FEATURE: A Day to Remember...

“Turn on the TV! He ran away!” 

My grandma repeated skeptically the words as she heard them on the phone.

It was December 22nd, and the winter holidays had just begun. I was in third grade and getting my schoolwork out of the way, so I could spend the rest of the vacation carefree. I was about half done math, when the phone rang.

“He ran away!” she repeated excitedly, as the meaning of what she was saying slowly sunk in.

I jumped from my chair to turn on the TV.  I remember knowing exactly who ‘he’ was, although I had never heard talk ill against him. His face was in every one of our classrooms, his eyes watching over us since kindergarten. His name, yet often chanted, was rarely spoken – other than by officials or newscasters, on TV.

"Ceausescu ran away!"

For the next three days, the entire country was either out on the streets, or glued to their television set, as the loyal partisans of the old regime fired upon the revolutionaries and attacked all socio-politic institutions like the media and parliament. At night, with the lights off and away from the windows, we kept watching the destiny of our country unfold. For the first time, the program did not stop at 10 PM as usual with the national hymn. The people had overtaken the transmission. 

YouTube: Citizens are asked to leave the area so the army can proceed to “destroy the last criminal elements.” Central Committee Headquarters of Romanian Communist Party.

The images filled the country with excitement. After this, there had to be change. The mere thought of a failed revolution was terrifying. Consequences of a lack of obedience at this level would have plunged Romanians into a layer of oppression making the past 50 years seem like a breezy walk in the park.

So we caught him, we trialled him, we shot him. The execution happened December 25, 1989. As terrible as it sounds, it was the best Christmas gift any Romanian could have imagined.

The revolution was short lived*, and the casualties – no less atrocious and ranging in the thousand – were nowhere near the number of those perpetrated by the communist regime over the five decades they held power. 

Hundreds were killed during the month of protests that lead to Ceausescu's capture that day. And the really scary part about his regime was that it happened in daylight, in the public space of major cities, with all traces - quite literally - washed away from the eyes of the masses. 

One of the darkest episodes happened on December 16 in Timisoara – the day that sparked the Romanian revolution. Protesters gathered around the city denouncing the Communist regime. They were met by the army with clubs, tear gas and tanks. Fire trucks were brought to hose them away. When that wasn’t enough to dissipate the movement, gunshots took care of the rest. About 60 people died that day, many on the steps of the local Cathedral. 

Their bodies were picked up and taken away. The fire trucks stayed behind and washed the blood from the streets.

That night, the corpses were loaded in refrigerated trucks and taken to be incinerated in Bucharest, a few hundred kilometers away. To eliminate all evidence, their ash was put in garbage bags and emptied in the sewage of one of the outskirts' neighbourhoods. Except for the unfortunate families of those few, the country woke up on December 17, as if nothing had ever happened.

We didn't turn a blind eye. We literally did not know. Media is just a dictionary word - or a governing tool at the most - in a communist regime.

The thing with totalitarian regimes is that it’s easy to judge them as wrong.  It is much harder to justify a coup d’etat against a democratic society subjugated by capitalism to the same patterns of elitism, censorship and abuse of state power in the name of economy.

Now, twenty-one years later – most of which I’ve spent as an immigrant of the flourishing Canadian economy – I reject what private entrepreneurship and a "façade of democracy"  stand for, as much as I do communism. From what I see, this emperor also has no clothes. 

So what is there left?

Time and again, we’ve seen that an abusive system only works for so long before the ‘abused’ has nothing left to lose and revolts. Yet, all functioning political systems place the human in a totalitarian position over the rest of the planet, assuming the ultimate creation of evolution is mankind. That leaves everything else on Earth, including Earth itself, ours to abuse.  

When we have tried everything we know, from Marx to Smith, and it has failed us... it may be time to forge another way.

VIVA LA REVOLUCION!


Update:

History repeats itself so accurately! 

Egyptian picture added February 2011.
 Like all others from this post, these are NOT my own pictures!

