered himself through the hole with a rope tied to a table, stole the treasure, stuffed it into a bag made from trousers, and, in the morning, exited the building with the treasure, a perfect crime. Or was it?

Later he was arrested by police when a gold watch that did not belong to him (had someone else’s initials inside) was found in his pocket. Inside there was also a curious key inside a box locket.

When the police searched his apartment, they found the treasure hidden inside a piano. Sadly, part of the treasure was split with his accomplice, a silversmith. They found in his possession part of what was left of the large tray after melting, and pieces of the necklace with the runic inscription. Both were sent to prison for six and three years respectively and what is left of the treasure was crudely repaired.

The Hen with the Golden Chicks had been repaired before this theft in 1867 in Paris, by a French jeweler at the Universal Exhibition.

In 1884, the building in which the treasure was housed caught on fire. To say that this treasure was bad luck, it is an understatement. Once again, to save what was left of the treasure, the caretakers threw it out the window. During the fall, the pieces got damaged again. It truly seemed that this treasure was cursed.

King Carol I of Romania sent the treasure to Berlin to be repaired by a master jeweler, Paul Telge, who was horrified by the condition of the exquisite treasure. Despite the prior repairs that were substandard, Telge restored the pieces, and made copies for the German museums.

During WWI, the government ordered all treasures to be sent to its allies in Moscow for safekeeping, right before the Germans invaded Romania. In 1917, The Hen and the Golden Chicks was sent to Moscow as well, a Moscow that was under the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Russians kept it until 1956 and did not seem willing to give it back to its rightful owners. Khrushchev eventually returned the twelve gold pieces back to Romania.

The treasure is now located since 1972 at the Romanian National History Museum in Bucharest, in the Treasury Hall, finally safe and at peace, after a long and tumultuous history of invading hordes of barbarians, burial, theft, damage, melting, and destruction.

 

 

 

  

A Traumatic Event in 1977

Americans have an interesting tradition; they ask where a person was at the moment of a disaster and people gladly share their memories from that date and that moment. Here is mine from 1977.

This traumatic event occurred on March 4, 1977. It was a chilly spring, Friday evening, and I was excited because we had hot water and I wanted to take a shower before the state turned the water off, a frequent occurrence in the poorly run communist economy.

At exactly 9:22 p.m. the walls started shaking badly, followed by an earthly whine unlike anything I had heard before. The bowels of the earth came to life like a giant monster. I dropped into the tub in a crouching position wondering when the walls were going to start falling apart. I watched the bathroom walls mesmerized as they swayed because I wanted to see how I would die. My dad was pounding on the door for me to get out and run down the stairs, but I could not speak and I was terrified in place like a statue.

We lived on the fifth floor, and I could not run fast enough to make it outside. Trying to run down the stairs would have been a mistake because a lot of people died when the stairs collapsed but the building did not. They could have survived if they had stayed put.

The 7.5 earthquake lasted 56 seconds, a long time for such a powerful and violent disaster. People were at home, had dinner with their families, and were getting ready to watch the Friday night movie that was allowed on the communist TV. Each Friday night, millions of people who could afford to buy a TV or had a neighbor with a TV watched the same movie allowed by the state’s censors.

The earthquake’s epicenter was deep in the bowels of the earth in the Vrancea Mountains, 85-100 km below the crust. Its violent shaking ended the lives of 1,578 people, injured 11,221 in Romania, 120 dead in Bulgaria, 165 injured, and two dead in Moldova. The capital city of Bucharest was affected the worst -1,424 people from the total humans killed resided in Bucharest.

After 56 long seconds, when the earthquake stopped, 32,900 buildings were left damaged or destroyed, and 35,000 families were without shelter. The economic losses were never accounted for by the communist government but a World Bank report from 1978 estimated the economic losses to be over $2 billion.

Most of the buildings lost or severely damaged were buildings from the pre-WWII era which were not built to withstand earthquakes, much less violent earthquakes like this one.

