What I learned from the Communist Party

What I learned from the Communist Party which ruled my country with an iron fist and a heavy boot on our necks and thin, hungry bodies, can fill a lifetime of horror stories. Twenty years living under such depressing ideological, mental, and physical prison surrounded by barbed wire and heavily armed and guarded borders is enough to fill endless books.

But will Americans listen or read about our collective and individual experiences? Apparently not, as they are marching full-steam ahead into communism and, by the time they wake-up from their ignorant stupor, it will be too late – there will be nobody left to caution them and they themselves will not remember what it was like to live free and make personal choices in life without government interference and forced mandates. So they will comply out of fear and cowardice.

The U.S. Constitution is already just a museum piece that the government is ignoring openly and deriding on a daily basis in their kangaroo courts. Law and order only exists for the benefit of Congress and the corporate oligarchy in control of 330 plus million people. Medical tyranny walks in lock step with government tyranny at all levels.

What did I learn from the Communist Party?

If I wanted to eat, I had to keep my mouth shut and get up early every day to stand in endless lines in order to buy enough food for the day if I was lucky and had enough coupons left on the rationing card.

If I wanted to enter a church, I had to wait until someone got married, got baptized, or died. Church was another arm of the Communist Party’s indoctrination machine.

If I wanted my parents to remain free and not be disappeared, I had to keep my mouth shut around everybody, including the closest relatives who could turn us in for a loaf of bread.

If I wanted to go on vacation, I was not allowed to because my parents were too poor to afford a train ticket or a hotel. They were receiving the Communist Party-decided equity pay young Americans and Democrat Socialists are clamoring for and demanding in this country.

If I wanted to go to summer camp, I had to join the youth communist brigades first and be subjected to more indoctrination before I was deemed re-educated in the communist ideological “think” and “speak.” But my parents had to be Communist Party members as well.

The Communist Party membership had to have the right pedigree – the more uneducated and stupid, the better. They could be brainwashed easier and bought off with an extra loaf of bread or a pound of meat weekly. And the neo-communists of today are still buying off the stupid and the useful idiots. There is never a shortage of them.

If I wanted to go to the movies, it had to be in an approved group of other students and the tickets were sold as a group ahead of time. Only party members could individually go to the opera, ballet, or theater. Their tickets were practically free.

I learned at an early age that individuality, creativity, speaking out, asking questions, and free thinking were unapproved and dangerous.

If I wanted to go inside a restaurant or hotel in my hometown, I was told no. I could only watch the sumptuous and luxurious inside from the street through the well-lit windows. It was dark at home as electricity was cut off and turned on only a few hours a day in order to allow us to do housework and school homework.  

Cooking was done with a gas stove and even that was cut off every day. Bathing was once a week with hot water that only came on for two hours. We had to schedule baths or showers around that time.

If I was cold, I had to wear many layers of clothes as heat was a rare commodity in our homes. The higher up you lived in the concrete and tiny high-rise apartments, the less steam circulated through the heater coils.

I learned to disregard the propaganda lies of equity, equality, and abundance we were fed in class by day-dreaming and imagining that I was traveling to and living in a beautiful country with plenty of food, no heavy armed police everywhere, beautiful colored clothes, plenty of doctors, medicine, clean hospitals without rust and blood oozing from the walls and dirty floors, fully stocked stores, and no bread lines. I was smart enough to see the bleak reality outside, totally opposite from the communist dogma fed to us by elites who lived in comfort and confiscated wealth from the masses.

I learned to cherish loneliness and nature in my grandparents’ village. The simple and hard life in the country was so much more exciting than the urban imprisonment and desolate life.

I learned to seek refuge in books from the local library. So many good leather-bound tomes had escaped the strict censorship of the Communist Party indoctrinating goons who never read anything except the communist ideology pamphlets and Karl Marx’s dangerous ideas.

I learned to enjoy small things in life and to cherish immediate family – we never knew when we would see them for the last time before they were disappeared for their thoughts of freedom and for their dissenting opinions.

I learned that aunts, uncles, and friends who worked hard and saved and acquired too much property beyond what the Communist Party deemed necessary, were sent to hard labor camps. Some survived, some did not. They built the roads, the bridges, and other public works while in captivity, existing on meager rations each day. If they survived their sentence, they emerged like walking skeletons, their physical health and minds scarred for life.

I learned that one childhood friend’s father was a communist apparatchik which explained why they always had food, her mom always cooked desserts, and they wore nice clothes, not the faded and old ones we wore. Their daughter threw away all the communist propaganda in her father’s possession when he passed away. She is definitely anti-communist now but it is a bittersweet “conversion” as the world is turning into a globalist tyranny of the communist oligarchical elites.

I learned so much from my experience and life under the Communist Party boot that I am devastated at the communist turn my adopted country is taking now and so rapidly. The land of the free because of the brave is fast becoming a communist tyranny of the government, the corporate oligarchy supporting it, and the medical professionals who swore to do no harm and are doing harm daily with no remorse.

And the people comply silently.

 

 

 

A Dark Day When America Transforms into Marx’s Vision

Karl Heinrich Marx, a notoriously lazy German who existed with his family as a welfare case of his rich friends, might be surprised that his academic thoughts and ideas shook the 20^th century to its core and enslaved millions of people across the world, creating monstrous regimes that killed 100 million of their own citizens for their dissension and unwillingness to accept a proletarian society that dispossessed humans of their own property, land, and freedoms, and turned them into serfs to the omnipotent socialist state imposed and run by the Communist Party.

Marx might be even more surprised that such a failed societal and economic model would be resurrected in the 21^st century in the least likely society to accept Marx’s ideas, the United States, the beacon of freedom for the rest of the world.

