Vladimir and His Journey to Freedom

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”             -  Albert Einstein

Klevan, Ukraine
Photo: Wikipedia Commons

My friend Vladimir came to the United States legally in 1979. It was almost impossible to come illegally from the former Soviet communist state, USSR. It was the first and last time in his life when being Jewish helped him a lot, he said. If he would have been a member of the communist party, Vladimir would not have been allowed to immigrate to the United States at that time or to become an American citizen.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s agents of the immigration office loved America and did their best to protect it from invasion by flotsam and jetsam from third world dictatorships, especially communist ones.

Being a member of a communist party today is a badge of foolish smugness since academia and the Obama administration have advanced the global communist platform continuously. Who would have thought that, after escaping communism in the late 1970s, Vladimir would eventually have to live again under communism in the 21^st century America, where it is worshipped by a large percentage of the American people. Did America not fight a war in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism? How many millions died in the fight against communism and as a result of the oppressive exploitation of the utopian ideas of a professorial bum called Karl Marx?

Vladimir’s escape from Kiev was immigration based on religious beliefs. One could argue today that the mostly male, young, and military age “refugees” from Syria and the Middle East are refugees from tribal wars and religious beliefs.

The fundamental difference between Jewish immigrants then from the Soviet Union and other communist satellite countries and today’s “Syrian refugees” is that Judaism is a religion while Islam is a theocracy and a legal system of governance based on Sharia Law. These “refugees” are economic refugees who are not interested in assimilating and contributing to make America great as Jews did. These Muslims want to take over our country and change our Constitution to Sharia Law.  As statistics show, a large percentage of these immigrants become immediate welfare dependents and remain so in perpetuity.

The Communist bloc nations severely restricted freedom and human rights to their populations. Vladimir would not have been able to immigrate to the U.S. had it not been for the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974. Two Democrats, Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, and Rep. Charles Vanik of Ohio, sponsored the bill which passed both houses unanimously. President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law on January 3, 1975. Vladimir and his family were beneficiaries of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which allowed Jewish people to immigrate to the West.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Jewish immigration loophole closed. Vladimir was lucky and escaped with his wife and son two months before the border closed. Immigration resumed in the late 1980s, generally for economic reasons, hence it was called the “sausage expatriation.” This was descriptive of the lone sausage or salami hanging in the windows of grocery stores during the communist era when shortages of food plagued every centrally planned economy. Socialist Venezuela is going through severe shortages of food, diapers, and toilet paper, in a country with huge oil reserves. Cuba is a classic example of a country exploited for 59 years by the communist junta of Fidel Castro.

In December 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, repealing the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that gave freedom from the communist oppression to so many Jewish people.

The Soviets and even the former dictator Ceausescu took advantage of this Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The Soviets imposed a “diploma” tax on immigration.  The tax was so high that, after the outcry from the West, it was removed after being in effect for over a year. Ceausescu allegedly charged Jewish émigrés $1,000 per head. His regime charged me for my education before I was allowed to leave.

Vladimir’s family paid $500 per person to renounce their Soviet citizenship. Consequently, instead of a passport, they received a piece of paper with a handwritten note under citizenship, “stateless.” They were “stateless” but free.

Although this amendment only applied to Jews and Germans under the “family reunification” egis, the Russians used this opportunity to also expel quite a few dissidents, Soviet writers and other top intelligentsia, who were too much in the public eye to make them disappear, and were thorns in the side of the Soviet regime.

Vladimir remembered that there was no synagogue in Kiev when he grew up, they worshipped underground. A few Christian cathedrals were left for baptisms, weddings, and burials. If people attended church, special agents from each factory were sent to spy on their employees who would pray on Christmas, Easter, or other special holidays. They wrote names down and made sure that such worshippers were given a really hard time in society. They oppressed everybody.

No entrepreneurs were allowed in the former Soviet Union. Those who tried were caught and severely punished. It was easy to go to Siberia for 15 years for a small infraction. His best friend’s parents tried to make candy at home and sell it to friends and neighbors. Because the father was found to have extra cash in the home, over and above his allowed salary, he was arrested by police and later summarily shot. If the commies really wanted to catch someone and make them disappear, it was easy to set them up, to put something incriminating in their homes, and then arrest them for the set-up crime.

Living on the edge of fear was something people got used to. People worried about families, friends, and children. “Soft pressure” was exerted often instead of jail or execution. “Soft pressure” meant that, if you were not in line with the communists, you and your children were not allowed to find jobs, or decent jobs, housing, attend good schools, or universities. And you were constantly watched by the neighborhood informer.

It was a psychological game to keep you suppressed and oppressed at the hands of the state. It was a faceless type of oppression; you never knew who ordered it or exactly why. “They might let you know somehow but you never knew to whom to apologize for your infraction. In Vladimir’s estimation, at least 25 percent of the population was treated this way and they had no recourse.

