The Not So Golden Epoch of Communism

Photo: Web

A photograph came across my desk depicting an arch of triumph of sorts which declared 1965-1985 “The Ceausescu Epoch – The Golden Epoch of Romania.”

If you ask any Romanian, this twenty-year period was one of the most tyrannical and oppressive regimes in its known history. It was a painful period of dark and repressive communist dictatorship maintained and characterized by brute force, fear, mental control, and constant food rationing.

The young pioneers, communists in training, “soimii patriei” (The Country’s Eagles), euphemistically “named” by Ceausescu himself, adopted the motto “Tot inainte,” (Ever Forward). A pioneer’s guide indoctrinated them how to behave as young communists. It seems that both communists and Socialist Democrat lefties are very fond of pathetic euphemisms which misrepresent reality.

On any given day the self-described Democrat Socialist left is trampling on the opposition’s rights, turning us into a collective guy facing a communist rolling tank in Tiananmen Square.

The two communist run television channels broadcast from 1 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily with a heavy dose of political indoctrination via carefully crafted and chosen entertainment and documentaries such as “The works of Comrade Ceausescu – Huge horizons opened for the revolutionary theory and practice,” the unfailing and tireless activity devoted to increasing the communist party role in society, “Science and Scientific Socialism as remarkable forces of production,” “We live decades of grandiose fulfillments,” choreographed literary-musical production aimed at bamboozling the proletariat into blind submission, and “From the big book of communism, the patriotic revolutionary responsibility of youth in Romania’s future in the Ceausescu Epoch,” more indoctrination for the generation of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Epoch, euphemistically and deceptively named “the generation of the revolutionary spirit and actions.”

In the painful daily reality, the proletariat and their children were forced to sing, march, and praise the dear leader, and the population in general was starved on a meager diet and bombarded with a false sense of wellbeing and daily doses of deviously crafted lies.

The communist subjects of all ages were forced to “recognize, apply, and respect the principles and norms of the labor and life of communists, of the ethic and equity of socialism – order, discipline, responsibility, and liability in all activities.”

Western visitors commented on how beautiful Romanian women were, thin as twigs but foreign guests did not understand the real reason for this forced thinness – the lack of food, the rationing of food via stamped cards, the endless daily lines, and the Communist Party prescribed caloric rations.

“The Program of Scientific Nutrition” decreed in July 1982 that men should have 37 g of protein and women 29 g of protein per day. The recommended caloric intake based on the type of activity - light, medium, forte, and exceptional - ranged from 2,000 to 2,700 calories for women and 2,700 to 4,000 for men. It seemed like a reasonable schedule except for the fact that most people would have been hard-pressed to find much food to deliver enough protein and nutrition. The obvious thinness of the population bore testimony to the lack of food. https://adevarul.ro/locale/ploiesti/programul-alimentatie-stiintifica-populatiei-comunism-trebuia-manance-cantareasca-persoana-1_57ac8f245ab6550cb8ab50f6/index.html

The “recommended” food intake was even lower for the rural population and their rationing cards entitled them to less food. If a villager wanted to raise a pig for his family’s use, he had to raise another one and donate it to the state.

People were not allowed to buy food anywhere else except in the area in which they lived. In other words, the rationing cards were valid only in one’s neighborhood stores.

The light activity category was comprised of office workers and housewives who owned stoves and other electric appliances.

The medium activity referred to workers in the light industry, men in construction industry, agriculture, students, and the military.

The forte activity category included miners, workers in the heavy industry, women in agriculture, soldiers in the field, dancers, and athletes.

The exceptional activity category encompassed metal workers, workers in abattoirs and butcher shops, dock workers in ports, and women in construction. https://cultural.bzi.ro/programul-de-alimentatie-stiintifica-a-populatiei-elena-ceausescu-daca-vor-sa-manance-mai-mult-riscul-este-al-lor-7053

Monthly rations of food for the average adult included:

-          300 g of daily bread

-          Chicken (1 kg)

-          Beef or pork (500 g); in case of severe food shortages, the party guidelines suggested buying canned meat from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

-          Cheese (500 g every three months)

-          Butter (100 g)

-          Sugar (1 kg)

-          Corn meal (1 kg)

-          Flour (1 kg every three months)

-          Eggs (8-12)

Workers involved in harder labor were entitled to extra 300 g of basic foods listed every month. Their families had to stand in line for the extra food, if available, and present extra rationing coupons issued to them by the state.