When the powerful tremor stopped, in the dark, people walked out of the building to assess the damage. The building stood but the walls were cracked. One slat in our bathroom window hung like a loose tooth of concrete, held dangling by reinforced iron. Nobody went back inside all night because there were aftershocks which sent terrified people running away from the building.

Downtown Bucharest was not so lucky; thirty-three buildings had collapsed. The high-rise apartments built between the wars and shortly after WWII were damaged severely or collapsed into a high pile of rubble and white dust. They were beautiful Parisian apartments, and now they were gone, Wilson, Scala, Casata, Nestor, Dunarea, Continental, and Belvedere. Two new and modern apartments also collapsed because the concrete was bad. As the earthquake waves resonated with the waves of the high-rise buildings, some gave way and collapsed.

Nobody went back inside and we spent the chilly night outdoors because we were too scared to sleep in our own beds or to even retrieve a blanket. Tired or not, cold, or not, we stayed huddled and praying, thanking God that we survived and the apartment complex A6 did not collapse.

When dawn broke, we could really see the damage to the exterior of the complex, huge cracks running vertically. I was not so sure that I wanted to ever go back inside because nothing looked safe from the outside.

We took a bus to my grandma’s house and were relieved that her adobe house and the brick home were unharmed. We were also happy that we had a place to stay until the state gave us the green light to go back to our reinforced concrete apartments. This was the first time that we spent several nights in the brick house. We were guests by necessity.

When we eventually went back, the apartment complex was surrounded by large tree trunks supporting all the sides of the building until repairs could be made. Or so we thought.

With no guidance from authorities or national emergency aid, we relied on neighbors for help. Despite their fear, people in Bucharest came together. Strangers used their bare hands or buckets to dig survivors out before more debris buried them.

Nobody fed us, neighbors helped neighbors and families helped each other. When Americans sent blankets, the Communist Party decided instead to sell them in the communist-run stores later. When Americans sent Bibles in Romanian to comfort the people, Ceausescu had them recycled into toilet paper.

Eventually we had to go back to the university. I took the early morning train and we arrived, we walked in horror from the train station past mountains of what was left of former large buildings, a thick white dust, and a piece of metal sticking out here and there.

The smell of decomposition was overwhelming. On the 11^th day, one young man who was buried in the basement bar of the hotel was brought out alive. His mother never left the area, waiting patiently to find her son. She knew that he was still alive. He survived against all odds.

Engineers rolled up their sleeves to consolidate the buildings that survived and were not going to be demolished. The costs kept climbing. On July 4, 1977, at a meeting of the Communist Party leadership, the dictator Ceausescu gave the order to stop the building consolidations and to proceed with just covering the cracks; everything broken in the interior had to stay as it was. But one engineer, Gheorghe Ursu, had the courage to stand up to the dictator and told him that it was wrong. He even offered to pay for reinforcement of the building he was working in with his own money. Frustrated, Ursu wrote a letter to Radio Free Europe, telling them what happened. Gheorge Ursu was followed years and years by the dreaded Securitate. He was finally arrested in 1985, beaten severely, and died during arrest. Such was the socialist society ruled by the Communist Party and its dictator.

The order that Ceausescu gave remained secret until his death in 1989. At that time, his son, Andrei Ursu, found the order in the Securitate Archives and made it public.

Ceausescu purposefully destroyed many public buildings and homes to make room for his “systematization” project of building the most monstrous communist palace to himself. This hateful man used the earthquake as an excuse to order the destruction of historic Enei Church in Bucharest which had been damaged during the earthquake. Communists do not tolerate religion of any kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Childhood Before School and in the Summer

I grew up in my maternal grandparents’ home until first grade and then every summer after that, alternating with visits to my paternal grandmother’s village and orchard.

My grandparents did not have electricity, running water, a bathroom, radio, or phone. They raised six kids in these conditions, four girls and two boys.