Marx’s 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, has been resuscitated today by brainwashed American generations who want socialism but have no understanding of what it entails. They hear the word “free” everything and that is enough for them to support such an oppressive form of society and disastrous economic model.

Marx’s pamphlet was written as a critique against capitalism even though he and his family shamelessly lived off his benefactors’ capitalist income. His outrage against the exploitation of capitalism as he saw it, is reminiscent of the youth of today who protest capitalism in the streets and want it replaced with socialism, while holding electronic products and living a lifestyle produced by an abundant capitalist economy.

Marx divided society into the ruling class and the working class, describing the proletariat as an exploited and oppressed segment of society by the ruling class. The working class is forced to sell their labor to exist and survive. It would be hard for the proletariat to find rich supporters like Marx had. He did not work a productive day in his life but lived off the generosity of his friends, instead of honestly providing for his wife and numerous children.

Marx talked about “eternal truths such as Freedom and Justice,” hence the cries of today’s youth for Social Justice, concepts they barely understand or can explain. 

Marx wrote that communism would abolish these eternal truths found in all states of society, “it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” (p. 92, The Communist Manifesto)

The evil “bourgeoisie” that owned the capital will be dispossessed by its “political supremacy” in order that all instruments of production will be centralized in the hands of the state and the proletariat will be organized as the ruling class. At that time, the total productive forces will be increased as quickly as possible.  (p. 93, The Communist Manifesto)

As the old social order is being destroyed and class distinctions disappeared, old conditions of production replaced with new ones, and utopian “association” will emerge with “free development” of all.

What were the ten tenets of Marx’s Communist Manifesto?

1.       “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”

When the Bolsheviks marched in with the Soviet Army into Romania, the society at large strongly opposed their idea of giving up land and private property to the state for the “public good.” Romania had a thriving economy under the monarchy and people were making an honest living on their own farms, small factories, small businesses. Using coercion, torture, and murder, the Bolsheviks wrested farms, houses, factories, hotels, private buildings, and stores from their rightful owners and turned everything over to the state which was now run by the Communist Party made up of a small group of revolutionaries. As they gained more power, they used this newly acquired state property as their fiefdom and awarded and rewarded their apparatchiks with other people’s homes and wealth. In typical fashion, socialists steal by decrees until they run out of other people’s wealth, money, and property.

2.       “A heavy progressive and graduated income tax.”

The masses are taxed until there is nothing left to tax and people have a bare minimum to exist on.

3.       “Abolition of all right of inheritance.”

Nothing is yours; it belongs to the state. My grandparents lost everything to the first round of Communist Party confiscation: land, the farm, farm implements, gold coins, family jewelry, savings, and any cash on hand or personal possessions in the home, including a mantel clock. When they died, the home they had lived in became the property of the state, the six children could not dispose of it as they wished.

4.       “Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.”

When I emigrated legally to the U.S., everything I owned was confiscated and I was only allowed to leave with two suitcases of clothes and memorabilia.

When my father (a staunch anti-communist) died, all his savings and possessions, including my books, were confiscated by the state. When my mom defected to the U.S., all her savings and possessions were confiscated by the socialist state as well. To add insult to injury, my parents, who worked since they were 18 years old, 43 years for my dad and 30 years for my mom, never received their pensions, it was also confiscated by the state. To this day, the state has made no effort to redress the situation to my mom. And it was not for lack of trying. I have even asked the prime minister in person.

5.       “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.”

People living in socialist societies had to save their money to purchase anything of value. Credit was seldom given by the only bank and the interest rates were confiscatory, as much as 50% in some cases to discourage borrowing. People would borrow from family members and return the money over time with an agreed upon but much lower interest rate.

6.       “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.”

State’s priorities involved the improvement of the lives of those in control, the communist oligarchs, who had amassed vast wealth confiscated from the population. Communication was state owned and controlled and so was transportation. We could travel by rickety busses or trains; few people owned cars as they were prohibitively expensive and the driving test quite difficult to pass.

Few owned telephones, it took 14 years to install a phone line from the time a petition was filed, and phones were tapped all the time. Letters were always opened and read by the state. There were few newspapers and a couple of magazines, all content controlled by the state. Rural residents used the party newspaper for toilet paper as it was always difficult to find, even though the country had vast forests. Nothing was published without the approval of the Communist Party and its censors. In America today we have censorship by a handful of tech giants, something nobody had envisioned in the country where freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Constitution. But then we had a Constitution under the socialist regime too, but the overlords thumbed their noses at it and kept changing it to suit their rhetoric.

7.       “Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.”

The infamous Five-Year Plans issued by the Communist Party was seldom fulfilled because it was irrational and unreasonable, not based on sound economics. The Party concentrated on developing the country through heavy industrial investments and projects at the expense of the proletariat’s living standards who were pathetic when compared to other countries.

8.       “Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”

Every able-bodied adult had a job with minimum pay established by the state, nobody was idle and on welfare unless they were sick or giving birth. People of all ages, including school children, were forced to do volunteer labor in agriculture, planting or harvesting crops, cleaning streets, and planting grass and flowers.

9.       “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.”

Farmers, whose land had been confiscated, had to commute to nearby cities to find employment in factories, and their wives and children tended to a small garden by their homes to eat. Some young but mostly old men and women were left behind to farm the state’s co-operatives.

Farmers were crowded in homes next to each other in their tightly packed villages or were forcefully moved into concrete bloc apartments in the city so that state-owned co-operative farms could be established with their joined lands.

10.   “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.”