Depending on the year and the type of shortages, usually caused by irrational exportation of food to foreign countries in exchange for hard currency and bad centralized planning by communist ideologues who had no idea how to run any economy, rationing cards were issued for shoes, clothing, food like flour, beans, cooking oil, sugar, rice, and other necessities.

Ceausescu’s Golden epoch of failed socialist rule by the Communist Party was nothing but a tarnished and empty goblet of promises and lies for the hapless proletariat who barely survived on an equal pay survival level that would have shocked even other Stalinist satellite countries.

Legal Immigrants Who Assimilate Are Always Welcome in America

The song goes, “in America the streets are paved with gold,” figuratively of course, a constant magnet for millions of economically starved people from around the world who recognize the easy life they can have in America at the expense of the hapless American taxpayers who are forced to share their wealth with the flotsam and jetsam of the third world who have nothing to contribute to our society but are drawn by the intense economic need of poverty and want. They are truly convinced that money grows on trees. And the Treasury is busy printing more money to cover America’s ever expanding trillion dollars of national debt.

We support countries with foreign aid we should never give a dime to. They overtly bite our hands that feed them. They are our enemies, the enemies of Christianity, of America, and of freedom.

Every time I write an article, I have a regular following of leftist trolls who are paid to write insulting commentaries in which they ridicule everything about me and about my LEGAL immigration status. They are paid useful idiots trolls by Democrat interests who promote the "tyranny of the oppressed," potential Democrat voters who come here illegally, thumbing their noses at our laws and calling Americans who oppose such illegal immigration fascists and racists.

One angry individual who knows that I am a naturalized American citizen, when he found out my political stance against communism, injected vitriol invectives in his wish that President Trump would deport me from the incipient communist America.

The most recent ad hominem attack referred to the fact that I immigrated LEGALLY so he accused me of wanting to shut the door for everybody else. That is certainly not my opinion. However, should we close the door to all immigrants?

Yes, we should bolt the door to all ILLEGAL immigrants who have not been vetted. They endanger our lives every day in so many ways: resurgence of formerly eradicated diseases, gangs, drug trafficking, school violence, street violence, hospital use abuse, road infractions and driving without a license or insurance, home invasions, identity theft, robberies, burglaries, welfare fraud, Social Security fraud, income tax fraud, etc.

Yes, I am here but I do not want to change “here” to reflect where I came from. I cherish the American flag and do not desecrate or burn it. I have assimilated and am a proud American by choice. I do not want to turn this country into the communist society I’ve fled.

Nobody in his right mind would leave a good place to move 7,000 miles away to something unknown, leaving friends and family behind forever. Staying there to help improve things was not an option because it was such a totalitarian society and no amount of effort on my part to change things there would have made a difference. We had no guns, no rights, no property, and no legal standing against the regime.

To say that leftists are mentally deficient is an understatement. One troll, probably sitting in his pajama in his parents’ basement, called me “an altar to grave welfare case.” I am still scratching my head on that one.

Another leftist troll called me “a ward of the state” because I taught at state universities and therefore that was somehow welfare. Had I worked for private institutions, only then my effort would have been legitimate work. I wonder if teaching Marxism, "racial justice," or “white privilege” at Harvard would have been valid work.

Here is my answer to those leftist trolls. I agree to shut the door to ILLEGAL immigrants, to people who are not vetted criminally, medically, and financially.

Immigrants should help make this country better, not become wards of the welfare system the minute they walk across the border. Illegal immigrants should not drain money from the Social Security fund they’ve NEVER paid into, burn our flag, waving the flag of their countries, and demand equal rights to American citizens.

