Social Engineering

Government dictated land use under the guise of sustainable development, sustainable communities, and social engineering are seemingly innocuous euphemisms. The reality is much more sinister, it is communist control of land use, agriculture, and housing.

I see in my mind's eye the grey landscape of drab and dirty concrete apartment complexes, crowded on the periphery of towns, close to polluting refineries, black smoke spewing steel factories, chemical plants, and other noxious industrial platforms.

The occupants of the small, one bedroom, one dining room, one bathroom, and one tiny kitchen apartments, had been living in villages surrounding large cities. They had been forcefully moved so that the land they had previously occupied and owned could be confiscated, controlled, and farmed by the government for the "good of the people." It was learned soon enough that the "good of the people" did not really exist, it was just an euphemism to enslave everyone to the communist party and its "caring" for the downtrodden.

A few villages escaped this social engineering because they were either too remote for practical mass agriculture or too scattered across the hills and mountains. Such was the case of my paternal grandmother's village, perched high up in the Carpathian Mountains, a rocky but rich soil. Scattered patches of land allowed the locals to grow grapes and fruits, undisturbed by the confiscatory land grab of the communist party. Farmers were able to make wine, jams, preserves, sell fresh fruit, while keeping all income. Being so isolated from the beaten path and being connected to the world by one weekly bus, made it impossible and impractical for communist revenuers to come claim their lion's share for the "good of the people."

The neighborhoods that had been developed by the government "largess" on the outskirts of towns were very poor and a sorry excuse for city living. Some did not have paved roads, running water, plumbing, or electricity. The mayor did not care about their fate although it was his job. Over time, buildings decayed from lack of maintenance, updating, painting, roofing, earthquake damage, were eventually demolished or left abandoned just like a ghetto area in the U.S.

Row houses separated by wooden fences looked respectable on the outside but were not connected to any modern conveniences and lacked bathrooms. A wooden shack, the outhouse, loomed very smelly in the back.

The apartment blocks fared a little better because they had electricity, water, sewage, and garbage pickup when the government provided them. The problem was that the government could shut them off any time it wished, without prior notification. This included water, hot water, steam heat, electricity, and garbage pickup.

People had to maintain everything, clean, and provide security. Many blocks turned into ghetto areas, best to be avoided. Some became really dilapidated especially if occupied by gypsies who stripped them down and sold all interiors for spare parts, then abandoned them. What was the law going to do? There were not enough jails for all recidivists. Besides, gypsies could come and go as they pleased, they were feared by everyone.

Before the arrival of the communists to power, people had bucolic life styles, sufficient food, homes they called their own, a small plot of land which they farmed and produced enough food on for their families and extra for the city market. Communist social engineering changed that - most became poor, needy, hungry, cold, homeless, landless, and certainly lacking their human dignity as they became totally dependent on the government for all their needs. Nobody would own much of anything, everybody had to rent from the government.

If, in your American naivete, are ever persuaded to even think that social engineering is a concept worthy of discussion, consider this - it is a communist code word for mass poverty and government dependency in perpetuity. Don't take my word for it, study history and review the same failed experiments in Cuba, formerly Iron Curtain countries of Eastern Europe, North Korea, and China, to name a few.

You can even take a short trip to Cuba to see the blight and dilapidation of formerly beautiful homes. So many inhabited buildings in Havana are in such bad shape that even Roman ruins like the Coliseum, are better preserved. These buildings that would be condemned in this country, were "socially engineered" and fundamentally destroyed by Fidel Castro's communist regime. Cubans owned homes, hotels, and land before it was confiscated through clever rhetoric, finally by force, and distributed as rental property to the "proletariat." All fell in a sorry state of disrepair and remain that way to this day.