Vladimir described how getting permission to immigrate took from six months to seven years for some people. Anybody attempting to leave was considered a traitor to the state.  In order to protect your boss from punishment for keeping a traitor employed, you had to leave your job; it was shameful and unpatriotic to keep such a person employed, such a “quisling.”

Wondering how the Soviets knew he was Jewish, Vladimir explained that everything had to be disclosed on the employment forms and it became part of the employment record that followed workers everywhere. Most places, once they found out that the applicants were Jewish, they were told they were wasting their time, they would not be hired.

Vladimir’s case was different because he was an exceptional professional. He was a geophysical engineer in the oil and gas field, working in a Soviet institute of 550 people, with many geologists, engineers, researchers, oil and gas explorers, specialists who knew how to put out oil fires through geological drilling and detonation, and many involved in research and development.

Once he was part of a small group that came up with a plan to put out a difficult oil well fire which they were able to extinguish in six days, a spectacular result, devising a plan to drill sideways in hard rock. For his part, Vladimir was given a bonus of 60 rubles, and a personal visit from the minister of energy. But Vladimir was happy with the personal satisfaction of a job well-done.

Forty-year old Vladimir, his younger wife, and eight-year old son left USSR on the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, November 7. The customs officers, armed to their teeth, reminded them that everybody was celebrating the Soviet Revolution and “you traitors are leaving the country.”

They were allowed to take 72 pounds per person and, not knowing where they would end up, they took forks, pillows, a frying pan, winter shoes, and other implements for survival. I remember when I left legally in 1978 with two sets of sheets that never fit any bed in America.

They were allowed to exchange from rubles the equivalent of $100 per person, $300 for his family, and he still has the money in an envelope. “This was our life-line. We did not have much family to leave our personal property with since most perished in WWII. We gave friends our books, we could not give away photographs older than ten years, and everything was strictly catalogued.” A person was only allowed a wedding band, a pair of earrings, nothing more expensive than 50 rubles, no paintings, and no art objects, nothing that was not on the approved list. Anything extra had to be given to the state. “My friend had given me some paintings, I had to give them back; if I hadn't, the state would have confiscated them.”

It took six months to a year to get paperwork to prove that they did not owe anything to the state. It was a terrible life to extricate from the clutches of communism and to gain freedom in the west. They would get the run around from every office. They had to prove so many things, they had to go to archives to prove everything and run the gauntlet of the Soviet red tape. “That was my life for six months.” Vladimir cannot understand why ignorant Americans are so eager to become communist!

A church in New York help them start their new life in America, got jobs, and eventually built a professional career that took him to Virginia where I met him a few years ago.

Since they left, Vladimir never went back to Kiev, now part of Ukraine. Many others, who left like him, did go back. He would like an apology from the state for what they have put them through. The chance of getting such an apology is zero. The country is no longer the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, it is now Ukraine.

© Ileana Johnson 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Borders Do Matter

Fintina Alba Memorial called "Troita"
 

Political elites have used social engineering to control masses of people and territories over the millennia. They have redrawn borders and moved tribes and herded people into harsher environments, not ideally suitable for human habitation and agriculture; they have sent humans to occupy already heavily populated areas through invasion, conquering them, destroying the local inhabitants’ religion in the process, and forcing them to accept the conquering religion of Islam. Christians organized their own crusades in response, to regain the territories occupied by Muslims.

Many borders have been erased or redrawn as the result of greed, war, war reparations, communism, colonialism, Nazism, Islamic conquests, tribal wars, and other politically and economically driven search for land, natural resources, drinking and irrigation water, navigable water, oil, diamonds, and precious metals.

In the 21^st century, the technocracy and the global elitists have pushed the social engineering much further, by planning to erase all national borders and destroying sovereignty in order to allow free massive migration of peoples around the globe, and by redistributing wealth from the haves to the have nots, regardless of effort.

The British found out that borders are important and chose to vote for Brexit, the exit from the mammoth technocratic experiment called European Union, a state-like federation controlled by Germany.

Angela Merkel invaded her own people with Islamist “refugees,” men of military age who have left their wives, mothers, elderly, and children behind to fight their tribal wars in Syria, while they slashed and burned across Europe, in order to eventually conquer thousands of years of Christian civilization through demographics and the politics of multiculturalism.

Nations want borders, people want to identify with their ancestors, their history, their families, their language, and their native ancestral lands where their heroes lay buried, where archeological remnants of their glorious past can be found, catalogued, and displayed in museums, a collective shrine to our human civilization. 

People are drawn to those with a common bond that establishes where they came from and exemplifies the long and arduous history of survival against all odds. Most people are fascinated by their own genealogical roots and spend time and resources to find out where they came from. Others hyphenate their names to identify with the continent where their ancestors came from.