When I emigrated to the U.S., I had to reimburse the omnipotent state for the education I had received up to that point even though we were supposed to receive a free education, including college. But nothing was free unless it benefited the mighty state.

As children we had to labor in the state’s fields to dig up potatoes, onions, pick grapes, pears, apples, and plums. It was volunteer work, and we were taken out of school two weeks in the fall and a few weeks in the spring.

The retread Socialist Democrats of America today claim that they “own the future.” The question remains, how dark is this future going to be and how long are the other Americans going to accept this evil darkness?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Radical Democrat Socialism American Style

When the radical socialists in Congress and in the streets of America started giving more and more rhetorical and chanting time to Democratic Socialism, half of America were enchanted, and half of America laughed. Such a construct aimed at re-defining socialism the American way was not to be taken seriously but it was. Young Millennials, egged on by seasoned members of the Communist Party USA, were going to build a better America, a Democrat Socialist America, free of capitalism.

Their explanation was that all the former Communist Party tyrants who obliterated over 100 million of their own people and enslaved the rest for most of the twentieth century were bumbling idiots. These American socialist wannabes who did not understand economics, politics, or knew geography at all, were going to do it better and thus succeed.

Now the Democrat Socialist whippersnappers have the chance to build their American-style socialist “paradise” with the newly “elected” duo Biden/Harris. Eighty million Americans genuinely believed that an octogenarian with severe health issues and a 47-year lackluster career in Washington would be the best president for the United States. As Newsweek magazine wrote on its cover on February 16, 2009, “We are all socialists now.”

If you ask most of the resident supporters of socialism, what is democratic socialism, you will get just as many confused looks, lame attempts at definitions, and the lack of understanding of what they support. They want a “socially owned economy,” a “workers’ self-management within a market socialist economy,” and a “decentralized planned socialist economy.” But they have no idea what it means.

Millennials do not understand how a capitalist economy functions, what is the role of capital and profit in the development of a free market economy. They are also highly ignorant of what drove into the ground the mis-managed centralized economies of all the socialist countries of the twentieth century. They could research the economy of Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and China today but that is too much to ask of such brainwashed generations.

Even though the Communist Party through the Bolshevik activists promised worker self-management and a socially-owned economy, the proletariat was not allowed to manage themselves and received nothing except a meager pay, hard times, starvation, misery, long food lines, shortages of everything, endless rationing, labor exploitation by communist unions called syndicates, and gulags funded by the Communist Party that lorded over them with an iron fist via its Central Committee, the security police, and its highly centralized five-year planning of their devastating economies.

Had these American radical Marxist activists known a smidgen of history, they would have realized that the democratic socialism repackaged lies presented to them in the 21^st century are repeats of those told a century ago by Bolsheviks dispatched around the globe by a well-funded cadre of communists on the payroll of bankers from the U.K. and America.

American students are now scholarly weak, ignorant, and thoroughly indoctrinated. They do not understand that security and prosperity cannot be legislated. You cannot make people equal by force of law, nor can you change their biology. You cannot steal from some and give to others in the name of social and economic justice.

You cannot legislate equal opportunity and equal outcomes. You cannot legislate inequality out of existence. Humans have been unequal since the beginning of time. Wealth and income disparity exist in the socialist economies centralized by the Communist Party and tech oligarchs.

Putting mom and pop stores and restaurants out of business creates more exploitation by large corporations that will function as oligarchies ruled by a centralized political committee of Democrat technocrats and billionaires.

Destroying the middle class is the dream of the Communist Party USA. The middle class is what made America successful and allowed a myriad of opportunities for all Americans to better themselves economically.

Millennials should listen to and learn from those who escaped from the prison of the workers’ socialist “paradise.” We lived under “Democratic Socialism.” It was neither democratic nor did it care about the poor masses. On the contrary, the rulers stole all the wealth and property and put everyone in prison who was considered “bourgeois.” And you were part of the imagined “bourgeoisie” if you owned a home or some land.

Under socialism ruled by the Communist Party, everyone was equally poor, miserable, and exploited with paltry wages, and no opportunity for education and progress. The poor people, that is the proletariat, had no opportunity for the constitutionally guaranteed self-governance; if they tried to demand anything they were promised, they were summarily dispatched to a gulag from which they never returned or worse yet, shot in front of their families to teach them a lesson they will never forget.

Democrat Socialists focus on redistribution of wealth by confiscating from those who worked to build wealth and giving it to those they see as having been exploited for the choices they made in life. D. Hamilton wrote that a “social democratic or democratic socialist America” must protect minorities from “predatory private employers” who focus on profit and “exploit people and the planet.”

To redress this exploitation, he proposes a federal job guarantee, a child trust, and reparations in a race-specific program. It is a welfare, wealth-redistribution scheme which, in his view would address the racial and economic injustice in this country.

To support his federal job guarantee (full employment) idea, Hamilton uses India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as an example of promotion of full employment and alleviation of poverty.

Looking at India’s exodus of labor to America’s high-tech jobs and our hiring of Indians (outsourcing) to do jobs that Americans used to do, highly skilled and educated Americans who are now unemployed because of it, it is easy to see that a job guarantee does not alleviate poverty.

Under the socialism I grew up in, everybody had a job, but it was not worth much economically and it only paid survival wages, way less than minimum wage in America. My people were what Roosevelt called “necessitous men” who were not “free men.” Again, security and prosperity cannot be forced and legislated by politicians, bureaucrats, and philosophers.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. There is no other force, there is no other party, there is no other real ideology . . . that is asserting the minimum elements necessary to lead a dignified American life.”

