Revisionist History, Fascism, and Holocaust Survivor Eva

Eva Moses Kor, Holocaust Survivor
Photo: Screen capture

As the socialist teachers in the halls of academia around the country continue the indoctrination of American children into the utopian society of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Castro, the rocket man of North Korea, and other dictators around the world, the Che Guevara t-shirt wearing young Americans have made their way into West Point and Main Street USA, protesting as paid mobs of racist BLM anarchists, fascist ANTI-FA anarchists, and other seasoned communist agitators.

Newspapers of note and the main stream media continue to rehabilitate communism and paint it in a positive light, spinning its non-existent egalitarian and social justice qualities, while hiding communism’s death toll of 100 million people.

Somehow Americans find communism benign even though millions of victims of communism were tortured and killed in labor camps and in prisons. ANTI-FA thugs pretend to be fighting against fascists yet employ fascist tactics in trying to snuff out anybody’s freedom of speech that contradicts their narrative.

When history is revised to suit the divisive agenda of those driving the narrative, it is easy to see how a few generations removed from the actual events forget or are simply never taught what truly happened. That is why videos made with the survivors of the Holocaust and of the communist jails and labor camps are important in documenting history.

Eva Moses Kor is one of the survivors of the incredibly cruel, painful, and inhuman twin “experiments” which Dr. Joseph Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, conducted in the Auschwitz concentration camp.  These “experiments” were supposed to discover “how to increase the birthrate of a master Aryan race.” https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+video+of+Eva+Kor&view=detail&mid=1C17F3B4891D4597EE3F1C17F3B4891D4597EE3F&FORM=VIRE

Eva and her twin sister Miriam, born in 1934, were taken with their family away from a small Transylvanian village in Romania in 1944 and shipped by cattle cars to Auschwitz. Her father, mother, and two older sisters were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

But the twins Miriam and Eva were selected for experimentation, exposed to injections with substances that gravely altered their health and almost killed Eva. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they were kept naked in a room and measured in every possible way. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, they were taken to a lab, where blood was drawn from the left arm, while a “minimum of five injections were given into the right arm.”

Eva came down with a serious fever, shivering in the melting August heat, with painfully swollen legs and arms, and huge red blotches all over her body; she could no longer walk and was not expected to live. After her fever broke, she was taken to the hospital in another barrack, where “people looked more dead than alive.” Mengele pronounced that she had two more weeks to live.

But Eva survived by the Grace of God, crawling on the floor to a water faucet at the other end of the barrack, falling in and out of consciousness. Once her fever was completely gone, Eva was reunited with a sullen Miriam, who, while “staring into space,” refused to talk about what happened and, according to Eva, they did not discuss it until 1985. The Soviet Army freed Eva and Miriam on January 12, 1945.

Miriam finally told her sister Eva that she had been under 24-hour Nazi watch while Eva was on the threshold of death. The Nazi doctors continued to inject Miriam with various substances which stunted the growth of her kidneys to that of a ten-year old child. This revelation was discovered during her second pregnancy in 1963. During her first pregnancy in Israel, Miriam was racked with kidney infections “that did not respond to any antibiotics,” Eva remembered.  By Miriam’s third pregnancy, her kidneys started to fail and they died in 1987. Eva donated her left kidney to her sister.  Eventually Miriam developed “cancerous polyps in the bladder” and died on June 6, 1993. The twins never found out what they had been injected with in Dr. Mengele’s labs.

A Nazi doctor from Auschwitz named Munch appeared in a 1992 documentary and Eva searched for him. She invited Dr. Munch to Boston but he declined. Instead, she traveled in August 1993 to Dr. Munch’s home in Germany.  Questions swirled, “You were in Auschwitz, did you ever go inside the gas chamber? Did you ever walk by a gas chamber? Do you know how the gas chamber operated?” He answered, “This is a nightmare that I live with every single day of my life” and described “the operation of the gas chamber.”

She wanted him to sign an affidavit that the gas chambers existed, that they were operational, and how people were gassed.  Munch was the gas chamber doctor who looked through a peephole while the people were being asphyxiated. When there was no more movement in the mass of humanity, he knew everybody was dead; he signed one death certificate each time with the number of people inside – no names, no identifies, just a body count.

