Vindolanda

An interesting example of democracy is found in the Roman Middle Republic when soldiers elected their own Centurions. It was quite common to see a 22-year-old Centurion serving on his second or third campaign. Who were the Centurions? Like the soldiers they commanded, Centurions were part-time militiamen. We know about this election from Polybius who described the process.

An interesting example of nepotism and friends in high places comes from Roman times. 

The Vindolanda tablets discovered south of Hadrian’s wall provide an insight into life on the Roman frontier in Britannia.

The posting for a soldier in this particular garrison was difficult.

Tablet number 891 which was discovered in 2017 refers to the earliest period in the fort’s occupation between 85 and 92 A.D.

The tablets survived because they were thrown away into the fort’s ditch, among many discarded military pieces that are now archaeological treasures.

In this letter, the writer asks for lighter military duties for a friend named Crispus. The writer uses flattery to appeal to the officer Verecundus’ “justice and kindness.”

Another interesting find among the tablets of Vindolanda is a diploma from Cheshire issued in the reign of Trajan to a Spanish DECURION by which he is granted Roman citizenship and the right of legal marriage with a present or future wife.

A DECURION was the leader of 10 Roman cavalry legionnaires.

When the Cows Come Home

This idiomatic expression in English refers humorously to an argument without a conclusion, something that will last not just an extended period but potentially forever.

The same phrase has a concrete meaning in Romanian and brings to mind a childhood experience from long ago and a shepherd named Nae whom everyone called Nea Nae, a form of respect, like an uncle.

Nea Nae was the village drunk in my maternal grandparents’ village. He was also the cows’ shepherd. The village had about 10,000 inhabitants with a population density of 215 people per square kilometer. Homes were clustered close to each other with enough yards for an outhouse and a garden.

The village, now called a ‘commune’ (interesting choice of words), was surrounded by pastures and co-operative plots of land, owned by the Communist Party government, and a few individual parcels on which villagers planted crops and shared the harvest with the state (not willingly).

Most homes had a milking cow, chicken, rabbits, ducks, and a pig, with a menagerie of outdoor cats to keep rodents under control. And this is where Nea Nae came into play. The villagers hired him to take care of the cows, sort of.

Every morning, Nea Nae followed the large herd of cows coming out one by one from each yard to the grazing pasture outside of the village, rotating the pastures in various ends to keep the grass growing. Before the sun set, he followed them back to the village, and one by one, the cows entered their respective yards, knowing exactly where their homes were. So much for the bad publicity that cows are dumb. They were smart enough to follow Nea Nae’s directions to the pastures and back home to the right yard. Each home was separated for privacy by tall wood fences, but the gates were opened by the owners, and the cows miraculously knew which yard was theirs.

‘When the cows came home’ was a real spectacle to watch. Sitting on my bench perch facing the unpaved road, I witnessed the cows return home from my grandparents “ulita” (road) many evenings. The cows never fell in the deep ditches dug up for irrigation and rain drainage on the side of the road. They slowly moved on to their destinations. The cow patties left behind were like land mines to avoid at all costs when we played.

Nea Nae, a kind and gentle soul with a well-tanned and ruddy complexion, was already tipsy by then. He went home to eat and then to the “circiuma” in the middle of the village to finish off drinking with his friends. They drowned their sorrows with him daily.

The villagers drank the cheap alcohol religiously provided by the state to keep the masses compliant and working menial and difficult jobs for subsistence level pay.

Nea Nae used to say that he was never going to die in his own bed because he was seldom in it. He slept on the floor partly under the bed most of the time, after he fell off from the very narrow twin bed he owned.

He used to be married in his younger years, but his wife had left him on account of his alcoholism. They passed each other in the village like strangers who only say hello. His only child, a daughter, checked on him from time to time. But the village did a much better job of keeping up with Nea Nae because he was their cows’ caretaker and cows were important for survival.