As a kid, I enjoyed running all over the village with my friends, bathing in dirty ditches, making mud bombs, catching small fish without a line, using grandma’s expensive stockings stretched on a wire shaped like a funnel. We played with tadpoles, frogs, climbed trees ate tomatoes from grandma’s garden, climbed trees to pick walnuts too early and ripen plums, walked around the yard barefoot, stepping in chicken and duck poo around the yard, happy as larks, never bathing except dunking in the clean river on special days. The toothbrush and toothpaste by the water pump in the yard was just a suggestion and was meant to be used by everybody.

My mom and sometimes my dad visited every Sunday when she was off from work. She stayed all day; I was happy and felt loved. I remember to this day the sadness and the feeling of abandonment every time she left on the last bus home. She promised to come get me and take me home, but that time never came. I don't know why they did not place me in kindergarten. I asked mom later in life and she said, they did not have the money, nor were they party members to assure a reserved spot for me. So, I stayed with my grandparents and, playing with my friends in the village during the week, made me forget how much I missed home. And time seemed to crawl until the next Sunday when mom visited. I was happy when I went to first grade because I moved in with my parents in the city in our tiny apartment we called home.

My grandparents' outhouse stood between the house and grandpa’s large garden, who fed not just us but my mom and dad in the city and the animals in the yard. As a toddler, I stole boiled potatoes and ate them unpeeled, potatoes meant to feed the pig. It was delicious! Beyond the garden stood the corn field and the large walnut tree that was still standing ten years ago.

Grandpa built a modest adobe hut made of mud mixed with manure and straw to serve as residence while the large, brick house was built. The adobe hut had two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and a hay loft. That is where I slept as a child, surrounded by grandma's numerous cats.

Looking through the tiny windows of the adobe house, I was entertained by heavy rains drumming up on the tin roof and the heavy snow falling in large flakes like a magical dance. I imagined how huge the world must be and how much I wished to explore it someday.

When the nice brick home was finished, nobody moved from the adobe house. If company came, they were housed in one of the smaller rooms in the brick home. The rest of the year it remained empty, nicely decorated and clean, with good furniture. Grandma kept her valuables there, her one pair of good shoes to wear to church during holidays, weddings, baptisms, and funerals. I loved to go through her trunk when she was not watching. I admired grandpa’s silver coin collection which included some Roman coins he had found in the digs outside of the village.

A chifforobe contained grandma’s good dress for special occasions and her stockings, neatly folded by her black shoes. She had tiny feet to match her petite stature.

Underneath the house was a root cellar where we loved to cool off in summertime. In wintertime the brick home was cold, and we flocked to the adobe house’s kitchen where a stove with iron clad top stood and warmed two rooms.

Grandpa always got up before we did, stoked the fire, and brought in a fresh supply of wood for the day. On the same stove, grandma removed the round circles of metal to make room for larger size pots that would sizzle on the stove for hours, our lunch and dinner.

Breakfast was simple, consisting of round, hard pretzels hanging on a string from the ceiling which we toasted on the iron stove top before we ate it with marmalade and tea, or smoked bacon sliced and eaten with mustard and pretzels. No telling how old the pretzels were because they were so hard!

As a child, I never understood why people kept a nicer, lovely home, never used, while the family crowded in a temporary home with so little space. It was such a hard life! I vowed that I would never be so cramped as an adult.

It was the same for clothing. People had one nice outfit and pair of shoes but seldom wore them. Women made their own dresses, skirts, and blouses out of cheap material that faded in the sun and wore a head scarf to protect them from the damaging rays in the fields. They wore the same clothes day in and day out until they fell apart and even then, some patched them to extend their life. Money was tight, supplies were hard to find, and people lived like they were in a perennial Great Depression. Life under communism was incredibly hard but it was much more intense on the farm.

Grandma fed us modestly considering that there were no stores of any kind in the village and she had to make her own bread. We had no car, and the only transportation ten kilometers to the nearest town was a bike or a bus that only ran two times a day and took over an hour to get to its destination.

