How Did He Subjugate So Many?

When I was growing up, I could not understand how an entire country was subdued into acceptance of their fate of living under the oppression of a tyrant installed in power by the Communist Party and the Soviet Bolshevik agents, a tyrant who was previously a shoe cobbler in his village of Scornicesti.

Yet this man, as Funderburk wrote, was able to “erase the past and construct a new man and society dependent upon the Communist Party and its organs of terror and intimidation.”  People were kept under the heavy boot of oppression because they were hungry, cold, controlled by abject fear, disarmed, and starved into submission by a huge army of Marxist cadre and well-armed militias and soldiers, composed of brothers, fathers, neighbors, and friends.

A few citizens in the more sparsely populated areas in the Carpathian Mountains, hid in the woods and kept their weapons, in opposition to the communists, but they were eventually rounded up and killed.

There was no place to hide from the well-paid informants of the Communist Party; often snitches were their own awfully close relatives, distant relatives, and even “best” friends turned informants, not because they believed in such an oppressive ideology, but because they wanted more food, medicine, medical care, and other scarce survival items.

Communist propaganda played each day on radio, television, political meetings, children’s shows, schools, and printed in newspapers, magazines, and on glossy posters. The music accompanying the daily propaganda was martial, somber, frightening, and deafening.

The Dear Leader was spoken of in biblical terms, he was the “creator of thought,” the “giver of strength,” and, in a Ministry of Truth Orwellian vein, he was the One who gave meaning and justification to our thoughts and ideas. Without him, a God-like figure, we were worth nothing, we were dust under his shoes.

We owned nothing in that miserable life, but we were NOT happy about it, just controlled into submission by fear and indoctrination. And it showed! You would have been hard-pressed to meet one smiling person on the street. Everybody frowned and crowded in never-ending store lines, on buses, and on trains, like sardines in a can. The evil and guilty, being driven around in fancy government-owned cars, controlled the good and the innocent.

Ceausescu was compared by his apparatchiks, poets, teachers, movie makers, writers, reporters, to famous historical figures like Stefan Cel Mare (Stephen the Great), Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the bloody thirsty prince from the mid-1400s who disposed of his enemies through strange methods of incarceration, torture, savage beatings, or summary and quite painful executions.

Ceausescu was, according to posters and recitations we had to make daily in meetings at school and work, the framer of the “multilaterally developed socialist society and Romania’s advance to communism.” All we knew was the reality of gurgling empty tummies, bare pantries, and headaches from insufficient daily intake of calories.

Ceausescu was aggrandized to the point that he was featured in every classroom, every office, every workshop, every factory, inside public buildings, outside buildings, in sculptures, portraits, military decorations, churches, icons, paintings, banners, statues, monuments, poems, plays, and monologues. Nothing happened in Romania without his approval. His elaborate portrait was next to those of ancient kings, princes, and voivodes.

On national holidays such as August 23, celebrating the victory over fascism, or the anniversary of the union of Transylvania with the rest of Romania, we had to march on the main boulevard, dressed in our pioneers’ uniform with the red bandana around the neck, carrying flags, placards with phrases like ‘Long live communism,’ and portraits of the Dear Leader; but it was not a real celebration for that occasion, it was a total deification of the tyrant, “the father of the country,” “the light of knowledge and wisdom,” and many other absurd and outlandish phrases invented by communists to venerate the cobbler dictator and his semi-literate wife who “owned” a scientific doctoral degree she never earned.

We lived in an alternate universe, The Twilight Zone of sorts, where bad people were in charge and good people were slaves to communism, to the Dear Leader and his family, who lived in the lap of luxury in exorbitant villas thanks to confiscatory stealing from citizens and the theft of the national patrimony and impoverishment of the country. His foreign bank accounts held millions of dollars while the oppressed masses starved.

During plenary meetings, worshipping party members and those in attendance stood up every two or three minutes, clapping and shouting praises for the glorification of the dictator Ceausescu. While it was standard protocol to stand during the entrance of a country’s leader, U.S. Ambassador David Funderburk refused to stand as often after the initial standing at his entrance, and was, according to his recollection, blacklisted.