On the few times when he ran out of money and was temporarily sober, I listened in awe to the petite Nea Nae spinning tales to his neighbors who listened to him mesmerized as well even though they knew none of them actually happened. He was such a gifted storyteller who had missed his calling. The sad thing was that he could not read. 

Under Nea Nae's watch, the cows always came home to their barns.  

Globalism Is The New Communism

I spent my first twenty years of life in my parents’ apartment. They had a hard time being approved for this apartment because they were not communist party members and the waiting list for the unprivileged proletariat was quite long. Communists, their paid informers, and activists had first dibs.

The tiny cubicle of reinforced concrete was divided into five spaces: bath, kitchen, living room, one-bedroom, small pantry, and one hallway. The entire place was about 650 square feet of space barely big enough for one person, about the size of an average hotel room today.

The bathroom was equipped with a small tub, a sink, a commode with a pull chain from the ceiling water tank, and a tiny window with exterior slats of concrete, and a lovely view of the world through prison-like bars. They were so heavy that, when we had a strong earthquake in 1977, one of the concrete bars broke and was dangling from the reinforced wires like a loose tooth. Last time I visited in 2015, the bar was still there, dangling loose.

The police state we lived under charged the “classless” society lower prices than the true cost to keep the proletariat happy and especially the country folks whose farms and modest homes were confiscated by the forced party cooperatives.

If some renters were behind their water, electric, rent, and gas bills, the total was divided by the number of apartments and everyone paid equal shares. The rest also paid for those who were behind. Eventually they were made to pay it back from their paychecks. Nobody was on welfare. No matter how much electricity, gas, or water each apartment consumed, the total was calculated and equally divided for each apartment.

You had to work if you wanted to eat. The food was of low quality, sold in endless lines, and with rationing coupons. Each family was only allowed so much meat, sugar, flour, butter, cooking oil, and rice per month.

My mom and dad’s apartment was an improvement from living in the same tiny apartment with another family of four who stole our food. Prior to that, mom and dad rented a bedroom from an old lady who lived at the edge of town, so far out that the party had not decided to demolish her little place yet in their haste for modernization.

Dad hated the communists and was not shy about making his feelings and thoughts known about all the parasitical propagandists employed in each factory by the dozen. They also hated my dad with so much passion and often hired goons to beat him up to silence him. One such beating caused him massive health issues and he died paralyzed, helpless, and untreated in one of Ceausescu’s horrible “free“ hospitals. He died on May 13, 1989, a few months short of seeing the demise of his foe, Ceausescu, on Christmas 1989.

My Dad worked hard every day for 43 years in one refinery after another since he was eighteen and left his home in the beautiful hills of Valea Dulce (Sweet Valley), leaving behind eight brothers and sisters, who were raised primarily by my grandmother, after my grandpa passed away at a young age. He now rests on the hill overlooking the green valley below, gently swept by the changing winds.

I spent many summers with my grandma and my cousins, playing by the nearby river and valley when they tended their sheep. The village was too hilly for co-operative farms to exist, so the communists left it alone. People raised grapes and fruit trees on the slopes with rich soil.

As early as I can remember, dad cursed Ceausescu out loud and hoped vociferously to see him dead someday.  Sadly, my dad died seven months before the dictator and his wife were executed after a brief kangaroo trial. 

I had hoped that the revolutionary front would give the Ceausescu dictator and his wife a fair trial but, since his ousting was a coup, not really a revolution as it was presented in the media, the coup organizers were eager to get rid of him so that nobody would find out the truth about the so-called “revolution.”

The young protesters present in huge crowds all over the city were shot as collateral damage by the Securitate men and their mercenaries. Curiously, the TASS agency, the Soviet news outlet, were present in the town of Timisoara, two days before the so-called “revolution” began there.

Dad would have been so disgusted when, on the first free election after 45 years of Ceausescu’s reign of communist terror, 83 percent of the population voted again for a communist government ruled by Iliescu, Ceausescu’s good friend and confidant who participated in the coup d’etat. Three months of revolution and freedom was not enough to erase 45 years of communist dependence.