Eva asked Dr. Munch to sign the document at the ruins of Auschwitz on the 50^th anniversary of liberation from the death camp and he agreed. “I will have an original document signed by a Nazi.  And, if I ever met a revisionist who said the Holocaust didn’t happen, I could take that document and shove it in their face,” Eva said.

“As a victim of over 50 years, I never thought that I had any power in my life,” Eva continued. In a letter to Dr. Munch, which took her four months to write, she actually forgave Dr. Munch in a document signed in 1995. She was immediately denounced by other Holocaust survivors for doing so. Eva explained that it was a form of healing for her; she no longer wanted to be Mengele’s guinea pig of 50 years prior.

Eva wrote down twenty nastiest words she could find in the English dictionary and then, as if she was speaking to Dr. Mengele himself, she said, “In spite of that, I forgive you.” She felt absolved that she, “the little guinea pig of 50 years, even had the power over the Angel of Death of Auschwitz.”

Eva described how Munch showed up with his son, daughter, and granddaughter, and Eva took her son and daughter to the signing of the documents. “I read my declaration of amnesty which is a very good little document and I signed it. Dr. Munch signed his document. I felt free, free from Auschwitz, free from Mengele.”

What was the point of Eva’s forgiveness? “It is an act of self-healing, of self-liberation, self-empowerment. All victims, all hurt, feel hopeless, fell helpless, and feel powerless.” She acknowledged that what happened was so horrible and tragic that it could not be undone, “but we can change how we relate to it.”

We must never forget what happened to Eva, Miriam, six million victims of the Nazi Holocaust who did not survive, and 100 million victims of communism who also perished at the hands of those elites who thought them inferior and disposable.

We should not discount and ignore the acts of fascistic violence of BLM, ANTIFA, and other groups who want to stifle the freedom of speech of those they disagree with and denigrate to the point of hate, otherwise history will repeat itself.

Communism Never Died, It Was Cleverly Repackaged for the Historically Impaired and Useful Idiots

“For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn



Eugene Lyons
Photo: Wikipedia

In 1950 Congress passed the Internal Security Act and, four years later, the Communist Control Act. It condemned communism and the Communist Party of the United States. Today a sizeable portion of Congress actually belongs to the Communist Party U.S.A. or is sympathetic to it. In a recent poll, 40 percent of Americans prefer communism to capitalism.

In 1954 Congress delineated penalties for anyone belonging to a party or a group calling for the violent overthrow of the United States. Just being a member, however, was not enough reason for arrest or penalty.  Today members of Congress, public citizens, and illegals call for the overthrow of our government without any penalties.

The Internal Security Act of 1950 is known as the Subversive Activities Control Act or the McCarran Act, after its principal sponsor, Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nevada).  Congress enacted this federal law over President Harry Truman’s veto who was concerned about the fact that it curtailed the freedom of speech, press, and of assembly.

This act required communist organizations to register with a subversive activities control board; investigations were made of suspected persons who promoted a “totalitarian dictatorship,” either fascist or communist.  If persons were members of such groups, they could not become citizens or enter/leave the U.S.

If found in violation of the McCarran Act, a person could lose his/her citizenship for five years. There was an emergency statute that gave the President the power to “apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage.”

The McCarran Act strengthened “alien exclusion and deportation laws” and, in times of war, allowed for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons. Picketing a federal courthouse was a felony if the intention was to obstruct the court system or influence jurors or other trial participants.

The House overrode Truman’s veto without debate by a vote of 286–48 the same day. The Senate overrode his veto the next day after "a twenty-two hour continuous battle" by a vote of 57–10. Thirty-one Republicans and 26 Democrats voted in favor, while five members of each party opposed it. (Trussel, C.P. September 24, 1950. Red Bill Veto Beaten, 57-10, By Senators.” New York Times)

Hollywood and the press dubbed this period of time the Red Scare and McCarthyism even though Sen. McCarthy, a war hero, was vindicated recently through the release of the Venona papers - there were people in Hollywood and other fields who were communist spies and sympathizers.