The desire to belong to your own kind is exemplified by the tragedy that took place 76 years ago at the border between today’s Russia and Romania. On April 1, 1941, on the day of the Holy Easter, a large column of villagers, who were fed up with the Soviet utopian exploitation, attempted to cross into Romania. They were massacred not far from the Romanian border, men, women, children, and grandparents, by machine guns and swords of the Soviet cavalry at Fintina Alba.

On a snowy day, Petru Grigor, Director of Historical and Cultural Research of Cernauti, talked about Romania’s martyrs and their bloody massacre. In the background is the memorial erected to remember those innocents who died in their quest for freedom, away from Soviet-imposed border that destroyed and separated Romanian villages and families of Bucovina. http://trinitastv.ro/stiri-video/ecouri-ale-tragediei-de-la-fantana-alba-si-lunca-80291

The Soviets had installed a new border in June 1940 between USSR and Romania, cutting large chunks of Romanian territory and annexing it to the Soviet Union.

The Red Army had occupied Basarabia, northern Bucovina, and Hertza in the military campaign of June 28-July 4, 1940, an area of almost 20,000 square miles with a population of 3.8 million people. Ready to occupy it with a full-scale invasion, the Soviets gave Romania an ultimatum on June 26 but the Romanian Army, in order to avoid military conflict, agreed to withdraw from the territories. Germany knew of the Soviet interest and remained silent. France, guarantor of Romania’s borders, fell. This emboldened the Soviets to issue the ultimatum of surrender.

Thus a large part of Moldova became, on August 2, 1940, part of the Moldova Soviet Socialist Republic, encompassing most of Basarabia, and part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the breakaway Transnistrian state.

The Hertza region and other regions inhabited by Slavic majorities in northern Bucovina, northern and southern Basarabia, became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Those who objected to the Soviet occupation were politically persecuted, arrested, deported to labor camps where few survived, and executed.

In January and February 1941 massacres took place at Lunca in the region Cernauti, and in spring 1941 at Fintina Alba, in Poiana Varnitei (Varnita canton). About two km from the border, Romanians, who wanted to return to their motherland and their ancestral lands, were murdered by Soviet soldiers.

Villagers had written letters, asking the new Cernauti authorities to allow them to return to their country. In March 1941, the villagers of Storojinet also petitioned to return to Romania, but the requests were denied, and the villagers returned home.

They made the fateful decision to leave on the rumor that the Soviet authorities would allow them to cross the border unharmed, and they would be able to rejoin the Romanian families left behind.

The villagers of Patrautii de Jos, Patrautii de Sus, and Suceveni went to church, prayed for a while, raised a white flag to show that their intentions were peaceful, and over 1,500 people joined a long procession, marching to turn in their requests to be allowed to return to their motherland, Romania.

Many others joined this column in the center of Hilbocia, more than 5,000 souls. A Soviet policeman urged them to return to their homes as their applications were not even accepted, much less considered. Deciding that they would rather die free than live under the Soviet boot, the group resolved to cross the border illegally. As Petru Grigor told the story, the villagers were met by Soviet border guards with machine guns, who mowed the column down in an inferno of bullets and death. “God cried that day.”

An investigation made in 1943 Bucovina, with the help of eye witnesses, discovered the names of 26 martyrs who died on that fateful day, April 1, 1941, in Fintina Alba. A monument called “troita” was erected on the site by Ukraine in 1991, following its installation to power after the dissolution of USSR.

The journalist Ion Dominte, writing in the newspaper “Bucovina” about the massacre at Fintina Alba, left a historical record of the events. The mass deportations of Romanians that took place in the first year of installation of the Soviet regime in this area came to light. Petru Grigor suggested that archeological digs should take place today, to find out the true number of those who were killed.

Orthodox Church pilgrimages with prayers and wreath-placing ceremonies take place every year “in memoriam” of those who sought freedom at all costs and did not wish to live under the Soviet boot across the border from their national roots.

Contemplating Mortality

Handsome Bogart, 18-years old
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017

I used to think that it was rather morbid that my in-laws had purchased their burial plots when my husband was a small child. Every time we went for a visit, we stayed in a hotel across from the hilly Memorial Gardens, with a large white praying statue on top. The lush green grass and the occasional Canada geese grazing on the slopes were peaceful and comforting evidence of perennial life.

Every time Ray would drive by he would joke in his inimitable dark humor that he bought his wife an anniversary gift and she never used it. It gave me shivers, imagining my husband’s parents deceased.