I enjoyed watching grandma canning vegetables and tomatoes in the summer and fall, preserving food for the winter in large jars sealed with wax or whatever she could find to do so. She grew her own vegetable garden, and I helped her open the ditch for water flow onto her vegetable rows when we had no rain. Her sweet strawberries were legendary.

She made the best “gogosari,” pickled red bell peppers with cauliflower, plum marmalade, sour cherry preserve, and the best tiny green tomato sweet preserves stuffed with walnuts. I wished I had the recipe now!

I followed grandpa often out of boredom and curiosity, watching him repair bikes, fix bike tires with glue, and whatever broken field implements the villagers brought to him. He was an amazing mechanic and historian who entertained me with war stories and his exploits at the archeological Roman dig on the outskirts of the village. The archeologists rented grandpa’s lovely home for three summers while the dig was ongoing.

Before he retired, he rode his bicycle to work and back each day for years, snow, rain, or whatever inclement weather. He was tough as they came. He did not live past the age of sixty-seven – medical malpractice killed him. He went in for a simple surgery, and the doctor clipped his large intestine accidentally. Gangrene set in, and he passed away. We had no way of complaining to anybody that the unskilled doctor killed a human being through malpractice, my beloved grandpa. It was communism and the state controlled everything. 

Grandma lived to be ninety and died in her own bed. Traveling from the U.S., my oldest daughter was lucky to meet her. I captured the moment when she and my grandma were standing by the water pump in the yard. I chose this photo for the cover of my first book; it has chapters of memories of what communism was like in daily life.

Getting my first paycheck in my late teenage years I understood why farmers and proletarian families stretched their clothes and shoes budget as long as they could, for themselves and for their growing children wearing high waters.

As a young adult I finally figured out that the soul of my grandparents’ home was in the adobe house where the immediate family met around the warmth of the hearth and where all the memories hung in the air.

 

 

Forbidden Tradition, Church, Food, and Drink

Watching young people all over the world clamoring for communism while waving red flags and Palestinian flags is depressing beyond description. These indoctrinated young people were never taught in schools what communism did to all the people who lived under its oppressing boot. Here are a few examples of life under the Communist Party state.

Christmas was erased from calendars, and the subjugated people did not protest. The Christmas Tree was renamed the Winter Tree. December 25 and 26 were normal workdays. Church attendance was frowned upon, and only old people went to regular and holiday church services. Nobody had any Bibles as they were forbidden. Traditional carols and caroling were forbidden and replaced by patriotic songs on TV and radio, singing praises to the dear leader and his wife. People were allowed to celebrate the New Year and nothing else.

The Press was controlled by the Communist Party and only what they approved was printed, broadcast, or distributed. In the northern part of Bucharest was a building which looked like a copy of the Soviet architecture in Moscow. It was called The Free Press House. It was expressly built to print Scinteia, the Communist Party newspaper. Its original name was Combinatul Poligrafic Casa Scinteii.

Built in 1952-1957 on land where horse races were held at Baneasa, the shockingly large building was paid for with forced subscriptions of 20-30 lei from workers who had money taken from paychecks every month without their permission. The average salary of a worker was eight hundred per month, but nobody dared to object the monthly “contribution” for the propaganda printing house.

The building is an identical copy of the Lomonosov University building in the former Soviet Union, another place of propaganda and indoctrination into communism. The Culture Palace in Warsaw, Poland, was also an identical copy. It was Stalinist-approved and dictated architecture.

The Romanian Free Press House as it is named today has decorative elements borrowed from Curtea de Arges Monastery, Cozia, and Horezu, which embellish the frontispiece of the building and four towers were inspired from Sucevita and Dragomirna. So, the Stalinist building is decorated by Romanian folkloric and church freezes in a country where the regime jailed priests if they did not follow the communist dictates.