The Communist Party U.S.A. continues to exist today despite the claims from the left that the Red Scare had run its course. Communist-leaning organizations like the ACLU, labor unions, and NAACP are now an important part of the American political milieu. According to the left, “a more liberal Supreme Court began to chip away at the immense tangle of anticommunist legislation that had been passed during the 1940s and 1950s. Today, the Communist Party of the United States continues to exist and regularly runs candidates for local, state, and national elections.”

Today’s large percentage of the American public who think that it would be a great idea to live under communism as opposed to capitalism, are not unlike Eugene Lyons who wrote “Assignment in Utopia” in 1937, describing his communist activism and journalism in America and his journey to Russia where the reality and harshness of Bolshevism hit him squarely in the face.

Lyons was shocked to meet hundreds of Bolsheviks barking orders to ordinary Russians "in whom suffering seemed to have burned out all emotion." Only the charred husks of their character remained.” (p. 56)

In a mood of romantic anticipation, Lyons arrived in the “land of proletarian dictatorship,” expecting a country of milk and honey with beds of roses. What he found was a forlorn-looking station; “nor cold nor darkness could douse our high mood of expectation.”  It was a thrill to find his private, misguided, and misconstrued esoteric symbols of what he perceived to be Utopia on earth.

Negotiating a permit, a propusk, Lyons realized that the word loomed “gigantic on Russia’s horizon.” Russians needed a permit for everything. “It allowed me to enter the musty old building, to follow my secretary through a maze of dark corridors, and finally to meet the censors. As a correspondent dubbed “sympathetic” and “friendly,” Lyons was shocked that he could not see President Kalinin. Comrade Rothstein, his handler, raised his eyebrows at this American’s temerity. 

“Would a foreign correspondent arriving in Washington, have the nerve to ask to see President Coolidge," Rothstein asked.  Lyons realized that communism operated under a “barbed-wire of inaccessibility.” No press conferences twice a week, no press secretary, no questions taken from the media like in America. The Russian communist president was king, no consultations with his cabinet members or his Secretary of State.

Even an idealist like Lyons eventually realized that the Bolsheviks, “the newly powerful, like the newly rich, are on the alert against any slight to their dignity” and this dignity was boundless.

Lyons found the Soviet’s capital intensely cold, with frequent blizzards and snowstorms, and “the night that comes so soon after noon make it an aloof and forbidding place.”  Russians called Moscow “the largest village in their land.”

Prior to Bolsheviks taking power, “until food stringency and growing political fears put a damper on such things, Moscow was a city of endless parties.” The cobbled streets and broken side-walks were quite dangerous under tightly packed snow. “A few well stocked shop windows seemed ill at ease in their embarrassing prosperity among the dusty windows filled with debris and emptiness.” Such was the grim and dingy life of Russian communism. (p. 58)

In his ardent idealism and longing for the communist utopia, Eugene Lyons illogically gave the Russian revolution credit for everything cultural, art, opera, theater, parties, fun, which the country had actually inherited from the tsarist era.  Idealist rebels like Lyons did not notice the misery and shortcomings surrounding him or glossed over them.

Living in the Lux Hotel, an overcrowded tenement of cabbage odors of all nations, colors, and tongues,  Lyons described the tenants as “the international communist type – if not the same features, at  least the same negligent dress, unkempt hair, and the same expression of anxious devotion.”

Lyons said, “Never before had I witnessed so much naked, unashamed sycophancy and career-building concentrated under one roof.” And Uncle Kremlin was protecting them with police, was shadowing them with Russian spies, made sure they stayed in their communist graces. One wrong move or sentence and they were out.  Uncle Kremlin was “suspicious of his foreign nephews and nieces” who “might forget themselves and play with those horrid Trotsky brats.”

After six years of living in Moscow post Russian Revolution, Lyons realized that equality of communism was just an illusion. He was infected by the disease of economic change, from capitalism to communism. He said, “I was ready to liquidate classes, purge millions, sacrifice freedoms and elementary decencies, arm self-appointed dictators with a flaming sword – all for the cause. It was a species of revenge rationalized as social engineering. Then I saw these things in full swing and discovered that the revenge was being wreaked on the very masses that were to be saved by that cause.”