*The first protest in the series that ultimately brought down the communist regime happened on November 15, in Brasov. All protests prior to December 22nd had been repressed with the help of the army. A series of events during the month culminated with the assassination (passed for a suicide) of then military chief Vasile Milea and his replacement by Victor Stanculescu in the morning of December 22. Stanculescu played a double role that morning, and refused to pass onto the army the orders to repress the protestants. By the afternoon, when the Ceausescus had fled the capital, he had officially sided the military with the people and against the dictator.

The total death toll of the Romanian revolution was just over 1,000, with about 3,500 wounded.

VIDEO : Trade Fair

Our first mini-doc for Intro to TV class

Click on the image to view:

Produced by:

Renee Giblin, Ariel Fournier, Mel Lefebvre and Irina Gaber

August 2010

PHOTO: On rich people's quarters...

FEATURE: "Do you include the pronoun in the verb?"

I was talking language issues with a specialist and she asked me this question about Romanian, my native language. It struck me a little odd… “When you say ‘I do’, do you say ‘I’ and ‘do’, or does the ending of the verb include the pronoun?" she replied to my puzzled look.

Indeed, the verb includes the pronoun. It is the same in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, from what I know. In French, you keep the pronoun, while in English the ‘I’ is capitalized and stands alone. She mentioned something about the impact of language on the culture of its people. The conversation quickly took another turn, and I was left wandering on the subject.

I see myself as 50% Romanian, 25% French- and 15% English-Quebecker, with hints of wannabe Latino. That roughly estimates my lifespan in the various cultures and the impact they have had on me so far. Communication studies, on the contrary of the other classrooms I have been to, have very few allophone - or non-native language - students. The fact is probably obvious to most. To me, it makes a lot of sense… in retrospect. It also makes the culture clash (and my lack of Canadiana) particularly striking. But what does all that have to do with pronouns?

People from the same culture will often gather together. That's normal, they belong to a community. Then sometimes you see various cultures associating together. "They are identifying because they’re immigrants!" you say? But why do the Spanish and the Germans rarely meddle? The Irish and the Asians? What if the answer laid in the subtleties of language?

This is where pronouns come into play. According to that specialist, it seems that weather or not the verb includes the pronoun in a language is related to the people’s sense of identity. That is, cultures from languages that use the pronoun along with the verb (eg, ‘je fais’) have a stronger identity of the self and the other, while those who don’t (eg.. ‘hago’)… well, don’t.  This translates, she tells me, into a more individually- or community-oriented society.  It also translates into a more active or passive role within that society.

If one little pronoun can have such effects, I know the issue doesn’t stop there. I will not venture here to analyze the intricacies of a subject I know little of. What I try, is to keep that in mind every time someone from another background says or does something I consider odd. You never know what other things their own cultural exposure has taught them! God only knows it's equally odd to them seeing me act the way I do. The mix of so-called clashing cultures gets confusing, even to myself.

So how do you say ‘I do’ in Romanian? ‘Fac’. See what I mean? Language can be the root of big misunderstandings.

*From the Journalism 519 class blog.


See also the New Scientitst's take on language in The secret life of pronouns

FEATURE: No Healing for the Child Soldier

The psychological and social rehabilitation and recovery of former child soldiers remains inadequate, and their personal struggles continue years after the armed conflicts end.

“The night the soldiers came to our village, they rounded up just us kids and told us we had to go with them. That our country needs us. 

The girls were separated from the boys and sent to ‘safe places’ to care for the dead and the wounded. 

We were taken to a military base and given an M16, which became our pillow and nightly companion for the months and years to come.”

The child soldiers in El Salvador - Photo: Gary Mark Smith.

This photo was taken during a firefight in Chalatenango, El Salvador in 1982. The series of photos, “The Streets of the Cold War/ El Salvador,” is online at www.streetphoto.com.

Tore Martinez Figueroa, now 31, told me about the day he found himself enrolled in the Armed Forces of El Salvador (FAES). “I was almost 14, studying in the city, and surfing most afternoons. We were very poor, and my father was often away working. I grew up mostly with my friends and ‘doña Ela,’ a lady who looked after me.”

The Child Soldier as defined by the Cape Town Principles (established at a 1997 symposium by the NGO Working Group on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and UNICEF):
“A child soldier is any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers and anyone accompanying such groups, other than family members. The definition includes girls recruited for sexual purposes and for forced marriage. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms.”