Asking those who fled the socialist paradise she advocates, at great cost to them and their families, the stories are quite similar.  Living under socialism was starvation, no human dignity, a huge loss of personal freedoms, abject poverty, hunger, lack of necessities, lack of proper medical care, lack of medicines, severe oppression, loss of individuality for the good of the collective, justice for the Communist Party rulers only, and loss of private property and land.

Millennials should listen to those who escaped the socialist “paradise” Ocasio-Cortez promotes from her congressional platform.  Millennials should ignore the political rhetoric coming from highly unenlightened politicians with an agenda.

 

America Stands in the Way of Global Governance

Whether we have global green religion or a socialist one world government, or a communist global governance, the end result will be the same – the foundation that guides globalists will be vastly different from the foundation that guides America, the U.S. Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence states that “… All men are created equal … endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights … to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness …”

But globalists think differently, freedoms and rights are granted by politicians.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2, states that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration.”

According to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution we have freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. At least we did until the all-powerful tech giants decided to censor conservatives on all their social media platforms.

Globalists, on the other hand, wrote in the U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Right, Article 19, “Freedom of expression may be restricted as approved by law.”

Our Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that “Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation.” Eminent domain abuses such powers under the guise of development for the public good. Private property is indispensable to a free market capitalist economy.

Globalists see private property as the source of evil and must be prohibited. The U.N. Conference on Human Settlements of 1976 states that “Private ownership of land contributes to social injustice; public control of land use is indispensable.” Land use and property rights are also addressed in U.N. Agenda 21/2030.

Communist dictators from socialist countries have confiscated their citizens’ private property in order to make everything equal, equally miserable and poor. They nationalized factories, confiscated land, wealth, and homes. They vilified people who owned property as the “bourgeoisie,” fomenting hatred among those who did not own property.

Mao, Castro, Ceausescu, Stalin, and other socialist/communist dictators destroyed the middle class because it owned property – land and real estate. In some countries farmers and urban property owners were executed to frighten the rest into submission, and others were sentenced to hard labor in gulags, building roads and railroads, and excavating ore in mines in order to pay for their sins of bourgeois ownership.

For the longest time, the American government “derived its power from the consent of the governed.” Lately huge changes have taken place and the government bureaucracy at all levels, local, state, and federal, along with Congress have taken dictatorial powers without the consent of the governed under the guise of doing what is good for the “collective.”

Collective, of course, is a communist code word for we tell you what to do and you obey. That is exactly what global governance believes, that “the governed derive their freedoms from the consent of the government."  

To prove the veracity of such a statement, watch what the local, state, and federal government are forcing us to do, locking down healthy people, forcing healthy citizens to wear face masks indefinitely, throwing them in jail for non-compliance, fining them, refusing them entry to grocery stores, malls, and medical clinics, and destroying small business and the economy for a minute percentage of casualties from a virus deemed a “pandemic,” forbidding doctors to prescribe potentially healing drugs that have been in use for 65 years, and pharmacists to dispense them under the threat of losing their medical and pharma license, firing doctors who actually cured many patients with drugs the government disapprove of, while censoring scientific data because it does not agree with the government narrative. This has never before happened in America on such a huge scale.

As the late Henry Lamb said in 2010, “In developed nations, the war against freedom means removing from individuals the freedom to do and say whatever they wish in the pursuit of their own happiness, and the freedom to choose the people who have the authority to make laws.  This war is waged with the counterfeit threat of cataclysmic global warming which requires global coordinated action. It is waged with trade agreements, treaties, and propaganda. It is wage with guilt-laden finger-pointing at America’s prosperity as the reason the rest of the world is in poverty.”

The war against our freedom is waged by the United Nations, its myriad of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and global communists with large endowments and billions to burn for their cause, paying and using useful idiots within each country to create havoc and betray their own history and Constitution under the guise of fighting fascism and desiring to install socialism.

And they claim, they don’t want the socialism that has failed in all of the countries where it has been tried for decades and resulted in utter rejection by their citizens who lived in abject poverty and subjugation, after millions have lost their lives.

As Dinesh D’Souza points out in his recent book, these wannabe socialists promise everything on Earth on the condition that “… you are expected to give up your ownership of yourself, including your right to keep what is yours, your personal autonomy and dignity and your independence of mind.” This is just another “lust for power,” in which “socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants.” (United States of Socialism, Dinesh D’Souza, pp. 9-11)

D’Souza proposes that the American socialists, who added identity politics (Latino, black, Asian, Pacific Islander, disabled, LGBTQ) to their platform, with the social justice component, should call their movement “identity socialism.”

The young and old Americans who actually desire socialism express their desire to be taken care of by the daddy government, a desire of dependency that is stronger than the desire to be free.

I have actually been told by older relatives, who now live free of socialism and the Communist Party, that they wished to return to the country before the 1989 revolution, because today, they have to take care of themselves and it is hard. 

In the old socialist country, the Communist Party took care of them and paid them an equal but miserable salary regardless of work participation and effort. And that satisfied them that they did not have to struggle and work. They did not have freedom but they had equality of result – they all were paid the same regardless of effort, skill, and education. The country was ruled by constant dictatorial decrees that even told them how much food they could consume per day and were given rations accordingly.

Non-governmental organizations have spread around the world indoctrinating disaffected populations and youth to start a new revolution under the banner of “#resist.” They are socialists advocating the same old failed system but using repackaged old slogans, promising free technology, an easy life, free education, homes, a guaranteed income, free health care, child care, and everything else they desire. It rings hollow as these promises have been made to all the other failed socialist countries around the globe.

Take Poland’s case as an example - Lech Walesa, who is now 76, a shipyard electrician, became the leader of the Solidarity movement in 1980, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and President of Poland in 1990. He is still in politics demanding that the government respect the constitution. Why would that be necessary in a post-communist society? Because the communist corruption never went away, it became part of the government under different names and the old guard and their neo communist spawn are still in charge.