To say that today’s youth have learned nothing from history is an understatement. It is obvious in the Bolshevik and Stalinist cultural purge the BLM, a racist organization, and ANTIFA, a fascist organization, engage in largely undisturbed. No historical monument or statue seems to stand in their way of violence and destruction.

The New York Times published a sympathetic piece about communism, “When Communism Inspired Americans.”  At the time, it was a misguided fringe of deluded proletarian activists perhaps who worshiped at the foot of Soviet Bolshevism.

Vivian Gornick wrote, “I was 20 years old in February 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule. Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage. ‘Lies! I screamed at them. Lies and treachery and murder. And all in the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!’  Confused and heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html

It seems that a whole lot of Americans today, influenced daily by the main stream media and Hollywood, are “inspired” by Venezuela’s bankrupt and starving socialism, Castro’s murderous socialist regime, Che Guevara’s revolutionary and chic hat, North Korea’s “rocket” mad man who is starving his own people, and Mao’s Chinese Marxist model.

Useful idiots in America, fat and happy on capitalist food and goods, are deaf and ignorant of the words of Heinrich Heine who said, “Communism possesses a language which every people can understand – its elements are hunger, envy, and death.”

We don’t see any wannabe communists, actors, professors, and journalists rushing to turn in their American passports to move to those dictatorial countries although they threaten us plenty that they will leave America because they irrationally loathe the capitalism that gave them a good life, success, and wealth, and  President Trump, a supporter of freedom, sovereignty, and economic prosperity.

 

Empires End in the Dustbin of History

Stefan the Great (1457-1504) Romanian ruler who
fought the Ottoman Empire in 36 battles and won 34,
named by the church, "Athleta Christi"
Photo: descopera.ro

Empires come and go. The twilight of western civilization is not just a poetic idea, it is a painful reality. Liberals often say that they do not like to make broadly pessimistic pronouncements about the collective fate of civilization.  Of course not, it might upset their blind followers who dwell in the haze of marijuana, hard-core drugs, immorality, decadence, and debauchery.

Anarchists are allowed to burn down towns, while police are told to stand down. ANTI-FA and BLM, fascist and racist organizations by any description, deface statues they don’t like and beat up others whose ideas they disagree with, proclaiming that they have a right to attack them for their opinions.

Young brainwashed generations are rejecting God, morality, their countries, their own skin color, their history, and everything that made our modern society most developed.

Terrorists are allowed to cause destruction and mayhem around the world yet those in power bring more into developed countries under the insane notion that they are protecting multi-culturalism and diversity and the U.N.-established “right” to migration anywhere they wish, regardless of borders and sovereignty.

The lessons of 9-11 and the unity against Muslim terrorist evil forces lasted as long as the clean-up ended, those innocents killed were buried, and the families recompensed from the 9-11 fund. Even the death of the 200 or so jumpers before the towers fell was sanitized by the leftist media because it was too much to bear and see.

The sacred ground containing the bodies of innocents slaughtered that day, who were never recovered, will be protected perhaps for a few decades. When a new generation of BLM and ANTI-FA snowflakes will decide that the monument is offensive to them, it will probably be torn down too.

Statues honoring Francis Scott Key, the lawyer and amateur poet who wrote our National Anthem, Christopher Columbus, derided by the left as an “Italian navigator, explorer, and colonizer,” Gen. Robert E. Lee, a war hero and veteran, were either destroyed, defaced, or vandalized by home-grown terrorists who would like to shut down any opposition to their fascistic behavior and ideas.

Mayors in places like Baltimore, Charlottesville, Dallas, and other highly liberal municipalities, took it upon themselves to rewrite history by ordering the removal of statues they deemed offensive, often in the middle of the night, while the rest of the citizens stood by in stunned disbelief. Bolsheviks and fascists smashed many statues, monuments, burned books and works of art they considered offensive and bourgeois and priceless artifacts were forever destroyed.

Muslim terrorists around the world are killing with gusto because they hate civilization and infidels but love the welfare in the countries they are rapidly occupying through demographics. Europeans and Americans are committing demographic suicide and the church is applauding, praising, and enabling the invaders. Islamists are successfully installing their seventh century theocracy called Caliphate and the powers that be in the western world seem to agree that it is the best path for their citizenry. Twenty-one centuries of civilization must have been a mistake which they aim to correct by national suicide.

