The misery and starvation subsistence that Romanians had to
endure for decades, while the media, political apparatchiks and the Ceausescus
rolled in the lap of luxury, finally exploded into revolt.
The people did not have arms; they had been confiscated
decades earlier. But the revolt leaders, as Pacepa described it, “were able to
mobilize virtually the entire citizenry by seizing the television station,
making it their headquarters, and then broadcasting their fight against the
hated dictator live, day and night.”
But even so, the revolution would have never succeeded had
it not been for the military forces who had joined the people’s revolt. The
proletariat had had enough suffering and misery during the quarter of a century
of Ceausescu’s oppressive communist regime.
Despite his “large, vicious, well trained, and heavily armed
security force,” and despite his underground bunkers and tunnels, he lost his
total control of the nation in a few days. The self-described “mother and
father of the nation” were whimpering during their arrest while attempting to escape
by helicopter.
The shoemaker and his uneducated wife, who awarded herself
degrees she never earned from schools she never attended, were finally deposed,
summarily tried by a military tribunal, and sentenced to death by firing squad.
The media was no longer there to lionize their diabolical tyranny.
For decades after World War II, the communist propaganda
machine of the most oppressive regime in Eastern Europe was kept alive and
enhanced through forced communist education, parades, posters, publications,
poetry, art, the dear leader’s cult of personality marches, a well-oiled propaganda
machine, books, pamphlets, and the powerful official Romanian media that
churned out tons of lies, disinformation, and manufactured history.
After the much-hated dictator Ceausescu and his wife were hurriedly
executed on Christmas 1989, the very next day a suspiciously “independent”
newspaper Adevarul (The Truth) published, for the first time for the repressed
population, the painful reality of the vicious and corrupt regime they had just
survived. People stood in lines for hours to buy the paper. After all, they
were used to standing in huge lines every day to buy food that would help their
families survive another day.
When Gen. Pacepa defected to the U.S., rumor had it that
Ceausescu had a nervous breakdown and wanted him killed immediately. He did not
want the rest of the world to find out the depth of his crimes against humanity.
Ceausescu ran a police state that Soviets would have envied.
All telephones were fitted with a “high-tech
microphone,” and people had to submit samples of handwriting in case they
decided to publish unauthorized hand-written pamphlets that would embarrass the
regime and reveal the truth. All
typewriters had to be registered with the police. Letters and packages were opened and read. Package
contents were checked; many were confiscated as contraband and used by the
loyal apparatchiks as spoils of war. Nobody bothered to reseal correspondence
or deliver mailed packages that were emptied of western goods and stolen. Informers
had to work hard to follow their marks’ every move. And yet, this type of spying
seems juvenile and pales in comparison to today’s technology that spies on us and
causes the erasure of any modicum of privacy we think we have.
While people starved and stood in lines for hours on end
each day to buy food, Ceausescu’s son, Nicu, a pathetic and worthless drunk,
broke unopened Johnny Walker Black Label bottles against the wall in his
parents’ fancy home when he got bored, laughing when broken bottles splashed
liquid on the walls, the expensive carpets, and furniture. The house maids had to
clean any evidence of his outrageous behavior.
Sadly, Pacepa remarked that, even though the evil dictator
and his wife were gone, the system that brought him to power and enabled him to
stay in power was very much alive, ready to produce another Ceausescu when
necessary. And the media was there to help.
Unfortunately, people were temporarily lulled into a false
sense of freedom, security, and peace. Giving them better living conditions and
the food they wanted for almost three decades, went a long way to quell any
dissent to the new “free” regime. Pacepa wrote then, “In the absence of any
organized opposition and democratic framework, Romania’s communist structure of
government remains essentially in place…”
That is how, overnight, the former communist handlers, in
the confusion and vacuum of uncertainty that ensued after the dictator’s
execution, became rich beyond their dreams, and made fortunes stealing money
and state property and selling it to the highest bidders before anyone woke up
to take account of the theft. It was eventually stopped but not before the massive
plunder underway became permanent.
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