Young people in Poland and elsewhere in the former Iron Curtain countries have been indoctrinated into the new socialism that is sweeping the globe. I call it hollow socialism because it is devoid of substance and full of empty promises.

When the Iron Curtain fell, children of survivors of socialism/communism have gone to school in the west on Soros and other leftist-founded scholarships. They are beholden to his philosophy of the new world. His NGOs stepped in and wrote the school textbooks to match his philosophy of the new world order predicated on environmentalism and socialism.

Young Polish women have rallied around the global feminist movement and environmentalism just like in the west and are #resisting the people who are fighting political corruption and communism. 

The Polish progressive movement came up with the slogan, “Women and Earth have too much to bear.” It is not a coincidence that their Manifa, spring march in Gdansk, copied the western model and advocated for the feminist movement and environmentalism, carrying LBGTQ flags. Globalists made sure that the movement spread across the globe, carrying the same signs and the same message.

If one is still deluded that socialism works if it is tried the “right way” or by the “right people,” look at Cuba today – it oozes poverty out of the pores of every decaying building under the leadership of the tyrant comrade Castro; look at Venezuela today, with the richest oil reserves, yet it cannot feed its people; and look at North Korea and the starvation of its people. Photographed from space at night, North Korea looks like a black hole – there are no lights at all, just complete darkness. And last, but not least, look at the mass poverty in the cities in America that have been run by a socialist Democrat government for decades – they resemble third world nations.

The Medical Journey of Dr. Mircea

Photo courtesy of 

Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea

Dr. Aurel Emilian Mircea’s medical journey started in 1961 Socialist Republic of Romania and took “20,000 miles and 50 years to complete.” He crossed numerous countries and three continents. He should be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the only Romanian licensed doctor who had practiced medicine on three continents, Europe, Africa, and North America and in four countries, Romania, Poland, South Africa, and the United States.

On his journey, Dr. Mircea had pursued and finally reached in 1977 the American Dream through socialist country after socialist country until he found the state of Texas, in the land of the free and home of the brave, his last stop.

Now in his eighties, Dr. Mircea remembers his graduation in September 1961 from the Carol Davila College of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania. Forced by the socialist regime to practice medicine for three years in a village, as payment for the free socialist education he received, he joined the “rebellious Barefoot Doctors” brigade. Some of his colleagues refused the assignment and were forced to give up medicine, working as taxi drivers and waiters – the blue-collar salary was higher and much less responsibility.

But Dr. Mircea chose a double life – doctor by day and professional musician by night. Playing trumpet in a jazz band earned him more income than physicians earned and was able to be in contact with foreign tourists even though the socialists controlled by the Communist Party forbade any contact with foreign nationals.

As a teenager, his bleak life in a decaying apartment complex revolved around standing in long lines to find food and sneaking around the countrywide secret police that monitored every individual’s movement in public places, at home, at school, and controlling private life. Learning to function in whispering conversations, he was able to avoid operators listening on phone calls but not the full-time informers who reported on the comings and goings of everyone.

Ninety-five percent of the population was oppressed by five percent of the ruling class, party apparatchiks, and the unelected class of oligarchs. “The promotion of the utopian socialism, the daily school indoctrination with compulsory study of Russian language and Marxist ideology made us all an unwilling bunch of mind-numbed robots.”

Teenagers, upon reaching maturity, accepted their destiny and the demands made by the communist commissars. Resigned to their fate, all were forced to march from high school grounds to the Dear Leader’s parade grounds and shout slogans nobody believed to be true, enforcing the deep-seated hatred of communism. “The enormous risk of repercussions or incarceration, by manifesting any sign of disapproval with the regime, in public places held us into a submissive state of mind.”

The involuntary volunteerism that I was subjected to in high school twenty-five years later when we had to harvest crops, was much harder for Dr. Mircea. He had to work as forced volunteers on government construction sites from seventh grade until he graduated from high school in the summer of 1953. Students passed along bricks, from hand to hand, or were ordered to carry heavy buckets of mixed concrete up shaky scaffolding. There was no such thing as OSHA protection when the communists ran everything. Who was there to complain to or sue?

A young Aurel E. Mircea helped build the new and decrepit Soviet-style concrete apartments with poor electricity, bad drainage, unsafe passages, elevators that never worked, open walls, open electrical wiring, and unfinished balconies. Each resident was entitled to only 100 ft of living space, a miserable life in the new Socialist equality for all. Sadly, many historical buildings and Orthodox Churches had to be bulldozed in order to make room for the Soviet style apartment blocks made of crumbling concrete poured in a hurry with reinforcing iron bars.

During 1944-1950 Aurel Mircea’s family of five had to undergo six punishing reforms of equality for the collective good:

1.       The regime nationalized all private land and homes, making the population subservient to the new communist regime.

2.       All firearms were confiscated, making ownership of any weapon an offense punishable by prison.

3.       Gold, cameras, typewriters, sewing machines, telephones, Bibles, and other valuables were confiscated.

4.       Gangs of secret police thugs invaded their home without a warrant and took their family car.

5.       Old currency was canceled, new currency was issued, each family was only allowed to have one month of income.

6.       The new living space law relocated their family of five into one room, 400 square feet, sharing bathroom and kitchen with two other families.

High schools were infiltrated by communist commissars tasked to spread the Marxist ideology. They were indoctrinated and had to study Russian, Darwinism, Soviet Union’s history, Scientific Socialism, and Marxism-Leninism. Any intellectual, professional, person of means with a nice apartment was labeled Enemy of the People.