The worshipping went so far that, on his 67^th birthday, Ceausescu was compared to Orion (“Luceafarul”), born at Scornicesti, “Nicolae with a laurel crown.” Imagine the nausea of having to take part in such surreal events.

Nobody dared to mention God on Romanian television, because, to the communists, atheism was their religion and Ceausescu was god. The word God had not been mentioned in the media after the Bolsheviks took over the country.

But one man, Ambassador David B. Funderburk, dared to use the word God in his July 4, 1982, television address to the Romanian people. Ambassador Funderburk recounts in his book, that month’s later church goers in the far north told him how dear and meaningful the word God was to them, knowing that it came from the President of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan. . .... “Let us pray that God will guide us and future generations in preserving the liberty that is the essence of the American spirit.” (David B. Funderburk, Pinstripes and Reds, Selous Foundation Press, 1987, p. 107)

Ceausescu had an army of controllers on the Communist Party payroll, i.e., the dreaded Securitate, the economic police, the street police, factory activists, school activists, and informants on every city block, street, apartment complex, and each entrance to the many public buildings, churches, schools, hospitals, factories, and libraries.

Nothing was left to chance and everything and everybody was constantly watched. His army worked hard to track the rest of us because they had low level technology, no Internet, computers, and smart phones.

Doctors and nurses were ardent supporters of the police state and highly compliant. Teachers followed the directives of the Ministry of Education. Fear and extra pay to help one survive were strong motivators.

We could not turn to churches for comfort because most priests were also informants to the Securitate and were on Ceausescu’s payroll. They helped keep the praying masses subdued and under control. Churches were kept open for baptisms, weddings, and burials and as a way for Ceausescu to know when the small underground opposition organized events.

 

The Prison that is Socialism

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

Imagine a large prison with beautiful mountains that you are not allowed to climb because you are too poor to afford the gear and you must get a permit from the warden. These mountains grow blue spruce and pine forests where bears and other creatures dwell but you cannot visit because important people are hunting brown bears and they’ve paid huge sums to shoot them under the supervision of the game warden.

If you wanted to hunt, it would not be possible because you did not have a license or a hunting rifle. Such weapons had been confiscated from the entire prison population long ago. But the warden and his men are well-armed and prepared to round up the bears or whatever God’s creatures his higher-ups were in the mood to slaughter for sport with their high power rifles.

This prison has beautiful rivers but you don’t own boats and canoes, only those who control the prison can afford expensive boats and licenses to go fishing or to spend leisurely afternoons on the water and on special lakes reserved only for those in power. Some of the rivers are the pride and joy of the elites, but most are heavily polluted by industrial activity because the watchers don’t care about environmental conservation.

This prison has cinder block towers for the residents forced off the land and crowded onto nine-story blocks made of reinforced concrete. The captives within can go about on foot, by train, by bike, and by rickety buses.

They are told how much they can eat and how many calories they can consume daily. It is degrading to be forced to stand in line to get daily rations of food but they are used to it if they want to survive. If they are lucky, they can find better choices twice a year, on Easter and at Christmas.

There are churches that perform baptisms, marriages, and burials. Church bells can be heard joyously ringing on religious holidays but sadly when someone passes. Death is inevitable for those in power and the prisoners alike, they are all equal eventually.

Nobody lives better than their neighbors but they look with envy at the wealth of their captors. The block informers make sure there is a detailed dossier on the comings and goings of every prisoner. Once in a while, a few are rewarded for their loyalty with a trip to a wellness spa with mineral waters and stinking Sulphur baths with magical healing properties.  The majority is not loyal; captive subjects just gave up any resistance in the face of utter defeat, mental and physical. They are very tired, overwhelmed, and in survival mode.

The mountains are rich in minerals and gold, but nobody can go explore even though everyone owns the mountains. If they start digging or even ask to dig, they get arrested for trespassing and theft.