As the way of all flesh goes, it seems to be closer and closer that Joan may have to use that anniversary gift from long, long time ago. Time flew by and, as it did, we thought of living, of family, of togetherness, of life’s accomplishments, not of mortality. We thought of ourselves as living forever until someone close or known to us got really sick and died. We brushed away the annoying thought of death, as if it would never happen to us eventually. Yet we all leave this earth as dust, a short lived spark in the memory of those who know us, perhaps love us, who are still alive and left behind.

I had an eerie feeling the first time I visited my Dad’s grave. It was perhaps because I was really sick when he died and I could not attend the funeral so many thousands of miles away. In a sense, I never really had closure. I stared for hours at the pictures of his funeral my uncle had sent me, but it was not the same. It was as if he was still alive in some far away corner of the world.

But I was staring then at this corner of the world and reality slapped me in the face. My Daddy was but dust and my memories of our lives together for the first twenty years of my life. With the grace of God, Dad and Mom made me, cared for me, and loved me enough to let me go to a better place so far away. How do you ever thank your parents for choosing life?

I knew Dad’s mortal remains where interred there, but his spirit was somewhere else, in Heaven, but in some ways it lived inside of me. It was so quiet around me, you could almost hear every sound nature made, buzzing of bees, the wind moving the tall grasses, and the leaves twirling on tree branches in the gentle breeze. The earth was alive but my Daddy was part of its dust. His bones were resting in a bag deep in the earth, the wooden coffin perhaps long decayed. I planted a flower on his grave wondering if sufficient rain would keep it alive after my departure. How long would it be before it withered and died, turning to dust?

My mom is losing her battle with dementia and she hardly remembers her life in the correct sequential order. We are happy when she remembers our names.

My mother-in-law is paralyzed following a botched spinal operation and will be sent soon to a hospice, closer to the ultimate chapter of her life. Her beautiful blue eyes are still the eyes of the little girl she once was, not understanding what happened, why time flew by so fast.

Bogart is our beautiful Snow Shoe Siamese whom we adore. He is turning 18-years old sometime this year, we don’t know when because my daughters adopted him from the pound. The vet told us, he was one year old then. Although his previous owner abused him in the first year of his life, we gave him a good and loving life and home.

Bogart is showing signs of old age, turning lean and meowing more than usual, probably from arthritis pain, but can still do a hippodrome routine once in a while, running up and down the stairs, thinking he is a race horse. We clip his twisted claws which sometimes get snagged or tangled on various pieces of furniture, tapestry, or leather chairs. He is an old kitty, a centenarian in human years.

As hubby and I are struggling with profound health issues, we are now fully realizing that we are no longer the immortal young who thought we could live forever. It seems like yesterday when we met, the years flew by, but we never had enough time together, we wasted part of our youth with other spouses who were not our soul mates.

My husband is an American hero who dedicated his entire adult life to his country and I hope that someday he will take his proper place at Arlington National Cemetery.

We cannot understood why we were here on earth and why God created us, for what purpose, but we now understand that we are no longer immortal and we hope that we are going eventually to a good place, part of the circle of life, leaving traces of us in our children’s DNA.

Does it matter for most people where the final resting place will be? The sun will rise again, rain and snow will soak the ground, the moon will cast ghostly shadows in my beloved woods, the fierce hawkish wind will blow, and the earth will renew itself as it had done for millennia. We become again invisible atoms in the universe.

 

Socialized Health Care Disguised as Tax

Oh the joy of socialist free stuff
Photo: Wikipedia

It appears that Obamcare is here to stay. Those doctors who grew up with the conditioning notion of utopian “social justice” love it. Those doctors who hate the government intrusion and regulation into their medical practice hate it. The American public is split as well along those lines.

Nobody really believed that Obamacare, deplorably named the Affordable Care Act, would be amended to benefit the wishes of the American people, much less repeal it. Once a bureaucracy has been ensconced and billions and billions of dollars have been spent and trillions earmarked to be spent in the future, it cannot be walked back. The welfare dependency mentality of half of the country will prevent that.

Congress does not represent the middle class that pays taxes for Obamacare; it represents the interests of the major corporatist donors. Half of the country wanted and cheered when the Democrat Obamacare was passed in the dead of night, Christmas 2010, without any input from Republicans.

But Republicans are now in control of Congress and the White House and they are still doing the bidding of the Democrats and of their anti-America constituents – they want that shiny piece of plastic that says they have “free” insurance, it is demanded by their “social justice” platform. Never mind that this piece of plastic is worthless when it comes to providing them with world class healthcare or any healthcare at all once rationing of care commences.

Look at Venezuela’s healthcare if you can stomach the malpractice, filth, blood, decay, bugs, rats, neglect, abuse, and rust in their free clinics. Castro and Chavez never sought medical care for themselves in their own free medical care system, they came to see the best and the brightest doctors in the U.S. or had them flown in.