Hiring practices favor the newly protected class to the detriment of Americans. My former two bank branches eventually fired all Americans in the last eight years and hired only Muslims with limited English skills. One recently lied and tried to talk down to me about economics and finance. She had been on the job for a week. I wondered how the large Spanish-speaking population banks with them.

You would be hard-pressed to find a medical professional, a taxi driver, a sales associate in a store, or an airport employee in the D.C. area who is not from the Middle East and speaking with a thick English accent, often incomprehensible. It is not racist or bigoted to state such a fact, even though liberals throw around such labels like confetti.

London was just attacked again, this time a bomb blew up on the metro.  Numerous people were singed from the flash of the bomb that partially detonated in a Lidl shopping bag. I wondered how many more such terrorist attacks, whether by bombs, knives, or cars plowing into crowds, will eventually convince the EU that their globalist, multi-cultural plan of flooding the old continent with economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East has failed miserably and must stop the open borders, welcome all the flotsam and jetsam of Islamist refugees who have no intention of ever accepting western civilization or assimilate.

That is why the western empire is in its twilight and will eventually demise in the dustbin of history. And my people fought the Ottoman Empire for centuries. Much blood has been shed to keep them out of Christian lands. Now they are here to stay and fundamentally transform us because we let them.

Mississippians Are Resilient People

My azaleas in Mississippi
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2004

As a resident of Mississippi for thirty years, I learned that living in the tornado alley close to Tupelo meant that downpours, high winds, and spun-seemingly-out-of-nowhere tornadoes were a weekly occurrence during hurricane season.

The first tornado I experienced took down part of the only mall in Tupelo and caused severe damage in its vicinity. The hit sometimes looked like a surgical strike and other times it downed an entire patch of forest on Natchez Trace, skipping and jumping to other locations for miles. We had straight line winds that often caused more damage than some tornadoes did.

During my tenure at the local university, most of the old trees, including a beautiful and venerable magnolia were uprooted. Several buildings, including dorms, were so severely damaged that they had to be torn down and rebuilt. Students were missed in their beds by mere inches by flying lamp poles or huge tree branches, and cars were smashed by falling trees.

I will never forget looking out of the window at the menacing clouds in the distance, watching my neighbors’ son get out of his car and, before he entered his parents’ house, one of the very old trees lining the street fell with a loud grown on top of his car, flattening it into a pancake.

Spotted tornado alarms would go off every week and people had to seek shelter in the bathtub or, as in our case, in the tornado shelter built inside the garage. The former owner, a doctor, thought that it was a good idea to place the water heater in it as well. I know he planned it because I found the architect’s drawings in the hall closet.

Living in the country for a while, I witnessed tornadoes do a lot of damage to trees and at times unlucky cows were struck by lightning or picked up by the wind cone – sometimes they were dropped nearby, sometimes we never knew where they went until other neighbors would find them dead or alive.

Living in trailers in the south was an entirely novel experience for a European like me – I’ve never seen one before.  During high winds and tornadoes, the tin can on wheels, although anchored well, rattled and lifted up as if trying to fly like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz. During sun-shiny weather bees, mice, and other critters found their buzzing and stomping grounds inside the thin metal shell and thin insulation.

We survived Katrina simply because we lived on higher ground and many hours inland but the wind damage was tremendous. Our sturdy house was built in 1960 when construction was a serious business, and homes were not built of spit and toothpicks.

We lived for three weeks without electricity and covered in 60-year old pine trees that fell around our home and into the street. The loneliness and despair stemming from the devastation around us was overpowering.

An entire town in the southern part of Mississippi was razed from the face of the earth as if it had never existed. Only concrete slab foundations and pipes jutting out of the ground remained. The media did not cover that disaster much because the attention was entirely focused on New Orleans and the people self-trapped in the stadium.

Mississippians, churches around the state, and the Salvation Army, sprang into action and started sheltering people, feeding them, providing water, cleaning up the incredible mess, and rebuilding quietly and efficiently in the same manner they’ve been fighting the force of nature for ages.

