Among the
many communist trolls that inhabit Facebook, none was more aggressive than the
guy who claimed that the communist middle class was so well off that he owned
not just one car, but two.
But one
little detail was way off in his narrative - there was no middle class under
communism, just the apparatchiks at the top and the rest of the proletariat,
whether they were college degreed or not, they all made very poor wages and
pensions by any standards.
There was no
welfare in communism, no free speech, no free press, no free anything if you
did not work, education was free but rationed, you were admitted at the
university only after the children of the party members got in first, food,
water, heat, housing were rationed, there were no six-figures incomes, no living
wages, just bare survival wages.
If you were
a party informer or a paid communist activist, you received more pay, more benefits,
and perhaps you owned a car which you polished every weekend and seldom drove it
very far. It was a status symbol that you worked for the party or that you were
involved in wheeling and dealing, meaning theft from work which you traded with
other people who also stole from their work whatever goods they produced.
Survival through bribery and knowing how to survive was paramount.
Doctors and
lab techs took bribes from their patients in exchange for potential better
care. Surgeons had envelopes in their files with the patient’s name inscribed on
them and the amount they bribed him with. (My dad’s envelope was among them,
5,000 lei, while he was dying in the hospital without any care.) Pharmacists
took bribes to sell drugs missing from the shelves that were hidden behind the
counter.
Most government
or service employees took bribes in the discharge of their jobs. If you knew
someone who knew somebody else, they took bribes and you “bought” the item or
the service you were seeking.
Bribes
allow you to have a phone installed ahead of the typical wait time of
fourteen years. Bribes would allow you to buy oranges and bananas in season.
Bribes would allow you to move ahead in line while waiting for a refrigerator
or a sought-after TV.
The rest of
the population barely survived and had to spend a good portion of their everyday
standing in line with a jute shopping bag to carry the items home.
Ceausescu,
the dear leader, forced the population to stand in long lines for forty-five
years. Nobody could imagine that shopping could be done without endless lines
if you lived in a free country. One of the reasons was that the borders were
locked down so tightly that few could travel abroad.
People stood
in endless lines for bread, oil, sugar, flour, milk, butter, and other
necessities daily. Moms, dads, children, grandmas stood in line in numbing
cold, pounding the ground to stay warm in the biting temperatures, dressed in
layers like onions.
We wore
rough wool sweaters on top of pajamas, shirts, and whatever else grandmas had
knitted. The adults talked in a chatter to keep warm, always careful what they
said about the dear leader and his party. Silence and whispering were dialects
of fear of reprisal.
The social
media trolls today are either deceptive in their rants and attacks or do not
understand that the world runs on greed. Even socialists and communists run
their countries on greed and brutality which lead to frightful fear.
There is no
society or political organization of humans that does not run on greed. Nobody is
so altruistic that they will let total strangers who wish them bodily harm and
even death to come into their homes and take over everything they’ve worked
hard for or have taken from others via legal means. But the state’s brutal
force will make them acquiesce.
There is
nothing that social media trolls would not say to total strangers in their blind
and ignorant support of socialist and communist ideologies. When their
superficial knowledge is exposed or exhausted, they resort to vile ad-hominem
attacks. This is true for the entire western world.
No comments:
Post a Comment