Mircea never became Lenin and Stalin’s Useful Idiot, he unwashed his brain of Marxism-Leninism and Dialectic Materialism by reading prohibited books, and learning the truth about the world from his uncle Constantin who had served a long and heavy jail sentence for being the Forestry Minister under the royal government before the communists took power and for having visited America. The inhumane socialist dogma never took root in Mircea’s mind, thoughts of freedom resided there always. After all, his scrambled name, A. Mircea, was AMERICA.

The communists reduced education from twelve years to ten. “The communist goal was to produce less educated people and more subservient factory workers. It was the goal of the Proletarian Paradise to have a huge class of Useful Idiots, as Stalin defined them: subservient people who want handouts, free healthcare, cheap food and housing.”

Children of the proletariat class (blue collar workers) received ten full points on the social college admission score, a sort of “bourgeois is evil” type of Affirmative Action. The social score only awarded five points to applicants from intellectual families and ten points to applicants from a blue-collar family. However, Aurel, the son of intellectuals, still managed to earn a spot in medical school.

With good test scores, luck, and giving “baksheesh” (bribery) to an old professor of infectious diseases and admission screener, who changed his family data to read that he was the son of a carpenter, Aurel had beaten the odds and was now part of the freshman class at the new Faculty of Public Health and Hygiene in Bucharest, established by the communist regime as the fourth branch of the Carol Davila Medical School to train doctors for “urban cleanliness.”

Aurel thought the Marxist indoctrination would stop in college but he was wrong. Each medical student was assigned to a group of twenty which had an “invisible” informer to the Communist Party. Their specific informer was not so invisible. Comrade Ghiorghi, an older communist commissar, was almost twenty years older, hailing from a rural primary school, with seven years of basic education, no high school, and no college entrance exam.

Comrade Ghiorghi was a “persecuted peasant, a member of the Communist Party, a devout Stalinist, and a cripple. Both his hands had the fingertips amputated by a new, Soviet-made thresher machine.” He was reporting everything the other students in the group said and did.

Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, the medical student communist stooge, never showed up for exams during the six years of college, never took notes during class, never showed up for written or oral exams, always took a roll call, pacing the amphitheater during daily classes, the perfect spy for the Communist Party. He received a diploma just like everybody else, landed a bureaucratic job with the Ministry of Health, never touching a patient, received a free apartment and a personal car, a Dacia. Until his retirement, he remained an employee of the Healthcare department in Bucharest – taking full advantage of his communist activist privilege.

Comrade Ghiorghi was one of the many commissars, trained agitators at all universities in Bucharest, architecture, polytechnic, economic, medical schools, arresting students during the student protests when they pelted the invading Soviet tanks in 1957. During the Hungarian Uprising and the Spring Prague, these commissars devastated the student communities – thousands were arrested, and some were deported to the Siberian gulag, never showing up again for class and their families never knew where they disappeared.

Comrade Preda was so hated by his medical school colleagues that, when the Carol Davila School of Medicine and Pharmacy 50-year class reunion took place in the fall of 2011 in Bucharest, a few who still remembered him and hated his guts, grabbed him and threw him out into the corridor.

For the next six years the study of Marxism-Leninism, Russian language, Darwinism, Dialectic Materialism, Scientific Socialism and other useless indoctrinating subjects continued. Students learned how to cheat and pass these Useful Idiot-classes while concentrating on medicine and science.

A classmate, Valeria, a Jewish girl, had great aspirations to move to Tel Aviv, taking advantage of the Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Bloc. Each émigré was bought and relocated to the promised land by the Prime Minister at the time, Davin Ben-Gurion. Nobody knew exactly how much was paid to the communist state per émigré, but Dr. Mircea alleges that the sum of $10,000 was the ransom paid for each Jewish person, money which “went straight to a secret bank account in Switzerland, for the use of the Politburo members and their international terrorist organizations.”

Medical school commissars brought many medical students on stage in front of the entire student body and made them confess and renounce their religious affiliations, the right to protest (many labor camps were packed with students who participated in anti-Soviet protests, never to be seen again), or denounce their parents for their illicit commercial trading and bartering done out of the necessity to survive.

By his fourth year of medical school, filled with clinical and practical courses in major hospitals and clinics, Aurel became a professional jazz musician, playing the trumpet. Mixing with gypsies, Jewish artists, Hungarian musicians, Italian singers, and a few German musicians, Aurel had no trouble getting weekend gigs in “dancing bombs.”

Government-owned basements in high rise buildings which had been assigned as bomb shelters during the war became dancing halls, making money for the starving musicians and for the government. The dancing halls became known as “bombs.” Aurel made more money on weekends playing trumpet by ear than most doctors working in the communist system made in a month.

Summers were spent on the Black Sea Riviera, Eforie Nord, playing in dancing halls and nightclubs. The tips and the excellent payroll, three times the meager salary of a physician, made them enough money to last a year. They received free modest accommodations, food, and free bus and train transportation. Compared to communist egalitarian payroll standards, the six band players were doing well.

Maestro Joe, the bandleader, and the showbiz agent, Sahak Baichian, connected them with VIP guests and restaurant managers, a steppingstone in their dream to escape communist Romania “by hook or by crook.” Sahak Baichian would eventually escape to Paris, reunited with his Armenian family, after a rich cousin paid a hefty ransom to the Communist government.