If you want to travel, you have to have enough money saved from your hard labor and ask permission from the state police which is in charge of giving out passes. The police always says no unless the prisoner is an exceptional athlete or musical genius in which case they are told yes but a security police guard follows them around the clock to make sure that they do not escape this beautiful prison built specifically to keep everyone in.

Food is scarce in this well-maintained and state of the art prison; everyone is thin, but not necessarily healthy as nutrition lacks a lot to be desired. People are not given vitamins or supplements unless they are really sick when often time it is too late.

The theoretically trained doctors experiment on the prison population with no consequence for their mistakes. How can one sue the watchers? There is nobody to watch the watchers, they do what they want.

The hospitals are oozing decay and negligence; equipment is rusty, sheets are stained and torn, medicine is missing, and if a prisoner is 70 years old, he/she is left to die because they are old anyway, they’d lived long enough; and the prisoners have no one to complain to or to protect them, crowded as they are in the large wards with chicken wire beds and rusty metal stands which were once painted white. Dubious stains cover the dirty walls, the floors, and even the mattresses.

Patients can pray to God in beautiful churches or in their cells but it seems that priests have forgotten them and are favoring the elites. The church has become an instrument of manipulation, preaching the agenda of the highest contributor. God is definitely lost in the incense wafting from a priest’s silver censer.

It looks dystopian inside but to the world, the outdoors is breathtakingly beautiful and the streets are clean. The prison warden has armies of gypsy bees sweeping the streets and, if as much as a cigarette butt is thrown on the ground, the offender is taught a painful and expensive lesson.

This prison has clean schools where directed curriculum is strict and approved by the chief warden, followed religiously by thousands of busy teacher bees supervised by principals with a waspy demeanor. Prisoners pay for all these equal benefits with their lack of freedom, pretending to work every day while the prison system pretends to pay them in their paternalistic generosity.

Many prisoners tried to escape this jail by cutting the barbed wire at the border, making a run for it and getting shot, or swimming across the large southern river and drowning. Few managed to flee and escape this prison. Many paid the ultimate price while attempting to find freedom.

The democracy spelled out in the socialist republic’s constitution was often hurled at these prisoners as a threat that democracy had gone to their heads and they better behave or else.

This dystopian prison country was the police state called socialism. One day the prisoners had had enough exploitation and mounted a revolution with the help of the army, arrested the socialist dictator who was trying to escape by helicopter, and executed him and his wife after a brief trial.

That free men and women from other societies want this kind of prison in their countries today, it is baffling to those who escaped the police state called socialism.

 

Choose Your Poison, Communism or Other Dictatorship?

I live under the dreaded Home Owner Association rules. The person in charge of checking yard compliance is the worst offender – his back yard looks like it was overtaken by the nearby forest weeds five years ago and he has given up. Since he lives next door to me, I wish I could rent a goat and let it loose on his property until she eats all the knee-high weeds.

He takes his job very seriously - he walks around the neighborhood early in the evening with a tablet in hand, diligently writing down minor offenses that will then appear in threatening letters to the respective homeowners. He reminds me of the neighborhood informant under communism who, for a small fee, a few extra crumbs of food, and access to the communist hospitals, would keep a daily log of everybody’s comings and goings and record information on their own relatives and then report it to the security police.

I do not know who snitched on my neighbors across the small pond. They had a beautiful vegetable garden within the perimeter of their well-tended yard. A painted fence surrounds the property in order to keep the deer and other forest critters at bay. They toiled in this garden every morning and every evening and it was a beauty: green and bell peppers, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, and squash. The garden was not visible from the street and it certainly did not violate the 300-page HOA rulebook that each homeowner was handed upon signing the agreement to move into the neighborhood.

Two days ago, two men with smirks of satisfaction on their faces were busy pulling out every plant by the roots in this beautiful garden and throwing it over the fence, while the lady of the house was crying, wringing her hands helplessly nearby and wiping away silent tears. It was heart breaking to see such injustice. Do we still live in free America? I have seen this woman work so hard tending to her plants since early March. It was a labor of love to provide her family with fresh vegetables, especially since everything is so expensive in grocery stores thanks to our disastrously run economy.