The 96-meter-tall building was constructed to resist earthquakes. Boris Caragea sculpted a 7-meter-tall statue of Lenin in 1960 which was placed in the front courtyard. In March 1990, following the anti-communist coup, the statue was taken down in three days. All that was left was the base. In 2016, on the same base, a new statue was erected called the Wings, dedicated to the heroes of the anti-communist resistance.

The building was taken over by various printing houses of newspapers and magazines after the anti-communist revolution. Its name was changed to the “House of the Free Press.”

Sadly, the first elections held after the communist dictator was deposed on Christmas 1989, elected another communist president who had been Ceausescu’s best friend and installed all the former communist cadre back in power.

It is important to mention and to remember that once socialism and communism are installed, it is near impossible to vote the country out of communism unless bloodshed takes place.

Food was difficult to find on the market, but alcohol was cheap and easy to acquire. The population was skinny and malnourished. People stood in endless lines daily for pathetic supplies that were not sufficient for twenty plus million people, thus rationing coupons were introduced.

An interesting story reveals how Pepsi had made its way to Romania. The first bottle of Pepsi appeared in 1967 while the communists were in power. How did Pepsi appear during full communism before the reintroduction of capitalism in 1990?

In 1959, a guy who eventually became the CEO of Pepsi had a brilliant idea to sell Pepsi beyond the Iron Curtain and presented President Khrushchev with a glass of Pepsi Cola.

In 1966, the communist regime of Romania built a department in a factory called “Munca” in Ovidiu, near the town of Constanta, a section which bottled Pepsi Cola to be sold in the resorts at the Romanian Black Sea shore. The first bottles of Pepsi rolled out in May 1967 and produced seven million liters per year. Coca Cola only arrived in 1991.

To Romanians Pepsi represented a delicious meal and a vacation on the seashore, relaxation from the drudgery of work. Pepsi was something that the proletariat could afford to buy if they had the money to go on vacation by the Black Sea.

The state paid for the Pepsi concentrate with Romanian wine and then mixed the concentrate with CO2 and bottled the Pepsi on site. The Soviets made a similar exchange deal but with vodka.

In the 1980s when the food situation and shortages under the communist regime became more dire, Pepsi drinks became a sort of medium of exchange. It was sold on the black market or exchanged for other goods. It was where I had my first bottle of Pepsi in 1977.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Special Salts and Guano

The Chinese scraped a white tangy salt off rocks called huo yao, the fire drug, which we know in the west as “the salt of the stone,” saltpeter. In a mixture of charcoal dust and sulphur, you have a remarkable eruption.

Scraping saltpeter off rocks was not exactly a reliable way to gather massive quantities of it. Extracting it from manure spread over land was also a slow and smelly process. For every pound of manure, a few crystals would grow.

In the mud areas of the River Ganges in India, the local population had been using saltpeter for a long time in their agricultural practices of fertilization with manure. The first documented reference to saltpeter is found in the early 17^th century when the English East India Company considered importing it from India in the early 1620s. The first recorded shipment to England was made in 1626. Saltpeter became one of the most important items traded by the English company.

On the three Chincha Islands located 21 km off the coast of Peru, on a group of rocks inhabited exclusively by flocks of birds, boobies, cormorants, and penguins, over thousands of years, bird droppings had formed a crust over a hundred feet deep, one of the finest natural fertilizers called guano.

The Inca called the bird droppings huanu, hence our term guano. Sprinkling it onto their fields as fertilizer, Incas valued guano just like gold and considered the killing of birds a capital crime.

Peru started trading the guano in 1840, after using Chinese labor to harvest the highly flammable fertilizer. By late 1850, the Chincha guano was exhausted when the workers struck rocks. Economists calculated that by 1860, 4,000 Chinese workers had died working in extremely noxious conditions. Peru’s source of riches was exhausted in two decades.

Peru had another unique salt called caliche found in the northern reaches they controlled in the Atacama Desert. The word caliche is derived from Quechua and it means salt.

Caliche appeared as a crust found by a stroke of luck by locals traveling from the Andes foothills to the Pacific Ocean. While making camp for the night and building fires, they noticed rocks on the ground sparking and igniting.