Allegedly, more than 10,000 innocent civilians who came out to protest Ceausescu’s regime were killed by Army and Securitate agents who, although had been collaborating since 1984 to depose Ceausescu, opened fire on demonstrators in Timisoara and Bucharest while claiming that the sharp shooters were foreign mercenaries.

Thirty-six years since the “revolution,” the neo-communists are still in power today with each new parliamentary government that comes and goes. The children and grandchildren of the “revolutionaries” are communists themselves, thanks to the socialist indoctrination in schools. And the old people are nostalgic about the crumbs that Ceausescu gave them once a month to keep them in line. Dad would have been so disappointed that people were so easily indoctrinated and bought!

And then things got worse. It took only 36 years since the “fall” of communism in Europe for the leftist activists to repackage communism as globalism with money from the many NGOs funded by George Soros.

American leftists got busy immediately destroying the capitalism that made them well-off economically and replacing it with socialism, the steppingstone to communism. They gave it a new name, Globalism, and they called themselves Democrat Socialists.

The march to global communism continues in the west with not much opposition from people who love their countries. They think that it will never happen to them.

 

Noblesse Oblige and Virtue Signaling

For twenty-nine years I took students to Europe on spring break to experience the rich history and culture. I certainly could not have afforded the trips had it not been for the generous program that allowed the leader to travel free as long as six students accompanied her.

The bus driver on a trip to Italy pointed out that there are buses of American students on spring break in many places in western Europe. “They are rich kids when compared to European kids. Do you see any buses full of European students on spring break across America,” he asked. He was right. There were none.

The only mass encounter with American landscape and culture took place this summer during FIFA World Cup. Every European soccer fan asked gushed about America, they were pleasantly surprised because their mainstream media always trashed America and the noisy Americans as if there was nothing good about our beautiful U.S.A.

There are some Americans who visit Europe upon graduating from high school. They are white rich liberals/progressives who go backpacking to Europe to find themselves, staying in hostels to pretend that they are poor, wearing torn jeans and shoes with holes in them to show their fake allegiance to the poor. I have never seen white, rich Europeans backpacking through America and staying in hostels here.

We are lectured by the white progressive rich in America who promote socialism with their wealth platforms of privilege, and virtue-signal their goodness in so many offensive ways.

They spew the communist ideology because the American education system told them that socialism, the steppingstone to communism, done the right way in America, would succeed this time even though it failed everywhere else it had been tried. Millions of its victims cannot speak for themselves anymore and those who survived are ignored.

One bragged about her rich family who helped her buy her first home in a very affluent and expensive real estate market just like her parents’ home which was bought by their parents. She held the keys beaming with unearned pride and began to lecture about the inequality and “institutionalized discrimination and the racial wealth gap” in our country between the haves like her and the have-nots like the rest.

She continued her rant of privilege while acknowledging her “wins in the system, a system that works for me, but we must make it more just.” She conveniently forgot to mention how she was going to make the “system” work for all and she made no pledge to donate her “unjust privilege” to the unprivileged or underprivileged.

A French expression, noblesse oblige, meant once that nobility obliges a person of high nobility to perform social responsibilities. However, rich Americans are not nobility, they promote socialism and communism while trashing the very capitalist society that bought them wealth, and their constant virtue signaling is not a form of noblesse oblige. It is just a form of social media narcissism, a “look at me, I am such a good person because I say so.” It is self-absorbed content with the goal of getting likes and admiration from total strangers. Narcissists suffer from a personality trait characterized by vanity, grandiosity, low empathy, and the sole desire for admiration. Virtue signaling is all about one’s grandiose ego.

 

 

 

                                                                                   

Jean Raspail's Imaginary End of Europe

There are many instances when reality imitates art and others when art imitates reality. Such is the case of the French writer Jean Raspail’s book, The Camp of the Saints, which was not received well by the mainstream media of the 1970s nor is it received well by the current mainstream media which decided to ignore its existence, ban it, or classify it as a fringe creation of a conspiracy author. Most recently, Amazon erased the sale of Raspail’s book from its platform.