Luck intervened again for Aurel when he found a convenient place to complete his summer internship requirements for medical school graduation. He was assigned to the director of the Astoria Hotel and Spa in Eforie Nord where he was making money with his trumpet at night and helping people four hours a day with their rheumatism and psoriasis. His boarding was free with his jazz band and the Dean’s office was more than happy to assign him where they did not have to provide accommodations.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Not So Golden Epoch of Communism

Photo: Web

A photograph came across my desk depicting an arch of triumph of sorts which declared 1965-1985 “The Ceausescu Epoch – The Golden Epoch of Romania.”

If you ask any Romanian, this twenty-year period was one of the most tyrannical and oppressive regimes in its known history. It was a painful period of dark and repressive communist dictatorship maintained and characterized by brute force, fear, mental control, and constant food rationing.

The young pioneers, communists in training, “soimii patriei” (The Country’s Eagles), euphemistically “named” by Ceausescu himself, adopted the motto “Tot inainte,” (Ever Forward). A pioneer’s guide indoctrinated them how to behave as young communists. It seems that both communists and Socialist Democrat lefties are very fond of pathetic euphemisms which misrepresent reality.

On any given day the self-described Democrat Socialist left is trampling on the opposition’s rights, turning us into a collective guy facing a communist rolling tank in Tiananmen Square.

The two communist run television channels broadcast from 1 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily with a heavy dose of political indoctrination via carefully crafted and chosen entertainment and documentaries such as “The works of Comrade Ceausescu – Huge horizons opened for the revolutionary theory and practice,” the unfailing and tireless activity devoted to increasing the communist party role in society, “Science and Scientific Socialism as remarkable forces of production,” “We live decades of grandiose fulfillments,” choreographed literary-musical production aimed at bamboozling the proletariat into blind submission, and “From the big book of communism, the patriotic revolutionary responsibility of youth in Romania’s future in the Ceausescu Epoch,” more indoctrination for the generation of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Epoch, euphemistically and deceptively named “the generation of the revolutionary spirit and actions.”

In the painful daily reality, the proletariat and their children were forced to sing, march, and praise the dear leader, and the population in general was starved on a meager diet and bombarded with a false sense of wellbeing and daily doses of deviously crafted lies.

The communist subjects of all ages were forced to “recognize, apply, and respect the principles and norms of the labor and life of communists, of the ethic and equity of socialism – order, discipline, responsibility, and liability in all activities.”

Western visitors commented on how beautiful Romanian women were, thin as twigs but foreign guests did not understand the real reason for this forced thinness – the lack of food, the rationing of food via stamped cards, the endless daily lines, and the Communist Party prescribed caloric rations.

“The Program of Scientific Nutrition” decreed in July 1982 that men should have 37 g of protein and women 29 g of protein per day. The recommended caloric intake based on the type of activity - light, medium, forte, and exceptional - ranged from 2,000 to 2,700 calories for women and 2,700 to 4,000 for men. It seemed like a reasonable schedule except for the fact that most people would have been hard-pressed to find much food to deliver enough protein and nutrition. The obvious thinness of the population bore testimony to the lack of food. https://adevarul.ro/locale/ploiesti/programul-alimentatie-stiintifica-populatiei-comunism-trebuia-manance-cantareasca-persoana-1_57ac8f245ab6550cb8ab50f6/index.html

The “recommended” food intake was even lower for the rural population and their rationing cards entitled them to less food. If a villager wanted to raise a pig for his family’s use, he had to raise another one and donate it to the state.

People were not allowed to buy food anywhere else except in the area in which they lived. In other words, the rationing cards were valid only in one’s neighborhood stores.

The light activity category was comprised of office workers and housewives who owned stoves and other electric appliances.

The medium activity referred to workers in the light industry, men in construction industry, agriculture, students, and the military.

The forte activity category included miners, workers in the heavy industry, women in agriculture, soldiers in the field, dancers, and athletes.

The exceptional activity category encompassed metal workers, workers in abattoirs and butcher shops, dock workers in ports, and women in construction. https://cultural.bzi.ro/programul-de-alimentatie-stiintifica-a-populatiei-elena-ceausescu-daca-vor-sa-manance-mai-mult-riscul-este-al-lor-7053

Monthly rations of food for the average adult included:

-          300 g of daily bread

-          Chicken (1 kg)

-          Beef or pork (500 g); in case of severe food shortages, the party guidelines suggested buying canned meat from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

-          Cheese (500 g every three months)

-          Butter (100 g)

-          Sugar (1 kg)

-          Corn meal (1 kg)

-          Flour (1 kg every three months)

-          Eggs (8-12)

Workers involved in harder labor were entitled to extra 300 g of basic foods listed every month. Their families had to stand in line for the extra food, if available, and present extra rationing coupons issued to them by the state.

Depending on the year and the type of shortages, usually caused by irrational exportation of food to foreign countries in exchange for hard currency and bad centralized planning by communist ideologues who had no idea how to run any economy, rationing cards were issued for shoes, clothing, food like flour, beans, cooking oil, sugar, rice, and other necessities.

Ceausescu’s Golden epoch of failed socialist rule by the Communist Party was nothing but a tarnished and empty goblet of promises and lies for the hapless proletariat who barely survived on an equal pay survival level that would have shocked even other Stalinist satellite countries.

Memories of Maita

Maita's house, after a fresh coat of paint in 2012

Maita’s real name was Elizabeta. Her intense blue eyes and will power could pierce through steel. She wore her long light brown hair tight in a bun and covered with a dark bandana to protect her head and face from the intense sunlight. With advanced age, her thick hair turned snow white. A tiny spitfire of a woman of maybe 80 lbs., she lost her husband in her early thirties, leaving her to raise eight children alone. Grandpa Mihail was a busy man, in-between farm chores and fathering children. Dead long before I was born, I was told that daddy favored him the most, out of three boys and five girls.