One of my uncles from Romania died recently of untreated pernicious anemia. The socialized medicine doctors told him to go home because he was too old and resources had to be used to treat younger people, he’s had his run in life. Never mind that, even on a bad day, he could still run circles around these young socialists, planting, tending to, and harvesting a huge garden every year to feed his family.  Had he had the money to give bribes to the government socialized care doctors to convince them to treat him, he would still be alive today.

Obamacare was never “free” health insurance or health insurance at all, it was a tax. At least that’s what Justice Roberts told us. It should have been called the Democrats’ Obama Tax. In the last seven years, it became obvious that people could not keep their doctors, their premiums skyrocketed, the deductibles went through the roof, they spied on your mental health, your gun ownership, and you paid for illegal aliens’ free medical care.

The same people who complained a few months ago that their insurance premiums kept going up and they had such high deductibles that they would never reach their impossible deductibles in any given year in order to use their insurance, now are happy that they are keeping Obamacare.  It’s easy to see how the one-carrier states might cease to cover them by 2018.

Does a government monopoly market and intrusion on every aspect of your life and death work well? Why is a 15-member non-medical panel the ultimate arbiter and decider of your medical care that may save your life but is expensive? Why should they decide your fate? How many cancer patients will be cleared for chemo, for example, when a treatment can cost upwards of $7,500?

Mandatory coverage should take into account the fact that some people deliberately lead a dangerous life that puts them at higher risk of disease. Like any other dangerous activity that is insured, such higher risk patients/customers should be placed in special insurance pools with higher premiums. It is simple economics. People who are healthy and lead a clean life should be rewarded with lower premiums.

Insurance should have never been offered as a condition of one’s employment. This keeps many people in terrible job conditions simply because they don’t want to lose their insurance. Make insurance portable and sell across state lines. The Cobra insurance when employment ceased was expensive and short-lived.

Few talk about reforming the legal system that allows frivolous lawsuits against doctors, making their malpractice insurance very expensive. Nobody talks about all the regulatory compliance with Obamacare that forces doctors to spend an inordinate amount of time on paperwork instead of seeing patients, and hiring extra staff just to keep up with the regulatory paperwork and computer electronic updates.

Dr. Lee Hieb suggested that patients with uninsurable illnesses should be kept on the Medicare system until their death but then the program should be phased out. The free market system used to price insurance tailored to the people’s needs and resources. Many Americans had no insurance but paid reasonable cash fees for care. When catastrophic illness hit, unless they had such insurance, they had to raise funds to pay for procedures.

Dr. Hieb also suggested the replacement of Medicaid with “personal health responsibility,” by establishing a health savings account for people who cannot afford insurance and a separate account for catastrophic health insurance coverage. The money could come from the health exchange subsidies and from other government sources.

According to Dr. Hieb “the federal government has no enumerated power to involve itself in health care at all, Medicare, Obamacare, and Medicaid are all equally unconstitutional.” Few examples exist where a bureaucracy has been repealed unless there was total social and political collapse. http://www.wnd.com/2017/02/4-steps-for-trump-to-undo-obamacare/

To sum it up, when it comes to Obamcare, nothing is happening really fast in Congress, it is the same corporation, different divisions. As a famously quoted phrase said, "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.

We can make suggestions until Doomsday, Obamascare is here to stay.

Who Stokes the Fire of Globalism?

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
― Winston S. Churchill

A total stranger asked me recently to name the one person who has done more damage to the U.S. by stoking the global communism fire. The answer is rather complex but I gave him a simplistic one - the education system with its hundreds of thousands of teachers who indoctrinate children eight hours a day, from kindergarten through college, into the utopia called Marxism. He had asked for the name of the one omnipotent person he wanted held responsible for the destruction of our country and the social engineering of western civilization.

Because United States is such a vast country, it is harder for the average American to see how they’ve been manipulated on so many fronts for a century now, in schools, in the media, through books, in the economic, judicial, political, and the health care realm, and how the elite globalist social engineering has taken hold in all fifty states like a metastasized cancer. They are now running the country; no matter which branch of the same political tree, R or D, is in power, the agenda goes on unabated. One can look at the results of the recent Dutch election and realize that self-destructive voters are hopeless.

It is easier to study a small country and point out how it has devolved into the current status quo by putting the events under the microscope of time. As it is often the case, the majority of people are oblivious to what is really happening under their noses. Lacking real information, the smart few turn to conspiracy theories, which sometimes are proven correct. But the majority of people rely on propaganda, the result of concerted efforts by those in power to manipulate them through the mass media, political disinformation, and through brainwashing in schools.

Paul Ghitiu, former Romanian Senator and publisher of “Vocile Dreptei,” (Voices on the Right) wrote on March 16, 2017, “After having read thousands and thousands of documents, analyses, studies, articles, I concluded that almost all theories and revelations that appear on the market and are classified as ‘conspiracy theories,’ are real. But those unmasked, who are guilty and have the press in their pockets, financial, political, national military interests, and especially international ones, catalogue such accusations under the above label, ridiculing the information that reaches the public opinion.”