The explosive and fertile caliche is made up of sodium chloride (table salt), nitrates, iodates, sulphates, and chlorides. The caliche is slightly different from saltpeter in that it has sodium nitrate rather than potassium nitrate.

Nobody is quite sure how the caliche appeared in the northern parts of the Atacama Desert. According to Ed Conway, there are theories:

1.      The product of an eerie fog that often forms across the desert at night and morning.

2.      These salts washed down from the Andes.

3.      Caliche was deposited here by an ancient sea.

Even though the deposits were mostly located in Peruvian and Bolivian territory, according to Conway, it was “enterprising Chilean immigrants who discovered most of the caliche, did most of the mining, and forged the all-important links with English and German financiers who provided the capital for their businesses." [mid 1870s]

The greedy decision by Bolivia to enact a retroactive tax of ten cents per quintal (100 lbs.) of nitrates exported from the area, even though they signed a treaty in 1874, pledging not to impose taxes on mineral exploitation, gave rise to a serious conflict. The railway’s manager, George Hicks, refused to pay and sought refuge on a Chilean warship stationed off the coast. Chilean troops occupied the area and the port a few days later.

Following the Ten Cents War which lasted five years (1879-1884), fought between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert region, Chile won “control over the most important mineral resources in the world - not just the nitrates of the Atacama, but the world’s biggest reserves of copper and lithium.” Bolivia lost its coastline and Chile became “a resource superpower.” (Ed Conway, Material World, p. 170)

 

 

 

 

 

Globalization and “Decivilization”

Our modern economy is based on efficiency, specialization, and globalization. Economists define efficiency as “the absence of waste when an economy wastes none of its available resources and produces the maximum amount of output that its technology permits.”

When a country leans heavily on specialization, it devotes resources to only a small proportion of the world’s productive activities. How does the country satisfy its other needs? Enter globalization.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines globalization as “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets.”

Manufacturing, production, and supply chains in the U.S. were moved to China, Vietnam, and Mexico because of cheap labor and less regulations.

Economists argued in textbooks that everybody is better off in globalization, but that is not true, ask the Rust Belt workers who lost their jobs in the quest for globalization. Ask engineers and other professionals in the U.S. who had to train their replacements from India after they were fired from their jobs.

Globalization has driven the modern economy of the last four decades. We no longer manufacture goods that are essential to the existence of our domestic market. It was painfully clear when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were severe shortages of goods resulting from interrupted supply chains coming from China and other countries who manufactured goods that we no longer produce in our own country because we were following the globalization’s economies of scale and cheap labor abroad.

Globalization has provided advances in the standard of living, infrastructure, in health care, education, and population growth in less developed countries.

In the case of a pandemic, a natural disaster, and war, countries will be forced to look at ways to produce domestically what their needs are.

In the developed world, the population no longer knows how to grow a garden, how to plant a sufficient crop to feed everyone, how to preserve their own food, sew, make necessary repairs in the home, hunt, or fish. In our economy, goods are discarded and replaced, seldom repaired.

In the absence of other specialized countries providing what we need daily, “Decivilization” will follow. “Decivilization” as defined by Peter Zeihan is “a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function.” With so many skills that we have lost, it is easy to see how such breakdowns can occur in a large economy.

We cannot eat technology, gadgets, or other things that drive our modern lives. We need food, medicine, clean water, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity.

We have become incompetent at tasks that are necessary for survival. We saw what happened to Zimbabwe when the population was forced to survive on subsistence farming.

Venezuela imported two-thirds of its necessary food before the economy collapsed and the population was forced to eat animals from the zoo. Their oil production crashed so much that farmers did not have enough fuel to plant crops. It was “the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere.” (Peter Zeihan, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, 2022, p. 64)

The more recent developments in Italy showed how dependent the southern population was on the delivery of food trucked from other parts of the country. Their grocery stores were empty for weeks as the truckers went on strike on Italy’s highways to protest the soaring prices of Diesel. Europe’s fuel prices have always been higher than in the U.S., but the wars in Ukraine and Iran have driven prices even higher.

