God, this article was full of lines that just made me want to cry.
This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of “child gulags,” in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as “heroine mothers” women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival “Ceauşescu’s child,” as in “Let him raise it.”
To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.
At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”
Everyone read this. It’s an incredibly well written article. Journalism like this is so rare.
Jesus fucking christ. This has hit me like a ton of bricks. And this is all so recent. What a stupid bubble I’ve grown up in. Glad to be edified, but mortified at humans, as well as totally inspired by them. Izidor and all of the other suffering people out there put me to shame. What a dumb thing to complain about work today.
Wishing that peace finds all those who have suffered at the hands of monstrous humans.
Highly recommend subscribing to The Atlantic. It’s about $50 for a year but has some of the best journalism across a variety of perspectives that will challenge you. Sometimes emotionally, like with this article, other times politically, but I always come away feeling more informed.
Well, you make a good case.
Have you read this from them?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/
(I can’t, I’m not a subscriber. But I think it used to be free or smth. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it in the past.)
Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless
He was an incompetant monster and damn that’s an exemplary case.
Oh, it gets better. The Romanian government couldn’t feed all the orphans because his dumbass tried to turn a bread basket with significant oil reserves into an industrial powerhouse (so he could have more guns), burning a lot of the oil that the economy relied on to pay for services to do it, so he came up with the bright idea of just giving them micro blood transfusions.
Of untested blood. With often unsterilized needles. Up to 120 times in a month.
During the AIDs epidemic.
They kind of mention this but the author didn’t seem to realize it was actually supposed to be a replacement for food instead of a medical procedure.
where the fuck did they get all that blood –
romania
oooooh
Yeah they had some leftover from the vampire times.
We may soon see this in Russia, where they’re talking about banning the idea of not having children as “extremism”
We might even see something like it in the USA, thanks to the evangelicals and Republicans.
Broke teen parents having no choice but to join the military? That’s a republican wet dream.
On the plus side, they were smart enough to go air force.
With them, I imagine the US will become more like Israel. They’re religious extremists.
They’re not following the teachings of Jesus though. What they are is some nationalistic spin-off that doesn’t have much in common with actual Christianity.
deleted by creator
A lot of the communist cosplayers on here don’t care about communism, its just a facade to cover their support for the CCP and Kremlin.
They could at least stan Vietnam and Cuba instead
I rarely hear about either on here, but I see comments from “communists” all the time.
Such odd organizations to willingly support, assuming those are actually people and not troll farms.
Yeah, a good portion are shills running LLMs.
Some are rightfully frustrated with things like corporate overreach and environmental apathy. They’re looking for an alternative and when they noticd a bunch of accounts who seem to be their peers supporting an alternative… they see what they want to.
Communism was the best thing that ever happened to Russia, and Russia was the worst thing to ever happen to communism.
We advocate against human rights violations, not for them. What, you think capitalism cradles and comforts children? Russia has only ever known corruption by the wealthy and powerful. Stop guzzling what you’re fed and realize that progress takes time and failure and effort. Just because Russia couldn’t pull it off, you think it’s impossible for the West to make it work?
deleted by creator
If you actually apply a Marxist analysis here, the system in the Soviet Bloc after the revolution failed in the 20s was a clearly capitalist one, the thing Engels described as the state becoming the “national capitalist” in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”. The very fact this was done to bolster “the economy” and sorted people into their ability to provide value to be exploited by the state economy is making that quite clear.
Capitalism does not mean western democracy, neither does having red aesthetics and abstract ideals and convictions make you communist - only the actual material base and relations of production and value are what should be looked at.
Russia’s system isn’t/wasn’t any better, unfortunately. This was incredibly brutal and so hard to read.
The funny thing is the Soviets actually warned him about literally everything. He wouldn’t listen, and Romania had enough independence to ignore them.
The Soviets made some huge unforced errors, but never “feed the orphans blood transfusions” errors.
What reading that last line felt like 😅😂
An important story.
Truly the most horrific of crimes against children. Nothing makes me more sick.