My next door neighbor shot himself in his bedroom. He had mental issues and the damage from the storm and the loneliness was too much to bear. Someone bought his house for pennies on the dollar because nobody wanted to live in a house where such tragedy occurred.

Mother Nature with its spun tornadoes did not care that it was a really hot or a really cold season, it left us without water and electricity for days and weeks. We stayed in hotels, showered at the gym, and helped other people do the same.

We lost refrigerators and freezers full of food many times over. I can’t remember how many times I’ve owned microwaves and TVs struck by intense lightning; one microwave I was attempting to buy from Sears cost me one penny – they could not find the price, it had been written off the inventory for disposal, so they sold it to me for a penny.  I’ve replaced HVAC systems flattened by fallen old pines twice and the roof three times in the twenty years I’ve owned the house. Yet my fig tree survived. To this day it gives an abundant crop of figs to the family who bought our home.

When the street was impassable due to fallen trees, our Mennonite neighbors from Brooksville showed up with chain saws and cleared it in less than a day and hauled off the timber. They dragged the roots to the dump and filled the huge holes left behind with fresh soil. Other flying debris which landed in the yard was also carefully cleared.

One of the pleasures of living in Virginia, aside from its natural and unmatched beauty, is that I do not have to hear the tornado sirens every week, telling us to seek shelter. We’ve had high winds that have caused some tree damage and a few tiles stripped off the roof, but nothing compared to the Mississippi tornado alley we had to live through almost every week when torrential rains came out of nowhere.

We’ve had highly powerful and intense hurricanes and tornadoes in the last two centuries but the population density was much lower and the infrastructure less developed. Billions of dollars fly out the window with the fury of wind and water, depending on the value of the homes and businesses in its wrathful path.

In the South Mother Nature unleashes its fury periodically and people learn to cope with such intensity because they are resilient and selflessly helpful to each other in the face of disaster.

 

Such Native Roots

There’s an interesting store in the local mall that had intrigued me for a long time. I’ve never been inside until today; I just passed by the window display and tried to ignore it every time. Occasionally I took pictures of the same two t-shirts, a red and a green one. One day the store was empty and another merchant was occupying the space. I made a mental note of relief that it was gone.

Today I found “Native Roots” in a different part of the mall, occupying a slightly larger space. I decided to go inside and strike up a conversation with the shop assistant. I passed by beautiful hand-made native knick-knacks, adorned leather, some beads, jewelry, some colorful dresses, wooden boxes, belts, and other unique items you can’t find anywhere else.

An entire wall had nicely folded t-shirts on wooden shelves, the very same two t-shirts I had passed by for years in the window of the previous location. I assumed such native items are very popular in the upscale mall in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties in the nation. How else could they afford the expensive rent?

The shop assistant was a native Ecuadorian who was proud of their help for the native tribe whose wares they were selling. She did not mention the name of the tribe or whether the tribe was Native American or an indigenous tribe from Ecuador. I only hope their stuff was not made in China.

I brought up the two t-shirts that had bothered me for a long time – still prominently displayed and sold in numerous colors. One was adorned with pictures of Indian chiefs with the phrase, “Homeland Security – Fighting Terrorism since 1492.” The second t-shirt was a composite of four Indian chiefs superimposed over the American Presidents on Mount Rushmore, with the words, “The Original Founding Fathers.”

I am a naturalized American citizen and I certainly resent the fact that I and my fellow Americans are called terrorists by these people. I asked the woman how she felt about those t-shirts. She responded that this is the Native Americans’ country and we are all terrorists because we took it away from them in 1492 when Columbus discovered America. What does that make you, I asked her? She gave me a blank stare.

I also asked her what the name of the country was when Columbus discovered it. Which tribe was killing their neighboring tribe for supremacy at the time? Do nomadic tribes living here and there make up a country and how do you claim a country? Do borders, language, and culture make up a country? If not, how do you define a country? She did not answer any of my questions, she just shrugged her shoulders.

I am not sure what these Indian chiefs, “original founding fathers,” have founded. She wasn’t able to clarify that matter either.