Ghitiu mentions, in a recent article titled, “Soros Accused of Inciting Racial Hatred and Violence,” the “malefic” Soros’ fingerprints through his Open Society Foundations that are active all over the world, including Romania. Ghitiu references ‘democratic’ “organizations from Romania (supported among others with or only with money from Open Society and other Soros organizations) with strategies, programs, with threats from the progressive politically correct arsenal of ‘discrimination, xenophobia, fascism, and racism,’ incitement to hatred, division, anarchy, with the arbitrary imposition of educational politics (sexual education), political diversity (LGBT, gay parades, civil unions, homosexual marriage), of politics of migration, and abandonment of identity and nationalism.” http://www.evz.ro/soros-acuzat-de-incitare-la-ura-si-violenta-rasiala.html

It is alleged that the people of Romania (19.83 million) were not necessarily interested in joining the European Union (2007) and NATO (2004), it was the desire of a few politicians who were bought by the outside technocrats, bribery which allegedly resulted in the coup d’état of 1989. It freed the population from oppressive communism so they cheered on. They were also able to travel freely and eventually seek employment in the western part of Europe. But joining the EU and NATO has had drastic consequences which altered the country forever from a nationalistic and economic point of view.

The traditional Romanian army was never the same. Industries were destroyed by selling factories for pennies on the dollar to foreign transnationals who did not want competition from domestic goods. On the other hand, one could argue that some factories were not really profitable under communism; many needed serious modernizing or even closing entirely.

The communist apparatchiks, formerly in power and in control of all records, sold out various factories, pocketed the proceeds, and made themselves instant millionaires and billionaires. They did so while the people were drunk with the euphoria of freedom, not realizing what was happening, and not knowing that those charged with enforcing the rule of law were in on the take as well. By the time the population realized what was happening, it was too late.

Large companies that were managing natural resources, such as Petrom, Distrigaz, Electrica, were sold to foreign monopolies, with profits going to the countries of origin, without any taxation.

Dishonest individuals and politicians in power sold for personal gain the rights to the national resources and natural reserves of the soil and subsoil. Huge forests were cut down and sold to timber industries abroad.

The financial weakening of the state occurred by importing more corruption from abroad. The sale and bankruptcy of Romanian banks weakened the country’s ability to control its monetary policy and the state had to resort to borrowing from foreign banks. Any kind of economic and financial development incentive or concession came with strings attached.

The destruction of many jobs, the growth of unemployment, and the low pay forced qualified workers to migrate elsewhere in the EU. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Romanian families were broken up; children were left in the care of elderly grandparents, themselves in need of care. Depopulation in Romania made room for its colonization by migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

According to some sources, Romania lost over 40 percent of arable land because of EU treaties. Foreigners and Romanians no longer living in the country were given the right to purchase land in Romania.

“The 2003 Constitution, voted and promoted by the entire political class, with only two days of an alleged “fraudulent” referendum, gave away Romania’s sovereignty.  The political class never disclosed to the people that the Romanian sovereignty would be ceded to the European Union.” (Art. 44, 148, 149) http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/ro/ro021en.pdf

Following its adherence to the EU in 2007, Romania was forced to spend billions of dollars annually in order to sustain various EU organizations under the guise of managing European funds properly and of inspecting various organizations for compliance with EU.

It is alleged by some sources that “Romania’s current debt, over $66 billion, can never be repaid even in ten generations.” The problem is that the rational voices of dissent are drowned out by domestic and foreign corruption, and by dishonest politicians put in power with foreign money. http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/romania

Romanians are demanding independence from the EU in order to rebuild their own country. The elitist foreign influence is destroying what is left of their economy and of their nationalism. Romanian children are indoctrinated into global citizenship, divorcing them entirely from their history and their national identity through curricula, mass media, advertising, and Hollywood.

Sadly, the Romanian people, who had suffered so much and had fought so hard for their independence, replaced one dictator, the communist party and its supreme dear leader Ceausescu, with a global elitist technocracy, run by the EU and multinational corporatist interests.

Pondering the question again, who is stoking this globalist communist fire and global citizenship across the planet, it is safe to say that one individual with a lot of money to burn is quite influential; U.N. plays a big part, academia, media, Hollywood, the military industrial complex, transnationals, the non-governmental organization (NGOs) lobby, and corrupt politicians. But a complacent, dumbed down, and welfare-dependent citizenry, through voting, backed the elitists and the Marxists with their empty promises of egalitarian utopia, and are thus causing their own demise.

