Energy, the Inept Socialist Way

The sunshine and balmier weather is giving some American people a reprieve from having to use so much energy to heat their homes as prices escalate due to the draconian measures the Biden regime had adopted on his first day in office – executive orders that shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, off-shore drilling permits, and drilling on federal land.

We had been an oil exporter during the Trump presidency, but we have become an oil importer from Russia during the Biden regime. This is not a good time to become dependent on such a  bellicose country which is now helping escalate the price of gas and fuel around the world.

Poor neighbors such as Romania have found themselves having to pay 450 euros for a month’s electric bill when the country’s average salary is 350 euros. How are poor people supposed to keep warm or find affordable fuel for their cars? Is an energy crisis looming?

Eastern Europeans are no strangers to energy crises or shortages. Cold winters and the inept Communist Party central planning brought power shortages, heat, electricity, and rationing of gasoline at the pumps. Americans have not had to deal with such problems in recent memory.

Drastically cutting back on energy and banning private cars in Romania, for example, in the frigid winter of 1984-85 did little to deal with the shortage of energy supplies. Mismanagement by communist apparatchiks, who did not know how to properly run the “socialist economy” and did not really care, reduced imports of everything and increased exports of gas and oil and Romania did not have enough energy and electricity for its own citizens.

The draconian measures to save energy, a severe lack of electricity, hot water, and heat in the communist concrete and steel blocks and very cold apartments (still in use today), factories, public buildings, frigid government stores, caused so much illness and death among the population, some of whom froze to death. 

According to David Funderburk, former Ambassador to Romania during the extremely cold winter of 1984-85, one in three babies died or were born severely malformed; many babies died in neonatal units when the incubators were unplugged to save electricity.  Old and young alike died from a scarcity of food and heat.

How did so many people live in cold and drab concrete 5-9 story apartments that were poorly built, heated, and electrified? The tyrant and his communists in power wanted to create the new socialist man and a new society, built back better, so he called for the destruction of private homes. If people were forced to abandon their homes overnight and herded into such high-rise and small space apartments, the state commissar could keep a better watch and a heavy boot on their necks, thus more easily controlling the citizens’ every move. The “new socialist plan” called for seizure of their lands for “the common good” and hundreds of thousands of private homes, with more space than the communist apartment blocks, were bulldozed.

The poor villagers and former farmers became dependent on the socialist state practically overnight. They could no longer get firewood in their village for heat or cooking, they had to beg the totalitarian state for their rations of timber, supplies of rationed gas, and supplies of rationed electricity.

And the communist lackeys did not stop just at destroying people’s homes. They destroyed their village churches and city churches, some of whom had withstood hundreds of years of history and turmoil. The totalitarian socialist state recognized 14 denominations but they called them cults.  (Armenian, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Lutheran, Reformed, Islamic, Jewish, Old Rite Christian, Pentecostal Evangelical, Presbyterian Evangelical, Seventh Day Adventist, Romanian Orthodox [the largest denomination], and Unitarian).

The communist tyrant did all this because he wanted to force the “passage from the bourgeois-landlord society to the multilaterally developed socialist society.” In this process he destroyed priceless historical monuments that could no longer be replaced. Destroying history, art and architecture, he destroyed the people’s identity, memories, and connections to their shared past, good or bad.  

In a not so distant future our American children will find themselves in a similar position when their connection to the past history will be forever altered or completely severed by the hordes of woke mobs. Right now they are just changing historical names of buildings and streets, removing classical books from libraries and bookstores, and destroying statues. Eventually they will erase their shared past completely and create a deceptive one.

After the destruction of so many churches, religious persecution followed. Children and grandchildren of religious figures, active churches members, and some of those who occasionally showed up for religious services, were discriminated against and some were jailed under trumped-up charges. People were charged with “serious misconduct of the socialist ethics and of the political and moral behavior” of the new socialist man.

If young people had relatives who had hunted down communists in the early days of the Bolshevik takeover of the monarchy, they were labeled in the socialist society as pariahs and nobody would marry them or their children. Dossiers followed them for the rest of their lives.

In 1972 and 1981, as part of a “good faith” offers, the socialist tyrant allowed equal shipments of Bibles translated into Romanian. Of the promised 20,000 Bibles, around 200 were actually delivered to churches. The rest of the Bibles were poorly recycled into toilet paper made at a factory in Braila. I had some of that toilet paper in my hand one day – words from the Bible were still visible on the badly recycled paper. That is what Christianity and its Bible meant to the communists and still does today.

Small mountain villages, where the communist party had not fully inserted itself and forcibly collectivized the farmers, experienced their tyrannical handprint anyway– there was no electricity, heating oil, gasoline, running water, or medical care. Church services and people’s modest homes were lit with candles or oil lamps. Heat came from firewood when available. The sad reality was that my paternal and maternal grandparents only lived 24 miles and 6 miles respectively from the seven largest refineries in Eastern Europe at the time, yet they only got electricity sometime in the mid-seventies.

Do we really want to go this painful route of scarcity, high prices, and rationing, in the name of green energy, solar and wind, that is not enough to service a large economy and 340 million people?

Western nations like Germany have learned a hard lesson from expensive and unreliable green energy, and are quietly and slowly reverting to fossil fuels as their brown-outs and high prices have taken a heavy toll on their respective economies.