The Propaganda Master of Communism

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A 2016 BBC documentary titled, The King of Communism – The Pomp and Pageantry of Nicolae Ceausescu, focused on Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena’s cult of personality propaganda that helped maintain his brutal Communist Party dictatorship (1965-1989) in the Socialist Republic of Romania, a tyranny that irreparably damaged the soul of a nation. Sadly, the documentary was celebrated by people who still believe in his misery right up to this day.  http://independentfilmnewsandmedia.com/the-king-of-communism-nicolae-ceausescu-bbc-history-documentary-2016-video/

Unfortunately, the old communist ideology has been repackaged for Millennials and useful idiots in shiny new wrapping paper, with colorful and expensive free bows, by self-described Socialist Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are so far to the left of the political spectrum that are in danger of falling off the Marxist cart.

I felt compelled to write because, although obvious facts were presented throughout this documentary, some of the chosen witness testimony on this film rewrites history by hiding most of life’s reality under the Communist Party boot, focusing instead on the awe and respect that those who helped Ceausescu maintain his reign of terror through intense propaganda still have for him to this day.

Watching this documentary almost two-thirds through, unless you were witness to this sad history of the Romanian people, you would think that Ceausescu and his wife were virtuous people who helped establish the Romanian people in the world Pantheon of respect and admiration.

Most of those interviewed on film were intimately involved in supporting and maintaining the communist party dictatorship with lavish propaganda and highly choreographed shows televised live or on tape. They were still great admirers to this day of the peasant and his seventh-grade dropout wife who kept 22 million people starving, disarmed, and unable to protest and defend themselves, prisoners within the borders of their own country.

The documentary focused on the highly effective propaganda and the cult of personality fed by extravagant and theatrical marches and shows that presented the Ceausescu couple as the father and mother of the country, the miracle leader who dared to buck the mighty Soviet empire and condemned the joint invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20-21, 1968  by four Warsaw Pact nations, Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland.

Never mind that the Soviets had been present in the country for a long time, advising them what to do, and training Romanian communist apparatchiks at the Soviet Communist Academy in Leningrad for years.

Each weekly extravagant show that forced workers and students to attend and glorify the dear leader cost 40 to 60 million lei, easily the salary of 100,000 people, starved and forced to live in communist-built apartments in town after their small plots of land were confiscated and collectivized by force and their homes bulldozed.

Ceausescu fashioned himself as the creator of a new Romania who needed to build the largest palace in the world, to his eternal glory. He destroyed homes in Bucharest (he condemned them because, he said, they looked like a gypsy village) that were in the path of his monstrous palace and moved the owners and renters in the country in apartments that had no sanitation or running water and residents had to use outhouses while the elderly who were not very mobile used buckets to be dumped into the outhouses daily.

An old Orthodox church was also in the way of Ceausescu’s dream. He had it moved 23 meters behind a high-rise apartment complex so that it would not be visible from his personal palace or from the street. Religion in general was frowned upon as atheism was the country’s religion.

His personal palace was designed, re-designed, built, a staircase built and torn, re-built, and nothing inside was ever imported. He built factories that made just a few parts in order to avoid importing anything from abroad where the parts would have cost peanuts by comparison. One of the largest carpets in the world was woven to decorate his monstrous hall – it was so heavy that it was impossible to unroll by hand.

The House of the People which now houses the Romanian Parliament (controlled by the largest party, the Social Democrats) is opened to the public for tours now. A cube of marble, quite ugly from the exterior, the building looks somewhat better on the inside. The Romanian people hate this building because of the heavy price they had to pay for it especially since they were never allowed inside, not even on the wide boulevards surrounding the building, avenues that went nowhere and larger than Champs Elysée.

This mammoth marble building, erected with the blood and sweat of starving and compliant Romanians, symbolizes the socialist oppression and repression that the equally miserable and poor proletariat rabble had to endure – how could 22 million people rebel successfully against such a totalitarian state ruling from this fortress?

At the time, could one of the poorest countries in Europe have afforded such a lavish structure when they lived like paupers, helpless spectators to their own downfall, actors, and “applauders” of their own demise at the hands of the Communist Party.

One of those interviewed in the BBC documentary, Gheorghe Arcudeanu (Show Director), a communist party sycophant, said, “He seemed like a good man. He enjoyed our shows. He thanked us for our work. It was a nice atmosphere for us.” Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a poet, another sycophant, describes Ceausescu as “a great statesman” who “will have his place in history.” He was right about that; he will have his place in the hall of infamy.

The spectacular theatrical shows remain on celluloid tape, but the nation who was forced to participate in them despised the Ceausescus. It was no surprise that he and his wife were summarily executed on Christmas Day 1989 after a two-day show trial.

History does not speak kindly of Ceausescu except in circles that advocate his communist party ideology. His Democrat Socialism robbed people of their pride, courage, wealth, land, freedom, and destroyed their souls, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.