The United States is sufficiently diverse in resources that it can make the economy work by being inventive. But most countries could be severely impacted if the flow of goods and services obtained globally is interrupted. In such a case, the political and economic map of the world will change. The urban areas will suffer the most.

Another variable that can also interfere with the global flow of goods and services between countries and continents is a natural disaster on an unprecedented scale, i.e., mega volcanic eruption, mega tsunami, earthquakes, solar flares.

The supply and demand in a globalized economy will be impacted if development slows due to the lower birth rate which in western nations is already below replacement value.

Moving cheap labor into Europe and the U.S., disguised as migration, may seem as a fix, but most of these economic migrants become welfare burdens to the taxpaying population.

Shortages of goods and services globally will force populations to take care of the needs of their own countries, the global flow of goods will stagnate, and the bedrock of our civilization will unravel.

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I Love Capitalism! I hate Socialism!

As a naturalized American by choice, I love my adopted country in which I spent my entire adult life. I grew up under a socialist republic and a socialist economic system run by the Communist Party apparatchiks. My twenty years there can help me make a clear and realistic comparison of the two economic systems.

It is obvious that I love the freedom of capitalism otherwise I would not be here. I hated socialism, the steppingstone to communism so much that I left behind everything I knew and loved, my mom and dad, my large extended family, my friends, and so many memories.

When the communist dictator who ruled the country with an iron fist for over four decades was executed in 1989, the people were elated that they did not experience the communist “paradise” Marx proposed theoretically, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." They could only imagine how much worse the Communist Man would have been after the failed and miserable Socialist Man.

Under socialism, the government controls all the means of production, dictates all quotas and makes five-year plans for the economy.

Paul B. Skousen defined Socialism simply as “the government force to control and change society,” and how it “progresses like a snake eating its tail.” Skousen wrote about the seven pillars of socialism:

1.      All-powerful rulers (the government and the communist party)

2.      Societal division into castes (India) or classes (proletariat and the party members)

3.      All things in common (everything allegedly belonged to the proletariat but nothing belonged to the people if they wanted to claim it)

4.      All things regulated (by a myriad of laws and constant decrees)

5.      Compliance is forced (large standing army, police, security police, and economic police; citizens are not allowed to own arms)

6.      Control of all information (two newspapers allowed; printing only party indoctrination and opinions)

7.      No unalienable rights. (rights were given by the party and taken back at will)

Under socialism we had no rights. We could not speak our opinions to neighbors, friends, family, or at work. We could not express dissatisfaction with the regime. We disappeared overnight if we did, never to be seen again, or perhaps years later after hard labor in a gulag or in a re-education camp.

There were two papers, Scinteia (The Spark) and Romania Libera (Free Romania), the Communist Party’s platforms of misinformation and communist indoctrination. We hated them so much for the constant lies that we used them as toilet paper. It was also necessary because we could not find toilet paper on the market or it had wood chips imbedded in the sheets (ouch).

When I first stepped into an American grocery store in winter, I was shocked at the shelves bursting with food of all kinds, fruits, and vegetables. I had to remember to close my mouth. Such “evil” capitalism, providing plenty of food for its citizens and a good life!

Our socialist shelves were empty and the meat department sold bones for soup. Vegetables were not available, save for a few wrinkled and sprouted potatoes. Lines were endless every day for bread, milk, butter, flour, rice, cooking oil, and other necessities. And the quantities were rationed.

Socialized medicine was free, unlike capitalism, but doctors were overwhelmed by the number of patients, and wrote prescriptions, knowing that we would not be able to find the drugs prescribed because the pharmacy shelves were bare.

Shop clerks and pharmacists sold the few items supplied to family, close friends, and for bribes. Shortages were constant because the centrally planned economy was a failure.