I tried to explain to her that commerce is based on appeasing all customers; she and the owner of the store must be appeasing the hate-fringe in America who believes that we have no right to our own country because we took it unjustly from natives. There is not one country on the planet that was not established either by occupation, conquest through war, or through a massive land purchase.

How did she expect the rest of America to buy her hand-made merchandise when she is calling her customers terrorists? What kind of business model is this? It seems to me like a business model built on hate, on disrespecting the country that has taken her in as a resident, legal or illegal.

She told me in her broken English that I should address those questions to her Ecuadorian boss.

Toilet Paper with Wood Chips

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Huffing and puffing, I lug the large package of toilet paper from our local Costco into the house. It’s not that the price is better; I just don’t want to go to the store more often than I have to. I stood in lines enough during my twenty years of living under the boot of communism.

I am always tempted to ask the cashier if that’s enough toilet paper for the average food intake. I never do it because the cashiers are all foreign, barely speak English, and my meek attempt at potty humor would be met by strange stares.

I kept a pink sample of pink toilet paper I brought with me from our first trip back to Romania after communism had “fallen” 25 years earlier. The tissue looks like crepe paper with splinters of wood embedded here and there, visible to the naked eye and painful to the rear end. Progress after decades of dictatorial communism is very slow in some aspects and fast in others.

It is still an improvement from the years I grew up when toilet paper and other necessities Americans take for granted were so scarce, people lined up for blocks to buy a couple of rolls and many left disappointed when the month’s delivery ran out.

People carried emergency walking-around cash and jute expandable shopping bags just in case they ran into a long line which may have been formed for something they needed, i.e., toilet paper, shampoo, oranges, butter, bananas, flour, oil, and sugar. Nobody knew exactly what was on sale that day; asking people around did not help, they did not know either; eventually, as they inched closer to the window, they found out what was delivered that day that people lined up for blocks for a chance to get the rationed amount.

Now in the twenty-first century America, the Snowflake college students are “triggered” by banana peels carelessly discarded on a tree. It makes one wonder, what is the progressive-approved non-racist method of disposing of banana peels after one eats a banana?

During the 1977 earthquake in Romania, the American Bible Society donated Bibles printed in Romanian which were meant to be distributed to the thousands of people who had lost their homes, their loved ones, and felt defeated. Biblical passages would have been inspirational and calming at such a time of profound grief. Instead of distributing them, Ceausescu’s regime recycled them into toilet paper. The print was so good or their recycling so bad that, one day, I found an entire roll of toilet paper with faint words, still legible, which turned out to be passages from the Bible. As scarce as toilet paper was, we kept it in the pantry because it was too sacrilegious to use it in this way.

As Americans, we never think how grateful we should be every day to the Scott Brothers of Watertown, Massachusetts, who invented the toilet paper in the 19th century!

Since people were embarrassed to buy it, the Scott Brothers thought they had a dud invention on their hands until they had the brilliant idea to give it freely to hotels. Hotels agreed to place it in rooms because they were fed up with their small pipes being clogged all the time. Until then, people used corn husks and newspapers which clogged the small sewer pipes. Customers loved the toilet paper for that very reason too and began buying it. And the rest is history.

In Romania's outhouses, we used corn husks and communist party propaganda newspapers because we did not have Sears and Roebucks catalogs or any catalogs for that matter. Once in a while a German tourist would leave behind one of their catalogs and we enjoyed looking at the abundance of everything we did not have, so we never used those for toilet paper. We especially enjoyed wiping with pages which had the dear leader Ceausescu's face on them.

Later on, when toilet paper was finally made, it was coarse light brown paper with wood chips still embedded in the paper, or, if white, it had faintly visible words on it from the books which were recycled into toilet paper.

I still have the few strips of pink toilet paper embedded with wood chips. I showed it to a lot of my former students but it did not seem to make any impact on brain-washed students who love communism and Che Guevara. Listening day and night to Hollywood and the academia extolling the wonderful virtues of communism, young people aspire to overturn their wonderful country built by capitalism and replace it with the tyrannical and egalitarian notion of communism. They believe this because they are young, idealist, often fat and well fed, restless for violent action, and never had to stand in line for anything except the latest electronic gadgets or concert tickets.