Communism Left So Many Scarred Lives Behind

On Christmas 1989, twenty-five years ago, the brutal communist dictatorship of Romania ended with the execution of the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena in front of a firing squad at Tirgoviste, following a brief trial. His reign of terror lasted 24 years (1965-1989).

The first communist despot, Gheorghe Georghiu-Dej (1945-1964) was so ruthless, the citizens felt like “hunted” animals during his regime.

Almost forty-four years of brutal communism left a deep and festering wound that would be hard to heal and would scar a few generations. In 1990 the world found out about the dreadful orphanages where hundreds of thousands of “orphans” were institutionalized under the benevolent “care of the state.”

These children were abandoned by their parents out of desperation because they already had too many children to support at home and it was impossible to feed them in an economy in which everything was rationed and the grocery stores were empty. It was a choice between death by starvation or accepting the magnanimous “care of the state” who promised them gentle care, food, and education.

Other children were abandoned because they were born imperfect or became sick, and the state refused to treat them medically in the substandard hospitals and polyclinics. Rationing medical care in the utopian paradise of communism dictated that the weakest in society, the elderly and the very young, be neglected and institutionalized to a miserable existence in unimaginable hell holes.
Izidor Ruckel spent 11 years of his life in such an institution, a “Camin/Spital pentru Copii Deficienti.” His parents abandoned him there when he contracted polio at an early age and the hospital institutionalized him.

Vaccines, just like drugs and medical care, were scarce, and doses often ran out before all children were immunized.  Many villagers were too uneducated to understand the importance of vaccinating their children against polio and other childhood diseases.

After ABC’s “20/20” aired a special on the plight of these terribly neglected children, Izidor was adopted by a California family and brought to San Diego.  He describes the trepidation and excitement when the family promised to come back and get him, the dreams to come to America of the show “Dallas,” his let-down when he thought he had been stood up, and the elation when they came back for him.

In a Washington Post video, Janice Tomlin, former “20/20” producer, talks about the megalomaniac Ceausescu who controlled Romania with an iron fist. “He basically destroyed the country. He outlawed abortion, he outlawed contraception, and every woman was required to have five children. In order to have a strong country, he needed to populate the country,” she said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/entertainment/romanian-orphan-tries-to-close-the-chapter-on-his-troubled-past/2014/01/30/596f8ee0-69ce-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_video.html

While she is correct that he destroyed the country, it was not because he outlawed contraception and abortion.  He condemned 20 million people to a life of total control, from cradle to grave, when sometimes death was a relief from the pain and misery of exploitative egalitarian life for the masses, while the communist elites lived in the lap of luxury in fancy homes, took expensive vacations, shopped in their own stores, and were treated in their own hospitals by western-trained doctors.

Contraceptives were not known well or easily available in socialist/communist Romania; women used abortion as a form of contraception. If they could find contraceptives on the black market, they were expensive, and women did not take them daily.

Women were certainly encouraged by law to have children to replenish the dying population but were not dictated to have five. The more children a woman had, the more welfare she received from the communist state. Country folks in general had lots of kids in order to have enough hands tending the co-operative farms and a place to stay in the old age in the absence of nursing homes.

Sighetul Marmatiei where Izidor was born is certainly a very impoverished area, and was so particularly during the communist regime.

Tom Jarriel’s report from ABC showed the cruel treatment of children in these orphanages. People were full of outrage yet nobody in this country bats an eye knowing that more than 40 million babies were aborted in this country since Roe v. Wade – it is considered a “choice” to murder a baby in the womb.

“Izidor was not abandoned into another family, he was abandoned into a hell hole,” said Janice Tomlin.

Dr. Jane Aronson, adoption specialist, described the children, “They were emaciated, skeletal… I’ve never seen that anywhere except in Romania.” I wonder if she had equal access to orphanages in communist North Korea, Cuba, Soviet Union, or China of that time.

Watching these children, most of whom have never been touched by human hands, hugged, loved, kissed, spoken to, read to, rocking themselves endlessly with a blank stare was heartbreaking.

Dr. Charles Nelson, professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at Harvard University, explained how the adopting families in this country were not prepared to intervene in the development of their children who still remembered what had happened to them while raised in an institution that neglected them during their most important formative years.

He also explained that institutionalized children have “lower IQs, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders, anxiety, attachment problems, difficulties in interpersonal relationships,” and show on scans smaller brains and less electrical activity. “Interventions may not yield the expected outcomes” even in cases when the children were not raised in institutions but were severely mistreated early in life.

Izidor is now in his early thirties and wants to rebuild his life, to help others. He said, “Sighetul Marmatiei is always going to be my hometown. My life is awareness, speaking for those orphans who did not get out.”  

Yearning for his real identity, for his biological roots, Izidor concluded with sadness and determination in his voice, “I’ve been known more as an orphan for 22 years now, that is my identity, and I would like to close that chapter and not be known as an orphan.”

The scars left on the soul and minds of so many surviving victims of communism are hard to heal.