I am all in favor of speeding up the cases of those in the process of submitting their paperwork to come to America LEGALLY. We should admit as many as possible of the four million LEGAL immigrants who are already awaiting patiently the resolution of their cases. They stayed in their countries and followed our immigration laws.

We should admit LEGAL immigrants who want to assimilate into our culture and have something to contribute to our society instead of draining it of resources while telling us every day what intolerant racists, fascists, Islamophobes, and xenophobes we are.

We should limit the number of foreign guest workers on H1B visas that corporations import in order to pay them a fraction of what they pay Americans. There are certainly enough educated Americans in computer engineering fields who are unemployed or have not been able to find a job upon graduation.

As C. Lamb stated, “It's a well-known secret in the software business that employers inflate the required qualifications in order to eliminate domestic hires. The employers just don't verify the qualifications for foreign applicants. I've seen job requirements that specify more experience with a software product than the lifetime of the software product.”

Telling someone from a different country, who was given shelter, welfare, medical care, a new life, education, a safe home, an opportunity at personal freedom, and who complains all the time that America is a racist and a bad place, and Americans who disagree with him/her are racists, SHOULD be told to repatriate.

We don't need more anti-American illegal immigrants or immigrants on H1B visas telling us how to do things their way. We have enough domestically grown and indoctrinated anti-Americans in positions of power.

LEGAL immigrants who follow our laws and assimilate into our culture are always welcome in America.

The Education Bus and Community Organizers

Conservatives used to believe in the true liberation of people from the enslavement by big and encroaching governments. You could hardly tell that today judging by the huge national debt they’ve escalated under a Republican president and a Republican Senate. They have been as profligate spenders as the Democrats, yet we still don’t have a wall to stop the invasion of illegals through the southern border.

Liberals are not really interested in liberty as the term implies, but want to conserve in perpetuity a system that oppresses voters, legal and illegal, and citizens, based on a euphemistically defined socialist/Marxist indoctrination by the government as the benevolent provider of everything without which life would cease to exist.

It does not seem to matter who is in power in Congress or the White House, Cultural Marxism is winning and destroying our own culture by leaps and bounds thanks in no small part to the education system which is now run by cultural Marxists.

There are some Republicans, RINOs, and Independents (those who cannot make up their minds that they are truly Democrats) among the sea of Democrats who run education at all levels, but they have no voice or influence to stop the indoctrinating curriculum and the Marxist community organizing instruction of America’s children.

Liberals, who now call themselves “progressives” even though the term “regressive” would be more appropriate, have constantly used the false narrative that the United States is a “democracy”, but the United States is a Constitutional Republic. 

“Progressives” from all walks of life, with a microphone, a camera, a grade book, or a journalistic pen in front of them, have repeated this lie constantly. Democrat low information voters eventually believed the ‘we are a democracy’ lie and echoed it as an indisputable truth.

A recent case in point, the annual conference of the National Education Association (NEA) which met in Houston, Texas, has hosted sessions on any social justice activism and Democrat political topics imaginable to the detriment of curriculum and instruction issues. http://www.aei.org/publication/nea-embraces-the-woke-agenda-but-votes-down-student-learning/

The 6,000 NEA attendees voted down the resolution “to re-dedicate itself to the pursuit of increased student learning in every public school in America.” Instead, the delegates endorsed “the fundamental right to abortion under Roe v. Wade,” urged reparations for slave descendants, pledged their help with the 2020 U.S. Census, pledged support for the violent Black Lives Matter movement, urged the U.S. government to admit that the illegals crisis at the border is the U.S. government’s fault for destabilizing the Central American countries, and last, but not least, supported teaching the bizarre concept of “white fragility” produced by the “white supremacy culture.”

The NEA delegates seem to have relegated student learning to the back seat of the education bus. Racial justice, social justice, abortion, ethnic and minority affairs, illegal immigration, voting, and women’s issues took the front seats.