 

#Resist, a Global Commie Totalitarian Movement

The leftist hordes of a communist political culture are on the march around the globe, in alliance with Islamofascism. These young people are shaped by universities, the media, Hollywood with their trashy productions and vile behavior, corrupt politicians with allegiance only to their own pockets, the multi-nationals, the corrupt judiciary, unions, and non-profits with billions and billions of dollars of funding from elitist billionaires such as George Soros who fancy themselves the social engineers of one world government and of the climate change industry.

What happened to American universities since the early 1970s has finally reverberated around the world, like a wave created by a small stone thrown on a placid lake. It has now become a tsunami of #resist anarchists and drones around the western world. They are now resisting authority, law and order, and the capitalist system that had made their parents successful in the first place. Marching under the banner of feminism and equality, asking to be Muslims, and promoting the subjugation of women in western societies, violent millennials are bullying anybody who is a Christian and a nationalist.

Campuses have become bastions of leftism and anti-Americanism. According to David Horowitz, the schools of education are now training teachers for social justice in every major.  “An entire series of texts designed for teacher instruction and published by Columbia Teachers College is devoted to ‘teaching social justice’ in mathematics and other unlikely subjects. Its editor is Obama collaborator and unrepentant terrorist William Ayers.” (David Horowitz, “Big Agenda,” p. 117)

Even in former Soviet-bloc countries the curriculum at all levels has been diluted by inconsequential studies that add nothing to scholarship or knowledge: ethnic studies, women’s studies, islamophobia studies, intersectionality, mixing biology, sex, religion, age, caste, nationality, race, and other bizarre criteria as systems of domination, discrimination, and oppression – all because the left finds social inequality and injustice everywhere.

Universities are no longer places of scholarship, invention, discovery, divergent opinions, peaceful discussion, but places of miseducation, indoctrination, and brainwashing. What these academics have achieved in a few decades, the totalitarian communists could only dream of. Inadequate graduates, who should have never been admitted to college in the first place, are now vessels of little knowledge who were told ad nauseam what to think, not how to think.

Radicals have crawled from the underground, spurred on by eight years of a radical American president who stoked the culture and racial wars non-stop, bringing America and its economy to its knees. The rest of the world watched in horror and disbelief the fall of the once great nation while dealing with their own problems brought on by a planned refugee invasion of Europe of millions of unvetted refugees from Middle-Eastern and African countries that harbor camps of Islamists fighting a holy war against Christianity.

Angela Merkel of Germany has managed to destroy her own country and many other countries in Europe who were forced to accept this flood of mostly single young Muslim men. And allegations are floating that she did it in order to save face, for optics, as the media would have gone berserk watching women and children being stopped at the border. For the sake of Merkel’s optics, Europe has become a safe-haven for terrorists and savages who slash and burn their way across many European countries with generous welfare states and no backbone to say no because it contradicts their multiculturalist generosity and Fabian socialist values.

It is not just the European youth who want to stay in college forever at the expense of government, with no idea as to what kind of taxes the rest of society must pay for all the welfare. Millennials are learning from their European counterparts that they deserve everything for free simply because they exist. The elderly in the former Iron Curtain countries are longing for the “simple days of communism.” And the young, who have no experience or idea what communism was like foolishly vote and demonstrate to bring about neo-communism.

The youth of Macedonia are involved in #resist and are active in trying to destabilize their center-right government, using anarchist advice from a translation into Macedonian of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, and money from the many radical NGOs in the west, allegedly including the Open Society Foundations.

Much of the youth in Romania who demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands for days, resisting (#resist) against an imaginary oppression, did not bother to vote because the government was not giving them discounts to go by bus to vote, only to those who had to go by train. According to my friend Darius, who lives in Romania, the Social Democrat Party’s (PSD) hard-core senior supporters threatened their grandchildren if they went out to vote.  The elderly nostalgia for communism included the PSD promise of higher pensions. It did not matter to them that the PSD leader, Liviu Dragnea, was a “convicted criminal.” “Dragnea appointed a Muslim woman as Prime Minister. President Klaus Johannis rejected his PM choice as her husband’s ties to Syria came to light.”

Twenty-seven years after the theoretical fall of communism, Romania still struggles with the scars left by decades of totalitarian rule under a brutal communist dictator. Lacking the Romanian version of the American dream, most people put in positions of power use their authority to enrich themselves and their friends because stealing was a way of survival under communism and it remains “glorified” today. People vote for corrupt and often uneducated leaders because they sell their votes for a disposable cell phone or a 15 euro bribe. Then they complain when nothing changes. Corruption is a way of life, including the expectation and acceptance of bribes.

Poor Romanians, who fell through the cracks of EU development funds, still live the same deprived lives. They may find more food but cannot afford it, nor are they able to bribe doctors under the socialized medical care system. Unable to afford private insurance premiums, such superior care remains a luxury service. Consequently, many die of treatable conditions while waiting their turn  in numerous lines to be seen by socialized medicine government doctors.

