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.