1989 A Bittersweet Year

I watched recently the video of a speech given by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to an adoring crowd of communist useful idiots a few days before the dictator was arrested in December 1989. Ceausescu, a megalomaniac who appointed himself the Father of the Country, was touting the slave wages he had ordered raised for his unlucky proletariat from 700 lei per month to 800 lei.

At the time, the pegged exchange rate was 12 lei to a dollar, making the proletariat’s wage of $58 per month go up to $67. What could we buy with this money? Sixty-seven dollars per month bought us subsidized teacup-sized concrete block apartments, occasional heat, some electricity, daily scheduled hot or cold water, subsidized weekly bus fares, one pair of shoes per year, one outfit, and enough food to keep us from starving to death. Most of us were underweight and malnourished, in dire need of vitamins which were impossible to find on the empty pharmacy shelves.

“To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” said Karl Marx’s popular slogan, “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen. “  Ceausescu and his wife and the communist party elites had been the deciders of our needs since March 22, 1965 until December 25, 1989.

The year 1989 was a painful, bittersweet period in my life and in the history of my people. It was a year filled with death, life, grief, anguish, freedom, physical pain, and the struggle for power.

My father passed away on May 12 in excruciating pain, denied drugs, IV nourishment, and any kind of medical treatment, a 60-pound shadow of his former self. My Dad was a sturdy and healthy 200 pound man full of life and joie de vivre.

An outspoken critic of the president, Dad was always detained at his place of employment for his views, his lack of membership in the communist party, and his not-so-secret desire to have another president replace Ceausescu in his lifetime.

Dad had just turned 61 when he was beaten one last time and languished three weeks before his death in a hospital ward, tended by his loving sister who kept him alive with teaspoons of water and broth. My Dad was one of thousands of victims, killed by communists in their quest for power and control. His honesty, his integrity, his freedom of speech, and his desire to be free sentenced him to an early demise.

Dad passed away one day before my doctoral graduation. He was so proud that his only child could accomplish something he had dreamed of – the opportunity to excel in a free country. I dedicated my degree to my Dad, to his unwavering support for my education. My mortarboard read “4 Dad” but it was little consolation for the visceral pain and inconsolable loss I felt.  

President George Bush Sr. handed me my diploma, shook my hand, and later wrote a very touching letter about my father. It was a bittersweet accomplishment. While I knew my Dad was in Heaven, smiling upon my shoulders with every ray of sunshine, I was angry that an innocent, sweet man was taken from this Earth before his time by the evil forces of communism.

Daddy had died holding a crumpled photograph of me and his two granddaughters in our finest Easter dresses. It was the only possession he was allowed to keep.

Dad’s nemesis did not live much longer. Ceausescu and his Harpy wife Elena were sentenced to death and executed on Christmas 1989, ending their 24 year reign of terror. It was the first time during the communist regime that Christmas carolers and the mid-night Christmas service were televised from the Patriarch’s Cathedral. The Orthodox Christians could finally worship freely without fear of reprisals.

Caught in the town of Tirgoviste while trying to flee by helicopter, the husband and wife team who had terrorized an entire nation for 24 years, bringing its people to their knees and to utter desperation, were now facing a military tribunal tasked with judging and sentencing them.

Refusing to answer questions based on the Constitution that he wrote, the dictator Nicolae repeated that he would only answer to the Grand National Assembly, not to the assembled military court. After a speedy, improvised, and bizarre trial that lasted one hour, during which the couple refused to cooperate, did not answer most questions, or gave canned propaganda answers, they were sentenced to death and their wealth confiscated.

The mercenaries Ceausescu had hired shot and killed, by some estimates, thousands of innocent Romanians who had gathered to protest peacefully the oppressive communist regime at the palace in Bucharest. The secret police executed many innocents in surprise raids, including hospitals. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19891222&id=eEgaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1iQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4888,6167293

The Romanian Army finally had had enough and joined civilians to fight against the communist tyranny.

“Why did you starve the people to death?” “I will not answer that question,” the deposed President said.

How can you make two narcissists, blinded by communist ideology, by absolute power and control, who made themselves wealthy beyond anybody’s imagination at the expense of the misery of the proletariat they so pretended to care about, understand the crimes they’ve committed against the Romanian people? As the prosecution said, it was “genocide through famine, lack of heat, lack of light, but the worst crime of all, the crime of imprisoning the Romanian spirit.”

I wished my Dad had lived to witness the joy the Romanian people experienced when the dictator was finally executed. Watching a soldier tie the wrists of the humiliated couple with plain rope and their outrage and claim that he cannot do that to “the Mother and Father of the Country” was vindication for the many times my Dad had suffered indignities, beatings, and arrests for his political views.

One individual commented that the Romanian people should have been allowed to be part of the trial and of the final punishment in the streets. But everyone was eager to get rid of the scourge of communism and of those who forced such dehumanizing ideology on an entire nation.

 The fight for power ensued; the communists changed their stripes, became wealthier, joined the EU, while their overt leaders went underground. Communists resurfaced with a vengeance in recent years, aided by European Fabian socialists and communists flush with money.