Communist rhetoric of equality and social justice entices and mesmerizes well-fed and clothed American millennials who are surrounded by wealth, food, proper medical care, good housing, transportation, college education paid by Pell grants, electronic gadgets, their Starbucks lattes, heating, cooling, clean streets, cars, and malls. They have no idea what communist life was and is like. Few visit Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea to see how people actually live under communist oppression. Thoroughly brainwashed, millennials dismiss as propaganda all testimonials of those who had lived under communism, survived and escaped to the west.

As Eugene Lyons wrote in his 1937 book, Assignment to Utopia,  ”The Russian Revolution, in March, 1917, was, for most of the boys in my college freshman classes, just one more headline in a time replete with startling news.” They understood it as the initial stage of the world revolution, the fight against capitalists in America, the very capitalism that gave new American arrivals an opportunity to a better life.

“Anarchists, socialists, American lumberjacks, Jewish clothing workers, Russian intellectuals, Italian terrorists, Hindu nationalists, even liberals with creases in their pants and Harvard accents” were part of the radical movements during Eugene Lyon’s youth.

Not unlike today, the rabid anarchists of the turn of the twentieth century were brainwashed in college and on the streets to fight against the “capitalist injustice.” Their simpler motives were greed and envy. The sweat shops of the have nots and the opulence of the haves were infuriating the anarchists, many of whom were either coming from a working class background or were well off and ashamed of their creature comforts, yet were unwilling to give them up.

The shackles binding the people of the world to oppression were the shackles fashioned by communist revolutionaries and Bolsheviks who had a huge following of college-age anarchists. Crafty and sly, the commies sugar-coated empty and deceptive promises of egalitarian utopia, passing on clever euphemisms to new generations, including today’s oblivious global citizen youth who have no clue what they are dreaming of and demanding in their #resist demonstrations and riots.

Blessings

Photo:  Ileana Johnson 2015

Tonight, the much awaited Snowmageddon 2017 came in the form of a wicked icy slush. Nobody must have heard of March snows – March roars in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Some grocery stores were emptied of milk and bread – the global warmists were afraid they would starve. I rushed to come home from the nursing home for fear that I might get stuck for six hours in an inch of snow as it happened two years ago on the Occoquan River Bridge.

The changing pressure is wreaking havoc inside my painful knees but I must stay mobile to see mom and to help my hubby recover from chemo. Today was a good day, she was happy, in less pain, and recognized me.

As always, I bring candy bars and chocolate to mom’s neighbors who are not diabetic. When I first got off the elevator I encountered the retired sailor with a proud tattoo on his wrist. He is always smiling and watching those who come and go on the keyed elevator. We always chat a bit and sometimes I bring him a couple of pieces of wrapped chocolate.

Mimi and I adopted Lakshmi across the hall from mom’s room. We have no idea what she says, she chatters in her Indian dialect that only her family and personal physician understand. Her room has no decorations at all; as soon as her family puts pictures on the walls, she takes them down. She refuses to wear any other outfit except one favorite dress. When the staff bathes her, they dress her in clean clothes but she changes quickly back into her favorite dress. I take her chocolate every time. We only truly communicate when she greets me with “Namaste.”

Last week Mimi ordered pizza for mom. Lakshmi and Maria came into the room and everybody ate pizza and watched TV – Lakshmi does not have a TV in her room. She is highly mobile and often checks in on mom  to make sure she has not fallen. Mom can barely stand now.

One day mom was eating breakfast in her chair and Lakshmi came in and made her bed. It seemed to give her joy to do that so we let her. It is almost comical to watch them huddled in the hallway, talking to each other in their respective languages, not one understanding what the other said, yet they nod and smile as if they have just shared a funny story.

It is so lonely for these residents, most of them don’t have any family visiting them at all or visit them infrequently. I cannot imagine not going to see my mom two or three times a week. Americans are a funny bunch, they talk about how much they miss their families, especially after they died, yet while the loved ones are still alive, they never take the time to go see them, to tell them in person how much they missed them. As a European who grew up with a very large extended family, I find that odd.

During Bingo days, Mimi and I take hand lotion bottles for prizes and bags of Lindt chocolate as a treat. The social worker makes sure those who are diabetic only get sugar free treats.

Mimi bought a large birthday cake for everyone on Mardi Gras. It was not a King cake, nobody at our local grocery store even heard of Mardi Gras much less bake such a special treat. But the residents were so happy!

I hope and pray that God continues to keep me mobile so I can bring a little joy to a few of the residents in mom’s nursing home, especially those who are immobile and trapped in their rooms. Mobility is a blessing that most of us don’t appreciate until we lose it in the twilight of our years.