The black market was alive and well, however, if marketeers were caught, they served years and years in prison, plus restitution of whatever the government decided.

Nobody must do without drugs in the capitalism system. There are many ways for people unable to buy medicine or medical care to find help in capitalism.

The socialist justice system found a person guilty as charged and a lawyer had to prove his/her innocence in a court of law overseen by the Communist Party workers and activists.

Shockingly, even though a person is innocent until proven guilty, people get away with crimes under capitalism over technicalities or a corrupt judicial system. They are innocent until proven guilty and the evidence of guilt sometimes is questionable or not enough.

I love capitalism because I was able to educate myself to the level that I wanted. I did not have to have a family with a history of Communist Party membership and activism to be allowed in college. Meritocracy was important but so was the affiliation to the Party. The children of the Party got in college first, no perfect exam scores necessary.

I love capitalism because I can attend any church I want. Nobody questions my love of country if I believe in God, own a Bible, and go to church.

Socialism frowns on people attending church and believing in God. Churches are allowed for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and as a way for priests to spy on their parishioners. Most regular church goers were old men and women.

The titles of books I could purchase and own were approved and published by the party’s printing house. If anyone owned more personal things than their neighbors, or books, tapes, records not approved by the party censors, then the economic police would come knocking and that person would go to jail after the police confiscated everything for “evidence” and disappeared the items for later distribution to party loyalists.

I can own a car or two under capitalism; I can drive a car, and I can learn to operate other vehicles if I choose. I can have my own phone, my own typewriter that is not registered with the police, my own computer, and other electronics.

In capitalism I could go on vacation if I saved enough money, I could get a passport to fly or sail anywhere in the world I desire to go. The socialist system’s police or the communist party would tell me no.

The Communist Party, not unlike the current Social Democrats, promised people “no religion, no countries, open borders, no possessions, and no worries.” What a bad life that was! If we crossed the border we were shot. The party kept us locked inside borders with high wire fences and heavily armed guards.

I can have a Christmas tree and decorations all over my lawn under capitalism, and, unless there is an HOA, I do not need permission to do so. People celebrate Christmas under capitalism, although lately the Muslim contingent of the American population is offended by our Christian symbolisms.

We had to work at Christmas time during socialism, and the government changed Santa Clause to Mos Gerila (Old Frozen Man). The communist party encouraged the celebration of New Year and forbade caroling.

Private ownership of anything in socialism was highly discouraged and punished with prison as bourgeois. I can own anything I want under capitalism if I have capital to pay for it.

Borrowing money in socialism was prohibitive and driven by extremely high interest rates in the 30-40 percent range. There was only one bank, the Party’s bank.

Every move in socialism was regulated, penalized, fined, taxed, and restricted by the Party rulers and prison was assigned at random.

Under socialism, government-sanctioned rights are the norm. As Skousen wrote, “When a government selectively protects some rights and ignores others, especially property rights, then socialism has started.”

I like capitalism because the health care system provides care to everyone, legal citizen or not, able to pay or not. They can pay later or use previously purchased health care insurance. Most doctors are well trained, and medicines are available without having to bribe the medical staff.

Under socialism, doctors were poorly paid, poorly trained, and did not care much about the outcome of patients from surgery. To this day, many who grew up under socialism are scared to go into hospital even though the medical system has vastly improved over decades of free market system.

Education was good under socialism although it had a large component of communist indoctrination. In capitalist society, unfortunately, the formerly spectacular education has turned into an indoctrination venue for socialism and socialist activism. Sadly, most young people are ignorant and lost in their devices and technology.

Over the years, the socialist indoctrination amplified in schools, slowly at first, but by now America is on its way to become a socialist country run by Socialist Democrats even though capitalism made them economically well off when compared to all other western nations.

We are at the point of no return because the Democratic Socialists of America Party has adopted the socialist platform of the twentieth century’s former Iron Curtain socialist countries run by the Communist Party. One interesting question remains; will Americans accept the government’s ownership of the means of production?