The clay-brick and wooden logs homestead was perched on a beautiful mountain surrounded by fruit orchards and small vineyards. Underneath the rich black soil were layers upon layers of salt that would someday doom the entire side of the mountain and the small farms as the topsoil slid down the foothill crashing everything in its path, trees, homes, barns, and vineyards, burying everything many families held dear for generations.  Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt as most people were working other fields or in government factories at the edge of the nearest town.

The communist party rulers made a meek attempt at helping those who lost their homes by offering them for sale small plots of land elsewhere in the village, not so isolated from their grasp.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

The front porch would offer a shady respite in summer time but in wintertime hungry wolves would be so brazen as to climb the few front steps in their quest for food.  Shiny eyes could be seen in the dark followed by hair-raising howls echoing in the distance, sometimes really close.

The chicken coup and shed were safe and tightly latched. The pig, sheep, and the cow, which provided milk, butter, and cheese for her large family, were also sheltered and locked at night.

Maita's gate and grapevines

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2011

 

Each child had a well-defined role and daily chores in her family. There were no idle little hands; everyone had to care for each other and to earn their keep. The most hated chore was walking up and down the mountain to the deep well activated by a wooden chained bucket and a wheel and covered by a heavy wood cover to prevent debris, animals, and small children from falling in. With each trip, boys had to carry back to the house two large buckets of ice-cold water balanced on a very heavy stick on both shoulders.

If a lot of snow accumulated, the clusters of trees, vines, and the orchards kept it in place; now and then mini-avalanches would bury some trees and fences in their path.

When the three boys were old enough to get jobs in the city, they joined the village men on the open transport truck. Traveling like cattle every day on the bumpy unpaved road for miles of miserably wet or frigid weather to a menial job, they resigned themselves to the proletariat’s  fate, working for slave wages for the communist utopia which pretended to protect them. On at least one occasion, a passenger was let off at his stop but he never made the long walk on foot up the mountain to his home; he was found frozen in the ditch along the way. After a six-month period of mourning, the tough life moved on.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

Sound carried so well across the valleys that it was hard to judge how far people or animals making the sounds were. As a child, I often heard aunt Leana calling out from the front porch of her tiny house above the tree lines to Maita’s home, telling us to come for lunch or a special treat she had baked. And it was a long and breath-taking hike to her house or so it seemed to a small child.

I would judge the distance based on the beautiful cross and Orthodox icon along the way, nestled in a covered shelter where the villagers would stop briefly for a prayer and a drink of water from the bucket and cup left fresh each day by the nearby community well.

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2012

 

The silence punctuated by our huffs and puffs would be startled sometimes by a concealed voice coming from a person behind a fence covered in grape vines, saying hello or asking how we were doing. Maita was so proud when her neighbors would fawn over her visiting granddaughter.

After the landslide precipitated by melting snow and gliding layers of salt, Maita rebuilt a home next to her oldest son Nicolae in the middle of the village, conveniently close to the only store, the bus stop, the cemetery, and the village church.  From the front porch we could see the valley below shrouded in mist at dawn and filled with endless rows of grapevines and fruit trees. When the sun came up, the cold creek we bathed in each week sparkled like a jewel.

I stayed in this mud-brick home every summer. It was always cool and smelled of quince and autumn smoke. Maita cooked on a spit fire her famous chicken in the cast iron pot and tasty smoked beans when she was fasting. She had a large garden with plenty of vegetables to feed herself and her son’s large family next door.  A small opening in the fence allowed for quick passage to the two properties separated by a weathered fence.

Today the house is sadly abandoned. The heirs cannot agree on what to do with the property that nobody wants. The blue metal gate is in need of a new coat of paint and creaks in the wind when it opens. The rust spots match the grape leaves on the vines overhanging the walkway. I tread lightly, careful not to disturb the past. The porch is latched just as Maita and her son Ion used to do it. Her last child passed away last summer but his presence is still felt in the garden now overrun with weeds.

Maita's last house

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

I peer inside through a window. The furniture looks just like the furniture I grew up with in our home. He must have transferred it here from the city after my daddy passed away. I am looking for my grandma’s icon and garnet rosary that used to hang on the wall but it is missing, probably sold long time ago by uncle Ion.  A priceless work of art, the 19^th century rosary and icon must have fetched good money on the market. When we no longer care for history, even valuable prayer objects become disposable. Poor and suffering people in a collectivist society cannot afford to be sentimental.

Aunt Leana's grape vines

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

I walked up the mountain to visit aunt Leana’s surviving husband, uncle Stelian. After a long hike, I found their stucco home with the porch I used to play on as a child. Somehow the climb seemed much shorter but just as breathless and difficult, and the homes and plots of land much smaller than I had remembered them as a child.

Uncle Stelian in his yard

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

Stelian was in the yard, sitting on a makeshift stool, drinking his beloved homemade wine and prune brandy. We spoke through the same fence I recall from decades ago. He did not invite me in. Confused as if he’d seen a ghost from the past, it took him a while to remember me and my name. I snapped his photo through the wooden slats of the fence, wishing sadly that I could have seen aunt Leana once more. Her caring hands and sky-blue eyes have long left this earth. Her beautiful and devout Christian voice still echoes in the Orthodox Church by the cemetery.

Leana and Maita's water well

Photo: Ileana 2011

 

The shade cast by the grape vines above sheltered the courtyard from the hot sun just as I remembered it.  The smell of ripened quince, purple plums, and crushed grapes carried by a gentle breeze flooded my memory.  I returned to my world, thousands of miles away, with a painful and unexplainable regret and a feeling of permanent loss, taking a moment in time back with me, stuck on a memory card.