We import a lot of fruit and vegetables from Mexico and Chile. Congresswomen Boxer, Feinstein, and Pelosi from California and this administration made sure that as much as possible of our fruit and vegetable production in the San Joaquin valley in California would be destroyed by denying farmers water – God forbid the Delta smelt, a tiny fish, might be hurt.

I moved away 8,000 miles to escape communism and now, this communist organization, the HOA, composed of die-hard Obama fans, was telling me that I could not move into the house my husband and I have built from our hard work until we signed such a contract. We paid the fee every month for the “privilege” of having our trash picked up twice a week, a swimming pool that we never used, and snow removal that seldom happened.

I thought we had choices in a free country but I was wrong. We moved as far away from the metro area as possible to escape HOA. We could have bought a parcel of land in the woods somewhere, but I am sure, EPA regulations would have made it impossible since everything is close to marshland. In Maryland, you can no longer build in an area without an established sewer system. Governor O’Malley, through executive order, has forbidden septic tanks. Houses can only be built along an approved corridor, thanks to UN Agenda 21’s Smart Growth, which requires that a very large portion of our lands be given back to the wilderness. We must move into high rises, five minutes’ walk or bike from work, school, and play

We no longer live in a free country; we just have an illusion of freedom.

When I first came to the United States, I recoiled in fear every time I saw a cop. My heart rate would go up tremendously, to the point of tachycardia. I had been conditioned, after 20 years of communism, that the security police, the economic police, the secret police, the military police, were there to harass citizens, arrest them, beat them, torture them, rape them, steal their possessions, their wealth, and confiscate any property. Their job was not to protect and defend us. It took me a good three years to get over the fear of police, the sheriff, and the highway patrol.

I was not alone in this. When my mom came to visit, she jumped every time there was a knock on the door. She experienced the same feelings because we had been conditioned to be submissive and to fear police, whether we did something wrong or not. They could always find something wrong if they wanted to in order to throw us in jail.

I see America moving in that direction. The emergence of TSA with their intrusive pat-downs and molestations at airports, random checks at metros, at train and bus stations, did not see many citizens protesting, they are being submissive, and they are giving up their rights, their freedom of speech, of being free Americans. We are transforming into a police state.

The most recent viral YouTube video shows a man, stopped three times at roadblocks in California within 90 minutes ride, asked to prove that he is American. He protested, had a camera ready, and refused to show his papers since he did nothing wrong,

The police was surprised that he said no, everybody else was compliant collectively, like sheep going over a cliff, “Is this not America anymore, is it Nazi Germany,” he asked. The rest of the drivers submitted, gave up their Constitutional rights, and yielded to the intrusion by police. Whatever happened to the requirements of probable cause and a search warrant?

We are just a few steps from ratifying the UN Small Arms Treaty. Once ratified, we must surrender our personal guns for protection and hunting. We will be defenseless against home intruders, thieves, and drug gangs. Criminals can always procure guns in spite of bans.

Fear is growing inside my heart. I see police everywhere, most are in unmarked cars, different types of vehicle, and hard to detect. If they are here to serve us and receive taxpayer dollars, if I do not know who they are, how will I be able to ask for help in case of an emergency? They are here to harass, catch and ticket speeders, control us, stop us, and cameras are everywhere. It is so scary, I do not like the America as it is transforming, and I fear for the future of everybody’s children and grandchildren. We are turning into a banana republic dictatorship with many similarities to fascistic elements and to communist China.

The question remains, which poison will we be forced to take, will we be like communist China, or some other type of dictatorship? We do have the 257 Chinese FTZ (Free Trade Zones) all over the United States, which seems bizarre, but, in context with all the money we owe them, it makes sense.

