Communism, Nazism, Covidism

 

by Daniel Dragomirescu (Romanian writer)

01)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism imposes itself on society by generating and maintaining fear.

02)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism suppresses, restricts and denies man's natural and legal freedoms.

03)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism generates a phenomenon of social conformity on a large scale.

04)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism attacks the rights of the citizen enshrined in the constitution and emphasizes duties and obligations.

05)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism generates denunciation.

06)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism is imposed by extended control over the media, in all their forms (audio, video, print media).

07)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism promotes official truth.

08)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism uses censorship.

09)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism attacks social cohesion and divides society into followers and adversaries.

10)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism turns the state into an instrument of domination and control.

11)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism makes extensive use of propaganda and manipulation.

12)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism abuses legislation.

13)  Like Nazism and Communism, Covidism claims to be the sole holder of political, social, and economic truth.

14)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism strikes at the middle class of society and at economic freedom.

15)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism aspires to nationalization, centralization, planning.

16)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism strengthens the state's repressive apparatus and uses it to combat protest movements.

17)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism does not tolerate opposition or even dissent.

18)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism tends to standardize society for the benefit of a ruling elite.

19)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism creates the premises for a nomenclature with unlimited privileges.

20)  Like Nazism and Communism, Covidism empties democracy of its content and maintains its forms in order to claim legitimacy.

21)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism aspires to the total planning of human life.

22)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism wants to create a "new kind of man," so that there is no opposition to the system.

23)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism claims to serve the social good and the general interest.

24)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism is internationalist.

25)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism despises man as he is by nature.

26)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism claims to do good by force.

27)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism is practically a form of totalitarianism.

28)  Like Nazism and Communism, covidism is a serious disease of the human spirit.

If it triumphs, it will collapse just like Nazism and Communism. What it aspires to do far exceeds the powers of the sorcerer's apprentice's magic wand.

Remember November 1987

By Daniel Dragomirescu, Bucharest (Romania)

The 15th of November 1987 marked the fall of the humane mask that the Romanian communist regime had been wearing. Self-legitimated as a political regime of 'popular democracy', yet installed with the help of the Red Army tanks on the 6th of March 1945 and maintained through a combination of populism, rigged elections, state despotism and terrorism, towards the end of Ceaușescu's presidency, Romanian communism was only representative of the dictator and the party nomenclature who enjoyed unlimited privileges. Following the generalized socio-economic crisis, determined by a series of catastrophic political decisions, towards the end of the 80s Romania suffered from cold and hunger, just like during the war. Food ratios were re-introduced like at the time Bucharest was being bombed by the Allies, while the shortage of consumer goods, starting with tooth paste, toilet paper or absorbent cotton and ending with the basic necessities (sugar, oil, bread) was widespread in the country.

One waited for whole nights in fronts of the stores for the most trivial things, while the application of the long-promised principle of communist allocation of social welfare, "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs", was being postponed sine die. In railway stations I could see how people rushed towards international trains in order to buy medicine (sulfamethoxazole), cigarettes (Bulgarian BT or the not so good Albanian Gent) or clothes from Polish or East-German tourists. When night fell in the cold seasons (autumn and winter) thousands of villages were left in the dark, on account of the drastic economizing that Ceaușescu's bureaucrats had imposed, whereas goods trains carrying whole grain cars meant for export hurried through railway stations. The situation was not much better in cities and the capital of the country was starting to feel the crisis that got deeper and deeper from one year to the next. The gas pressure was low in the evening, the heat from the radiators and the central heating lasted for a couple of hours in the morning and evening, hot water ran for a few hours at the end of the week (not in every city, though), and saving power meant leaving whole neighborhoods in the dark. After the winter of 1984-1985, I heard Bucharesters complaining of the freezing cold they had to put up with in their flats, converted into fridges, throughout the winter.

One freezing morning, while queuing for milk, I saw a man collapsing on the pavement, dead. He had had a heart attack – people had had to wait for a long time in the cold, starting with 6 am, until the shop opened, so that they could get a bottle or two of milk or a jar of yogurt. After the milk was quickly gone, for the rest of the day the shop turned into a kind of museum. The basic food in most shops was frozen ocean fish and Vietnamese shrimps, and instead of real coffee, people could only drink "nechezol", an indistinct mix of dubious substitutes with a brown color (which was said to have caused countless cases of pancreatic cancer). Nevertheless, the regime claimed to be extremely benevolent towards its citizens and especially towards the workers, whom they claimed to represent like no other regime in history. The cult of Ceaușescu and his illiterate wife, Elena, had become grotesque, and Romanians were forced to applaud and honor the two "beloved children of the people". Some joker launched the joke that Romanians came to resemble the penguins from the North Pole – flapping their wings and feeding on fish. Even the socialist Mitterand, back then the president of France, had to disalign from Ceausescu's regime and limits further contacts with it, in order not to compromise himself.

This was the picture of everyday life in the Socialist Republic of Romania, when, on the 15th of November 1987, the great revolt of the workers from the Red Flag truck factory broke out in Brașov, a historical and beautiful city in the heart of the country. Nobody had expected something of this kind in Ceaușescu's Romania, where the omnipresent political police (the Securitate), like Stalin's NKVD, had a large number of informants and was rigorously monitoring any hostile attitude or dissidence from the line of the communist party and the 'socialist' and 'popular democratic' regime in Bucharest. The great revolt of the workers in Brașov was repressed with an incredible brutality for a state in 20th century Europe, and Europe was unable to do anything to prevent it. However, this revolt of the workers managed to unmask the dictatorship in the country. The political regime that had declared itself 'democratic' and 'of the workers' was neither in reality. It worked only for the benefit of the communist nomenclature, whose lifestyle, through its luxury, privileges and arrogance mimicked the lifestyle of some tribal aristocracy from a third world country. The communist totalitarian regime from Ceaușescu's Romania was nothing but a horrible tyranny, through which a minority was imposing its will on the popular majority, who was forced to eat frozen ocean fish, drink cold water (when there was tap water) and repeatedly applaud Ceausescu's endless demagogic speeches, bearing in silence all imaginable deprivations.

English version by Roxana Doncu

Editorial modification: Raymond Walden