The community organizing aspect of NEA’s annual convention was further enhanced by the speakers, i.e., Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill de Blasio. NEA has 3 million members, but it is alleged that 60 percent of them have self-identified as Republicans and Independents. Did NEA’s socialist political platform represent them or teaching in general?

The most pressing problem that we face today is the indoctrination of our youth into Cultural Marxism. It is essential to redress the socialist direction this nation is driven into with the force of a leftist tidal wave.

But it will take more than 15 years, perhaps 30 to change this dangerous course back to the tenets of our constitutional republic especially when we have to fight our own brethren, Republicans and Democrats, bent on amending the Constitution under the excuse of reigning in out of control politicians. And you know instinctively it is a bad idea as Soros wants to have a Convention of States (COS). It is a red flag – a gut realization that they probably have their own global Constitution ready to go to replace our U.S. Constitution during a runaway COS. Should the COS run smoothly, and the delegates successfully amend our Constitution, since politicians ignore the current Constitution and lord over us with ever more intrusive legislation, an amended one would be equally ignored.

We must however continue to fight the powerful educational system and our own corrupt elected officials at all levels of government. They consider themselves the ultimate arbiters of wisdom to fundamentally transforming America into a global governance.

Swamps and the Civil War

Winter camp in Neabsco 1861

Photo: Library of Congress

Leesylvania State Park, named after the Lee family and their homestead in the bluffs covered with lush green trees, is located by the Potomac River. A swampy area, rich with fauna and flora, surrounds the banks and extend into tributaries in Prince William County, 24 miles south of the political swamp of Washington, D.C. and 24 miles north of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

During the Civil War, following the Confederate victory of the battle at Ball’s Bluff in October 1861, both Confederate and Union armies settled along the way between Richmond and Washington. Confederate soldiers marched from Fairfax County to Prince William County to defend the line from Manassas to Quantico.

Batteries located on a bluff in today’s Leesylvania State Park on the Potomac River blockaded shipping to Washington. There are still two cannons left in the original location in the park bearing witness to this blockade.

In parts of the Neabsco and Quantico Creek area is where Confederate units built log huts with clapboard roofs to shelter them in the winter months. Gen. John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade built its winter camp named Camp Wigfall in the vicinity of the swampy area by the Potomac River in Prince William County in the summer of 1861.

The museum archives describe how men who were not on fencepost duty, cooked and cleaned the camp, played cards to pass the time, “foraged, and visited brigade sutlers [civilian provisioners to an army post] or friends and relatives in the nearby camps.”

A temporary Lone Star Theater was built for the Hood’s Minstrels, a group of actors, brass band, and choir. Highly popular, this theater saw performances by Sam Sweeney (banjo) and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” bard Harry McCarty.

Texans near Dumfries in early 1862

Photo: Pictorial History of the Civil War (1866)

Because conditions were unsanitary, the camps experienced outbreaks of measles, dysentery, diarrhea, and typhoid fever. According to museum archives, more soldiers died from various disease outbreaks than died from actual combat. Hailing from the Deep South, most soldiers relied on locals for their care while army doctors struggled to control the epidemics.

Private James M. Polk from the 4^th Texas Infantry wrote that “Our losses in the winter of 1861 from sickness and exposure, incident to camp life were very heavy. I had the measles; had a relapse and developed a case of typhoid-pneumonia; and my fate was uncertain for about six weeks. For ten or twelve days I did not eat a mouthful of anything.”

It is easy to understand how the soldiers, in their weakened condition from battle and marching, would fall prey to the conditions in the camps. The area today is swampy, reminiscing of surroundings back in 1861. It is difficult to walk through the dense vegetation, mud, murky soil, and infernal mosquitoes even though there are wooden planks placed strategically around to help navigate the muddy flats.

When the Confederates withdrew towards Richmond in early March 1862, the camps were abandoned. While the retreating soldiers took with them what they could, the lack of enough wagons, the bad roads, and their quick departure, forced them to destroy provisions and munitions to avoid their capture by the Union soldiers. The few surviving camps were occupied by the Union troops but were eventually destroyed.