We are in a period of economic abundance and welfare dependency; Americans have not suffered economically since the end of World War II. Under this administration, food stamp recipients are at an all time high, yet the government is advertising the giving of more food stamps, renamed to take away the stigma of being a perennial bum, waiting on handouts. Economic abundance had lead to complacency, laziness, apathy, and dependence on government as a nanny state. Who needs a family, mommy and daddy, when we have the government? Such dependency is going to lead to cowardice and a morass of spiritual, moral, and physical bondage.

What Communism Wrought

Today my Dad would have been 84 years old. I still mourn his tragic and premature death at the hands of communist goons who took over the country of my birth and terrorized people for 41 years. Dad was barely 61 and healthy.

The benevolent dictator Ceausescu ruled Romania with an iron fist, lording over the frightened and defenseless population. His portrait was everywhere next to his hideous wife, “the Mother of the Country.” She had given herself that title along with a Ph.D. in chemistry. A fifth grade dropout, she had grandiose ideas of her faux accomplishments.

Dad hated Nicolae Ceausescu and his co-dictator wife, Elena, with a passion. He never hid his utter disdain for the arrogant, narcissistic, and uneducated couple who rose from the poverty of community organizing with empty promises of paternal and maternal care for the weak, the poor, and the downtrodden, to a life-style of the rich and famous.

Torturing, imprisoning, and killing millions of innocents, the Ceausescus had appropriated their possessions and amassed such a vast wealth, it was hard to tell how much money he had in Swiss bank accounts, how much art, jewels, land, and homes.

The dictator was proud that he gave “homes” to all his subjects, the proletariat, crowding country and city folk alike into high-rise concrete apartment blocks, while taking their homes and land for agricultural cooperatives or grandiose buildings and palaces dedicated to the Communist Party. Hastily built of reinforced concrete, the nine to twelve story apartments were Spartan, ugly, cold, dirty from the heavy pollution, and chipping concrete chunks like loose teeth.

The benevolent dictator made sure that there was no middle class left when he finished his fundamental transformation of the former prosperous monarchy into a socialist/communist republic. He kept changing his mind as to whether the country was a socialist popular republic or a communist one, frequently altering the Constitution on a whim, adding more articles, while robbing Romanians of their former rights and freedoms.

People were frightened to speak to their neighbors or relatives because nobody knew who was an informer. The country had become a country of snitches for a few extra lei (the official currency) a month, meat and other necessities, proper medical treatment at the Communist Party polyclinics and hospitals, and access to drugs at their well-stocked pharmacies. Adults turned in their own parents and relatives. Children often did the same, without realizing that such childish indiscretions would send their parents to jail.

Dad was under the commies’ radar all the time because he refused to be a member of their party and always blamed them publicly for destroying the country. He was not shy to assign blame and to criticize the dear leader and his wife. Although a pacifist who could not hurt a fly, Dad was always beaten and imprisoned every time the Ceausescus traveled anywhere near my dad’s location.

The peoples’ discontent and misery was palpable but they did not dare discuss their thoughts with anybody. Dad had the courage and foolishness to say what was on his mind. He did not care that the communists had built a very strong police state: regular police, traffic police, security police, economic police, military police, and ideology police. Dad really believed in human beings’ inalienable right to freedom and economic independence, not dependence on an omnipotent government. He saw every day how this all-powerful government robbed people and gave back very little, while pretending to care.

Since goods were in such short supply due to poor centralized planning by communist bureaucrats, people learned to survive through stealing from work and bartering. Dad hated theft and reported the culprits all the time. Since theft at work started at the top and trickled down to the lowest ranks, orders were often given to punish my dad for daring to expose the thievery. He was beaten many times for his honesty. He always recovered, more resolute that he was doing the right thing.

One day his luck did run out. A savage beating and dropping from a certain height into a metal shaving pit resulted into a cracked skull that was not treated at all at the state-run hospital. Receiving little food or water, he died four weeks later, a slow and agonizing death, shrinking to half his healthy size.

Dad is in Heaven now, satisfied that his premature death was not in vain. Many people who know and understand how a totalitarian regime robs humans of their freedoms, are picking up the opposition against communism.