Raspail was considered a racist and xenophobe and his book a creation for the fringe “white supremacist circles.” The media screed trashed it non-stop even though the book received France’s most important literary awards.

Editions Robert Laffont, the publishing house that owns the original rights to this book, has authorized its most recent translation.

Why in the world would the mass media and globalist controllers deem Raspail’s book a racist malignancy and everyone who reads it a racist? For the simple reason that his fictional book accurately predicted mass migration and its destruction of western civilization.

Jean Raspail’s imaginary characters, hordes of Indian invaders, are not so imaginary in twenty-first century Europe. Raspail wrote his book, The Camp of the Saints, in 1973, half a century before the current mass invasion of Europe and North America began.

Raspail, unlike Orwell and Huxley, does not present the outcomes of a dystopian society but the dystopia as it unfolds step by step as the result of “modern spiritual self-hatred” of western civilization, in this case in France.

The “nihilism of guilt” forces logic-minded scholars to bend over backwards to avoid the left’s reproaches by turning on their friends and joining the ranks of the left in condemning Raspail’s book.

Raspail (1925-2020) loved to travel and often mourned the disappearance of indigenous tribes. He judged New York a “desert” because “we no longer run into an Algonquin.” His two favorite themes across his 40 books and a dozen novels are ‘literary royalism’ and ‘love for places and peoples distant in time and space.’

Raspail’s offense, as perceived by literary critics and the western media, was that he dared to write about the fate of the indigenous people of Europe and whether their fate would be like the peoples who had vanished because of European colonization. He imagined the “end of European and Western civilization” when France is invaded by a horde of immigrants from India.

The media sees his third book, The Camp of the Saints, not as a literary reflection of the death of the West, direct result of the massive immigrant invasion, but as a racist and xenophobic expression of his imagination.

He describes the “myth of the noble savages” who are vulgar in their “crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellant hygiene.” The migrants are “materially and culturally destitute” and are looking for a better life, primarily an immediate “deliverance from poverty and from the often-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western societies.”

The French government becomes paralyzed as they have no idea what to do with this army of immigrants. Civil society collapses thanks to the do-gooders who withdraw from public life in the face of the invasion. The immigrants’ lives are not improved at all, so they install their own dictator-generals and Brahmins in the French government, imposing the very same society they had fled.

The invaders take over civic functions and French society. Academia describes “mass immigration as morally required and inevitable,” thus eventually causing the death of France and of Europe.

Raspail satirizes the “left-liberal Catholicism” which sees Christ in the invading migrants. Vatican sells its treasures to win the approval of the Third World while turning their backs on their own flock.

The intellectuals, who prepare the way for the immigrants to land safely, are assassinated by the army of migrants after the French army deserts. “The left-wing militias who welcome the migrants are killed or become servants, peasants, and prostitutes.”

The Camp of the Saints brings to life the leftist view that “The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to humanity.” The West must submit to the morally superior non-Western “Other.” And the “Others” turn to violence, destruction, and murder of the welcoming locals and of those who objected to their landing on Europe’s shores.

 

1938 Steyr 220 Glaeser Cabriolet's Interesting History

This is a 1938 Steyr 220 Glaeser Cabriolet Austrian luxury automobile which cost 7,850 Reichsmarks ($3,160 in 1938 dollars). 

The Auschwitz camp Commandant owned one and it was stolen by three Polish political prisoners and a Ukrainian mechanic who also stole 4 German uniforms from the concentration camp's laundry and managed to fool the German gate guards and escaped, never to be captured. 

This is one car of two still in existence at the Lane Auto Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

Social Media Trolls

If schools have not indoctrinated your children into communism, don’t worry, there are social media trolls who have no knowledge of the topic, but they speak loudly enough (in caps or in podcasts) and with derision.

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.